I was reminded of this when I saw recently that the Biden administration’s Food and Drug Administration wants to ban menthol cigarettes. Menthol flavorings account for approximately 37% of cigarette sales. That demand will not disappear but it will be driven underground, creating more significant risks to consumers.

Ninety years after the failure of Prohibition, we are going to try it again with smokers. Ironically, many of the same liberals who campaigned for three decades for the legalization of marijuana and other soft drugs (something I generally support) now want to effectively ban smoking.

The FDA’s proposed rule would “prohibit menthol as a characterizing flavor in cigarettes and all characterizing flavors (other than tobacco) in cigars.” The government justifies its action because it has “the potential to significantly reduce disease and death from combusted tobacco product use.”

That sounds a lot like a reprise of what the temperance league told us about alcohol prohibition: “Alcohol prohibition will save lives, reduce crime, cure social ills, and improve the nation’s health.”

But even if all these virtuous results were true, since when is the United States government empowered to regulate the health and riskiness of America’s personal habits? Don’t we have a right as Americans to do things that are bad for us? Or do we slouch toward a nanny state?

There are a lot of dangerous activities that Americans take great pleasure in and choose to do even though they are risky — rock climbing, parachuting out of airplanes, driving a motorcycle and eating too much sugar (a sin that I am definitely guilty of) are prominent examples. Remember when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to stop obesity by banning Big Gulps? Reading the misinformation in The New York Times is bad for you — but I wouldn’t ban the newspaper.

We should have learned from the mostly failed war on drugs that the main impact was to enrich drug dealers. Instead of the government getting funds by taxing pot (as many states do now), the money went to the drug cartels, crime syndicates and street corner drug dealers.

I’m not a smoker; I don’t smoke; and I don’t like it when people smoke around me and I have to inhale and smell the cigar or cigarette smoke. I taught my kids not to smoke or use drugs, and smoking cessation programs in schools make a lot of sense. I have friends who died far too young because of their chain-smoking habits. On the other hand, I do on rare occasions smoke cigarettes, especially when stressed out. It relaxes me, just as I sometimes take chewables at night when I am having trouble falling asleep. I don’t want a government official yanking the cigarette out of my mouth.

An FDA prohibition could backfire by making smoking “cool” and “sexy” again. When I was in high school and my friends and I would occasionally head to the beach and puff on marijuana joints, part of the thrill was precisely that it was verboten. We were teenage rebels without a cause, and we were acting like James Dean.

We should also consider that the government is also collecting billions of dollars of tax revenues from smokers. Driving cigarette sales underground puts the money into the hands of the criminals.

Yes, keep cigarettes out of the hands of kids. But let adults, not the government regulators, make their own decisions about the risks of smoking.

Stephen Moore is a syndicated columnist.

Without COVID-19, President Joe Biden would never have been elected, of course. So, for the left, the virus defeated former President Donald Trump. COVID-19 is now the gateway to the left’s utopian agenda of multitrillion-dollar climate policies, hyperregulation of the economy, the rebirth of the welfare state and a radical redistribution of income.

Under Trump policies, we had one of the most robust financial and economic expansions on record, especially regarding minority advancement and historic reductions in poverty. The entitlement state was in retreat as income growth and record job openings pushed millions of people out of the welfare state into work. If the left truly cared about the plight of the poor, they would have celebrated. Instead, the results showing tax cuts, deregulation and laissez-faire policies work made liberals miserable.

COVID-19 made the rebirth of big government possible. Last year, with Trump still in the White House, Congress spent $6 trillion, much of it (such as the $600 a week bonus unemployment benefits) wastefully and ineffectively. But it was emergency spending.

The National Bureau of Economic Research recently declared the recession ended in April of 2020, and the recovery has been accelerating thanks to the vaccine.

We would be aggressively cutting government spending in a rational world, as we did after victories in World War II and the Cold War.

Instead, the left has leveraged COVID-19 fears to call for a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill on top of the $1.9 trillion spent in March on welfare programs and now $4.1 trillion in public works programs; labor union protections; green new deal subsidies; Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps expansions; and bailouts of Amtrak, urban transit and schools. The public schools in many blue states were shut down for a year, yet taxpayers have to give the teachers unions $100 billion. Explain that one.

The Congressional Budget Office calculates all of this will add $20 trillion of new debt spending over a decade, and that is with a massive tax increase.

COVID-19 has somehow given a new license to even the nuttiest leftist ideas. So, we have Democrats speeding forward with a plan to raise tax rates to more than 50% and implement welfare benefits that can pay families more than $100,000 in annualized wage equivalent benefits. The government could hit and remain above 50% of GDP, matching the European socialist nations.

