Category Archives: markets

A Trade War

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Russia has announced that it won’t buy certain goods from certain of the nations that are sanctioning Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and its fomenting of rebellion in eastern Ukraine. This is a trade war that Russia shouldn’t be expected to win.

For one thing, Russia’s economy is the size of Italy’s and more moribund, so any trade war can only hurt Russia relatively more than it can hurt the far larger economies of the US, the EU, Australia, Canada, even Norway, who are the targets of the Russian boycott.

For another thing, here are some facts related to this boycott.

[Russia has] banned imports of meat, fish, milk and milk products, and fruit and vegetables….  The ban has been introduced for one year

[Russia] may also introduce restrictions regarding imports of planes, navy vessels, and cars…

And

Russia depends heavily on imported foodstuffs—most of it from the West—particularly in the largest and most prosperous cities such as Moscow, where imported food fills an estimated 60-70% of the market. Food and agricultural imports from the US amounted to $1.3 billion last year, according to the US Department of Agriculture, and in 2013 the EU’s agricultural exports to Russia totaled €11.8 billion ($15.8 billion). [This is against GDPs of $17.3 trillion and €13.1 trillion for the US and the EU and ₱75.8 trillion ($2.1 trillion) for Russia.]

A year, though, is plenty of time for the banned sellers to find new markets, which reduces the long-term need to sell to Russia at all. This, in turn, produces a capacity functionally to embargo Russia with respect to those goods—not by explicitly and legally refusing to sell to Russia, but by voluntarily and economically selling elsewhere instead.

A year also is plenty of time for Russia to find other sellers: Latin America, Turkey, other ex-Soviet nations, and so on. Russians won’t starve. However, the reason these other sources aren’t current suppliers is because the boycotted nations can sell into Russia at lower prices than those alternatives. These alternative sellers will, almost necessarily then, cause higher prices in Russian stores.

Entitlements and Taxes

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Dr Ben Carson had a couple thoughts a while ago; they’re still valid.

On taxes:

What we need to do is come up with something simple. And when I pick up my Bible, you know what I see? I see the fairest individual in the universe, God, and he’s given us a system. It’s called a tithe.

We don’t necessarily have to do 10% but it’s the principle. He didn’t say if your crops fail, don’t give me any tithe, or if you have a bumper crop, give me triple tithe. So there must be something inherently fair about proportionality. You make $10 billion, you put in a billion. You make $10 you put in one. Of course you’ve got to get rid of the loopholes.

On health care:

Here’s my solution: when a person is born, give him a birth certificate, an electronic medical record, and a health savings account to which money can be contributed—pretax—from the time you’re born ’til the time you die. If you die, you can pass it on to your family members, and there’s nobody talking about death panels. We can make contributions for people who are indigent. Instead of sending all this money to some bureaucracy, let’s put it in their HSAs. Now they have some control over their own health care. And very quickly they’re going to learn how to be responsible.

The only place I disagree with him is on the degree of heritability of the HSA. Given the slowness of growth of the relevant supply (of health-related services) compared with the rapidity of growth of its demand, accumulating wealth in an HSA would over just a couple of generations create too much money earmarked for health services; this money would rapidly increase health services prices. And that would price those just starting out—newborns, new immigrants, and so on—out of the health services market, just as the present system and its immediate precursor have done. Instead, let the dearly departed’s remaining HSA be passed into his estate as an ordinary asset of the estate, and let each new entrant—those newborns, new immigrants, and so on—start their own HSAs anew.

Nonetheless, The Wall Street Journal titled their article about these thoughts “Ben Carson for President.” We could do worse.

Appellate Court En Banc Hearings

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The DC Circuit a short time ago held in Halbig v Burwell that Federal regulations regarding Federal health plan exchanges violate Obamacare’s plain language: Federal subsidies, contrary to those regulations, are available only to health plan holders who got their plans through State-run health plan exchanges.

Adam White, in a recent Wall Street Journal piece in the context of that ruling and the Federal government’s subsequent appeal to the DC Circuit to rehear the case en banc, noted a couple of things.

One is how rare en banc (re)hearings are, especially for the DC Circuit:

The DC Circuit rehears virtually none of its cases. Each year the court’s three-judge panels make roughly 500 rulings, but the court averages roughly one en banc rehearing. This year has produced a bumper crop: two. The previous year: zero.

Then he got into why this is so.

…the court’s high standard, found in the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure: en banc rehearing “is not favored and ordinarily will not be ordered” unless the case satisfies one of two standards. First, an en banc rehearing may be needed to “secure or maintain uniformity of the court’s decisions.” A three-judge panel is not allowed to overrule old precedents, even when precedents are in conflict; only the full court can do so, en banc.

