FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019 (NY Times article about FedEx not paying taxes)

FedEx responds to The New York Times article from Nov. 17, 2019.

"Statement from FedEx 
 
The New York Times article is a deliberate distortion of our company’s actions before and after tax reform. FedEx has paid federal income tax every year, including fiscal year 2018. Following passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), FedEx invested billions in capital items eligible for accelerated depreciation and made large contributions to our employee pension plans. These factors have temporarily lowered our federal income tax, which was the law’s intention to help grow GDP and generate investment in the U.S. The accelerated depreciation deductions are only temporary with higher depreciation and lower taxes early in the life of a new capital asset. This is then offset by lower depreciation and higher taxes later in that asset’s life. These temporary deductions FedEx received for capital investments are minimal compared to the overall impact the company has on the economy.

FedEx made extensive investments in our team members and our global network to better serve our customers following passage of the TCJA. These investments included a voluntary contribution of $1.5 billion to the FedEx pension plan to ensure it remains a well-funded retirement program, more than $200 million in increased team member compensation – about two-thirds of which went to hourly team members – and more than $3 billion to significantly expand and modernize our Memphis and Indianapolis hubs through 2025.

FedEx takes pride in paying its full share of taxes and has paid almost $10 billion in total taxes in the U.S. during the last five fiscal years, contributing to tax revenues of the U.S. government. We have supported tax increases in some cases, particularly federal diesel and gasoline taxes, to fund badly-needed infrastructure in the United States. The decrease in U.S. investment over the past year is due to the slowdown in global trade which has a significant impact on the asset-intensive industrial economy, including FedEx.

Statement from Frederick W. Smith, Chairman and CEO of FedEx Corporation 

The New York Times published a distorted and factually incorrect story on the front page of the Sunday, November 17 edition concerning FedEx and our billions of dollars of tax payments and billions of dollars of investments in the U.S. economy.  Pertinent to this outrageous distortion of the truth is the fact that unlike FedEx, the New York Times paid zero federal income tax in 2017 on earnings of $111 million, and only $30 million in 2018 – 18% of their pretax book income.  Also in 2018 the New York Times cut their capital investments nearly in half to $57 million, which equates to a rounding error when compared to the $6 billion of capital that FedEx invested in the U.S. economy during that same year.

I hereby challenge A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times and the business section editor to a public debate in Washington, DC with me and the FedEx corporate vice president of tax.  The focus of the debate should be federal tax policy and the relative societal benefits of business investments and the enormous intended benefits to the United States economy, especially lower and middle class wage earners.

I look forward to promptly hearing from Mr. Sulzberger and scheduling this open event to bring further public awareness of the facts related to these important issues."

William Easterly reviews ‘Good Economics for Hard Times’ by Banerjee and Duflo

From The WSJ.

"Proponents of market reforms are quick to tout the benefits that markets have to deliver. But as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two of this year’s Nobel laureates in economics, repeatedly show in “Good Economics for Hard Times,” some apologists have a tendency to overpromise. Markets, the authors remind us, can be sticky. Pro-market reforms like freer trade, for instance, only work as well as advocates predict when people can freely move to better opportunities.

In reality, people don’t move so fluidly to new industries or regions. The authors cite a 2013 comparative study of regional labor markets in the U.S.—regions defined by commuting patterns—that were affected by the expansion of Chinese trade between 1991 and 2007. The study showed declines in total employment in the American regions hardest hit by Chinese competition. This should not have happened if workers had simply moved within the same region to an industry that benefited from cheaper imports. Workers could have also, in theory, moved to an expanding region from a declining one.

But workers do not move easily, even when an expanding region is nearby. A 2010 study of labor mobility in India following trade liberalization in 1991 found a similar result of people stuck in declining districts. Yet another study, from 2014, found a different kind of immobility in Bangladesh, where people in rural areas did not migrate to cities as much as predicted by the urban-rural wage discrepancy.

In contrast to such “bad economics,” Mr. Banerjee and Ms. Duflo offer the “good economics” of policies that take such stickiness into consideration. The authors are not trying to get rid of markets. They recognize Venezuela as an example of what happens when markets are distorted by price controls and hyperinflation. They warn that a trade war with China would create a new list of losing American regions. They also admit that removing drastic measures such as state ownership and central planning—as China, India, South Korea and Vietnam have done to varying degrees—delivered much higher economic growth.

