Tag Archives: political economy

Josh Hawley Has This One Wrong

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Senator Josh Hawley (R, MO) is planning to introduce a child tax credit bill that would grant $6,000 to a single parent family with children less than 13 years old, and $12,000 to two-parent families with children in that age group.

We need a plan to help working parents that is pro-family and pro-work. I’ll be proposing legislation this coming week that gives a major tax cut to working parents to help them afford to start a family and raise their kids[.]

I have no doubt that Hawley’s heart is in the right place, but he’s badly mistaken on this.

For one thing, stipulating his underlying premise that tax gerrymandering is a good idea, he misses the point that kids cost the same to raise no matter how many parents they have, and regardless of how many of those parents work. The idea, predicated as it is on giving two-parent families a choice in how many of the parents work, also ignores the simple fact that a single parent not only has no such choice, but she (yes, I’m assuming. Sue me) has no support from a second parent, working or not.

For another thing, his underlying premise is badly flawed. Our tax code has no business being used for social engineering, whether for family support or for any other purpose. The same (tax) cost break could be given to those families, along with all American families and individuals, by limiting our tax code to covering the three—and only three—spending purposes enumerated in our Constitution, and then by setting that tax code to a single, low, flat rate shorn of all credits, subsidies, deductions, on all income, regardless of source, that leaves more of our money in the pockets of each of us.

A Brazilian Extortion Move

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The headline of a Wall Street Journal piece regarding the Amazon forest, its putative role in Earth’s climate, and Brazil says it all: Brazil’s Climate Overture to Biden: Pay Us Not to Raze Amazon. The article’s lede lays it out in crystalline terms.

Brazil’s government, widely criticized by environmental groups as a negligent steward of the Amazon rainforest, has made an audacious offer to the Biden administration: provide $1 billion and President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration will reduce deforestation by 40%.

The article closed with a question for readers:

Should the US give the Bolsonaro government in Brazil $1 billion to slow deforestation in the Amazon?

No, I say. No, in spades.

Here’s my counteroffer to Bolsonaro: slow deforestation of the Amazon by 50%, and we won’t cut our imports of Brazilian goods and services by $1 billion. End your deforestation by 2030—your proposed goal—and we’ll continue, after that date, to import Brazilian goods and services at rates consistent with market demand.

Here are the Brazilian terms starkly articulated by Bolsonaro’s Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles:

If we don’t give these people this economic support, they will continue to be co-opted or incentivized by illegal activities.

Cute. Those are “activities” the Brazilian government condones with its own passivity. Hence the Bolsonaro/Salles threat: “Nice forest you guys got here. Be too bad if something was to happen to it. Be better if you was to pay up.”

Foxconn’s New Deal

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In 2017, Foxconn signed a deal with Wisconsin to invest $10 billion, build an electronics manufacturing plant in the State, and hire 13,000 people by the year 2032.

Now, Foxconn has renegotiated the deal and will invest as much as $672 million and create 1,454 jobs by the year 2025.

What’s changed?

A number of things, but two in particular are the Republican Governor and Republican President in 2017, and the Progressive-Democrat Governor and the Progressive-Democrat President today.

It’s also true that the negotiated incentives are considerably less per job created under the new deal than under the old, but what does that matter to the 11,500 folks who won’t get any of those new jobs? What does that matter to the businesses—and their employees and prospective new hires—who won’t get the business associated with that earlier and much larger investment?

But hey, collateral damage happens. Nor does that damage matter to Progressive-Democrats; all they want is the look-good-in-the-shower headlines.

Progressive-Democrats’ Newspeak Dictionary

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“Infrastructure” entry. Here’s a brief list of what the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party claim is infrastructure and what they want to spend $1.25-$1.5 trillions of your tax dollars on.

  • climate action
  • climate justice
  • affordable housing
  • green housing
  • police accountability
  • Supreme Court expansion
  • paid leave
  • child care
  • caregiving

Infrastructure is turtles, all the way down.

Que Bill the Cat.

Here’s the standard, Merriam-Webster online dictionary, definition:

1: the system of public works of a country, state, or region
2: the underlying foundation or basic framework (as of a system or organization)

And the standard, American Heritage online dictionary, definition:

1. An underlying base or foundation especially for an organization or system.
2. The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons.

I decline to surrender the dictionary to the extremists of the Left or to their Party.

Internal Tariffs

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Mercantilist tariffs (as opposed to tariffs as foreign policy tools) are purely protectionist, designed to punish competitors for competing. They’re not only aimed at foreign competition, either, as Europe’s auto industry is demonstrating [emphasis added].

Auto makers in Europe eager to boost sales of their electric vehicles have a new strategy: demanding higher taxes on conventional vehicles that burn gas and diesel fuel.
The top executives at several car and truck makers are calling on European governments to introduce the new taxes on carbon-dioxide emissions from gasoline- and diesel-powered cars and trucks as a way to help their EVs better compete.

And there’s this bit of disingenuosity [emphasis added]:

Taxing emissions from polluting vehicles, he [Volkswagen AG Chairman of the Board of Management and VW Group CEO Herbert Diess] and other executives say, would help ensure electric vehicles remain attractive for buyers after the expiration of subsidies that are now sustaining sales.

But don’t you dare think about taxing the EVs’ pollution from mining the materials needed for the batteries, the pollution from manufacturing those batteries, or the pollution from disposing of those batteries when they’re spent.

Once again, if a company’s product is unable to compete in a free market without subsidies for their own products or artificial burdens—those internal protectionist tariffs—laid on competing products, the company’s product is not viable and not ready for market.

Full stop.