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The Trump administration deregulation efforts will raise incomes by about $3,100 per household over the next five to 10 years, and sharply reduce prices for consumers, according to a report released Friday by the White House Council of Economic Advisers. 

“The deregulatory efforts of the Trump administration have also removed mandates from employers, especially smaller businesses, and have removed burdens that would have eliminated many small bank lenders from the marketplace,” Casey Mulligan, the chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, told reporters Friday. “These deregulatory actions are raising real incomes by increasing competition, productivity, and wages.”

The Council of Economic Advisers report is titled “The Economic Effects of Federal Deregulation Since January 2017: An Interim Report.” 

The report takes a sampling of 20 major deregulatory efforts, which it projects alone will save consumers and businesses about $220 billion annually, and increase after-inflation incomes by 1.3%.

“Many of the most notable deregulatory efforts in American history, such as the deregulation of airlines and trucking that began during the Carter administration, did not have such large aggregate effects,” the Council of Economic Advisers report says.

The aggressive deregulation also cuts consumer prices for prescription drugs, health insurance, and telecommunications, removes mandates from employers, and eliminates rules keeping small lenders from the marketplace, the report says.

The report talks about the hidden costs of regulations. 

“The ongoing introduction of costly regulations had previously been subtracting an additional 0.2 percent per year from real incomes, thereby giving the false impression that the American economy was fundamentally incapable of anything better than slow growth,” the Council of Economic Advisers report says. “Now, new regulations are budgeted and kept to a minimum.”

The report says prescription drug prices have long outpaced inflation, but in the last two years, price hikes fell by more than 11%, and even below inflation. It says that in 2018, prescription prices, “even declined in nominal terms over the calendar year for the first time since 1972.”

“We estimate that the results of these actions will save consumers almost 10 percent on retail prescription drugs, which results in an increase of $32 billion per year in the purchasing power of the incomes of Americans (including both consumers and producers),” the report says.  

James Gattuso, senior fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation, noted the depth of the Council of Economic Advisers report.

“They really dug in and looked at rules that really had an impact. This showed a big impact,” Gattuso told The Daily Signal. “The administration should not lose momentum. They are nowhere near finished. This is not mission accomplished. There are still a lot of regulations out there.”

When Trump came in, he worked with the Republican Congress through the Congressional Review Act to sign 16 bills deregulating education, mining, and retirement accounts. The Council of Economic Advisers projects this will mean an increase in real incomes of $40 billion for the country.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or tax reform, and the banking bill also had a big impact, Mulligan said. 

“Consumers are also saving money on internet access: about $40 per subscriber thanks to the deregulatory actions of Congress and President Trump,” Mulligan said. “Considering that most households have multiple internet subscriptions, when applied to both wired and wireless, $40 per subscription becomes $15 billion per year in the aggregate.”

The post Trump Deregulation Will Boost Household Income by $3,100, Report Finds appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As more states pass restrictions on abortion, companies are
coming out of the woodwork to oppose them.

Recently, some 180 companies “employing more than 108,000 workers” purchased a full-page ad in The New York Times under the banner “Don’t Ban Equality: It’s time for companies to stand up for reproductive health care.”

Translation: It’s time for businesses to defend abortion.

Many of these companies aren’t typically considered far-left
organizations. Exactly what message are they sending to women by spending ad
dollars to promote abortion? Are they saying babies are bad for business? 

A closer look at these companies may help to unmask what’s driving this ad.

It turns out that only two of them are listed among the top 180 companies offering the most paid maternity leave to women, according to Fairygodboss, a women’s career advancement network. And those two companies are nowhere near the top of the list.

In other words, these companies are stingy. They aren’t supporting women; they’re protecting their bottom line.

The fact is that parental leave imposes a cost on these
companies. The disruptions of time off (even earned) for doctor’s appointments,
managing morning sickness, and staying healthy during pregnancy are a drain on
company revenue. Many of these employers offer new mothers a bare minimum of
maternity leave. Others offer nothing at all.

