Category Archives: markets

A Campaign Platform

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I’ll be brief. The Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidate and current President Joe Biden, has a legislative and administrative history of

  • open to nonexistent borders, epitomized by his failed effort to codify the entry of 1.4 million or more illegal aliens per year (assessed at weekly intervals) before a President would be authorized to do anything toward closing our border
  • enormous inflation that’s only just abating, although the new price levels remain much higher than extant in the prior administration, with no sign those elevated price levels are abating
  • real wages falling relative to those extant in the prior administration as nominal wage increases, with some excursions to the topside, in the main have been smaller than price increase increases due to inflation
  • denigrating Israel as it fights for its survival against the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah—and against their masters, Iran—while moving to protect Hamas by demanding cease fires that only benefit Hamas
  • encouraging continued butchery in Ukraine by slow-walking and blocking weapons Ukraine needs while coddling the invader barbarian as sanctuary against serious counterattack by Ukraine
  • appeasing Iran in its desperation to get Iran to let this administration back into the failed Iran nuclear weapons development deal
  • appeasing the People’s Republic of China regarding that nation’s seizure and occupation of the South China Sea and its threats against the Republic of China
  • meekly accepting PRC military and spy bases in Cuba, elsewhere in the Caribbean, South American, in even more meek abrogation of our erstwhile long-standing Monroe Doctrine
  • active deprecation of our energy production and energy independence through constant attacks on and blocks of coal, oil, natural gas—even liquid natural gas export—in favor of unreliable wind and solar farms

Those are just the high points; the full list is quite extensive.

This is why Biden and Harris won’t run on policy and how their policies for the next term would benefit Americans. Instead, their campaign platform is personal; it’s focused against a man. They don’t even argue against his policies, past or future—only that the man himself is bad.

This lack of a coherent, reasoned platform is instructive of the capacity of the Progressive-Democratic Party to govern.

Green Subsidies

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There’s this bit from Power Line:

And this quote from Severin Borenstein’ and Lucas Davis’ The Distributional Effects of U.S. Tax Credits for Heat Pumps, Solar Panels, and Electric Vehicles:

Over the last two decades, US households have received $47 billion in tax credits for buying heat pumps, solar panels, electric vehicles, and other “clean energy” technologies. Using information from tax returns, we show that these tax credits have gone predominantly to higher-income households. The bottom three income quintiles have received about 10% of all credits, while the top quintile has received about 60%.

It’s reasonable to ask why those “bottom” quintiles—which include the middle-class folks—don’t buy more of these cool green devices. The answer is because even after the lavish subsidies, they can’t afford the devices. The remaining, out of pocket, costs still are too great. Worse, those remaining out of pocket costs comprise the entirety of the costs for much of the bottom two quintiles:

About 40% of US households pay no federal income tax, so millions of mostly low- and middle-income filers are simply ineligible for these credits.

It’s also reasonable to wonder whether Government is simply subsidizing a market until the devices become ubiquitous enough for prices to come down. Leave aside the fact that subsidies vanishingly rarely go away and protected industries just as vanishingly rarely lose their “protection.” The plain fact here is that, after all these years of pushing the devices, and even after all these years of real improvements in their performance, there is no interest in these devices across the broad market. It’s an industry that’s not going to take off without ever larger subsidies, ever increasing government pressure on us to get these devices anyway, ever increasing effort government effort to deny us access to alternative devices.

These green subsidies just give the already rich liberal Left a way to look good to each other in their solar-heated showers.

Maybe it’s time to start making the supporters of Green Politics pay their fair share.

 

H/t Ralf Longwalker

Lab-Grown Meat for our Troops

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And for everyone else, too. DoD wants to have this stuff for our soldiers to the tune of a $450 million budget increase—increase, not an initial funding—for BioMADE to produce meat in a petri dish for our military’s chow halls and, presumably, for what passes for MREs these days.

The Department of Defense is funding a bio-industrial manufacturing company that has proposed feeding US troops lab-grown meat to help “reduce the CO2 footprint of food production.”

BioMADE’s proposal includes

growing meat and other kinds of food by “utilizing one carbon molecule (C1) feedstocks for food production.”

There are plenty of reasons to object to this expenditure and to this food “development” program. One thing not being addressed, though, is the simple fact that there are some few lipids—fat molecules—that our bodies cannot make from scratch and must be eaten intact. They are essential lipids in precisely the same manner that essential amino acids cannot be made by our bodies and must be eaten intact by eating…meat. (I’m eliding here the question of whether these essential amino acids will be produced in the petri dishes.) These essential lipids are best taken in by eating…red meat. Which is not the petri dish meat—which isn’t really meat, but protein—that BioMADE wants to inflict on sell to our troops.

Will BioMADE be growing fat in adjacent petri dishes? Or will our troops’ diets suffer, and their health be heavily endangered, by that lack?

Too Bad, So Sad

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Ford is having trouble peddling all the battery cars and trucks it has committed itself to manufacturing in response to Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s functional battery car mandate, a mandate centered on ruinous tailpipe emission limits he’s put together via his EPA. So far this year alone, Ford has lost $1.3 billion, or roughly $132,000 on each battery car or truck it has sold.

Ford’s competitors aren’t in such dire straits, having eschewed such a foolish commitment. Ford’s answer, though, isn’t to wise up and walk away from that commitment. Instead, it’s intervening in a 25-State law suit in the DC Circuit that’s trying to eliminate the rule forcing those tailpipe limits. Ford is defending the limit in its effort to force its competitors into the Ford boat. In its filing, Ford claims that

Ford has taken steps to transform its business to ensure compliance with stricter emissions standards. Ford is investing billions in electrification efforts [and it] has a critical interest in ensuring that a level regulatory playing field applies to the entire industry.

Never mind that the regulatory playing field would apply levelly across the entire industry if the tailpipe emission limits were rescinded.

No. Too bad. Ford’s bad choices in no way obligates its competitors to follow along, nor does it obligate us average Americans to pay for Ford’s folly.

A Legislative Proposal

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Congresswoman and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R, WA) and Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone Jr (D, NJ) described a bill they’re proposing that would purport to reform Internet controls and Big Tech’s control over those controls.

Our measure…would require Big Tech and others to work with Congress over 18 months to evaluate and enact a new legal framework that will allow for free speech and innovation while also encouraging these companies to be good stewards of their platforms. Our bill gives Big Tech a choice: work with Congress to ensure the internet is a safe, healthy place for good, or lose Section 230 protections entirely.

18 months is far too long, with far too much time and opportunity for Big Tech to weasel-word saccharine pseudo-reform.

Better would be to give them 6 months, with a hard deadline written into this legislation: satisfactory reform of 230, or 230 is rescinded. A Critical Item that must be included in this proposed legislation is a concrete, publicly measurable definition of “satisfactory reform.”

Another, Highly Useful Item, that could be beneficially included in the bill’s Purpose paragraph, would be a clear and blunt statement that the bill is intended to supplement parental responsibility for their children’s time and activity on the Internet; it does not replace that responsibility.