Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Union Politics

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Here’s what the American Federation of Teachers union “agency fees” would have been spent on absent the favorable ruling in Janus vs AFSCME, which said that public unions can no longer make non-union employees pay into union coffers as a condition of employment.  These are actual resolutions to be offered at the AFT’s convention this weekend.

Keep in mind, too, that those agency fees typically ran to 60% to 80% of member union dues—which gives an idea of how much a public union’s intake was spent on politics rather than on member matters.

  • single-payer health care
  • opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline
  • President Donald Trump’s “immediate resignation or removal”
  • denounce[ing] Mondelez for moving Nabisco cookie production to Mexico [and non-union plants]
  • urg[ing] local affiliates to pressure “employers to sell or carry only Nabisco products made in free union workplaces in their schools and on their campuses.”
  • support for “anti-war groups”
  • removal of the US’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in South Korea, which “enhances the effectiveness of a US first strike with nuclear weapons by drastically weakening any nuclear retaliation by a potential target nation such as China or North Korea”

Regarding that last, I certainly wish it were true that THAAD would drastically weaken an enemy’s second strike, especially after its first strike.  That’s secondary, though.  Primary is the lack of relationship with actual education or with enhancing a teacher’s ability to teach that these AFT resolutions have.

The union does have a couple of education-related resolutions.

  • free college
  • [urging] “school districts, colleges, and universities to offer their students diverse views about military service and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, balancing arguments for military service and ROTC training with the arguments of critics of military service, including its health risks.”

Yeah, those are serious education proposals.

Allies

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Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, the main governing body of the European Union, says

Dear America, appreciate your allies, you don’t have that many[.]

That’s true enough; we certainly don’t have that many who aren’t demanding to freeload off American blood and treasure for their defense while being unwilling to contribute much of their own to their defense.

Tusk tweeted soon after,

US doesn’t have and won’t have a better ally than EU. We spend on defense much more than Russia and as much as China.

What Tusk carefully, cynically, elided is the fact that most of the NATO nations won’t honor their own commitment to spend 2% of their GDP on their own defense—including in particular, Germany, whose “commitment” to increase their spending all the way up to 1.7% won’t be complete for two more years.  He also carefully equated the EU’s spending with the NATO nations’ spending.  Of course, any European schoolboy knows the EU is not a member of NATO, for all that many of its constituent nations are.  It’s also clear that the EU really isn’t that much of an ally on matters of defense.

On the other hand, Tusk’s native Poland feels differently.  That nation wants the US to permanently station an armored division in Poland—and they’re willing to commit €1.3 billion to €1.7 billion ($1.5 billion to $2 billion) of their own money to support the stationing.  (Aside: we have 30,000 troops stationed in Germany; that would be a very good source of armor.)

Some complain that this would violate the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which bars stationing nuclear weapons permanently in NATO’s eastern border nations along with Russia’s commitment not to station nuclear weapons near its western border.  However, those folks ignore the fact that Russia already has functionally abrogated the spirit of that treaty by stationing troops in occupied Crimea and occupied eastern Ukraine and in occupied parts of Georgia, and literally by beefing up its nuclear establishment in Kaliningrad and moving tactical nuclear missile units close to its own western border explicitly for targeting central and western Europe.

There are, though, now an additional five NATO nations (beyond the US, Great Britain, and Greece) who’ve raised their defense spending above their 2% commitment: Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania.  Notice that: not long-free, complacent central and western European NATO nations, but those only recently freed from the Soviet Union yoke.

Maybe, instead of wasting time jawboning with nations that don’t care all that much about their own security, we should form a new mutual defense alliance centered on those eastern European nations, who still appreciate the blessings of freedom.  And freeloaders like Tusk can be left free to see to their own devices without further American hektoring.

Free Food Stamps

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The House passed a farm welfare bill that includes a requirement for food stamp recipients to work for their welfare payouts last month, and the Senate passed its version—carefully without that requirement for actual work. Or perhaps just timidly passed, since Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts (R, KS) was intimidated by Progressive-Democrat Ranking Member Debbie Stabenow (D, MI) and couldn’t find the backbone to oppose her.

Now the two bills go to conference for resolution, and the outcome doesn’t look promising for work.

In today’s tight employment environment, that work would be easy to find, too, and in light of that, The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board made the comment

What’s bewildering is that Democrats seem willing to write off so much human potential as permanent wards of the state.

There’s nothing at all mysterious about that, though. The only potential that Progressive-Democrats see in these unfortunates is their votes, not their human potential. Indeed, that’s the Progressive-Democrat work-for-welfare program: vote for us Prog-Dems, or we won’t pay you any money.

President Donald Trump should support the House and inject some backbone into Senate Republicans, including especially Roberts, and announce he’ll veto any farm welfare/food stamp bill that doesn’t include the House’s work-for-stamps requirement.

In a Contest of Tariffs

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In a piece purporting to show Where the Trade Battle Hurts the Most, Julie Wernau and Ira Iosebashvili had this comment:

Renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement are being closely watched in Canada, too. The Trump administration has used threats of auto tariffs to win concessions from Canada and Mexico, a strategy that hasn’t sat well with the two countries.

President Donald Trump also offered them, and the rest of the G-7, a regime of no tariffs at all. Their refusal even to discuss the offer doesn’t sit well with those of us outside the NLMSM.

A Thought on Auto Tariffs

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board is worried about auto tariffs.  They do make a fair case concerning the national security aspect of our automobile industry (while eliding the fact that industry includes many more car companies than just GM, Ford, and Chrysler—and that none of them manufacture cars in the US, while all of them assemble cars in the US from imported parts).

They weaken, fatally IMNSHO, their argument, though, when they present only one aspect of the case for/against auto tariffs or the threat of significant increases in already extant auto tariffs.  In particular, the Editorial Board has carefully elided the fact that the Trump administration and German auto manufacturers have agreed in principle to a no-auto-tariff-at-all regime.

Now it’s on the German government and Brussels to agree.  It’s likely, although not certain, that plans to impose a 20% tariff on auto imports from the EU had an impact in moving the German companies toward eliminating tariffs altogether.

A no-auto-tariff regime also would render the security beef moot, but some folks on the Left don’t want that.