Prosperity prolongs life

No wonder lifespans are so short in Russia after so many years of socialism.  Capitalism gives life.  Socialism gives death

The Intimate Link Between Income Levels and Life Expectancy: Global Evidence from 213 Years

Michael Jetter et al.

Abstract

Objectives
What is the main driver of life expectancy across societies and over time? This study aims to document a systematic and quantitatively sizeable relationship between income levels and life expectancy.

Method
A panel data set of 197 countries over 213 years is analyzed with different regression methods. Robustness tests are provided.

Results
By itself, GDP per capita explains more than 64 percent of the variation in life expectancy. The Preston curve prevails even when accounting for country‐ and time‐fixed effects, country‐specific time trends, and alternative explanatory variables such as health‐care expenditure, malaria prevalence, or political institutions. If anything, this link has become stronger over recent decades when data quality has improved. Results from instrumental variable estimations suggest this finding to be largely unaffected by reverse causality. Quantile regression results suggest the relationship between income and life expectancy to be persistent across different levels of life expectancy.

Conclusion
Income matters for life expectancy. If policymakers want to prolong people's lives, economic growth appears to be the pr

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How to make the USPS lose even MORE money

The United States Postal Service is a chronic money loser and politicians have failed to trim its most wasteful services, such as Saturday delivery. For his part, Vermont socialist and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wants to expand the USPS into banking.

As Sanders writes in a May 9 Medium commentary, “Today’s loan sharks wear expensive suits and work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions of dollars in total compensation by charging sky-high fees and usurious interest rates, and head financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and American Express.” For Sanders, “an important way to provide decent banking opportunities for low-income communities is to allow the U.S. Postal Service to engage in basic banking services.”

“What could possibly go wrong with that?” wonders Justin Haskins at Fox News. Haskins finds “no reason to believe the federal government is capable of effectively providing anyone with banking services, nor is there a dire need for such a costly new system.” For Haskins, this is “nothing more than a scheme to dramatically increase the size, power, and influence of the federal government,” and akin to “socialist banking.”

Sanders chose to spend his honeymoon in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Fellow “democratic socialist” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is on record as saying that “capitalism will not always exist in the world.” The pair’s USPS banking plan, the “Loan Shark Prevention Act,” does expand the power of government, and under socialism, the government controls the commanding heights of the economy. To understand what that means in practice, see conditions in Cuba.

“The Cuban government announced Friday it is launching widespread rationing of chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap, and other basic products in the face of a grave economic crisis,” explains a recent CBS News report. So it’s all about shortages, rationing, and perpetual poverty.

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The vote-by-phone tech trend is scaring the life out of security experts

With their playbook for pushing government boundaries as a guide, some Silicon Valley investors are nudging election officials toward an innovation that prominent coders and cryptographers warn is downright dangerous for democracy.

Voting by phone could be coming soon to an election near you.

As seasoned disruptors of the status quo, tech pioneers have proven persuasive in selling the idea, even as the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine specifically warn against any such experiment.

The fight over mobile voting pits technologists who warn about the risks of entrusting voting to apps and cellphones against others who see internet voting as the only hope for getting most Americans to consistently participate on Election Day.

“There are so many things that could go wrong,” said Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a coalition of computer scientists and government transparency advocates pushing for more-secure elections. “It is an odd time for this to be gaining momentum.”

Behind the vote-by-phone push is a political operative who grew rich helping Uber elbow its way onto city streets and Bird populate the sidewalks with electric scooters, and who sees mobile voting as a potential cure for an ailing democracy.

Bradley Tusk is using the same tactics in this personal crusade that he used to advance tech startups. He has bet a significant share of the fortune he built off his equity stake in Uber that the gospel of mobile voting will spread so fast that most Americans will have the option of casting their ballots for president by phone as soon as 2028.

He has already persuaded the state of West Virginia and the City of Denver to start tinkering with voting by phone, and hopes to move quickly from there.

“What we learned at Uber is once the genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be put it back in,” said Tusk, a venture capitalist who managed former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s reelection campaign before bouncing to Silicon Valley. In the tech world, he invests in startups that face political and regulatory hurdles, then helps knock those hurdles down by galvanizing the public’s appetite for game-changing innovations.

Tusk is certain participation in elections would surge if the technology were widely permitted, even though studies in some of the few places around the world that have tried the method revealed no big turnout boost. Although turnout for the 2018 midterm election was the highest in more than a century, it still brought out only about half of eligible Americans. And while turnout has gone up for presidential contests, it has dropped sharply for many state and local elections around the country.

