Poverty

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University professor compares Malthusian population explosion scare to climate change extremists

“Reducing our consumption of fossil fuels will not make bad weather and extreme natural events go away.” – Pierre Desrochers, author and academic

Faithful readers of this blog know my position on climate change. Yes, it is taking place; it’s cyclical. And, yes, we have experienced a very slight warming, but we cannot do anything to change that trend.

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University of Toronto professor Pierre Desrochers compares climate change extremists to Malthusians. (montrealgazette.com)

In an interesting writing by University of Toronto associate professor of geography Pierre Desrochers, recently excerpted in the Wall Street Journal’s regular Notable & Quotable column, I found his observation of those who believed that the means of human subsistence (Malthusians) were so similar to climate change dooms day catastrophists.

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) argued that human population would increase to the maximum extent permitted by human fertility, that the means of subsistence wouldn’t keep up, and that the unavoidable result would be poverty, starvation, war, diseases and population crashes. Continue reading →

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Liberal Arizona Republic columnist says Medicare exists because of LBJ’s “courage”

Writing in The Arizona Republic, liberal columnist Linda Valdez took the occasion of Medicare’s 50th anniversary to laud the “courage” of Lyndon Johnson, for signing it into law.

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President Johnson signed the Medicare Bill in Independence, Missouri in 1965 and gave the first signing pen to former President Harry Truman. (lbjlibrary.org)

Of course, she failed to mention that when he signed the Medicare bill in 1965, the initial cost was $3 billion, and it was estimated that the cost would increase to just $12 billion in 1990. Actually, it grew to $110 billion by 1990. Last year the cost went up to $511 billion. And a funding crisis looms.

We have spent some $15 trillion on LBJ’s war on poverty, however, 46 million people live in poverty today, and another 20 million live on less than half of the poverty level. His prediction of “victory of prosperity over poverty” is long forgotten. Continue reading →