Fox And Friends: Polar Bears Prove Climate Change Is ‘Not Really Real’

(Photo credit: AP)

Polar bears can’t catch a break anywhere, least of all Fox News.

On Fox and Friends this morning, Fox Legal Analyst Peter Johnson Jr. was asked about last week’s ruling by the D.C. Circuit to uphold the decision to protect polar bears as a “threatened” species. He made the case that environmentalists use polar bears as a fundraising tool, and that the threat to polar bears may be imaginary:

JOHNSON: It really depends upon whether you believe the global warming is real, whether polar bears are actually threatened or not. This has become a big fundraising tool and it’s become a problem, too, for oil interests throughout the world because they have to act in a way that is very expensive in terms of making modifications.… So is global warming real or not real? I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s not really real.

Watch it:

Global warming is undoubtedly real. In fact, the real climate debate has shifted to how much climate scientists have actually underestimated global warming impacts.

With regard to polar bears, the court said that the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the polar bear correctly as “threatened”:

“The Listing Rule rests on a three-part thesis: the polar bear is dependent upon sea ice for its survival; sea ice is declining; and climatic changes have and will continue to dramatically reduce the extent and quality of Arctic sea ice to a degree sufficiently grave to jeopardize polar bear populations…. No part of this thesis is disputed and we find that FWS’s conclusion – that the polar bear is threatened within the meaning of the ESA – is reasonable and adequately supported by the record.” [Page 14]

It went on to say that 13 out of 14 peer reviewers found the rule generally “represented a thorough, clear, and balanced review of the best scientific information available from both published and unpublished sources of the current status of polar bears.”

Polar bears depend on sea ice for feeding. Arctic sea ice volume has collapsed. The question on threats to polar bears is not over whether general population estimates are stable. (Where there is sufficient data, many more subpopulations are decreasing than are increasing.) If Fox and Friends wants to get to the root of the issue, they should host a discussion about whether polar bears should be classified as “threatened” or “endangered.”

Polar bear ranges will only get more crowded by other animals. Under an incorrect-yet-ironic headline (“Study: Global Warming Helps Polar Bears,”) Fox News reported in January that many mammal species will expand their ranges northward as the Arctic warms. As the sea ice melts, the polar bears will surely welcome their new grizzly bear overlords from the south.

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ADHD’s Lasting Effects Prove That Mental Disorders Need To Be Treated Just Like Any Other Illness

When the bipartisan Wellstone-Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) was signed into law in 2008, mental health advocates hoped it would begin bridging the gap between the way that mental health treatments and more “traditional” medical services are provided — particularly by prohibiting different standards for one type of care over the other. Unfortunately, the evidence shows there’s still a long way to go when it comes to making the dream of medical parity a reality.

Time’s new Mayo clinic-sponsored report points out that ADHD, while being increasingly diagnosed and treated in children, has lingering long-term effects on adults and is a strong indicator of co-occurring mental illnesses for both children and adults. But lax insurance requirements, as well as a lack of awareness about the long-term effects of mental illness, have led to a dearth of research regarding the comprehensive effects of what medical professionals tend to dismiss as a childhood behavioral disorder:

It’s not that the condition isn’t being addressed adequately, or that doctors, parents and teachers are not aware of the condition: they certainly are, since education and awareness about ADHD has increased in recent decades, even contributing to a rise in diagnoses… [Dr. Barbaresi of Boston Children’s Hospital and Mayo Clinic] argues, however, that the legacy and long term implications of an ADHD diagnosis haven’t really been considered and studied adequately, since most doctors tend to think of the condition as one that primarily affects children that they tend to outgrow once they reach adulthood. The need for attention is even greater considering that the study also found a connection between ADHD and suicide. While the absolute number of deaths in the adults who still have ADHD is low, the statistical difference is significant: children with ADHD were nearly five times more likely to die from suicide than other people in the study group. [...]

