Widget Image
Follow PPD Social Media
Thursday, February 13, 2025
HomeStandard Blog Whole Post (Page 559)

Too many social problems are conceived of in terms of what “we” can do for “them.” After decades of massive expansions of the welfare state, the answer seems to range from “not very much” to “making matters worse.”

Undaunted, people in a number of countries are coming up with new proposals that are variations on the theme of government-provided income — which amounts to relieving people from personal responsibility.

Yet even some conservatives and libertarians are coming up with proposals for more “efficient” versions of the welfare state — namely direct cash grants for life to virtually all adults, instead of the current hodgepodge of overlapping bureaucratic programs.

political cartoon welfare state wagon begins

Charles Murray recognizes that “some people will idle away their lives” under his proposal. “But that is already a problem,” he says, and therefore is no valid objection to replacing the current welfare state with a less costly alternative.

Everyone recognizes that there are some people unable to provide for their own survival — infants and the severely disabled, among others. But providing for such people is wholly different from a blanket guarantee for everybody that they need not lift a finger to feed, clothe or shelter themselves.

political cartoon welfare state wagon ending

The financial cost of providing such a guarantee, though huge, is not the worst of the problems. The history of what has actually happened in times and places where people were relieved from the challenge of survival by windfall gains is not encouraging.

In both England and the United States, the massive expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s has been accompanied by a vast expansion in the amount of crime, violence, drug addiction, fatherless children and other signs of social degeneration.

Maybe that was just coincidence. But there have been too many coincidences in too many very different times and places where people were relieved from the challenge of survival by windfall gains of one sort or another.

In 16th and 17th century Spain — its “golden age” — the windfall gain was gold and silver looted by the ton from Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere. This enabled Spain to survive without having to develop the skills, the sciences or the work ethic of other countries in Western Europe.

kay-bird-welfare-vacation

Unemployed single mother Kay Bird, who has admitted spending £3,000 of taxpayers’ cash on a round-the-world trip to far flung destinations with her 10-month-old baby Chloe. She is pictured with her daughter in Dubai. (Photo: @FrontPage/DailyMail)

Spain could buy what it wanted from other nations with all the gold and silver taken from its colonies. As a Spaniard of that era proudly put it, “Everyone serves Spain and Spain serves no one.”

What this meant in practical terms was that other countries developed the skills, the knowledge, the self-discipline and other forms of human capital that Spain did not have to develop, since it could receive the tangible products of this human capital from other countries.

But once the windfall gains from its colonies were gone, Spain became, and remained, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe. Worse, the disdainful attitudes toward productive work that developed during the centuries of Spain’s “golden age” became a negative legacy to future generations, in both Spain itself and in its overseas offshoot societies in Latin America.

kay-bird-welfare-world-vacation

Miss Bird and her young daughter splash around in the Indian Ocean during the trip. The young mother receives more than £8,500 in various benefits. (Photo: @FrontPage/DailyMail)

In Saudi Arabia today, the great windfall gain is its vast petroleum reserve. This has spawned both a fabulously wealthy ruling elite and a heavily subsidized general population in which many have become disdainful of work. The net result has been a work force in which foreigners literally outnumber Saudis.

Some welfare states’ windfall gains have enabled a large segment of their own citizens to live in subsidized idleness while many jobs stigmatized as “menial” are taken over by foreigners. Often these initially poor foreigners rise up the economic scale, while the subsidized domestic poor fail to rise.

Do we really want more of that?

British historian Arnold Toynbee proposed the “challenge and response” thesis that human beings advance when there are challenges they must meet. The welfare state removes challenges — and has produced many social retrogressions.

Those with the welfare state vision often want to remove challenges even from games by getting rid of winning and losing. That is consistent with their overall assumptions about life. But it seems very inconsistent for conservatives and libertarians to support plans whose net effect would be to reduce the inherent challenges of life for still more people.

[mybooktable book=”wealth-poverty-and-politics-an-international-perspective” display=”summary” buybutton_shadowbox=”true”]

Thomas Sowell: A number of countries are

Donald-Trump-America-First-Energy-Policy-Speech-Bismarck-ND

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump speaks at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota, to deliver his major energy policy and climate speech, on May 26. (Photo: Reuters)

Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge?

Stated succinctly, Donald Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump University, is sticking it to him. And the judge’s bias is likely rooted in the fact that he is of Mexican descent.

