Category Archives: political economy

Eric Adams’ Duplicity

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Or it’s the incompetence of New York City’s Progressive-Democratic mayor, Eric Adams.

After warning that a surge in illegal arrivals to the Big Apple would “destroy New York City” and blaming the influx for prompting budget cuts, New York City Democratic Mayor Eric Adams reportedly plans to provide illegal alien families with pre-paid credit cards.

A key aspect of Adams’ scheme:

The plan will begin with a $53 million pilot program targeting the migrant residents of the Roosevelt Hotel. Run through Mobility Capital Finance, the pilot plan will provide 500 families with an Immediate Response Card for use on food and infant care supplies.

That works out to $106,000 per illegal alien family. How does that compare with the amounts Adams’ budget commits to the city’s resident—and American citizen—homeless families? How does that compare with the amounts Adams’ budget commits to “ordinary” welfare payments to the city’s resident—and American citizen—families who are at the bottom of the city’s economy?

And this:

The city estimates that roughly 15,000 migrant families currently reside in NYC hotels and the administration plans to expand the program to all of them should the pilot program prove fruitful.

At $106k per each, that accumulates, according to my third grade arithmetic, to $1.59 billion. Beyond that, what logic supports the blatantly unequal treatment that favors those 15,000 families while leaving all those remaining illegal alien families literally out in the cold? Of course, that would run the bill up another billion-and-a-third….

From where does Adams expect to draw those $106k per family in his self-proclaimed environment of City destruction and attendant budget cuts? It’s more of his magical thinking.

Good That Something is Kicking Them in the Behind

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European nations are getting worried about another Donald Trump Presidency. That worry is

prompting some of America’s staunchest allies in Europe to push their neighbors that are more reluctant to spend into further action on defense and security.

To the extent that’s accurate and, if so, it bears serious fruit, that would be good, and ample justification for reelecting Trump.

In a sign that European officials are starting to address their armaments shortages, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on January 23 announced a $1.2 billion multicountry contract for 200,000 155-millimeter artillery shells, a type being heavily used in Ukraine. The shells will be produced in France and Germany and purchased by Spain, Belgium, and Lithuania.

That’s an insultingly puny step that, by itself, can’t be anything more than cynical virtue-signaling. Those 200k shells are a just a day-and-a-half expenditures by both sides combined at Verdun. Verdun was an extreme usage, certainly, but the Ukrainians are facing a much better equipped barbarian army today than the German army was that the French faced then. Those 200k shells might last a week or 10 days on defense; it’s not enough to sustain an offensive.

And what else are the European NATO nations doing?

European leaders are struggling to align against what many see as a severe potential threat to the postwar order and the prosperity that Washington’s security umbrella has brought to the continent. NATO, which turns 75 in April, has allowed Europeans to focus on economic development, confident that the US would repel threats from Moscow or elsewhere.

And

Despite increased European military spending [miniscule as it is—ed.], high-level talks are failing to deliver big results in part because the cost of shifting from US-backed security to a more independent stance would be enormous.

Translation: the European NATO nations are doing little more than continued empty yapping.

And this:

Many European NATO countries say their increases in military spending were prompted more by Russia’s initial 2014 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent hostility than by Trump’s threats. Last year, nine of NATO’s 29 European members met the alliance’s target of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense by 2024, compared with just two in 2014 when NATO set the threshold. About half are expected to hit the target this year.

That’s just disingenuous. Of those seven since 2014 who increased their spending, five of them came during the Trump administration or immediately after, with their budgets already set in the last Trump year. And at that, Germany promptly welched and redid its military spending budget downward. Only two acted in response to Russia’s “subsequent hostility”—itself a cynical euphemism for the barbarian’s 1922 invasion of Ukraine.

These nations’ failure to date is their betrayal of their fellow NATO members—they’re holding themselves incapable of responding materially to an attack on a fellow member. Their failure to date is a betrayal of their own citizens—they’re holding themselves incapable of responding to an attack on themselves.

Joe Biden Had A Deal

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden had a deal with Venezuela’s MFWIC, Nicolás Maduro: if Maduro would allow Maria Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader, to run in a free, unfettered election for the Venezuelan office of President, Biden would lift the oil and gas sanctions former President Donald Trump (R) had imposed over the Maduro government’s continued and rank misbehaviors.

And so it came to pass that Biden lifted those sanctions.

However.

On Thursday Venezuela’s president of the national assembly said Ms Machado won’t be allowed to run. The next day Mr Maduro’s hand-picked Supreme Court echoed that declaration, upholding the ban, with charges that she had engaged in conspiracies against the regime. The only “conspiracy” is that she opposes the regime.

Who benefits from the deal that lifted the oil sanctions? Not the US. Venezuela’s government men and women do. The People’s Republic of China does.

Either Joe Biden is incapable of matching wits with a thuggish dictator’s machinations, or he knew this would be the outcome, and he agreed the deal anyway. Either way, Joe Biden is unfit for a second term.

More Reasons to Disband

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Now the Biden administration is actively seeking to undermine our friends and allies on top of destroying our energy industry.

