The numbers don’t lie, except when they do
'A lot of flaky statistics have been in the news lately'
President Biden said during July’s heat wave that “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.”
Mr. Biden is “wrong by a factor of 25,” writes Bjorn Lomborg, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, in the Wall Street Journal. “While extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold.”
Mr. Lomborg notes that heat-related deaths have declined for decades in America and around the world because prosperity has allowed more people to afford air conditioning and other technology. This wealth was made possible by reliable energy courtesy of fossil fuels.
Here are some other numbers to ponder during the dog days of August.
How about 300,000? That’s the number of people in America who have been killed by fentanyl overdoses from 2022 until now. That’s roughly the period in which Vice President Kamala Harris has been “border czar.”
Last Tuesday, she told a Georgia rally audience that she’s been tougher on immigration than former President Trump – even though 6 million illegal aliens have crossed into the United States on her watch.
If she gets any tougher, the Border Patrol will be handing out taxpayer-funded coupons for several free meals at Ruth’s Chris Steak House – but only for people entering illegally. If you follow the rules, you get turned away but given a 50-cent-off coupon for a single chili dog at 7-11. Just kidding. You don’t even get that.
Ms. Harris’s claim to be an immigration hawk is right up there with President Biden insisting he inherited 9 percent inflation from Mr. Trump.
Inflation was 1.4 percent when Mr. Trump left office in 2021. Then it spiked wildly right after Mr. Biden attacked America’s energy industry with executive orders on his very first day in the Oval Office. As gas and diesel prices surged, so did the cost of everything else.
Then came trillions in new federal deficit spending and the Federal Reserve Bank’s disbursement of cash to keep up with it all.
Keep in mind that the current 3 percent alleged inflation rate is on top of what came before. Prices for many items have nearly doubled, and products have been downsized. That shrinking can of soup is not a figment of your imagination.
Pretty soon, a lunch bag of potato chips will cost $4 and contain enough for maybe a toddler.
Even McDonald’s has announced a slowdown in traffic as people balk at paying casual restaurant prices for fast food.
The inflation has hurt other chains, too, such as Chick-fil-A, which has had to increase its meal prices in order to maintain its reputation for high quality and decent portions.
In addition to the media’s whitewashing of the Biden/Harris inflation, a lot of other flaky numbers have been in the news lately.
In Venezuela, communist dictator Nicolas Maduro claims he won 51 percent to 42 percent for his opponent in the July 29 presidential election.
An opposition party audit of more than 70 percent of the tallies, however, shows that Edmundo Gonzalez won 6.2 million votes to Mr. Maduro’s 2.7 million. Many international observers, including the U.S. State Department, say that Mr. Gonzalez was the clear winner.
In good communist fashion, the Maduro regime quickly claimed victory and is crushing mass protests.
Some of this sounds familiar. As with a certain 2020 national election in North America, vote counting in Venezuela mysteriously stopped in the middle of the night. Depending on where they were collected, ballots got disparate treatment.
Not to worry, Mr. Maduro has offered to let his handpicked, communist Supreme Court review the votes. That’s like asking Al Capone to polish the silverware.
Maybe they should just bring in the North Korean Vote Fraud and Gulag Assignment Squad. On second thought, there are lots of Cuban security experts already working to fundamentally transform Venezuela into a communist police state.
Catastrophic damage to the once-rich nation’s economy and social fabric began with socialist Hugo Chavis’ election in 1999. It accelerated under Mr. Maduro since he took power following Mr. Chavez’s death in 2013.
More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled to other countries, and another million are expected to leave if Mr. Maduro gets away with his election steal. Many are likely to head for the United States’ open southern border.
And speaking of the USA, the Biden/Harris administration is still using facial recognition technology to round up people who were at the U.S. Capitol riot back on Jan. 6, 2021.
As of January, U.S. attorneys had charged more than 1,265 defendants across nearly all 50 states and D.C., and secured jail sentences for more than 460 people. Prosecutors have promised even more arrests.
By contrast, the thousands of BLM/Antifa rioters – who tore up cities in 2020, laid siege to federal buildings, destroyed $2 billion worth of property, killed more than 25 people and injured hundreds of police officers – are not losing any sleep.
Nor are most of the pro-Hamas protesters who stormed a House office building in October and bullied and barred Jews from elite campuses this spring.
There are a number of reasons for this. But the most important one is that these are Democrats, not Republicans, Christians or conservatives.
This column was first published at the Washington Times.
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