Tag Archives: economics

An Infrastructure Program

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In the coming year, the Trump administration intends to push for an infrastructure improvement program for its next major legislative effort.  It’s certainly true that we need much improvement in our roads, bridges, and transportation networks in all mediums, for both economic and national security reasons (bonus points to those who can identify President Dwight Eisenhower’s motivation for pushing the Interstate Highway System like he did).

It’s also true that such a program would be broadly popular among American citizens.

It’s also true that the proposal coming onto offer, rather than being another Federal boondoggle, would only commit $200 billion as seed money, with the States and locals putting up the bulk of the funding and work.

That’s all well and good, but it’s insufficient: the program would remain vulnerable to inflated costs.  To complete the effort and make the overall program more efficient, Congress and President Donald Trump, in parallel with the infrastructure effort, need to get rid of the Federal requirement that contractors pay union prevailing wages instead of competitive wages, and the administration also needs to encourage the States to get rid of their own, similar, requirement.

The Fed’s Interest Rates

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In a Letter to the Editor in a recent Wall Street Journal, was this remark:

[A] major reason for doing this [artificially suppressing interest rates] is an attempt to raise inflation to their sacrosanct 2% level.

Interest rates are inherently inflationary, since they raise the cost of money. If the Fed were serious, they’d set their benchmark rates at levels historically consistent with 2% inflation, and then they’d sit down and shut up.

One factor keeping the Fed interfering, though, is universal to all bureaucracies—the bureaucrats can’t sit down and shut up, they think they have to be constantly doing or yapping.

Sometimes it’s necessary to clean out the whole rat’s nest, not just go through the motions with scheduled rotations of the political appointees at the top.

Minimum Wage in San Francisco

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City Supervisor Jane Kim, in a recent Letter to the Wall Street Journal Editor sang huzzahs for the city’s $15/hr minimum wage and touted a tax on robots that were replacing those low-skilled workers priced out of the labor market by that minimum wage.

The minimum wage isn’t a pathway to the middle class; it is a safety net to prevent destitution.

And

[A] “robot tax” is a practical way to smooth the transitions caused by automation….

She’s wrong.

I’m sure the robots and kiosks that are replacing those low-skilled workers appreciate being saved from destitution.

However, a true safety net would be a vasty reduction in San Francisco’s runaway regulatory regime and usurious tax scheme.  Then one of the most expensive cities in the nation could become affordable for the low-skilled and other poor.

Instead, the Supervisor wants to tax those robots and reduce them to similar jobless poverty.

Why Not All of Them?

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President Donald Trump wants Congress—which is to say, Republicans, since the Progressive-Democrats in Congress want nothing to do with any Trump or Republican generally proposal—to take up welfare reform as the next major Government revamp after tax reform goes through (assuming, of course, a few Republican ego-riven snowflakes don’t blow that up).  However, Louise Radnofsky, who wrote the WSJ piece at the link, seems not to understand the scope of the problem.  Commenting on a speech concerning the matter that Trump gave in Missouri a bit ago, Radnofsky wrote this:

The president didn’t offer specifics about which of the dozens of welfare programs he was seeking to change….

How about all of them, Madam?

As Trump put it in that speech,

I know people that work three jobs and they live next to somebody who doesn’t work at all.  And the person who is not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that’s working his and her ass off….

Now, it’s certainly true that there are welfare queens who are too lazy or too greedy to do actual work when they can get OPM for free.  They’re a small majority, though; most folks have enough self respect to want to work for their living and earn their way.  However, it far too often makes no economic sense whatsoever for them to do so.

Too many folks are trapped in the Progressive-Democrat welfare cage because they don’t have the skill sets needed to get jobs that pay as well as their aggregated welfare checks—and those that would work anyway are steadily being priced out of the low-skill jobs they would take by spreading minimum wage laws that require employers to pay more than the work available is worth.

Then there’s the welfare cliff.  Far too often, getting a job or a better job than the one currently held, or even simply accepting a pay raise, would put the person into a high(er) income bracket that would result in a cut in welfare payments greater than the value of the job, the better job, or the pay raise.  This net reduction in income would be lunacy, except for its effect on keeping folks trapped and voting for the politicians who control the handouts.

Reform all of the welfare programs, reform our welfare system as a system, and reform it extensively.  Go down, Trump and Congress, and let these people go.

That’s the Point

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Six months after it went into force, China’s tough new cybersecurity law is still troubling US technology executives who fear that it will put the intellectual property of their companies and the data they collect in jeopardy.

And

…while the law went into effect June 1, the Chinese government is still drafting specific implementation rules.

And

Company and trade-group representatives are also concerned that the network-equipment security reviews could expose proprietary source code, jeopardizing their trade secrets[.]

The People’s Republic of China wants other nations’ intellectual and technology property, and it’s willing to steal it in any way it can.  Especially targeted are businesses the PRC considers “critical information infrastructure:” computer-network operations in telecommunications, energy, transportation, information services, and finance.

Notice that.  These technologies also are critical to the other nations’ security. But that’s why the PRC demands the accesses and is so…hazy…about its rules facilitating getting those accesses.

One more reason to restrict the amount and nature of any business dealings with the mainland.