The White House on Friday announced a temporary pause on pending decisions of exports of liquefied natural gas to non-free trade countries, until the Energy Department can factor climate change into its reviews of the projects.

Two changes (for starters) are badly needed, and these changes badly need significant majorities in the House and Senate and a Republican in the White House (which puts a premium on the elections this fall).

One of those changes is enactment of a statute giving the relevant approval authority(s) 10 calendar days in which to approve an export application or to provide a detailed explanation for denial, which explanation must have only concrete, measurable reasons, be devoid of generalities, and be publicly available NLT the 11th day. Absent such a decision, the application must be deemed approved.

The other change is the disbandment of the Department of Energy with all Department personnel returned to the private sector, not reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government. The only functions remotely worth retaining are ARPA-Energy and Science and Innovation, which should be folded into ARPA with circumscribed funding authorities.

Another change, in furtherance of the concept of the second change, is the disbandment of the Environmental Protection Agency, with its personnel also returned to the private sector, rather than reassigned within the Federal government. This agency—the managers in charge of it, along with its employees, have for too long conflated environmental protection with climate “protection,” with its cockamamy decisions exemplified by its ruling that plant food in our atmosphere—CO2—is a pollutant.

A Gen-Zer is Upset

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The young woman is tired of her generation being called lazy because they—she in particular—are working 40-hour weeks, “barely getting by,” and don’t want to do that for the rest of their lives. They have other things they want to do. She then insisted that today’s economy is not the one in which prior generations started out, and Gen-Zers starting out have it hard today compared to earlier generations when we were starting out.

She has a beef in some respects.

However.

Here is what was available to this Boomer when I was just starting out.

The house I grew up in was all of 1232 square feet, compared with today’s median size of 2500 square feet. That house didn’t have central air conditioning. We were some years into it before we got a window air conditioner for our living room. Such basics as a thermostat for the furnace was a manually set mercury-based affair, not today’s programmable with its variety of part-of-day or -night or vacation settings.

We didn’t spend $250 and more per month on cable TV—it didn’t exist.

We didn’t spend $50-$100 per month on an Internet connection—there was no Internet.

We didn’t spend $80-$120 per month on cell phone service—it didn’t exist.

We didn’t drop $800 on a new cell phone—they not only didn’t exist, the phone company gave us our landline instrument as part of their POTS service. (Don’t know what that is? Welcome to my starting out world. Go look it up, if it doesn’t interfere too badly with modern priorities.)

We didn’t hire Uber or Lyft or Door-Dash or anything of that ilk—that ilk didn’t exist. We drove ourselves, or went shanks mare. And doggy to go bags were our takeout.

We didn’t have much in the way of shipping costs, other than moving our household, or the occasional order from a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog—there was no such thing as eTail.

We couldn’t even order our books online. We used the local library, or we drove (or did that shanks mare thing) down to the local bookstores. Of course, the library or the bookstore could special order a book we wanted. By sending a letter or making a POTS call. And we could go pick up the book at the library or bookstore when it arrived.

We spent nothing on programs for our personal computers or laptops or aps for our cell phones—that kind of software programming didn’t exist, and neither did the personal computers or laptops, or cell phones to run them on. Spreadsheets? Those were paper-printed grids on which we used pencil or pen. Word processors? Manual typewriters, or pencil/pen and paper. We did have actual (hand-cranked) adding machines, though, so it wasn’t all pencil and paper.

If we wanted to talk to our neighbors, we visited them or they us. If the ones we wanted to talk with lived far away, we wrote postcards and letters. International mail was something else, with its folding envelopes on which we wrote our letters, and then folded them to become the international mail envelope to save the weight of an additional sheet of paper. Or we called long distance (haven’t heard of that? Welcome to another aspect of the modern world, which isn’t what I started out with) on our landline POTS service. International calls were both especially expensive and faint of voice on both ends. There was no concept of electronic social media.

The list goes on and on.

If Gen-Zers want to start out with costs similar to those earlier starting-out generations, they need to learn to live without all of today’s technology.

Further, regarding today:

When I finally walked out the door in retirement from my skilled professional job, I still was working 50-60 hour weeks. That schedule wasn’t universal, but it was quite common throughout those earlier start-outers’ careers. We had families to support and kids’ college to plan for. Family mattered, not personal wants. Indeed, family was central to our personal wants, and gladly so. We weren’t centered exclusively, or even primarily, on our selves.

The mom-and-pop HVAC folks who deal with my current house’s heating and air conditioning (central, mind you, today) not only work those 60-hour weeks, they work holidays, too, including Christmas. It’s the same for the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, road builders, all the trades.

One last fillip. This particular Boomer did have a somewhat easier time handling my starting out costs. I’d enlisted in the USAF, getting commissioned through my college’s ROTC. With that military career as my first, I was given structure, a place to live, and a grocery store that was a bit cheaper than the local economy grocery stores. The young woman, and others of her cohort, might think about enlisting in one or another branch of our military, whether as enlisted or as an officer. They’d be helping out their nation’s security, and they’d learn what work truly is and how rewarding it can be.