Freedom Line Blog

Despite attempts to portray the Biden/Harris administration as friendly toward domestic U.S. energy producers, American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher highlights how that’s simply not the case.  Zycher cogently distinguishes the deceptive metric of oil and natural gas production on federal lands – which is a trailing indicator from permits and exploration years old – from new permits granted, which better reflects current friendliness toward U.S. energy producers.  It’s not a pretty picture for Biden/Harris apologists or the Harris campaign team:

Biden/Harris Unfriendly Toward U.S. Energy Production

After the United States Supreme Court ruling this past June finally and rightfully overturning “Chevron Deference,” one might hope that federal agencies and the bureaucrats who populate them in Washington, D.C. would recognize and respect the new limitations on their previous excesses.

The ruling struck a major blow against administrative state overreach.  And while the Court’s decision specifically dealt with agencies’ rulemaking process and the ability to interpret statutes however they like, hopefully it and similar previous rulings will start imposing desperately needed guardrails to prevent rouge agency action.

The Unites States Department of Education (DOE) offers a textbook example of that sort of rogue behavior.   Many cogently contend that the DOE shouldn’t even exist, and that federal education dollars should instead go directly to the states, letting them handle education policy at the more effective local level.

Of course, if we accomplished that, bureaucrats in the DOE ranks wouldn’t be able to use their lofty titles to attack universities of their choosing at whim.

More specifically, we at CFIF told you a few months ago about an attempted money grab by DOE at the University of Arizona.  in that instance, the DOE moved to shift tens of millions of dollars in student debt from thousands of students instead onto the U of A following its acquisition of a for-profit online university.  That offers just the latest example of the ongoing efforts by federal regulators to target more market-driven education models.

To date, DOE has failed to provide any clarity or guidance in their scheme to U of A, despite that fact that it could cost Arizona taxpayers millions at a time when Vice President Kamala Harris desperately wants to avoid stirring up opposition among voters in this critical swing state.

Unfortunately, the DOE’s malfeasance shouldn’t be surprising.  It stems from DOE’s stubborn and unfounded aversion toward any market-oriented education outside of bureaucratic control.  How dare U of A experiment with an innovative form of education delivery, they believe.    That’s shameful of them, and ultimately damages student populations that the DOE exists to help.

In that vein, our friends at the Heritage Foundation released a report earlier this year detailing DOE’s two-decade war with for-profit higher education, even in cases where those schools were partners with nonprofit institutions.  “Rather than singling out the for-profit sector, which is meeting the needs of non-traditional students in particular, the department should hold all sectors to the same standards instead of expressing the anti-market biases,” the Heritage report found.

Sadly, U of A appears to be just the latest victim of DOE’s perverse witch hunt.  That triggers the looming question: Who’s next?  If the DOE can do this to the largest university in such a politically and economically important state like Arizona, what other state universities in less-pivotal swing states might they target next to try to recoup their student loan “forgiveness?”

Hopefully, pressure from the courts, elected officials and the public results in some restoration of sanity at the end of the day, and that DOE decides to put the interests of Arizona students and taxpayers first.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Michael Ramirez on Vice President Kamala Harris’ price controls:

In this week’s Liberty Update, we highlight how Kamala Harris isn’t even bothering to conceal her goal of abolishing private health insurance in America.  Whereas Barack Obama earned PolitiFact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year” for assuring America that, “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it,” Harris just openly advocates ending private healthcare plans completely.  Some pro-socialized medicine extremists claim that the 80% of Americans who prefer private insurance are somehow oblivious to its cost.  In a letter in today’s Wall Street Journal, however, a wise reader notes that government plans cost even more:

[T]he average annual cost of Medicare per beneficiary in 2022 (the latest data) was $15,727.  For a retired couple, that’s $31,454 a year, or 30% more than private coverage for a whole family.”

A second reader further notes that while someone with employer-provided private insurance can at least see how much is taken out of his or her paycheck, we have no idea how tax dollars that subsidize government plans are inefficiently used within the murky interiors of the federal bureaucracy.

