Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

The Specialness of Snowflakes

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The New York Times newsroom is going to walk out (as I write this) on Thursday because they don’t like the cutbacks in editors (an understandable concern, even if the newsroom denizens offered no alternative) and other personnel reductions the paper is being forced to make in an effort to reduce costs to a survivable level.  It’s their plaints, though, that drew my attention.  The copy editors group wrote a letter to Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn in which they said in part,

You often speak about the importance of engaging readers, of valuing, investing, and giving a voice to readers. Dean and Joe: we are your readers, and you have turned your backs on us.

News flash, guys.  Baquet’s and Kahn’s readers, the NYT‘s readers, are the customers who pay around $325/yr for a subscription, or more than $500/yr for both print and online subscriptions.  You guys get paid to read your boss’ paper in order to make error corrections.

NYT reporters sent a letter to the same targets in solidarity with the copy editors.

Requiring them to dance for their supper sends a clear message to them, and to us, that the respect we have shown the Times will not be reciprocated.

Respect has to be earned, guys.  You have a legitimate beef regarding the lack of transparency in personnel moves your paper is making (another part of your letter), but respect has to be earned the same way any honest American earns it: through actual deeds.  You guys don’t get respect just because you think you’re special.  In particular, you utterly disrespect your readers—those paying customers—when you masquerade unsubstantiated rumors, which you amusingly attribute to “senior officials,” to sources who “are speaking anonymously because they’re not authorized to speak,” and the like, as fact.  And you do that while also carefully declining to corroborate those rumors with on-the-record remarks.

Question for you both—and for Baquet and Kahn—when y’all come back to work on Friday (today, as I post this): did anyone notice your absence?  Besides the janitors, I mean.  Folks like actual customers.

The Health Care Choice

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The Wall Street Journal has the right of it, and it’s a stark one for the Republican Party and for us Americans.  The House and the Senate bills for getting rid of Obamacare and replacing it with something better are far from perfect, but they are significant improvements over the Obamacare assault on Americans’ access to health care, and on individual liberty and responsibility.  Further, the House plan has always been billed as the first part of a three-part effort at complete repeal and replacement; it’s never been claimed to be a final answer.  And the Senate bill on offer is not one, either.  Senate Republicans are well aware of this.

However, posturing Republican Senators from both the Conservative (or so they claim) and the middle regions of the party, no better than the openly kickback-demanding Progressive-Democrats of 2009 Congress infamy, are standing in the way of any progress at all.

Here’s the choice, then, with which these persons are faced: doing the deal and passing an improvement over the disaster that is Obamacare, with its growing loss of access even to health coverage plans, much less actual health care, and coming back next year for further improvement, or inflicting the continued failure of Obamacare on Americans foolish enough to have trusted these guys.

Here’s the collateral damage from failure that would be inevitable from making the wrong choice and the avoidance of which was a major motivation for electing Donald Trump: loss of control of the Senate to the Progressive-Democratic Party, and with that, loss of the Supreme Court for generations, if not permanently.  Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer all are likely to retire in the next three years.  Justice Clarence Thomas may well, also.  The Progressive-Democrats will block conservative, textualist Justice nominations, for whom the Constitution actually matters as the supreme Law of the Land, and will get confirmed—one way or another—three (or four) Justices in the Ginsburg (“the Constitution is a living document that lives through judicial rulings rather than Art V”) or Thurgood Marshall (“I rule and let the law catch up”) mold.  This would be an even worse disaster to our Republic and to our liberty than continuance of Obamacare, which only threatens our fiscal weal.

Universal Basic Income

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Emeritus Professor Richard Wallace, of Wofford College, is enamored of Mark Zuckerberg’s universal basic income proposal.

Here’s the quick and dirty of the thing, beginning with a quote from Wallace’s letter.

The strongest arguments for universal income center on its elimination of work disincentives by the unconditional nature of such grants.

Leave aside the fact that free money is its own disincentive to work. A UBI will only increase demand—all that seemingly added money with which to buy stuff from necessities to goodies—without increasing supply. The resulting price inflation will very quickly reduce the buying power of the UBI to the same level that the current poverty-ridden man possesses. A UBI will not make anyone better off.

On the other hand, it will make everyone, including the poverty-ridden man this is intended to help, worse off: the UBI will come out of the pockets of everyone in the form of current taxes, future taxes to pay the borrowings, and/or devalued dollars. This will reduce monies for investment and innovation, truncating economic growth and reducing economic mobility.  The latter will act to confine the poverty-ridden man to his poverty.

Another Refusal to Engage

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…rather, another decision by the Progressive-Democrats in Congress to turn their backs and obstruct.  In follow-up to the March meeting between the Congressional Black Caucus and President Donald Trump, Trump invited the CBC to another meeting.  The CBC refused.

CBC Chairman Congressman Cedric Richmond (D, LA) wrote in a letter to Trump that proposals in the president’s budget would “not only devastate the communities that we represent, but also many of the communities that supported your candidacy.”

Richmond listed some of those proposals which include reductions to funding for Pell Grants, repealing and replacing Obamacare, and so on.  Reasonable men can debate the merits of these proposals, and here would have been an excellent opportunity for those who disagree with them to do just that.

But the CBC refused to talk.  Instead, they disparaged the meeting as nothing more than “a social gathering.”  In refusing to debate the questions, all the CBC has left is obstruction.

On the other hand, I could simply rail at the apparent racism inherent in a group of black Congressmen refusing to meet with a white President.  However, I’m not of the Left; I’m a conservative writer, so I won’t engage in the racism of manufacturing a racist beef where no grounds exist.

Medicaid-Receiving Companies Object to the Senate Bill

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The Senate is proposing an overhaul of Obamacare and an improvement to the health coverage providing industry, and one of those improvements is a rollback of the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid and an eventual capping of Federal funds transfers to the States’ Medicaid programs.  There are objections to this.

The primary objections are from insurers and hospitals, et al., who get a significant fraction of their income from the guarantees of Medicaid payments; they don’t want to have to compete in the open market.  They prefer the supposed safety of that guaranteed income, paltry though it is, especially compared to the income available from a free market, and they don’t care what that “safety” costs those who must pay for it.

The States themselves, for instance, in addition to financing their own Medicaid programs, are required to contribute to other States’ Medicaid programs through those Federal tax transfers, and by extension they’re forced to contribute to other States’ spending decisions generally.

Let Medicaid be the State-run program it was intended to be. Keeping the monies that would otherwise be transferred to other States would both leave more money for funding a State’s own program and force each State to become more fiscally responsible, instead of exercising a claim on other States’ money.  That fiscal responsibility also will contribute to the rising prosperity of freer market.

And let the health care providers and coverage providers compete for income from that much larger market.