Tag Archives: political economy

Yet Another Start

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The House has passed—by 414-5—a bill that markedly improves Americans’ 401(k) retirement plans that are offered by most employers. If also passed by the Senate and signed into law by the President (or passed anew over a President’s veto) the bill would

  • raise the age at which retirees must start taking money out of their Plans, over the next decade, to 75
  • allow older workers to make bigger contributions: the current “catch up” contributions of $6,500/yr for those older than 50 would rise to $10,000/yr for people ages 62, 63, and 64
  • the extra $1,000 people 50 and older can contribute annually to an IRA would become indexed to inflation

These are important moves. However, there are no reasons in logic or economics for those age or contribution limits. Folks should be able to contribute as much as they want to their retirement plans, whenever they want, at any age, and regardless of income.

They should be able to delay making withdrawals for as long as they wish—and not be required to continue making withdrawals once they start. Retirement withdrawals should be in the amounts and at the times the retiree deems useful, not when Government dictates them.

The benefits of such finishing touches are readily apparent. The more we’re allowed to save during our working years for our retirement, the less dependent we’ll be on increasingly fragile government retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare when we do retire.

The more retirees have for their own retirement resources, the less stress retirees will impose on those government programs, which can only reduce their fragility.

War, Inflation, and Biden’s Energy “Policy”

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President Joe Biden (D), having had his nose rubbed in the criticality of fossil fuels to our economy and those of all nations around the world by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s frequent use of oil and natural gas exports as weapons, now is begging other nations and consortia to produce more oil. And he’s insisting that our own oil and gas producers do more to produce while castigating them for being responsible for the present high and continuing inflation rates us Americans are experiencing.

An anonymous White House spokeswoman:

Mr Biden “wants to do everything possible and sensible to mitigate” the affect of high energy prices on American families.
“He’s been clear in recent remarks that oil and gas companies should help ensure that oil supply meets demand, and at the same time we need to advance clean energy options and decrease our reliance on fossil fuels[.]”

This is disingenuous, though. Biden and his advisors know full well that oil and gas producers cannot just turn on the wells and turn them off at will. It costs time and money to cap the wells in a safe, environmentally protective manner, and it costs time and money to uncap them in a safe, environmentally protective manner. It costs time and money to protect pipelines from the pressure reductions associated with significant production decreases, and it costs time and money to protect pipelines from the pressure increases associated with significant production increases. It costs time and money to reschedule and reallocate rail cars for oil transport.

It especially costs time and money to dig new wells, frack new wells, and lay additional pipelines to handle the increased production. That transport brings me to refineries—these cost time and money to to close and to open in order to handle refining decreases and increases. Natural gas-to-liquid natural gas facilities are even more expensive to close and reopen, and require even more money than simple refineries to build more of, which we need to do since we don’t have enough here, and potential customer nations don’t have enough of at the receiving end.

The time and cost problems don’t end there. It takes time—years—to recoup those costs, which run to billions of dollars per year. And yet, the current Progressive-Democrat political environment is one of zealously anti-fossil fuels regulation, drilling blockages, pipeline blockages.

Oil and gas producers are understandably and justifiably chary of spending that time and money to alter their production schedules. They can’t trust the Progressive-Democrats to let them produce long enough to recoup all those costs.

There’s just no reason to believe Biden and his advisors are serious about oil and gas or of high energy prices or of inflation generally.

Former President Donald Trump Has a Plan

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Former President Donald Trump (R) has a plan for recovering our nation from the ravages of Progressive-Democratic Party control over the last year and more, and that will continue to be inflicted over the next several months to three years. In the main, he’s on the right track; although I disagree with his constant harping on personalities, like his disparagement of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R). McConnell’s tactics, to take the particular case as illustrative, are not Trump’s but without McConnell’s skillful politics, there would be no Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch; we would have Merrick Garland inflicted on us. Without McConnell’s acumen, Trump would not have all those hundreds of conservative—which is to say, textualist—district and appellate court judges confirmed.

On policy, there’s also this Trump shortfall:

[T]he nation’s 45th president said his plan begins with recapturing GOP control of at least one chamber of Congress in November and creating a bulwark to stop the Biden agenda.

