Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Rule Making and Rule Enforcement Pauses

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Commerce has a regulation, enacted in 2019 with effect last March (!), that

allows the government to block foreign telecommunication-gear imports and other business deals deemed a security threat[.]

There’s a clump of US businesses and trade groups that are pressing the Biden administration to “pause” enforcement while it

reviews the best path forward to working with industry on securing the [information and communications] supply chain[.]

There’s a larger problem here.

The objectors raise, entirely legitimately, let’s stipulate, concerns about this telecommunication-gear rule’s supposed excessive breadth of reach. However, willy-nilly cessations of enforcement just because this or that business or group gets a new administration to whom to object, is badly counterproductive. They are disruptive, they reduce predictability of the business environment impacted by that rule/regulation, and they raise the costs of doing business and through that costs to the end buyers.

If a business entity (or anyone else, come to that) has reason to object to a rule or regulation that’s in effect, that entity should take the matter up in a court of law. Appealing to the chief law enforcement facility—the White House—for selective enforcement is not the way to go.

Also: this is another reason for Congress to take back most of its delegation (of rule-making) authority to Executive Branch facilities, and enact—or not—its own, specific, laws that need very little rule making authority by unelected persons.

In the Land of YGTBSM

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Some of you may recall that a few weeks ago, Texas had several days of electricity (and associated natural gas) blackouts, some of those areas lost water for a number of days, and some areas lost Internet connectivity—and Internet-based communications—for some time.

A Wall Street Journal ran an article last week that looked into the sources of the electricity failures; it’s well worth the read in its own right.

A couple of items jumped out at me, though, concerning ERCOT, a State-level regulator about which I’ve written before.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas activated a program that pays large industrial power users to reduce their consumption during emergencies. But the grid operator, known as Ercot, didn’t know who was being paid to participate in this program and what type of facilities were getting shut off, it has since acknowledged.

How is that possible? How can an entity that bills itself as a reliability facility not know who its members are or what types of facilities it might affect?

It gets better, though, regarding ERCOT’s member facilities.

“We do not know what type of facility it is,” said Kenan Ögelman, Ercot’s Vice Ppresident of Commercial Operations. “We do know [a facility] has qualified and performed to the requirement because we test them, but we don’t know what it is they do.”

How anything be tested if the testing personnel don’t know what [a facility] does?

ERCOT really has to go.

He’ll Gladly Pay You Tuesday

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There’s a new entry in the Progressive-Democrats’ Newspeak dictionary.  According to Congressman Ritchie Torres (D, NY), President Joe Biden’s (D) infrastructure…proposals…

are not expenditures, these are investments[.]

That distortion of the plain language of our honest dictionaries isn’t his whole story, though.

In my view, it’s short-sighted to obsess about the dollar amount because these are not expenditures, these are investments[.]

He’ll gladly pay us Tuesday for an investment in his hamburger today.

Wait—this is Tuesday. Pay up, Congressman. Or better, stop spending money you don’t have. Your credit’s no good.

Wait, wait—Tuesday never comes in the Congressman’s world.

It’s only Money

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And it’s not even mine. So, Meh.

Treasury Department officials on Wednesday urged Congress to move quickly to increase the federal borrowing limit this summer, warning that the federal government could run out of cash much sooner than in previous debt-limit episodes.

Joey, crack debt, and the Left don’t care….

Or, channeling another, Biden is saying he’ll gladly owe us Tuesday for a borrowing today.

No.

The Federal government doesn’t need to have its debt ceiling raised. It needs its flood of spending vastly reduced.

Dangerous Naivete

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken has it. During a 60 Minutes interview, the man actually said that our nation does not have the luxury of not dealing with China.

That’s a blatantly raised straw man. No one is arguing that we should have no dealings with the People’s Republic of China. The debates are centered on how we should deal with it. Leave aside the fact that a total boycott of trade with the PRC is dealing with it, rather than not dealing with it, a means that no one is touting.

Instead, the debates involve moving our supply chain away from the threat the PRC poses, as illustrated by that nation’s attempt to cut off supplies of rare earth metals to other nations. They involve jawboning businesses to stop doing business with PRC suppliers operating with Uyghur slave labor. They involve how to pressure the PRC to desist from its Uyghur genocide in progress. They involve how to respond to the PRC’s occupation of the South China Sea and the islands within it that are owned by other nations (even if ownership is often disputed among those other nations.

Blinken said this, too, in that interview.

I want to be very clear about something. Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to.

This, especially, is an example of Blinken’s naivete. Our purpose most assuredly must include containing the PRC, holding it back. At least until it’s ready to stop being our enemy, to stop its genocide, to stop its slavery, to leave the South China Sea and respect the ownership of sovereign nations’ territory.

In fine, until the PRC is ready to join the community of civilized nations.

The full interview can be seen here.