Category Archives: political economy

When Did History Begin?

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According to members of the Progressive-Democratic Party, it began in 2022. Take, for instance, the Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman from Pennsylvania, Chrissy Houlahan.

As inflation cools, it’s important to think about how far we’ve come since the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

How far we’ve come:

At this time last year, due to the efforts of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats as we emerged from the pandemic, we were seeing strong economic growth, historically low unemployment, and large wage increases, particularly for low and middle-income workers.

What we were seeing at this time last year was the beginning of an Obama-esque slow recovery from the booming economy that already was expanding rapidly as we came out of the Wuhan Virus situation in the summer and fall of 2020 in that history that exists before this time last year.

What we are seeing since this time last year is the recovery to that latter half of 2020’s historic unemployment—for women, blacks, and Hispanics, especially—due to the recovery of jobs lost during the Wuhan Virus situation, and very few new jobs created.

What we are seeing since this time last year has been declining real wages in the face of Party-driven inflation as those wage increases—which Houlahan knows are only nominal, but chooses to elide—paled in the face of inflation. Only in the last month did nominal wage increases exceed inflation, and that’s far too soon to know whether this one time is the start of a trend or merely a one-off.

What we are seeing over the last two years is a widening of the wage gap between whites and minorities as that slow recovery and Party’s racist and sexist identity politics limit who gets back into those recovered jobs. That wage gap had narrowed significantly over the four years through 2020, as folks on the lower rungs—especially minorities and single mothers—actually got jobs (that historically low unemployment rate extant in 2020 and before) and had income. And their wages rose—nominally and in real terms—faster than did the wages of the middle and upper classes.

However, Americans were still experiencing high prices.

Yes, we are. And we will relative to our incomes for some years. Inflation may finally be coming back down—it’s still higher, though, than it was at the end of the prior administration, over two years ago—but as Houlahan admitted, inflation is a rate of price increase, it is not the prices themselves. The prices Party’s inflation drove up will not come back down.

One factor that contributes to those high prices in addition to overall inflation is the cost of energy. That has become even more expensive with Party’s open war on fossil fuel-based energy, and its effort to eliminate that industry altogether. They don’t care that energy is at the heart of the cost of production (and so at the heart of the cost of us ordinary Americans‘ purchases, especially for those of us on the lower economic rungs, below Houlahan’s middle class).

It’s certainly true that supply chain disruptions have contributed, also, to higher prices. However, the prior administration, and American businesses on their own, had already been working to revamp our supply chains to re-anchor them in more stable, more favorable locations. The disruptions of the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine also have contributed. But that invasion was encouraged to start by the Progressive-Democrat-run Biden administration’s open timidity in the face of terrorists in western Asia and in the face of the barbarian chieftain in the Kremlin.

New Democrat, same as the old Democrat.

BLM and Fairness to the Taxpayer

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The Bureau of Land Management is moving finalize its two-yr-old effort to increase the minimum price oil and gas developers must pay to lease Federal land for oil and gas development by five times: from $2 per acre to $10 per acre. BLM also wants to increase the minimum bond those developers must pay from $10,000 to $150,000.

Those increases, on their faces, look like chump change, but those minima are for miniscule fields that are far too small even to think about drilling an exploratory well. Also included in the BLM’s move are these cost increases and production limitations:

  • reduce the primary term for new onshore leases from 10 years to five years, even though a significant percentage of leases require more than five years to start producing. For example, recent data shows that 37% of leases in New Mexico started production more than five years after authorization.
  • raise annual rental rates to $3/acre for the first two years, and then $5/acre, increasing costs by at least $123 million per year.
  • eliminate authority to grant royalty relief in difficult times or national emergency.
  • raise the minimum inspection fees each operator will pay annually to anywhere from $800-$11,300 per lease, varying by lease.

And this:

  • impose a new $10,000/mile annual fee for water depths greater than 500 feet; and $1,000/mile for water depths less than 500 feet. There are approximately 26,000 miles of pipelines in the offshore with about 12,600 miles in waters less than 400 feet and 13,700 miles in waters greater than 400 feet. Increased annual costs would total about $149 million.

The BLM claims that these increases aim[] to ensure fairness to the taxpayer.

That’s silly.

What would be fair to us taxpayers, and especially to those of us ordinary Americans on the bottom rungs of our economy who pay little or no taxes, would be to not do those increases—none of us will see a cent of those cost increases. We will, though, pay even more for our energy—home heating and cooling, fuel for our cars and for the shippers’ trucks. No, the money from those increases will go to the Biden administration’s special interests.

Not Successful?

