Tag Archives: political economy

It’s Not Only That

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The Wall Street Journal notes that the Federal Reserve says it makes its determinations based on what the data tell it, and then the WSJ notes that the Fed has been wildly wrong lately and lays that off to data volatility. The failures, it seems, are in the Fed’s data dependency.

The Fed says it sets policy based on incoming data, especially on inflation and jobs. And those data have been both unreliable and far more volatile than usual….

The WSJ then provides its definition of data dependency:

“[D]ata dependency” has come to mean looking only at recent data, ignoring projections for the effects of interest rates on the economy in future.

The problems with this definition are two. In the first place, projections of the future are just guesses, even if somewhat informed by current data. As a great 20th century American philosopher understood, it’s tough to make projections, especially into the future.

The other problem is that this definition of data dependency wholly ignores realized, empirical data: those that have occurred before “recent.” Decent data reliance requires those past data be included, even if as estimates of the underlying trend through that empirical past into “today” (and some little way into the future).

A Determination to Create Dependency

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The Progressive-Democrat-run government of California has placed on its November ballot a proposal to require a State-wide minimum wage of $18 per hour. The Wall Street Journal editors provide some data, citing a Beacon Economics study.

  • 90% of the 130,000 newly unemployed in California during the past two years were under age 35
  • Between the first quarters of 2022 and 2024, unemployment among those ages 16 to 19 increased to 19.2% from 10.8% in California, versus 11.9% from 10.5% nationwide
  • Unemployment among those 20 to 24 years old also ticked up 1.3 percentage points in California, while declining 0.7 percentage points nationwide
  • unemployment averaged 3.2% in the 20 states that followed the federal minimum wage compared to 4.1% in the 15 with minimums between $14 and $17
  • fast-food employment in California has declined 3.2% over the last five months while increasing 3.6% nationwide
  • fast-food prices in California increased 3.7% after the higher minimum took effect in April

The editors asked a question: Are they trying to keep teens out of work? It’s far broader than that.

Where do these unemployed go? To Government for early on unemployment insurance and for long-trm welfare payments. The youth—those 16-19 years old and 20-24 years old—who start out dependent on Government for handouts have very little hope of breaking that dependency; it’s hard enough for adults who’ve been and are being priced out of low-skill jobs. Especially in an economic environment so riddled with these Progressive-Democrat policies.

That dependency on government, though, is votes for that government’s incumbents and preservation of those incumbents’ power.

A Cost of Government

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The Congressional Budget Office is saying that the Progressive-Democrat Biden-Harris administration’s Medicare prescription drug scheme could cost taxpayers more than $20 billion over three years.

The budget analysis arm of Congress said the increased costs are due to the government subsidizing many seniors’ premiums by sending money to insurance firms, and it would cost at least $5 billion extra in 2025 alone and add to the deficit.

If the administration really wants to spend our tax remittals on subsidies for seniors’ prescription drugs, it would be orders of magnitude more efficient to send those subsidy dollars directly to the seniors and let each individual senior use the money for his own particular medicine needs.

That’s anathema, though, to Progressive-Democratic Party politicians. That would put the decision-making, the responsibility, in the hands of us average Americans as individuals, in the hands of individual geezers in the particular case. Party doesn’t think we’re capable of making our own decisions, though. Party insists that only its members who are in government are capable of such decision-making; the rest of us really need to just sit down and do as we’re told. And experience the joy of that.

Broken Promises

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The lede lays it out.

Government makes many promises, the Biden Administration more than most. Results are another story.

Here’s an all too typical example:

The 2021 infrastructure law included $42.5 billion for states to expand broadband to “unserved,” mostly rural, communities. Three years later, ground hasn’t been broken on a single project. The Administration recently said construction won’t start until next year at the earliest, meaning many projects won’t be up and running until the end of the decade.

With this follow-up:

Blame the Administration’s political regulations. States must submit plans to the Commerce Department about how they’ll use the funds and their bidding process for providers. Commerce has piled on mandates that are nowhere in the law and has rejected state plans that don’t advance progressive goals.

Whatever. That excuse misses the point. These program failures aren’t unique to the Biden-Harris administration. These incumbents are only the latest example. No, the failures have gone on for so long, across nearly all 235-ish years of Federal administrations, that it should be well-understood, by us average Americans and by the politicians who make them, that promises in the name of Government are just lies: they know when they make those promises that they won’t be carried out.

The answer lies not in making Government men live up to their government program promises; it lies in getting Government out of our economy almost altogether, and letting us citizens and our private enterprises do their trick in a free market unhamstrung by government promises, much less excessive regulatory laws and regulations.

Words

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is “subtly” changing what she says about her economic plans, should she be elected. Her advisers’ claim is

While President Biden’s agenda focused on jobs, Harris is focused on costs. Where Biden sees voters foremost as workers, she sees them more as consumers.
As a result, her policies are aimed at trying to help middle-class Americans afford the things they need and want, and helping them build wealth that can be passed along to their children, her advisers say.

She may be changing the style of her rhetoric, but her plans remain to raise taxes on our income, in the name of making the billionaires “pay their fair share” without specifying what that share is, and which tax increases will reach down into our middle class through their effect on small businesses and large businesses’ employment plans.

She may be changing the style of her rhetoric, but her plans remain to increase government spending on Party special interests, including subsidies for her “green new deal” businesses while hamstringing our oil- and gas-based energy production ability.

She may be changing the style of her rhetoric, but her plans remain to institute price controls on a broad range of products from pharmaceuticals to food in our grocery stores, all in the name of her mythical price gouging.

She’s also said in so many words that her values haven’t changed. Her values are made plain through those plans. What she’s saying now, those “subtle changes,” are as her Senate colleague Bernie Sanders (I, VT) says, just empty words uttered to curry votes.

Nothing more.