Second, en banc rehearing is appropriate for what the federal appellate rules call cases of “exceptional importance.” For the DC Circuit, this standard has been met almost exclusively by cases raising serious constitutional issues. Over the past decade seven of the nine cases reheard en banc raised difficult questions of constitutional law, such as the rights of Guantanamo detainees or of terminally ill patients.

Cases that will substantially affect the court’s own workings also can be deemed of “exceptional importance.” In 2011, the court sat en banc to decide whether taxpayers could file lawsuits challenging IRS procedures for obtaining tax refunds.

Halbig was a straightforward application of the Obamacare law as it was written. That the 4th Circuit saw this differently isn’t relevant; the DC Circuit can only rehear its own cases, not those of sister appellate courts. There’s no precedent conflict here. Some might argue that the question has Constitutional significance, and I’d agree with them. However, neither set of litigants raised any sort of Constitutional question, and the case and the ruling turned on the law itself. There’s no Constitutional controversy here, either.

What about the case’s “exceptional importance?” Judge Harry Edwards, who dissented in Halbig, wrote this in a 1987 case [Edwards’ emphasis]:

[N]o judge agrees with all of the decisions handed down in the circuit….” But if each judge called for en banc rehearing simply to overturn a panel decision with which he personally disagrees, it would do “substantial violence to the collegiality that is indispensable to judicial decision-making.” Rather, en banc review must be reserved for “the rarest of circumstances… [with] real significance to the legal process.”

In the context ofHalbig, it’ll be instructive to see whether the DC Circuit’s newly appointed judges are appellate judges who happen to be Democrats or whether they are Democrats who happen to be appellate judges.

Another Government Overreach

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In a recent op-ed piece, The Wall Street Journal correctly decried the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s CARDS program. This program, cynically named “Comprehensive Automated Risk Data System,” is a program that wants to require all of our brokerage houses to report to FINRA massive amounts of data concerning our investment accounts, including what we’re doing in (with?) those accounts.

The op-ed correctly objected to CARDS’ massive collection of data, saying

FINRA says the ocean of data will help it spot a problem almost in real time, far earlier than if it showed up during a regular examination. …

But the financial crisis showed that more data doesn’t guarantee that regulators will know what to do with the information, and it’s as likely the data flood will overwhelm FINRA.

 

But the WSJ missed a far larger problem with CARDS (and with FINRA generally). The piece cited FINRA’s Chairman and CEO Richard Ketchum’s statement about CARDS’ purpose:

CARDS will allow us to collect and manage data from firms in such a way that we can quickly identify trends and product concentrations that are harmful to investors and take swift, responsive action.

Whose definition of “product concentrations that are harmful?” Why, Big Government’s, of course. This is the real danger of this sort of program: government usurping the free market’s role—and so, deprecating the market—in determining what is harmful. This simply makes the definition of “harmful” a political one, rather than a legitimate one.

Paul Ryan’s Expanding Opportunity in America

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House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s “Expanding Opportunity in America” proposal can be seen in full here. I’ll only comment on parts of it in this post.

On the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, then, we should reexamine the federal government’s role. For too long, the federal government has tried to supplant, and not to support, the people fighting poverty on the front lines—families, neighborhoods, community groups. In the fight against poverty, the people ultimately are the vanguard, and government is the rearguard. Government protects the supply lines. But it is the people themselves who take to the front lines.

A major part of his proposal is his Opportunity Grant Pilot-Project

[T]his proposal [The Opportunity Grant Pilot-Project] would create a new pilot project in a select number of states. In participating states, the federal government would consolidate a number of means-tested programs into a new Opportunity Grant (OG) program. The largest contributions would come from SNAP, TANF, child-care, and housing-assistance programs, and the funding would be deficit-neutral relative to current law.

It is important to note that this is not a budget-cutting exercise—this is a reform proposal. This consolidation does not make judgments about an optimal level of spending. Instead, this proposal is concerned with our ability to use resources effectively and to find out what works. It allows the federal government to leverage its strengths—vast resources—while also allowing states, localities, and communities to leverage theirs—deep knowledge of their population and the unique challenges they face. Therefore, this proposal seeks to create the space and flexibility necessary for local, state, and federal government to add value without making judgments about the right level of spending.

OG Funding Stream

  • Consolidates several means-tested programs into a new Opportunity Grant program.

  • Each participating state gets the same amount of funding they receive from the programs listed in Appendix I.

  • The proposal is deficit-neutral relative to current law.

  • Within the Opportunity Grant, states would have flexibility in accommodating housing-aid recipients, the elderly, and the disabled—either by maintaining the current programs or dedicating the same amount of resources to them in the new program.