Consider the fisheries in the coastal state of Kerala, India. In the past, as the fishermen completed their catch offshore they would head to their nearest fish market, flooding some areas with product while elsewhere customers would go away empty-handed. It was a serious misallocation of resources. The stickiness, in this case, was a lack of information. Once cellphone technology arrived in the region, fishermen could call ahead and locate those markets with the most customers. Sticky markets corrected.

Great so far, but then the book takes some wrong turns. In calling for tax increases, for instance, the authors recommend engaging “the best minds in the world to work with governments . . . to redesign our social programs for effectiveness.” For the U.S. in particular, “the only possible way out involves a much expanded role for the government.” This isn’t merely introducing cellphones to fishermen.

Would such a big redesign really work? Take one program the authors celebrate for having overcome stickiness: the federal government’s 1994 Moving to Opportunity program, which offered residents of high-poverty public housing a chance to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. The early results showed little payoff for the program’s beneficiaries, but 20 years later researchers found strong positive effects on earnings and college enrollment for the children of parents who participated in the program. How do you redesign policies for effectiveness if you won’t know whether something works until 20 years later?

The authors also acknowledge that there will be disagreements about solutions. Do you subsidize the U.S. regions that have lost out from trade with China? Or do you target assistance at people rather than places? Politicians and voters are also unlikely to select policies based on what the academics recommend. In the U.S. and the U.K., the public does not seem to vote as much for redistribution as the authors would want them to. In fact, the authors note that, in U.S. and U.K., polls have shown only about 25% of the public trusts economists.

Unfortunately, the book’s tone does not help foster trust. The authors originally hoped to address a “growing polarization” because policy debates have become “a high-decibel slanging match.” They say their job is “to offer facts” that they hope “will help mediate these divides . . . and thereby arrive at some reasoned disagreement [with] respect on both sides.”

Yet the authors themselves struggle to manifest this respect. They engage in some ad hominem arguments, discounting their opponents’ views if they have appeared on television or in the press, if they work for the private sector, are “strident” or belong to “a previous era.” The authors don’t identify by name those doing bad economics, except for an attack on “nine conservative academic economists, mostly with solid reputations but also part of this older generation.” The authors feel that their opponents suffer from “ignorance and ideology” because they “often feel free to ignore the weight of the evidence.” For their own arguments, the authors appeal to the authority of “recognized leaders in the profession,” also known as “today’s best economists.”

In October, Mr. Banerjee and Ms. Duflo, together with Michael Kremer, won the Nobel Prize for their work on evidence-based policy in economic development. “Good Economics for Hard Times” lives up to its authors’ reputations, giving a masterly tour of the current evidence on critical policy questions facing less-than-perfect markets in both developed and developing countries, from migration to trade to postindustrial blight. But the book is less convincing when it suggests that a wholesale redesign of social programs is a viable or desirable replacement for our messy democracies and sticky markets. The evidence is lacking for such an ambitious evidence-based policy."

Suffixing Industrial Policy with “2.0” Doesn’t Make It Credible

Donald J. Boudreaux.

"Industrial policy is back in fashion.

It’s unsurprising that many people on the political left believe that the economy can be improved by putting large chunks of it under the direction of politicians and their bureaucratic minions. The political left deeply believes that the allocation of resources that results when individuals invest their own money as entrepreneurs, and spend their own money as consumers, is inferior to the allocation that would be achieved if the state directs investment and, thereby, necessarily also overrides many of the consumption decisions that would be made in free markets.

Yet it’s jarring – and disappointing – to encounter a case for industrial policy in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. But there it is, offered up proudly by Sridhar Kota and Tom Mahoney. Their labeling it “Industrial Policy 2.0” is a futile attempt to distinguish it from any of the sorry entries on the long list of past industrial-policy failures.

The very title of the piece – “Innovation Should Be Made in the U.S.A.” – puts the economically informed reader on notice that the text of the piece is likely to be economically uninformed. The warning is warranted. And while the authors likely didn’t choose the title, it accurately reflects the authors’ mistaken suggestion both that the U.S. is lagging in innovativeness, and that innovation that originates within the U.S. is necessarily better for Americans than is innovation that originates elsewhere.