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The Wall Street Journal thinks so regarding Texas border security. Here’s their headline and subheadline from last Friday:

Texas Spent Billions on Border Security. It’s Not Working.
Operation Lone Star, with $4.5 billion spent so far, has had little effect on migration while facing charges of civil-rights abuses

And this, in Findell’s third paragraph:

The program is an explicit challenge to the national government, which by law controls international borders and immigration enforcement.

The rest of her piece follows closely on her headline while largely ignoring that key datum in her third paragraph.

On the other hand, there are some actual facts regarding Texas’ Operation Lone Star:

Since the launch of Operation Lone Star, the multi-agency effort has led to over 394,200 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 31,300 criminal arrests, with more than 29,100 felony charges reported. In the fight against fentanyl, Texas law enforcement has seized over 422 million lethal doses of fentanyl during this border mission.

That sounds pretty successful to this poor, dumb Texan. That’s also despite the national government’s—President Joe Biden’s (D) administration’s—conscious decision to not control our southern border, to instead allow record millions of illegal aliens to flood across that border.

The idea that Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) administration faces civil-rights charges is literally, narrowly true. The cases brought, though, are risible. There’s nothing at all abusive about transporting illegal aliens—who volunteer for the trip—to loudly avowedly sanctuary cities where, by those cities’ proclamations, all illegal aliens are welcome. (Progressive-Democratic Party mayors, like New York City’s Eric Adams, now are whining about having the influx of illegals into their cities, but those plaints are just that—empty whining. Were Adams, et al., actually serious about no longer wanting the illegals, he and his cohorts would cancel the sanctuary status of their cities.)

An Opportunity to Reverse Kelo

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Kelo v City of New London was a 2005 case involving our Constitution’s 5th Amendment Takings Clause: a homeowner who didn’t want to sell her home in New London, CT, to a property developer who said he needed the property to finish out the development of shopping mall. New London agreed on the developer’s representation that his mall would produce more tax revenue for the city than the homeowner’s property tax remittances. In the resulting suit, the Supreme Court decided that government has the authority to commit such a Taking and redistribution for the public purpose of increasing government’s tax revenue.  The Court said that one man’s private purpose is superior to another’s so that other must surrender his property to the one.

What the Takings Clause actually says is

…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

For public use, not for public purpose, and certainly not for a private enterprise’s claimed public purpose.

Now a case is developing that should end in the Supreme Court and present the Court with an opportunity to reverse that shameful ruling.

A public school district in Texas is pursuing an eminent domain process to remove a 78-year-old man from the home that his family has owned for more than a century in order to build a high school football stadium parking lot.

The 78-yr-old homeowner’s daughter, Tara Upchurch:

I want you to understand what the significance of this place is for my father. It is where he played as a child with his grandparents, where he woke up 4 a.m. to milk cows, it’s where he spent 39 years happily married to my mom, and it’s where he raised a family, and it’s a place we never thought he would leave[.]

On the other hand,

Aldine ISD is planning to build a $50 million football field and parking lot on his property and is using eminent domain options after the Upchurch family rejected an initial offer to purchase the property last year, KPRC reported. Eminent domain allows the government to acquire private property for public use.

Aldine ISD wants it, and its desire is more important than a property owner’s…ownership. Well, then. That settles it. That’s what Kelo has wrought.

Private property ownership isn’t actually ownership: if another private entity wants it, all that one needs to do is to persuade a government or quasi-government that its desire is greater than the original owner’s ownership, and the owner must give it up.

This is the mess that Kelo caused, and this is the mess that the Supreme Court should get an opportunity to clean up, and it should clean it up.

A Good Move

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It needs a parallel move, as well. Sadly, both are pipe dreams in the current government.

Recall that President Joe Biden (D) has pushed, through the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his Loan-Level Price Adjustment rule which penalizes Americans with good credit scores by requiring mortgage lenders to charge them higher interest rates in order to lower the rates charged those mortgage borrowers who have poor credit scores.

Senator Roger Marshall (R, KS) and Senator Mike Braun (R, IN) have introduced the Middle Class Borrower Protection Act that would block Biden’s move.

This is a good initial move, but it wants a separate, parallel move: reduce the funding of the FHFA by the aggregated dollar amount of the loan rate increase that Americans with good credit scores would be forced to pay were the Biden Rule left intact. Leave that reduction in place, and freeze the FHFA’s remaining budget at its current level for a minimum of five years (to remove it from election cycles), with automatic extensions of the freeze until Congress is satisfied that no one in the agency is working on ways to get around the MCBPA’s bar.

Sadly, both are pipe dreams at present: there are too many Progressive-Democrats in the Senate for either legislation to pass.