Anyone who thinks policy doesn’t matter should consider that red states are outperforming blue states economically.
President Joe Biden likes to brag about Bidenomics. He’ll cite statistics about job growth, a growing GDP and falling inflation. The American people aren’t buying it.
The fundamental problem is inflation, which is both toxic and unavoidable. It’s an acid that eats through savings accounts, personal budgets and dreams of homeownership. The American people aren’t fooled by spin about falling inflation rates. Dropping inflation from 7 percent to 3 percent may be progress but it doesn’t address persistently higher prices. The Federal Reserve’s inflation target is 2 percent.
Still, it is worth digging in a little deeper to the economic numbers. ABC News recently performed an analysis of state-level data. It found a major difference between blue and red states. “Most of the best-performing states” had “voted in favor of former President Donald Trump,” reporter Max Zahn wrote.
Five states had above average results on “job growth, personal income growth, gross domestic product growth and gas prices.” Four of them, Idaho, Texas, South Carolina and Utah, voted for Donald Trump in 2020. The fifth was the swing state of Wisconsin, which has strong Republican majorities in its Legislature. Another 13 states did well on three of those metrics. Nine of them supported Trump.
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January visitation to Vegas: Convention attendance up, highway traffic down
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Small Canadian air carrier to begin Las Vegas service
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Rather than acknowledge the benefits of more laissez-faire leadership, Mr. Zahn desperately looked for ways to explain away the results.
The story quoted Mark Partridge, a professor of economics at Ohio State University, who said, “The climates are better in red states, and Americans like good climates.” Ah, yes. If only New York and Illinois were in the Sun Belt, companies and taxpayers would be flocking to these high-tax, regulatory hothouses. Talk about a cloistered academic.
Another explanation is that “Democrat-leaning cities” draw a young and educated workforce. There’s an obvious problem here. Blue states also have Democrat-leaning cities. They aren’t as attractive because the Democrats running state government don’t rein in the worst impulses of those local officials.
There is scant reference to the real reason. Free-market policies, which are more common in red states, best create the conditions for economic growth. Profit is the reward that companies receive for best meeting their customers’ needs and fuels expansion and hiring. Red states largely celebrate profitable companies. Blue state officials often attack them or strangle them with regulations.
There’s an important lesson for Nevadans. Democrats are on the cusp of achieving super-majorities in both legislative houses. If they do that in November, they can override GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo’s vetoes and turn the state from purple to blue.
Look around the country to see the evidence of what that might portend for the Silver State’s economy.
The beginning of the Russian-Ukraine war in early 2022 led to a significant tightening in global liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies as Europe replaced lost Russian LNG with supplies from the US. Currently, LNG markets are stabilizing and, according to one commodity desk, could enter an oversupply period in 2025.
In a note to clients, a team of analysts led by Ehsan Khoman, who is in charge of the commodities research desk at MUFG Bank, said the global LNG market is on the verge of transitioning from tight to oversupplied:
When factoring in LNG export capacity currently under construction in the US (and other regions), we anticipate ~200mpta of additive global LNG supply capacity before the end of this decade (constituting ~50% of the 409mpta global LNG supply currently ). To put the sheer velocity of this additional supply into context, global LNG demand printed at 401mpta in 2023. This LNG oversupply, beginning to take shape from 2025, leads to risks that global gas prices may decline to around supply cash costs (~EUR15 - 20/MWh), which may lead to the cancellation of US LNG exports (akin to 2020).
Khoman highlighted the "chart of the week," which states that an oversupplied LNG market, primarily because of a surge in supply from the US and the Middle East, beginning in 2025, will "end the energy crisis."
The analysts pointed out that Qatar is positioning itself as the "world's lowest cost LNG producer" as it rapidly expands exports, thus soaking up market share.
At face value, although the Qatari announcement may seem counterintuitive given the approaching oversupply, we view that Qatar can leverage its pedigree as the world's lowest-cost LNG producer to take advantage of increased market share in light of the recently announced halts in US LNG export project approvals.
