Category Archives: regulation

The Forgotten Man

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A recent Wall Street Journal editorial correctly pointed out the costs to us ordinary Americans of a variety of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden administration plans. The editors were particularly concerned with the administration’s plans for bank and credit card fees that these institutions charge individuals who overdraw their account or make late payments on their credit cards and that these institutions charge businesses for using the various ATM and credit card payment networks.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency proximately responsible for the latest round of regulations capping those fees at markedly lower levels,

acknowledges[] the lower penalty may cause more borrowers to pay late, and as a result incur higher “interest charges, penalty rates, credit reporting, and the loss of a grace period.” This would make it harder to qualify for an auto loan or mortgage.
The agency concedes that credit-card issuers may also raise interest rates, reduce rewards, “increase minimum payment amounts or adjust credit limits to reduce credit risk associated with consumers who make late payments.” Because some states cap credit-card interest rates, “some consumers’ access to credit could fall.”

The editors closed their piece with this bit of naivete, though:

The forgotten man always pays.

Who says they’re forgotten? These are the ones the Progressive-Democratic Party wants to trap into welfare, so Party can trade welfare payments for votes. Imperial Rome did bread and circuses; Party does welfare dolings.

Government Making Crime Pay

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Now the Progressive-Democratic Party reigning in the New York State government wants to reward felons for their crimes. After those felons have paid their debt to New York society through their jail time (and apparently before they’ve served out the rest of their penalty in the form of parole), the State wants to give them $2,600 for their trouble.

The legislation, introduced by State Senator Kevin Parker [D] and Assemblyman Eddie Gibbs [D], would allow inmates to collect around $400 each month over six months once they leave prison.
As the bill currently stands, there are no limitations on how or where the money can be spent, according to Fox 5 New York.

They’re looking at setting aside $25 million for this reward fund.

Instead of paying criminals for their crime, maybe this taxpayer money (the original $40 the felons routinely get on release came from their garnished wages from the jobs they held while in jail) would be better spent going to a victim rehab/make whole fund instead. Alternatively, maybe this taxpayer money would be better spent countering, if only a little, the State’s Defund the Police movement.

Alternatively alternatively, maybe this taxpayer money—evidently excess collections since it’s aimed at such foolishness—could be returned to the State’s citizens. After all, as Progressive-Democrat Gibbs complains,

In this economy that [the original $40] amount is barely enough to get groceries or purchase clothes for a job interview[.]

That’s also the case for the honest citizens of New York, both jobless and working poor.

It’s highly useful to help released felons readjust to life on the outside and start to recover (or begin) an honest life. Paying them for their crimes doesn’t accomplish that. Thus, and additional alternative: commit the $25 million to programs—not State-run!—jail house training in the trades, half-way house rehab and job prep, and the like. Gibbs and Parker like the idea of no strings attached for the felons’ spending their $2,600 each; they should have no trouble committing, unrestricted, their aggregated $25 mil to private enterprises to run these programs. Or—the horror—paying the $2,600 per to the employer who hires a newly released felon.

It’s instructive that of all the plethora of alternatives available, these Progressive-Democrats picked the absolute worst of the lot, the one that directly rewards the felon with free cash.

Further Reasons to Ban TikTok

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And not just force its sale by ByteDance. ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and as such it’s subject to PRC laws, including the PRC’s national security law requiring PRC companies to answer queries from that nation’s intelligence community, queries which can range from “what do you know about this subject in that country” to “go find out, conduct the espionage.” That’s reason enough to ban the company (that subordination of PRC-domiciled companies to that nation’s intelligence apparatus is reason enough to ban all PRC-domiciled companies from the US, but that’s a different story).

Another reason to ban TikTok stems from this claim made by the company in response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s unanimous vote (that’s 50 (of 52 Committee members; 2 weren’t present to vote) Representatives of both parties agreeing on something) to advance legislation that would require TikTok to be sold by ByteDance to a non-PRC affiliated company or be barred from operating in the US. That claim by an anonymous spokesman for TikTok:

This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States. The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.

That’s a lie on two fronts, explicitly intended to create hysteria. The first front is the business about “total ban.” It is no such thing, and TikTok managers—and their ByteDance owners—know full well: that claim cynically ignores the primary option the legislation offers, the sale of TikTok to an acceptable, non-PRC affiliated buyer.