In addition, data from this same group of study participants showed that more than 60% of kids with ADHD have a learning disability and develop at least one additional mental-health problem while they’re still children. Yet insurance companies are reluctant to authorize additional assessments that may detect and treat these conditions. “If a child gets diagnosed with ADHD, we want to do a comprehensive psychological assessment to see if the child has undiagnosed disorders because we know these kids are at risk,” says Barbaresi. “But insurance won’t pay.”

That’s in stark contrast to the way that children are evaluated for other medical conditions, such as diabetes. “We know they’re at risk for developing kidney and eye problems so they’re regularly assessed for those issues. We don’t wait until a child has renal failure or loses his eyesight,” says Barbaresi. “But with childhood ADHD, we can’t get authorization to do these assessments until it’s already happened.”

The Mayo study on ADHD underscores the practical hurdles of enacting true parity between the ways that mental health disorders and more “traditional” medical problems are diagnosed, treated, and even researched. Societal stigmas and decades of traditional medical practice have perpetuated a system in which mental health disorders are considered to be unique, individualistic medical problems — they are not — that ignores the interplay that mental disorders have with other medical conditions, not to mention the physical manifestations of such disorders.

Much of the focus on changing this unacceptable status quo has — justifiably — concentrated on funding and access to mental health care services. For instance, between the Wellstone-Domenici law and Obamacare’s requirement that statewide insurers include mental health coverage as an “essential health benefit,” millions of Americans are expected to gain access to mental services:

That is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. But the mental health benefits that states must provide under Obamacare are left largely to states’ discretion — and there is little reason to expect that states will impose strict requirements on insurers since mental health is still largely considered a form of “specialty” care culturally, if not legally, and private insurance doesn’t tend to cover patients’ out-of-pocket psychiatric costs. Bringing true parity between mental and physical health care necessitates a paradigm shift in the very culture of how such conditions are analyzed, approached, and treated, in addition to stricter insurer requirements for providing comprehensive care.

Armed with more data from longitudinal studies about the long-term effects and complex interactions of mental health problems — such as the Mayo ADHD study — health care professionals could substantially improve the lives of millions of Americans, and help eliminate a dangerous medical inequality and stigma in the process.

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Why Manny Pacquiao Refusing To Fight In Vegas Doesn’t Prove A Problem With American Tax Policy

Conservatives are overjoyed at the news that boxer Manny Pacquiao is refusing to fight his next bout in the United States because he doesn’t want to pay taxes, and anti-tax groups like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform are already using it as an example of how America’s “punitive” tax policy makes it less competitive with other countries around the world.

ATR first worries that the American tax code will make it more likely that other boxers follow Pacquiao’s lead, then expands into a broader critique of taxes on ordinary American investment:

Fewer boxing matches per year would mean fewer vendors, a decrease in tourism, and less money being spent in host cities. Hosting a major sporting event has proven to create jobs and insert economic life within the city. The federal government needs to follow the examples being set by GOP governors seeking to reduce their respective state’s income tax burden or risk losing investments across every industry.

At the end of the day, people migrate and invest in places where they will receive the most for their services and skills. The higher the income tax, the less return these same people will see. By continuing to have this excessively high income tax, the U.S. continues to discourage businesses and workers looking to make profitable investments.

The most obvious problem with this thinking is that the Marquez-Pacquiao fight is somehow going to bring great benefit to Las Vegas. It won’t. Fight or no fight, Vegas hotels and casinos are going to be full of high-rollers and ordinary gamblers and non-gamblers alike, because it’s Las Vegas. The utility of a sporting event in that type of economy is almost certainly even smaller than the utility of bigger sporting events, and gearing tax policy toward the attraction of sporting events is a terrible idea anyway.

