It’s a Start

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If it passes, a draft bipartisan Federal permit reform bill that’s circulating in the Senate would be a good start. As is the usual case in politics, it wants improvement, but first pass this first step, then return forthwith with improvements, and pass those.

What the bill has, if the Senate as a whole can pass it and then the House do so, too:

  • strict deadlines for agencies to complete environmental reviews—two years for bigger projects and one for smaller ones—and lets developers sue if their reviews are delayed
  • requiring plaintiffs to challenge permits within 150 days of their publication—they now have six years—and to have suffered direct harm or face imminent injury
  • 150-day statute of limitations would apply to challenging so-called biological opinions
  • if a judge faults an environmental review, agencies could correct the purported lapse rather than restart the permitting process
  • repair and replacements of critical infrastructure, including transportation, water, grid and energy projects, would be exempt from NEPA reviews
  • generally prohibit federal agencies from rescinding or suspending permits and allow permit holders to sue for damages if they do

I suggest the following improvements for enactment in the next legislative session:

  • one year to complete large project environmental review, six months for smaller projects. If the deadline passes without Agency action, the permit is deemed issued with no caveats or conditions and cannot be challenged in court. Agencies also must have the burden of proving they didn’t just rubber stamp a rejection in order to meet the deadline. Agencies have these newfangled devices called computers along with software with which to facilitate reviews. There’s no need to mosey along with manually done procedures
  • require plaintiffs to challenge within 60 days. They also have access to modern computers and software with which to review the permit and produce their challenges
  • 60-day statute of limits to challenge all opinions, not just biological ones. See the above about computers and software
  • generally prohibit federal agencies from rescinding or suspending permits, period

I know; it’s a pipedream to get the initial step passed, much less the improvements. But I dream.

Rahm Emanuel’s Latest Installment

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Over the last several weeks, Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate hopeful Rahm Emanuel has been publishing sections of his campaign platform in The Wall Street Journal. His latest installment is here. Emanuel talks a good game, but as Long Time Reader might expect, I have thoughts on it.

The carried-interest rule suggests that those in the business of buying and selling companies need the incentive of a special tax break. They don’t.

This is a conveniently plausible assertion, but it’s wholly unsubstantiated. Let Emanuel supply the facts and logic underlying his claim.

To be effective, reforms will need to work hand in hand with an enforceable international floor.

Absolutely not. Such a move gives foreign governments too much influence over our domestic economic policies. The only legitimate “international floor” needs no enforcement mechanism; the floor is however low individual nations let their domestic tax policies go and stay competitive. Progressive-Democrats spend ‘way too much time and energy trying to limit competition.

[R]aise the capital-gains rate closer to the rate that prevailed during the late 1980s, when it was the same as the tax on ordinary income. … You can’t claim that narrowing the gap between passive income and earned income would undermine the incentive to invest when we saw robust growth in exactly those conditions.

Yes, I can. Emanuel first needs to prove–or at least provide evidence–that the growth under those conditions would not have been even more robust had that gap not been narrowed. Showing a counterfactual is hard, but Emanuel isn’t even trying.

[E]liminate the stepped-up basis that allows them to pass fortunes from one generation to the next free from capital-gains taxes. This policy has nothing to do with driving economic growth and serves only to preserve inherited wealth.

 Contra Emanuel, there’s nothing wrong with a family preserving its wealth. Aside from that, it’s not for Government, or for Progressive-Democrats who want to run Government, to dictate to the rest of us the proper way to handle our wealth.

It’s instructive, too, that Emanuel is not proposing even working toward a single low (in the range, I suggest, of 10-15%) tax on all income regardless of source (viz., those capital gains), with no deductions, credits, subsidies, loopholes, or other froo-froo.

In that environment, private-equity fund managers, firefighters, police officers, and teachers–and Warren Buffet and his (ex-?) secretary–all would be paying the same rates, with the rich still having their bigger bills.

