Daily Archives: 8 October 2026

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.