Tag Archives: economics

Works for Me

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has taken his State hostage and, reminiscent of a scene in Blazing Saddles, involving his Cleavon Little character counterpart, is threatening that if he doesn’t get billions in Federal dollars, “the…hostage…gets it.” (“Isn’t anybody gonna help that poor State?”)

During a speech detailing the state’s annual budget, Cuomo requested at least $15 billion in federal funding—or the state will likely have to implement a number of undesirable measures, including tax increases.

And

Cuomo said the state has proposed temporarily increasing the top rate by two percentage points to 10.86%, from 8.82%. A wealthy resident in New York City would pay a top rate of 14.7% in combined taxes….

“Temporarily.” Sure.

But the very threat is Cuomo’s admission that his State already plenty of money; it just needs reallocation. Cuomo’s State has no need of Federal—which is to say, the money of us non-New York citizens.

The Censor Campaign

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Open MIC is a Left-wing activist organization that buys stocks in companies and then uses that shareholder status to push policies having nothing to do with the companies’ business and everything to do with “social justice,” sham diversity goals, and other attempts to alter the nature of commerce in our American economy.

Now the group has joined the censorship campaign against free speech.

New shareholder resolutions call upon advertiser Home Depot Inc and agency group Omnicom Group Inc to investigate whether their advertising policies inadvertently contribute to “violations of civil or human rights” by funding platforms that spread inappropriate content, according to copies of the proposals filed in late 2020.
The effort was organized by Open MIC, an organization that uses shareholder engagement to promote causes such as diversity and privacy.
Advertisers have come under pressure to withhold their spending from controversial TV programming or social-media platforms such as Facebook Inc. and to use their weight to push for more content moderation.

“Inappropriate” is as defined by Open MIC. No disputes of that definition are allowed.

Such attempts to censor do not constitute an open microphone; they move to prevent disfavored groups of Americans from having access to the microphone.

They’re claims that ordinary Americans are too grindingly stupid to be trusted with our own decisions regarding what to listen to and how to evaluate what we hear.

They’re borne of the terror the Left has of views and of speech that contradicts the Left’s Received Wisdom.

Veto Authority

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The People’s Republic of China has once again reached into American businesses to control what they do.

This time, it was the proposed acquisition by Cisco Systems of Acacia Communications, both of which are American companies. The PRC condescended to approve this acquisition—subject to certain conditions the PRC dictated.

The PRC also is actively interfering with the American company Applied Materials’ proposed acquisition of Kokusai Electric Corporation, a Japanese company.

Earlier, the PRC interfered with, to the point of blocking, a merger between Qualcomm, an American company, and NXP Semiconductors NV, a Dutch company.

A question that the Biden administration must answer: why do we allow an enemy nation—the PRC—to have veto authority over American business’ decisions such as mergers and acquisitions?  I’m not sanguine that the administration will even take on the question, much less answer it in any way favorable to our businesses.

Related to this is why Europe’s nations, the European Union, or Asian nations cede similar authority over their businesses to the PRC.

None of us need the PRC market that badly, especially since the non-PRC Asian markets are readily available, as are those of South America and Africa—the latter two which could easily lose much of their own government graft with the greater economic prosperity that would result from greatly increased trade and business penetration.

These are private companies making these decisions, to be sure. The PRC, though, isn’t only dictating how those companies must operate within its border–a right of any nation–the PRC is dictating how those companies must operate anywhere in the world. The PRC’s vetoes of mergers and acquisitions are global.

In aggregate, such companies’ desperation to do business in or with the PRC at the expense of acceding to the global diktats of our common enemy threatens the security of each of our nations.

More Bigotry of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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This time as espoused by President Joe Biden (D). In describing one way his administration would fight the Wuhan Virus situation, then-President-elect Biden said this:

Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild.

He went on to call this “equal access to the resources needed to reopen and rebuild.”

That’s not equal access; that’s preferential access. And that preference isn’t based on merit or actual need, it’s based—in Biden’s own words—on race and gender. Progressive-Democrat disapproved of Americans are to be sent to the back of the bus—if they’re allowed to board at all.

This is a racist- and sexist-based form of “assistance.”

Biden also commented on working to get around “systemic barriers to relief.” As a Supreme Court Justice has already noted, [t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The concept easily extends to sex and to all other forms of non-merit discrimination.

The Progressive-Democratic Party, now as openly espoused by its head, has chosen not to do so.

Too Much Dependence

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…on the central government in DC.

Sunday’s Wall Street Journal had a piece decrying the problems with getting the Wuhan Virus vaccines “the last mile” into folks’ shoulders. They’re right that that’s a serious problem. Even though the Federal government is behind schedule on getting vaccine doses into the States’ hands, those States have the bulk of those delivered vaccines still in the refrigerators, uninjected—they’re vastly behind schedule.

The States and locals, though, are mischaracterizing the problem. Typical is this:

Jeff Duchin [Health Officer & Chief, Communicable Disease Epidemiology & Immunization Section, Public Health], Seattle and King County, WA, said the federal government succeeded in helping fund and purchase vaccines that were developed in record-breaking time, but said it didn’t do nearly enough to ensure that the “last-mile” distribution efforts would be successful.

He’s badly mistaken, and that’s dangerous for Washington’s citizens, and the error itself is dangerous for all Americans. That “last mile” is, and can only be, the responsibility of the States. The Federal government has no authority there.

That’s the nature of our federal republic structure of governance.

The States—Progressive-Democrat-run and Republican-run alike—had been told for months that vaccines would be available by the end of the year. Where was their planning? Even if they didn’t believe the ability to execute commitment, or the commitment itself, that prior planning would have been useful whenever the vaccines arrived. The States chose not to bother.