The Press-Dispatch

December 22, 2021

The Press-Dispatch

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C-6 Wednesday, December 22, 2021 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg For the baby boom generation who could ever forget Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown and the peanuts gang have entertained generations. For- ever eight years old Charlie Brown "must be the one who suffers be- cause he is a caricature of the av- erage person" said creator Charles M. Schulz. Charlie's catchphrase is "good grief" which characterizes his outlook on life. In 1965, Coca-Cola was looking for a Christmas special to sponsor and, as fate would have it, a "Charlie Brown Christmas" was born. Christ- mas isn't "the most wonderful time of the year" for everyone. Beneath all the revelry, celebration and yuletide joy often lie sadness, emptiness, dis- appointment, and even depression. Charlie Brown experiences this de- pression and becomes even more dis- couraged by his observations of over commercialization. The way we celebrate Christ- mas today has little resemblance to Christmases past. The first celebra- tion of Christ's birth was observed in Rome on 25 December 336. It be- gan as a religious mass or obser- vance and continued until the 1800s. Christmas as celebrated today, with its gift giving, caroling and such, be- gan in the early 1800s. By the 20th century, Christmas had become do- mesticated and commercialized. Giv- en the stresses of shopping and find- ing the "gift that counts," I'm sur- prised that more people are not se- riously depressed. The show begins with Charlie Brown telling Linus that despite all the traditions of Christmas cards, decorations, and presents, he still winds up depressed, but is not sure why. Linus dismisses Charlie Brown's attitude as typical, quoting Lucy: "Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Brown- iest." At the psychiatric booth, Lucy ex- presses joy at the sound of Charlie Brown dropping money into her can. She tries to diagnose Charlie Brown Nikki Haley's Christmas present to America Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambas- sador to the United Nations, has served up a kind of Christmas pres- ent to the nation in the form of a new comprehensive policy book, issued by her organization Stand for Ameri- ca, serving up conservative solutions for our nation's many challenges — domestic and foreign. Conservatives get a bad rap that they just say "no." That they're against everything but never clear what they are for. Haley is one conservative that can- not be accused of not having a broad vision and not being forthcoming in sharing it. It's all here in "American Strength: Conservative Solutions Worth Fight- ing For." Latest Gallup polling shows just 24% of Americans are satisfied with how things are going in their coun- try. Recent polling from Pew Research shows only 24% of Americans say they trust their government to do the right thing "always" or "most of the time." The only thing Americans seem to agree on these days is dissatisfaction with their government and the state of affairs in their country. Trust in government has not ex- ceeded 30 % since 2007. The last time it exceeded 50 % was in October 2001, after the nation unified behind Pres- ident George W. Bush's effort to re- spond to the horrible terrorist attack on our nation on Sept. 11, 2001. Per Pew, data reporting trust in government started in 1958, when the National Election Study first began asking the question. Those years from the late 1950s to the ear- ly 1970s were the last time, except for that brief moment in October 2001, 50 % or more of Americans surveyed said they trust their government to do the right thing. Subsequently, it all went downhill. What characterizes the years from the late '60s/early '70s up until the present is vast expansion of govern- ment power and intrusion into the lives of citizens. In other words, the more government goes where it doesn't belong, the more confidence and trust that citizens feel in their government deteriorate. Only when we were attacked, when government was the focus of what is clearly its job — national defense — did trust get back above 50 % . The flow of information from the economic and cultural fronts in the nation radiates troubling news. Inflation is surging for the first time in over 30 years. National debt is growing to dangerous levels, equal to the size of our whole national econ- omy with projections from the Con- gressional Budget Office that it will get much worse. Our entitlement programs — So- cial Security and Medicare — have severe projected financing problems that make it impossible to continue without major reform. Culturally, family and marriage are collapsing. Birthrates are at his- toric lows, and surveys show Amer- icans of ages where families are formed indicate low interest in hav- ing children. America needs conservative lead- ership to get us back on track with policies driven by traditional Amer- ican values of limited government. "American Strength: Conserva- tive Solutions Worth Fighting For" serves up the blueprint. I was honored to write the chapter on Overcoming Poverty and Build- ing Long-Term Wealth. But I am in distinguished company with leaders such as Ken Langone, founder of The Home Depot; Sens. Tim Scott and Pat Toomey; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; Pas- tor