The second front is that business about stripping TikTok users of their Constitutional right to free expression. Of course, it’s no such thing, as those TikTok and ByteDance persons also know full well. Were ByteDance to refuse to sell and TikTok barred, no one’s free speech would be stripped away, only a single pipeline would be stripped away. All of TikTok’s users, every single one of them, would have access to any and all of a plethora of other pipelines through which to speak, pipelines like Facebook YouTube, Gab, Truth Social, CloutHub, GETTR, MeWe, LinkedIn, Parler, X, and on and on. Further, were TikTok to be sold, that question would never even arise since the TikTok pipeline would be free to continue operating.

Additionally, the ability of this PRC company to mobilize all of its members to manipulate an American internal political matter demonstrates the influence the PRC is able to exert on American domestic politics.

As lawmakers prepared to consider the legislation on Thursday, users of the app…saw notifications urging them to complain to their House representative about the bill. Then the app let people call their representative with a few presses of buttons, fueling congressional concerns about TikTok.
TikTok’s campaign quickly overwhelmed the phone lines of some congressional offices…illustrated how TikTok could mobilize an army of people and gather data to push user behavior, which some lawmakers say is the exact reason they don’t want the company to have ties back to [the PRC].

That PRC manipulation by itself is yet another to ban TikTok altogether.

Virtue-Signaling in the Credit Card Market

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is at it again, attempting to buy votes with another of his sham attempts to save us ordinary Americans money.

The Biden administration on Tuesday finalized a new rule to cap all credit card late fees at $8, a move that is expected to elicit fierce pushback from industry giants.

His Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

estimates the new regulation will save American families more than $10 billion in late fees annually by reducing the typical late fee of about $32. That amounts to an average saving of roughly $220 per year for the 45 million people who are charged late fees.

Stipulate for the moment that the CFPB actually has an accurate, fact-supported basis for its cost claims. Those fees help the banks recoup a significant fraction of the costs they incur when credit card holders are late on their payments. This restriction on cost recovery is only going to lead to tighter bank restrictions on who they’re willing to issue credit cards to.

How much money does Biden think will be saved by those who no longer can get credit cards, or by those whose cards are not renewed on the renewal date?

Biden really thinks we’re stupid enough to not see through his bread and circus shenanigans.

Another Reason to Rescind Chevron Defense

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As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it in their editorial last Tuesday, nothing is stopping the

Securities and Exchange Commission and prosecutors from finding [regulatory] meaning in statutory penumbras.

Now the SEC is manufacturing a rule based on nothing but the æther in SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s mind. Gensler has hailed into court a pharmaceutical company employee for the “insider trading” crime of trading in options on the stock shares of another pharmaceutical company, a company about which the man had no insider information at all. Not a whit.

Gensler, however, in plumbing the depths of his shadowy æther, has claimed to have found something in a penumbra of Federal law and Court decisions regarding insider trading. The man he’s charging knew from an employee-broadcast email from his company’s CEO that his company might be about to be acquired by another company—not the company in which our man did his trading.

Poof—Gensler has waved his hands and conjured an insider trading beef centered on no insider trading information at all. As the WSJ noted,

Federal law doesn’t explicitly ban trading on confidential information. But courts have said that insiders defraud companies by “misappropriating” private information for personal gain.

It’s in the phantasmal penumbra of “private information” that Gensler has conjured his offense: private information in one company (not even that private, it was a company-wide email that revealed the potential for an acquisition of the employee’s company) casts a shadow over other, Gensler-unspecified, companies, and so brings those other companies into the reach of one company’s allegedly private information.

And this, regarding those chimeric penumbras[1] of which too many of our courts still claim to see:

If something is in a penumbral region, it is not in the text.  If it is not in the text, it does not exist ….  If it does not exist, a judge cannot rule on it.  If in the end, all a judge can do after carefully reading the text is go more than a toe’s dip into its shadows for meaning, then he must not go in: he must rule a lack of governing statute or strike the statute for vagueness, and in either event return the matter to the political branches.

And this, from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in denying a 2014 cert petition in Whitman v US [emphasis in the original]:

Only the legislature may define crimes and fix punishments. Congress cannot, through ambiguity, effectively leave that function to the courts—much less to the administrative bureaucracy[.]

Now the Supreme Court must overrule the SEC outright, which would be much easier to do were it to also—or already have by the time this case reaches it—rescinded the Chevron Defense foolishness which subordinates, by Constitutional design, the coequal Judiciary not just to the Executive, but to Executive subordinate branches led by political appointees and peopled by unknown and faceless bureaucrats.

[1] Hines, Eric, A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law