Can there be any defense of a statement so horrific?

Just this. First, Trump has a perfect right to be angry about the judge’s rulings and to question his motives. Second, there are grounds for believing Trump is right.

On May 27, Curiel, at the request of The Washington Post, made public plaintiff accusations against Trump University — that the whole thing was a scam. The Post, which Bob Woodward tells us has 20 reporters digging for dirt in Trump’s past, had a field day.

And who is Curiel?

An appointee of President Obama, he has for years been associated with the La Raza Lawyers Association of San Diego, which supports pro-illegal immigrant organizations.

Set aside the folly of letting Clinton surrogates like the Post distract him from the message he should be delivering, what did Trump do to be smeared by a bipartisan media mob as a “racist”?

He attacked the independence of the judiciary, we are told.

But Presidents Jefferson and Jackson attacked the Supreme Court, and FDR, fed up with New Deal programs being struck down, tried to “pack the court” by raising the number of justices to 15 if necessary.

Abraham Lincoln leveled “that eminent tribunal” in his first inaugural, and once considered arresting Chief Justice Roger Taney.

The conservative movement was propelled by attacks on the Warren Court. In the ’50s and ’60s, “Impeach Earl Warren!” was plastered on billboards and bumper stickers all across God’s country.

The judiciary is independent, but that does not mean that federal judges are exempt from the same robust criticism as presidents or members of Congress.

Obama himself attacked the Citizens United decision in a State of the Union address, with the justices sitting right in front of him.

But Trump’s real hanging offense was that he brought up the judge’s ancestry, as the son of Mexican immigrants, implying that he was something of a judicial version of Univision’s Jorge Ramos.

Apparently, it is now not only politically incorrect, but, in Newt Gingrich’s term, “inexcusable,” to bring up the religious, racial or ethnic background of a judge, or suggest this might influence his actions on the bench.

But these things matter.

Does Newt think that when LBJ appointed Thurgood Marshall, ex-head of the NAACP, to the Supreme Court, he did not think Marshall would bring his unique experience as a black man and civil rights leader to the bench?

Surely, that was among the reasons Marshall was appointed.

When Obama named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, a woman of Puerto Rican descent who went through college on affirmative action scholarships, did Obama think this would not influence her decision when it came to whether or not to abolish affirmative action?

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” Sotomayor said in a speech at Berkeley law school and in other forums.

Translation: Ethnicity matters, and my Latina background helps guide my decisions.

All of us are products of our family, faith, race and ethnic group. And the suggestion in these attacks on Trump that judges and justices always rise about such irrelevant considerations, and decide solely on the merits, is naive nonsense.

There are reasons why defense lawyers seek “changes of venue” and avoid the courtrooms of “hanging judges.”

When Obama reflexively called Sgt. Crowley “stupid” after Crowley’s 2009 encounter with that black professor at Harvard, and said of Trayvon Martin, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” was he not speaking as an African-American, as well as a president?

Pressed by John Dickerson on CBS, Trump said it’s “possible” a Muslim judge might be biased against him as well.

Another “inexcusable” outrage.

But does anyone think that if Obama appointed a Muslim to the Supreme Court, the LGBT community would not be demanding of all Democratic Senators that they receive assurances that the Muslim judge’s religious views on homosexuality would never affect his court decisions, before they voted to put him on the bench?

When Richard Nixon appointed Judge Clement Haynsworth to the Supreme Court, it was partly because he was a distinguished jurist of South Carolina ancestry. And the Democrats who tore Haynsworth to pieces did so because they feared he would not repudiate his Southern heritage and any and all ideas and beliefs associated with it.

To many liberals, all white Southern males are citizens under eternal suspicion of being racists. The most depressing thing about this episode is to see Republicans rushing to stomp on Trump, to show the left how well they have mastered their liberal catechism.

Pat Buchanan on what Donald Trump said

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters as he arrives to appear with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at a fundraising event in Lawrenceville

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets supporters as he arrives to appear with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at a fundraising event in Lawrenceville, N.J. on May 19, 2016. (Photo: Reuters)

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump vowed during his “America First” victory speech Tuesday night that he was “going to be America’s champion.”

Speaking at Briarcliff Manor in Westerchester New York, Mr. Trump ripped the now-presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and the globalist agenda she, her party and many in his own party have supported for years. That agenda has been repudiated this election cycle in favor of national populism on both sides of the aisle and, judging by his speech, he intends to capitalize on it.