The theme from Khoman is that oversupply conditions will lead to "lower for longer" prices that could help the EU reverse damaging de-industrial risk, especially after the Russian Nord Stream pipeline was blown up.
This past week, Denmark dropped its investigation into "deliberate sabotage" of the Nord Stream in 2022. Recall last year, The Washington Post published a bombshell that Ukraine was involved in the bombing. And if the world wants to understand who is responsible, one must ask: Who stands to benefit from cutting cheap Russian LNG supplies to the EU?
Well, the latest US Energy Information Administration data shows the US has become the number one LNG dealer to the EU following the bombing of the undersea pipeline.
Meanwhile, oversupply conditions are expected to end in the latter part of this decade. A suppression of LNG prices will help the West tame energy inflation.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that adults aged 65 and above get an additional dose of the updated 2023–2024 COVID-19 vaccine following a heated debate by an advisory panel on the issue.
The vaccination was recommended by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) panel.
“The recommendation acknowledges the increased risk of severe disease from COVID-19 in older adults, along with the currently available data on vaccine effectiveness,” the agency said in a Feb. 28 press release. “Adults 65 years and older are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, with more than half of COVID-19 hospitalizations during October 2023 to December 2023 occurring in this age group.”
“Data continues to show the importance of vaccination to protect those most at risk for severe outcomes of COVID-19. An additional dose of the updated COVID-19 vaccine may restore protection that has waned since a fall vaccine dose, providing increased protection to adults ages 65 years and older,” it said.
As of Feb. 23, more than 22 percent of U.S. adults have received the updated COVID-19 vaccine, including 41.8 percent of adults over 65.
Dispute Over Wording
During the panel discussion, members debated intensely about the wording of the recommendation. Some wanted a stronger wording, such as “should receive an additional dose,” in the recommendation, according to a report by the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy Research and Innovation Office at the University of Minnesota.
However, other members disagreed, pointing out that evidence does not support the need to add “should” in the vaccine recommendation. They also raised concerns that the wording could end up having a chilling or discouraging effect on individuals who haven’t received a shot during the fall.
Several members noted that COVID-19 activity is not following a seasonal pattern such as what is seen with the flu. They projected the number of COVID-19 levels to likely wax and wane over coming months.
The members eventually voted in favor of the stronger recommendation, with the measure passing 11–1. After ACIP’s decision, CDC Director Mandy Cohen endorsed the recommendation.
“Most COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations last year were among people 65 years and older. An additional vaccine dose can provide added protection that may have decreased over time for those at highest risk,” she said.
The next dose should be taken at least four months after the previous dose. Individuals with compromised immune systems can get their next dose two months after the previous one.
Vaccine Harms
Despite the CDC pushing older people to take additional COVID-19 shots, studies have shown that the jabs may not be effective and could instead cause harm.
A study from Japan published in January looked at the impact of bivalent vaccines among older people. A bivalent vaccine is a shot that triggers an immune response against two different strains of the virus.
Researchers said they “did not find sufficient evidence of effectiveness of bivalent vaccines among previously infected older adults.”
An April 2023 study that looked at over 51,000 employees at the Cleveland Clinic who were given bivalent vaccines found that effectiveness of the shots declined depending on the strain. With the BA.4/5 strain, vaccine effectiveness was only 29 percent, which dropped to 20 percent for BQ strain, and then to just 4 percent for XBB.
A January 2024 study warned that repeated vaccination with mRNA COVID-19 boosters could result in “adverse effects on the immune system.”
“This is particularly relevant in the case of immunocompromised individuals, where the overall cost-to-benefit ratio may lean toward the negative,” the researchers wrote.
“Given the decreased severity of the virus, as acknowledged in various jurisdictions, there are legitimate concerns about the frequent administration of boosters in immunocompromised patients, raising questions about whether this practice may be causing more harm than benefit.”
COVID-19 vaccines are also facing scrutiny for shedding effects. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration defines shedding as the “release of [viral or bacterial gene therapy products] ... from the patient through one or all of the following ways: excreta (feces); secreta (urine, saliva, nasopharyngeal fluids, etc.); or through the skin (pustules, sores, wounds).”