The math is simple for these companies: Motherhood means higher costs and less profit—and abortion is a convenient way of minimizing those costs. Babies are bad for business, and abortion is good for business. A female employee can terminate her pregnancy on Saturday and return to work the next week.

Jumping on the social justice bandwagon for “reproductive
rights” is hardly an act of altruism. Their monetary incentive cannot be
denied.   

The CEOs who signed this ad are sending American working
women a clear message: Abortion is good for business and necessary for “health,
independence, and ability to fully succeed in the workplace.”   

Think about that. Companies like H&M, &pizza, and The Body Shop, who employ many young women, are making a statement that to “fully succeed in the workplace,” women had better put their jobs above their own family lives and the life of an unborn child. “Can you really afford motherhood? Do you want to succeed in your job? Well, then, you’d better abort your baby.”

This is not speculation. The Atlantic reports that
Michael Bloomberg, co-founder of Bloomberg L.P. (which signed the ad), has “a
long-alleged history of undermining women.” Allegations have been brought
against Bloomberg for sexual harassment and discrimination against pregnant employees,
which The Atlantic describes as “insidious manifestations of misogyny.”  

The lawsuits include serious charges exposing the bigotry of
Bloomberg toward women having babies. For example, when a sales representative
once told Bloomberg she was pregnant, he replied, “Kill it!” and went on to
mutter, “Great, no. 16”—referring to the 16 women employees who were pregnant
at the time. 

The company Seventh Generation, also a signer of the ad, has
baby care among its product lines. One would think that promoting childbearing
would benefit such a company, but apparently not.

For abortion advocates, babies are as disposable as diapers
anyway. 

But it may turn out that these companies are being short-sighted, even for their own interests. In 2018, the number of U.S. births dropped to its lowest level in 32 years. That’s alarming, and it’s not good long-term for the workforce.

Shouldn’t we expect companies to support their female
employees and the fathers who should be raising the next generation of American
workers?

Unfortunately, in the eyes of Bloomberg, Yelp, Tinder, Atlantic Records, Square, Inc., Amalgamated Bank, MAC Cosmetics, and more, advocating abortion is better for their bottom line. Hiding behind the labels of “equality” and “reproductive health care” might be a good PR stunt, but American workers will come to see right through it. 

How sad that 180 businesses are priding themselves on killing babies. Abortion may be a short-term way to reduce costs, but workers and their children deserve better. Companies ought to be concerned about their long-term bottom line: caring well for moms and dads who will raise the workers of tomorrow.

The post For Liberal CEOs, Abortion Is Good for Business appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday promised to roll out soon a health care proposal that “blows away” Obamacare, while receiving credit for another health care measure he signed into law in 2017.

In his speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s 2019 Road to Majority Policy Conference in Washington, Trump said, “We have a health plan that is far better than Obamacare.”

We’re keeping Obamacare alive; I felt I should do that. … If we win the House back, and keep the Senate, we are going to have a plan that blows away Obamacare.

It will be less expensive, and it will be far better health care and health insurance. And, we’ll be announcing it over the next month or so.

Trump invited a grateful survivor of bone cancer to the stage who gave the president credit for a 2017 health care law that she said saved her life.

Natalie Harp, a millennial entrepreneur from California, fired up the crowd nearly as much as the president when talking about the “Right to Try” law that Trump signed in 2017 that enables terminally ill patients to gain access to experimental drugs before the medicines are approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

“We all know the story about the Good Samaritan, but what you don’t know is, I was that forgotten person on the side of the road, the victim of medical error, the No. 3 cause of death under the previous administration, and I was left to die of cancer,” she said.

“First, the medical establishment, they came by and saw me there, and they wrote prescriptions for opioids, and they walked on,” said Harp, standing next to Trump. 

Next, the political establishment, they saw me there, and they stopped just long enough to come over and tell me how to die, how to speed up my death, and die with dignity.

But then, an outsider gave up his own quality of life so that we could live and work and fight with dignity, because he believes in survival of the fighters, not the fittest.