COVID-19 is all but over, and the toll has been awful. Life expectancy fell in 2020 for the first time since World War II. Tragically, the “cure” — or should I say, the carnage — of the Biden post-COVID-19 progressive experiment might, in the end, be far more devastating and long-lasting than the terrible disease itself.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy.”

I got a similar response when I asked oil magnate T. Boone Pickens whether he would vote for Trump. He looked at me with a quizical look on his face and replied: “Well, who else is there to vote for?”

Right. Who else is there? Yet, amazingly, a caucus of lifelong Republican politicos in Washington is announcing to the world with defiance and self–righteousness that they will vote for Hillary Clinton.

They are mostly former Mitt Romney and George W. Bush operatives. They lost, and now they want people to believe that their anti-Trumpism is an act of heroism and principle. They ingratiate themselves to the New York Times, Washington Post and Team Clinton – the sworn enemies of free markets and conservative values.

Somehow, this doesn’t offend their moral compass.

I certainly don’t mean to disparage conservatives who say they won’t vote for Trump. One’s vote is a matter of personal conscience. But to actively support Hillary is to put the other team’s jersey on and then run a lap around the stadium.

It’s worth examining the case of the Republicans for Hillary, because none of the arguments make much sense.

First, many say that Trump can’t win – it’s hopeless. These are the same political geniuses who a year ago assured us that Trump could never win a primary (he won most of them), that he couldn’t win 50 percent of the vote (he did), and that he couldn’t win 50 percent outside of New York (he did). Then they said he couldn’t win a majority of the delegates (he did). On every occassion, the Trump haters were wrong. How about a little humility since they are batting .000?

The “Trump can’t win” mantra isn’t just wrong, it’s subversive. Of course he can win. He is running against Hillary Clinton, for goodness’ sake. So why do they say this? Because the never Trumpers want Trump to lose because he is to the political class (Republicans and Democrats) the disruptor that Uber is to taxicab drivers.

Second is the complaint by some economists that Trump can’t be supported because he is not for free trade. Longtime Washington insider Vin Weber reportedly has said: “The world economic order and the Republican Party” would be “all in shambles” if Trump wins. “I think markets would collapse.”

Really? Hillary Clinton flip-flops every day on free trade, so why is it that only Trump would cause a recession? He doesn’t get that the Trump movement is a revolt against the world order.

Meanwhile, Trump is calling for the biggest tax cut and reform since Ronald Reagan. He is for massive regulatory relief and school choice. Trump wants to kill Obamacare. Trump wants a pro-America drilling policy on energy. Hillary wants to soak the rich, increase the debt, stop energy development, expand entitlements and double down on Obamacare. How is this a difficult choice for a free marketeer?

Third, the Trump haters say we must throw Trump under the bus and concentrate on saving the Senate and House.

This is a foolhardy strategy because one can’t win without the other. As economist Donald Luskin puts it in his historical analysis of presidential races and Senate gains, “It is clear from history that the House and the Senate move in the same party direction as the White House, and with the same magnitude. That means the presidential candidate is like a boat that congressional candidates are riding on. It’s really stupid to torpedo that boat.”

Finally, there is the view expressed by Brett Stephens, my former colleague at the Wall Street Journal, who wants to “make sure Trump is the biggest loser in presidential history” so that we can “rebuild the conservative movement.”

Brett, if Obama/Hillary win a third straight presidential race, there won’t be a conservative movement left to rebuild. The Republicans will move to the left. Worse, for Obama to win effectively a third term will be a voter validation of all of the destructive policies of the last eight years. This will be one of the greatest victories for liberal governance of all time.

Do the “never Trumpers” want to facilitate that? Do they want to hand the Left its greatest victory for liberal governance of all time? If they do, they are the unforgivable betrayers of conservative principles.

Stephen Moore is an economic consultant with Freedom Works and a senior economic advisor to the Trump campaign.

Although both parties’ leaders are slow to admit it, the annual fight over $4 trillion of federal funding is heading down a now-familiar path. Lawmakers will lurch toward a government shutdown, pass a temporary continuing resolution to keep federal doors open and agree to a last-minute omnibus funding bill – a massive trillion-dollar-plus package riddled with waste and cobbled together without public scrutiny or congressional debate.

And lawmakers wonder why their approval ratings hover in the teens.

Worse, Republicans will take the blame, because they run Congress. So what can fiscal conservatives do to break this cycle of fiscal dysfunction? Protecting the 2011 Budget Control Act and its spending controls should be priority one for the hundreds of lawmakers who profess to want responsible government spending.