In response to broad public discontent over economic conditions, the Biden/Harris administration habitually points to the nation’s unemployment rate.  What remains underreported is that the unemployment rate is actually on a disturbingly upward trend over the past year, from 3.4% in April 2023 to 4.1% now, just as voters consider whether to continue the economic policies of the past four years:

Unemployment Rate’s Disturbing Upward Rise

Today, the House Oversight Committee is holding an important hearing entitled “The Role of Pharmacy Benefit Managers in Prescription Drug Markets Part III:  Transparency and Accountability.”

For those unfamiliar, Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) amount to middlemen that control prescription drugs for millions of Americans.  A majority of Americans receive health insurance through employer plans or government programs such as Medicare, which in turn cover prescription drugs through PBMs.  Those PBMs negotiate with drug companies and pay pharmacies, but throughout the process determine the drugs that insured patients may obtain and at what cost.

The problem is that PBMs operate in such an opaque and complex manner that they’re able to inflate drug costs while claiming to be working to reduce them.  It has reached a point where even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now investigating PBMs’ role in driving up costs for Americans.

Today’s House Oversight Committee hearing accordingly offers invaluable assistance in alerting Americans to PBMs’ ongoing role in unnecessarily increasing drug prices for consumers, and hopefully helps propel reform in this critical realm.

In their increasingly desperate effort to resuscitate Joe Biden’s sagging campaign, his defenders claim that stock markets vindicate “Bidenomics” (not that they call it that anymore, of course) vis-a-vis former President Donald Trump.  Well, our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity show what happens when you adjust stock performance to account for out-of-control inflation under Biden:

“Biden Boom?” Not So Much.

However else one opines on the merits or perils of artificial intelligence (AI), everyone of good faith can agree that it mustn’t become a tool for brazen copyright infringement.  Artists who pour their (sometimes literal) blood, sweat and tears into their creative works shouldn’t have those works stolen and exploited by AI bots.

That is particularly true as it relates to AI music generators specifically created for that exploitative purpose.

For that reason, we should all welcome and applaud major record labels for their decisive lawsuit against AI generators Suno and Udio, whom they accuse in their complaints of copyright violation on an “unimaginable scale.”

The complaints make for gripping reading unlike most legal filings, but we’re not talking here about sampling various songs or “fair use” or ambiguous similarities between songs.  We’re talking about wholesale theft, scraping songs for exploitation, which not only punishes artists but America’s entire world-leading music industry.

The complaints can be – and should be – read in their entirety here and here, and we should welcome this effort to enforce creators’ IP rights, regardless of how the broader AI landscape continues to expand.

In our latest Liberty Update, we call Joe Biden out on his deficit fibbing, which he continued in last week’s debate meltdown against Donald Trump.  Excepting the unanticipated Covid spending that Biden and his party supported, official government data shows in sharp relief how Biden’s baseline deficits exceed Trump’s, as we pointed out:

Biden Baseline Deficits Exceed Trump’s

In recent weeks we at CFIF have criticized the Biden administration’s indefensible legal crusade against entertainment enterprise Live Nation, which promises nothing but a waste of judicial resources and litigation costs in its attempt to reverse a merger that the very same Department of Justice (DOJ) blessed just a few short years ago.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar and tech expert Mark Jamison adds his own intellectual heft to the issue in his new commentary “The Government Is Gunning for Live Nation.  It’s Making a Historic Mistake”:

The recent case filed by Department of Justice (DOJ) exemplifies the administration’s tendency to view company breakups as a panacea for perceived market ills.  The DOJ argues that Live Nation’s integration of concerts, event venue ownership, talent agencies and ticketing creates barriers to competition and enables the company to engage in unfair practices.  The DOJ believes that spinning off Ticketmaster, which Live Nation acquired nearly 15 years ago, and Live Nation’s concert venues will foster a more competitive market.

History suggests otherwise.”

