Debt Defying
WESBURY, BRIAN
CDC HIV/AIDS annual report (available at: http://www.cdc.gov/ hiv/stats/hasr1202.htm), but that nobody in the media has bothered to tell you: 9Forget the heterosexual AIDS epi- demic....
...9Childhood AIDS is disappearing...
...No, the median for those is also the 30-34 year-old range...
...I wrote about it in The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, published eleven years ago...
...CDC HIV/AIDS annual report (available at: http://www.cdc.gov/ hiv/stats/hasr1202.htm), but that nobody in the media has bothered to tell you: 9Forget the heterosexual AIDS epidemic...
...You CAN find bad news in the CDC report...
...There is no clear relationship between interest rates and deficits...
...Common sense, no...
...Would-be risk-takers probably should think a bit harder about the tremendous costs and sometimes serious side effects ofanti-HIV medicines...
...Blacks have about ten times the AIDS rate of whites, Hispanics four times...
...The category of those who so much as claim to have gotten the disease this way comprises over 90 percent of the population but only 11 percent of AIDS cases...
...But in 2000 when the surplus was 2.4 percent of GDP, the real 10-year Treasury bond yield averaged 3.6 percent...
...In August, the outgoing director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD andTB Prevention, Helene Gayle, told reporters that infections in heterosexual women are increasing more rapidly than any other group...
...Seen Magic Johnson lately...
...A decade after his diagnosis he's become a bit pudgy, but otherwise seems no worse for the wear...
...Rural cases comprised 14 percent of the total for last year, or 3,061 in number...
...For example, every year minorities constitute a greater share of the AIDS reaper's victims...
...He theorized that if the U.S...
...The total of pediatric AIDS cases last year was less than 200, compared to 959 in 1993...
...9Forget all that "leading cause of death" stuff...
...The real measure of the burden of government is not the deficit, but the Brian S. Wesbury is chief economist at Griffn Kubik Stevens & Thompson, Inc...
...a Chicago-based investment bank specializing infixed-income securities...
...AIDS fell off the CDC top 15 list back in 1998.AIDS deaths have declined from a high of over 50,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 per year now...
...I was right...
...But forgive me if I don't feel like gloating, k CROWDING OUT COMMON SENSE BY BRIAN S. WESBURY I recently debated former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, now the president of Harvard.At one point, he echoed a line much in fashion these days among Democrats: that reduced Federal deficits fuelled the economic boom of the 1990s...
...rates.This drives up the cost of capital, reduces investment and slows economic activity...
...On the other hand, not only was this predictable, it was predicted...
...To the extent (government and the media) failed to give minorities much-needed extra attention, they left them in the back of the busmor the back of a hearse," I wrote...
...By 1999 it was down to 7,139 and last year it fell further, to 6,530...
...But they're apparently assuming that with new therapies coming out all the time, they probably will never get AIDS.And they're probably right...
...It suggests that government borrowing "crowds out" private investment and pushes up interest Federal deficits did not hinder the I99OS' technology explosion...
...When a decline is the "most rapid" area of growth, how bad can things be...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 SEPTEMBER/OCToBER 2OO...
...Female AIDS cases attributed to heterosexual contact declined from 4,281 to 3,981, down in turn from 6,253 in 1993...
...Adjusted for inflation, 10-year Treasury bonds yielded 3.5 percent in 1990 when the deficit was 3.9 percent of GDP...
...had added another $3 trillion in government debt during the Clinton years, instead of building surpluses, business investment would have been much weaker...
...This self-serving theorymcredit - ing Clinton and at the same time backhanding Ronald Reagan for building up debtmreally is voodoo economics...
...Nonsense...
...But the CDC's numbers show reported female HIV infections attributed to heterosexual contact declined slightly last year, from 2,506 to 2,448...
...9Forget the teenage epidemic.Teen cases comprised less than one percent of the total for last year, or 342.This is down from 588 cases in 1993.True, former CDC chief and current Surgeon General David Satcher did tell a credulous Juan Williams at NPtL in early July that "the median age for women getting AIDS today is about 16"' Actually, the median according to the CDC annual report is the 30-34 year-old range...
...Could he have meant HIV infections, the earliest stage of the disease...
...For her dedication in providing such useful information for the past six years, Gayle has now been hired by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to direct their AIDS funding activities...
...Gayle also cited studies indicating that young homosexual males are showing a clear increase in risky behavior.Yet even this bad news is the inevitable result of good newsmwisely or not, people are making risk-benefit decisions based on the availability of new therapies.While those drugs have not yet made full-blown AIDS a controllable condition like diabetes, it appears they have done so with HIV infection...
...9Forget the "rural AIDS explosion...
...This is down from 5,809 cases in 1993...
...Quite to the contrary, it was Reagan-era tax cutting that created the incentives for taking risks and investing...
...In a book that many stores and one giant chain resolutely refused to stock, I detailed the obsession with portraying the disease as one of heterosexual middle-class whites, and the deadly disinformation spread by politically-correct slogans such as "Everyone's at Risk" and "AIDS Is an Equal Opportunity Destroyer...
...Fewer people died of AIDS last year than any year since 1985...
...In 1993, 9,570 such cases were reported...
...What about this talk of resurgence...
Vol. 34 • September 2001 • No. 7