Passed by strong bipartisan majorities and signed by President Obama, the act established spending caps on the one-third of the federal budget not devoted to entitlements or interest payments. These caps have been the only meaningful restraints on federal spending during the Obama years. And they have worked – when enforced.

The Budget Control Act contributed to the decline in federal spending from $3.6 trillion in 2011 to $3.51 trillion in 2014 – the first multiyear reduction in spending since the 1950s. The deficits during this time also dropped, from $1.3 trillion in 2011 to $438 billion last year. Unfortunately, absent serious reforms to the nearly two-thirds of the budget that goes to entitlements, deficits are now relentlessly headed back to the trillion-dollar level.

The bad news is that a combination of Republican “defense hawks” have partnered with Democrats who want more social programs to eviscerate the very spending restraints for which many of them voted in the first place. They have successfully leveraged the threat of a government shutdown to increase the caps three times in the last four years, limiting the law’s success and increasing spending by $145 billion.

But the Budget Control Act still remains the law of the land, and promises more than $420 billion in savings between now and 2021, no matter who is president. Will it stick? Only if fiscally responsible members of Congress force their colleagues to live by the promises they made.

Their best bet to accomplish this would be to immediately pass a two-year appropriations bill that locks in the budget caps for 2017 and 2018.

Here’s how it would work. A two-year continuing resolution would work the same way as the two- or three-month spending bill that lawmakers are going to pass anyway: It would fund the federal government at the levels already established by current law. Under the Budget Control Act, discretionary spending is capped at $1.07 trillion for 2017 and $1.065 trillion for 2018. If kept, these caps would protect $150 billion in savings promised over the next two years.

What’s more, a two-year continuing resolution would temporarily end the era of shutdowns, fiscal cliffs and other manufactured spending crises. These crises have been the higher-spending crowd’s favored tool to bludgeon their opponents into breaking the Budget Control Act’s caps; they use them to give their opponents a false choice between higher spending and economic catastrophe.

A two-year proposal would take this threat off the table and provide the budgetary certainty that both Republicans and Democrats always claim to want.

It would also give Congress more time to reform and re-establish the normal budgeting process – which has not occurred in nearly a decade. This would still allow Congress to consider a budget and appropriations bills. But any bills with higher spending would have to pass based on their own merits, without the threat of a shutdown leading to higher spending across the board.

Republicans keep talking about the need to fix the broken budget process. This would be a first step to achieving that goal and restoring the fiscal discipline that is a prerequisite to eventually balancing the budget.

The pro-spending lobby will no doubt scream bloody murder at any attempt to disrupt business as usual. But with $19 trillion of debt, they should be forced to make the case for why a broken system is preferable to certainty and fiscal responsibility. Polls continue to show that out-of-control spending is a top priority for voters – particularly Republicans.

The onus is now on fiscal conservatives to act – and quickly. They can put forward a plan to prevent a government shutdown, provide budget certainty for two years and protect bipartisan spending caps – caps that are as necessary now as they were five years ago.

Surely, that’s better than sitting back and watching Congress run down the well-worn road to higher spending, broken promises and national insolvency.

Stephen Moore is co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and an economic consultant with Freedom Works. Andy Koenig is senior policy advisor at Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce.

This is nothing more than an old-fashioned, political mob shakedown of a deep-pocketed industry for money. The attorneys general are hoping for a repeat of the multibillion-dollar tobacco company settlement in the 1990s. The big, obvious difference here is that tobacco companies sell a product that is dangerous to one’s health. The oil and gas companies sell energy that makes all modern life possible.

Worse, the AGs want to use the steel-heeled boot of government to get energy companies to stop giving money to free-market institutions with which the Left doesn’t agree. But they are permitted to donate to the Sierra Club, the Wildlife Federation and the Center for American Progress. The goal is to silence any opposition to the climate change industrial complex.

The way to create a scientific consensus on an issue is to muzzle anyone who dares disagree with the scientific consensus. If these science police had been around several hundred years ago, we’d all be forced to believe that the earth is flat.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman hinted that he’d like to see criminal prosecution and jail time for the energy company executives, saying, “Financial damages alone may be insufficient. … The First Amendment does not give you the right to commit fraud.”

The end-game here could hardly be more sinister. The AGs are following the example set by the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to bleed and “bankrupt” oil and gas producers in America, as they are doing now to the domestic coal industry.

All the while, there has been no factual basis for these allegations, just conjecture and speculation. First, there is no evidence that the companies produced global warming research. Second, there’s no evidence they covered it up. Third, there is no evidence that this research (if it happened) confirmed or denied global warming. Fourth, there is no consensus among leading scientists about whether global warming is happening, why it is happening or what its effects might be (whether positive or negative) on the planet.

