Monthly Archives: March 2018

Energy “Subsidies”

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The Federal government is continuing its ethanol mandates in its misguided effort to clean up the fuel our cars burn as we get about our business.  In an op-ed earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal rightly decried the artificial, government-created and -propped up market in RINs, which oil refineries can trade around in order to get credit for ethanol that they’re unable to obtain and blend into the fuel they produce.  As the WSJ noted, one of several outcomes of this artificial market is this.

The core problem is that the federal government has distorted the energy market by using subsidies and mandates to support biofuels.

The Federal government has distorted far more than that. By diverting so much corn to ethanol production, the Feds have very greatly driven up the price of food—corn and corn products, meat animals fed on corn, other food crops that are corn substitutes—wheat, beans, etc—and on and on.

The solution is to end this political favoritism.

The favoritism here is in acceding to the wishes three Senators from corn-producing States: Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst (both R, IA) and Deb Fischer (R, NE).

The more direct solution is for the Feds to end the ethanol mandates and to get out of the energy and food markets altogether (the latter which also requires eliminating farm support subsidies, a much more politically difficult proposition even though the subsidies also markedly drive up the cost of food). A large side effect of that would be to strike a blow against political favoritism.

The Old Ball and Chain

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Hillary Clinton made a speech in India in which she said some things that apparently she was too timid to say here in the US of A.  One thing she said was about white women:

…we don’t do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.

Because white women who don’t toe the line and vote for Clinton (or now, presumably, for the Progressive-Democratic Party candidate, whomever she might be in whatever race) just can’t think for themselves, they’re just the medieval-esque property of their lord and master husband.  Or of their male child if they don’t have a proper life with a husband.

It’s plain why she didn’t dare say such a thing in Texas, or middle Oklahoma, or farmland Iowa, or anywhere else but the West Coast and the northeast.  Or in Tennessee.  Even Missouri, where a Progressive-Democrat Senator proclaimed her offense from Clinton’s spew.  Or in Wasilla, AK.

At least Clinton didn’t go after all the ditzy blondes that didn’t vote her way.

Oh, wait….

Probing the Attempted Murder of an Ex-Spy

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Recall that an ex-spy and his daughter were attacked in a British park with a view to killing at least the ex-spy.  The weapon used was a nerve gas that’s only made in Russia.  The investigation itself is pointing strongly at Moscow as the instigator of the murder attempt; although the investigation is not complete.  Now Russia is refusing to cooperate in the investigation unless certain conditions are met.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Moscow would only cooperate with the UK’s investigation into the nerve-agent poisoning of a former spy if London supplied the substance in question and opened up the probe to Russian officials.

Supplying a sample of the nerve agent—which use just incidentally also poisoned roughly 20 other folks associated with the discovery of the two victims, their transport to a hospital, and their treatment, thereby illustrating the indiscriminate nature of the attack—would be entirely reasonable.

That last, though, opening the investigation to the Russians should be unacceptable to the Brits for a couple of reasons.  One is that the Russians are unlikely to cooperate with, much less support, the investigation in any serious way regardless of any sharing by British investigators.

The larger reason, though, is that the opening would only provide Putin with another avenue for spying on Great Britain.

An Unintended Consequence

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The health coverage plan providers, companies like Humana, Aetna, Anthem, et al., are gaming the Medicare system to keep their Medicare bonuses coming in.  Surprise.

It seems that when Obamacare was passed, it included a system of paying bonuses from Medicare to those plan providers that got sufficiently high ratings on the quality of their plans.

But wait….

Medicare ranks privately managed plans…on a five-star quality scale and provides financial bonuses to providers of top-ranked plans. [A plan-holder’s] plan was set to be downgraded, which would have cost Humana its bonus. So the company merged plans covering [the plan-holder] and more than a million others into different contracts with higher scores. That preserved the bonuses.

That’s called cross-walking, and it’s entirely legal, if maybe a tad shady.

This is the sort of thing that happens, though, when Government intrudes itself too far into a marketplace.  Private enterprise is more agile than government bureaucracies can ever hope to be, and they can move much faster than any government bureaucracy can hope to do.

It’s also why black markets flourish in centrally planned economies.

The existence of this ability to cross-walk is a function of our Federal government’s intervention in what should be a free, competitive market.  The question wouldn’t even exist if we had an actual health insurance industry that operated free of Government fetters in an actual freely competitive market.

Biofuel Mandates

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The Wall Street Journal had a piece titled Biofuel Mandates Are a Bad Idea Whose Time May Be Up that centered on the possibility that these might get watered down, or even eliminated, sometime “soon.”

The Renewable Fuel Standard, which forces oil refiners to mix corn-based fuel into gasoline, is one of history’s great policy boondoggles.

Well, NSS.  The only things it’s done of practical consequence have been to serve as a backdoor subsidy for farmers and to drive up the cost of corn, corn substitutes, and food that eats corn.  And to drive up the cost of gasoline and to create ethanol fuel-related automobile engine maintenance costs.

But that’s the problem with Government mandates in general when they’re intended to create a market for a particular product.

As a mandate, the time for this one on biofuels never was.