John Hagee; Dennis Prager; and others, covering the full gamut of do- mestic and foreign policy The USA is badly in need of a 21st-century conservative makeover. Nikki Haley and Stand for Amer- ica serve up the vision and the plan. Star Parker is president of the Cen- ter for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show "Cure America with Star Parker." Deadly delays COVID-19 deaths are up. Politi- cians tell us to wear masks and get vaccinated. Amid the fear, I'm surprised that we haven't heard more about two drugs that could make COVID-19 much less of a threat. In blind tests, Pfizer's Paxlovid was found to reduce the risk of hos- pitalization and death by 89 percent! It was so effective that Pfizer was ad- vised to stop the tests. "They halted the clinical trials! " exclaims Michael Cannon, director of health policy at the Cato Institute in my new video. "They decided it would be unethi- cal (not to give the drug to people in the control group.) But if it's uneth- ical to deny them the drug, it's un- ethical to deny the American public that drug! " Excellent point. Yet that's what the Food and Drug Administration is doing. They force us to wait until they're sure all drugs "meet the agen- cy's rigorous standards." How long might they delay? "If the FDA is following its cur- rent practice," says Cannon, "it'll be a matter of months." Months is an improvement over the 10 years it usually takes the FDA. During the pandemic, the FDA loos- ened regulations to get some medi- cines to people faster. "(But) we're still losing thousands of lives unnecessarily," complains Cannon. At the beginning of the AIDS cri- sis, the FDA delayed approval of ma- ny AIDS drugs. Some Americans formed "buyers clubs" to purchase AIDS drugs from Mexico. That's what the movie "Dallas Buyers Club" was about. But buying unapproved drugs from other countries is illegal. Now the United Kingdom has ap- proved molnupiravir, Merck's coro- navirus antiviral pill. In tests, it cut hospitalization by 30 percent. But we can't try it in America. "More input is needed," says the FDA. More input is always helpful, but our FDA is just slow. "The United Kingdom approved molnupiravir back at the beginning of November," Cannon points out. "The FDA didn't even meet to de- cide whether to approve it until the end of November. In the meantime, thousands of Americans died." While people die, President Joe Biden praises the FDA for their "hard work." "We shouldn't be praising them for doing a job that no one should be do- ing, which is violating your rights," says Cannon. "If we just gave patients the freedom to purchase drugs oth- er countries had approved, we would go a long way toward restoring your right to make your own health deci- sions." FDA regulators don't want to kill people, but they do have an incentive to work slowly. If they approve a drug that hurts someone, they'll get hor- rible publicity. They may get fired. But when people die from delayed approval, no bureaucrat gets in trou- ble. We don't know which people might have been saved. "That's why the FDA always tries to make sure that it never lets an un- safe drug on the market," says Can- non. "Even if the cost is years of de- lay and many, many lives lost." His solution: Have no FDA. I push back. "Some people would try drugs that would kill them." "Yes, some people would have ad- verse drug events," he replies. "But the number of lives that we would save would absolutely swamp the number of lives that we lose to un- safe drugs." The FDA was created 100 years ago because some people were harmed by quack medicines. But of course, some still are. "The entire premise of an agency like the FDA is that you're not smart enough to make these decisions for yourself," says Cannon. But maybe we're not smart enough, I tell him. "I'm not smart enough to judge whether a pill really works or I'm being sold snake oil." "It's not true that you're not smart enough to make this decision your- self, John," he says. "You can con- sult experts, your physician, medical journals, Consumer Reports. You can consult government regulatory agen- cies in other countries. Every day the One of the most popular provisions of the 1994 Contract with America was a rule requiring Congress to live by the same laws that families and businesses are subject to. So, why doesn't Congress live by the financial and accounting stan- dards required of the rest of us? I'm speaking of the multitril- lion-dollar Build Back Better law, a giant financial masquerade. No one knows what it costs. None of the Democrats in Congress who are hell- bent on passing it seems to care. That may be because, as the House Bud- get Committee chairman has pro- nounced, "We can pay for whatever we want to pay for." Uh-huh. Don't hire this man as your accountant. The bookkeeping gambits in this bill are so brazen that it's hard to be- lieve they think they can get away with it. One of the tricks is to hide the ac- tual cost by counting 10 years of reve- nue to pay for five years of new spend- ing programs. But, amazingly, even with this sleight of hand, they can't make the numbers add up. Another is to assume that Congress can pass the most significant increase in U.S. his- tory and it won't hurt the economy. The Congressional Budget Of- fice has to score whatever Congress sends its way, so it shows massive deficits in the first five years of the