News Story of the Day: well, this is bad news for any fiscal conservative.
For the 29th consecutive month, Americans spending grew faster than their incomes. Here is what we learned from the latest U.S. government numbers: YoY income growth hit four percent, YoY spending held steady at 4.4 percent, and the personal savings rate slumped to 2.8 percent.
No wonder why most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are trillions of dollars in debt.
Chart of the Day: the FANG stocks are still in high demand, despite prices at all-time highs and pay zero dividends. Is this a sign the second version of the dot-com bubble has arrived? Here is a great chart from Money Week that compares the 1990s Nasdaq to today’s FANGs+ Index:
Illustration of the Day: the current bull run will be the longest in modern U.S. history. This infographic takes a look at the six longest bull markets (per Visual Capitalist):
Quote of the Day: if Roe v. Wade is overturned and abortion becomes illegal across the country, will a black market form? Prior to the historic Supreme Court ruling, coat hangers were the norm, underground terminations were common, and many people were sent to jail. What would happen today? Maybe a black market for abortion pills.
From Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown:
If abortion were illegal in parts of the country, women these days would be much more likely to attempt abortion with black-market pills than coat hangers or other more dangerous measures. That’s not to say that these pills wouldn’t be without their dangers: Any drugs bought on the black market can pose quality-control problems. But with foreign pharmacies relatively easy to order from online, and abortion pills still legal in many states, opportunities to obtain legit abortion pills in an underground market may actually be pretty expansive.
In this way, pregnant women’s options and outcomes in a post-Roe world might not be a grim or gruesome as they were in an earlier era. And efforts to actually eradicate abortion stand less of a chance than they ever have before, when the only reliable ways to terminate pregnancies involved invasive and dangerous medical procedures undertaken in specific locales. As it stands now, anyone with an internet connection and a little cash can pretty easily obtain the pills, and no special or sterile setting is required.
But this also opens up other frightening possibilities. A crackdown on either pharmaceuticals ordered online from foreign pharmacies or pills flowing between states could seriously step up the time-tested brutality and civil-liberties squelching capability of the drug war.
Many states already have criminal laws against illegally induced abortions, and women have been prosecuted under these (and anti-fetacide laws) for illegally obtaining and taking pills to induce abortion. In another instance, a mother was imprisoned for illegally obtaining the pills for her teenage daughter—and this is with legal abortion. In a country where abortion was illegal or inaccessible in some states, we could almost certainly expect to see more state laws targeting both women who self-induce abortions and (especially) people who assist them in doing so in any capacity.
We’ve already seen a recent weakening of protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal provision protecting internet platforms and publishers from certain legal liability for the speech of their users, or conduct resulting from that speech. As of this spring, websites and apps can be sued in civil court and criminally prosecuted by states if anyone uses them to facilitate or promote prostitution. It’s not hard to imagine Congress carving out a similar provision for any website that somehow facilitated someone obtaining abortion drugs illegally.
The same goes for laws like the Mann Act, still in frequent use to punish people who drive other adults across state lines for “immoral purposes” (usually sex work). Under a slightly revised Mann Act or something similar, we could see whole new swaths of federal agents devoted to ferreting out and stopping people from helping women in states where abortion is illegal obtain abortions in other states.
With our current state of medicine and technology, eliminating abortion anywhere in the country could prove more difficult than the pro-choice side fears—a small consolation, but a consolation nonetheless. Meanwhile, the police-state antics, disastrous policy, and rising prison populations that come from outlawing abortion could prove every bit as devastating to American women and the general state of freedom in the country as any return to back-alley abortion doctors could be.
Tweet of the Day: if there is one Twitter account you should follow, it would be @CatheeMcKennnna. Ostensibly, some Canadian government officials banned a couple of these parody accounts, but this one seems to be surviving – for now. It pokes fun at Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, another big government advocate who wants more taxes, more regulations, more restrictions. And she thinks you shouldn’t make fun of politicians.
Here is one hilarious tweet:
No idea what this is, but people keep sending it to me. On another note, I plan on flying to a bunch of places to meet with people about a bunch of stuff. pic.twitter.com/ta58epA1I7
— CatheMckennnnnna (@CatheeMcKennnna) June 29, 2018
Video of the Day: the world is coming to an end again, according to the left. The media is freaking out that liberal Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring. The left, which suddenly cares about the U.S. constitution and what the Founding Fathers think, is outraged, and Free Beacon put together a hilarious compilation with the music of “O Fortuna.”
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