Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

In Just One Year

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It is, though, something that’s been well-known for several years; it’s been baked into our economy by the prior spending and taxing paradigms of this administration from its passage of Obamacare forward.

A slowdown in the growth of federal revenues, as well as rising government spending, pushed the US deficit up in the 2016 fiscal year for the first time since 2011, reversing the trend of falling deficits as the economy recovered in recent years.

The budget shortfall widened to $587 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept 30, the Treasury Department said Friday, up 34% from the previous fiscal year.

And the deficit is going to continue to rise in the coming years unless government spending is sharply curtailed.  The sequester has been good for generating those smaller deficits, but it’s badly damaged our national defense capability—which was the point of the extortion President Barack Obama (D) attempted when he offered the sequester in conjunction with his fellow Democrats’ refusal to agree to a responsible budget.

[A] growing number of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security recipients, as well as slightly higher interest rates on publicly held debt, helped drive up total spending by 5% in 2016, while total revenues grew by just 1%.

This puts a premium on reforming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and on getting our debt under control.  Which demands getting rid of our deficits, not growing them.  Which demands reducing government spending, not growing it.

But that’s going to take a change in administrations and the preservation of the Senate and the House.

How Many Layers of Bureaucracy

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…whether government’s or private businesses’ will Big Government require before it will allow a failed enterprise to fail?

Regulators want to prevent taxpayers from having to ever again bail out big banks. Their latest idea: make the banks bail themselves out.

Previously, banks had struggled to persuade regulators they had a plan—called a “living will”—that would allow them to be dismantled and shut down if they got into trouble without taxpayers taking a hit. Now, banks are creating new structures that would allow their most important parts to keep functioning, even if the parent company has to file for bankruptcy. The aim is to avoid the kind of market chaos that could cause economic harm.

Never mind the far greater market chaos created by keeping these failed entities around, actively cluttering the market.

Make the banks bail themselves out?  Get regulators out of the way, and let the banks—or any other enterprise—prevent their failure with sound, market-driven business decisions, instead of facing a greater risk of failure by being trapped into decisions driven by Big Government regulations.  Those remaining businesses that fail will deserve to do so from their poor decision making.

The whole concept of a “living will” and a free market enterprise is internally contradictory.   Let a failed enterprise fail, and let the free market, consisting of all of its participants including the enterprises that rise from the bankrupt’s ashes, prosper.

Racism of the Left

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Again.  Still.

A Black-owned bakery, Fat Cupcake, baked up a batch of cupcakes to honor our President, an American who happens to be black; they titled the cupcakes “Mr President.”  Fat Cupcake described their confection on their menu as an

Oreo (™) Cookie baked inside white cake, cookies n’ cream buttercream.

It didn’t take long for the Left to start manufacturing a racist beef where none exists, thereby displaying their own racism.  Via Yelp, for instance:

Very troubling. They were serving a cupcake called the “Mr President” that had an Oreo cookie inside. When I tried to point out the racism implied, they claimed that “our current president loves Oreos.”

Never mind that President Barack Obama (D) is well-known for loving Oreos; there’s no “claim” there.

This isn’t just an isolated anecdote, either.

Since opening in Southeast Portland, [Fat Cupcake owner Anjelica] Hayes said she’s had to field questions about whether her cupcakes are racist.

I’m surprised someone isn’t whining about the sexist nature of the establishment’s name.

Apparently Bureaucrats Don’t Have Enough Control Already

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The European Commission is considering unilaterally expanding the scope of its authorities.

The European Union’s antitrust authority on Friday said it was considering changes to its merger review rules to include a wider swath of technology and pharmaceutical deals that normally wouldn’t fall within its purview but could possibly harm the bloc’s internal market.

…the European Commission said it was fielding opinions from the public on whether the regulator should also probe mergers involving companies with smaller revenues.

Because instructing the big companies on the business decisions the Commission would permit them to take doesn’t have enough juice for them anymore.

Such a move would be especially significant for the digital and pharmaceutical sectors, the EU said, where an acquired company might generate little turnover but holds commercially valuable data or owns products under development that haven’t yet been marketed.

That’s an area of regulatory vacuum, and we can’t have that, now can we?  Besides those data and nascent products represent action on which the EU wants its vig.