Dr. Pierre Kory, founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), has said that both mRNA and adenovirus COVID-19 vaccines may cause vaccinated individuals to release spike proteins and other components. For instance, one study found the presence of mRNA in the breast milk of vaccinated females.
During a Feb. 15 congressional hearing, health officials from the FDA and the CDC admitted that COVID-19 vaccinated people can still get infected and transmit the disease.
“There’s data that shows that earlier in the pandemic there was some reduction in transmission. The data on that are very challenging to pin down. It does not absolutely prevent transmission,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, said at the hearing.
“[The COVID-19 vaccines] do a very good job of preventing death and hospitalization. They may not prevent infection,” he admitted.
Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.
The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.
But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.
Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”
The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.
The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears.
Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.
Some experts told The Epoch Times that deliberate fraud appeared to be at work, while others suggested more innocent explanations.
But regardless of why the problems exist, the implications of the findings are hard to overstate.
With no climate crisis, the justification for trillions of dollars in government spending and costly changes in public policy to restrict carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collapses, the scientists explained in a series of interviews about their research.
“For the last 35 years, the words of the IPCC have been taken to be gospel,” according to astrophysicist and CERES founder Willie Soon. Until recently, he was a researcher working with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.
“And indeed, climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” Mr. Soon told The Epoch Times.
Dancers working with Mothers Rise Up (a group of UK mothers protesting about climate change) prepare to hold a performance protest outside Lloyds of London in London on Feb. 26, 2024. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
“But good science demands that scientists are encouraged to question the IPCC’s dogma. The supposed purity of the global temperature record is one of the most sacred dogmas of the IPCC.”
The latest U.S. government National Climate Assessment report states: “Human activities are changing the climate.
“The evidence for warming across multiple aspects of the Earth system is incontrovertible, and the science is unequivocal that increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases are driving many observed trends and changes.”
In particular, according to the report, this is because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and agriculture.
Looking at timescales highlights major problems with this narrative, Mr. Soon said.
“When people ask about global warming or climate change, it is essential to ask, ‘Since when?’ The data shows that it has warmed since the 1970s, but that this followed a period of cooling from the 1940s,” he said.
While it is “definitely warmer” now than in the 19th century, Mr. Soon said that temperature proxy data show the 19th century “was exceptionally cold.”
“It was the end of a period that’s known as the Little Ice Age,” he said.
Data taken from rural temperature stations, ocean measurements, weather balloons, satellite measurements, and temperature proxies such as tree rings, glaciers, and lake sediments, “show that the climate has always changed,” Mr. Soon said.
“They show that the current climate outside of cities is not unusual,” he said, adding that heat from urban areas is improperly affecting the data.
“If we exclude the urban temperature data that only represents 3 percent of the planet, then we get a very different picture of the climate.”
A meteorologist launches a weather balloon measuring the zero degree isotherm at MeteoSwiss station in Payerne, Switzerland, on Sept. 7, 2023. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
Homogenization
One issue that scientists say is corrupting the data stems from an obscure process known as “homogenization.”
According to climate scientists working with governments and the U.N., the algorithms used for homogenization are designed to correct, as much as possible, various biases that might exist in the raw temperature data.
These biases include, among others, the relocation of temperature monitoring stations, changes in technology used to gather the data, or changes in the environment surrounding a thermometer that might impact its readings.
For instance, if a temperature station was originally placed in an empty field but that field has since been paved over to become a parking lot, the record would appear to show much hotter temperatures. As such, it would make sense to try to correct the data collected.
Virtually nobody argues against the need for some homogenization to control for various factors that may contaminate temperature data.
But a closer examination of the process as it now occurs reveals major concerns, Ronan Connolly, an independent scientist at CERES, said.
“While the scientific community has become addicted to blindly using these computer programs to fix the data biases, until recently nobody has bothered to look under the hood to see if the programs work when applied to real temperature data,” he told The Epoch Times.