Mr. President, I have to say, you have made a lot of promises to us, and you have kept every one of them. So now, we are going to make you this promise: Just as you fought for us, forgotten Americans will never, ever forget how you saw us on the side of the road, and you walked over, and you picked us up, and you made us great again.

We are going to fight for you, Mr. President. God bless you!

Trump tweeted about Harp earlier this month after seeing her tell her story on the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” program.

Natalie Harp, fighting Stage 2 Cancer and doing really well, was a GREAT guest on @foxandfriends. Right To Try is producing some truly spectacular results. Proud of Natalie!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2019

Trump spoke of seeing Harp when she was not able to stand and speak with authority, as she did before the large audience Wednesday at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

“She was in a wheelchair, she was in a bed, and they were actually preparing her for death,” Trump said. “Because of Right to Try, they had a medicine that wouldn’t have been approved for years. Now, it’s looking a lot better. I don’t know what it was, but that sucker worked for Natalie.”

In his remarks to the conference, Trump also discussed a number of other issues, including his pushing for better trade deals ahead of his trip to Asia, noting that he’s about to nominate his 145th federal judge, and highlighting that his administration has protected religious liberty for Americans.

In criticizing late-term abortion, Trump brought up controversial comments made earlier this year by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, who the president said appeared to indicate support for infanticide after a baby is born.

Virtually every top Democrat politician supports taxpayer-funded abortion right up to the moment of birth. If you watched Virginia, the governor, after the moment of birth. That was something no one had heard of before. After the moment of birth. Nobody believed it.

I don’t think anyone had heard of it, when he talked about wrapping the child and then discussing with the mother whether she wants to keep it. The child is born, so that becomes an execution. That becomes an execution.

Every child, born and unborn, is made in the holy image of God, and that is why I’ve asked Congress to ban the late-term abortion of babies. And they’ll do that.

In a Jan. 30 radio interview, Northam had defended third-trimester abortions in certain difficult circumstances:

If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

Northam later blamed the media for mischaracterizing the comment, but said he did not regret making it. 

The post Cancer Survivor Hails Trump for ‘Right to Try’ Experimental Drug Law appeared first on The Daily Signal.

An appeals court in the United Kingdom has overturned a previous ruling from a British court that ordered that a pregnant developmentally disabled woman have an abortion contrary to her own wishes and and her mother’s. 

Justice Nathalie Lieven of England’s Court of Protection ruled that the woman must have a an abortion Friday. Lieven called the situation “heartbreaking,” and said, according to The New York Times, “I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the State to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn’t want it is an immense intrusion.” 

That ruling was overturned on Monday by an appeals court, according to reports. The Wall Street Journal reported that “The three judges on the Court of Appeal didn’t explain why they ruled against proceeding with the abortion and said they would give their reasons at a later date.” 

“This vulnerable mother and her viable unborn child never should have been in this situation to begin with,” Melanie Israel, a research associate at the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email.

“Adding the violence of abortion to an already painful situation is not the answer,” Israel added. “Officials must swiftly take action to identify how she became pregnant in the first place and ensure that women in similar circumstances are not at risk.”

The pregnant woman, who resides in London, is in her 20s and “has the mental capacity of a 6- to 9-year-old, according to evidence presented in court,” according to The New York Times.

Obianuju Ekeocha, a pro-life advocate and speaker born in southeast Nigeria, wrote in First Things that the developments in London point to a continuing degredation of the value placed on human life. 

“We should be outraged that a government-affiliated health establishment is fighting to kill a fully developed baby against the wishes of the mother and grandmother, and also that Justice Nathalie Lieven—who has admitted that all evidence indicates the disabled woman wants to keep her baby—has ruled that the child should be aborted,” Ekeocha, founder of Culture of Life Africa, wrote. 

“This case exposes how far the tyranny of the abortion regime extends. In a society that has decided the unborn have no rights, the worth and life of the unborn are determined by the most powerful,” she added. 