This is insufficiently specified. If Republicans succeed in gaining a majority in only one chamber of Congress, it must be the Senate. It’s in the Senate that the safety of the Supreme Court lies.

It’s in the Senate that treaties lie.

It’s in the Senate that Executive Branch nominations get confirmed or denied.

Even though the House of Representatives must originate revenue (i.e., taxing) bills and by tradition spending bills, it’s in the Senate where these live or die. It’s in the Senate (as well as the House) where budgets, allocations, and spending bills generally live or die.

It’s in the Senate that the safety of our republican democracy lies.

Senator Rick Scott Has a Plan

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No, in this article, I’m not referring to his 11 Point Plan to Rescue America; I’m writing about his urging American businesses to divest themselves of their investments and other business connections inside the People’s Republic of China.

Earlier this month, I wrote an open letter to American business leaders with a simple message: it’s time to cut ties with and decouple our supply chains from Communist China to realign US business with American values.

He went on.

We need a strategic economic decoupling from Communist China—that includes ending investment and partnerships with companies controlled by the CCP. This is something I have been calling for over a year. While decoupling must begin now, we know it’s not a process that will be completed overnight. Supply chains must readjust and be removed from the grasp of the Chinese Communist Party.

Scott is absolutely right. The PRC is an enemy nation, and business—any economic—ties with the nation are fraught with danger, not only for the individual business—the intellectual property and technology thefts Scott references—but for our national security—those intellectual property and technology thefts along with defense and diplomacy-related espionage and technology thefts. Every nation carries out such espionage, but that espionage by the PRC is strongly facilitated by the nature of the business ties PRC laws impose on companies doing business in, or with businesses in, the PRC.

What needs to be understood here, though, and I’m not sure even Scott fully understands the matter, is that every business in the PRC is under the thumb of the Communist Party of China. The PRC’s 2017 National Intelligence Law makes them so: every PRC company must answer all of that nation’s intelligence community requests for information regarding the company’s internal affairs, the company’s business dealings with other businesses, and the company’s information gleaned from its customers, whether individual or business. And if the company doesn’t have that information, it’s required to try to get it.

Micromanaging

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A State government is reaching into the business decisions of private enterprise, presuming to dictate to State-domiciled businesses what their business decisions must be in an otherwise competitive labor market. Here’s Pennsylvania House of Representative Jennifer O’Mara (D, Delaware):

The Healthy Employee and Healthy Workplace Act will help Pennsylvania’s families by requiring employers to provide paid sick leave to their employees. Workers would be able to use paid sick leave to seek treatment for an illness or a family member’s illness, in addition to treatment related to domestic violence or sexual assault.

Elizabeth Stelle, director of policy analysis at the Commonwealth Foundation offers one reason this is a counterproductive, if not outright idiotic, idea.

The real question is how to help the small percentage of workers that don’t have this benefit. The answer is more flexibility, not more regulation. For example, the federal Working Families Flexibility Act would allow employers to give hourly workers the choice of accumulating “comp time” in lieu of overtime pay[.]

The Progressive-Democrat O’Mara and her cohorts don’t care about such trivia. For Progressive-Democrats, it’s not about individual choice—us average Americans are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted with making our own choices.

I offer another, more general objection, to the principle so plainly underlying O’Mara’s proposal. It’s about accruing personal and Party power in government and the ego trip of controlling other people’s lives and businesses.

There’s no need for this bill. That competitive labor market I mentioned will solve the matter. Just like “dental” and then health insurance became, in the competition for labor, a standard benefit and not a perk for the few.

Just like paid vacation became, in the competition for labor, a standard part of the worker’s pay package, and then grew from a few days to a week, to two weeks, and more. With accrual from year to year.

Just like paid sick leave became standard….

Now paid vacation and paid sick leave rapidly are becoming simply paid time off—adding the two original time blocks into a single time block with the same number of days that the two pay components separately had—with the worker no longer having to differentiate between the two because employers, if not Progressive-Democrats, trust their employees’ decisions.