The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1439685
C-4 Wednesday, December 29, 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 Thank you, Senator Manchin The saying, "One man with courage makes a majority" has been attribut- ed by historians to different sources. But regardless of who said it, there is one man who stands out today wor- thy of this description. It's West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Manchin has been a one-man show in the Democratic Party, standing of- ten in solitude, holding feet-to-the-fire of his president and his party's leader- ship, pushing back on the massive and irresponsible spending avalanche in the Build Back Better act. Now, Manchin has slammed the door, saying he can't vote for the bill, effectively killing it. In so doing, Manchin has done a great service to his country and to his party. Ideologues in leadership in the Democratic Party, intoxicated with the power voters gave them in the last election, lost touch with those same voters. Last February, immediately after the elections, Democrat voters gave the Democrat-controlled Congress a 61% approval rating, per Gallup. By Oc- tober, the approval rating for Congress by Democrat voters was down to 33% . And, of course, President Joe Biden's own approval rating has plum- meted from 57% from early last Febru- ary to 42 % by the end of October. Voters gave Democrats control of Congress in the last election by a ti- ny eight-seat margin. Yet, they have been governing like they were voted in in a landslide with a major mandate to transform the Unit- ed States into a new secular humanist bastion of socialism. It's not true, and Manchin has been a bulwark holding fast against this usurpation of power by the far left in his party. As he said in his statement announcing that he will not vote for the bill, "My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dra- matically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vul- nerable to the threats we face." The senator also expressed very legitimate concern that it was all be- ing done dishonestly, accusing his col- leagues of camouflaging the real cost of the legislation they were advancing. House Democrats advertised the cost of the Build Back Better act at around $2 trillion. However, the nonpartisan Universi- ty of Pennsylvania Penn Wharton Bud- get Model, run by former government economists, estimated it at more than twice this at $4.6 trillion. Then the Congressional Budget Of- fice, which answers to Congress, is- sued its estimate at close to $5 trillion. The issue is dishonest game-playing by congressional Democrats. Multibil- lion-dollar programs that clearly will be permanent are scored by those who produced the bill to expire after one year. Informed observers agree that this is ridiculous. The Congressional Budget Office scored the bill, assum- ing these programs last for the 10 -year duration of the projection. As a result, the CBO estimated the cost of the bill at 2 1/2 times more than those who produced the legislation. Manchin also did voters a great ser- vice by calling inflation, which has been one of his great concerns about the bill, "inflation taxes." Inflation is indeed a tax and also a result of sleight of hand of legislators. How many politicians would specifical- ly legislate $2 trillion in tax increases to pay for a $2 trillion spending bill? Did you say none? Instead, funds get borrowed and then the central bank prints money to pay the bills. More money in circulation means every dollar is worth less. Prices go up — inflation. The latest report of a 6.8 % increase in the CPI means a 6.8 % reduction in the real income and savings of every American. All this without even getting in- to the misguided plans for all these funds. And, hidden in it all, elimination of the Hyde Amendment, which, for almost a half-century, has prevented the use of federal funds for abortions. Thank you, Sen. Manchin. Every American who cares about saving our country is indebted to you. Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show "Cure America with Star Parker." Questioning the science When people criticize Dr. Anthony Fauci, he says: "They're really criti- cizing science. Because I represent science." Pretty arrogant. I assume Fauci is a top-notch scien- tist. My brother worked with him at the National Institutes of Health and respected him. But power tends to corrupt, and Fauci has been given a lot of power. His department directed tax dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to modify coronaviruses in bats. When Sen. Rand Paul asked Fauci about funding "gain of function" re- search, experiments that try to learn more about a disease by making it more contagious or deadly, Fauci de- nied it, saying, "Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about! " But it turns out that Paul did know what he was talking about. The Wuhan experiments Fau- ci funded did not directly cause COVID-19. We know that because the molecular structure of the altered vi- ruses is different. But gain-of-function research is risky and deserves public discussion. I like that Paul, unlike most of his colleagues, pushes for that discussion. In my new video, he says he does this because it's important "not only for as- sessing what happened and how this pandemic arose, but making sure it doesn't happen again." Originally, "experts" claimed COVID-19 came from animals in the wet market in Wuhan. But now "ex- perts" say that COVID-19 