“I beat a rigged system with overwhelming support, the only way you can do it,” Trump said. “We can’t beat a rigged system by relying on the very same people who rigged it. We can’t rely on the politicians who created our problems to fix them.”

Mr. Trump went on to clobber the Clintons for making millions during and as a result of their careers in public service. He announced he will give a major speech next week informing the American public on the family track record, insinuating he had something new to add to what many politicos know to be a very old story with the Clintons.

“I wonder if the press will want to attend,” he joked. “Hillary Clinton turned the State Department into her private hedge fund… We’re going to turn this all around and we’re going to do it by putting America first.”

He vowed under a Trump presidency the U.S. will never enter into foreign conflicts that are not in the vital security interests of the United States

“On trade, America first means the American worker will have their jobs protected” from unfair competitive advantages given away to foreign governments by poorly negotiated trade deals. “On immigration, America first means protecting the jobs and wages of American workers whether you’re first , second or third generation,” he said.

“Every American worker is entitled to the same rights and privileges.”

While he was essentially running unopposed, Mr. Trump racked up large margins in the final voting states on Tuesday and outperformed public polling where available, putting him well-above the needed 1,237 delegates to clinch the Republican nomination.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump vowed during

Donald-Trump-Hillary-Clinton-New-Jersey

Donald Trump, left, greets supporters as he arrives to appear with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in Lawrenceville, N.J. on May 19, 2016. Hillary Clinton, right, speaks at a campaign rally in Blackwood, New Jersey, U.S., May 11, 2016. (Photos: Reuters)

Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump has won the New Jersey primary and now-presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton leads Sen. Bernie Sanders. Worth noting, Mrs. Clinton is underperforming her polling numbers in the Garden State, while Trump, who essentially ran unopposed, is significantly over-performing his polling numbers.

Still, the win is enough for Mrs. Clinton and the media to claim she clinched the Democratic nomination, something she took months longer than anticipated to do against self-proclaimed socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. That makes Mrs. Clinton the first female presidential candidate ever to secure a major political party nomination, but also the first male or female to be under federal investigation for political corruption and mishandling classified information.

On Monday, Sen. Sanders pushed back on the notion the race is over, vowing to take the fight to the convention no matter what the outcome Tuesday. That said, PPD projects Mrs. Clinton will likely have enough pledged delegates, that is not counting superdelegates, to clinch the nomination and win on the first ballot at the convention. The state of California will decide whether the former secretary of state will have won enough pledged delegates to flat-out win the nomination by the time Tuesday’s votes are counted.

“There’s nothing to concede,” Sen. Sanders said in reaction. “Secretary Clinton will not get enough pledged delegates to win the nomination and the superdelegates don’t vote until the convention.”

Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump has won

Obama Immigration Speech

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about immigration reform during a visit to Del Sol High School in Las Vegas, Nevada November 21, 2014. (Photo: Reuters)

Just when you think the Hollywood left might be showing some independence from the Obama White House, it once again falls in line to mouth its propaganda. Just kidding. No one believes that Hollywood leftists think independently.

Fox News reports that the White House has drafted a social media script on immigration for its Hollywood zombies to disseminate. You may recall that the White House furnished gun control talking points for its Tinseltown puppets earlier this year.

The entertainment shills dutifully delivered President Obama’s thinly disguised message for gun control with the mindless hashtag “StopGunViolence.” The White House supplied the script, imploring its actor enablers to tweet it and post it on other social media. It doesn’t matter that Obama’s lawless proposals would do nothing to make Americans safer. What’s important is that liberals care, as evidenced by their painfully vacuous hashtag-parroting tweets.

On the immigration message, Jesse Moore, the White House’s associate director of public engagement, sent an email to so-called Hollywood A-listers, with a video urging the stars to join the #IAmAnImmigrant movement.

Just as with the social media gun control campaign, the White House shamelessly twisted the issue to mislead the public through fact-free, emotion-based appeals. The email said, “We are a nation of immigrants, and whether you’re an immigrant, the child or grandchild of immigrants, or you stand with immigrants — it’s on all of us to ensure that we continue to recognize the role immigrants continue to play at the core of this country.”

On cue, such screen luminaries as Kerry Washington, Julianne Moore, Alan Cumming and Rosie Perez complied. Washington’s account tweeted, for example, “Join Kerry and become part of the #IAmAnImmigrant movement today iamanimmigrant.com.”

