Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

“Clean” Cars

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That’s what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) wants Government to subsidize.  He’s proposing Government spend $462 billion to pay Americans trading in our gasoline-powered cars for electric ones.  He wants to drop $17 billion on subsidies for auto manufacturers to “help” them build more electric cars along with batteries and associated parts, and $45 billion on charging stations and associated “infrastructure.”

In addition to ignoring where this money is supposed to come from, he’s also misleading on the “clean” electric car bit.  He knows, after all, where the electricity must come from to charge those batteries, whether at home or at his charging stations.

That electricity is generated by coal-, oil-, and gas-fired generating plants.  In New York, where Schumer’s fellow Progressive-Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo has banned fracking and additional gas infrastructure, those generating plants can’t use clean gas to produce electricity for Schumer’s cars: those plants are dependent on coal and oil fuel: Schumer’s electric cars will have even larger carbon footprints.

“Clean” electric cars, indeed.

This sort of scheme also is an affront to our free market economy and an insult to ordinary Americans’ intelligence.  If electric cars were ready for market, they wouldn’t need government subsidies to be saleable.  If Americans wanted electric cars, we’d buy them in droves on our own, without needing to be bribed into buying them.

Small Increase

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That’s what an oblivious press has termed Chile’s attempted 4% increase in the cost of a ride on the subway. Chile, especially its capital, Santiago, has been in an uproar over that increase for the last several days, and the protests have expanded to address “social/economic inequality” in general.

The turmoil was triggered by a small increase in metro fairs in the capital….

Here are some round numbers, used for illustration, that compare a poor man and a rich man, one needing to use the subway to get to work or to get to market to buy other necessities and the other on a strictly occasional basis (he has personal transportation).  Subway use absorbs 40% of the poor man’s income, 4% of the rich man’s. Whom do you suppose that 4% increase hits the hardest? For whom is the increase just another coin in his pocket?

There may be good reasons for the fare increase, but not understanding the situation isn’t one of them.  (I’m ignoring, too, the relative impacts of a free market economy vs a centrally directed one, and separately, who should be making the fare decisions.)

And not too tangentially (excuse the opening ad)….

‘Twas a Famous Victory

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The UAW is touting its strike resolution with GM as a victory and a model to be used against [sic] Ford and Fiat-Chrysler. A letter writer to The Wall Street Journal has pointed out some other aspects of the union’s most famous victory.

For every GM employee at an assembly plant, there are at least 30 working at suppliers providing parts, materials, and services to those plants.
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During the strike almost all the tier suppliers were forced to shut down or seriously curtail their operations, meaning layoffs (union and nonunion alike). Many of those employees must seek other employment….
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the [suppliers’] employees who do go back to their jobs will simply go back to work with accrued lost wages and benefits incurred during the layoffs. Those suppliers will also have to go out, recruit and train new employees to replace those who left and don’t return, adding to their costs.

But, hey, UAW management got theirs.

Gasoline Prices and California

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California has the highest pump-price of gasoline in the nation now.  That raises some related questions in my pea brain:

What’s the per centage of all-electric vehicles in California’s government car and truck fleet (no one is producing serious electric/hybrid heavy equipment)?

What’s the per centage of hybrid vehicles in their fleet?

I suspect there are more than zero in each category: what’s the carbon footprint of the energy used to charge those vehicles’ batteries?

A City’s Attack on Privacy

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You’re aware of the Chicago Teachers Union strike against the city, demanding a ton more money—a 15% pay raise over the next three years (against Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s meek counteroffer of 16% over five years).  Here is another part of Lightfoot’s offer to the union [emphasis added].

1-5.8 Bargaining Unit Employee Information. The BOARD shall provide the UNION on at least a monthly basis, and on a weekly basis for the months of August, September, and October, a list of all current employees in the bargaining unit, which shall include each employee’s first and last name, shift, job title, department, work location, home address, all telephone numbers (including cell phone number if available), personal and work email addresses, date of birth, seniority date, base hourly pay rate (if available), language preference (if available), identification number/payroll code/job number, salary, status as a member or non-member, UNION dues, and COPE payment.

Nor can any school district employee, whether union member or not, opt out of this information grab.

Chicago is no place to live with a city administration that has no respect for its citizens’ personal information, their privacy, a city administration that considers such bits of information to be nothing more than bargaining chips.