Tag Archives: political economy

Income Inequality

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The Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party like to bleat about this and to complain further about how it has only gotten worse.

They know better.

Here’s a little tidbit, from Phil Gramm’s and John Early’s op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:

While the disparity in earned income has become more pronounced in the past 50 years, the actual inflation-adjusted income received by the bottom quintile, counting the value of all transfer payments received net of taxes paid, has risen by 300%. The top quintile has seen its after-tax income rise by only 213%. As government transfer payments to low-income households exploded, their labor-force participation collapsed, and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

That bit is disguised, as Gramm and Early point out, by the Census Bureau’s decision to not count taxes paid and Government transfers—welfare payments—paid when it measures income.

Of course the Left and their Party want to ignore actual facts—that’s demonstrated by that last part: [low-income household] labor-force participation collapsed, and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

Those are carefully created Government dependents—and votes collected in payment for those handouts.

“Sanctions”

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That’s what US, Canada, Britain, and European Union politicians are claiming they’ll impose on the People’s Republic of China in response to PRC genocide efforts against the Uyghurs in the PRC’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The sanctions are expected to vary in type, and will include Global Magnitsky economic sanctions on individuals alleged to be involved with the mistreatment of the Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China.

Among those sanctions are these which the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU already imposed last Monday to four (count ’em) PRC officials:

  • Zhu Hailun, former deputy Communist Party head in Xinjiang
  • Wang Junzheng, party secretary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps
  • Wang Mingshan, member of the Xinjiang’s Communist Party standing committee
  • Chen Mingguo, director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (PSB)
  • Xinjiang Public Security Bureau itself

Politico noted, interestingly, that the EU explicitly omitted to sanction the top Communist Party boss in Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo.

That’ll show them. We’re wagging our fingers very firmly at the PRC, and shortly we’ll be wagging our fingers even more vigorously.

Right.

What’s truly needful here is—at the minimum—a ban on import or even purchase of goods manufactured, including constituent parts, or assembled in Xinjiang or any business anywhere in the PRC with any sort of tie back to Xinjiang, and a parallel ban on doing any sort of business with a Xinjiang-associated enterprise.

Better would be to expand that list to include an ever broadening set of imports from or exports to the PRC until that nation provides publicly available and publicly verifiable proof that the PRC has put an end to its assault on the Uyghurs.

Fat chance, though, as the politicians of the four nations have shown themselves too timid to do more

How Fast is Fast?

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Starlink is touting 120Mb/sec on its downlinks from its growing constellation of satellites purpose-built and -orbited to provide Internet connections.

Other satellite Internet providers in the offing are claiming similar speeds.

Put the speeds in context, though.

My Ethernet Internet connection gets link speeds in the gigabit/sec range.

My cable Internet provider gets me downlink speeds in the low hundreds of Mb/sec (faster than Starlink’s present 120Mb/Sec).

Consider another aspect of a satellite constellation network. Surface-based Internet connections (which cable connections are, for all that some of them still use microwave connections rather than underground copper (less obsolete than microwave) or glass to send their signals over much shorter distances than can satellites—which must bring the signal up from its ground-based origin, run it along that longer orbital arc, and then back down to the surface-based destination.

The throughput in any leg of that distance may well be lightning fast—which 120MB/sec is, for all that gigabit/sec is faster. But to all of that must be added the physics-created latencies—because the signal only goes at the speed of light—with further latencies created by each relay required as the signal is pushed from satellite to satellite before being relayed to the ground.

For all that negativity, though, a satellite-based Internet connection is fast, fast enough for consumer needs (so far) and for most business needs (so far), and it’s infinitely faster for those users in locations not reached by any other Internet network.

The follow-on question is whether a satellite-based Internet network can evolve as those “so fars” evolve.

Minimum Wage and “Must Pass” Bills

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Congressional Progressive-Democrats are looking for ways to pass a national minimum wage law through Congress.

