Tag Archives: political economy

The Utility of Automation

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The International Longshoremen’s Association is demonstrating that, in spades, with its strike and its intent on inflicting maximum damage to our nation and our economy. Here’s the ILA MFWIC, Harold Daggett:

We’re going to show these greedy bastards you can’t survive without us!

Pretty nice business you got there. Pay up, suckers.

People are going to sit up and realize how important longshoremen jobs are. They won’t be able to sell cars. They won’t be able to stock malls. They won’t be able to do anything in this country without my f—ing people.

Automation will make such threats to business’ ability to function at all destructions of the past.

In today’s world, I’ll cripple you[.]

That’s Daggett’s response to speculation that the Biden/Harris administration might invoke Taft-Hartly to force the union workers back to their jobs. In the process of crippling our nation, he’s said he’d include slow-walking every step of every task.

Oh, and robots won’t hold out for a 77% pay raise as a precondition to entering into any negotiations at all.

The sooner this union is replaced with automatic facilities at the docks, the better off we’ll all be—including those dockworkers.

Biden-Harris Helene Failure

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Regarding the damage done by Hurricane Helene and recovery efforts by those concerned: don’t count the Biden-Harris administration among those concerned. Cynical Publius noted on X:

This is unbelievable.
XVIII Airborne Corps is located on Fort Bragg (I refuse to call it by that other woke name), a mere 268 miles from Asheville and the worst flooding areas of this Biblical-level tragedy.
The Corps’ capabilities include:

-Extensive medium and heavy lift rotary wing aircraft.
-A theater sustainment command with incredible capabilities for delivery of food, potable water, fuel and construction materials.
-A medical brigade with Level III surgical capabilities.
-An engineer brigade with robust heavy construction assets.
-A military police brigade that can provide traffic control and assist local LE.
-An Airborne Infantry division that has routinely supported disaster relief in years past.
-A world-class command, control and communications HQ capability to make it all work.

NONE OF THAT has been ordered to assist civil authorities? NONE OF IT??????
Fort Bragg has routinely supported domestic disaster relief for DECADES—Katrina, Homestead, you name it.  Hell, I myself have a Humanitarian Service Medal for support to Hurricane Fran relief out of Bragg.
Now we can’t do anything for an epic disaster in the SAME FREAKING STATE?
WTF, over?
This goes beyond mere negligence.  It must be malicious.  Perhaps Kamala and Joe don’t want NC’s rural GOP counties to be able to vote on November 5th?
This is an abomination, and one of the worst derelictions of Presidential duties in US history.

He posted in response to this, in which we have Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s cynical (there’s no reason to believe it’s merely ignorant) claim, quoted from a C-SPAN clip of a reporter’s question and Biden’s response (see the clip itself at the end of the post):

Biden on Hurricane Helene:
Reporter: “Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?”
Biden: “We’ve given everything that we have.”
Reporter “Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?”
Biden: “No.”

The expression on Biden’s face shows how proud he is of this (lack of) effort.

Hugh Wang added

And a little further east is Camp Lejune and cherry point. II MEF [Marine Expeditionary Force] with an entire Marine Air Wing, trucks, engineers, etc.

This is beyond disgusting.

Government “Influence” over US Industry

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The headline says it all:

Harris Puts Government Intervention at Heart of Economic Policy

And this:

Her plans are largely an extension of Biden’s yearslong effort to use government tools and finances to boost key sectors of the economy. The approach, known in economic parlance as “industrial policy,” is also increasingly supported by some Republicans, who have relaxed their free-market convictions….

Harris’ policy proposals are reminiscent of 1930s Italy and modern-day People’s Republic of China. Too many Republicans are going along with this sort of degradation of our economy.

Borrow More and Spend More

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The People’s Republic of China economy is continuing its malaise and apparent downward spiral from falling prices and its festering real estate crisis. International trade tensions aren’t helping.

A solution:

The central government in Beijing needs to borrow and spend more to drive up growth and inflation, he said, and should give its local counterparts more freedom to use their borrowing quotas to support consumption.

