There was much ado amongst some of the Twitterati yesterday about this piece in Scientific American.  I gave up on SA as anything approaching a scientific magazine a couple of years ago, but this piece hits a new low.  Title: People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties – Subtitle: A growing mortality gap between Republican and Democratic areas may largely stem from policy choices.  This is pure political hit piece.  The data is indisputable, but what is not examined is at what cost those differing mortality rates come.

If you ban cigarettes, fewer people will die, but at the cost of freedom and for some at the cost of happiness.  The same could be said for bacon, or ice cream.  Freedom includes the freedom to make “bad” decisions.  Further, the piece assumes a higher death rate to be a bad thing a priori.  But is it?  We live in a time where some states permit physician assisted suicide to relieve suffering.  So why then is a policy that permits more freedom of choice in some health harming areas to be judged negatively?  Why is it inherently permissible to poison yourself to death, but not to eat yourself to death?

(ADDENDUM: The piece is also based on an enormous statistical fallacy – correlation does not equal causation.  The article contends that Republican policy creates a higher mortality rate, but it is equally possible that people that engage in a lifestyle that would come with a higher mortality rate prefer to vote Republican, and that Republican policy would thus support their lifestyle.)

This piece in SA does not survive serious consideration, it is just a collection of statistics which upon cursory examination make Republicans look bad.  There is no scientific purpose served by its publication, but it does serve to try and gin up some Democratic votes in November, which is all it is really about….

…As is the news out of California that they are banning the sale of gasoline powered cars by 2035.  This, like the forgiveness of student loans, will never come to pass.  California currently imports roughly 25% of its electrical power.  It will not permit the construction of new generation save for wind and solar.  Californians are already being told to forego the charging of their electrical vehicles during periods of high electricity demand.  Where is the electricity this move will demand to come from – let alone how will they get it to the cars in a timely fashion?  Then there is the capital cost of EVs.  Most people cannot afford them.  I thought Democrats were the party that cared for the poor, but in the last two days they have doled out cash to the upper middle class and now priced cars out of the realm of possibility for the poor.  The most likely outcome of this move, should it actually come to pass, is the appearance of gigantic auto malls up and down the opposite side of the California border.

But, just in case the virtue signaling in these moves does not take, they can always resort to name calling.  Such will, properly employed burnish your virtue credentials.  After all, all of us church-going Republicans are now, according to the president, “semi-fascists,” whatever the heck that means.  For a party that purports to hate Donald Trump, they sure do sound an awfully lot like him.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the fruits of Democratic policy are becoming increasingly evident.  Anecdotally, I am encountering more and more failing small businesses.  While I know anecdotes are just that, due to my business I have a much larger sample size than most people.  So these comments may not rise to the level of “study,” but I think they are valid.  The problems are twofold – a shortage of labor and supply chain.  Companies that survived shutdown cannot survive a lack of product on the shelves or people to sell what product they do have.  and the labor shortage is more pronounce than simply unfilled positions.

People are insisting on continuing to work remotely while employers are discovering that remote work is far less productive than on-site work.  Then there is the whole “quiet quitting” thing.  I am not sure people understand how inflationary these phenomena actually are.  Less productivity means less product when we already have too much money chasing too few products.  Just as the government pumping money into the economy is inflationary, so are actions that lower the product in the economy for all that money to buy.  But I guess if all these businesses fail, there will be no jobs to quietly quit from.

So here is where we are.  Democratic policy is creating unsustainable economic havoc.  To avoid the electoral consequences of that they decide to take executive and legislative action that is completely impossible to actually bring to fruition while they call Republicans the most heinous of names and their willing accomplices in the media write articles that are sensational but hardly truly meaningful.

Not a pretty picture, is it.

Second Addendum: This – “Inflation eases as consumer prices rise 6.3% in July.”  I don’t think so, Scooter.  “Inflation slows,” maybe, but “eases?”  Hell no.  6.3% CPI increase year over year is extraordinary, there is nothing easy about it.  This is nothing short of an Orwellian level effort to bend language to suit your desires.  Spare me.