Let’s put aside the obvious impropriety of the White House’s using taxpayer dollars to engage in partisan political advocacy. Instead, let’s examine the toxicity of its message.

Does anyone disagree with the notion that the United States is a nation of immigrants and immigrants have contributed greatly to America? The problem is that the White House is intentionally painting border enforcement hawks as bigoted and anti-immigrant. Not that this is anything new. It’s no different from Obama’s depicting Second Amendment defenders as Bible-toting bitter clingers who are wholly indifferent to gun violence. Why would he use facts when lies work so much better?

The left deliberately ignores that conservative opposition to liberal open borders policy has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. It rejects that America is based on an idea. Our bond as Americans has been grounded not in our ethnic background but in our unified commitment to liberty, equality of opportunity, equal justice under the law and the belief that we human beings, made in God’s image, have certain unalienable rights. Ironically, the very reason millions upon millions have immigrated to America is that it has been uniquely free and prosperous because of these foundational principles.

Ronald Reagan encapsulated the concept beautifully when he said: “America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, ‘You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.’ But then he added, ‘Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.'”

Don’t you see? The conservative position on immigration is inherently colorblind. Our founding ideas belong to all Americans. The left, on the other hand, by flooding this nation with immigrants and celebrating their “diversity” rather than encouraging assimilation into the ethnic-neutral American culture, is overtly race-conscious and divisive.

We don’t exclude people from entering based on race. We welcome immigrants, provided they come in legally, according to the rule of law, and consistent with our national sovereignty.

There’s a reason we have immigration laws under which we control the orderly flow of immigrants and require prospective citizens to learn and embrace the unique American system. If our citizenry ceases to unite around our founding ideas, we will cease to be unique. Leftists have been at war with these ideas for decades, so we sure don’t want to invite millions more people into the nation without restriction and outside the law if they reject our uniqueness. We must not have open borders and further Balkanize our society and dilute our national identity. A sovereign nation has no duty to commit national suicide. In fact, it has a duty to its citizens not to do so.

Immigration and citizenship are a two-way street. Citizens and would-be citizens have a duty to the nation to respect its laws, just as the nation has a duty to citizens to safeguard their rights. We, as a sovereign nation, have a right to admit or reject new citizens and to condition citizenship on their acceptance of the American idea.

Obama’s crusade to divide Americans on the basis of race, gender and income has done immeasurable damage to our society. His exploitation of the immigration issue and his depiction of patriots as bigots are making it worse. These liberals know we aren’t bigots. But we know that many of them, in their heart of hearts, don’t embrace the American idea, which is one reason they are trying to flood the borders and dilute what it means to be an American.

[mybooktable book=”the-emmaus-code-finding-jesus-in-the-old-testament” display=”summary” buybutton_shadowbox=”true”]

Just when you think the Hollywood left

Donald Trump Endorses GOP Candidate Mitt Romney In Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS, NV – FEBRUARY 02: (L-R) Ann Romney, Donald Trump and 2012 Republican nominee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. (Photo: AP)

Hello, investors. Come join the foreign policy experts in daily panic attacks over what a President Donald Trump would mean for your world. What does one do about a candidate whose tax plan would send America into the fiscal abyss — who flaps lips about not making good on the national debt?

Should we be investing in the makers of Xanax and Klonopin? And on the personal side, are there enough benzodiazepines to go around?

We’re not talking just about the very rich. Anyone with a retirement account or a small portfolio has something to lose. The economic consensus is that a Trump presidency would sink all boats. And that certainly applies to Trump’s own economically struggling followers in the least seaworthy craft.

“Most Rust Belt working-class Americans don’t get it,” Bob Deitrick, CEO of Polaris Financial Partners in Westerville, Ohio, told me. “The working class thinks he’s going to stick it to the elites.”

The facts: The Trump tax plan would deliver an average tax cut of $1.3 million to those with annual incomes exceeding $3.7 million. The lowest-income households would get $128. (No missing zeros here.)

Folks in the middle would see federal taxes reduced by about $2,700, which sounds nice but would come out of their own hide. Medicare and other programs that benefit the middle class would have to be slashed. So would spending on science research, infrastructure and services essential to the U.S. economy.