Mr. Jamison’s piece merits a full read, but he highlights how American consumers will be the ones to pay the price of this latest misguided activism from the Biden administration:

Live Nation has become the world’s leading provider of live concerts, ticket sales and related services.  Its success stems from innovative integration across multiple business lines, a structure that its competitors want to replicate, according to the DOJ.  The agency contends that this integration is hard to duplicate, so it stifles competition and innovation.  Yet this very structure has driven substantial value for consumers and investors.  The only beneficiaries of breaking up Live Nation would be those less effective competitors who struggle to match its innovations.”  (Emphasis added.)

Well said.

In our latest Liberty Update, we highlight how Americans have soured on “Bidenomics” despite Biden supporters’ ongoing insistence that voters trust them rather than over three years of actual, real-life experience and hardship.  Well, our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity have highlighted another point that merits emphasis as minorities turn against Biden in his reelection effort.  Namely, they prospered far more under President Trump than President Biden:

Minorities Prospered Far More Under Trump Than Biden

At CFIF, the issue of improving taxpayer privacy and protection against persistent abuse by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) remains among our most important missions.  Among the abuses that we’ve chronicled is the case of convicted criminal Charles Littlejohn, who rejoined the IRS in 2017 with the specific purpose of illegally breaching and leaking the private tax returns of Donald Trump and other Americans to radical left-wing organizations like ProPublica.

In The Wall Street Journal this week, one of those victims speaks out on his own experience and the need for greater taxpayer protection against this recurring problem that should terrify all Americans of every political persuasion.  Ira Stoll, whose tax information was passed to ProPublica, even helpfully details how federal law allows victimized taxpayers to sue the government for at least $1,000 and attorneys’ fees.  His broader point, however, is that crimes like those perpetrated against him could be avoided if the IRS simply collected and retained less confidential information, much of which it doesn’t even need for legitimate operational purposes:

The problem transcends the Littlejohn leak.  A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office documented 462 unauthorized accesses or disclosures of tax information between 2012 and 2021, ‘of which 24 resulted in guilty outcomes’ after referrals to the Justice Department.  Much of this could be solved if the government simply collected and stored less confidential data.”

We agree wholeheartedly, and applaud Mr. Stoll for speaking out even though ProPublica retains his data and could vindictively release it at any time.

Joe Biden tells Americans that he’s helping them by building “from the bottom up and the middle out.”  But the numbers don’t lie, and the ugly reality is that he’s only dragging us all toward the bottom.  Throughout his presidency, wage gains (green) have been consistently exceeded by inflation (blue), meaning loss in real earnings (red):

Bidenomics Means Lost Earnings

Consumer spending accounts for approximately two-thirds of the U.S. economy, so Joe Biden’s crushing impact on consumer confidence helps resolve his apologists’ confusion over Biden’s economic disapproval.  After inheriting an economy rebounding from the Covid shock, Biden’s policies quickly drove consumer confidence back downward, where it continues to stagnate.  No wonder he finds himself in such electoral hot water.

Bidenomics Crushes Consumer Confidence

CFIF often highlights how the Biden Administration’s bizarre decision to resurrect failed Title II “Net Neutrality” internet regulation, which caused private broadband investment to decline for the first time ever outside of a recession during its brief experiment at the end of the Obama Administration, is a terrible idea that will only punish consumers if allowed to take effect.

Here’s what happened after that brief experiment was repealed under the Trump Administration and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai – internet speeds skyrocketed despite late-night comedians’ and left-wing activists’ warnings that the internet was doomed:

Internet Speeds Post-“Net Neutrality”

File under “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.”

Somehow, it actually seems like a farcical April Fools’ Day headline, in fact.  Google, with its deep history of scraping and scanning other sources’ substantive content for its own uses, now objects to OpenAI using YouTube content to train its text-to-video generator:

The use of YouTube videos to train OpenAI’s text-to-video generator would be an infraction of the platform’s terms of service, YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan said.”

Optimists might hope that Google is finally recognizing and preparing to correct its wayward course, while realists and cynics will roll their eyes at what they’ll label naivete.  As the old adage goes, however, “every saint has a past, every sinner has a future,” so we’ll maintain hope.

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of student debt held by thousands of students onto the University of Arizona after the fact following U of A’s acquisition of the for-profit online university that it originally targeted.  In other words, the Biden DOE is compounding its habit of forgiving student debt by shifting the cost ex post facto onto the backs of Arizona taxpayers.