Moreover, unlike the tobacco company litigation, where smokers got cancer and heart disease, who is the victim here of the purported fraud by the energy companies?

While these AGs are using their position of power to intimidate big oil, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and others have been busy creating millions of energy-related jobs, helping the U.S. become the largest energy producer in the world, driving down the cost of energy and adding to U.S. growth. Without the energy companies and the shale oil and gas boom of the last decade, the U.S. would not have escaped the Great Recession. But in Washington, no good deed goes unpunished.

Now for the ultimate irony of these AG witch hunts: Oil and gas companies are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions already – in part because of fracking and the new boom in natural gas, carbon emissions have rapidly declined in over the past decade. So where is the fraud?

What’s more, because natural gas burns cleanly, and because of its availability, affordability and abundance, it is more and more the fuel that powers the engine that drives our economy. The more we burn, the more emmissions trends decline (see chart). ExxonMobil and all the other energy producers should be honored for environmental cleanup, not demonized.

So fracking is reducing greenhouse gases, and yet the state AGs who say that global warming is an imminent crisis threatening the future of the planet are trying to stop the energy companies they are suing from fracking. States like New York, which has banned fracking altogether, Maryland, which has implemented a moratorium through 2017 and California, where local governments have prohibited the practice, are thus depriving themselves and the rest of the market of greater access to clean energy.

All of this suggests that maybe it is the AGs who should be sued for fraud. We’re pleased to report that ExxonMobil is, fighting back. The company admirably called the bluff of these AGs and filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts attorney general and the U.S. Virgin Islands attorney general, charging that the AGs are guilty of harassment. In recent days, the Virgin Islands AG dropped the subpoena.

Here’s hoping that the rest of these shakedown artists drop their witch hunts, too.

Editor’s note: ExxonMobil is not currently a contributor to the Heritage Foundation. However, its last contribution amounted to 0.05 percent of the Heritage Foundation budget.

Stephen Moore is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the co-author of the book “Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy.” Timothy Doescher is a research associate at the Heritage Foundation.

As Ronald Reagan would say: “Well, there they go again.” Tax cuts for the rich is the boilerplate attack line against tax rate reductions. We’ve heard this every time a tax cut has been floated for the past 30 years.

But this criticism isn’t even close to historically accurate. Many times, tax rate cuts – including in the 1960s under President John F. Kennedy and in the 1980s under President Reagan – have raised tax revenue collected from the wealthiest tax filers because lower rates reduce inentives for tax avoidance and recharge the batteries of the economy and grow taxable incomes.

In both the 1960s and 1980s, supply-side tax cuts were followed by increased revenue. As Larry Kudlow puts it in his soon-to-be-released book on the JFK tax cuts: “We had 6 percent growth, and the tax payments by the wealthiest filers nearly doubled. We had quarters of 6 percent growth back then.” After the Reagan cuts, the share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent rose from 19 percent in 1980 to above 25 percent in 1988, according to IRS tax return data.

In other words, tax cuts are like performance enhancing drugs – and these are legal.

The heart of the Trump tax plan is to cut our business tax from the highest in the world down to 15 percent, making our rate one of the lowest. This will reverse the stampede of businesses fleeing America – great companies like Burger King and Medtronics. When the businesses come back, so will good paying middle class jobs.

Small businesses – the backbone of our economy – will benefit, too. Their tax rate will fall from close to 40 percent to 25 percent, because business owners pay taxes at the personal income tax rate. This will allow companies to invest more and hire more workers here at home. Getting rid of tax loopholes will help pay for these reductions.

Hillary, meanwhile, has hinted at raising the top income tax rate to as much as 50 percent. Business owners will pay above 60 percent of that extra tax. Raising taxes on employers is no way to get them to hire more workers.

The latest Commerce Department reports tell us that one of the weakest areas of the economy now is business investment. The rate was negative for the past six months, which is a lead indicator of troubled waters ahead. Even Hillary Clinton has complained that businesses aren’t investing enough, but she wants to raise taxes on dividends and capital gains.

The Trump plan would reward invesment going forward by chopping the capital gains and dividend tax rates to 20 percent from closer to 24 percent. I’ve advised Mr. Trump to cut that rate down to 15 percent, but 20 percent is a start.

Hillary says that Trump has no way to pay for this tax cut. Wrong.

Mr. Trump has an aggressive government downsizing plan. He would repeal the costly and ineffective Obamacare law and replace it with consumer-driven health care. Obamacare promised to save $2,500 per family – but most families and businesses are seeing premiums skyrocket.

