Category Archives: political economy

Further Reasons to Ban TikTok

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And not just force its sale by ByteDance. ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and as such it’s subject to PRC laws, including the PRC’s national security law requiring PRC companies to answer queries from that nation’s intelligence community, queries which can range from “what do you know about this subject in that country” to “go find out, conduct the espionage.” That’s reason enough to ban the company (that subordination of PRC-domiciled companies to that nation’s intelligence apparatus is reason enough to ban all PRC-domiciled companies from the US, but that’s a different story).

Another reason to ban TikTok stems from this claim made by the company in response to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s unanimous vote (that’s 50 (of 52 Committee members; 2 weren’t present to vote) Representatives of both parties agreeing on something) to advance legislation that would require TikTok to be sold by ByteDance to a non-PRC affiliated company or be barred from operating in the US. That claim by an anonymous spokesman for TikTok:

This legislation has a predetermined outcome: a total ban of TikTok in the United States. The government is attempting to strip 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.

That’s a lie on two fronts, explicitly intended to create hysteria. The first front is the business about “total ban.” It is no such thing, and TikTok managers—and their ByteDance owners—know full well: that claim cynically ignores the primary option the legislation offers, the sale of TikTok to an acceptable, non-PRC affiliated buyer.

The second front is that business about stripping TikTok users of their Constitutional right to free expression. Of course, it’s no such thing, as those TikTok and ByteDance persons also know full well. Were ByteDance to refuse to sell and TikTok barred, no one’s free speech would be stripped away, only a single pipeline would be stripped away. All of TikTok’s users, every single one of them, would have access to any and all of a plethora of other pipelines through which to speak, pipelines like Facebook YouTube, Gab, Truth Social, CloutHub, GETTR, MeWe, LinkedIn, Parler, X, and on and on. Further, were TikTok to be sold, that question would never even arise since the TikTok pipeline would be free to continue operating.

Additionally, the ability of this PRC company to mobilize all of its members to manipulate an American internal political matter demonstrates the influence the PRC is able to exert on American domestic politics.

As lawmakers prepared to consider the legislation on Thursday, users of the app…saw notifications urging them to complain to their House representative about the bill. Then the app let people call their representative with a few presses of buttons, fueling congressional concerns about TikTok.
TikTok’s campaign quickly overwhelmed the phone lines of some congressional offices…illustrated how TikTok could mobilize an army of people and gather data to push user behavior, which some lawmakers say is the exact reason they don’t want the company to have ties back to [the PRC].

That PRC manipulation by itself is yet another to ban TikTok altogether.

Impact of Biden’s Border and Immigration Policies on Employment

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Another outcome of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disdain for our national borders and for actually vetting who comes into our nation is this. Notice, too, that the graph isn’t some tenuously done aggregation of data from questionable sources; it’s a FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data, compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) graph.

In just February, 1.2 million immigrants (legal and illegal) gained a job. Meanwhile, 500k native-born Americans LOST their job.
Since Covid, native-born workers have actually LOST 2 million jobs. All of the net job gains are immigrants.

 

The sharp dip is from the Wuhan Virus Situation. After that, the sharp increase in employment is nearly exclusively from a mix of immigrants, temporary and otherwise, and illegal aliens, whom the poster euphemistically terms “illegal immigrants.”

In just February, there were those 1.2 million immigrants of one sort or another. In January, the latest month for which data are publicly available, there were more than 176,000 illegal aliens encountered at the Southern Border, and an unknown number of undetected illegal aliens. Those 176,000 are roughly one-seventh of that total.

The problem here isn’t that immigrants are successfully competing with “native born” Americans for jobs. It’s that all those illegal aliens appear to be successfully competing in an arena they should never have access to.

Virtue-Signaling in the Credit Card Market

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is at it again, attempting to buy votes with another of his sham attempts to save us ordinary Americans money.

The Biden administration on Tuesday finalized a new rule to cap all credit card late fees at $8, a move that is expected to elicit fierce pushback from industry giants.

His Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

estimates the new regulation will save American families more than $10 billion in late fees annually by reducing the typical late fee of about $32. That amounts to an average saving of roughly $220 per year for the 45 million people who are charged late fees.

Stipulate for the moment that the CFPB actually has an accurate, fact-supported basis for its cost claims. Those fees help the banks recoup a significant fraction of the costs they incur when credit card holders are late on their payments. This restriction on cost recovery is only going to lead to tighter bank restrictions on who they’re willing to issue credit cards to.

How much money does Biden think will be saved by those who no longer can get credit cards, or by those whose cards are not renewed on the renewal date?

Biden really thinks we’re stupid enough to not see through his bread and circus shenanigans.

