Tag Archives: political economy

Cowardice

Posted on by
Reply

This time, by Intel’s Chairman Omar Ishrak and CEO Pat Gelsinger. This management team, a short time ago, sent out a letter to Intel suppliers asking them to avoid sourcing from the [People’s Republic of China’s] region of Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has conducted a campaign of forcible assimilation against religious minorities.

Intel called on its business partners to steer clear of the remote northwestern region of China, noting that “multiple governments have imposed restrictions on products sourced from the Xinjiang region. Therefore, Intel is required to ensure our supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.”

After a hue and cry on PRC social media, though, Ishrak and Gelsinger cringed and ducked under their separate desks, and had the company issue a carefully unsigned corporate statement expressing “Intel’s” regret over having offended the PRC.

…its letter was written only to comply with US law and didn’t represent Intel’s stance on Xinjiang.

Please don’t hurt us, please. We didn’t mean it. And this plea:

We deeply apologize for the confusion caused to our respected Chinese customers, partners, and the public[.]

There’s this, too, illustrating the artificial nature of the conundrum:

Multinational companies have been caught in the middle as Western governments have pressured companies to disentangle their supply chains from Xinjiang.

No, they’re not caught in any middle. They just need to find the moral courage to shift their supply sources and their markets out of the PRC. They have the economic wherewithal, even if the transition processes will be near-term expensive. An earlier First Lady identified the position to take: “Just say no.” Even that infamous shoe-maker, Nike, has the right words, if not the integrity to honor them: “Just do it.”

Never mind that it’s PRC President Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party cronies who should be apologizing for their ongoing atrocities against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

This is disgusting cowardice, and it should be unacceptable for American company managers to put lucre from the PRC above morality.

This Isn’t Ignorance

Posted on by
Reply

The Biden-Harris administration wants our oil companies to produce more because energy prices are too damn high. Never mind that it’s Biden-Harris policies that have crippled American oil and natural gas production and driven those prices so much higher.

The Biden administration says that oil companies face no government constraints on drilling more in the short run, even as it presses the companies to shift long term to cleaner forms of energy in response to climate change.

Which is a complete lie.  Then we get this from Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, via her spokesman:

It’s important for the American oil-and-gas industry to address near-term energy demands while also recognizing that they need to begin transitioning their companies.

How, exactly? The Biden-Harris administration has closed off drilling on Federal lands, it has shut down one major pipeline, and it’s threatening to close off two more.

Oh, wait. There’s this from Granholm, just a few months after she laughed uproariously at a question concerning her plan for boosting our energy production:

Please take advantage of the leases that you have, hire workers, get your rig count up[.]

Leaving aside those lease cutoffs she and her boss, Biden-Harris, have inflicted. That’s not a short-term process; those monies can only be committed for the mid- to long-term. Drilling wells on private land, just like they would have done on the closed-off Federal lands, takes time, equipment, money—and pipelines. And there’s high likelihood that “next year,” Biden-Harris and Granholm will punish those producers for producing so much climate “poison.”

Berating, pressuring, our oil and natural gas producers to produce more after having spent the year berating, pressuring them to cut production, and hamstringing them to ensure they produce less isn’t borne of Biden-Harris or Granholm ignorance.

This is outright dishonesty by those Know Betters in the Federal government.

One More Reason

Posted on by
Reply

The last two administrations have dumped $3.5 trillion of supposed Wuhan Virus relief funds into our economy since the virus situation began in early 2020.

Now we’re learning that almost $100 billion of it has been stolen. That doesn’t seem like a large per centage of the total. However, as numbers have a quality all their own, and while those $100 billion are a small per centage of the trillions, they would have had their own use. Fighting the Wuhan Virus’ entry into our nation via our southern border, for instance, by building more of the wall that Biden-Harris has been so desperate to stop. Generating more—many, many more—of the home tests that Biden-Harris has been lying about producing. Plusing up our police forces so as to reduce the rate of crime that Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) insist are no big deal and that other Leftists insist is justified reparations. Plusing up our military. The list goes on.

In the end, this is just one more reason to not use the Federal government to handle, centrally, such handouts. Instead, make block grants to the States.

That won’t stop the graft of this sort, but it at least would divide the money up across the States so that it would be harder to steal, and the governments making the disbursements would be closer to the problem—and to their constituents for accountability.

Better yet would be to tot up the total of all Federal transfers to each State and roll those into block grants—no strings attached—to the States. Then reduce the size of the block grants each subsequent year by 10% of that first year’s block until no more monies are being transferred to the States from Federal coffers.

After all, those monies, the Federal coffers, are the tax monies sent to the Feds by each State’s citizens. Let each State keep those tax funds in the first place, and eliminate the middle man. Each State will use the money more efficiently and more directly for that State’s citizen needs and wants and not for another State’s purposes.

The Federal government should collect, and use, only that which it needs for the only Constitutionally mandated purposes extant: to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States. That general Welfare, too, is enumerated in (and limited to) the purposes delineated in the next 16 clauses of Art I, Sect 8; the last clause being not a spending purpose but an authorization for Congress to make specific laws for specific spending.

If It’s a Good Idea….

Posted on by
Reply

One sub-bill in the Progressive-Democrats’ reconciliation bill would have removed a loophole that lets foreign purchasers of US real estate dodge a tax that could reach 30% on the profits generated by those holdings.

The loophole works like this:

Instead of buying a building directly, a foreign investor creates a shell company in an offshore location like the Cayman Islands.
That shell company then lends money to a US entity called a blocker corporation, which in turn buys the building. Instead of paying any profits from the building directly to the foreign investor, the blocker corporation sends interest on its loan to the offshore shell company, which then passes it on to the foreign investor. By taking this detour, the foreign investor avoids the tax on foreign real-estate owners.

It works because the blocker is a corporation domiciled in a territory that’s a US tax haven, and so those corporations avoid the tax.

There are a couple of implications from closing this loophole.

[P]roponents say it could raise billions in tax revenue.

That works for me. On the other hand,

Property owners worry it could also lead to fewer foreign purchases of US commercial real estate.

I’m having a hard time seeing any serious downside to that beyond a temporary (I say) downward pressure on real estate prices, or more likely, a slowing of increases in real estate prices, in the initial period following the closure of the loophole. After that initial period, though, the real estate market would adjust to the new regime, and real estate prices would resume their normal behavior.

If this sub-bill is a good idea—and I think it is, at least in principle—than it should be excised from that reconciliation foolishness and presented by itself in a clean, stand-alone bill. In January.

Taxes and “Give Backs”

Posted on by
Reply

There is a surprisingly broad misunderstanding regarding taxes and to whom those taxed funds belong, even among those who should know better. One example is The Wall Street Journal editors’ mischaracterization of Arkansas’ tax reductions in an editorial, which they subheadlined

Little Rock returns some of its booming revenue to taxpayers.

The “return of revenue” was this:

Governor Asa Hutchinson recently signed legislation that reduces the top state income-tax rate to 5.5% from 5.9%, effective New Year’s Day. The rate will continue to drop in stages to 4.9% by 2025.

Along with this:

The state Department of Finance and Administration anticipates that some 105,000 residents will soon pay no income tax as a result.

And this “sweetener:”

The legislation includes the sweetener of a $60 tax credit for some 535,000 Arkansans who make less than $23,600.

None of this is giving money back to Arkansan citizens; all of it is letting them keep more of their money in the first place.

Even the tax credit is less a giveback than it is a let ’em keep it, albeit after the friction of a tax man middleman has taken its toll.