Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

A Tale of Two States

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A Wall Street Journal editorial provided the comparison.

Since 2010

  • New York’s population has grown from a skosh under 19.4 million to a skosh over 19.4 million
  • Florida’s population has grown from 18.8 million to 21.5 million
  • New York’s spending has increased by $43 billion—about $570,000 for each additional person
  • Florida’s spending has increased by $28 billion—a $10,400 increase per new resident
  • New York’s spending on worker retirement benefits has nearly doubled
  • Florida’s spending on worker retirement benefits has grown by one-sixth of that
  • New York’s Medicaid consumes 40% of the state budget—twice as much as education
  • Florida spends about the same on schools as on Medicaid—and has an older population—retirees don’t flock north to New York
  • Florida’s private job growth has been about 60% higher than in New York
  • Florida’s finance job growth has been 25%
  • New York’s finance job growth has been 9.7%—and New York is supposed to be our financial city

Currently,

  • New York’s 2021 budget was for $177 billion
  • Florida’s 2021 budget (albeit not yet signed by the governor) is for $93 billion
  • New York’s spending is 35.9% Federal (taxpayer nation-wide) dollars—$63.5 billion
  • Florida’s spending is 32.8% Federal dollars—$30.5 billion

And after all this, New York still is demanding more Federal dollars—$61 billion worth—not just from the good citizens of Florida, but from the good citizens of all of the other States in these United States.

There’s one more difference between the two States: one is run by Progressive-Democrats, the other by Republicans. You know which is which.

Aside: both States use Federal dollars—the dollars of taxpayers from all the other States as well as those two—for enormous portions of their budgets. It’s time to do away with Federal transfers of taxpayer dollars from one State to another, except in time of declared regional or national emergency. Leave all those transfers in the originating States for their own use.

Backwards

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The transportation departments of a number of States are backing away from transportation projects, infrastructure projects that they have been claiming are desperately needed. Their excuse? They “need” more Federal aid. The already allocated $15 billion isn’t enough, they’re bleating.

The States have this backward. They don’t need Federal aid—the dollars of taxpayers in other States—they need to let their own citizens get back to work, including, perhaps beginning with, infrastructure projects like these road projects.

The States will then get all the “aid” they need: directly, in the form of income and business tax revenues from those businesses and employees working on those projects, and indirectly from the general, vast pickup in overall economic activity that would result from releasing American citizens from homebound gaol.

Active Dependency

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The Transportation Security Administration is looking into the prospects and processes for taking passenger temperatures among all of TSA’s actual security duties.

Airlines have been pushing for the Transportation Security Administration to start taking passengers’ temperatures as part of a multifaceted effort to keep potentially sick people from boarding planes and to make passengers feel more comfortable taking trips again.

Such a thing is supposedly to cost under $20 million, and it won’t cost passengers anything. Instead, all of us taxpayers will be paying for the passengers’…concerns. To the extent those exist; it is, after all, the airlines pushing, not pax.

There are better uses for the money, though. One would be simply to pass the bucks along to me, and I’ll undertake to not travel by air. That would net out to considerably less than the twenty mil, though, as I’d owe a heft tax bill, even after the 2017 tax cut.

Seriously though: nothing is keeping airlines from taking passenger temperatures themselves. The foolishness of this actively seeking dependency on government to do for us is getting old and tired.

House Relief Bill

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Here’s what’s in the House “relief” bill, written in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) kitchen where she could have ready access to her special ice cream. The bill was written with zero Republican input, zero Republican amendments, carefully limited debate on the House floor, and passed almost entirely along party lines; although the bill did make 14 Progressive-Democrats choke to the point of voting against it, and one Republican was too timid to oppose it.

  • $1 trillion in funding for state and local governments

Money that State and local government do not need. To the extent that Federal funds—the dollars of taxpayers who are citizens of other States—are needed in a particular State, those funds should go directly to the point of need: the individual citizens and those citizens’ individual businesses.

  • relief to wealthy residents of high-tax states like New York by waiving the $10,000 cap on the federal State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction for 2020 and 2021

These look like the same 1% that the Progressive-Democrats hate so much, and they look like the folks ex-President Barack Obama (D) disdained as having made enough money. But they’re not the same 1%—their the rich donors to the Progressive-Democratic Party and Party-supported causes.

  • explicitly omitting Hyde Amendment limits on Federal abortion funding
  • explicitly withdrawing the work requirement criterion for food stamps

It’s important to keep in mind, on that last, that the work requirement wasn’t limited to requiring actual work. In lieu of work, the recipient could seek work, train for work (vis., take community college classes, intern, etc), do volunteer work, and so on.

Other goodies include

  • student loan debt forgiveness
  • $25 billion for the Postal Service
  • $3.6 billion to states for planning and preparation of elections

That last contains a national requirement to hold elections by mail—the Progressive-Democrats’ unconstitutional attempt to Federalize our elections.

All that money, and all of it is irrelevant to the supposed need for additional relief from the economic dislocation to which the Wuhan Virus situation has led. The Progressive-Democrats could have passed an actual relief bill, but they’ve chosen—again—to hold relief hostage until they’re paid their ransom in the form of their leftist wish list.

The Progressive-Democrats also could have sat back and done nothing for the moment, following the Senate’s recommendation that Government stop throwing money around and instead observe the effects of the money already shoveled out into the firebox.

No. The Progressive-Democrats chose instead to provide in Bill form, Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign platform.

How cynical. Especially during this period of economic distress.

Trade Needs

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In an article about, among other things, the People’s Republic of China’s attempt to extort Australia into sitting down and shutting up about the PRC’s role in the Wuhan Virus’ spread across Earth, David Thomas, a consultant who for several decades has advised Australian businesses on investing in the PRC, said this:

The world is going to need China’s capital, manufacturing, and consumption power when this is all over.

That’s so wrong it’s foolish. We’re discovering that now, and after the Wuhan Virus situation has been dealt with from medical and economic perspectives, that we can’t afford to be very economically involved in the PRC.

The size of the PRC’s consumer population would be nice to access, but it’s unaffordable from economic and national security perspectives. The barriers erected to entry into that market are excessively high. The intellectual property and technology transfer demands exacted as a condition of doing business there and the outright theft of those things done not only from the foreign companies extant inside the PRC but from those foreign companies’ home nations are overt threats to security.

The world does not need the PRC’s manufacturing power at all. There are lots of other nations scattered around Asia, Europe, North America, and South America that are fully capable of filling the manufacturing role in place of the PRC, and there are many nations in Africa that are fully capable of developing into viable manufacturing sources.

Nor does the world need the PRC’s capital. Like its consumer market, it would be nice to access some of it, but it will be accessed adequately to the extent the world’s nations sell their goods and services to consumers in the PRC. However, we can’t afford that part of PRC capital that would be used to buy technology-oriented businesses in order to acquire those technologies.

Kerry Stokes, a billionaire mining-equipment and media magnate is just as foolish.

If we’re going to go into the biggest debt we’ve had in our life and then simultaneously poke our biggest provider of income in the eye it’s not necessarily the smartest thing you can do. We are a trading nation. We have nothing else to do but trade[.]

Australia does, indeed, need to trade. But it doesn’t need to trade with an enemy. It does need to change trading partners, and there are a planet-ful of nations that can substitute, individually or in groups, for that enemy.

It’s time for the free nations, the free market nations, of the globe to stop letting themselves be cowed by where their next trade dollar is going to come from and start thinking, instead, about the material and security cost of that dollar and to start thinking about where the trade dollar after the next will come from.