Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Boeing, Iran, and Aircraft Sales

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Iran reportedly reached an agreement Sunday to buy 100 planes from Boeing, pending the final authorization from US Treasury officials.

These are passenger aircraft, ostensibly destined for Iranair and other Iranian airline companies.

There are a couple of questions about this deal, though.  One is where will the money (in the neighborhood of $17 billion) come from with which Iran will pay for these aircraft?  Who will lend Iran the money?

The second question has more dire possibilities.  Regardless of Boeing’s motives (and I do not doubt them), in the end, these are fundamentally transport aircraft.  What assurances can there be that Iran won’t turn them over to their military for transport of equipment and soldiers, whether to support Iranian military adventurism (Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, for instance) or to support Iranian terrorist clients (Hamas and Hezbollah, for instance)?

Laughingstock

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The Pentagon held a video-teleconference with Russian defense officials Saturday, two days after Russia bombed Pentagon and CIA-backed rebels not once, but twice on Thursday near Syria’s border with Iraq and Jordan.

And especially [emphasis added]

The second wave of strikes occurred after the US military called Russia on an emergency byline established following Russia’s deployment of dozens of fighter jets and attack helicopters to Syria in late 2015.

This is how seriously Russia takes President Barack Obama’s (d) administration.  This is the contempt Vladimir Putin has for this President and for Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her Reset that she wants to extend.  A Reset that is too expensive, indeed.

Elections have consequences.

Another Failure of Leading from Behind

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As the Tuesday [ASEAN] meeting ended, people briefed on the matter said discord emerged over how the proceedings should be presented to the public—between China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, and among ASEAN members themselves.

Indeed, no official post-meeting statement was produced, as is usual for international meetings.  Several participants issued their own statements, and Indonesia canceled a joint appearance with the PRC representative.  The PRC—not an ASEAN member—even presumed to instruct the participants that whatever ASEAN might say could not be the official ASEAN comment.

We’re not a member of ASEAN, but as a Pacific nation, we certainly could—and should—exercise a measure of influence and help.  But this administration doesn’t want to engage here, either.

Time to Decertify the Local

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Some employees of Cablevision in Brooklyn, members of the Communication Workers of America union, were at a company BBQ circulating a petition to decertify their local, 1109.  Naturally the local’s officials objected, and they threatened the petition circulators.

I just want you to understand, to be perfectly clear that CWA we’re probably going to personally sue y’all[.]
…
[W]e’re going after y’all personally[.]

It’s especially serious when an NLRB administrative judge objects to the union local’s behavior, ruling these union officials had violated Federal labor law with their threats.  It’ll be interesting to see how the NLRB board itself rules on the union’s inevitable appeal.

States Competing for Corporations

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Competition is at the heart of America’s economic success, but not every type of contest benefits society.  Consider the growing trend of businesses cajoling states and politicians to compete for who can dole out the most corporate welfare.  It’s especially frustrating because there are already plenty of ways to promote job growth without robbing taxpayers.

And

States could start with eliminating tax carve outs and replacing them with lower-overall tax rates and lighter regulatory burdens.  Federal lawmakers could also do their part by lowering America’s highest-in-the-developed-world corporate tax rate.

And

Embracing these policies would protect taxpayers…multinational firms with multimillion-dollar profit margins.

You bet.  Lower-tax rate policies, among other things, would directly increase those entities’ profit margins by reducing the size of a cost center.  They also would let these entities lower their prices (if only slightly), which would increase their sales (if only slightly), which would then increase their profits if not their profit margins.

In the end, States compete better on the basis of who has the lower tax and regulatory rates over all rather than who gets to the better carve-outs and special treatments.  In fact, the carve-out/treatment path, among other things, leads to an enormously byzantine tax structure within which it’s increasingly difficult to measure which State’s carve-outs/treatments are better.