The entrepreneur frames the fight as one pitting reformers against special interests invested in a low turnout that makes lawmakers unaccountable and easy to corrupt. He talks of the security concerns as if they are a sideshow. Sure, the scholars raising them are earnest, he said, but their approach to the challenge bewilders him. He likens them to people whose only solution to making a swimming pool safer is to fill it with concrete.

He and the executives at Boston-based Voatz, the company he is working with, say the way to make the technology more secure is to improve it through more pilot programs.

“Magic beans,” responds Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer at Microsoft, accusing backers who make claims for secure voting technology of peddling something that doesn’t exist. Benaloh sits on the National Academies committee that has warned against the technology.

This is a personal crusade for Tusk. He has refrained, he said, from investing in any of the start-up firms he recruits. His motivation comes from the dismay he developed over what he saw in politics, most notably when he was deputy governor in Illinois under Rod R. Blagojevich, who is serving 14 years in federal prison for corruption. Tusk detailed his disgust in a book he wrote in 2018 titled “The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics.”

“I don’t see a world where the country can survive long term without something that fixes the dysfunction,” Tusk said. “Maybe this is that something.”

He’s meeting with election officials all over the country, offering to pay for pilot mobile voting programs out of his own pocket, as he did in West Virginia and Denver. Tusk is aiming to get 25 such pilots launched over the next few years, spending as much as $50 million. He is optimistic that a couple of states will work with him to allow voting by phone in the 2020 presidential primaries.

So far the pilot programs have been small. West Virginia used the Voatz app to offer mobile voting as an option to military personnel serving abroad in both the primary and general election in 2018. There were 144 votes cast in the state using it. Denver officials offered it as an option to several dozen voters in municipal elections in May. Tusk is confident that states that start dabbling in it will scale up quickly, and make the tech universally available in just a few election cycles.

“The technology can be perfected, but people have to look at this,” said Mike Queen, deputy chief of staff to West Virginia’s secretary of state. At a national gathering of secretaries of state this month in Santa Fe, West Virginia will be urging other states to launch their own pilot programs.

That prospect alarms some of the nation’s most prominent election-security thinkers, who see in Tusk a formidable adversary with an intimidating public relations tool kit. They say he and other promoters for the projects are misleading election officials about how secure the systems are.

“There is wide agreement among computer security experts that this is problematic,” said David Dill, a professor emeritus in computer science at Stanford. “It disturbs me that officials are getting enthusiastic about this voting technology without talking to the people who have the expertise to evaluate its security.”

The National Academies report warns that the risks of this and other forms of internet voting are “more significant than the benefits.”

“Secure Internet voting will likely not be feasible in the near future,” the report said.

The report specifically disputes claims by firms like Voatz that say their system is secure because it sends votes over a blockchain. The technology leverages a network of potentially thousands of independent computers with their own security systems, aiming to diffuse risk. Promoters of such voting say hackers could not alter an election without penetrating thousands of independent security systems.

That argument is in dispute.

“Anybody who is promoting blockchain voting either doesn’t understand blockchains, doesn’t understand voting, or is being dishonest,” said Benaloh, the Microsoft cryptographer. He was speaking at a panel earlier last month at Columbia University that also included West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner.

Cryptographers tick off a list of reasons blockchain technology used for such things as trading Bitcoin won’t work for protecting American election systems, which foreign agents already see as ripe for attack. The cryptographers warn that the app could be breached and stealthily redesigned to rig votes, that malware spread onto voters’ phones could make the system go haywire, that blockchains themselves introduce new security vulnerabilities.

Spreading voting out over the internet, computer experts at America’s most prominent research universities caution, also makes it impossible to create a reliable backup paper trail that election officials can use to audit results.

Blockchains “don’t solve any of the problems,” Benaloh said. “They actually introduce new ones, and make things worse.”

Voatz is refusing to open up its code to unaffiliated programmers and cryptographers like Benaloh and Dill for stress testing of vulnerabilities, citing trade secrets. But its chief executive, Nimit Sawhney, bristles at their critiques, saying they reflect “a misunderstanding of how we use the blockchain.”

The stakes are high. The lead investor behind Voatz is the venture arm of Overstock.com, which states its mission is to “change the world by advancing blockchain technology.”

West Virginia officials say they are taking it slowly. They have no plans right now to expand beyond overseas military personnel, saying those are voters who could otherwise be disenfranchised, and that the state’s audit showed the Voatz technology was effective in enabling them to vote securely.

But Tusk believes the technology will spread quickly.

“Once we prove this is a thing that works and people can do it, I think there will be real demand for it,” he said.

And he has learned well how to inject the pitch into popular discussion.

