Category Archives: markets

Return of the Excess Profits Tax

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Excess profits taxes are taxes on profits that government decides for itself is too much. They were first tried in the US by individual states during our Civil War. They went national under Progressive governments during WWI and WWII and were not repealed until after WWII. Another Democratic administration revived them for the Korean War, and that one disappeared at the end of 1953—over 60 years ago.

Now another Progressive President, Barack Obama, wants to revive it, and without even war as justification: he just wants the money because he Knows Better the use of that money than do those companies that actually earned it. Under his 2016 Budget Proposal, Obama insists that companies

would be subject to a 14% tax on up to $2 trillion of overseas earnings they have already accumulated[.]

Obama claims he wants “more revenue” from our multinationals in order to help pay for infrastructure—you remember, all those shovel ready jobs he joked about not being so shovel ready after all.

Companies accumulate profits—earnings—for a number of reasons: saving for economic disaster or industry downturn, planned very expensive capital expansion, planned very expensive R&D, planned…whatever. They also simply hold onto funds during economic or regulatory climates that make it infeasible to spend the money.

The reasons, though, are none of the government’s business. Government has no place dictating to a private company what its purpose is in accumulating and retaining earnings. This impropriety plainly includes saying to a business, “You have too much cash on hand. Give it up.”

Here’s an alternative, albeit one inconceivable to Democrats: get more revenue from our multinationals, and get more revenue from our domestic companies and from us citizens, by cutting tax rates, reducing regulation, generally getting government out of our way. The resulting growing economic activity will generate lots more total revenue for government. Especially when tax reform makes it useful for companies to bring home the trillions of dollars they’re holding overseas.

They’re still holding all those trillions, after all, because there are no viable projects there, either, on which to spend the money.

Privacy Misbehavior

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Andrea Peterson of The Washington Post has a warning.

Recall that ‘way last November, Verizon was exposed as using a supercookie that they’d developed for the purpose: it sits on your cell phone and tracks, ostensibly for their own use, your cell usage (supposedly limited to your use on the Internet). And you can’t delete it.

It turns out that Turn, an online advertising company that works with Google and Facebook,

uses [the Verizon supercookie] to collect data that makes it easier for advertisers to place targeted online ads, according to the researchers.

Verizon says they’re “looking into this,” but they don’t say they’re putting a stop to it.

We are evaluating how third parties are using the UIDH in this evolving ecosystem and considering any appropriate response[.]

Peterson suggests that

Turn’s use of the identifier highlights how data about someone’s online tracking practices can sometimes be deployed beyond its original intent—making it harder than ever for consumers to control who has knowledge about their online activities.

And

Turn’s General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer, Max Ochoa, confirmed Mayer’s analysis of how its program worked in an interview with The Post.

Ochoa also thinks this is perfectly jake [emphasis his].

Clearing cookies is not a reliable way for a user to express their desire not to receive tailored advertising….
…
It is vital to note that clearing a cookie cache is not a widely recognized method of reliably expressing an opt-out preference.

Yeah—because the user didn’t use a bureaucrat’s special hoop. This, of course, is nonsense. The user didn’t clear the cookies because he didn’t have anything better to do with his time, so he just started putzing around with his cell phone. Leave it to an advertiser—and one that does his data collection for his clients in an entirely behind-the-scenes way—to pretend to this level of obtuseness.

Just as disappointingly, Verizon is pretending innocence in all of this.

“[I]t is unlikely that sites and ad entities will attempt to build customer profiles for online advertising” and noting that the identifier “changes frequently.”

Never mind that

While you have a Turn tracking cookie and are on the Verizon network, it kept track of the linkage between your Turn cookie and that Verizon Wireless tracking header,” he explained. “But if you get rid of the Turn cookie, the back end of that system would notice and reinstate that cookie based on the header.

It strains my credulity to think that the IT experts at Verizon wouldn’t understand this as they developed their supercookie and deployed it.

Hmm….

Another Reason

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…not to do business through ObamaMart and to get rid of Obamacare and with it ObamaMart. Even the AP has the tale.

When you apply for coverage on HealthCare.gov, dozens of data companies may be able to tell that you are on the site. Some can even glean details such as your age, income, ZIP code, whether you smoke or if you are pregnant.

