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Archive for July, 2018
July 30th, 2018 at 1:04 pm
Image of the Day: Inexplicable Economic Surge in 2017 and 2018
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Inexplicably, U.S. economic growth has surged in the first and second quarters of both 2017 and 2018 after a deregulatory and tax-cutting presidential administration replaced a hyper-regulatory and tax-raising one:

Inexplicable Economic Bump

Inexplicable Economic Bump

July 24th, 2018 at 11:57 am
Image of the Day: Manufacturing Ascends to Record High Output
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From our friends at American Enterprise Institute, predictions from people like Barack Obama on the U.S. manufacturing sector’s demise were greatly exaggerated.  As one can see from the image below, the sharp upward trajectory since Donald Trump’s election has taken American manufacturing output to a record high:

U.S. Manufacturing Reaches New High

U.S. Manufacturing Reaches New High

July 23rd, 2018 at 3:48 pm
This Week’s “Your Turn” Radio Show Lineup
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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT: Rachel del Guidice, Reporter for The Daily Signal: Trump/Putin and Haley/UN;

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT: Cleta Mitchell, Parker and Political Law Attorney at Foley & Lardner: IRS and Schedule B Disclosure;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT: Phil Kerpen, President of American Commitment: Soda Tax;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT: Bryan Riley, Director of National Taxpayer’s Union’s Free Trade Initiative: Tariffs and NAFTA;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT: Roslyn Layton, Visiting Scholar with American Enterprise Institute: Net Neutrality, CRA and Privacy Concerns; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT: William J. Conti, Partner with Baker & Hostetler: Judge Kavanaugh and Midterm Elections.

Listen live on the Internet here. Call in to share your comments or ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

July 18th, 2018 at 2:18 pm
Image of the Day: Trump Destroying the Planet, Cont’d
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From withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord to his administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump is obviously destroying the planet:

Trump Is Destroying the Planet

Trump Is Destroying the Planet

July 17th, 2018 at 11:28 am
CFIF Praises IRS Decision to Eliminate “Schedule B” Donor Information Filing Requirement
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ALEXANDRIA, VA – In welcome news, the U.S. Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) announced yesterday evening that the IRS will finally cease requiring certain nonprofit organizations to file “Schedule B” forms that list sensitive personal information like the names, addresses and other identifying information about private citizens who donate to those organizations.

In response, Center for Individual Freedom (“CFIF”) President Jeffrey Mazzella issued the following statement:

“As many Americans are all too aware, recent years have witnessed an increase in assaults against our First Amendment freedoms of speech and association.  In some cases, the IRS has collected and leaked private information on contributors to 501(c) nonprofit organizations contained in mandatory Schedule B forms that by law were to remain confidential.  And across America, hyper-partisan government state-level officials have demanded Schedule B forms and confidential donor information contained therein as part of their campaign to harass organizations and donors with whom they disagree politically.

“With this announcement, the IRS and Treasury are acting on the acknowledgment that Schedule B information is irrelevant to its handling of tax filings, and serves no substantive purpose. In this era of persecution of private citizens for their political beliefs, together with the IRS’s admission that it can’t guarantee the confidentiality of the information contained on the Schedule B, this decision is welcome news.

“We at CFIF applaud the Trump Administration Treasury Department and IRS for their leadership and doing the right thing by eliminating the Schedule B form filing requirement for many nonprofit 501(c) organizations.”

CFIF has spearheaded the broad conservative and libertarian coalition to eliminate the Schedule B from filing requirement, including, among other efforts, coordinating a letter to President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin earlier this year signed by more than 60 influential organizations and individuals urging executive action to accomplish that end.

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July 13th, 2018 at 9:37 am
The Price and Importance of Innovation

America’s pharmaceutical innovators lead the world, saving and improving people’s lives on a daily basis.  But relentless efforts to move toward a single-payer system and impose destructive price controls threaten our continuing progress.

Drug maker Biogen recently announced exciting results of a clinical trial for a new drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Yet, despite the promise that this could be a breakthrough that gets us closer to a cure, the medical community and families with loved ones suffering from the disease are holding their collective breath.

Why? Because we’ve been down this road before.

Alzheimer’s is one of the most complex and pernicious medical conditions that we face, with no known cure and an immense emotional and economic toll. Worse, the rate of diagnosis is increasing and estimates suggest the cost of the disease has already surpassed $259 billion.  According to one Alzheimer’s Association spokesperson, it will “bankrupt Medicare.” By 2050, the cost of care for Alzheimer’s patients could exceed $1 trillion annually.