Or we could skip the very deep spending cuts and see the national debt balloon by nearly 80 percent of gross domestic product, calculation courtesy of the Tax Policy Center.
Some might think that Trump’s tax plan — including the repeal of the federal tax on estates bigger than $5.43 million — would impress the income elite, but they would be wrong. In a recent poll of Fortune 500 executives, 58 percent of the respondents said they would support Hillary Clinton over Trump.

Most in this Republican-leaning group are undoubtedly asking themselves: What good is a fur-lined deck chair if the ship’s going down?

Then there are the others.

“Do middle-class Americans have any idea what could happen to the economy or the stock market if our president ever vaguely suggested defaulting on the national debt?” Deitrick asked. (His clients tend to be upper-middle-class investors.)

He recalls the summer of 2011, when a congressional game of chicken over raising the federal debt ceiling led to the possibility of a default. The Dow lost 2,400 points in a single week. And taxpayers were hit with $1.3 billion in higher borrowing costs that year alone.

Trump said on CNN that he is the “king of debt,” which in practice means he frequently doesn’t honor it. That’s why many major lenders shun him, talking of “Donald risk.”

Speaking of, Trump famously said in a Trump University interview, “I sort of hope (the real estate market crashes), because then people like me would go in and buy.”

But he also predicted that the real estate market would not tank — shortly before it did. Perhaps he never figured out there was a housing bubble. Or it was part of a clever scheme to peddle real estate courses with brochures asking, “How would you like to market-proof your financial future?”

Imagine a whole country taking on “Donald risk.”

The business community runs on stability. It can’t prosper under a showman who says crazy things and denies having said them moments later. A Trump presidency promises more chaos than a Marx Brothers movie — and you can believe it would be a lot less fun.

A Trump presidency promises more chaos than

unemployment-benefits

Weekly jobless claims, or first-time claims for unemployment benefits reported by the Labor Department.

Among the many disturbing signs of our times are conservatives and libertarians of high intelligence and high principles who are advocating government programs that relieve people of the necessity of working to provide their own livelihoods.

Generations ago, both religious people and socialists were agreed on the proposition that “he who does not work, neither shall he eat.” Both would come to the aid of those unable to work. But the idea that people who simply choose not to work should be supported by money taken from those who are working was rejected across the ideological spectrum.

How we got to the present situation is a long story, but the painful fact is that we are here now. Among the leading minds of our times, including Charles Murray today and the late and great Milton Friedman earlier, there have been proposals for ways of subsidizing the poor without the suffocating distortions of the government’s welfare state bureaucracy.

Professor Friedman’s plan for a negative income tax to help the poor has already been put into practice. But, contrary to his intention to have this replace the welfare state bureaucracy, it has been simply tacked on to all the many other government programs, instead of replacing them.

It is not inevitable that the same thing will happen to Charles Murray’s plan, but I would bet the rent money that there would be the same end result.

Just what specific problem is so dire as to cause some conservatives and libertarians to propose that the government come to the rescue by giving every adult money to live on without working?

Poverty? “Poverty” today means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means — no more and no less. Most Americans living below the official poverty line today have central air-conditioning, cable television for multiple TV sets, own at least one motor vehicle, and have many other amenities that most of the human race never had for most of its existence.

Most Americans did not have central air-conditioning or cable television as recently as the 1980s. A scholar who spent years studying Latin America has called the poverty line in America the upper middle class in Mexico.

Low-income neighborhoods suffer far more from social degeneration, including high rates of crime and violence, than from material deprivation.

Welfare state guarantees of not having to work, however the particular policies are applied, are not a solution. Relieving people of personal responsibility for their own lives, however it is done, is a major part of the problem.

Before there can be a welfare state in a democratic country, there must first be a welfare state vision that becomes sufficiently pervasive to allow a welfare state to be created. That vision, in which people are “entitled” to what others have produced, is at the heart of the social degeneration that can be traced back to the 1960s.

Teenage pregnancies, venereal diseases, dependency on government and murder rates were all going down during the much disdained 1950s. All reversed and shot up as the welfare state, and the social vision behind the welfare state, took over in the 1960s.

That vision featured non-judgmental rewards and non-judgmental leniency toward counterproductive behavior, whether crime or irresponsible sex and its consequences. But relieving people from the responsibilities and challenges of life is doing them no favor. Nor is it a favor to society at large.

American society has become more polarized under the welfare state vision. Nor is it hard to see why. If we are all “entitled” to benefits, just by being present, why are some entitled to so little while others have so much?