The Trump plan will dramatically expand drilling for American energy, and reopen coal mines that have been closed under Obama. Thanks to new drilling technologies America will become the No. 1 oil and gas producer in the world – creating millions of new high-paying union jobs, raising royalty money for the government, and reducing our trade deficit.

Trump also favors the “penny plan” – cutting one cent of every dollar from government programs – except Social Security and interest payments, for five years. This will save trillions over a decade.

The biggest deficit we need to urgently fix is our growth deficit. We must pump up our GDP growth from the anemic 1 percent rate of Obama’s last six months up to a sustained 4 percent for five to 10 years.

Here are some amazing statistics from the Congressional Budget Office. If you raise the growth rate by one percentage point over one decade, it reduces the budget deficit by $3 trillion. If Trump can juice growth from 2 percent to 4 percent then, poof, federal borrowing disappears by $6 trillion.

Liberal economists pout that this kind of growth is impossible for America, but that’s what people said in the miserable 1970s, but Reagan (and JFK before him) proved that, with the right policy incentives to get government off the back of business, a new era of prosperity is just around the corner.

Stephen Moore is an economic consultant with Freedom Works and a Fox News contributor.

In this instance, I was informed “house rules” say the player gets to choose whether he wants the card or a replacement. This effectively gave him two last cards, and, sure enough, he pulled his full house after rejecting the first card.

Cheated, I high-tailed it out of there and never went back. The Never Trump movement would have said: Too bad, you should have known the house rules before you sat down.

For four months I (mostly) kept my mouth shut during the GOP presidential delegate chase, but now that it is over, I want to shout it from the rafters: the nomination process is the most corrupt, elitist, anti-democratic system for choosing a president imaginable. It is rotten to the core.

It is what millions of primary voters are rebelling against. Even as 35 states had lined up for Trump, super PACs, professional politicians, and party hacks conspired how to overrule the will of the voters and pick the candidate they wanted.

Donald Trump was never my first, second or third choice. This isn’t about Trump, though. It’s about restoring basic fairness and voter empowerment going forward.

This year the party chieftains wanted to tell millions of voters, who sometimes waited two hours in line across the country to cast their ballot, that their vote doesn’t really count. A record turnout of voters went to the polls naively thought that Republicans believed in one man, one vote. The insiders replied: Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. You should have known the rules.

And by the way, as we learned this year, it doesn’t matter what the rules are because the insiders are empowered to rewrite the rules when they don’t like the way voters are voting.

Another story: A few weeks ago a longtime conservative friend, who is also a Virginia delegate, told me proudly that she and all her delegate friends intended to not vote for Trump at the convention.

Wait a minute, I reminded her, somewhat stunned; a plurality of voters in Virginia chose Trump. She launched into a tirade that she has been an activist in the party for 20 years and how dare all these new Trump voters just storm into the party and vote for someone other than her first choice. She all but blurted out: My vote should count more than theirs.

Apparently, in the GOP rulebook, all voters are created equal, but some voters are more equal than others.

Many people are intensely unhappy with the outcome – and they feel entitled to a “better” candidate. But imagine that it was Ronald Reagan who had won Florida, New York, Illinois, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Massachusetts, California (where he is up by 25 points), and at least 20 other states. But the party hacks said: sorry, we nominate George Bush. See you in November.

Conservatives would have gone ballistic and justifiably so. Since when do we as conservatives believe the ends justify the means?

It seems like just yesterday that Republicans were making fun of Democrats for rigging the system for Hillary Clinton, and the voters be damned.

Now the other argument in favor of the corrupt nomination process is that the Republican Party is a private organization and it can make whatever rules it wants.

Fine. But if that’s the case, the party should at least have the decency to tell the voters: We have a couple thousand insiders who are going to decide who our nominee is. Don’t make 20 million people trudge to the polls under the false belief that their vote matters if it doesn’t.

Amazingly, this is the same party that says it must drive up voter turnout to win, but when voters do turn out in record numbers, they thumb their noses at them as stupid, low-information, “not real Republicans,” and so on. My delegate friend sneered: I’ve never even seen these people at a Republican meeting before. Um, isn’t that a good thing?

As an aside, Democrats routinely slander these voters as racists, xenophobes, know-nothings, fascists and other niceties. Wouldn’t it be nice if the conservative intellectual class came to these voters’ rescue rather than piling on and giving credence to these vile leftist rants? Whose side is the Never Trump crowd on?

