Tag Archives: political economy

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.

ILA Featherbedding

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Railroad unions are pikers here.

[T]here were 50,000 or so ILA strikers but only 25,000 or so port jobs. That’s right, only about half of the union’s members are obliged to show up to work each day. The rest sit at home collecting “container royalties” negotiated in previous ILA contracts intended to protect against job losses that result from innovation.

This ILA monopoly abuse is aided and abetted by Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden. Biden, far from invoking Taft-Hartley, which he doesn’t believe in, openly made his own extortionate threats against management:

President Biden had threatened the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) with legal action this week if it didn’t give in further to union demands. “My Administration will be monitoring for any price gouging activity that benefits foreign ocean carriers, including those on the USMX board,” he said in a statement. This was a direct threat to Maersk and other ocean carriers if they added a surcharge because of the disruptions from the ILA strike.

Keep in mind, too, that this was just for the precondition the ILA demanded in order for the union to agree to negotiate at all. The union will be back with its still-open strike threat on 15 January. And to hell with the rest of us Americans:

Mr Daggett [the ILA MFWIC] was happy to put countless truck drivers, warehouse employees, retail clerks, and auto workers out of work so he and his “connected” members can buy another yacht.

This is what a Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Federal government will do to all of our economy and to us American citizens’ right to work and to choose for ourselves whether to join a union or not—and to keep all of our paycheck if we choose to not join a union.

The Utility of Automation

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The International Longshoremen’s Association is demonstrating that, in spades, with its strike and its intent on inflicting maximum damage to our nation and our economy. Here’s the ILA MFWIC, Harold Daggett:

We’re going to show these greedy bastards you can’t survive without us!

Pretty nice business you got there. Pay up, suckers.

People are going to sit up and realize how important longshoremen jobs are. They won’t be able to sell cars. They won’t be able to stock malls. They won’t be able to do anything in this country without my f—ing people.

Automation will make such threats to business’ ability to function at all destructions of the past.

In today’s world, I’ll cripple you[.]

That’s Daggett’s response to speculation that the Biden/Harris administration might invoke Taft-Hartly to force the union workers back to their jobs. In the process of crippling our nation, he’s said he’d include slow-walking every step of every task.

Oh, and robots won’t hold out for a 77% pay raise as a precondition to entering into any negotiations at all.

The sooner this union is replaced with automatic facilities at the docks, the better off we’ll all be—including those dockworkers.