Tag Archives: political economy

The Second Best Way

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have a way to get us average Americans to save more for our retirements, proposed at the end of its worry (justified) about unintended consequences associated with President Donald Trump’s (R) retirement saving program for our lowest income citizens.

The best way to get Americans to save more for retirement is by bringing down inflation and growing real wages.

The second best way, though, and one with more immediate effect, is to eliminate the contribution caps on our existing retirement programs–401(k), Traditional IRA, and Roth IRA. These are purely arbitrary limits with no fiscal meaning. They were set in order to get Progressive-Democrat buy-in and so actual passage. The limits were demanded by Party in order to cap the more successful and deny them the retirement capacity their greater success otherwise would have facilitated.

It’s time to be done with that.

Couldn’t Possibly Be

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It seems that more than 3 million folks once getting “Federal food aid” have stopped getting that aid. This is due, primarily, to tighter work requirement restrictions:

Under the new rules, able-bodied adults aged 18 to 64 without children under 14 must work, volunteer or participate in approved job-training programs for at least 80 hours a month. The previous age limit for work requirements was 54, and allowed exemptions for adults with children under 18.

Naturally, the Left is engaging in its manufactured angst over this.

Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University who studies food insecurity, said larger state drops like Arizona’s were “beyond anything we’ve ever seen.” Heflin said she was concerned it would result in vulnerable Americans not getting enough to eat.
“These large state drops in SNAP caseloads represent a fundamental restructuring of the food-assistance safety net,” she said. “We should expect to see a surge in food insecurity and its related negative consequences at new levels.”

Of course. The large drop couldn’t possibly be an indication of the bloat in the program and the number of ineligible folks taking the aid “beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

And there’s Bruce Meyer, a University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy Professor, who accidentally let that cat out of the Leftists’ bag:

Most of the people who are getting food stamps are needy. When you’re cutting that many people, you’re probably cutting into some people who really do need the benefits.

It certainly should be “most,” and it should be far more than just that. Only cutting “some” who really need the benefits is a strong indicator of the amount of bloat that’s been present.

A Solution

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Last year, a People’s Republic of China-owned and -operated mine in Zambia had a catastrophic failure of a mine tailings wall, creating an environmental disaster for Zambian citizens.

[A] tailings dam owned by Sino-Metals collapsed and unleashed toxic sludge into the Kafue River, farmlands along the river valley are scorched, hundreds of people lack a source of clean drinking water and residents continue to live on land contaminated with heavy metals.

The Zambian government meekly aided the PRC and its mine operators in covering up this disaster, trying to hide it from the public. To hell with its own citizens who still are paying with their health and their lives for the failure, now of their own government in addition to that of the PRC and its mine operators.

According to a US House Select Committee on China,

The Zambian government, which owes $6.6 billion to the Chinese government and Chinese lenders, has held back from pressing Sino-Metals over the disaster, fearing retaliation from China….

Retaliation. Here’s an alternate solution: cancel the contract with Sino-Metals and all other PRC “investments” and “loans” in Zambia, declare the $6.6 billion debt reclassified as the PRC’s and Sino-Metals’ debt to Zambia for the cleanup, and dare the PRC to retaliate in any material way.

No actual dollars would flow from this, but two salutary things would result: Zambia would be freed from a debt it never should have taken on in the first place—PRC terms are notoriously usurious and are designed for to force default and confiscation of the collateral (here, the mine itself) put up for the loan. Zambia also would be out from under the PRC’s thumb and free(r) to trade its wealth of natural resources to more honorable nations under more equitable terms.

Mistake

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President Donald Trump (R) is pushing Congress to include in its next budget enactment a 50% increase in the US quota contribution to the IMF, a dollar increase of some $55 billion.

The mistake is in this:

the cost to US control over IMF resources, which Treasury conceals with its claim in the budget that the “equiproportional” quota increase “would be fully offset by a reduction in” the use of debt, “all of which will keep the IMF’s overall lending capacity constant.” What Treasury doesn’t disclose is the hit to US power when the IMF gets more of its resources from equity than debt.

That hit comes from voting on IMF lending which depends on the fund’s use of debt via New Arrangements to Borrow which it does in order to raise lendable monies. This is loosely akin to a bank’s need for extending savings accounts to customers in order to raise funds to lend to other customers.  It takes approval by 85% of IMF voting shares for the IMF to borrow, and the US has had, heretofore, 16% of the voting shares, giving us veto power over IMF’s borrowing.

So long as the IMF has to borrow to lend, the US can exercise a large measure of control over IMF lending. But the US quota increase would shift the IMF’s ability to lend to those quota funds, and with that shift, the US would lose its current voting veto power, IMF could lend without serios oversight.

One upshot of all this, if it is passed, is an increase in the People’s Republic of China’s ability to borrow from the IMF and thereby to prop up its own internal excessive borrowing. And helping out an enemy nation like that is a very serious mistake.

Progressive-Democrats Destroy Again

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This time they’re Illinois’ Progressive-Democrat governor, the inestimable JB Pritzker, and the State’s Party-dominated legislature. (The Wall Street Journal misattributed the fiasco to Pritzker, but even within Party, Governors need the complicity of Party’s legislative syndicate.) Following is from the Chicago Tribune, from which the WSJ quoted.

The owner of two-thirds of a massive natural-gas-fired power plant in Will County is moving their part of the facility to Texas.
Literally.
As in, putting huge turbines on flatbed trucks and driving them south to friendlier climes.
We’ve learned that two-thirds of the capacity at the 1,350-megawatt Elwood Energy facility—the largest natural-gas-fired peaker power plant in Commonwealth Edison’s territory and one of the biggest in the nation—now is being shut down thanks to Illinois’ landmark clean-energy law [Climate & Equitable Jobs Act] enacted in 2021. The sudden removal of that whopping 900 megawatts of capacity could well drive up local electric bills that already have been rising.

And this:

The remaining three units at Elwood will continue to operate at the site and now will be permitted to do so under the law until 2045. Why? Because the previous owner, J-POWER, sold those three units to Dairyland Power Cooperative, of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, which by virtue of being a nonprofit is allowed by CEJA to operate gas-fired power plants over the next few decades that otherwise would have to shutter in a few years.
So those emissions also will continue well into the future, but only because ownership changed from a private company to a nonprofit.
Yes, that’s how CEJA works. If you’re not a privately held gas-plant operator, you can continue to pollute.

This is far more than the empty virtue signal that the WSJ article suggested. This is the wanton foolishness resulting in destruction that Party is so enthusiastically pursuing for reasons only Party members can have a glimmer of understanding.