Tag Archives: political economy

More Biden-Inspired Censorship

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It seems that Senators Josh Hawley (R, MO) and Chuck Grassley (R, IA) requested a collection of documents and answers to 10 questions from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Mayorkas sent back non-responses to the questions and heavily redacted documents in not responding to the docs request (“two documents already in the public domain” and “500 pages of material, approximately half of which are mostly or entirely redacted”).

DHS cited Freedom of Information Act disclosure privileges in making the redaction[.]

This is yet another example of the Biden administration’s intrinsic dishonesty and its penchant for censorship.

The Senators shouldn’t have had to respond with the obvious:

We remind you that the oversight letters we send to the Executive Branch are signed in our capacity as sitting members of Congress, a separate and co-equal branch of government.

And

Noting that DHS cited Freedom of Information Act disclosure privileges in making the redaction, Hawley and Grassley pointed out that FOIA provisions “do not apply to the oversight requests we submit in our capacity as constitutional officers and should not be applied to the materials that DHS produces in response to congressional requests.”
“Simply put, Congress controls when to make documents within its possession public, not DHS….”

2024 can’t come soon enough, and the Republicans better not blow that one.

Decreasing Rate of Inflation

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It’s still inflation, and it’s still growing. Wall Street Journal editors point out that

The 12-month inflation rate fell to 7.1% in November, which is down from 7.7% in October and is the fifth annual rate drop in a row since inflation peaked at 9.1% in June.

That decline, though, is against a higher rate of inflation that year ago—2021—than in 2020, the last year of the prior administration, which also was the last year of our economic burgeon.

In addition, greatly mitigating any beneficial effects of that reducing inflation rate, the prices generated by that inflation persist, and they will into the future. Those prices will be paid—into that same future—out of real wages that have shrunk by 3% year-on-year.

All of which suggests the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has good reason to stick to its leaked intention to lift rates by another 50 basis points on Wednesday.

No. The Fed should have stuck to its 75 basis points (0.75%) benchmark interest rate increase pattern, instead of its meek .50% increase of last Wednesday. Kill this inflation spiral. Kill it dead. Dragging things out only runs up the costs for us average Americans who continue to pay those increasing prices with shrinking dollars.

Even those editors seem to agree:

The better policy is to break inflation now and return sooner to the Fed’s target of 2%. That’s a stronger foundation for growth and a rising standard of living for workers whose budgets have been savaged by inflation.

The Editors’ headline is spot on: Inflation Isn’t Vanquished Yet.

Far from it. And neither are its pocketbook effects.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

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Lots of folks tout cryptocurrency as the be-all and end-all of currency and liberation of our money from Evil Government.

However.

Here’s a bit about blockchain.

A blockchain is a distributed database or ledger that is shared among the nodes of a computer network. As a database, a blockchain stores information electronically in digital format. … The innovation with a blockchain is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data and generates trust without the need for a trusted third party.

Guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data—the fidelity part of that is that each transaction of good in a sequence of transactions is explicitly tracked and its provenance known: who or what did the transaction and who or what received the transaction. At every step of the way from first origin of the first transaction to the last recipient of the last transaction.

Here’s a bit about cryptocurrency, using the hoary Bitcoin as a canonical example.

The key thing to understand here is that Bitcoin merely uses blockchain as a means to transparently record a ledger of payments, but blockchain can, in theory, be used to immutably record any number of data points.

Cryptocurrencies use blockchain—and that ledger, here, of payments (from whom or what to what or whom)—to track the financial transactions.

That immutable record of transactions is just what governments love to have in order to track their subjects’ doings.

Cryptocurrencies are encrypted, though—that’s the “crypto” part. Except that any encryption mechanism can be cracked, and governments have the resources to do exactly that should the men in government decide they have a “need” to.

On the other hand, cash transactions still are untrackable.

How Much

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians constantly and loudly insist that they need to raise taxes so that the rich actually pay their fair share.

Here are some data on what Americans actually pay at various levels of tax remittances.Notice, too, that the Federal Poverty Guideline for a family of four in 2020 was $26,200 for the Lower 48 and DC.

And there’s this, showing the progressing progressiveness of our tax code.Even as that marginal tax rate has come down, the percentage of total income taxes paid by those Evil Rich has gone up.

This is why those Progressive-Democrats steadfastly refuse to say how much is that “fair share,” whether in dollars or in rates.

This is Why

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Georgia recently won a court case in which the Biden administration had—illegally, as it turns out—blocked its program to expand Medicaid eligibility to individuals making up to 100% of the federal poverty line ($13,590 for singles) while conditioning benefits on working, going to school, or volunteering 80 hours a month.

However, under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act of 2020, States are unable to remove able-bodied Medicaid folks—i.e., folks who are fully capable of working but who choose not to—from their Medicaid rolls as long as the Wuhan Virus emergency remains in effect. The CDC conveniently continues to extend that “emergency,” even though no less a light than our Progressive-Democrat President, Joe Biden, has said the emergency is over.

Alternatively, Georgia could remove those folks and the Federal government could withhold hundreds of millions in federal funds. In all, the Federal government mainlines $130 billion in additional Medicaid funds into all the States’ veins.

As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

The emergency is a Faustian bargain for states….

This is why it’s at best idiotic for any State to take Federal (our taxpayer) money under any circumstance. The dollars don’t come with strings attached; they represent yokes around the States’ necks.