Posts tagged as “Column of the Day”

Energy prices are soaring in Europe, and the effects are rippling across the Atlantic. Blame anti-carbon policies of the kind that the Biden Administration wants to impose in the U.S.

Electricity prices in the U.K. this week jumped to a record £354 ($490) per megawatt hour, a 700% increase from the 2010 to 2020 average. Germany’s electricity benchmark has doubled this year. Last month’s 12.3% increase was the largest since 1974 and contributed to the highest inflation reading since 1993.

Other economies are experiencing similar spikes.

● Read in The Wall Street Journal

● Read <and comment here on The Red Line

Senate Republicans cleverly repartitioned president Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s $2 trillion tax-funded American Jobs Plan and his $2 trillion American Families Plan into a no-taxes $500 billion Bipartisan Infrastructure Act that swing-district voters understand and like,

and a $3.5 trillion tax-funded grab-bag of social spending that swing voters don’t understand and hate -- and that Democrat Senator Joe Manchin now opposes, providing cover for moderate House Democrats to oppose as well.

Manchin's opposition and that of moderate House "Manchins" will reduce the scale of the grab-bag, if not scuttle it completely.

● Read on The Red Line

The nation faces an unprecedented array of challenges and will inevitably encounter additional crises in the future. Yet some in Congress have a strange belief there is an infinite supply of money to deal with any current or future crisis, and that spending trillions upon trillions will have no negative consequence for the future. I disagree.

● Read in Wall Street Journal

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

President Joe Biden continues to live in an alternate universe in regard to the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. As someone put it on Twitter, his message is: "The mission was a complete success" and "it's all my predecessor's fault."

● Read in The Day

● Read and comment here on The Red Line

Afghanistan’s military has laid down its weapons, and the Taliban have wasted little time in collecting them.

The U.S. sent nearly 600,000 small arms, 76,000 vehicles and 208 airplanes to Afghanistan’s military and police from 2003 to 2016, according to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report, one of the few such compilations. The most recent quarterly report of the U.S.-led military coalition documented deliveries of 174 Humvees, nearly three million rounds of ammunition, and nearly 100,000 2.75-inch rockets during the period.

● Read full article in The Wall Street Journal

Over the last 18 months, based on CDC numbers, about 466 of every 200,000 people in Connecticut have died of COVID-19. Yet, the daily average for deaths this summer from COVID is vanishingly small, given that over 80% of adults are now vaccinated.

In even greater contrast, the odds of a young person, aged 19 and under, dying of COVID has been 1 in 200,000 over the entire course of the pandemic. The odds of them committing suicide is roughly 20 times that number.

In actual numbers, not rates, 1 young person aged 10 and younger, and 3 people aged 11 to 19 have died of COVID-19 in Connecticut, according to data provided by the state medical examiner. By comparison, 11 children in Connecticut in 2019 died of abuse or neglect.

As we approach the opening of schools, it would seem clear that schools should open for normal in-person instruction with a minimum of special safety precautions. Our focus should shift to the many likely more serious threats to schoolchildren when deprived of normal education.

● Read in CT Examiner

● Read and comment here on The Red Line