Tag Archives: political economy

Market Imperatives

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Ford has said that it will delay the rollout of its wholly battery-powered three-row electric vehicles, its new model SUVs, from 2025 to 2027. That’s not because of development or production problems, either.

The additional time will allow for the consumer market for three-row EVs to further develop and enable Ford to take advantage of emerging battery technology, with the goal to provide customers increased durability and better value.

“Allowing the consumer market to develop further”—in other words, consumers don’t want these battery SUVs, and Ford isn’t intent on producing and not selling them, until customers actually want them. Which they don’t, never minding Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s æther-borne claim to the contrary.

Those silly consumers—they just don’t know what’s good for them.

Yet Another Misapprehension

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…by the Left in its favoring of and dependency on Government. This one concerns what passes for education in our public schools and is written openly by a Letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section.

The letter writer opines that since everything else is free in those schools, so should lunches be free.

We have long provided free books and transportation for schoolchildren, regardless of their parents’ income.

No, we never have. Those books and transportation means were, and are, paid for with our tax money.

We are responsible for students’ welfare from the time the free bus picks them up in the morning until the free bus takes them home at the end of the day.

Again, no we are not. “We” are responsible for students’ education from the time of their arrival at school to the end of the (too short IMNSHO) school day. Parents—the true “we”—are responsible for the students’ welfare all of the 24 hours in a day.

It makes sense that we should also be responsible for students’ nutrition while they are under our care at school.

This makes no sense at all, especially since they are not at all under “our” care at school. That “our” part is exacerbated by the sophistry that “our” care actually is educating our children.

What Progressive-Democrats Think of our Veterans

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Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Governor Maura Healey is moving to turn an erstwhile Boston veterans care facility into a shelter for illegal aliens. She’s intent on converting

the historic Chelsea Soldiers’ Home—which was vacant and scheduled for demolition—into a site for 100 migrant families and pregnant women[.]

Meanwhile, there remain several hundred of our veterans—who are in our nation legally—in Boston who are homeless and need shelter of their own. When the facility was open to veterans, they had to pay $10-$30 per month, depending on whether they needed nursing care or just a place to be. The facility was closed last December, though in lieu of a different, larger facility. Closed, not kept open as an additional facility for our veterans.

It’s true enough that otherwise unsupported pregnant women also need a place to be, and it’s true enough that the women aren’t necessarily illegal aliens. The fact remains though, that for all that earlier support, our veterans had to pay for their stays there. Now that it’s scheduled to become a shelter for illegal aliens, those illegals won’t even have to pay that token fee. America’s—Massachusetts’—taxpayers will foot the bill for them.

This is what Progressive-Democrats think about the generations of Americans, and of those soon-to-be-American by dint of their service, who have fought for our nation, for our freedom, and have been maimed, or killed in those struggles over the centuries. Illegal aliens—who broke our laws and continue to break them by staying here of their own, malice aforethought—will get better treatment under this move than our veterans, men and women in much direr straits as a result of their defense of our nation.

It is shameful that an American political party would treat those who made that party, and all the others, possible in this way.

Pay Their Fair Share

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Progressive-President Joe Biden is busily trying to raise taxes in his never ending effort to get the Evil Rich to Pay Their Fair Share™.

Here are some numbers and a couple of graphs, via The Wall Street Journal‘s editors:

…for 2021 show that the top 1% of Americans reported 26.3% of the country’s adjusted gross income, while paying 45.8% of total income taxes.

This graph shows the trend of taxes paid and who pays them over the course of this century:

Yet Biden, Progressive-Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), Progressive-Democrat Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (IL), and the rest of Biden’s Party syndicate, individually and as a group, flat refuse to say what they believe that fair share should be. Plainly, that’s because they’ve already defined among themselves, that fair share to be All of It.

This is illustrated by the tax increases that Biden is actively pushing this year. Per a Tax Foundation analysis,

The tax increases would substantially increase marginal tax rates on investment, saving, and work, reducing economic output by 2.2% in the long run, wages by 1.6%, and employment by 788,000 full-time equivalent jobs. On a gross basis, we estimate Biden’s FY 2025 budget would increase taxes by about $4.4 trillion over that period [of 2024 to 2034]. After taking various credits into account, the increase would be about $3.4 trillion[.]
[Biden’s] tax changes…include “additional taxes on high earners, higher taxes on US businesses—including increasing taxes that Biden enacted with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) —and more tax credits for a variety of taxpayers and activities[.]

As the WSJ editors asked,

Is this not a “fair share” to Mr Biden? Then what would be?

Plainly what would be to Biden and his Party syndicate All of It.

This is the central plank of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s platform this season. And they won’t stop with the Evil Rich as they define down what constitutes “rich” behind their DEI smokescreen.

Reassurances

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People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping is busily…reassuring…foreign business leaders, especially American chief executives, that

the country is working to improve its business environment.

Xi mustn’t be taken seriously in any of this.

The PRC’s national security law requires all PRC-domiciled businesses and their affiliates satisfy the nation’s intelligence community requests for information on any subject it deems useful for national security and to actively seek out that information—to conduct espionage if necessary—to obtain that information. That information gathering is far easier when the (foreign) target is present in the PRC.

Further PRC laws require foreign enterprises to partner with local enterprises (though the requirement for equal or majority control by the domestic enterprise has been lifted) and to facilitate technology and intellectual property transfer to the local enterprise as a condition prerequisite to doing any business within the PRC. If those transfers aren’t moving quickly enough to suit the government, the government’s hackers attempt to steal the data.

Yet further PRC laws require Communist Party of China apparatchiks present in those domestic partners to have access to the foreign partner, also.

Overarching all of that: the PRC is a nation that rules by law; it is not a nation that operates under rule of law tenets. As such, the laws by which the PRC operates are malleable and subject to the ephemeral whims of Xi and his Communist Party of China syndicate. That, though, is not unique to Xi, or to the PRC since 1949. Rule by law has been the position of the rulers of mainland China since the nation began coalescing out of the Warring States Period nearly two-and-a-quarter millennia ago.

If those American business heads, already showing excessive credulity by being present at the PRC’s China Development Forum and subsequent personal audience granted by Xi, allow themselves to be taken in by Xi’s blandishments at the audience, they’ll be showing themselves too credulous to be fit to manage their respective businesses.