1) Baby, It's Cold Outside

Colder weather causes far more deaths than warmer weather.

We've made this self-evident point backed by the science about climate change many times. But now, even the Main Street media is acknowledging that a little warmer is a lot less dangerous than a little colder.  

This headline from, of all places, USA Today last week confirms this truism:

Researchers have discovered that over the last 25 years, 65% of all temperature-related deaths were due to cold, while the remaining 35% were heat-related. Overall, in that period, some 69,256 U.S. deaths had extreme temperature exposure recorded as an underlying or contributing cause, according to a new study.

The findings are published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

A slight warming of the planet will reduce deaths dramatically and globally due to increased agriculture output. So the doomsday scenario that kids are learning is a lie.

This is also why about 20 years ago the enviros changed their scary narrative from "global warming" to "climate change."

2) Coffee Tariffs Are Suspended and Prices Are Suddenly Falling

There's a lively debate among free market economists about whether tariffs contribute to inflation. We think they can at the margin by raising production costs.  

But what is indisputable is that tariffs on certain products raise their costs and thus prices. Coffee prices rose sharply after the Trump tariffs of up to 40% on Brazilian and Colombian coffee beans. And then, suddenly, Trump lowered the tariffs. Here has been the immediate response as reported by Reuters:

"Global coffee prices plunged on Friday after U.S. President Donald Trump removed 40% tariffs on imports of Brazilian agricultural products including coffee and cocoa in the face of growing angst from American consumers about high food costs."

This chart shows the before and after effects of the tariffs being imposed and then repealed:

3) Stocks for the Long Run

Unless you win the lottery, nothing pays off in the long term more than U.S. companies.

The average real annual rate of return on the Dow Jones stocks has been just under 7% over the past 130 years. The S&P 500 has recorded similar gains.

The best and fastest ways to reduce wealth inequality is to have every worker invested in the market. Yet liberals keep saying that allowing American workers to invest their Social Security payroll tax dollars in an index fund is "too risky." The more they say that, the less wealth low- and middle-income Americans are able to accumulate. And so they become dependent on government.

Is that intentional?

4) Could Chile Be on the Cusp of a Second Economic Miracle?

And speaking of personal accounts for Social Security, Chile famously did it back in the 1980s and workers got very high returns for their retirement years.

That was just one of many free market and tight money policies implemented in Chile starting in 1980. The combination of low tax rates, privatization, sound money, and personal retirement accounts made Chile the jewel of South America.  Between 1980 and 2019, poverty fell from 45% to 6%, and per capita income tripled to $24,000 a year. Venezuala, which went in the socialist direction, saw their economy collapse and poverty surge.

But as we have previously reported, in 2021, Chileans elected a leftist government to overturn the free market policies, and inflation and poverty rates surged. Now Chileans may be headed back to economic freedom and bigger paychecks.

In the first round of last week's presidential election, over 50% of Chilean voters backed one of three clearly conservative candidates. Next month, a runoff will be held between Jose Antonio Kast, who counts Argentina's Javier Milei and President Trump as political allies, and Jeanette Jara, a Communist Party member and former labor minister in the current left-wing government.  

If the Chilean voters elect Kast, poverty rates in Chile are likely to rapidly decline and per capita income is expected to rise.

5) America Doesn't Have An Affordability Crisis; Blue States Do

We were the first voices to make this point just over a week ago originally in the Hotline and our analysis has now gone viral everywhere. It's been picked up by Fox, Fox Business, the White House, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and now even CNN.

Our message was pretty simple: Whatever it is - electricity, gasoline, rent, taxes - the costs are more burdensome in blue states.

Nine of the 10 highest cost states are run by the Left.  So how can they solve the problem THEY created?

Last week, left-wing Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria opened his CNN show by repeating our riff that "if America has an affordability crisis, it tends to be in places Democrats govern, like New York, Illinois, and California, which all feature high taxes, soaring housing costs and stagnant outcomes."

New York state mirrors the city. Its spending has risen from roughly $70 billion in 2000 to more than $230 billion today, about twice Florida's budget even though Florida has several million more residents. When voters see that record, they conclude, not unreasonably, that more money is not the answer.

Yet Democrats' instinctive response to every problem remains the same -- spend more. The truth is that local government in the U.S. is already living on borrowed time. For decades, states and cities have traded short-term political harmony for long-term fiscal ruin. To keep peace with powerful public sector unions, they promise ever more lavish pensions and benefits, then quietly defer the bill to future taxpayers.

Across America these obligations act like slow motion fiscal time bombs. Invisible for now, but guaranteed to explode.

Meanwhile, daily governance suffers. In too many Democratic strongholds regulation has metastasized into paralysis. Housing is unaffordable because local zoning codes and environmental reviews, rent control and union carve-outs make construction painfully slow and expensive.

California has spent $24 billion on homelessness over five years, yet the problem has only worsened. More is spent per mile on subway construction in New York than in any other city on earth. Each new initiative layers another bureaucracy atop the last.

Here's our more thorough analysis of the blue state out of control costs:

6) Mr. Popular

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