The real problem, though, is the idea that tax policy is somehow the only factor in where future fights will take place. Fight promoters are going to lose a substantial amount of money if Pacquiao and Marquez fight in Asia, because more people will pay to watch if they fight in the U.S. That means there is an advantage for promoters and even most boxers to fighting in the U.S. even if they have to pay higher tax rates. It even extends in Pacquiao’s case, since lower tax rates aren’t the only reason he wants to fight in southeast Asia: nearing the end of his career, the Filipino boxer sees it as an opportunity to broaden his global fan base.

And that hits at the fallacy of ATR’s broader critique of American tax policy. Conservatives aren’t necessarily wrong when they argue that “people migrate and invest in places where they will receive the most for their services and skills.” Where they go wrong is in assuming that tax rates are the only or even the dominant determinant in that equation, and in assuming that people and their investments automatically flow to the lowest tax rate attainable. Place matters to people, and the United States is still a more advantageous place to do business, make social and business connections, and live than many other countries with lower tax rates. That’s why rich people don’t flee high-tax states like California and New York en masse, because California and New York still offer business and social advantages to many of the people who choose to live there that other states don’t have. And it’s why businesspeople and their investment don’t just up and leave the U.S. even though we charge a higher personal tax rate than many other countries. There’s no evidence backing up the claim that taxing the rich hurts growth or drives away investment, and in the U.S., periods of higher marginal tax rates actually featured higher rates of economic growth.

There are any number of reasons why people choose to live, invest, and do business in the places they do, and taxes fund many of the things, from education to infrastructure to law enforcement that protects against the graft and corruption that are the price of doing business in Macau, that make certain places advantageous to others. Conservatives don’t like to acknowledge that reality, though, because it makes it obvious that race-to-the-bottom tax policy, in which wealthy people like Pacqiuao benefit at the expense of everyone else, is a fallacious idea.

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Three December Facts That Prove ‘Uncertainty’ Isn’t Plaguing The Economy

In recent months, as the United States approached the so-called “fiscal cliff,” lawmakers and business executives argued that the supposed uncertainty brought on by the cliff’s combined automatic spending cuts and tax increases was depressing America’s economic growth. It has made a convenient narrative for chief executives who want to cut government spending and corporate taxes and institute policies more favorable to their companies.

Even in the wake of the deal to avert the fiscal cliff, which adds certainty to tax rates if not to spending cuts, CEOs are making the same argument. There is only one problem: it doesn’t appear to be true. Three indicators from December — job growth, holiday sales, and housing — prove that the uncertainty argument doesn’t hold water:

JOBS REPORT: The economy added 155,000 jobs in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report released this morning. That was in line with projections and equal to the monthly average over the last year. Hourly earnings also rose, and the unemployment rate remained constant from November. In all, it offered no indication that the supposed uncertainty surrounding the end-of-year fiscal cliff drove down hiring over the month.

HOLIDAY SALES: Holiday sales over Thanksgiving weekend rose 13 percent in stores and online, not far from the 16 percent rise over the same weekend in 2011. And despite forecasts in mid-December that holiday sales were slumping, retailers reported a 4.5 percent jump that actually beat earlier projections. Auto manufacturers, meanwhile, had their strongest sales month since 2007.

HOUSING: Housing prices continued to rise in October (the latest data available) according to recent reports. The S&P/Case Shiller index showed that prices rose 0.7 percent, beating the 0.5 percent increase projected by economists. In the 20 cities the index follows, prices rose 4.3 percent from October 2011. The December jobs report also showed that 30,000 construction jobs were created last month, another indication that the housing market has rebounded. “The housing turnaround continues,” the Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley tweeted. “It’s driving job growth now.”

Of course, “uncertainty” is really just the CEOs’ way of asking Congress for corporate tax cuts and massive spending cuts. But their preferred budget policies have done plenty to slow down the economy. The public sector shed another 13,000 jobs in December, and it has lost more than 600,000 jobs since the end of the recession. Nonpartisan agencies from the Congressional Budget Office to the International Monetary Fund, meanwhile, have warned Congress about the perils of further spending cuts.

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