So how to fix the GOP nominating system to empower voters and make the delegate class mostly impotent? I’m no expert (who is?), and I do believe in federalism, where the 50 states decide their own rules. But, at the very least, get rid of the rules that allow “unbound delegates.” Trump won almost 60 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania yet as many as two-thirds of the delegates said that at the convention, they would choose someone other than Trump. Delegates should be bound based on a well-defined rule of either winner take all, or some kind of proportional system.

As I write these words, I just received a text that some influential Never Trumpers are still conspiring to find a way to take the nomination from Trump even after he gets way past the 1,237-delegate finish line. They are advising delegates to break the rules and not vote for Trump even though they are honor-bound to do so.

Will the madness ever end? If only these smartest minds of the party, by their own admission, would help figure out how to beat Hillary.

Stephen Moore is an economic consultant at Freedom Works.

Puerto Rico faces more than $70 billion of debt and the government is already in technical default on many of its bonds. Billions more come due in the weeks ahead and the government says they are out of money to repay – with the island nation already defaulting on a $422 million debt payment that was due on Monday.

These debts don’t even include an additional $43.2 billion of unfunded pension liabilities. Add it all together and the debt reaches at least 150 percent of GDP. That’s a lot of weight on the shoulders of the Puerto Rican people. All the government has done is raise taxes, with the sales tax recently hiked from 7.5 to 11 percent. Tragically, Puerto Rico has become the Detroit of the Caribbean.

By law Puerto Rico can’t declare bankruptcy, but the territory is in de facto chapter 9 already.

Republicans in the House have drafted a rescue plan that would allow the island to restructure its debt and delay payments as it attempts to rebuild its shattered economy. The statistics are heartbreakingly bleak: almost half the residents are in poverty (and more than half of all children), only about 40 percent of adults are even in the workforce, half of families collect welfare benefits, and more than 10 percent of the island’s residents have left for Florida, Texas, New York or other safe havens.

Puerto Ricans are American citizens whose lives have been turned upside down. The U.S. government has a moral, if not legal, obligation to help. But as a territory Puerto Rico needs to agree to help itself.

Here is what shouldn’t happen: a financial cash bailout from U.S. taxpayers. Puerto Rico is 100 percent responsible for all of its taxes and spending save its social security tax and spending. And as such, U.S. taxpayers had no say whatsoever in the amount of debt Puerto Rico took on and should not have to pay for Puerto Rico’s bad decisions. A U.S. bailout would only reward bad behavior and finance another spend and borrow binge.

The government of Puerto Rico, many Democrats on Capitol Hill and the media have invented a story here that the villains are the investors and institutions like hedge funds who bought the bonds. The bondholders are certainly not guiltless for lending money to a government that is recklessly out of control. And bondholders will surely pay a heavy price for their financial mistake – they are likely to get at most 70 cents for each dollar they are owed. So the bondholders will be punished by the marketplace.

The real source of the crisis is the government itself. Puerto Rico’s own elected government has failed its citizens. Even on the eve of the crisis, the terrirotry continued to spend and borrow as if they were running a Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme.

The Republican plan that has the support of House speaker Paul Ryan, would create a strong financial oversight board to take control of the government’s finances, taxes and budgeting decisions. This is an absolute must because the government in San Juan has proven itself incapable of governing. And we know this model works. In the 1990s it helped save Washington, D.C. during its darkest hours of financial troubles. Now the city is booming.

Democrats like minority leader Nancy Pelosi are once again accusing Republicans of trying to turn the island into a “colonial” state. This is absurd and offensive. The GOP plan offers a financial life raft for the island and we believe that if the Puerto Rican legislature or voters prefer to go it alone, they should have a simple up or down vote on whether to agree to a control board.

The thorny and controversial issue is how to restructure the outstanding debt. There are at least a dozen classifications of bonds and the bondholders do have a legal right to repayment or to be able to sue in court.

About one-quarter of the debt carries a constitutional “full faith and credit” guarantee of repayment granted by the government of Puerto Rico.

Those constitutionally guaranteed bond holders must be put first in line for repayment as is consistent with their legal rights. The Republican plan as currently written would take away their right to sue in court and we find this to be an improper taking of their property and their claim on assets. Any legislation should preserves the hierarchy of bond holder claims.

Puerto Rico’s government would like nothing more than a weak control board with no teeth, and the authority to illegally “cram down” a repayment structure without the bondholders’ consent. This would not only be unfair to the bondholders – most of whom are individual investors or pensioners – but it would also hurt Puerto Rico in the long term because only a nitwit would ever again agree to buy Puerto Rican bonds when the island has shown it will blatantly violate contractual obligations. Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Congress and Puerto Rico should also learn from history. One of us, Art Laffer, worked 40 years ago to save the Puerto Rican economy, which was drowning under its own anti-growth policies. The solution agreed to was a supply-side fiscal reform which included cutting the highest personal income tax rate down from 87 percent to 50 percent. The policies worked like a charm. The territory’s economy grew every year at a record pace and tax revenues surged even with lower rates. It was a Laffer Curve miracle and the success was one of the inspirations for the Reagan tax cuts, which would help revive the U.S. economy five years later.

