The Daily Chart
February 19, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The stats geek Nate Silver offered up an interesting observation at the New York Times a few days ago. Since the late 1970s there have been two primary surveys of consumer and business sentiment about the economy—the University of Michigan survey, and the Conference Board survey. The Michigan survey is designed to measure pocketbook sentiment of consumers, while the Conference Board tries to measure business conditions. For more than 40
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February 16, 2024 — Steven Hayward
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell again last year, and the Biden Administration will no doubt claim that it is because of their “Inflation Reduction Act” measures promoting renewable energy. In fact, the reduction owes almost entirely to the growth of natural gas power generation: So what does Biden do? Announce new measures to throttle natural gas production and distribution. Chaser—here’s why restricting U.S. natural gas exports is stupid:
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February 15, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Today women outnumber men in college enrollment, and in many graduate fields. Women are advancing in the corporate ranks. Yet for some reason word is out that women have it worse than ever, though the problem is skewed to younger people, which raises the question, what the hell are they learning in school? (Never mind: we know.) Naturally the problem also skews by ideology: Chaser—discrimination in favor of men in
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February 14, 2024 — Steven Hayward
By now it shouldn’t be necessary to point out that the liberal response to the death of George Floyd in 2020 has been a disaster for the very people whom liberals claim they champion: low income minorities. The mindless embrace of the “defund the police” and reduction of enforcement of traffic stops has led to a significant increase in black mortality especially. Nice going liberals.
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February 13, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Word has gone out for the media from Certified Smart People: attack the Republican House for being the least productive Congress in decades in terms of the number of bills actually passed. This shows how out of touch they are, since “Do-Nothing Congress” is one of the happiest phrases around for anyone acquainted with Gideon Tucker’s famous axiom, “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is
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February 12, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries has his knickers in a twist because House Republicans refuse to re-instate the state and local tax deduction. But I thought Democrats want to increase taxes on the top 1%? This ought to be an embarrassment, but Democrats long ago got over being embarrassed by hypocrisy. I say to House Republicans, keep pouring SALT into self-inflicted blue state wounds.
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February 10, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Just ahead of Super Bowl Sunday it is worth noting that there hasn’t been a white starting cornerback in the NFL for more than 20 years, and this isn’t likely the result of affirmative action, since professional sports operate strictly on merit. Here’s what the long-term trends look like for all of the positions in the NFL (click to embiggen):
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February 9, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Well, well, lookie here: the price for bets on Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom being the Democratic nominee jumped sharply last night: I believe that’s what they call “gapping up” in the futures market pits. My offering to the Twitter gods this morning: Chaser—headline this afternoon:
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February 8, 2024 — Steven Hayward
For the climate cult, scary charts like Michael Mann’s dodgy “hockey stick” haven’t done the trick of scaring everyone into bug-eating submission. So they come up with stylistic depictions like these to overcome their “communications problem” (which is the all-purpose excuse for our resistance to bug eating—that there might be defects in their case is simply never admitted): Oh, I’m sure you’re convinced now! How can you ignore the compelling
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February 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
George Washington famously said in his Farewell Address: ““[o]f all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…. reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Conservatives still believe this. Liberals increasingly don’t. It is arguably the case that this question may be the most important divide, or source of political polarization, in
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February 6, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Over at Tablet Magazine, Tony Badran exposes how elite universities tolerate anti-Semitism because they need the revenue from foreign students (who pay the rack rate for tuition), not to mention the lavish funding Arab nations have used as bribes to American universities. Badran reports: Universities have acknowledged the obvious fact that many of the campus protest leaders are foreign students, here on limited educational visas, in the manner with which
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February 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Remember how the left jeered when Sarah Palin, back during her star turn in 2008, led crowd chants of “Drill, baby, drill!” All the Certified Smart People like John Kerry and Al Gore said there was no way we could hope to end our dependence on foreign oil through domestic production, and President Obama was predicting that the U.S. would be off of oil by 2020 or so. Funny we
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February 2, 2024 — Steven Hayward
When oil and gasoline prices rise, the left screams “price gouging!” “Collusion! Investigate the oil companies!” And the blames the endlessly soaring cost of health care on “corporate greed” as well. Somehow, though, the left never yells “collusion” or “greed” about college tuition, which has inflated more rapidly than health care costs over the last generation. But there never seem to be any congressional hearings on why this happens, or
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February 1, 2024 — Steven Hayward
I’m just catching up with a 2022 article in the Southern Economic Journal on “The impact of chief diversity officers on diverse faculty hiring,” by four economists from Baylor University. The article analyzes the growth and results of the explosion of hiring of DEI administrators on college campuses from 2001 to 2019, and makes some judgments about the results. The first most useful thing about the study is quantifying the
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January 31, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Remember the Obama 2012 campaign’s infamous “Life of Julia” video, which envisioned a world in which the State had replaced men entirely as the support structure for single women? That astoundingly revealing video and slide show seems to have been scrubbed from the internet (although as the link above demonstrates, the Biden Administration has exactly the same dependency-promoting mindset), but course there are Wayback Machine versions you can see if
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January 30, 2024 — Steven Hayward
As you have no doubt heard, 2023 was the planet’s hottest year on record (a “record” that only goes back about 150 years, with more and more uncertainty and unreliability the farther back you go). Certain it is accurate to say last year was the hottest since we started measuring more precisely by satellites—starting 45 years ago. One of my gurus on this subject, Dr. Roy Spencer (who helped design
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January 29, 2024 — Steven Hayward
Everyone knows generally that the public school bureaucracy has exploded over the last generation, but I have seldom seen the full grotesque dimensions of this displayed so vividly:
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