In an entitlement context, all sorts of “gaps” and “disparities” automatically become “inequities,” and a reason for lashing out at others, instead of improving yourself.
Only in a society in which rewards are based on contributions is there any reasonable reply to the question as to why Bill Gates has so much and others so little.

The track record of divorcing personal rewards from personal contributions hardly justifies more of the same, even when it is in a more sophisticated form. Sophisticated social disaster is still disaster — and we already have too much of that.
[mybooktable book=”wealth-poverty-and-politics-an-international-perspective” display=”summary” buybutton_shadowbox=”true”]

[caption id="attachment_25651" align="aligncenter" width="740"] Weekly jobless claims,

Statue-of-Liberty-New-York-background

Statue of Liberty in front of the New York City skyline.

At the risk of oversimplifying, libertarians want to minimize the level of government coercion is society. That’s why we favor both economic freedom and personal liberty. Simply stated, you should have the right to control your own life and make your own decisions so long as you’re not harming others or interfering with their rights.

That’s a philosophical or moral argument.

There’s also the utilitarian argument for liberty, and that largely revolves around the fact societies with more freedom tend to be considerably more prosperous than societies with lots of government.

I’ve repeatedly made this argument by comparing the economic performance of market-oriented jurisdictions and statist ones.

Let’s look at some new evidence. Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Institute for Management Development is a highly regarded educational institution that publishes an annual World Competitiveness Yearbook that basically measures whether a nation is a good place to do business.

So it’s not a measure of economic liberty, at least not directly. And the quality of governance matters for the IMD rankings (presumably based on something akin to the European Central Bank’s measure of “public sector efficiency“).

But you’ll notice a clear link between economic liberty and competitiveness.

Here are the top-10 nations. (you can look at the rankings for all nations byclicking here).

As you might suspect, there’s a strong correlation between the nations that are competitive and those that have smaller governments and free markets.

Indeed, three out of the top four jurisdictions (Hong Kong, Singapore, andSwitzerland) rank in the top four for economic liberty according to Economic Freedom of the World.

And I’m happy to see that the United States also scores very highly, even if we only rank 17 out of 157 for economic freedom.

Indeed, every country in IMD’s top 10 other than Sweden is ranked in the top quartile of EFW.

You also probably won’t be surprised by the countries getting the worst scores from IMD.

Congratulations to Venezuela for being the world’s least competitive nation. Though that might be an overstatement since IMD only ranks 61 jurisdictions. If all the world’s countries were included, Venezuela presumably would beat outNorth Korea. And maybe a couple of other squalid outposts of statism, such asCuba.

It’s also worth noting that Greece gets consistently bad scores. And I’m not surprised that Argentina is near the bottom as well (though it has improved since last year, so hopefully the new government will continue to move in the right direction).

By the way, it’s worth noting that economic freedom is a necessary but not sufficient condition for competitiveness. Jordan, for instance, ranks in the top 10 for economic freedom but gets a low score from IMD, presumably because the advantages of good policy don’t compensate for exogenous factors such as geopolitical risk and access to markets.

The moral of the story, though, is that free markets and small government are the recipe for more prosperity. And those policies are probably even more important for nations that face exogenous challenges.

[mybooktable book=”global-tax-revolution-the-rise-of-tax-competition-and-the-battle-to-defend-it” display=”summary” buybutton_shadowbox=”true”]

Libertarians, as both a philosophical and moral

Hillary-Clinton-San-Francisco-AP

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally, May 26, 2016, in San Francisco. (Photo: AP/John Locher)

On June 7, five states–California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota–will hold their primary contests and 676 pledged delegates are up for grabs. According to the PPD Democratic Delegate Count and Tracker, which does include committed superdelegates, Hillary Clinton is just 25 delegates shy of locking up the Democratic nomination.

The Clinton campaign is hoping that New Jersey, where she has slightly more than a 20-point lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders, will put her over the top. But judging by polls and demographics, the California primary could deal a humiliating defeat at the end of a long nomination contest no one expected to go until June 7. Worth noting, Mrs. Clinton’s delegate lead margin is disproportionately due to the support she has enjoyed from minorities–more specifically black voters–and, even more specifically black voters in the South.

However, she once enjoyed a double-digit lead in the Golden State and now Sen. Sanders is just 2 points behind on the PPD average. California is no doubt the biggest delegate prize on Tuesday night. There are a total 548 delegates up for grabs in the California Democratic primary, including 317 in the congressional districts. Another 105 are at large, 53 are Pledged PLEOs and 73 Unpledged PLEOs.