The data firms have embedded connections on the government site. Ever-evolving technology allows for individual Internet users to be tracked, building profiles that are a vital tool for advertisers.

Connections to multiple third-party tech firms were documented by technology experts who analyzed HealthCare.gov….

Additionally, former Chief Information Officer for President George Bush the Younger and current corporate cybersecurity consultant Theresa Payton was cited by the AP as saying

[T]he large number of outside connections on HealthCare.gov seems like “overkill” and makes it “kind of an outlier” among government websites.

It’s hard, too, to look past the idea that the ObamaMart designers from Kathleen Sebelius on down didn’t know this was a player at the time they chose not to put any security protections into the thing.

Repealing Obamacare

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Republicans—leadership, rank and file—and Conservatives want to repeal Obamacare, and they’re right to do so. Obamacare has been an unvarnished disaster for our nation.

To this end, Republicans need to pass repeal legislation and put it on President Barack Obama’s desk, where he surely will veto it. That veto will work to Republicans’ benefit as it helps shape the 2016 elections, but things must not stop there.

The leadership also is playing small ball, working a piecemeal approach. This includes

  • a bill that would define a full-time worker under the health law as working 40 hours per week
  • repeal [of] the…2.3% tax on medical devices such as X-ray equipment and artificial joints
  • a bill that would allow Americans to opt out of the law’s individual requirement to buy insurance

Other pieces that need to be addressed, say I, include

  • repeal of the employer mandate to provide insurance
  • repeal of the contraceptive mandate

All of this will require the Republicans on the right side of the party—the Cruzes, Gohmerts, and so on—to exercise far more patience than has been their wont. Repeal’s veto won’t be overridden, we need a Republican President to sign a re-passed repeal. Most of the piecemeal approaches also will be vetoed, and most of those will be sustained by the Democrat minority in each House. But all of these votes, initial passage and veto override alike, should be by roll call. With all the Democrats—every single one of them—explicitly on the record as favoring the Obamacare disaster, those votes will very favorably shape the ’16 elections.

But that’s not enough. Even when successful, the result will be a return to the status quo ante-Obamacare. The then-existing health insurance and health provision industries badly need restructuring. Republicans need to have in place a plan to achieve that and a timetable for the plan’s execution.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R, WI) has been cited as saying

that Obamacare would be replaced with something that gives Americans more choices and lowers costs, improves their access to care and is “truly patient centered….”

But he says he does not have a “timeline.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) has said

Our challenge, our opportunity is to pass common-sense solutions…that repeal Obamacare and replace it with patient-centered reforms that will help our constituents have better access to high-quality health care in America….

That’s not enough: it’s time to get specific. It’s time to lay out exactly what legislation will be proposed to restructure those two industries.

There’s this critical caveat, too. Accepting arguendo Obamacare as a general solution for the restructuring, it was doomed to fail because it tried to do too much all at once. The restructuring of those two industries, even in accordance with Conservative imperatives, will see a similar doom if it attempts the restructuring all at once. These industries need to be restructured piecemeal. Pass legislation to correct (some of) the worst ills in one session, and use the year to observe how those corrections worked and where they failed. In the next year of the session, correct the corrections where necessary and pass legislation correcting the next worst ills. And so on, year by year. The industries can be favorably and successfully restructured over the course of 4-6 years (much faster than the 80 years it took to get to the point of Obamacare, but not overnight, and especially not in one fell swoop).

But that takes patience. All or nothing right damn now will only achieve nothing. With Obamacare left in place.

Carbon Footprint

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[I]n 2011, the University of Technology Sydney made a significant breakthrough by synthesizing something called graphene paper (GP), an ultra thin layer of graphite that has five to six times lower density than steel, but is two times harder with 10 times the tensile strength and 13 times higher bending rigidity.

GP also works well in lithium-ion batteries and even better in lithium-sulfur batteries. The latter kind has far greater storage capacity and is a whole lot cheaper; GP solves the sulfur degradation problem.

There’s a lot more at the link.

Of course there are practical problems yet to be solved at this early stage. A carbon fire burns hot. Get the car, or pickup, too light, and the shock absorbers will need serious redesign—a particular problem for working pickups that do off-road work. But still….

An all-carbon vehicle? Gah. The horror.