Tag Archives: politics

Retreating from Net-Zero?

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the claim of The Wall Street Journal editors.

The climate policy retreat is accelerating as Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley this week joined an exodus from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance. Energy reality can bite.

The “retreat” consists of five banks out of the 140 that are members of the NZBA, a gang of banks sworn to refuse the business of any enterprise that isn’t sufficiently climate-sensitive and -activist enough to suit the syndicate. It’s true enough that the five are major players in the world of banking, but they’re still only five.

The editors wrote, also, that mutual fund manager Vanguard had pulled out of the Net Zero Asset Managers pledge. That’s one out of 350 enterprises that took that pledge. The editors wrote further that JPMorgan Asset Management, BlackRock, and State Street Global Advisors have left Climate Action 100+, a collection of some 600 investors who pressure businesses to comply. Three are part of this “retreat.”

However.

Leaving these syndicates and changing their ways of climate-woke behaviors are two different things. We need to see these banks’, investors’, and business’ altered behaviors over some period of time before it’s believable that they’ve changed more than their public rhetoric.

A Flat Tax

Posted on by
Reply

Steve Forbes, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media, and Stephen Moore, a Heritage Foundation economist, proposed last Monday.

Collapsing the personal-income and corporate tax rates to 15% would have huge economic benefits. America would suddenly have one of the lowest tax rates in the world, resulting in trillions of dollars of new capital flow and a spike in take-home pay.

And this:

The simplicity of a flat tax would reduce the deadweight costs associated with tax compliance—and the headaches. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs calculates that Americans spent almost eight billion hours filling out tax forms in 2024.

Using a naïve estimate of 97.2 million households (and even more naively assuming all households pay taxes, which provides an upper bound on the number of households relevant here), that works out to over 80 hours per household—two working weeks—of tax compliance labor.

This, too:

The Tax Foundation estimates that this cost the economy $413 billion in lost productivity, and the Internal Revenue Service estimates that we spent $133 billion on out-of-pocket compliance costs.

That’s $4,250 per year in lost productivity for each household, with an added $1,370 per year per household of unreimbursed spending just to comply with current tax law. Most households could find other uses for those $5,620.

Still, I don’t think Forbes and Moore go far enough.

I’d add getting rid of the corporate income tax altogether. Business’ customers pay the bulk of those taxes, anyway, rather than the taxed business; for the taxed business, the tax is just another cost center to be covered proximately through product/service pricing and indirectly through reduced spending on innovation, expansion, hiring, and raises.

Forbes and Moore suggest getting rid of some deductions, but I’d go farther here, too. Get rid of all deductions, subsidies, and credits, too, and tax all income from all sources as ordinary income. Let businesses make their expansion and financing decisions based on purely business and market criteria instead of having to game the tax implications of borrowing or stock issuances. Individuals also would go back to making their spending and investing decisions based on what’s good for their individual/family situations instead of having to game a byzantine tax system in the course of their decisions.

And those optimal decisions would include how to use those $5,620.

A Scenario

Posted on by
Reply

Let’s assume the Chaos Caucus is successful in preventing the election of a Speaker of the House. We already have Congressman Thomas “Permanent No” Massie (R, KY) and Congresswoman Victoria “Toddler Tantrum” Spartz (R, IN) on record saying they’ll not vote for current Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) for Speaker when the new House convenes on 3 January 2025.

That’s enough, given the Republican’s tiny majority in the House, to prevent a Speaker from being chosen. If the Chaos Caucus persists, the Electoral College vote can’t occur on 6 January. If the Chaos Caucus ego-driven obstruction persists through 20 January 2025, who would become the Acting President?

Currently the line of succession is this:

President of the United States—don’t have one
Vice President of the United States —don’t have one
Speaker of the House—don’t have one
President Pro Tempore of the Senate—serves in place of the President of the Senate, that non-existent Vice President of the United States.

The President Pro Tempore is elected by the Senate at large—one of which we will have on 20 January. With the Republican majority of 53 Senators (52 until Senator-elect and current Governor Jim Justice (R, WV) is sworn in, which he has said he’d delay until his successor Governor is sworn in), it’s less likely that a President Pro Tempore would not be elected promptly.

I speculate that the Senate Majority Leader-to-be, John Thune (R, SD), would be elected President Pro Tempore.

Which would make John Thune the acting President.

Is this what the Chaos Caucus is aiming for? Seems unlikely since Thune isn’t, and never has been, far enough right to suit the Chaos Caucus.

Misunderstanding “Equity”

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer in Friday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section badly misunderstands this artificial, modern “liberal” construct of humans and the human condition. She writes

Mr Stone seems to have confused “equal” with “equity” [in his WSJ Cross Country op-ed] We aren’t all created equal, and this is why there is DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion.
Equity isn’t about being “created equal.” It is about creating equality. This means that no matter if you are tall or short, blind or sighted, wheelchair bound or not, rich, poor, male, female or any other gender, etc., these characteristics won’t be permitted to hamper your equality of treatment, opportunity or access.

Therein lies her misunderstanding. Equity doesn’t create equality at all; instead, it destroys it. The characteristics she ascribes to the equality being created by equity are the characteristics of equality that all human beings are born with: we start out owed equal treatment under law because we are all equal in the eyes of God. This is why we have those laws demanding equal access—to protect our intrinsic right to equal opportunity.

Equity, on the other hand, singles out specific groups of Americans for special treatment, and does so at the direct expense of other groups of Americans, both specific and generalized. Equity does this in the name of the equal outcomes that the ideology holds as its underlying tenet. That is the very definition of unequal treatment and the destruction of the equal nature of us under law and under God.