Fallacies Galore

Consider this startling claim: “Once manufacturing departs from a country’s shores, engineering and production know-how leave as well, and innovation ultimately follows. It’s become increasingly clear that ‘manufacture there’ now also means ‘innovate there.’”

First, manufacturing is not departing from America’s shores. Real manufacturing output in the U.S. is today near an all-time high. And this output would almost certainly be even higher were it not for the Trump administration’s economic-nationalist policies. Ironically, such policies are the very sort that Kota and Mahoney – who explicitly criticize what they contemptuously call “the outsourcing paradigm” – endorse as a means of boosting manufacturing in the U.S.

Second, despite their insinuation that engineering and production know-how are leaving the U.S., or are threatening to leave, the authors present absolutely no evidence to back this insinuation – an insinuation that is almost impossible to square with the reality that U.S. manufacturing (it cannot these days be said too often) is today near an all-time high.

Third and more fundamentally, when and to the extent that trade and markets are free, Americans benefit from innovation no matter where it occurs. Kota and Mahoney seem blind to the reality that if Lee in Shanghai figures out how to produce steel at a lower cost, Americans who are free to buy steel unimpeded on global markets reap the benefits of the resulting lower price of steel no less than if this innovation were done by Lou in Youngstown.

Fourth and even more fundamentally, the authors mistakenly write as if the amount of innovation is fixed.

Yes: if a foreign country attracts more investment to create manufacturing plants it will likely also become the site of greater innovation. This fact is so in part because an increased number of factories that produce outputs for sale in competitive markets naturally inspires people who work in those factories to creatively devise better and more efficient uses of those factories. But greater innovation in these cases also comes from a deeper source – namely, the improved policy climate that itself heightened the attractiveness of putting factories in those locations.

Countries that attract more investment typically are countries whose public policies and private attitudes have become more favorable to markets, including to the innovation which is the source of economic growth. So it’s quite natural that as countries industrialize according to market forces the peoples of those countries unleash more of their innovative energies.

Importantly, this increased innovation abroad does not decrease innovation here in the U.S. Innovation here is merely rechanneled into different avenues.

Stop Dissing the Service Sector

One of these avenues is the service sector. This sector (although you’d never guess it by reading Kota and Mahoney) has for a century now been the single largest sector of the American economy. As the U.S. manufacturing sector continues to shrink relative to the U.S. service sector, a greater portion of American innovation occurs in the provision of services. Yet Kota and Mahoney mistakenly write as though innovation is driven exclusively by manufacturing and occurs exclusively in that sector.

By the way, don’t suppose that innovation in manufacturing is somehow better than innovation in services. Among the most spectacular innovations since the end of World War II are Sam Walton’s, and later Jeff Bezos’s, revolutionary improvements in retailing. Other innovations in services are Fred Smith’s creation of affordable overnight package delivery and Sergei Brin and Larry Page’s improvements in search engines. And let’s not forget innovative services such as ride-sharing, music streaming, and social media.

I can’t resist here giving a shout-out to one of my favorite entrepreneurial service providers: Jiffy Lube. Oil-changing services are, perhaps, not very high-tech, but they save me and millions of other Americans enormous amounts of time. Surely some of this saved time is spent being innovative.

Had the portion of resources and creative human energies Americans devote to manufacturing not fallen over the past several decades, fewer – and perhaps none of the above-listed – innovations in services would have occurred. As a result, we Americans (and non-Americans) would have been poorer.

A Fallacy Wrapped In a Contradiction

A smorgasbord of other fallacies, factual and logical, runs throughout Kota and Mahoney’s case for industrial policy. I close, however, by flagging this one sentence: “We have lost much of our capacity to physically build what results from our world-leading investments in research and development.”

It’s an erroneous factual claim wrapped in a contradiction.

The erroneous factual claim is the one about production capacity. In fact, U.S. industrial capacity is today at an all-time high. And so we have not “lost much of our capacity to physically build.” Also, if this assertion by Kota and Mahoney were correct, explaining why American manufacturing output is now near an all-time high would be challenging, to say the least.

