We’re the Government, and We’re Here to…Help

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Not some government personnel saying they’re from the government; they are the government. The People’s Republic of China plans to form a new government entity whose purpose, ostensibly, is to help out the PRC’s economic private sector.

[The PRC’s] National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s top economic planner, said Monday that it would set up a bureau to coordinate policies across different government bodies and help development of the private economy, the source of most of the new jobs and economic dynamism in the country.

This says it all, though:

The new bureau will be tasked with monitoring the country’s private economy and establishing channels for regular communication with private enterprises….

Those channels will become channels of control. “This is what you ought to do to increase performance. Be too bad if you don’t do these things.”

The NDRC’s claim is this:

Unlike the recently formed national data bureau, which also falls under the NDRC’s umbrella, the new department announced Monday won’t hold a vice-ministerial rank, suggesting it is unlikely to be a policy heavyweight in a vast government bureaucracy that has long favored the country’s powerful state-owned enterprises.

That won’t last. The new department will increasingly gain power as its controls strengthen. That’s not particularly unique to the PRC; all governments are populated by bureaucrats whose primary personal imperative is to hold onto/increase their power as part of their justification for their jobs. It’s just a stronger imperative for the bureaucrats of the PRC government, and especially for Emperor President Xi Jinping.

Thus, this is the government of the People’s Republic of China extending its control over the nation’s economy through a back window. I don’t write “the nation’s private economy” because that term in the PRC is a cynical euphemism for government-controlled businesses that are nominally privately owned. Mainland Chinese companies, along with those on Hong Kong and Macau, are too beholden to the PRC’s intelligence community’s “information” demands and to the PRC’s newly enacted “report on your friends’ and neighbors’ suspicious espionage activities” law.

Then Don’t Do That

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he wants to avoid brinksmanship and the risk of a government shutdown in the upcoming talks as Congress get back to work after its August month back home.

We cannot afford the brinkmanship or hostage-taking we saw from House Republicans earlier this year when they pushed our country to the brink of default to appease the most extreme members of their party.

If Schumer were serious, though, he’d cut out his obstructionism and work with Republicans to pass spending bills that represent true spending cuts; and he’d work with Republicans to make permanent the tax cuts enacted in 2017 and to further reduce tax rates; and he’d work with Republicans to pass legislation that would seal our southern border; and he’d work with Republicans on the sole rational spending increase, that for rebuilding our Navy and the rest of our military establishment.

Instead, he’s bent on his brinkmanship and on his decision to try to hold our economy hostage for his personal and his Party’s political gain. He’s pushing for another Schumer shutdown.

Buying Battery-Operated Cars

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My then-new gasoline-powered 2022 Ford Escape and my wife’s new 2023 Ford Maverick hybrid, each one level down from Ford’s top tier, each cost in the low- to mid-$30 thousands. Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal‘s Senior Personal Technology Columnist, evaluated a number of battery-operated cars under $60,000 to see which one of those she liked best. The ones she looked into were the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Tesla Model Y, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, and Volkswagen ID.4.

The prices of these, as tested, were—oh, wait; she didn’t discuss equipage in any detail, nor did she name the price of those cars as tested. Accordingly, here are the prices I found after an arduous five minute Bing search. All prices, save Tesla, are via Edmunds; Tesla’s prices are per Tesla.

  • Mach-E: $42,500-$60,000, depending on how gussied up you want it
  • Model Y: $52,900-$66,000, depending….
  • Ioniq 5: $47,700-$59,400, depending….
  • EV6: $45,900-$60,200, depending….
  • 4: $40,300-$56,500, depending….

Assume, arguendo, that Stern’s evaluations are reasonable (noting that some of her criteria are matters of taste), and truncate the gussying to Stern’s $60,000 cap. This is the cost of transportation that the Progressive-Democrat Biden administration is trying to force us to pay in the name if its—and the Left’s—climate funding industry and related artificial hysteria.

This is just to get into the car, too; the comparison elides questions of range; the availability of charging stations outside the home garage; the long time to charge to the battery-operated cars’ 300-ish miles range (my Escape reaches 400+ miles on a tank of gas, and the tank fills in three minutes, or so); and of special importance to the Left (except when inconvenient to them); the environmental damage done by mining the raw materials and disposing of the spent batteries.

“I’m Busy”

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President Joe Biden (D) has traveled to Maui to observe the damage done by the wild fires there and to claim that “help would be on the way.” Biden has just been to Florida to observe the damage done by Hurricane Idalia and to claim that “help would be on the way.”

But Biden still hasn’t been to East Palestine, seven months after a train derailment that polluted the town and its water supply with toxic chemicals that leaked from train’s tank cars. “I’ve been busy,” he claims.

Well, I haven’t had the occasion to go to East Palestine. There’s a lot going on here, and I just haven’t been able to break.

A lot of that lot going on here is the 40% of his time in office that he’s spent on vacation, mostly in his Delaware home.

