Featured Articles: Introducing #PlatformPitches

#PlatformPitches is the name we’ve given to our new series of articles, offering suggestions to the Republican ticket. There are now two articles in the series:

Introducing #PlatformPitches: Our Suggestions for the Republican Ticket

#PlatformPitches: Time For A New COPS Program

Thought of the Day: The Truth About Mpox

The time of Covid is the time everyone would like to forget. It’s just too traumatic. Thankfully, the Brownstone Institute was founded in the era of Covid to try to apply some of the lessons learned to public health.

One problem with the aftermath of Covid will be familiar to students of public choice theory everywhere: an unexpected situation arises; bureaucracies and special interests are brought about to face the unexpected situation; the situation recedes; but the bureaucracies and NGOs now have an incentive to perpetuate themselves and justify their own existence.

Enter “Mpox”, also known as monkeypox. The World Health Organization recently declared the disease Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Brownstone’s David Bell offers a good dose of sanity. Mpox “fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash, and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades,’ produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men. The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.” A disease that transmits through close contact will spread much less fast than an airborne disease.

However, while Mpox has caused around 500 deaths this year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this pales in comparison to the 40,000 deaths from malaria and hundreds of thousands of deaths from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malnutrition and unsafe water in the same time period.

Writes Bell: “Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.”

However, there is now a “pandemic-industrial complex.” We “now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure. The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy […] vaccine-based response.”

Let’s all keep our cool, at least for now.

Policy News You Need To Know

#BigTech – Important new report from the great Clare Morell at EPPC on getting phones out of schools. Watch this space. One problem: the polling we’re aware of shows parents support phones in schools.

#PriceControls – Price controls to the left of me, price controls to the right… Brookings looks at the impact of the drug price controls included in the IRA. “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported a $6 billion reduction in spending associated with the new negotiated prices, evaluated at 2023 volumes of prescriptions.” As we wrote at the time Vice President Harris gave her “price-gouging” speech, price control can work…in the short term.

#PriceControls – Speaking of, CEI’s excellent regulation observer Ryan Young has a good look at the current state of price controls.

#TaxPolicy – ATR, Gover’s group, has a nice list of all the tax increases Kamala Harris has proposed. They add up to $5 trillion. Yowch! Speaking of: Philip Pilkington points out that, with Harris proposing raising the corporate tax rate to 25%, and Donald Trump proposing lowering it to 15%, this is probably the election with the biggest delta in corporate tax rates at stake in many decades at least. Worth keeping in mind.

#Immigration – More on the Biden-Harris Administration’s “parole-in-place” program which came into effect this week and will give work permits to many illegal immigrants. One problem? Previous such programs have been rife with fraud.

#Immigration – Speaking of, when you hear “Trouble at the border”, you think about the Southern border. But now, even the Northern border is being overwhelmed, and DHS is struggling to keep up.

#Immigration – Speaking of, a new report by the Inspector General of DHS reveals the stunning news: DHS has lost track of 291,000 unaccompanied children smuggled across the border. (Via) This level of incompetence is beyond any kind of partisan or ideological divide. Each of those children is a potential unspeakable tragedy.

#IndustrialPolicy – TSMC Breaks Ground on €10 Billion German Plant in Chip War Salvo. This is one risk with industrial policy: you start a bidding war.

#IndustrialPolicy – Industrial policy creates (or can create) zero sum competition between nations, but also inside nations, National Review’s Dominic Pino reminds us, editorializing against trying to use tax credits to attract Hollywood to your state.

#MonetaryPolicy – Given the inflation picture, the idea of dollar devaluation to improve exports may not be very realistic, but some people are still discussing it. At City Journal, Patrick Horan explains why that’s a bad idea.

Chart of the Day

Striking numbers:

Meme of the Day