Author Archives: eehines

Uncertainty?

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A Wall Street Journal article centered on one American company’s claimed uncertainty regarding adjusting its supply chain to no longer be in the People’s Republic of China cited this:

American Outdoor Brands spent months coming up with a plan to minimize the pain of tariffs. Now it is stuck waiting to see where to go.
Most of American Outdoor Brands’ products, which range from fishing tools to hunting gear and pizza ovens, come from China. Executives were prepared to reposition the company’s supply chain ahead of July 9, when the so-called reciprocal tariffs were set to take effect, betting that it could move quickly to reduce any pain points once the new levies kicked in.
But President Trump’s decision last week to extend the deadline for trade deal negotiations to August 1 has prolonged the uncertainty for many companies. That means American Outdoor Brands’ supply-chain reshuffling plan remains on ice.

Why? Where’s the uncertainty? These companies—not just American Outdoor Brands—still know they need to move their supply chains out of the PRC. At worst, they just have more time in which to do so.

American Outdoor Brands’ CFO Andy Fulmer:

We’re very comfortable that we’ve done all the upfront work on where we’d go by product category. We’re just kind of waiting for those firm rates to come out.

Stop dithering, then, and execute. The likely range of tariffs already is well-known, and they’re unlikely to be raised in the face of intransigence; they’ll just go into effect on the deadline, or be delayed again.

In the meantime, there are a myriad other places from which to source intermediate components and—in American Outdoor Brands’ and others similarly situated—final products. Bangladesh, comes to mind, as does Jordan. And manufacturing-experienced Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Japan, Philippines. It would be easy enough in those latter cases to contractually require components not come from the PRC directly or indirectly.

Even move the supply chains to…the United States.

Jurisdiction

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A commenter on an earlier post suggested I define “jurisdiction.” Herewith.

Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution define and create our social compact as a nation whose people are sovereign and whose government men and women work for us by our consent (in government’s existence) and by election (of those men and women actually serving*).

Johnson’s Dictionary, 4th ed, contemporaneous with the writing and ratification of our Constitution:

JURISDICTION.
1. Legal authority; extent of power.
2. District to which any authority extends.

Modern American dictionaries, viz., Merriam-Webster Online, define jurisdiction:

Jurisdiction
1: the power, right, or authority to interpret and apply the law a matter that falls within the court’s jurisdiction
2a: the authority of a sovereign power to govern or legislate
b: the power or right to exercise authority: control
3: the limits or territory within which authority may be exercised

The definition of jurisdiction as our Founders understood it remains the same as it is understood today. (Aside: that only keeps things convenient. Were the definition materially changed today, our Constitution still would have to be understood and applied in those original terms; an Amendment would be needed, not judicial decree, to bring that definition forward to today.)

Our government’s jurisdiction, thus, does not extend beyond the limits of our nation’s social compact.

Our social compact (any social compact) isn’t only geographically defined, however. It’s also, and primarily, a two-way commitment, a mutual agreement to protect the compact’s members and the members’ agreement to submit to and obey the rules associated with that agreement.

Hence, my claim in that earlier post: illegal aliens, by entering our nation illegally and remaining illegally present, are holding themselves outside the tenets of our social compact. By holding themselves outside our social compact, they are holding themselves beyond the reach of our government’s jurisdiction. Their presence within the territorial limits of our nation only cedes control via raw power to our government.

*Unelected bureaucrats in government, from Congressional and Executive Branch staffers through the men and women in civil service are selected and hired—at bottom—by those elected representatives.

There’s Moderate…

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…and there’s moderate. Consider, for instance, the Progressive-Democratic Party’s candidate for governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger. Her voting record, while she was a Congresswoman representing the 7th District of Virginia in the US House of Representatives, is comparable to those of, for instance, Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY). News writers call Spanberger a moderate in her run for governor. This characterization of Spanberger is typical of politicians near the center of Party.

That’s actually not far wrong, either, when context is included. Spanberger is a moderate within Party; she is near its center. However, that center is nowhere near the center of the American political spectrum as a whole. Party’s center is well to the Left in the context of our national political spectrum. That’s how far left Party has moved since the Obama reign, and it’s been moving ever farther left since the beginning of the Biden reign. How far left, and still on the move, is demonstrated by the power and influence of the socialist, in nominally Independent, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—and by Party’s overwhelming nomination of the openly socialist Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor.

The Spanbergers of Party are to the right of Party’s Left wing, but they are still Progressives and so remain far Left overall.

Harvard’s Contradiction

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Powerline has a piece that has Harvard seemingly talking about setting up a conservative center on its campus as a balance to its strongly Leftist bent. (Such a center would, supposedly, cost up to $1 billion. I note that that’s less than 2% of its endowment, eliding that much of that endowment is targeted IAW the requirements of the donors who made and make that portion of the donations.)

Say, though, that the scuttlebutt is accurate, and Harvard is serious about setting up such a center. Harvard has also said, per The Telegraph, that

it refused to change its hiring, admissions, and other internal procedures following demands by the Trump administration….

Those hiring, admissions, and other procedures, though, are based entirely on its determined DEI practices, which are nakedly racist and sexist, and drive Harvard to hire only left-leaning or outright leftist personnel of merit ranging from none to quite a bit.

Given that, on what basis would Harvard hire actual conservative personnel for its claimed conservative center?

A Tax False Premise

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A letter writer in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section offered an alternative to the provider tax so many States assess. The provider tax is a tax States levy on hospitals that, in the depths of the scam, the States use to get a larger allocation of Federal fund transfers into their Medicaid programs, which then reimburse those hospitals for their provider tax remittances to the State.

The letter writer suggests

If states collected taxes from other sources, channeled the revenue into their Medicaid programs and continued to provide the same services, they would be entitled to the same federal matching as they are today. Nothing would need to change.

The false premise from which this letter writer proceeds is this: the need for those tax dollars in the first place is not at all established. On the contrary: Medicaid is a State-run program and its payouts are entirely controlled by that State. As such, each State’s Medicaid program should be funded entirely and exclusively by the citizens of that State. There is no need for the Federal government to transfer the tax remittals of the citizens of any other State (much less all of them) to any State for its Medicaid program.

Indeed, were each State to retain those tax dollars rather than sending them to the Federal government, the citizens of each State would be better able to fund their State’s Medicaid program.