Tag Archives: political economy

A Simple Question

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And a simple answer.

In an article in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal about the West’s economic sanctions on Russia and their impact on Russian citizens, the authors, Ann Simmons and Yuliya Chernova, ask a simple question:

How effective are the sanctions against Russia proving to be?

The answer to that is blindingly obvious and is given by the answer to this question: How many battalions has Putin been forced by those sanctions to withdraw from Ukraine?

Meantime, in the face of namby-pamby sanctions and inadequate arms and ammunition shipments, Ukraine continues to lose ground, and Ukrainian civilian women, children, and old men continue to be butchered by the barbarian.

Regulatory Review and Streamline

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Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) has a thought on this.

Youngkin signed Executive Order 19 to create the Office of Regulatory Management. This office will streamline the regulatory review process by subjecting agencies to its oversight. The executive order directs the new office to implement a 25% reduction in regulatory requirements.

And

The order states the office will review all regulations for their impact on local governments, the regulated community and private citizens. It will also streamline the regulatory process by requiring agencies to prepare a unified regulatory plan for every fiscal year.

It could work. It could, though, just turn into another layer of bureaucracy in getting regulations handled and new proposals enacted or rejected. As some of you might expect, I have a couple of thoughts of my own on this.

Although regulations must be reviewed every four years, the executive order states this is not uniformly achieved….

Regulations not reviewed on time or whose review isn’t finished on time should be deemed expired on the date of their review anniversary and no longer in existence as of that date. This requirement will require legislative action, though, rather than a Governor’s Executive Order.

And this thought, also deadline oriented:

According to the order, most regulatory proposals take two to three years to be adopted. The office will work to streamline this process to more quickly approve or reject proposed regulations.

Set hard deadlines—vis., 30 days, 90 days, as appropriate to the stage of proposal, 6 months to enactment—and if a stage of review is not complete by its deadline or the overall proposal not ready for enactment by its deadline, the proposal is deemed rejected and cannot be brought up again until after the next election cycle. This, too, will require legislative action rather than an EO.

Don’t allow stalling or dithering or indecision, or excuses for any of that. Push the pace, and specify the concrete, measurable response to stalling or dithering or indecision.

Biden to Oil Producers: Produce More

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Also Biden to oil producers: you can’t drill, though.

The Biden administration plans to block new offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans….

Produce more, but…. This is on top of the existing slow-walking and outright sitting on the myriad permits required to act on existing leases.

Oh, wait….

The proposal released by the Interior Department on Friday evening would allow as many as 11 oil lease sales for offshore drilling over the course of five years.

As many as 11 of them—a couple a year over those five years. Never mind that Biden’s administration cannot be trusted to grant the permits required for those leases to have a chance.

Never mind that it takes years, once the permits are granted, to drill a producing well, or that not all drilling will result in a producing well.

Never mind that the Biden administration cannot be trusted to not cancel those leases later in the name of its drive to the Liberal World Order.

Never mind that even if all five of those years are available to production, they’re not enough for the oil producers to recoup the costs of the exploration and subsequent drilling for effect.

That’s the duplicity of President Joe Biden (D) in his cynical pretense to be “doing everything he can” to reduce the cost of gasoline at the pump and of energy generally.

A Performance Principle

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Norway, it turns out, did really well as a nation during the recent Wuhan Virus Situation.

Not long ago, the World Health Organization published mortality stats from the past two years, which showed that nearly every country’s excess death count spiked during the pandemic. Norway’s barely moved. The Norwegians had pulled off the closest thing possible to an optimal response to the most vexing problems that Covid-19 presented.

Then what? Norway, rather than rest on its laurels, studied the situation, with particular reference to the nation’s successes and failures—and there were some failures, even as Norway did so well overall. Why was Norway, in the words of the WSJ article’s author, so eager to probe its failures? Norwegian economist Egil Matsen is the second chair of the Norwegian commission that was set up early in the virus situation to plan ahead and then to study in hindsight Norway’s response for future reference. He said,

It reflects a desire to see what we did well—and what we did not do well. I think there is perhaps even an expectation that when something this unusual and serious happens to our country, it should be evaluated and we should try to learn from it in the aftermath.

What a concept. Plan ahead, and then see how well the plan did and did not do in an actual situation. Don’t just kick back in celebration—do that, sure, and rue failure when that occurs—but work to do better. Learn from experience. And one lesson here is that, while a physician chaired this sort of commission, an economist was second chair. Economists are trained to take a much more systems approach, to look at the broader picture, of a problem that has a range of national-level implications; a medical professional is trained to understand only the medical implication.

Responding to a pandemic is nothing if not the classic economics problem of weighing costs and benefits.

Inflation and Putin’s War on Ukraine

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Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank President, said she plans on raising interest rates only gradually, while acknowledging that the EU’s inflation problem was steadily getting worse.

Speaking at the ECB’s annual economic policy conference in Portugal on Tuesday, Ms Lagarde said Europe’s inflation problem was deepening, but warned that the region also faced weaker growth prospects related to the war in Ukraine.

And

The ECB’s gradualism, as Ms Lagarde described its approach, reflects the larger economic blow that the war in Ukraine has dealt to Europe….

President Joe Biden (D) also (in)famously blames Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine for the high inflation in the US.

I wonder if accelerating the shipment of arms and ammunition; accelerating, in particular, the shipment of tanks, artillery, rocket artillery, antiship and antiaircraft weapons; and getting out of the way of transferring combat aircraft (all with associated training and logistics) to Ukraine might then eliminate that inflation cause and boost economic growth by helping Ukraine quickly to win the war inflicted on it.