Ekeocha also spoke of the shared heritage between her and the unnamed grandmother, writing, “I understand why this Nigerian grandmother would be against the killing of her grandchild. Catholic Nigerians are pro-life both because of our faith and because of our cultural heritage.” 

Prior to the appeals court reversal, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Kevin K. McAleenan, acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, asking the officials to help.

The suggestions offered by Rubio included that the U.S. provide the pregnant woman and her mother receive alternative medical care in the United States with the help of a temporary non-immigrant visa.

On Twitter, Ekeocha praised the appeals court ruling overturned the previous ruling that ordered the pregnant developmentally disabled woman have an abortion.

BREAKING NEWS!!!

Today 3 Appeal Court judges in London have over-ruled the horrible decision made by Justice Lieven to have 22weeks unborn baby aborted. PRAISE BE TO GOD!!!! https://t.co/z8xASi0XK0

— Obianuju Ekeocha (@obianuju) June 24, 2019

The post Mentally Disabled Woman Will No Longer Be Forced to Abort Her Child, After Court Reverses Ruling appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump cited a Los Angeles County legal settlement as evidence of improper voting in California, as the state’s largest jurisdiction moves to clean up its voter rolls. 

Los Angeles County began sending notices to inactive voters as part of a settlement of a 2017 federal lawsuit with watchdog groups and county residents who had sued over voters on the rolls who have moved, died, or are otherwise ineligible.

The county will send as many as 1.5 million notices to voters who haven’t cast ballots in the past two federal elections, according to Judicial Watch, one of the litigants, which was notified of the plans last week. 

Voters who don’t respond to the county notices and who then don’t vote in the next two federal elections will be removed from the voter rolls, after 2022. Federal elections, which draw the largest turnouts, occur every two years.

Thus, a person would essentially have to be an inactive voter for at least eight years—two election cycles before the notice and two cycles after—before becoming ineligible.

In a “Meet the Press” interview aired on NBC on Sunday, host Chuck Todd asked Trump if he was still bothered by not winning the popular vote in 2016.

“I’ll say something that, again, is controversial. There were a lot of votes cast that I don’t believe. I look at California,” Trump told Todd. 

Todd interrupted several times before Trump returned to his point. 

“Take a look at Judicial Watch. Take a look at their settlement, where California admitted to a million votes,” Trump said. “They [California] admitted to a million votes.”

Todd appeared unaware of the settlement, agreed to in January. “A million votes of what? What are you talking about?”

Trump responded, “Judicial Watch made a settlement. … There was much illegal voting.” 

The settlement was not an admission that 1 million votes were illegally cast, but the litigation asserted that 1 in 5 registered voters in Los Angeles County are ineligible and that the county took no action to remove them from voter lists or check their status.

With about 10 million residents, the county has a larger population than 41 of the 50 states. Moreover, the state of California has not cleaned up its voting rolls for 20 years, according to Judicial Watch.

“This Judicial Watch settlement will result in the immediate and ongoing clean-up of voter rolls in California and L.A. County,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “This victory for clean elections in California will set another national precedent for other states to take reasonable steps to ensure that dead and other ineligible voters are removed from the rolls.”

The county notices are listed in the settlement agreement, and list three options for a registered voter to check: “The person named on this card no longer lives at this address” or “The address information listed above is correct. Please sign below and return this card” or “The address information above is wrong. Please provide the correction information below.” 

In the 2017 case of Judicial Watch v. Dean C. Logan, the conservative watchdog group sued on behalf of Wolfgang Kupka, Rhue Guyant, Jerry Griffin, and Delores M. Mars, who are lawfully registered voters in Los Angeles County. The Election Integrity Project California Inc., a public-interest group that monitors polling and voter rolls, was also a party to the litigation.

The settlement was reached in January, but Los Angeles County notified the plaintiffs it has begun the process of cleaning the rolls just last week. 

The media relations office of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan did not respond to phone and email inquiries from The Daily Signal as of publication time, despite an email Friday saying, “We’ll respond [as soon as possible].”

The Daily Signal followed up with an inquiry on Monday. 