“We’re going to have a very contentious campaign,” Clinton said late Sunday night at a rally in the California capital, “because I’m going to point out at every single moment that I can why I believe the Republican nominee should never get near the White House.”

And she could lose it. Let’s look at why and question whether her lead in the state was ever even that large, at all.

“We haven’t seen much change over time in our polling results among California’s Democratic Presidential Primary likely voters,” PPIC pollster Mark Baldassare said. “In the March PPIC Survey, 48% supported Clinton and 41% supported Sanders. In the May PPIC Survey, 46% supported Clinton and 44% supported Sanders.”

PPIC, which was one of two of the most accurate pollsters in the 2008 Democratic primary between Mrs. Clinton and then-Sen. Barack Obama, was again ahead of the trend in the state. While others were showing a larger lead for the former secretary of state, PPIC has shown a rather close contest, which is driven by the unique demographic makeup of minorities in the state.

“It’s important to note that age has been an important factor for the Democratic presidential candidate preferences,” Mr. Baldassare added. “The nonwhites have a younger age profile and the whites have an older age profile among the California Democratic presidential primary likely voters in our May PPIC Survey.”

We couldn’t agree more. The PPD Election Projection Model relating to the Democratic primary–among other variables–examines the percentage of a state’s primary electorate black voters represent and whether a state is located in the South. In other words, comparing our own in-house polling and recent public polls such as PPIC with previous cycles indicates the socialist senator from Vermont is succeeding in driving the percentage of younger voters higher than previous years, which undercuts Mrs. Clinton’s advantage among minorities.

Our model gives Mrs. Clinton a slight 56% chance of winning the California primary with a margin of around 2%, a result that basically leaves me no confidence in her ability to hold Sen. Sanders at bay. The model has underestimated his support in Ohio and Michigan and overestimated her support in North Carolina by margins large enough to conclude he has a very real shot at winning this thing on Tuesday night.

That said, the constant barrage of media coverage essentially designed to tell Sanders supporters the contest is over and not to bother may have an adverse impact on his ability to get younger voters to the polls. That’s just not something we will know for sure until we observe the traffic at the polls on Tuesday.

The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton cannot rely upon her support among minorities because there is so much overlap with younger, more leftist-socialist voters in the Democratic primary electorate. If she does win, then I suspect she will have cobbled together a less-than impressive coalition including older, less liberal voters and those on the fence swayed by the endorsement of the still-popular Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown.

Due to location and demographics, Hillary Clinton

Hillary-Clinton-SC-Primary

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton greets supporters as she arrives to speak to supporters at her election night watch party for the South Carolina Democratic primary in Columbia, S.C., Saturday, Feb. 27, 2016. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Hillary Clinton has won the Puerto Rico Democratic Primary, putting her on the cusp of having enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination. According to the PPD Democratic Delegate Count and Tracker, which does include the superdelegates supporting her for the presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton is just 25 delegates shy of locking it up.

“We just won Puerto Rico! ¡Gracias a la Isla del Encanto por esta victoria!” Mrs. Clinton tweeted. As the race was called, the former secretary of state was in Sacramento rallying voters in before the California Democratic primary.

Mrs. Clinton won all 7 delegates up for grabs in the U.S. Virgin Islands and, at least as of now, 33 of the 60 delegates available in Puerto Rico. She carried the territory by roughly 61% to 39% over Sen. Sanders, who is campaigning hard in California in hopes to pull off an upset and convince superdelegates to switch allegiance.

While she once enjoyed a double-digit lead in the Golden State, Sen. Bernie Sanders is now just 2 points behind on the PPD average in the biggest delegate prize on Tuesday night.

“We’re going to have a very contentious campaign,” Clinton said late Sunday night at a rally in the California capital, “because I’m going to point out at every single moment that I can why I believe the Republican nominee should never get near the White House.”

Last week, California Gov. Jerry Brown, once an avid critic of the Clintons and accuser of corruption, praised Sen. Sanders but endorsed the Democratic frontrunner.

Hillary Clinton has won the Puerto Rico

People's Pundit Daily
You have %%pigeonMeterAvailable%% free %%pigeonCopyPage%% remaining this month. Get unlimited access and support reader-funded, independent data journalism.

Start a 14-day free trial now. Pay later!

Start Trial