Tag Archives: economics

“Unfair and Absurd”

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President Joe Biden (D), through his Press Secretary Jen Psaki (via her daily press conference), said that it’s unfair and absurd that businesses should pass on to their customers the costs represented by higher taxes that Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democrats want to impose on them.

There are some…who argue that, in the past, companies have passed on these [tax] costs to consumers. … We feel that that’s unfair and absurd, and the American people would not stand for that.

Why shouldn’t businesses pass on the costs represented by taxes?

Biden’s claim raises additional questions, too. What other costs does Biden consider unfair and absurd for businesses to pass on to their customers? What is Biden’s limiting principle regarding passing costs on to customers?

Ransomware Shame

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Corporate executives openly confess that they would aid and abet ransomware criminals by paying them for their crimes.

  • 78% of C-suite executives claim that they would be willing to pay a ransom
  • 56% would be willing to pay over $100,000 to resume operations

That’s deliberately hanging a target on their enterprises.

And this…

  • 74% of executives with hybrid work environments believe their in-house IT and security teams lack the capability to defend against ransomware
  • 60% of executives believe their employees could not identify a cyberattack

…indicates that those executives aren’t even trying seriously to train their IT and security teams or their employees, or to enforce security measures by their work-from-home employees.

Worse than that, they actively cover up their crime enabling:

well over half (61%) of business owners admitted to concealing a breach

This willingness to reward hackers for their hacking not only endangers their own companies, it endangers other companies, as well, by making the crimes routinely lucrative—which these executives are smart enough to know.

That willingness to pay the fee-for-hacking-services aggregates into a threat to our nation’s weal and security. After all, where are the hackers so willingly rewarded located? In our nation’s enemies: 82% of the attacks come from within Russia and the People’s Republic of China, split evenly between the two.

Worrying about the Wrong Time Frame

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A Wall Street Journal opinion piece subheadline well summarizes the piece itself:

the Speaker pushes Democrats to take votes that will end careers in 2022

The WSJ‘s Editors write this as if they take the matter seriously. But they, and far too many others who also should know better, are taking far too short a view.

“Career ending” votes were taken in favor of Obamacare, too. Obamacare survives, and here is the Progressive-Democratic Party back in power.

So it will be with the Progressive-Democrat reconciliation bill and the pre-amendment to it that is the “infrastructure” bill. A few Progressive-Democrats might lose their seats as they vote to force passage, but these two destructive bills will live on.

And, dangerously, the Progressive-Democratic Party will recover.

This is Backwards

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In a Wall Street Journal article on the difficulty of estimating ridership on roads and highways to be built in the future and so the need for them, and the poor allocations of costs and Federal dollars that result from the inaccuracies, there was this statement.

If lawmakers enact the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill now before the House, state and local officials will have to decide which projects to spend money on.

This is backwards. State and local officials should have to decide first what infrastructure projects they want to complete, their cost, their priority, and have contracts already let contingent on receiving Federal dollars before Congress contemplates an infrastructure bill that would send taxpayer money to any of those States.

Those are critical first steps in getting to shovel-ready jobs to which to commit funds.

What Should the Fed Do?

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Nick Timiraos, in his Wall Street Journal piece expressed some concern about the tightrope the Federal Reserve bankers must walk (his phrasing) regarding its bond purchase taper and what others, especially market players, might say about the Fed’s dot plot—a graph that’s generated from individual board members’ views of raising and lowering interest rates and to what level.

Getting that message [regarding bond purchasing] to stick could be tricky when the central bank’s two-day meeting concludes Wednesday if new interest-rate projections—the so-called dot plot—show officials are considering rate increases at the same time….

The only way to make any message stick is for the Fed to do what it says it will do in its “messaging,” regardless of any outside dumpster-diving interpretations of their tea leaf scraps. Seers are going to claim to see regardless of what the Fed does. If the Fed says it’s going to taper its bond purchase program, that’s what it should do. Full stop.

Rather than tapering, though—my humble opinion—it’s long past time for the Fed to reduce, to below zero, its bond buying, selling off the bonds it already holds to enormous excess. Put an end to half-measure tapering.

Separately, the WSJ asked

What action, if any, should the Fed take on interest rates?

The Fed should set their benchmark interest rates at levels historically consistent with their target inflation rate of 2%, more or less, and then sit down and be quiet. Stop trying to micromanage market rates.

Neither case is complicated, except that Government bureaucrats overcomplicate them with overthinking.