Since the early 2000s, various governmental and intergovernmental organizations creating global temperature records have relied on computer programs to automatically adjust the data.
Mr. Soon, Mr. Connolly, and a team of scientists around the world spent years looking at the programs to determine how they worked and whether they were reliable.
One of the scientists involved in the analysis, Peter O’Neill, has been tracking and downloading the data daily from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Global Historical Climatology Network since 2011.
He found that each day, NOAA applies different adjustments to the data.
(Top left) A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather tower atop a building in Washington. (Top right) A radar is prepared by NOAA for studying tornadoes, in Memphis. (Bottom) A man works as officials are briefed at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images, Seth Herald/AFP via Getty Images, Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
“They use the same homogenization computer program and re-run it roughly every 24 hours,” Mr. Connolly said. “But each day, the homogenization adjustments that they calculate for each temperature record are different.”
This is “very bizarre,” he said.
“If the adjustments for a given weather station have any basis in reality, then we would expect the computer program to calculate the same adjustments every time. What we found is this is not what’s happening,” Mr. Connolly said.
These concerns are what first sparked the international investigation into the issue by Mr. Soon and his colleagues.
Because NOAA doesn’t maintain historical information on its weather stations, the CERES scientists reached out to European scientists who had been compiling the data for the stations that they oversee.
They found that just 17 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were consistently applied. And less than 20 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were clearly associated with a documented change to the station observations.
“When we looked under the hood, we found that there was a hamster running in a wheel instead of an engine,” Mr. Connolly said. “It seems that with these homogenization programs, it is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.”
A spokesman for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information downplayed the significance, but said the agency was working to address the issues raised in the papers.
“NOAA uses the well-documented Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm every day on GHCNm (monthly)—version 4, and the results of specific adjustments to individual station series can differ from run to run,” the spokesman said, adding that the papers in question didn’t support the view that the concerns about the homogenization of the data made it useless or worse.
“NOAA is addressing the issues raised in both these papers in a future release of the GHCNm temperature dataset and its accompanying documentation.”
It’s time to add another vaccine to theshortage listin the U.S. as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hasurgedhealthcare providers to conserve their supply of tetanus shots.
The warning from the national public health agency comes after one of the two providers of tetanus shots in the U.S., nonprofit MassBiologics, discontinued production of its tetanus and diphtheria (Td) vaccine. MassBiologics’ exclusive distributor, Grifols USA, told the CDC that supply of the product, which is called TdVax, will last until June of this year.
Meanwhile, the other manufacturer of tetanus shots for the U.S., Sanofi, “is taking steps to augment their available supply,” the CDC said.
Sanofi’s product is Tenivac, which also defends against tetanus and diphtheria.
The CDC has installed temporary controls on the “public and private sectors” on ordering the vaccines, it said, “to help manage the gap in supply.”
Another option, without any supply issues, are combination vaccines for tetanus, diphtheria and acellular pertussis (Tdap). The CDC has asked providers to transition to use of Tdap vaccines “whenever possible.”
Tdap vaccines available in the U.S. are Sanofi’s Adacel and GSK’s Boostrix. The shots are more expensive than Td vaccines but have increased in popularity, while sales of Td shots have declined.
Td vaccines should only be provided to those who can’t receive pertussis-containing shots, the agency added. The shots present a small risk of encephalopathy (brain damage). Pertussis is more commonly known as whooping cough.
Tetanus is a virus caused by bacteria Clostridium, which is often found in soil. The bacteria can cause muscle contractions, especially in the neck and mouth, also referred to a “lockjaw.”
In recent months, the CDC also has dealt with a shortage of a new immunization to combat respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Called Beyfortus, the antibody from partners Sanofi and AstraZeneca is the lone RSV immunization in the U.S. for infants.
Universal Health Services (UHS) beat estimates for the fourth quarter and is forecasting higher, though still "conservative," full-year earnings for 2024.
