Bonjour! Here’s your PolicySphere morning briefing! If you were forwarded this, here’s more about who we are and what we’re doing and, of course, don’t forget to sign up and tell your friends.
NEW: Check out our exclusive interview with AEI’s James Pethokoukis on his book on how to kickstart American breakthrough innovation back to levels not seen since Apollo.
#Drugs – Apparently, the French have a cure for the common cold, but the FDA doesn’t want you to have it. Tyler Cowen has more.
#Drugs – Speaking of, R Street’s Wayne Brough points out something which you probably already know, but is still worth repeating: “Bad Patents Keep Drug Prices High.”
#EducationPolicy #DEI – “Colleges and universities are facing a looming enrollment disaster as more Americans question the value of higher education (due to both its cost and quality) and an aging population limits overall student enrollment,” points out AEI’s Michael Brinkman. He has an idea that would both help higher education institutions remain relevant and make everything easier: skills-based hiring. “Degree-based hiring is not just a barrier to opportunities for those without a degree; it’s also a poor method of identifying qualified candidates for jobs,” he writes, quite correctly. And so, “[i]n response to this disconnect, institutions of higher education should work with employers and industry associations to build short-term bridge programs to careers. Although these would not be full degree programs, they could still be significant enough to support institutions’ enrollments, potentially bringing relief to some schools in the midst of enrollment crises.” This is all well and good, were it not for DEI and civil rights laws. College requirements for many jobs and the dearth of skills-based hiring did not happen by accident. The function of college degrees in American society is to help employers fulfill DEI goals by providing a credential that obscures disparities in skills. Until DEI is addressed, we fear that Brinkman’s excellent proposal will remain dead letter.
#Energy – R Street’s excellent energy scholar Josiah Neeley has a good article on how the Biden Administration is taxing clean energy in contradiction to its stated opposition to climate change.
#Immigration – An illegal alien from El Salvador was released from DHS custody with a Notice to Appear (NTA) before a federal immigration judge. After being released, he murdered a woman in West Virginia. Breitbart has the details. This is not a local crime story. This is the result of policy.
#PublicHealth – American Mind, a publication of the Claremont Institute, has a very insightful article by Scott Yenor looking at the latest bit of woke pseudoscience, which is called “minority stress theory.” The theory says what it sounds like: being a minority in our bigoted society is so stressful that minorities suffer a particular kind of stress which harms their health. This, of course, means that more DEI programs are required to correct these disparities. Representative sample of this nonsense: “One study finds that gay men incur anal cancer at a much higher rate than straight men. But those who engage in risky behavior are too ashamed to go to doctors out of fear of being mocked and denigrated, so they eschew regular check-ups. Therefore, their shame leads to anal cancer.”
#PublicHealth – This week, the World Health Assembly had its deliberations in Geneva. Brownstone Institute’s David Bell points out that the event was full of misinformation designed to stoke fear of further pandemics, as part of the WHO’s agenda to, like every bureaucracy, increase its budgets and power.
#Reg – If you’ve been reading the PolicySphere Morning Briefing, you know that the Biden Administration has been going wild with new regulations, practically every week. Literally: “One must go back roughly two months to find a week’s worth of rulemaking that was not measured in the billions of dollars,” writes American Action Forum’s Dan Goldbeck, who has been providing the best coverage of this under-the-radar, but frenzied, new rulemaking. This week, in particular, new energy efficiency rules have brought over $5 billion in increased “consumer incidental product costs.” Read our exclusive interview with American Action Forum President Douglas Holz-Eakin here.
#Reg – This is more anecdotal, perhaps (although it is a dynamic industry) but also shows the negative consequences of ill-conceived regulation: Reason has a report on how the micro distillery movement “faces closures and stifling market access due to outdated laws and burdensome middlemen.”
#TaxPolicy – Another recurring theme in our Morning Briefing is the egregious character of the US tax code’s many budget-busting clean energy tax credits. Here’s a particularly striking example of what we mean, from Cato’s Adam N. Michel: a little-known tax credit for biofuel producers has become a magnet for fraud and manipulation, according to a little-noticed report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.
#Contracting – As a new Heritage report points out, “[d]elays in the Defense Department’s procurement process for shipbuilding have become endemic, with programs routinely experiencing years-long holdups and backlogs. These delays cost the Pentagon much money and negatively affect the U.S. Navy’s capacity to protect American interests.” The report highlights solutions on how to remedy this disastrous situaiton.
#AI – R Street is doing a valuable series on cybersecurity and AI. Their latest article looks at some guidelines on smart regulation of AI, both at the national and international level.
Chart of the Day
Fascinating chart from the Institute for Family Studies study we previously covered, which strongly suggests that French pro-family policy did make a difference to their birth rates:
Meme of the Day
