Tag Archives: political economy

Build Back Better is Good

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Jason Furman, ex-Chairman of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) White House Council of Economic Advisers and currently a Harvard Professor of something styled “Practice,” is all about the Biden-Harris reconciliation collection of policies known as Build Back Better.

He even wrote this in all seriousness in his piece in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:

Build Back Better would have a minuscule impact on inflation over the medium and long term.

Even were that true, though, in the short term where most of us live, especially the lower middle class and poor among us who live especially short-term—paycheck to paycheck—we’re facing not just inflation, which is a rate, but actual steady-state higher prices; higher prices which will last into Furman’s medium and long terms, and beyond.

Meanwhile, wages won’t rise fast enough to reduce those higher prices to the status quo ante‘s buying power any time soon, leaving our lower middle class and poor worse off in Furman’s medium and longer term, and beyond.

That wage rise, further, will be held back by Biden-Harris’ and Progressive-Democrats’ penchant for regulation, which will hinder the rise in productivity that’s necessary to facilitate wages’ rise.

Furman knows this full well; he’s one of the Smart Ones of the Left.

Cutting Your Home’s Carbon Footprint

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Alberto Cervantes and Katherine Blunt had a piece on this subject in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

It’s a piece that I can only characterize as virtue-signaling. Their opening paragraph has this:

What does a lower-carbon home look like?… It uses heat pumps for heating and cooling, solar panels and batteries for electricity generation and storage, induction ranges for cooking and chargers for electric vehicles.

What they seem a pains to elide, though, are associated, unavoidable carbon footprints (as always, granting (which I do not, except arguendo) carbon footprints matter) and really nasty pollution.

What is the carbon footprint from the manufacture of heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries?

What is the carbon footprint from mining the raw materials? The carbon footprint from their transformation into the components for those heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries?

What is the carbon footprint from transporting materials from each prior stage of mining and manufacture to the next stage and ultimately to the end-use location?

What about the pollution from mining the ores necessary for these items’ components? The lithium, nickel, cadmium, and other battery metals are especially toxic to mine—and not only the metals, the mining tailings also are strongly polluting.

What about the toxic pollution from disposal of spent batteries—those toxic metals still are in those batteries that no longer work due to the simple nature of batteries aging and fading out of usefulness?

Energy efficiency always is a plus, if only from an economic perspective. But our goal should be energy efficiency, not limits on permitted energy.

We Need It

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One of the arguments Progressive-Democrats are using to rationalize their claimed need to pass their spendiferous reconciliation bill is one being advanced by Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D, MI), this time via a Friday interview with Martha MacCallum on her The Story. Huge spending subsidies for child care is necessary because folks can’t otherwise afford it, so they can’t go back to work.

What Progressive-Democrats refuse to address, though—including Dingell (and MacCallum shied away from asking Dingell about it)—is that pre-pandemic, folks could afford child care, the unemployment rate was solidly below 4%, and the labor force participation rate was two per centage points higher than today.

What’s changed? I mean, besides lockdowns, which we now know was a mistake, yet Progressive-Democrats still demand them, and Progressive-Democrats having gained power and insist on throwing money at an economy that cannot absorb it without historically high inflation.

Weakness

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Russia is continuing to withhold a free flow of natural gas to the EU, holding the flow down in order to elevate prices inflicted on the EU’s citizenry and to restrain Europe’s industrial capacity.

Gas prices have soared in Europe in recent months due to low inventories and a recovery in demand as the economy rebounds from the pandemic. The price surge has taken a toll on energy-intensive industrial activity while consumers face a steep rise in energy bills as the winter heating season begins.

Those prices are five times the level of just a year ago—before Biden surrendered to Putin on the Russia-sponsored hacker shutdown of Colonial Pipeline by unblocking the finishing of Russia’s Nordstream 2, which unblock also was in furtherance of Merkel’s demand for Russian natural gas via that cross-Baltic Sea pipeline.

Officials and analysts say that Moscow is using Europe’s energy crunch to gain geopolitical leverage.

Well, of course Putin is. He’s not an idiot.

And

In another sign that Russia isn’t about to significantly boost supplies to Europe, Ukraine’s gas transmission system said Sunday that it hasn’t received any additional requests from Gazprom and the gas transit remained below capacity.

This is the outcome of outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s and newly arrived American President Joe Biden’s (D) enthusiastically pursued energy policies coupled with Biden’s overt timidity in front of Putin. First, demonstrate Europe’s weakness. Only after that, exploit that weakness.

It stretches credulity beyond breaking to believe two such heavily intelligent people didn’t anticipate this.

Government Controls

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Here’s the latest version of the Biden-Harris administration’s attempt to expand government control over our economy, this time using Medicare drug pricing as their venue. This example also is the latest inclusion in the Progressive-Democratic Party’s reconciliation bill.

The Health and Human Services Secretary will “negotiate” 10 to 20 of the drugs that Medicare spends most on, starting in 2025. Drug makers will get socked with a 95% excise tax on gross sales if they don’t agree to the government’s price.

This is a textbook example of the fascism version of socialism. Companies are free to produce and sell whatever they want, so long as it fits within Government requirements directing what is produced, the volume of production, and the prices to be charged.

Yet, Biden can’t make the trucks run on time.