Tag Archives: economics

The Rogue EPA

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Glider trucks are freight-hauling trucks with used, rebuilt engines and drive trains installed in new cab-chassis.  Then-President Barack Obama’s (D) EPA, led by the paragon of green envy virtue, Gina McCarthy, decided that these used trucks actually were new trucks and held them required to meet that EPA’s emissions standards for new trucks.  After all, the Environmental Protection Act exempted used trucks from those standards, and the Obama crowd and its cronies like Volvo didn’t like that.

In late 2017, in order to prove the legitimacy of the claim, some holdover folks of the EPA ran a test on a couple of glider trucks and found them to meet/exceed EPA standards for new truck emissions.

So, shut up.

No.

Staff at EPA headquarters told [Steve Milloy, the author of the piece at the link] that administrator Scott Pruitt had no knowledge of these tests and never authorized them. The renegade report that the tests produced wasn’t peer-reviewed, as is customary. It also wasn’t printed on official EPA letterhead or assigned an internal EPA document number. It is not even available on the EPA lab’s website. Yet it mysteriously found its way into the hands of glider opponents at the early December public hearing on the proposed rollback.

The current budget request for the EPA contains a payroll budget level that’s consistent with a 47% reduction in EPA employees.  That reduction is clearly justified.

Projection

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Kentucky has decided to take advantage of new Federal Medicaid rules and add a work requirement to those receiving Medicaid payments in order for them to be eligible for continued payments.  Recipients in the typical working age range of 19-64 must do 80 hours—two weeks—of what the State terms “community engagement.”  There are, of course, exceptions for those who cannot work.

As Kentucky’s governor Matt Bevin (R) noted in his tweet about his decision to approve the new rule,

There is dignity associated with earning the value of something that you receive. The vast majority of men and women, able-bodied men and women … they want the dignity associated with being able to earn and have engagement.

Progressive-Democrats are in an uproar over the requirement that people actually work in order to receive government largesse.

Congressman John Yarmuth [D, KY] call[ed] it a “dangerous and irresponsible” decision that will lead to the “financial ruin” for thousands of families that reside in Kentucky.

Of course.  Just like adding a work requirement in the Federal government’s reform of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (later replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which continued the work requirement—until then-President Barack Obama (D) waived the work requirement) dangerously and irresponsibly led to financial ruin for all those hundreds of thousands of families.  Oh, wait—that actually led to the adults in those families not only going to work, but to those families’ increased prosperity, since their earned income was greater than their AFDC/TANF payments.

The Progressive-Democrat is projecting.

 

*The waiver led to an explosion of families on TANF and their increased poverty, thus providing an actual experiment on the outcome of a work requirement.

It’s a Start

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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has been instructed by President Donald Trump to adjust its rules to allow the States to adjust their own rules to require work for Medicaid payments.

This is a very good start.  There are two remaining steps, though.  The funds transferred to the States in support of Medicaid need to be converted to block grants with no strings attached.  Each State knows its own medical support needs far better than does the Federal government.

The last step is to begin reducing, over a short number of years, the size of those block grants until no funds at all are being sent to the States.  This will get the Feds out of the States’ business, remove an extortion tool from the Feds’ kit which the Feds use to push the States into doing (or not doing) things the Feds demand be done or not done, and it will greatly reduce Federal spending.  In 2016, the Federal government sent almost $350 billion to the States in Medicaid transfers.

The Price of Labor

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…is also a cost to labor.  Minimum wage mandates took effect at the start of the year in 18 States and in 20 cities.  These mandates have drastically raised the cost to labor.

Late Monday, casual dining chain Red Robin Gourmet Burgers (RRGB) announced that it would eliminate bus boys at 570 restaurant locations, a move that is expected to save the company an estimated $8 million over the course of the coming year. The company’s chief financial officer said the decision was made in order to “address the labor increases we’ve seen.”

Those busboys can thank their respective Progressive-Democratic politicians for the wage increase they can enjoy not having.  They also should remember this largesse in the coming primary season and again this fall.

There’s another cost to labor, one that is far longer lasting, and so far more devastating to us citizens and the economy in which we must operate.  Michael Saltsman, Employment Policies Institute Director, addressed the problems faced by our teenagers and other first-time workers:

I think the loss, as the minimum wage goes up…[is the] hollowing out of entry-level opportunities[.]

Without that entry-level experience—not only in a particular job, but in the nature of having a job, the ethic of work—how will our first-timers get the next-level job?  How, indeed, will they even get any entry-level job when they’re being priced out of the starter market?

Tax, Tax, Tax

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That’s the position of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.  With Great Britain going out from the European Union, Juncker says the remaining nations will have to pony up yet more money “if we are to pursue European policies and fund them adequately[.]”

Currently, the EU budget is capped at 1% of the total of the EU members’ aggregated GDP.  However, it’s not enough, though, that the remaining nations will have to fill the large-ish gap created by the British departure.  Juncker wants yet more.

Yet, even that “have to fill” bit remains unjustified in any concrete terms.

Some of those new [policy] demands include building a common European defense, the fight against terrorism and protecting borders as more and more refugees and migrants seek to enter Europe. There are also calls to increase spending on research and making the bloc’s economy more competitive in the digital age.

Never mind that these are individual, sovereign nation needs.  Nor is there need for any EU-level taxes—much less increased taxes—in order for the members to coordinate those programs among themselves.  Ordinary trade agreements could achieve most of those, were EU legal requirements not in the way.  Even the fight against terrorism and protecting borders: the US and Canada handle that between us, as do Mexico and us for the most part, and we don’t tax each other for the purpose.

Unspoken among those policies, too, is the demand for money to bail out individual member nations that have differing ideologies, for instance, about the purpose of money and of government.  This at bottom is a diversity demand that’s driven by a concomitant too-great diversity of national political and social philosophies.

Juncker has pointed out that his tax demands amount to the price of a daily cup of coffee for the average taxpayer, while eliding the fact that that average taxpayer has little to no say regarding whether he’d rather have that daily cup than send his money off to Brussels.

I am of the opinion that Europe is worth more than a cup of coffee a day[.]

Europe, certainly.  The EU, not so much.  (Notice, too, Juncker’s mindset regarding national sovereignty with his careful conflation of the EU with Europe.)