Puerto Rico, then as now, was bleeding jobs, real output declined and the budget deficit swelled. Yields on Puerto Rican tax-exempt bonds were even higher than New York City tax exempts – and New York was also in crisis back then.

After the elections of 1976 a new government came in and started slashing tax rates and tax surcharges. Excise taxes were lowered and a special $2 per barrel oil import surcharge has been lifted. Employment from 1976 to 1979 increased by 107,000 jobs. Real growth averaged 6 percent for 1977 and 1978. Even Puerto Rican tax-exempt bond yields have fallen relative to those of other tax-exempt bonds. Even with the tax cuts, the Laffer curve effect worked. The budget actually moved into surplus as the economy surged. Expatriate Puerto Ricans returned to their island as opportunities expanded.

This brings us to our last and maybe most important recommendation. Why not turn Puerto Rico into a Hong Kong of the Western hemisphere through new rounds of tax, regulatory, property rights, and welfare reforms. The first step is to restructure the debt and then jump start the dormant private economy so that the standard of living starts rising again. It worked 40 years ago and it can work again in 2016.

Arthur Laffer is president of Laffer Associates and Stephen Moore is an economic consultant with Freedom Works. They are co-founders with Larry Kudlow of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

That’s the basis for the EU’s just-announced antitrust complaint against Google. The California-based technology giant is accused of installing software into the popular Android smartphone that favors Google features, such as Google Maps, over competitor products.

“Our concern,” complains Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s antitrust chief, “is that by requiring phone makers and operators to preload a set of Google apps, Google may have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers.”

That’s ridiculous because it was largely Google technology that made apps work on smartphones in the first place.

The heart of the complaint is the longstanding and controversial issue of a company “bundling” its technology products to favor a firm’s services over those of competitors. So now the EU wants to force Google to offer its competitors’ products on the Android phone. Next thing you know, McDonald’s is going to be slapped with an antitrust complaint for not offering Wendy’s fries.

But if we cut through the EU’s 19th century antitrust jargon, this is nothing more than a raid on Google’s profits and products and market share, which is said to be too “dominant.” The same might be said of this year’s Golden State Warriors.

Well, it’s true that Google’s Android technology has a commanding two-thirds market share in Europe. How did that happen? By Google building better smartphone technology. And if Europeans want access to all these alternative apps, they have a simple market remedy: Buy a different phone.

Is there any industry in world history that has been more hypercompetitive than high-tech? How can Google be anti-consumer when prices for Internet services and products fall year after year. The EU says consumers need “more choices.” There are many competitors to the Android technology – and those alternatives don’t favor Google products. Why should Google be punished for having the most popular product? AT&T and Microsoft once were thought to be monopolies, and it was market forces that evaporated their lead.

The spurious complaint could cost Google tens of millions in legal costs to defend itself and billions of dollars of lost sales – but that, of course, is exactly the point. The eurozone is using trumped-up antitrust charges to improve the competitiveness of its own second-rate smartphone and other technology products. Similar claims have been brought against Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. The U.S. government should be vigorously defending American companies and jobs against such hostile litigation and regulatory barriers to trade.

Here’s what’s maddening. The eggheads in Washington are piling on. Federal Trade Commission lawyers are launching their own investigation into whether Google violated restraint-of-trade laws. This only validates predatory foreign claims against American companies.

Can anyone imagine the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians or the Chinese suing one of their own companies for being too successful? Never.

The Obama administration seems to be intentionally trying to export tech jobs out of America. The antitrust cops under Obama have been hyperactive in blocking multibillion-dollar mergers of American companies – from airlines to tech companies to retailers to energy firms – supposedly to protect consumers.

This month, the FTC blocked an energy merger involving multibillion-dollar Halliburton and Baker Hughes and the Pfizer-Allergan marriage. It is blocking the Staples and Office Depot merger, which Staples argues, persuasively, is necessary because all of the competition now is with online retailers like Amazon.

Some 150 mergers have been blocked by the feds under Obama, according to CNNMoney. This doesn’t protect consumers, it injures U.S. competitiveness. Mergers lead to economies of scale in production costs and are more likely to lower prices than raise them.