Not exactly the best way to flatter citizens of a swing state whose votes it desperately seeks amid sinking electoral prospects.

Here’s the background.

Amid a rapidly evolving educational environment, in August of 2020 the U of A announced its intent to acquire private online Ashford University in an attempt to extend its global reach, a pursuit shared by numerous other traditional universities.  The new entity was named the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC).

Well, years prior to the acquisition California and federal bureaucrats had accused Ashford of “deceptive” tactics, and last year the Biden DOE announced that it would discharge $72 million dollars in debt held by 2,300 of Ashford’s former students.

Lo and behold, this month the Biden DOE announced that it would seek to extract that amount from the U of A, which obviously had nothing to do with the conduct alleged by the DOE and California.

It all adds yet another questionable element to the Biden administration’s ongoing effort to boost its popularity among younger voters by shifting college student debt to anyone and everyone other than the legal borrowers themselves.  Whether that will please taxpayers in the swing state of Arizona might have been a consideration that escaped the Biden folks.

Among his parade of other outright untruths in his borderline unhinged State of the Union address, last night Joe Biden repeated his economically illiterate claim that “trickle down” tax cuts benefit wealthier Americans at the expense of federal revenues.  Our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity once again provide an invaluable illustration of the falsity of that claim:

Americans are by now broadly aware of the threat posed by Chinese-owned TikTok, including its threat to U.S. national security.

In recent days, we’ve witnessed in real time another emerging TikTok threat reaching the headlines:  The threat it poses to intellectual property protections, which undergird America’s status as the most artistically and musically productive and influential nation in human history.

Universal Music Group, however, has decided to stand up and fight back by removing its catalog of songs – including artists like Taylor Swift, Drake and Billie Eilish – from TikTok.

Tone-Deaf TikTok has built its aggressive worldwide empire largely on the backs of music created by American artists, as even its corporate leadership openly admits.  As TikTok’s very own “Year in TikTok 2021 Music Report” states in its opening sentence, “Music is at the heart of the TikTok experience.”

Those are its own words.  Indeed, TikTok content features music to a degree beyond other social media platforms.

As the contractual relationship between Universal and TikTok approached its end on January 31, TikTok decided to play hardball by proposing to compensate songwriters and artists a fraction of what other social media platforms pay, essentially disregarding its reliance on music-based content amid ascending advertising revenues and user base.

In other words, TikTok demands a right to build a music-reliant business without paying fair market value for that music on which it relies.

Songwriters and performing artists invest enormous amounts of time, talent and resources in creating their original works of art.  In so doing, those artists and songwriters obtain intellectual property rights in their creations.  By leveraging its massive and growing worldwide power, TikTok seeks to exploit those creative works for its own benefit without just compensation.  That violates the artists’ intellectual property rights, which have provided the fuel by which America became the world’s leader in music influence.  Artists deserve fair compensation for the use of their creations, and TikTok cannot be allowed to jeopardize America’s system of IP protections.

It also merits emphasis that TikTok’s behavior threatens emerging artists and songwriters most of all.  Whereas established artists often possess other potential revenue sources, emerging artists and songwriters rely more heavily upon royalties and fair compensation for their works.  Consequently, TikTok’s refusal to fairly compensate for use of music in expanding its platform will stifle growth of new musicians and restrict their ability to sustain careers in an already competitive industry.

TikTok has made many enemies, and its behavior in this instance helps illustrate why that’s the case.  It is inherently unfair and improper for TikTok to use its vast and growing control to exploit songwriters’ and musical artists’ creations to amass even more profits and expand its worldwide reach without offering fair compensation to those creative minds who play such an outsized role in its business model and growth.

Universal Music Group merits applause for standing up to TikTok, which may inspire others in positions of power to follow its lead.

As Joe Biden attempts to paint a rosy picture despite Americans’ real-world experiences, the truth is that wages still haven’t caught up to inflation during his presidency:

Inflation Outpaces Wages Under Biden