Category Archives: political economy

They’re Confessing Their Crimes

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They’re really quite blatant about it, too.

A ransomware gang claimed this past week that it broke into the systems of the fintech platform MeridianLink. The breach has been reported to regulators.
The company didn’t report it, as new rules will require them to do. The hackers did.

AlphV (or Black Cat, depending on who’s speaking for the gang) aren’t the only criminal hackers to do this sort of thing. Other hackers are joining in on telling the cops of their deeds, as a means of pressuring the victims to pay up. Or their security failures will be made public.

Aside from only cowards meekly surrender and functionally if not legally aiding and abetting the criminals by paying, and the situation is straightforwardly enough greatly mitigated by those companies getting serious about their IT security, a separate question exists.

These criminals have all confessed their crimes. Where are the regulators? Where is DoJ? Certainly, it’s hard to identify the members of these criminal organizations, but hard means possible. In the meantime, these crime syndicates can themselves be traced back and their accesses to the Internet hindered severely, if not outright blocked. And their identities publicly disclosed.

Only Reliable Way to Enforce Lease Sales

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The 5th Circuit has ruled—correctly IMNSHO—that the Biden administration must sell oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico as existing law requires and get it done within the next 37 days.

That’s good news, but it’s insufficient since it lacks an enforcement mechanism. The only reliable enforcement mechanism under this Biden administration is to deem the leases currently applied for to be sold under the parameters provided in the lease applications and to deem future lease applications, until the 73 million acres in question are committed, similarly sold after 37 days, the court’s mandated time limit for getting the Gulf’s acreage leased out.

The court’s ruling can be read here.

Jayjuz

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Here’s a pretty dispositive demonstration of the destructiveness of Progressive-Democratic Party economic ideology policies. The Transparency Foundation notes that

Our methodology calculates that a typical middle-class family of three earning $130,000 a year faces a “Cost of California” penalty of $26,478.72 versus if they simply paid the national average of cost in each category[.]

And

In California, renters pay 47% more than the national average, while homeowners pay 32% more, healthcare services cost 42% more, and state and local taxes are 14% higher[.]

Even areas where California citizens supposedly pay less than the national average, health insurance and homeowner’s insurance, the claims of lower costs are deceptive.

Health insurance is heavily subsidized by taxes on all Californians, and those taxes generally are elided when State officials calculate the insurance cost.

With homeowner’s insurance, costs to California’s citizens are artificially suppressed by State government mandated rate change limits. With insurers not allowed to charge risk-based premiums—risks that include State officials’ interference with forest and water management practices, interference that then runs up the likelihood of fires and broadens the extent of damage caused by those more frequent fires that do occur—insurers are leaving the State. Those departures, in the medium- and long-term, make Californians increasingly dependent on the State’s government for homeowner’s insurance.

$26,478.72. The 2023 Federal Poverty Guidelines for a family of 3 puts the 100% Guideline at $24,860. The 250% Guideline, used by so many government welfare programs as their upper bound, is $62,150, just a bit over twice that California Penalty.

Progressive-Democrats are actively inflicting poverty on American citizens, and the only rationale (I do not say moral or ethical) motive for this is to create dependency in order to control votes and to preserve Leftist political power.

Contract Discipline

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Amtrak is in the hole to the tune of $140 million in maintenance costs for its current fleet of trains because the contractor Amtrak hired to build and deliver uprated replacement trains is having trouble with testing requirements and production defects and so is nearly three years late on delivery.

Amtrak is also losing even more revenue in anticipated ticket sales from the new, larger trains that were supposed to enter service in 2021. And the railroad is missing out on other revenue because some older Acela units have been pulled from service to be cannibalized for spare parts.

One way for our government to deal with such things is with fixed price contracts, under which the contractor gets a sum of money and must satisfy the production requirements of the contract within that sum. These contracts, though, don’t make the contractee whole from the contractor’s failure.

Here’s another way: write into the contract that the contractor is responsible for the contractee’s maintenance and other costs attributable to the contractor’s failure to meet deadlines. Such a move would make future contractors, e.g., France-based Alstom in the Amtrak case, responsible for Amtrak’s $140 million, and more, inflicted on it by Alstom’s failure to perform. If no contractor is willing to incur that risk, that contractor need have no business from the government at all.

Here’s a Thought

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(No comments from the peanut gallery.)

Time is rapidly decreasing to get a budget passed in time to prevent a Federal government partial shutdown. There are those who fear that, and many of those distort the situation by claiming that it would be a total shutdown and one that would push all grandmas and grandpas off the Social Security cliff and deny wages for our soldiers. The hysteria is strong in those, but let’s take it seriously for a moment.

Here’s a solution. Assume Congressman Andrew Clyde (R, GA) is correct in his prediction that the House will finish passing all 12 of its appropriation bills by the supposed deadline of 17 November. To the extent the shutdown hysteria needs to be taken seriously, there will need to be an extension/additional Continuing Resolution in order to give the Senate time to deal with the appropriations bills, the House-Senate Conference that will be necessary to resolve any differences, and that CR. I’m eliding here the idea that Senators themselves need no funding in order to do their jobs and work these bills. They can work for free for the time being.

If the Senators, led by Progressive-Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY), but really only 60 of the 100 are needed, are serious, they’ll need under Senate rules only about a week to consider and pass or vote down an appropriation bill. Since Senators all are very proud of their ability to “walk and chew gum,” as they love so quaintly to put it, they can consider all of the appropriations simultaneously and in parallel with their handling of the CR. This is especially true given the size of each Senator’s staff and the size of the Senate-as-a-whole’s staff.

It should take only a day for the Conference Committee to resolve any differences, and an additional day for the respective houses to pass or reject the Committee’s recommendations.

Thus: pass a CR containing spending at the latest pre-Wuhan Virus Situation level, good for nine days. That’s sufficient time for the Senate to act on the CR and the appropriations bills.

And pass no further CRs. Full stop. If the Senate as a whole chooses to reject any of the House bills, or the CR, the Senate—Republicans as well as Progressive-Democrats, depending on how the Republicans vote—will have demonstrated that they’re more interested in their political games than they are in the weal of their constituents and of our nation at large. They should be left, with apologies to Hosea, to reap the whirlwind: it hath no budget; the funds shall yield no meal.