The contradiction arises when the authors mention “our world-leading investments in research and development.” Because our imports of manufactured goods have steadily increased for decades, how can it be that today we have “world-leading investments in research and development” given the authors’ thesis that innovation dries up as we Americans import ever-more of the manufactured goods that we use?

Conclusion

Any case for industrial policy reflects the economic and factual understanding of those who offer it. With their Wall Street Journal essay, Kota and Mahoney join a long roster of economically and factually uninformed individuals who’ve tried to make a cogent case for industrial policy – individuals who, in every case, have failed."

The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U. for Millions

The European Union spends $65 billion a year subsidizing agriculture. But a chunk of that money emboldens strongmen, enriches politicians and finances corrupt dealing.

By Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo and Benjamin Novak of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"Under Communism, farmers labored in the fields that stretch for miles around this town west of Budapest, reaping wheat and corn for a government that had stolen their land.

Today, their children toil for new overlords, a group of oligarchs and political patrons who have annexed the land through opaque deals with the Hungarian government. They have created a modern twist on a feudal system, giving jobs and aid to the compliant, and punishing the mutinous.

These land barons, as it turns out, are financed and emboldened by the European Union.

Every year, the 28-country bloc pays out $65 billion in farm subsidies intended to support farmers around the Continent and keep rural communities alive. But across Hungary and much of Central and Eastern Europe, the bulk goes to a connected and powerful few. The prime minister of the Czech Republic collected tens of millions of dollars in subsidies just last year. Subsidies have underwritten Mafia-style land grabs in Slovakia and Bulgaria.

Europe’s farm program, a system that was instrumental in forming the European Union, is now being exploited by the same antidemocratic forces that threaten the bloc from within. This is because governments in Central and Eastern Europe, several led by populists, have wide latitude in how the subsidies, funded by taxpayers across Europe, are distributed — even as the entire system is shrouded in secrecy.

A New York Times investigation, conducted in nine countries for much of 2019, uncovered a subsidy system that is deliberately opaque, grossly undermines the European Union’s environmental goals and is warped by corruption and self-dealing."

"The program is the biggest item in the European Union’s central budget, accounting for 40 percent of expenditures. It’s one of the largest subsidy programs in the world.

Yet some lawmakers in Brussels who write and vote on farm policy admit they often have no idea where the money goes."

". . . Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orban . . . uses European subsidies as a patronage system that enriches his friends and family, protects his political interests and punishes his rivals."

"The European Union spends three times as much as the United States on farm subsidies each year, but as the system has expanded, accountability has not kept up. National governments publish some information on recipients, but the largest beneficiaries hide behind complex ownership structures. And although farmers are paid, in part, based on their acreage, property data is kept secret, making it harder to track land grabs and corruption. The European Union maintains a master database but, citing the difficulty of downloading the requested information, refused to provide The Times a copy."

"80 percent of the money goes to the biggest 20 percent of recipients. And some of those at the top have used that money to amass political power."

"Farmers who criticize the government or the patronage system say they have been denied grants or faced surprise audits and unusual environmental inspections, in what amounts to a sophisticated intimidation campaign that harkens to the Communist era."

"One man who did speak up was Mr. Angyan, the former under secretary for rural development. A jowly, gray-haired rural economist with a mischievous smile, Mr. Angyan became an unlikely crusader for small farmers. He served under Mr. Orban, initially thinking him a reformer, only to leave angry and disillusioned. He canvassed the countryside, documenting the government’s dubious land deals and mistreatment of small farmers.

And then he disappeared from public life."

The Happy, Healthy Capitalists of Switzerland

Forget Scandinavia. Switzerland is richer and yet has a surprisingly equal wealth distribution

By Ruchir Sharma. Excerpts:

"Like many progressive intellectuals, Bernie Sanders traces his vision of economic paradise not to socialist dictatorships like Venezuela but to their distant cousins in Scandinavia, which are just as wealthy and democratic as the United States but have more equitable distributions of wealth, as well as affordable health care and free college for all.

There is, however, a country far richer and just as fair as any in the Scandinavian trio of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. But no one talks about it.