It’s clear that the Europeans are trying to bring down an American tech giant to allow their own feeble alternatives to compete. This is just a disguised form of Euro-protectionism. Washington’s case against Google is much worse: It is unpatriotic and damaging to the U.S. economy.

Things may get worse, not better, next year. Hillary Clinton has promised that, as president, she would “beef up the antitrust enforcement arms of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission” and hire “aggressive regulators” in order to “better understand the link between market consolidation and stagnating incomes.” She’s coming after those Ferraris and millionaire secretaries at Google and Facebook.

Then these same liberal politicians wonder why the economy is growing at a measly 1.5 percent and why businesses aren’t investing.

Stephen Moore is an economics consultant at Freedom Works and a Fox News contributor.

Then a strange thing happened about a decade ago. Radical environmentalists took control of the Democratic Party. ‎ These leftists care more about the supposed rise of the oceans than the financial survival of the middle class. The industrial unions made a catastrophic decision to get in bed with these radicals, and now they – and all of us – are paying a heavy price.

The latest evidence came last week when another coal giant in America, Peabody Energy Corp., filed for bankruptcy. This is the same fate suffered by Arch Coal Inc., Alpha Natural Resources Inc., and other coal producers that have filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors.

This isn’t a result of free-market creative destruction. This was a policy strategy by the White House and green groups.

They wanted this to happen. This was what Clean Power Plant rules from the Environmental Protection Agency were all about. The EPA set standards by design that were impossible to meet and even flouted the law that says the regs should be “commercially achievable.” This was a key component of the climate change fanaticism that pervades this White House.

Ideas have consequences. Obama has succeeded in decimating whole towns dependent on coal – in Wyoming, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Hillary Clinton recently vowed she will put all of coal out of business. This is how you win a Democratic primary these days. What kind of political party dedicates itself to destroying an entire domestic industry.

No one in the progressive Democratic Party seems to care that an estimated 31,000 coal miners, truckers, engineers, construction workers and others have lost their job since 2009 as a result of this fanaticism. Another 5,000 or so could be given pink slips at Peabody. To the Left, the families whose lives are ruined are collateral damage to achieve their Utopian dream of saving the planet. The people who now run the Democratic Party believe the ends justify the ruthless means.

Investors have gotten crushed, too, as a result of coal’s demise. The ‎coal industry has lost more than $30 billion in stock value since 2009, with many of these losses showing up in union pension funds and private 401(k) plans.

What is maddening about all of this is that coal is much cleaner than ever before. EPA statistics show that emissions of sulfer, lead, carbon monoxide and smog from coal plants have been reduced by 50 percent to 90 percent in the past 40 years. The air we breathe is cleaner than ever. ‎Carbon dioxide, by the way, is not a pollution – it doesn’t make you sick.

Clean coal is a reality, but that fact never slowed the greens down. The Natural Resources Defense Council now wants the EPA to slap $700 million in environmental fines on Peabody. These people just never stop.

Global warming advocates should ask themselves what they are accomplishing. For every coal plant we shut down, China and India build another 10 or so. Donald Trump is right: The rest of the world really is laughing behind our backs at our economic suicide pact.

Our coal is much cleaner, and our environmental laws much stricter, than China’s and India’s, so this shift of output and jobs from the U.S. to our rivals succeeds in making us poorer and the planet dirtier.

America is the Saudi Arabia of coal; we have an estimated 500 years’ supply. So for economic and ecological reasons, we should want American coal to dominate the world market, but the environmentalists’ rallying cry is: “Keep it in the ground.”

Do liberals care that the demise of coal could lead to major disruptions in America’s electric power supply? Coal still supplies more than one-third of our electricity, because it is cheap and highly reliable – much more so than wind and solar energy.

America was built on coal. Kathleen Hartnett-White, an energy expert at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, notes that the Industrial Revolution “was made possible because of coal and other fossil fuels that replaced green energy like windmills.”

Perhaps the millenials will realize their mistake when they won’t be able to power up their PlayStations, their iPhones and their laptops.

Republicans in Congress aren’t blameless here. They have controlled the House for five years, and both chambers since 2015. But they have sat by while the EPA destroys an iconic American industry. Why has Congress not overruled EPA rules on carbon – which is not a pollutant? Every poll shows that Americans care most about jobs and the economy – and only about 3 percent care most about climate change. Yet, they refuse to stand up to Obama and take the side of the American worker.

Republicans should remind coal workers and the union brass every day that the GOP is the party that wants to save this industry, and Democrats are firmly on the side of layoffs and unemployment.

Stephen Moore is an economic consultant with Freedom Works and a Fox News contributor.