might have come from a lab. "This has become so polarized that you're either completely in the bag with Fauci or completely opposed to him," says Paul. "There is no one wanting to actually get to the truth of where this came from or understand that this could happen again." I ask Paul what he thought about Fauci's flat dismissal of anyone who criticizes him. "That's an incredibly arrogant atti- tude," replied Paul. "Reminiscent of the medieval church (where) the gov- ernment representative decided what was science... Any time you have gov- ernment dogma saying they are sci- ence, or government bureaucrats who claim that 'this is the one and perfect truth'... we should run head- long away." Today our government wants to mandate vaccines in private workplac- es. The administration claims that's necessary because not enough peo- ple are vaccinated. Paul calls that a "big lie." "We are not stupid. The whole idea of collectivism is that people are too stupid to make their own decisions. Individuals will make rational deci- sions and do." I push back. "Some people are stu- pid. Is there no point when the gov- ernment does have a right to force a vaccination? " "I'm not for ever forcing someone to take medical care," says Paul. What about kids? "The death rate among children is less than the seasonal flu," Paul points out. "We never mandated that kids get vaccinated for the seasonal flu, (even though they get) like 49 different vac- cines. Can we not leave some choice for parents and kids? " I hope so but push back again. "What if it's airborne Ebola? Does gov- ernment ever have the right to say, you must take this medicine? " "No," says Paul. "Once you let gov- ernment in the door to make these de- cisions, they make onerous decisions." They do. I'm a libertarian. I want government out of my life. But an epidemic is the rare excep- tion where some government force may be appropriate. If a disease is vi- cious and contagious, and a medicine clearly reduces the spread, I want gov- ernment to protect me from reckless people, like it protects me from mur- derers. Not to say that America needs a vac- cine mandate. There's been far too much government force during this pandemic already. It's good to question the govern- ment's rules. I'm glad Paul does that. But when it comes to epidemics, I won't say: never. John Stossel is creator of Stossel TV and author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media." How much do solar, wind and elec- tric vehicle companies get in federal handouts and tax loopholes in Pres- ident Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill? Well over $100 billion in taxpay- er largesse. If all the tax credits are in- cluded, that number could reach half a trillion dollars. No other industry in American history has ever received this lucrative a paycheck. The folks at the Institute for Energy Research calculated that this is on top of the more than $150 billion in sub- sidies these industries received from Uncle Sam in the last 30 years. The umbilical cord to taxpayer wal- lets never gets cut. Yet, laughably, the left says all these subsidies to "green energy" are necessary for an "infant industry." Really? Does Big Wind or Big Solar ever grow up? Incidentally, our ancestors were using windmills and solar panels during the Middle Ages. So why do these renewable energies get so much money from Congress, and why do Democrats want to give them the biggest payday in the history of the Washington favor factory? Not because renewable has great promise. Thirty years after the handouts start- ed, wind and solar accounted for less than 8 % of our total energy production. It's inconsequential. If we taxpayers are "investors" in green energy, we'd be wondering where our return is at this point. Wind and solar costs are go- ing down, but not near- ly as fast as the cost re- ductions in natural gas, thanks to the shale rev- olution. But now the left is trying to save its lat- est round of gargantu- an welfare checks by ar- guing that the higher costs of oil and gas at the pump show that these energy sources prove that we can't rely on fossil fuels. It is reminiscent of the story of the boy who kills his parents and throws himself at the mercy of the court for being an orphan. Oil and gas prices are rising because Biden and the left have declared war on American fos- sil fuels. They aren't allowing drilling. They instead are passing new "meth- ane" taxes and not building pipelines. Now liberals shake their fingers at the producers and accuse them of gouging consumers as they assault the added American oil and gas supply that would lower the prices to fill up your tank and heat your home. They are now starting a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in Washington, paid for by taxpayers, telling us that the high gas prices the Biden administration wants mean we have to stop using gas. The irony of all of this is that the reliance on green energy subsidies is one good rea- son for so little technolog- ical progress in renewable energy. We'd perhaps see more innovation if the in- dustry had to fight on a lev- el playing field. Democrats in Congress keep doling out the dollars because the green energy industry gives 90 % of its contributions to Democrats. It is nothing more than a pay-to-play gambit. If wind and solar are the low-cost energy sources of the future, why do they need so much government aid? Will they ever take the training wheels off? A fter three decades, maybe it is time to admit the obvious: Wind and solar are niche energy sources that will not anytime soon, and probably never, provide anywhere near the en- ergy we need for our $22 trillion indus- trial economy. Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at FreedomWorks. He is also a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a Washington Examiner columnist. When it comes to elections, all Americans can surely agree that ev- eryone who's eligible to vote should be able to, and that all votes should be counted honestly and fairly, undi- luted by fraud, errors, or mistakes. The Heritage Foundation has cre- ated its new Election Integrity Score- card to help ensure that happens. President Abraham Lincoln once said, "Elections belong to the peo- ple." At a time when politicians across the country upended state election rules under the guise of COVID-19, the need to protect the people's elections, and to safeguard the value of every citizen's vote, couldn't be clearer. Every citizen's vote is sacred. The right to vote is how we as a free so- ciety guarantee that our govern- ment remains a republic of the peo- ple, by the people, and for the peo- ple. Americans need and deserve elections that they can trust, secure in the knowledge that their vote will not be lost, stolen, altered, or negat- ed by fraud or a vote cast by an ille- gitimate voter. Several years ago, Heritage cre- ated an Election Fraud Database to shed light on this issue. A sam- pling of recent, proven instances of election fraud from across the coun- try that now has over 1,300 entries. Every case represents an instance in which a public official, usually a prosecutor, discovered fraud serious enough to act upon. It's important to note that the da- tabase, by focusing on successful- ly prosecuted cases, is only a small sampling of the much larger prob- lem. An unknown number of legit- imate instances of election fraud go undetected or fail to be pursued by the authorities. To address this serious issue, The Heritage Foundation has created and is now releasing the Election Integ- rity Scorecard. This scorecard an- alyzes the election laws and regula- tions of every state and the District of Colum- bia to measure how well they protect the integ- rity and security of the election process. To de- ter such fraud, protect the right to vote, and en- sure fair and secure elec- tions, we are making the Election Integrity Score- card available to voters, state legislators, and election officials across the country Creating the Election Integrity Scorecard was not easy. Heritage analysts reviewed the laws of every state relevant to election integrity, checked the accuracy of each law by election-law experts, and provided the opportunity for state election of- ficials to fix any incorrect summary of their laws and regulations. The Election Integrity Scorecard grades each state based on whether its laws and regulations meet 47 dif- ferent standards within 12 broad cat- egories, derived from "best practic- es" recommendations that Heritage has previously published. These categories cover every- thing from requiring identification for voting to maintaining the accura- cy of voter registration lists to han- dling absentee ballots securely and effectively. They require states to have strong laws ensuring transpar- ency and the ability of candidates, political parties, and the public to ob- serve every aspect of voting and elec- tions. Such transparency is funda- mental to fair and honest elections. We grade states on whether they have implemented procedures that endanger election integrity such as same-day and automatic voter reg- istration, vote-trafficking of absen- tee ballots, or allowing private fund- ing of election officials and offic- es, which raises serious conflicts of interest. We are also looking at whether states provide voters and their state legislators standing to sue executive branch and election officials who refuse to comply with the law or who seek to change the rules gov- erning elections by set- tling collusive lawsuits without the specific ap- proval of the state legislatures that established those rules. We even pro- vide model statutes on this and other recommended best practices. Our Election Integrity Scorecard will give states—and particularly state legislators—a better idea of where their state laws and regula- tions meet the "best practices" stan- dards and where they need improve- ment. It provides them with the tool they need to fight back against lib- eral groups and politicians that seek to undermine election integrity with unwise and dangerous changes in election laws. Of course, even the best laws are not worth much if responsible offi- cials do not enforce them rigorously. But our scorecard will give citizens of each state the ability to make sure that their elected and appointed pub- lic official do just that. Every citizen needs to be involved. Our work on election integrity is ded- icated to ensuring that the future of our republic remains in the hands of American voters and the choices they make when they enter the vot- ing booth. Dr. Kevin Roberts serves as the sev- enth president in Heritage's 48-year history. Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore The biggest corporate welfare recipients ever LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Signed letters must be received by noon on Monday Heritage Viewpoint By Kevin Roberts, Ph.D. A new way to protect the integrity of our elections