Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Arrogance of the Left

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This is made blatantly, nakedly clear by New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio.  In his State of the City speech last week, he laid bare the premier goal of the Progressive-Democratic Party, even above doing away with ICE and with our borders generally.  He said—and he meant every word of it:

Here’s the truth. Brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. There’s plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands.

His first sister is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) who wants to raise taxes on those wrong hands to 70%—or more; she, like her fellow Party apparatchiks, have articulated no limiting principle to such raisings, they’ve carefully declined to say how much is one’s “fair share.”

After that, de Blasio’s brothers and sisters of the Party want free education and free, single-payer medical care for all, including illegal aliens (remember their open border demand).

How to pay for all of this Party largesse?  The first goal: by taking all that money that’s in the wrong hands and giving to the correct, deserving holders of the money.

Mind you, who are the correct holders, who are the deserving holders, will be defined by those members of the Progressive-Democratic Party.  They’re the ones who Know Better than those with the money, those who’ve earned the money, how that money should be used.

It isn’t their money, anyway.  It’s the Party’s money.  Party generously will let us have some of it for a period of time, though.

Union Greed Realized

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Recall that the United Teachers Los Angeles union threatened to strike this week if they didn’t get their way.  Now they’ve gone ahead and done it, putting the education (such as it is in this district’s public—NTLA-manned—schools) of 500,000 children at risk.  For instance, at the Third Street Elementary School

[a] notice plastered on the school gate said that students will be gathered in the auditorium and the outdoor lunch pavilion area, instead of classrooms, during the strike, and overseen by administrators and teacher assistants.

No education allowed here, per the NTLA.

Recall the issue central to the union’s demands—the end of competition from charter schools that operate in the same district, sometimes in the same school buildings, and that attract students, who then do much better in school and get much better educations.

The union…cast the strike as a broader referendum on the growth of charter schools, which don’t have to follow some public-school regulations and whose teachers are largely nonunionized. Charter schools aren’t part of the contract bargaining….

In other words, charter school teachers have much greater flexibility in how they teach their students, and they aren’t bound by union demands regarding employment and employment parameters.  Charter school teachers also are regulated by the State rather than the union local jurisdictions.

A Judge’s Error

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The Trump administration had expanded rules allowing employers to opt out of being required to provide birth control coverage to their employees at no cost to the employees, so long as the opting out was convincingly based on religious or moral grounds.  Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California has issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the expansion while an underlying lawsuit against the expansion is underway.

Ordinarily, blocking an enforcement while the underlying case proceeds is no big deal, but this one is just plain wrong.  Gilliam based his ruling in significant part on the premise that

the [expansion] would result in a “substantial number” of women losing birth control coverage, which would be a “massive policy shift.”

For one thing, given how cheap birth control drugs and devices are and how easily obtained prescriptions for them are, it’s not at all clear that a “substantial number” of women would be unable to obtain birth control drugs or devices.

But the larger, vastly more important matter is this.  As Gilliam himself noted, the expansion would be a policy shift (massive or not, that’s irrelevant here).  Policy matters are political matters, and so they clearly are outside the purview of the courts.  Policy—political—matters are the exclusive province of the political arms of our government and of We the People.  A judge who intrudes, from his bench, into political matters clearly violates his oath to uphold the law.  Making policy has no place in his oath.

Dismantling Great Britain

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The EU is pressing its effort to punish Great Britain for the latter’s effrontery in leaving the EU.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has reiterated that the EU finds a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland “unacceptable.” He warned of “serious damage” in the event of a no deal scenario.

Because the EU wants to split Northern Ireland away from Great Britain.

No threat there.

Political Power

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Here come the Progressive-Democrats, and they’ve made their priorities clear in the House with the first things they want to get done.  Here’s some of what’s in their HR1:

  • “campaign-finance reform”—requires some advocacy groups to publicly disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, even if the groups aren’t running ads that endorse candidates but merely inform voters about the issues. Except when rich folks like Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg are spending on Progressive-Democrats.  Those names aren’t required to be exposed.
  • provisions from the Honest Ads Act—just regulates online political ads the same as broadcast television. Regulation: name those donors, again. Never mind that even nefarious ads intended to “influence” the 2016 elections accounted for all of 0.01%—that’s 1 in 10,000—of all the online ads in that cycle.
  • expanded definition of “electioneering communications” to include communications targeted to any particular constituency. An online ad running only in Texas that mentions a New York politician would be “regulable.”
  • The Federal government would gain control over the means by which States run elections. Because a remote, isolated central government, especially one run by Progressive-Democrats, Knows Better than a local State government how that State should run its elections.

For Progressive-Democrats, it’s all about personal political power.  Remember this in the coming election season.