Monthly Archives: January 2023

Indications of the Extent of the Exposure

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A Rapid City city councilman, Jason Salamun, wants to ban TikTok from city-owned devices and networks, and to prohibit city agencies from using the app. A councilwoman, Laura Armstrong, opposes the proposed ban, claiming Rapid City has bigger problems to solve, such as crime and drugs. Yet that just illustrates how easily the ban could be enacted compared with solutions to those bigger problems.

Armstrong also claims—and she’s serious—that TikTok isn’t a threat. Never mind that TikTok is wholly owned by People’s Republic of China-domiciled ByteDance, and that under the PRC’s national intelligence law, ByteDance can be required by the nation’s intelligence apparatus to conduct espionage on American government and business entities and on individual Americans. That espionage would be done through TikTok.

Armstrong did some of her own research on the matter.

Among the things she found, the city’s exhibition center could lose business because contracts with musicians require the venue to promote gigs via TikTok, she said.
The city’s fire and police departments use TikTok to recruit, and the Solid Waste department has an official TikTok account….

That demonstrates how widespread the city’s exposure is, yet Armstrong is arguing, and again she’s actually serious, that far from demonstrating the threat, this exposure demonstrates only the difficulty of ridding the city of the threat.

Go figure.

Yes, and No

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Company employees are getting pay raises just for staying on the job rather than moving on to other endeavors.

Wages for workers who stayed at their jobs were up 5.5% in November from a year earlier, averaged over 12 months, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That was up from 3.7% annual growth in January 2022 and the highest increase in 25 years of record-keeping.

It’s also the case that new hires are getting bigger signing bonuses, initial salaries, and more perks for joining the company.

However, this claim by The Wall Street Journal (at the link above) is mostly backwards in the present environment:

Faster wage growth is contributing to historically high inflation….

It’s true that increasing wages—increasing labor costs generally—feeds into inflation as companies have to raise their prices when labor costs eat too far into their profit margins. However, as WSJ also noted,

Prices rose at their fastest pace in 40 years earlier in 2022.

That sharp rise in inflation actually began before the sharp rise in wages, and it has far outstripped the rise in wages: 2022’s inflation peaked above 9%, and it’s still around 7%. The current wage increase is only a nominal increase. The real change in wages, what real people spend on real necessities and wants, has been negative: that 5.5% nominal increase in November, compared with November’s 7.1% inflation for instance, actually represents a 1.6% decrease in actual buying power for us average Americans.

The fact is that the current period of high inflation is driving the rise in labor costs, not the other way around.

Taxes and our Federal Tax Code

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Former President Donald Trump (R) paid breathtakingly little Federal taxes compared to his wealth over the six years covered by his tax records, which the Progressive-Democrats so dishonestly, if strictly legally, released. And yet, despite those same Progressive-Democrats’ desperation to expose illegalities in his low tax payments, those same records prove he did nothing illegal; he simply took advantage of what our tax code—as enacted over the years by both parties as they held sway—plainly, and by design, allows.

Think that’s unfair compared to you and me? Think it’s not right that rich folks should have access to…loopholes…that us average Americans can’t reach?

Nah. For all the imbalance, there’s nothing unfair about it. The opportunities are right there in plain sight in our byzantine body of tax law. And they become increasingly accessible to us as we rise up our nation’s economic ladder.

Still the imbalance should be corrected, and that’s easy to do. Nor does it involve increasing taxes on the rich, although it does involve closing those…loopholes.

All it takes is two things.

First, we get rid of our existing income tax code, every jot and tittle of it.

Then we replace it with a new income tax code. That new code would eliminate entirely business income taxes—not merely zero out the maximum rate, eliminate that tax altogether. If it’s still on the books, it’s too easy to raise the rate later, even from zero.

Businesses don’t pay a significant portion of that tax, anyway; their customers do in the form of higher prices, and the rest of us do in the form of reduced rates of business growth, hiring, and wage increases—with the resulting reduced productivity—and in reduced rate of innovation.

With the elimination of the business income tax, businesses would be able to raise capital, grow, innovate, produce—make business decisions—based solely on the economic wisdom of the decisions. Having to dance around the tax code, having decisions influenced by tax advantage or disadvantage would be a thing of the past.

The new income tax code would include a low (10% perhaps) flat tax on all personal income regardless of source, and the code would have no subsidies, deductions, credits, what-have-you. No loopholes. Just: enumerate your income, remit 10% of that.

Now us Americans would be able to keep more of our money, make freer decisions concerning our needs and wants, have more to save for emergencies, future expenses, retirement. All based on our own view of our present and future economic situation, instead of having to do our own dance around the tax code.

Too, with everyone paying at least a little, the Federal government would see a net increase in tax revenue, and that increase would be even larger from the increased overall economic activity in a free market economy in which the private players, us Americans and our businesses, are more active.

Easy peasy. All it takes is political courage. And for us American voters to inject that courage by repeatedly firing those politicians who lack it and repeatedly hiring those who have it. After all, that’s what elections are for—they really do have consequences.

Federal Workers Working Remote

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I agree with the concept, sort of.

The Federal Government Initiative, an NGO government watchdog, has noticed that current federal telework practices, implemented during the Wuhan Virus situation, are associated with a dramatic reduction in paid leave used by the federal workforce. The FGI has expressed misgivings.

Before the federal government engages in expanded telework in perpetuity, its impact should be investigated more fully by agency Inspectors General, Congress, and other oversight entities[.]

I agree that many—most, in fact—nearly all—Federal workers should be allowed to work remotely, and in perpetuity. Remotely, mind you, not via telework.

The Federal offices, especially the large ones, like Education, Interior(!), Commerce, Federal Reserve, Treasury, and agencies like CFTC, SEC, CFPB (these are not at all exhaustive lists) should be removed from DC and scattered around the middle-sized and small towns of middle America, of flyover country. Those offices should be among the people they serve, us average Americans, and away from the overweening influence of the bubble-residing coastal elites.

Here’s the deal, though: all of the employees should be required to come back to the office. No more teleworking. The remoteness of their work will consist of working in the small towns of the Midwest, the north, the Southeast, and the Southwest. They’ll get used to it, though, and they’ll learn that middle America isn’t all that remote, after all.

Think about Leaving

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Portland business owners are more than fed up with the level of crime destroying their businesses. Their idea of who has the solution is misguided, though.

Frustrated business owners are calling on city and county leaders to do more to combat rising property crime in Portland….

This situation is not solely on the heads of Portland’s city councilmen or the county commissioners. The business’ fellow residents of Portland keep electing those councilmen and commissioners, politicians who’ve demonstrated their lack of commitment to order and rule of law.

Why would any business owner want as his customers folks who so consciously approve of and vote for such politicians? Those are the voters, after all, who then vandalize, rob, and otherwise trash their businesses. There are plenty of jurisdictions that do regard rule of law to be a Good Thing, and those jurisdictions have sound economies with plenty of room for businesses currently domiciled in lawless Portland.