Build Back Broker bill and then, magically, the next five years generate significant surpluses. Is there any human being on the planet who believes these surplus- es will emerge or that these new entitlement programs will disap- pear? They won't. Con- gress is planting seeds in the budget that we know from ex- perience will grow into mighty (ex- pensive) oak trees. We will let the children worry about that in 10 or 20 years. Yet, President Joe Biden still reads off the teleprompter that the bill "costs nothing" and it "won't raise the debt by a penny." I wonder if he even believes that. It is closer to a $4 trillion tax, spend and borrow blitzkrieg with honest accounting, not $2 trillion. Under the process of reconcilia- tion, legislation typically expires af- ter 10 years unless Congress votes to make such provisions permanent, as it did, for example, with former President George W. Bush's tax-cut bill. Using reconciliation allows the president and Democratic leaders to mask the actual cost of BBB. As for- mer President Ronald Reagan said, "Government programs, once launched, never dis- appear. Actually, a gov- ernment bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth." If a CEO of a major cor- poration or the manag- er of a small business did accounting the way Con- gress does, they would get thrown in jail. Bernie Madoff doesn't hold a candle to the Demo- crats in Congress. And for full dis- closure, Republicans pull from this bag of tricks, too. The one man who can rescue us is West Virginia's Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. He's been calling out his colleagues for their chicanery. But will he stick to his guns and force Congress to use generally ac- cepted accounting principles and re- al numbers? We can only hope. If he doesn't, he too will be a co-conspir- ator in one of the greatest financial swindles of all time. Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at FreedomWorks. He is also a co-found- er of the Committee to Unleash Pros- perity and a Washington Examiner columnist. China celebrated its 20th anniver- sary of being admitted to the World Trade Organization on Dec. 11. While the mission of the WTO is to ensure that world trade is as smooth, predictable, and free as possible, to- day's China remains economically and politically unfree. As BBC's economics editor point- ed out, China's admission to the World Trade Organization changed the game for America, Europe and most of Asia…The promise, suggest- ed by the likes of former US Presi- dent Bill Clinton, was that "import- ing one of democracy's most cher- ished values, economic freedom," would enable the world's most pop- ulous nation to follow the path of po- litical freedom too. "When individu- als have the power not just to dream, but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say," he said. But that strategy failed. Pascal Lamy, the European Union trade commissioner at the time of China's accession and former WTO director-general from 2005 to 2013, stated that China's accession was a "defining moment" for the WTO and the multilateral trading system, which required China's "political in- telligence, technical knowledge and, of course, a good (accession) team." However, he further suggested that, going forward, China needs to do more by fulfilling its "commitment in the WTO." To be fair, China's economic development has been notable since it opened more to the world in the late 1970s and allowed for a more capitalist economic mod- el to succeed. Entry into the World Trade Orga- nization in 2001 further opened Chi- na's market to foreign trade and in- vestment, enabling China to lift mil- lions more out of abject poverty and give a greater number of Chinese cit- izens access to a better quality of life and leisure. Beijing has long taken credit for China's economic success and wish- es to keep it that way. However, the Chinese Commu- nist Party has never abandoned its socialist ideology and authoritarian approach. Chinese President Xi Jin- ping has successfully injected the party's new paradox between crav- ing greater control that puts the party above all and the pursuit of much-needed positive economic out- comes, which has been increasingly challeng- ing. China has often paid lip service to reforming its bloated, inefficient, state-owned enterprises and command economic structure. Unfortunate- ly, recently announced reforms have rarely panned out, with pro-market reforms slowed and even derailed in some sectors. According to the Index of Eco- nomic Freedom, the Chinese econ- omy remains a mostly unfree coun- try with weak property rights and a protectionist financial system. Chi- na's economic freedom has mar- ginally grown over the past few de- cades, but at a snail's pace. The Chi- nese economy remains "mostly un- free" and stands as the 107th-freest (out of 179) in the 2021 index, lag- ging behind the majority of other countries in maximizing opportuni- Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Continued on page 7 Continued on page 7 Continued on page PB Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore The greatest financial swindle of all time Heritage Viewpoint By Anthony Kim Points to Ponder By Rev. Curtis Bond China's 20th anniversary of WTO membership necessitates a reality check True meaning of Christmas Continued on page 7 Court

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