The King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based for-profit health system reported $216.4 million net income ($3.16 per diluted share) during the fourth quarter, an improvement over last year’s $174.8 million ($2.43 per diluted share) and $0.25 higher than the consensus estimate, according to numbers released after market close on Tuesday.
Net revenues for the quarter rose 7.4% year over year to $3.70 billion, which was also above the consensus estimate of $3.66 billion.
For the full year 2023, UHS notched $717.8 million of net income ($10.23 per diluted share), up from last year’s $675.6 million ($9.14 per diluted share). Net revenues across the acute and behavioral care hospital operator’s business rose 6.6% year-over-year to $14.28 billion.
In commentary given during Wednesday morning's earnings call, executives said the company continues to see "strong" demand across its business but that yearlong headwinds including elevated expenses, payer pressure and capacity issues made their mark on Q4 and full-year margins.
CEO Marc Miller noted that premium pay within the acute care hospital segment was roughly on par with the previous quarter at $67 million, though still down from the peak of $153 million in early 2022. Wage growth across both sides of the business is holding steady at about 4% to 5% annually, executives said, and physician fee expenses are still elevated from the past year's disruption.
Many of these pressures are expected to hold, but not substantially worsen, in the coming year, they said. A 2024 forecast released late Tuesday projects 12-month net revenues between $15.41 billion and $15.71 billion and earnings per diluted share between $13 and $14.
Executives said the company is hedging its bets with the 2024 preview. The roughly 5% to 6% of expected growth is "split pretty evenly between price and volume," with the former being an optimistic goal and the latter a bit of an undersell, Chief Financial Officer Steve Filton said.
He also pointed to the volatility introduced by last year's physician fee spikes that, even when the industry realized were imminent, came at a scale that caught hospitals off guard.
"Even when we're aware of issues, etc, the last couple of years, have created a little bit more volatility than we're accustomed to," Filton said on the call. "So I think, where we were trying to account for some of that [with] what I view as a fairly cautious approach to guidance."
Those fees and other labor expenses aren't currently expected to skyrocket beyond inflation again during the coming year, executives said.
On the upside, UHS expects it will continue to regain behavioral volumes as it plugs some (but not all) of its staffing holes and builds capacity. A bump in low-acuity acute care hospital volumes that resulted from pandemic-deferred care is also appearing to stabilize and is expected to improve case mix in 2024, they added, while a year of elevated pressure from payers is finally starting to subside.
“We saw for much of 2023, payers being more aggressive as their medical loss ratios were rising in a variety of ways, including denials and patient status changes, which would include recapping patients from inpatient to observation,” Filton said. "I don't think we changed our billing practices during the [fourth] quarter, but ... we're starting to anniversary some of that more aggressive behavior of the payers."
In the Q4 2024 results for the acute care services unit alone, on a same-facility basis, UHS executives highlighted year-over-year increases in adjusted admissions (5.6%), adjusted patient days (4.3%), net revenue per adjusted admission (3.7%) and net revenue per adjusted patient day (5%) for the fourth quarter. Same-facility net revenues increased by 9.7% over the final quarter of 2022.
The system also logged same-facility, year-over-year increases across the full calendar year across adjusted admissions (7.6%), adjusted patient days (4.7%) and total net revenues (7.6%). Net revenue per adjusted admission declined by 0.6%, though net revenue per adjusted patient day was up 2.2%.
Volume gains within the behavioral health segment were slimmer, though revenue increases stayed steady. For the quarter, on a same-facility basis, adjusted admissions rose 1.4%, adjusted patient days increased 1.1%, net revenue per adjusted admission increased 5.8%, net revenue per adjusted patient day rose 6.1% and overall net revenues increased 7.2% year-over-year.
For the full year, behavioral facilities boosted adjusted admissions by 3.2%, adjusted patient days by 2.1%, net revenue per adjusted admission by 4.7%, net revenue per adjusted patient day by 5.9% and overall net revenues by 8%.
UHS employs almost 97,000 people across 27 inpatient acute care hospitals, 333 inpatient behavioral health facilities and other locations in the U.S., the U.K. and Puerto Rico.