He offers, though, few ideas on how this program would eliminate the welfare tax cliff he mentions and that’s also described here. “Sign a contract:”

Providers must be held accountable, and so should recipients. Each beneficiary will sign a contract with consequences for failing to meet the agreed-upon benchmarks. At the same time, there should also be incentives for people to go to work. Under each life plan, if the individual meets the benchmarks ahead of schedule, then he or she could be rewarded. For example, if the goal of an individual’s plan is to find a job within six months, and he or she starts working within three months, he or she could receive a bonus. Bonuses could take a number of creative forms, such as a savings bond.

He offers no examples of how this might work; he relies solely on the hope that State experimentation will suffice. This isn’t all bad, if only for the admission that the Federal government has no solutions—and that’s the point of his entire proposal. It’s also not a forlorn hope: State experimentation is necessary; it’s there that the answers will be developed.

Of course the Progressives in government will not like this plan: it encourages people to see to their own ends, it enables them to become responsible, independent, contributing citizens, and it will end their dependency on the welfare handouts of Progressives—it will reduce the need for those whose jobs, political or bureaucratic, depend on being able to provide welfare handouts.

Regarding Ryan’s Earned Income Tax Credit expansion, I confess to misgivings here, too, although Ryan’s proposal makes sense as a first cut. I’ve never been enamored of this; it’s hard to see how the welfare cliff from losing the credit in return for advancing in work isn’t a discouragement from finding advancement in work. However,

The consensus among independent economists is that in most cases the EITC makes low-income families more likely to work by increasing work’s rewards. CBO also finds that it encourages households to enter the labor force.

EITCGraphRyan’s proposal is simply to expand EITC eligibility to younger workers and to childless single and married parents (not to raise the upper income bound for eligibility), and to pay for that expansion with spending cuts—real cuts—elsewhere in the budget.

Running the numbers seems to mitigate the other part of this: that discouragement from advancement through the reduction in EITC subsidy that results. A married couple, one child family, for instance, making $25,000/yr gets roughly $3,500 in EITC for total income of $28,500. Were that family gets a wage increase to $30k, EITC falls to a rough $3k for total income of $33k. Thus, the family would keep $4.5k of that total income increase; the drop in EITC would constitute only a 10% “tax” on that raise.

Federal criminal justice system

Ryan’s proposal here centers on sentencing and prison reform, and this is good. A couple things are lacking, though, regarding sentencing. One specific sentencing reform that would be valuable—and that would dovetail nicely with his jobs training proposal—regards nonviolent criminal sentencing. This should center on community service, but not just any service: the criminal’s time here should be in a service that also teaches the man a marketable skill, so that when he’s finished paying his debt for his crime, he’s not only a free man again, he has the means with which to earn his way through life, rather than (be forced to) resume stealing it.

The other reform here will be much harder to achieve, and in truth it’s outside the scope of a budget proposal. We have too many Federal laws on the books, and in particular, we have too many Federal criminal laws. These need to be culled.

In the end, there’s much not to like in Ryan’s proposal—it’s deficit neutral, for instance; it by design leaves spending and taxing alone—but there’s also much to like. Progressives in government won’t like it, either. It reduces the Federal government’s role in our economy and in our individual lives, and from that it reduces those Progressives’ raison d’être.

The largest likability, and this alone is a deal maker, is that it’s a net improvement over the existing welfare régime: it takes control over welfare away from the Federal government, which for all its good intentions is too remote and too slow to respond to changing conditions, and puts welfare in the hands of those closest to the particular welfare needs: the State governments and local agencies.

Ryan’s proposal does this—another strong likability—by reallocating existing spending into consolidated block grants and shipping those to the States. The strings attached to these grants—and I’m of mixed minds regarding any Federal stringing—are minimal and centered on satisfying a Federal agency (primarily HHS and Education) that a State’s plans for the grants are suitable to the task.

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Finally, we also must be mindful of two things: the first is that better is the enemy of good enough. This plan is good enough, for today. This plan is good enough as a first step.

The other thing is a direct follow-on to the first: welfare reform—nothing in politics—is a once and done affair. Most discussions of welfare reform, tax reform, spending reform, what-have-you reform only look at a specific proposal as though it’s entire in itself and nothing more need be done, or rejected. It’s not good enough now, so toss it and start over.

This plan is not fully grown or perfect, either. But it’s good enough for now. It’s good enough (since passage in 2014 is unlikely) for next year, and that year’s status as the first year of the 114th Congress. Pass it, knowing that the work isn’t done and knowing that the work can be improved. Then come back the following year, the second year of that Congress and correct the defects that will have become apparent by then, and add to the plan additional, de novo, changes as the experimental results come in, as experience suggests new ideas. Then in each of the sessions of the 115th Congress, do it again. And again in the 116th. And so on.