Tag Archives: economics

There’s More To It

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As part of the (actually quite minor) snafu wherein the House and Senate passed trivially different versions of the tax reform bill, the Senate’s Parliamentarian ruled that 529 Savings Plans—modified by the tax bill to be usable for K-12 as well as secondary education expenses—cannot be used, on a straight majority vote, for K-12 homeschooling, even though formally schooled K-12 children and their parents can use the Plans.  Two icons of Progressive Democracy, Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Ron Wyden (D, OR), had objected and raised the matter to the Parliamentarian.

The Senate passed its version of the tax reform bill minus the protection for homeschooled children, since there weren’t going to be eight (or even one) Progressive-Democratic Party Senators who would vote for tax reform or lower taxes in any form and sent it back to the House where the bill was passed again and then sent to the White House for the President’s signature.

Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX, and whose 529 amendment was cut back by this maneuver) expressed his dismay.

What the Democrats did is they carved out one group, they carved out just homeschoolers, and they cut homeschoolers out. It really was shameful.
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The Democrats view is they want control. They want control over everything, whether it is control over regulating an industry, control over the internet or, in this instance, control in how you educate your students.  The reason the Democrats don’t like homeschoolers is if you’re spending the time, investing the time at home teaching your kids, they can’t mandate what you’re teaching them.

Cruz is right, but that’s not all of it.  The Progressive-Democratic Party also is in the tank for the teachers unions, and homeschoolers are beyond the reach of those unions.  The Sanders-Wyden move also was in service to their unions.

In either case, or both of them, the Progressive-Democrats used children as political weapons.  That’s despicable.

Progressive-Democrats and Taxes

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The Wall Street Journal asked in their Sunday op-ed how it came to be that

the party of the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s and the co-writers of the Reagan reform in the 1980s [became] implacably opposed to pro-growth tax policy?

The WSJ‘s editorialists should know better.  This isn’t their (or your or my) grandfather’s Democratic Party.  This is the Progressive-Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and all of its rank-and-file politico members.

These politicians and their nine-year-old Progressive-Democratic Party that is the inevitable evolution of that prior entity do not want the folks who earned the money to be able to keep it and spend it IAW their own needs and wants and imperatives.  The Progressive-Democratic Party and its members need to have control over our money, and they are thoroughly dismayed over the loss to their political power that’s represented by the reduction in the amount of our money they’ll be able to control.  That’s power they’ll have much less of.

It has nothing to do with ideology.  It has nothing to do with income inequality.  It has only to do with political power.  It’s that nakedly simple.

Good for Workers, Good for Business

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Recall the National Labor Relations Board’s case of a couple of years ago, Browning-Ferris Industries.

Browning-Ferris concerned a recycling center staffed by contractors. The original [NLRB] ruling found the contractors were jointly employed by a staffing firm and Browning-Ferris.

This ruling, if allowed to stand (the case also is in the Federal court system) would have allowed contractors like those at Browning-Ferris, McDonald’s, and any other franchise-centered corporation not only to form unions at individual franchises (which they’ve always been able to do), but also to form a grand union across the corporation.

President Donald Trump appointed a couple of folks to the NLRB to fill vacancies created when two ex-President Barack Obama (D) appointees quit in a snit over Trump’s election.  Now the NLRB has voted to overturn that prior NLRB ruling.

This is good for both business and for employees.  It’s good for business because modern unions have devolved into extortion rackets that threaten a business’ ability to exist through crippling strikes unless the unions get pay and benefits that they demand, even when those things cost more in their per-employee aggregate than the employee’s work is worth.

It’s good for the workers because it means, with labor costs allowed to match the value of the work done, labor won’t be replaced by automation that’s cheaper than the union-elevated labor costs.  Jobs will be preserved, and more hiring will occur.  It’s also good for workers because it frees them to negotiate their own wage and benefit package instead of being dragooned into whatever a union might impose on them.

The Question is a Non Sequitur

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John McKinnon and Brent Kendall, in their Wall Street Journal piece, asked Is FTC Up to the Task of Internet Regulation?

His piece is about the split between what the FCC (the erstwhile “regulator” of the Internet, courtesy of the Obama administration) and the FTC are qualified to regulate.

The question is a bit of a non sequitur, though. The Internet is merely a transport medium, and it needs very little regulation. The FTC is fully up to the task of regulating (ideally with a similarly light touch) trade, which is independent of the medium—highway, railroad, snail mail, or electronic—over which the traded products are transported.

And: lightly regulated commerce is highly conducive to innovation.  Just look at our communications system since the breakup and deregulation of Ma Bell.  And the Internet between its inception and the Obama FCC-imposed impediment.

“SALT and School Taxes”

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That’s the title of a recent Wall Street Journal Notable and Quotable.  The excerpt cited a Bloomberg piece (link in the N&Q) in which that piece’s author, Sahil Kapur, went on at length about how the tax reform and rate reduction bill currently on offer in the Congress will hurt the poor, over-taxed citizens of New Jersey and the State’s education capacity.  Because for the children.

How cynical.

If Kapur and others of his ilk don’t like New Jersey’s high taxes (or New York’s, or California’s, or Illinois’) or how those revenues are allocated, they should stop looking for Federal handouts and get to work on their State governments. After all, it’s Kapur and his fellows, and the rest of the citizens in those States, who’ve been busily electing those overtax and misspend governments.

It’s also true enough that some of those States send more of their citizens’ tax money to the Feds for redistribution than they get back from the Feds, but that just emphasizes the need to put an end to such redistribution of OPM.  It has nothing to do with whether the SALT tax distorting deduction should be preserved.