This $700 billion European economy is among the world’s 20 largest, significantly bigger than any in Scandinavia. It delivers welfare benefits as comprehensive as Scandinavia’s but with lighter taxes, smaller government, and a more open and stable economy. Steady growth recently made it the second richest nation in the world, after Luxembourg, with an average income of $84,000, or $20,000 more than the Scandinavian average. Money is not the final measure of success, but surveys also rank this nation as one of the world’s 10 happiest.

This less socialist but more successful utopia is Switzerland."

"Capitalist to its core, Switzerland imposes lighter taxes on individuals, consumers and corporations than the Scandinavian countries do. In 2018 its top income tax rate was the lowest in Western Europe at 36 percent, well below the Scandinavian average of 52 percent. Government spending amounts to a third of gross domestic product, compared with half in Scandinavia. And Switzerland is more open to trade, with a share of global exports around double that of any Scandinavian economy.

Streamlined government and open borders have helped make this landlocked, mountainous country an unlikely incubator of globally competitive companies."

"Small companies anchor the economy, accounting for two of every three jobs. Only one in seven Swiss work for the government, about half the Scandinavian average."

"Die-hard admirers of Scandinavian socialism overlook the change of heart in countries such as Sweden, where heavy government spending led to the financial crises of the 1990s. Sweden responded by cutting the top income tax rate from nearly 90 percent to as low as 50 percent. Public spending fell from near 70 percent of G.D.P. to 50 percent. Growth revived, as the largest Scandinavian economy started to look more like Switzerland, streamlining government and leaving business more room to grow.

The real lesson of Swiss success is that the stark choice offered by many politicians — between private enterprise and social welfare — is a false one. A pragmatic country can have a business-friendly environment alongside social equality, if it gets the balance right. The Swiss have become the world’s richest nation by getting it right, and their model is hiding in plain sight."

The Myth That Eating McDonald's Makes You Obese

Critics often have an overly negative view of McDonald’s food.

By Hans Bader. Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law.

"I lost ten pounds in the summer that I worked at McDonald’s, eating there all the time. Yet, people try to blame fast-food restaurants for their obesity. It’s one of the “myths about fast food” discussed this week in the Washington Post, which observes that “just eating burgers does not cause obesity.”

As that newspaper notes, this myth was based on the claim that poor people are getting fat because “junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that makes it almost essential for the poor because they need cheap calories ” Based on this perception, “the Los Angeles City Council banned new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles in 2008.”

But as The Post points out, “Studies and surveys show that fast food is most popular among upper-middle income brackets.” Indeed, “wealthier Americans – those earning $75,000 a year or more – are more likely to eat it at least weekly (51 percent) than lower-income groups,” according to a 2013 Gallup survey. “Those earning the least are the least likely to eat fast food weekly – 39 percent of Americans earning less than $20,000 a year do so.”

Unjustified Shunning of Fast Food

Moreover, “regular restaurants are not appreciably healthier than fast food joints,” according to a comprehensive 2015 study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition that compared fast food with full-service restaurants. And entrees at fast-food restaurants typically have fewer, not more, calories, than those at fast-casual restaurants.

In America, obese people have so far been unsuccessful in suing McDonald’s over their weight gain. But in Brazil, a judge in 2010 ordered McDonald’s to pay an overweight employee the equivalent of $17,500, after he gained 65 pounds over 12 years of working at the restaurant and eating its food for free. That was a truly strange ruling that disregarded the fat man’s personal responsibility for his eating habits.

While restricting fast-food restaurants in places like Los Angeles, government officials have sometimes subsidized sit-down restaurants whose food is no healthier. Pancakes with butter and syrup have less nutrition and more empty calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger. But the Obama administration used federal funds to subsidize the opening of an International House of Pancakes in Washington, D.C.

Critics often have an overly negative view of McDonald’s food. To appease them, McDonald’s altered the contents of its Happy Meals, replacing some of their french fries, which do contain some vitamin C, with prepackaged apple slices that contain essentially no natural vitamin C (they do contain artificially-added vitamin C). But my daughter did not like the prepackaged slices. She said they tasted different from fresh apple. Such prepackaged apple slices lose virtually all of their natural vitamin C in processing. Even a fresh apple has far less vitamin C than a potato. A potato contains 40 percent of your vitamin C needs for the day, compared to about 10 percent in an apple, or 20 percent for a typical order of french fries.