Bombers and RAF Fairfield

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Our B-1s and B-52s have been redeployed Stateside (cynics might term the transfer a retrograde movement, but they’d be overstating the case) from RAF Fairford after the recent intercepted terrorist attack attempt.

My own not very humble take on that is this. Fairford has no bunkers for protecting aircraft based there; the aircraft are just parked out in the open for anyone with a long gun to take potshots at should the notion strike. The UK government’s apparent disdain for restraining terrorist wannabes—the terrorists were out on bail within hours of their arrests—emphasizes that exposure. Our bombers had no business being there for any reason other than a maintenance problem that prevented an individual bomber from reaching a serious air base.

Diego Garcia, on the other hand, is the same distance from Tehran as is Fairford. It has the same lack of bunkers, but it’s much harder for terrorists to approach.

Deployment to Diego Garcia has an additional benefit: getting there, and back at the end of a deployment, enables a number of aerial refueling squares to be filled.

Know Better Socialism Made Manifest

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Michigan’s Socialist Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Senator, Abdul el-Sayed, is a poster child for socialism’s Know Better ideology. He’s claiming now that

[m]ost billionaires don’t park their money making more businesses. They park their money in the stock market. That is not meaningfully investing in opportunity. It’s just investing in other billionaires.

Not only is el-Sayed completely ignorant about how rich folks gained their wealth generally, he’s completely ignorant of how they grow their wealth. (I’ll leave aside the shibboleth that they already have “enough” wealth and shouldn’t be looking to earn more.)

He’s also insisting he’s the primary, if not sole, arbiter of what constitutes meaningful investing. The folks who got their wealth by investing in their own way in areas of their choosing don’t know as much about it as he does, and so he must direct their investing for them.

El-Sayed’s position is insulting to us average Americans in two ways.  One is that we’re too stupid to manage our own financial affairs; his Socialist Government must do that for us. The other is that we’re stupid enough that we cannot see his self-absorbed arrogance in representing himself as Knowing Better how the Evil Rich should deploy their assets than do those Evil Rich, or that he won’t be coming after us later.

Bonus third insult: that we’re stupid enough to believe he’s not as economically ignorant as he really is.

Absolutely

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New York City’s Socialist Progressive-Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani defines Socialism this way:

Socialism to me means you’ll have whatever you need to live a dignified life and that it is the government’s job to deliver on that[.]

He’s correct as far as that simple statement goes, but Mamdani cynically uses it to disguise his call for outright socialism. The core tenets of socialism, though, are that Government knows best what’s good for us, Government caps opportunity in an effort to enable the least of us to keep up with the most capable, and Government achieves these by taking the wealth of the successful and redistributing it among the least successful. Socialism achieves equality of poverty in every instance.

Free market capitalism, on the other hand, enables all of us to live dignified lives and to do so with only minimal government intervention. In a capitalist society, government’s (note: small-g government) primary roles are two, and they are critical: one is to minimize crime, and the other is to promulgate rules that protect free markets: sanctity of contracts and honesty in the negotiations that produce those contracts.

Capitalism further allows each of us to prosper as well as we might, beginning from equality of opportunity, given our individual endowments of ability, work ethic, and luck. None of us have our abilities or the outcomes of our abilities truncated artificially by Government.

“Dignified,” too, is more than just being personally comfortable. It’s possible to live a dignified life only if it’s a moral and virtuous life, as Ben Franklin and John Adams had it those ~250 years ago. That means we take care of each other as well as ourselves.

Notice two things about that: we take care of each other; we do not depend on—create ourselves dependent on—Government to do for us. Our individual prosperity flows from, and increases via, free market capitalism, an economic system under which each man [is] guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. The other thing, then, is that the personal prosperity that comes from this system vastly potentiates our ability to take care of ourselves and, especially, of each other.

Free market capitalism, in fine, combines the opportunity for individual prosperity with individual dignity as the only truly moral economic system: it’s the only system that leaves each participant in a free and voluntarily done economic exchange better off than he was before the exchange.

Socialism has no capability to achieve any of that.