“He” is Julian Evans-Pritchard, Singapore-based Capital Economics‘ Head of China Economics. He doesn’t, however, suggest from whom the PRC should borrow.

The population of potential lenders includes the good citizens of the PRC, who are reluctant to lend any further, having been burned by their own borrowing into that real estate market, and whose pullback is feeding that problem. Lenders include those who might lend to those local counterparts who already are not consuming the yuan already borrowed. More room in those local borrowing tills seems scant, and those potential lenders already are debt-strapped on their own. Lenders also include international buyers—individuals, businesses, and governments—of the various PRC government debt instruments. Those instruments already issued have lost and are continuing to lose market value to the detriment of those current lender/holders; this drives up the interest rate the government must offer on new issues, which increases the cost of that borrowing. After a point those increasingly elevated interest rates become prima facie evidence of the current and increasingly risky nature of those instruments.

Evans-Pritchard also doesn’t seem to recognize the inherent weakness of borrowing based on declining value asset collateral—which is what borrowing for consumption is.

It all adds up to the foolishness of Modern Monetary Theory, the theory that money is leaves on an infinite tree. What the People’s Bank of China has done—offering 500 billion yuan in loans to funds, brokers, and insurers to buy Chinese stocks; putting up another 300 billion yuan to finance company share buybacks—is just the first step of pulling leaves off that tree. To be sure, cutting its benchmark interest rate and lowering bank cash reserve requirements, which the PBOC also has done, ordinarily is a standard central bank move to stimulate economic activity, but when they’re done on concert with those other moves, they lose their stimulative effect and just become the sharp sugar high before the crash. The end result of this will be yet more borrowing, but this time from the futures of the PRC’s current children and of their children’s children—whose generational sizes are shrinking.

There are lessons here for us, were our politicians interested in learning them.

Just a Few Clarifications

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Janet Yellen, the Biden-Harris administration Treasury Secretary had an op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal that is full of gaslight claims, and so I offer here some clarification on some of them.

When President Biden and Vice President Harris took office, thousands of Americans were dying from Covid-19, and the unemployment rate was 50% higher than it is today.

Fifty percent more than a small number still is a small number. Aside from that, unemployment already had been starting down, sharply, and had reached roughly 6.5%—down from a peak of 10%-11% at the height of the shutdown—and was continuing to fall rapidly as our nation reopened in the latter half of the last year of the Trump administration.

We vaccinated millions to save lives and allow businesses to reopen safely.

Aside from the fact that businesses already were reopening—hence the already rapidly falling unemployment—those vaccinations occurred with vaccines developed under a Trump administration crash program. Production and distribution of those vaccines had already begun, and one of the first actions of the Biden-Harris administration in early 2021 was to delay delivery of those vaccines to the distribution centers.

[W]e made critical investments in infrastructure and manufacturing—from clean energy to semiconductors….

The Biden-Harris administration allocated those dollars; a large fraction of them, three-plus years later, remain unspent.

The US labor market recovered faster from the 2020 recession than from previous recessions. Economic growth surpassed private-sector predictions of a modest recovery.

Our economy already was in a steep, rapid recovery, beginning in late summer 2020—the last year of the Trump administration. Oh, and the labor market already was rapidly reemploying the work force.

[T]he US has outperformed many other advanced economies, with greater real gross domestic product growth and a faster decline in inflation while maintaining a strong labor market.

This is an especially large bit of gaslighting. Our economy doing better than “many other advanced economies” is a non sequitur. We aren’t those other nations; our citizens live here in the United States, and we operate here in our American economy. Too, that so much bragged about inflation decline is from a high peak caused by Biden-Harris policies, not least of which was the Inflation Reduction Act enacted in the Biden-Harris first year that threw trillions of dollars into our economy without an associated increase in production. Yellen also carefully ignored the fact that prices remain higher today, by double digit accumulated inflation, than they were in the final stages of the Trump administration. Those higher prices are an especially serious problem given that real wages have shrunk over Biden-Harris administration, with only recent periods of wage increases exceeding the same period inflation.

And that GDP growth? That’s compared to the exceptionally low GDP growth experienced during the depths of the Wuhan Virus situation.