Unjustified Shunning of Potatoes

Potatoes are highly nutritious, yet many people harbor irrational prejudices against them.
They have a lot more vitamin C, and at least as much potassium, as a banana. And a baked potato typically has only about 110 calories, similar to a banana.

Despite this fact, the Obama administration banned white potatoes from the federal WIC program in a 2009 regulation, a ban that was repealed in 2017 after policymakers realized that potatoes were a nutritious and economical food source.

In 2010, an NIH official foolishly urged an audience of parents to stock their refrigerators with apple sauce, as a way of ensuring that kids always have access to fruits and vegetables. She made this silly recommendation even though apple sauce is sugary and has no vitamin C (unless vitamin C is artificially added to it, since an apple’s natural vitamin C is lost when it is processed into apple sauce)."

Is the Man-Made Climate Change Debate Really Over?

By Dominick T. Armentano. He is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and professor emeritus in economics at the University of Hartford (CT). 

"Climate change enthusiasts are convinced that man-made global warming poses a near-term environmental disaster. Yet gloom-and-doom forecasts about the fate of the Earth are hardly new, and few have proven accurate.

In 1798 the Rev. Thomas Malthus predicted that mass starvation would strike England in the 19th century because population growth would inevitably overwhelm food production. It didn’t happen.

Or recall the dire predictions by experts in the 1970s that the world was running out of oil and that prices would skyrocket and stay high for decades.

These views were supported by analyses from the CIA and a boatload of geologists who believed in the so-called “peak oil” theory.

But the experts were wrong. Adjusted for inflation, a barrel of crude oil today is cheaper than it was in 1980, which is arguably one of the most pro-consumer developments in recent economic history.
And now we are told that the world is on the brink of environmental disaster due to man-made global warming.

The conventional wisdom, repeated endlessly in the popular press, is that the Earth is heating dangerously because we burn fossil fuels and that this will generate devastating droughts, fires, floods, and rising ocean levels. (The oceans are currently rising by about one-eighth of an inch per year).

In response, several prominent politicians have developed multitrillion-dollar plans to “do something.” Those who question those plans, or the theory that temperature increases are man-made, are often smeared as immoral or antiscience.

Yet there is really only one policy-relevant question in the entire climate-change debate: does the increased use of fossil fuels—and the consequent increase in carbon dioxide emissions—contribute significantly to the increase in the Earth’s surface temperature?

The scientific evidence on warming is reasonably clear: since 1880, the atmospheric temperature has increased slightly more than 1 degree Celsius.

Over those many decades, there have been periods of warming, periods of cooling, periods where no major changes occurred, and more recently, a relatively modest but sustained period of warming. No real debate here.

But can this recent warming be reasonably correlated with increased fossil-fuel use? After all, C02 is a relatively minor greenhouse gas (0.041 percent by volume), and any statistical association of specific levels of carbon emissions with specific temperature changes historically has not been compelling.

For example, while CO2 emissions have steadily increased for many decades (much of it from expanding industrial activity in India and China), the Earth’s temperature, though trending upward, has varied markedly.

More specifically, while CO2 growth rates have been almost five times greater since World War II than before, the average annual temperature increase since 1945 has been roughly the same as it was before 1945.

All of this would imply that increased CO2 levels may not be the sole (or perhaps even the primary) factor driving changes in global temperatures.

Yet if CO2 is not the primary cause of temperature change, then the entire economic and political case for carbon taxes and other regulations on CO2 emissions is severely weakened.

Why should we increase the price of energy generated from oil and natural gas (let alone consider the multitrillion-dollar costs of any Green New Deal) if reducing emissions in the United States (or even the rate of emissions) would produce no discernable net benefit to society?

After all, one thing is certain in this entire debate. Any important restriction on the use of fossil fuels would raise the price of almost everything and hurt low-income families the most, despite any political promises to the contrary.

Some of us are old enough to remember the major print media (Time, Newsweek, etc.) scare stories concerning global cooling in the early 1970s.

We were all going to freeze in the dark unless the government did something about the coming mini-ice age. But cooler heads prevailed, and we didn’t rush to judgment with massive environmental regulation—which would have been a disaster.

Let’s take a breath and adopt that same cautious approach with respect to the current controversy."