Recently, the idea of voting by phone emerged as a subplot on the popular Showtime drama “Billions.” The plot twist came after Tusk had dinner with one of the show’s creators. In the show, security concerns scarcely register as a legitimate barrier. The foil is a corrupt Washington politician motivated by anything but the public good.

What did Tusk think of the way the show framed his battle?

“It was great,” he said.

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Desperate Dems Trying to revive Watergate
   
Destroying Trump is the only policy they care about

At this point, the vast majority of Americans are sick and tired of rehashing the news from 2016. Well, Democrats — the “progressives” always yammering about being on “the right side of history” — are about to ensure that we rehash the news of 1972.

In hearings set for Monday, June 10, House Democrats plan to make quite the spectacle of beginning to review Robert Mueller’s report by calling as their first witness John Dean, the former White House counsel … to President Richard Nixon. As National Review notes, “Dean served as the star witness in the Watergate impeachment trial and ultimately pled guilty to obstruction of justice in 1973.”

Why are Democrats pulling what appears to be a totally irrelevant stunt? Because they clearly want to draw parallels between the drive to impeach President Donald Trump and the scandal that eventually forced Nixon’s resignation. “This is Trump’s Watergate,” they tell us. Dean himself called the Mueller report “more damning” than anything produced by the Senate in the ‘70s on Nixon, and he insisted regarding Trump’s actions that “this is clear obstruction.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler declared, “While the White House continues to cover up and stonewall, and to prevent the American people from knowing the truth, we will continue to move forward with our investigation.”

The truth is, what Democrats in concert with Barack Obama’s “Justice” Department did with the fake dossier is much more significant and a much greater assault on freedom and free elections than anything Nixon ever did.

Even The Washington Post’s Watergate-era liberal, Bob Woodward, has called for an investigation into the FBI and CIA’s reliance on the Christopher Steele dossier. “I think it was the CIA pushing this,” he said. “Real intelligence experts looked at this and said, 'No, this is not intelligence; this is garbage,’ and they took it out. … The idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments, as Mueller also found out, is highly questionable.”

Nevertheless, Mueller may be done, but the Democrats’ MAGA obstruction continues and will continue through at least November 2020.

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Did Votes By Noncitizens Cost Trump The 2016 Popular Vote? Sure Looks That Way

This article from 2017 deserves a re-run.  Very little has been done about the problems it raises

Election 2016: Late in 2016, we created a stir by suggesting that Donald Trump was likely right when he claimed that millions of noncitizens had illegally voted in the U.S. election. Now, a study by a New Jersey think tank provides new evidence that that's what happened.

Last November, just weeks after his Electoral College win that gave him the presidency, then President-elect Donald Trump tweeted, "In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

The reaction was angry and swift, with the left accusing him of being an "internet troll" and of hatching a "Twitter-born conspiracy theory."

At the time, we noted that a group called True The Vote, an online anti-voter-fraud website, had claimed that illegals had cast three million votes last year. The media and left-wing groups immediately portrayed True The Vote as a fringe group with little credibility.

The only problem is, a study in 2014 in the online Electoral Studies Journal made a quite similar claim: In the 2008 and 2010 elections, they said, as many as 2.8 million illegal noncitizen votes were cast, "enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes and congressional elections," said the study, authored by Jesse T. Richman and Gushan A. Chattha, both of Old Dominion University, and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

The bombshell was this: "Noncitizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress."

It got little coverage in the mainstream media, and what coverage it did get was almost entirely dismissive.

Now comes a new study by Just Facts, a libertarian/conservative think tank, that used data from a large Harvard/You.Gov study that every two years samples tens of thousands of voters, including some who admit they are noncitizens and thus can't vote legally.

The findings are eye-opening. In 2008, as many as 5.7 million noncitizens voted in the election. In 2012, as many as 3.6 million voted, the study said.

In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that there were 21.0 million adult noncitizens in the U.S., up from 19.4 million in 2008. It is therefore highly likely that millions of noncitizens cast votes in 2016.

And it was no accident. Democrats had extensive get-out-the-vote campaigns in areas heavily populated by illegal aliens. As far back as 2008, Obama made sure that those who wanted to vote knew it was safe, announcing that election records would not be cross-checked with immigration databases.

And last year, the Obama White House supported a court injunction that kept Kansas, Alabama and Georgia from requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The message was sent, loud and clear: If you're a noncitizen or here illegally, don't be afraid. You're free to vote. No one will stop you.

We don't know the exact number of illegal votes. No one does. But the data that are available suggest that the number of illegal votes was substantial — probably in the millions, as Trump said — and likely had a significant impact on the election's outcome.

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