And this bit:

Meanwhile, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R), Senators Sherrod Brown (D), and JD Vance (R) have called on Biden to issue a disaster declaration for East Palestine.

Biden hasn’t throughout these seven months since the disaster, even though the State and local jurisdictions have asked for the declaration. Biden’s vacation schedule has been interfering with that simple action, too.

It’s clear: Biden’s vacations are more important that going to East Palestine.

Frankly, the good residents of East Palestine are not missing anything in Biden’s absence. He’s speaking to them quite clearly from where he is.

Some Labor Day Questions

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First published in 2015, I’ve updated it for today.  In an ideal world, I’ll be able to update it again next year, with a yet more optimistic tone.

The Wall Street Journal asked some questions on Labor Day 2012, and supplied some answers.  Here are some of those questions and answers, which remain as valid this Labor Day.

  • Q: How are America’s workers doing? Not good. Over the past decade, over the ups and downs of the economy, taking inflation into account, the compensation of the typical worker — wages and benefits—basically haven’t risen at all. … The Labor Department recently said that 6.1 million workers in 2009-2011 have lost jobs that they’d had for at least three years. Of those, 45% hadn’t found work as of January 2012. … Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday that unemployment is still two percentage points higher than normal….
  • Q: Things ARE getting better, though. The US economy is creating jobs, right? Back in December 2007 when the recession began, there were about two jobless workers for every job opening.  When the economy touched bottom in mid-2009, there were more than six unemployed for every job.  At last count, the BLS says there were 3.4 jobless for every opening.
  • Q: How much of this elevated unemployment is because the unemployed just don’t have the skills that employers are looking for right now?  …the bulk of the evidence is a lot of the unemployment really is the old-fashioned kind: the kind that would go away if the economy was growing at a stronger pace. Mr. Bernanke said as much at the [2012] Jackson Hole conference….

In 2019, the jobs situation was drastically improved.  The overall unemployment rate was at an historic low, and there were more job openings than there were folks to fill them.  The black unemployment rate was at a record low.  The Hispanic unemployment rate was at a near record low.  The women unemployment rate was at a near record low.  Wages, both real and nominal, were growing.

These two questions remain relevant for this year.

  • Q: What about the COVID-19 virus situation? It hit us hard last winter, when we knew nothing about it, and much of the data we did have had been falsified, with other, critical, data withheld from us by foreign entities for critical weeks. However, the initial spike has collapsed, and the latest, end-of-summer surge is waning. The fatality rate, given an infection, is a small fraction of 1% for most age groups and in the 3%-5% range for those in their 60s and older. Vaccines are on the horizon, and mitigating treatment techniques and drugs are in effect that greatly lessen the severity of most infections and shorten significantly hospital stays, and decrease drastically mortality rates for those hospitalized. It also turns out that children are the least harmed by this virus, neither likely to pass infections among each other nor to adults; schools can re-open for critically important face-to-face teaching and learning, and many of them are. Associated resurgences of infection are turning out to be minor.
  • Q: But What about the Delta Variant? What about it, indeed. The existing vaccines—they’ve been in use for months—work nearly as well against this version as they do against the original versions. On top of that, empirical data suggest that this variant is less lethal, if more infectious, than the original versions. Children get infected from this version more than they did the original versions, but more than almost not at all remains right next door to not at all. And it’s still not lethal for children beyond a few sad anecdotes. It’s only government bureaucrats and pressmen that are hyping the thing.
  • Q: But what about the economy? This was a politically-forced, not an economically-induced, shutdown of our economy, and so it can be re-opened just as politically or by simple business decision to do so. And it is, in broad swaths of our economy. GDP is on a sharp rise, the unemployment rate is around 8.4%, which is well below the Panic of 2008 rate, and the current rate is falling. The employment participation rate is rising again. Businesses are reopening, furloughed employees are being recalled. At this point, it’s only government welfare payments and reburgeoning regulation that’s holding our economy back.

Substitute any of the evolving variants to the Wuhan Virus for the reference to the Delta Variant. We’re still stuck with an unbelievable CDC and a variety of vaccine and mask mandates that have no grounding in science, or even in the data being collected.

We now have a burgeoning inflation, most especially in the necessities of life: food, shelter, energy for heating/cooling our shelter, and fuel for getting to work. And today, in 2023, years after the depths of the Wuhan Virus situation, that jobs picture is not so good: we’re only just recovering the jobs lost to the Federal, State, and local governments overreaction and lockdown response, and with that inflation, real wages have fallen for most of those years; only in the last couple of months have wage raises exceeded each month’s inflation.

Labor Day is here, and this time around, it represents the traditional beginning of the mid-term election campaign season. Our economy and our nation can be recovered, if we all get to the polls and vote for members of Congress who will take seriously fiscal and regulatory responsibility—which means reduced spending and reduction of regulations on the books.

Happy Labor Day.