Progressive House Democrats are rapidly searching for ways to revive the $15 minimum wage increase after a stinging loss in the passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus law.

Congressman Mark Pocan (D, WI):

We will get at least 50 votes in the Senate, and we will find a way to finally do what Congress has been negligent to ask for too long; whether it’s adding it to a must-pass bill or pushing it around those arcane Senate rules or some other measure, America will get the raise that is long overdue that we are committed to[.]

Along strictly Party lines and/or by being buried in a bill that Congress and the President will decide the nation can’t exist without.

Not that anyone in the Progressive-Democratic Party cares about bipartisanship. Here’s Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN):

We should not allow any obstacles to get in our way as we push for this policy. It’s imperative that we explore every avenue, every strategy, that will allow us to push through[.]

And here’s the utter contempt for those ordinary Americans who run the small and mom-and-pop businesses that will be most damaged by a nationally mandated minimum wage. Congressman Donald Norcross (D, NJ), Co-Chair of the Progressive-Democrats’ Congressional Labor Caucus insists that:

small business owners opposed to a $15 minimum wage hike are crying “crocodile tears,” arguing that “they should be happy because it levels the playing field with competition; across the street will be paying the same thing….

Yeah—those whiners should be satisfied that all of them are being equally damaged. Never mind that they aren’t only competing against those “across the street;” they’re also competing against the major businesses and chains—who can handle a mandated increase in wage.

But hey—the Progressive-Democrat knows far better, from the august heights of his Beltway bubble, than do actual business owners and operators what the situation is on the ground.

There’s a hint buried in there, though, somewhere. If the concept of a Federally mandated minimum wage can’t pass through Congress as a stand-alone bill, maybe it’s just barely possible that a Federally mandated minimum wage is a terrible idea, a bad law, and something that us Americans—and us actual business owners—don’t want.

Panic-Mongering and the Wuhan Virus

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Here are some examples of that panic-mongering. They are far from an exhaustive list, but they are illustrative.

New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo estimated that, based on the epidemiological curve at the time, “in 45 days [the state] could have up to an input of people who need 110,000 beds that compares to our current capacity of 53,000 beds, 37,000 ICU units, ventilators, which compares to a capacity currently of 3,000 ventilators.”

Yet,

COVID hospitalizations in the state peaked roughly a month later, coming in at just under 19,000…. Total ICU COVID patients peaked shortly thereafter at 5,225, or at just 13% of the governor’s forecast.

And this one:

Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom estimated that, on top of its existing 75,000 hospital beds, the state would require “an additional 50,000 beds in our system.”
“Our new modeling suggests 50,000 is the new target number[.]”

Yet,

California data show that the state’s current peak in hospitalized patients came in early January of this year and totaled just under 23,000….

And this one:

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington predicted on March 31 of last year that Michigan would see peak COVID-19 hospital usage on April 10, topping out at about 14,000 COVID patients in beds.

Yet,

Data from the COVID Tracking Project shows that on that date hospitalized patients in the state totaled just over 3,800. That number plummeted in the weeks that followed, and though it rose again during the fall/winter spike, its peak on December 2 was still just 4,300, significantly less than IHME’s springtime projection.

And this one:

[From] New Jersey, an analysis out of Rutgers University in mid-March 2020…determined that, with about 23,000 hospital beds statewide, the state might face a peak shortfall of over 300,000 beds in a worst-case model positing minimal action to curb the spread of COVID.

Yet,

Hospital usage…peaked in the state on April 16 at 8,224 before falling sharply. During the fall spike, the COVID hospital census there plateaued around 3,600.

It’s hard to believe that such learned persons could be so far wrong—and not move quickly to correct their errors.

Maybe it’s time to look at their motives for making those projections. Maybe that time has come, especially, against the naked power grab that is the Progressive-Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, which they masqueraded as a Wuhan Virus relief bill, even though less than 10% of that nearly $2 trillion bill has anything even remotely related to the virus.