The Next Step

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It’s becoming necessary. I wrote yesterday about the need for tariffs on a variety of tech-oriented goods that the People’s Republic of China is heavily subsidizing for production and export.

It’s rapidly becoming necessary—if it hasn’t been for some time already—to take the next step vis-à-vis trade with the PRC.

Trade routes snaking through former Soviet republics Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are among the many paths into Russia for so-called dual-use goods—singled out by the US and its allies because they can be used on the battlefield.
Despite their efforts, Central Asia is a growing pipeline for Russia, made possible by thousands of miles of open borders, opaque trade practices and opportunistic middlemen. The goods often originate in China, where they are manufactured in some cases by major US companies, which say the items are being imported by Russia without their permission.

Such goods include war-relevant items like computer chips, routers, and ball bearings used in tanks. These items are important for, if not critical to, the barbarian’s war machine and his war against Ukraine. A lot of these items are US products produced in the PRC for delivery to Western and other Asian customers. The PRC is redirecting much of that output to its “friend forever,” Russia.

It’s become time to take the next step: bar American companies that produce such dual-capable goods from producing them in the PRC or exporting them from other sources into the PRC market. The transition away to other production sources and supply chain pathways will be expensive, but not nearly so expensive as the barbarian overrunning and enslaving Ukraine, with sights on targets further west, and the PRC’s subsequent invasion of the Republic of China and closing off the East China Sea commerce lanes to Korea, Japan, and the US.

Tariffs

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When considering the utility of tariffs, it’s useful to keep in mind that foreign trade has very little to do with economics and very much to do with foreign policy. Tariffs, within that framework, can be either good or bad, although as with any tools used in any conflict, they won’t come without cost.

Tariffs imposed solely to protect domestic industry are strictly protectionist, and they result in a less efficient economy with higher costs for domestic consumers. However they might seem justified at their outset—to give a nascent industry (not a nascent company) a chance to get established, for instance—they don’t get canceled once the need for the protection is gone. After that, protectionist tariffs just become a drag on the domestic economy. A canonical example of this is the LBJ-era chicken tax on German light pickup trucks, still in place to the point that we import no German light pickups at all.

On the other hand, tariffs to influence foreign nations to change their ways are matters of foreign policy more than they are of protection, for all that their impact is economic. Such tariffs impose the same domestic costs as protectionist tariffs, but the long-term gain, if they’re done carefully, will outweigh those short-term costs—just as is the case with any set of tools used in other sorts of conflicts.

This is the case, for instance, when a foreign nation government subsidizes its own output to gain an advantage in an otherwise free market international trade environment. It’s especially the case when those subsidies effectively close off that nation’s own domestic market to nations that would otherwise compete in the subsidizing nation’s domestic market with their own exports into it.

This is especially the case when the foreign nation is an enemy nation using its subsidies as its own foreign policy tool to dominate our economy with a view to…influencing…our own international—and domestic—actions.

That brings me to the People’s Republic of China in particular.

[The PRC] is competing with advanced economies in cars, computer chips, and complex machinery—higher-value industries that are viewed as more central to technological leadership.

And

Beijing…plowing money into factories, especially for semiconductors, aerospace, cars, and renewable-energy equipment, and selling the resulting surplus abroad.

That money is cheap, state-directed loans, and from those subsidies, PRC companies are glutting foreign markets.

To be sure, the PRC is rationalizing this—as are many non-PRC economists—as a need to revive its domestic economy, one that, at 5.2% GDP growth year-on-year, is outgrowing our own. It does seem that the PRC economy is slowing, but it’s slowing from a very high growth rate to a high growth rate. The outcome remains one of potential dominance of our economy, especially in national security-critical technologies and energy production. This is coupled with the PRC’s nakedly acquisitive moves in the South China Sea and to a growing extent in the East China Sea, and with its increasingly overt and threatening behavior toward the Republic of China.

That brings me to tariffs as a foreign policy tool.

We should be answering the PRC’s behavior with tariffs of our own, and we should be working to get our friends and allies to apply tariffs, also. To be sure, they will be unlikely to go along with us, but they certainly won’t if we don’t make the effort to persuade.

Such tariffs ordinarily would only be high enough to offset the subsidy advantage the PRC is looking to achieve and return those markets to free competition. However, the PRC’s overall behavior makes these tariffs important foreign policy tools rather than merely protectionist. The tariffs to be imposed should be designed to strongly influence the PRC’s overall international behavior, especially in its current, apparently shrinking, economic position.

The tariffs we impose should begin at least twice the value of the PRC subsidies, and increase—rapidly, don’t give time for the PRC to adjust—from there until the PRC’s international behavior has been suitably altered.