Tag Archives: markets

Another Obamacare Episode

Posted on by
Reply

The Justice Department has declined to defend Obamacare in the suit against it brought by a large number of States in the aftermath of Congress’ repeal of the Individual Mandate penalty tax.  Recall that Chief Justice John Roberts rewrote the law in 2012 to recreate the penalty as a tax in order to preserve the IM as constitutional, and thereby to preserve all of Obamacare as constitutional because of the inseverability of all parts of the law.

With the repeal of the IM’s…tax…that inseverability should doom the rest of Obamacare.

As a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision not to defend the law,

University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley said three Justice Department attorneys withdrew their names from the brief [wherein DoJ advised the court of its position].

Three Justice Department attorneys also should withdraw their names from the Federal payroll.

Brexit Failure in the Offing?

Posted on by
Reply

Great Britain’s Labour Party is about to offer legislation that looks a great deal like it [emphasis added].

It shall be a negotiating objective of Her Majesty’s Government to ensure the United Kingdom has full access to the internal market of the European Union, underpinned by shared institutions and regulations, with no new impediments to trade and common rights, standards and protections as a minimum.

There’s very little difference between this and Remain.  Labour is suggesting Britain’s abject surrender in the Brexit negotiations with the Moghuls of Brussels.

Maybe not failure.  Maybe this is Labour’s betrayal of the British people, who voted to leave the EU because they wanted out of the EU.

Australian Trade with the PRC

Posted on by
Reply

Australia is finding much of its exports to the People’s Republic of China piling up in PRC ports (Australian wine is the proximate subject of the WSJ piece at the link)—not because the customers no longer want them but because the PRC government objects to Australian policies designed to limit PRC meddling in Australian domestic affairs.

From that, there’s this remark by Rob Taylor, the piece’s author:

Australia faces an awkward diplomatic balancing act in trying to address concerns about political interference while relying heavily on China for its economic well-being.

Stop being dependent on the PRC for trade. It’s as dangerous to be dependent on a single trading partner as it is for a business, or a nation, to be dependent on a single product.

There are lots of other markets around the world—and throughout Asia—for Australian goods and services. It’ll be expensive for Australia to wean itself off the PRC, but the payoff will be well worth it.

Other nations doing business with the PRC should consider the same weaning. After all, what’s the value of a large potential customer base when its government uses that connection for an economic Anschluss?

US Corn Exports

Posted on by
Reply

The Trump administration is working on a deal with the People’s Republic of China to reduce the trade imbalance we have with them (whether the trade imbalance really is a bad thing and whether the PRC is working the deal as hard as the Trump administration are questions outside this post).  American farmers would have trouble producing enough to meet their part of the goal, were the deal to go through.

US corn exports could jump from $150 million to about $10 billion annually within a few years if China vastly expanded its quotas and reduced its duties that are as high as 65%, according to one estimate.

The farmers—particularly corn farmers—would get a great deal of help in ramping up their exports if they weren’t…encouraged…to divert significant fractions of their crop to ethanol production.  This is another consequence of ethanol mandates and another reason to get rid of them.

Update: In 2016, the US diverted 5.28 billion bushels of corn to ethanol production, or 36% of our total corn production that year. At roughly $3.45/bushel, that works out to $18.2 billion of corn production that was diverted.  Simply eliminating this useless diversion would seem to cover that production jump cited in the quote above.  It also would seem to leave $8 billion of production to mitigate food costs that are inflated by the diversion.  This, in turn, would help our poor and mitigate the need for food stamps and therewith reduce the tap on taxpayer pocketbooks.

The Obama Legacy

Posted on by
Reply

Much has been made over the last week, both favorably and unfavorably, of the magnitude of President Donald Trump’s erasure of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) legacy.

I disagree with that coverage.  Trump has been mitigating, if not correcting, as many of Obama’s errors as he can, but he’s done nothing about Obama’s legacy, which includes the following far from exhaustive list:

  • apologizing to the world for our successes
  • bowing to world leaders, deeply on several occasions
  • alienating our friends and toadying up to our enemies
    • attacking Israel for insisting on defending itself
    • demanding that Israel accept the pre-1967 borders as the Obama administration’s price of peace
    • excusing Hamas terrorism against Israel
    • turning his back on Iraq
    • telling Great Britain to take their bust of Winston Churchill and….
    • telling Great Britain that if they leave the EU they can’t count on trade deals with the US any time soon
  • insisting that Daesh was a JV team and then refusing to confront them when they exploded over Iraq and Syria
  • drawing red lines in Syria over al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own civilians and then ducking away from those lines
  • creating the JCPOA, to which even French President Francois Hollande objected at the time
  • his State Department’s too expensive “Reset” with Russia
  • acquiescing to Russian occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine
  • acquiescing to People’s Republic of China’s seizure of the South China Sea
  • acquiescing to northern Korea’s nuclear weapons expansion in the name of “strategic patience”
  • agreeing the Paris Climate Accord
  • passing Obamacare
  • passing Dodd-Frank
  • routinely governing by diktat Executive Order rather than working through Congress

While many of these failures have yet to be addressed, substantial progress is being made.

No, Obama’s legacy is intact.  It’s a legacy of deep, abject, and unbroken failure.