Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Earmarks

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Progressive-Democrats in Congress are moving to bring these back. On this, I tend to agree.

Go ahead and do earmarks; they can be useful horse-trading tools. Just set aside 1% of the budget, the rough amount historically spent on them, as a separate line item.

Then require all earmarks in their aggregate to fit within that 1%, and require each earmark to be individually debated on the record and on the floor of the House and the Senate.

Let the public see, up front, what their tax dollars are paying for, and let the particular constituents see how effective their Congressman and Senator really are in representing them in each Congressional session.

The Biden Panic-Mongering

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In a Wall Street Journal article about the European Union’s failure to deal with its Wuhan Virus situation in any serious way, there are a couple of graphs that bear on our own situation. The first one concerns the number of confirmed Wuhan Virus cases (which is much less than the number of actual infections).

Notice that. At our worst, there were only some 75 cases per 100,000 people, a roughly 0.075% case rate in our population. (The EU was much better at that time, more on that below.)

The second graph concerns our Wuhan Virus mortality rate.

Notice that: at our worst, our mortality rate was around 1.5 per 100,000, a roughly 0.0015% mortality rate in our population. A back-of-the-envelope bit of arithmetic indicates a roughly 0.02% mortality rate given a confirmed case (and even lower given an actual infection). (Here, too, the EU fared better.)

This is the exaggeration of the Biden administration—and of the Progressive-Democrats in Congress—regarding our virus situation.

It’s time to throw off the chains (to use a term of art) of overreaching government and go back to going about our normal daily business.

No more lockdowns. Businesses full open, workers back to work, out of work workers freely able to find work, consumers freely able to consume.

Children back in school in person, K-12 sports and other extra-curricular activities back in full swing, teachers who continue to refuse to go back to in-person teaching fired for cause (which would open up some jobs for actual teachers).

So it is, in the EU. Despite the EU’s incompetence in vaccinating, its case rate and its mortality rate are vanishingly small. Quite apart from the EU’s and its constituent nations’ governing personages needing to get off their dead behinds and get the vaccinations rolling, they need simply to open up and let their citizens’ lives return to normal.

No more excuses.

The Wuhan Virus “Relief” Bill

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…that the Progressive-Democrats rammed through on strictly Party lines (after President Joe Biden (D) so piously promised bipartisanship and the Progressive-Democrat Senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, so loudly proclaimed that he would not support any bill that did not have input and support “from my Republican friends”): it was prosyletized by Congressional Progressive-Democrats as desperately needed to revive our sagging, struggling economy.

Here’s how badly our economy was sagging and struggling:

Household net worth—the difference between assets and liabilities—ended the fourth quarter at $130.2 trillion, the Federal Reserve said Thursday. That was up 5.6% from the third quarter and 10% from the end of 2019.

That fourth quarter value is the highest household wealth level on record.

Struggling. More Progressive-Democrat newspeak.

Promises of Progressive-Democrats

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The Biden administration (or, as they like to style it, the Biden-Harris administration (can anyone remember the last administration that was referred to as the President-Vice President administration? The Kennedy-Johnson administration? The Carter-[mumble] administration?)) is making economic recovery promises. Here’s one from his brand-spanking new Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellon:

I’m anticipating, if all goes well, that our economy will be back to full employment—where we were before the pandemic—next year, and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that without this, it could probably take until 2024.

Yeah. Obama made similar promises regarding unemployment post his Panic of 2008 “stimulus.” The levels of unemployment embodied in those promises weren’t matched–his promises went unfulfilled–until some years after his promised date. Those failures were at least in part due to the explosion of regulations the Obama administration wrote.

Biden is making the same promise, through Yellen, engaging in the same regulatory explosion, and adding the fillip of overt attacks on our energy industry. And our economy will suffer the fate, exacerbated by that attack on our energy.

Progressive-Democrat Power Grab

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It turns out their Wuhan Virus “relief” bill, of which 9% actually contains money for dealing with the virus, has a blatant, deliberate attack on the federal structure of our nation. It’s an attempt to dictate to the States, individually and severally, that they’re not allowed to reduce their taxes [emphasis in the original].

The bill explicitly bars states from cutting taxes. States “shall not use the funds,” the bill says, “to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in the net tax revenue” that results “from a change in law, regulation, or administrative interpretation during the covered period that reduces any tax (by providing for a reduction in a rate, a rebate, a deduction, a credit, or otherwise) or delays the imposition of any tax or tax increase.”

All of us need to remember this assault on our nation in the fall of 2021.