Category Archives: markets

They’ve Been Called Out

Posted on by
Reply

The Left is always on about the need to raise taxes, the need for folks (especially the rich, but in general, too) to pay more to government in order to get all the services government is supposed to provide.

Now they’ve been called out and their hypocrisy exposed empirically, at least in one nation that our own Left wants us to emulate.

Hammered by the opposition for slashing taxes and going on a spending spree with the country’s oil money, the center-right government [of Norway] has hit back with a bold proposal: voluntary contributions.

Launched in June, the initiative has received a lukewarm reception, with the equivalent of just $1,325 in extra revenue being collected so far, according to the Finance Ministry.

Finance Minister Siv Jensen:

The tax scheme was set up to allow those who want to pay more taxes to do so in a simple and straightforward way.  If anyone thinks the tax level is too low, they now have the chance to pay more.

Jonas Gahr Store, with a net worth of $8 million (and a leading Labour Party politician), is one of those refusing to pay more than tax law requires, even though the rate, he insists, is too low.  Now it’s personal, though; he’s not dealing with anonymous OPM.

“Pay up, Sucka–”

“No.”

Payback

Posted on by
Reply

The European Union is pushing for it over Great Britain’s appalling effrontery in choosing to go out from the EU.

The European Union’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier on Thursday gave a stark warning to officials in London that the UK won’t have “frictionless trade” with the bloc after it leaves.

… Mr Barnier said that he isn’t sure that the EU position is “fully understood across the Channel.”

Barnier added

In practice, “no deal” would worsen the “lose-lose” situation which is bound to result from Brexit. And the UK would have more to lose than its partners[.]

Lose-lose.  And the Brits will lose more.  Barnier and his EU comrades will make sure of it.

You shouldn’t have voted to leave.  Pay up, sucka.  The rest of you in the EU, pay attention.  If you try to leave, we’ll make you pay, too.

An Area for Sales Increases

Posted on by
Reply

We must be on the right track.  Now it’s time to push the pace.  The People’s Republic of China doesn’t want us to sell to the Republic of China the wherewithal to defend itself against aggression, not even the pittance that is the $1.4 billion arms deal that the Trump administration is contemplating.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang on Friday said Washington should immediately stop the sale to avoid harming relations with Beijing.

He said the deal would severely damage China’s sovereignty and security interests and runs contrary to Washington’s commitment to a “one-China” policy.

That’s risible.  Leaving aside whether good relations with the PRC should come at a cost as steep as meekly abandoning an ally and friend would be, what’s harming those relations is the PRC’s constant drumbeat of threat against the RoC; the PRC’s occupation of international waters and of islands that belong to the sovereign nations surrounding the South China Sea to the east, south, and west (although the RoC has conflicting claims to some of those islands); and the PRC’s aggressions against Japanese islands in the East China Sea.

Further, there’s no threat to any “one-China” policy.  There’s only one China on the Asian mainland, and there’s only one China on the island of Taiwan.  No one is arguing otherwise.

Our next step should be to help the RoC to upgrade their defense forces and equipage into something that truly can defend the nation.

The Health Care Choice

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Medicaid-Receiving Companies Object to the Senate Bill

Posted on by
Reply

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.