Social Issues

Submitted by Walter E Williams via The Burning Platform blog,

Michael Hiltzik, a columnist and Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote an article titled “Does a minimum wage raise hurt workers? Economists say: We don’t know.” Uncertain was his conclusion from a poll conducted by the Initiative on Global Markets, at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, of 42 nationally ranked economists on the question of whether raising the federal minimum wage to $15 over the next five years would reduce employment opportunities for low-wage workers.

It was just yesterday when we documented the continuing slide in the loonie, which is suffering mightily in the face of oil’s inexorable decline.

As regular readers are no doubt acutely aware, Canada is struggling through a dramatic economic adjustment, especially in Alberta, the heart of the country’s oil patch. Amid the ongoing crude carnage the province has seen soaring property crime, rising food bank usage and, sadly, elevated suicide rates, as Albertans struggle to comprehend how things up north could have gone south (so to speak) so quickly.

The London Times wrote an article in 1987 that linked the smallpox vaccine to the deadly spread of AIDS in the 1980’s. In the article (republished below) it is admitted that the World Health Organisation (WHO) led a huge campaign aimed at “eradicating smallpox” but may have also been responsible for awakening what we know today to be the HIV virus. Smallpox vaccine ‘triggered Aids virus’ The Aids epidemic may have been triggered by the mass vaccination campaign which eradicated smallpox.

Europe’s worsening refugee crisis is in many ways the best thing that could have happened to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign.

Last summer, the brazen billionaire kicked off his run for the White House by taking aim at America’s broken immigration policy. Trump painted a picture of an impossibly porous Mexican border across which stream hordes of drug dealers and rapists who poison American society and bleed the economy dry.

Politico reports on Bush’s vendetta with Rubio:

But Florida Republicans in both camps tell a different story, one of an elder statesman who, after waiting eight years to run for president, viewed his younger protégé’s decision to challenge him for the GOP nomination after one term in the senate as an affront—and of personal enmity that’s deepened as Rubio has risen to the top of the field while Bush has sunk.