That is a crisis medical professionals are rushing to solve, but progress has been slow. An estimated 99.6 percent of Alzheimer’s drug “candidates” (i.e. experimental drugs designed to treat Alzheimer’s) fail.

In 2018 alone, high profile failures in Phase 3 clinical trials from drug makers like Eli Lilly and Merck represent decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in research yielding little to no results. Even Biogen’s announcement, as promising as it is, has only a 50 percent chance of gaining FDA approval, according to analysts.

The issue of high drug prices is real, but too often the public doesn’t understand the immense risk – and cost pharmaceutical companies take on to research and develop new treatments for devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s. While everyone hopes Biogen’s new drug is a success, many drugs – including many recent potential treatments for Alzheimer’s – never make it through the clinical trials to market. What’s worse, the lack of transparency in our health care payment system drives costs up even further.

Drug makers invest hundreds of millions of dollars and more into developing new treatments and cures, with no guarantees their research and development will yield results.  That risk must be protected to ensure the continued motivation to strive for better treatments and new cures.

Efforts to cap prices and leverage government buying power via a single-payer system threaten to curtail research and delay or eliminate future cures. It’s a gamble that the United States cannot make, both for our own health and for future generations.

July 12th, 2018 at 9:37 am
Ramirez Cartoon: The Left’s Meltdown
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Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

July 9th, 2018 at 5:06 pm
This Week’s “Your Turn” Radio Lineup
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Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CDT to 6:00 p.m. CDT (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her radio show, “Your Turn: Meeting Nonsense with Commonsense.” Today’s guest lineup includes:

4:00 CDT/5:00 pm EDT:  Alex Brill, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute – Unemployment Rate Data:

4:15 CDT/5:15 pm EDT:  John Malcolm, Vice President, Institute for Constitutional Government, Director of the Meese Center for Legal & Judicial Studies and Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation – A Look at Potential SCOTUS Nominees;

4:30 CDT/5:30 pm EDT:  Ilya Shapiro, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies and Editor-in-Chief, Cato Supreme Court Review – Justice Kennedy’s Legacy and the Harvard Admissions Case;

4:45 CDT/5:45 pm EDT:  Gayle Trotter, Attorney and Spokeswoman for Judicial Crisis Network – #AnotherGreatJustice and the Confirmation Process;

5:00 CDT/6:00 pm EDT:  Timothy Lee, CFIF’s Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs – The Janus Decision; and

5:30 CDT/6:30 pm EDT:  Travis Smith, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University – Superhero Ethics.

Listen live on the Internet here. Call in to share your comments orStudi ask questions of today’s guests at (850) 623-1330.

July 6th, 2018 at 1:17 pm
Latest Jobs Report: 600,000 Americans Come Off the Sidelines and Get In the Game
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Today brought yet another impressive U.S. employment report from the Labor Department, with an unexpectedly high 213,000 new jobs added in the month of June (versus the expected 195,000).

But the report includes a particularly impressive number after nearly a decade of people just giving up on working during the Obama era malaise.  Over 600,000 Americans decided that the market is so hot that they got off the sidelines and entered the game:

The increase in the unemployment rate came due to a rise in the labor force participation rate, which increased 0.2 percentage points to 62.9 percent as 601,000 people came off the sidelines and re-entered the labor force.”

Continuing the sports analogy, The Wall Street Journal notes that what we’re witnessing is a different kind of ballgame under the Trump Administration than the unprecedented economic sluggishness that characterized the Obama “expansion”:

Steady hiring and low unemployment shows the labor market continues to be an area of strength for the economy since the recession ended nine years ago.  What might be different now is that other aspects appear to be picking up steam.  Some economists project economic output rose at better than 4% annually in the second quarter for the first time since 2014.

Rising consumer spending, manufacturing output and exports are expected to have contributed to the gain, set to be officially reported later this month.  If sustained, that would be a turn from much of the expansion in which hiring has been consistent, but growth has been sluggish, holding near a 2% annual rate.  One explanation is wages.  Even though Americans were finding jobs, scant raises left them with little room in their budgets to step up spending.”

It’s amazing what an economic agenda of tax cuts and deregulation can do for an economic cycle that was supposedly on weary legs and amid an era of “secular stagnation” when solid growth was a thing of the past.

July 2nd, 2018 at 10:10 am
Image of the Day: New Record High Positive Outlook for U.S. Manufacturers
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And the good economic news just keeps on coming.   American manufacturing companies report a new record high positive outlook in the continuing wake of tax reform and deregulation.  Note the immediate uptick beginning at the very end of 2016:

Record Positivity Among U.S. Manufacturing Companies

Record Positivity Among U.S. Manufacturing Companies