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla alerted other counties to clean up their voter registration lists to comply with the 25-year-old federal National Voter Registration Act, better known as the “motor voter law.” Padilla is also updating the National Voter Registration Act manual in order to clarify that ineligible names must be removed.

Padilla’s office notified Judicial Watch on April 11 that that aspect of the settlement had been implemented, but his office said its recent actions were not a result of the settlement. 

“Judicial Watch is once again deliberately distorting this settlement to undermine voter confidence in democracy,” Padilla’s press secretary, Sam Mahood, told The Daily Signal in an email.

“The settlement was clear and simple. California will continue its work to adhere to modern list-maintenance procedures under the National Voter Registration Act,” Mahood said. “Updating the NVRA manual and providing guidance and training to county elections officials on voter-list maintenance is a regular practice for the Secretary of State’s office, which was already in progress prior to the settlement.”

The post After a Lawsuit, Los Angeles County Begins to Clean Up Its Voter Rolls appeared first on The Daily Signal.

By Anthony B. Kim

Pollsters had heart palpitations in June 2016 as the people of Great Britain voted to leave the European Union.

A dismayed media spouted speculative hysteria about the British economy that spread faster than a fire at a match factory. Three years after the June 23, 2016, referendum, however, the establishment in Westminster remains incapable of admitting it was wrong.

The reality is that the uncertainty surrounding
Brexit has had little obvious effect on the British economy.

Despite doomsday predictions, the British
economy since the Brexit vote has not lived down to Brexit opponents’
expectations and has managed to outperform and outrank the other large
economies of the European Union.

According to The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom, the United Kingdom has the world’s seventh-freest economy and scored more than 10 points higher than the regional average.

Three economies that have been integral to the European Common Market since its inception, Germany, France, and Italy, by contrast, ranked 24th, 71th, and 80th, respectively.

The United Kingdom’s economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.4% in the first quarter of 2019. At first blush, that number isn’t particularly impressive, but it quickly becomes commendable when compared with economic performances across the English Channel and parroted economic forecasts.

France grew 0.9% and Germany grew 0.6% in the first quarter, while Italy registered no growth at all. The entire eurozone grew at only 1.1%. Despite predictions of gross domestic product losses of up to or greater than 5%, the British economy has grown every quarter since the referendum.

Unemployment is below 4%, the lowest it’s been since the early 1970s, according to the Office for National Statistics. The unemployment rate in Britain is half the eurozone rate (7.8%), and less than half of Italy’s and France’s at 10.2% and <a target="_blank" …read more

From:: Daily Signal – Feed

By Jason Hopkins

Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost spoke to Congress on Thursday about the immigration crisis, and how it’s keeping agents from apprehending migrants who cross the border illegally.

“I have been forced to divert 40% to 60% of Border Patrol’s manpower away from the border as we process and care for nearly 435,000 family and children that have flooded across our southern border so far this year,” Provost said Thursday before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security, Facilitation and Operations.

Border Patrol and other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security have long complained the immigration crisis has forced them away from their enforcement duties, as they must handle the large influx of illegal migrants needing to be processed within the U.S.

Provost said 1,036 illegal migrants were caught in a single group in May — the largest single apprehension in the 95-year history of the Border Patrol. Such overwhelming numbers, she said, have forced her agents to abandon their posts, leaving other illegal migrants able to evade arrests.

“So far this year, we have observed 100,000 people who have successfully evaded arrest, a five-year high in what we call ‘got-aways,’” the Border Patrol chief said to lawmakers. “These are just the ones that we know about. Even with [the Department of Defense’s] support, I fear that we are missing far many others.”

It’s not just the number of illegal migrants that is overwhelming immigration agents, but the demographics. U.S. laws are designed to quickly process and deport Mexican adult men traveling alone. However, migrants reaching the U.S southern border today are vastly unaccompanied minors and family units from Central America.

Large swaths of immigration officials have been forced to vacate their normal duties in order to help process these migrants. Customs and Border Protection is <a target="_blank" …read more

From:: Daily Signal – Feed