Tag Archives: economics

Barbara Lee Wants Her Obamaphone

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Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D, CA) thinks it’s cold blooded to view an economy in terms of dollars and sense.  In particular, she thinks President Donald Trump is “heartless” for taking that perspective on an economic question.

When it comes to federal spending, one thing has become clear over the past month. Republicans and this heartless president, they think about budgets in terms of dollar signs and decimal points, but as I’ve said over and over again, budgets are moral documents. They put on paper the principles and the priorities of the nation[.]

No, what’s heartless is spending money we don’t have until we’re so broke as a nation we can’t help anyone.  The first ones to help cannot be government, anyway; no matter how hard government personnel try, no matter how good the intentions of government personnel, they can only be second onto the scene, sometimes tragically late.  The non-government, citizen response to Harvey and Irma demonstrate that to all willing to see.

No, what’s immoral is a government mandate to give “assistance” to Government-favored groups and to do so in Government-mandated ways.  There is no more moral economic system than a capitalist, free market system, where each party to an economic arrangement, because it’s a voluntary arrangement, comes away better off than he was before the agreement.

And this from Lee:

Regardless of who you are, no child should go hungry at night. These devastating cuts are just the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed, no child should grow hungry at night.  And in a free market economy, unburdened by excessive Government regulation, unburdened by excessive Government spending-driven crowding out, and so prosperous economy, there would be far fewer hungry children to begin with.  And by “heartlessly” cutting out the $200 billion worth of fraud, waste, and abuse from Government’s plethora of duplicative food and other “welfare” programs, those $200 billion would be available for spending on a variety of truly useful programs—like those much fewer hungry children, like hands up (not hand outs) to folks who need a hand up and don’t want the trap of hand outs.

No—Lee just wants her Obamaphone, because manna from Leftist heaven.

And this, from House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D, MD):

Although we are in the minority, let me remind you of what I said at the beginning, the Republicans have not passed a fiscal bill, a continuing resolution, an appropriations CR or omnibus without significant Democratic votes and, in some instances, not in every instance, with the majority of votes being cast for that bill being Democrat votes.  So we have a lot of leverage…and we intend to use it.

Here is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s promise of continued obstructionism.  So much for any useful outcome of the deal President Donald Trump struck with the Progressive-Democrats.

Another Bit of Foolishness

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And another incentive for businesses to relocate.

San Francisco is looking to tax robots because they are taking rote jobs that humans do.  They’re not the first to consider such a thing, but it’s still foolish.  Never mind, especially with minimum wage laws pricing the unskilled and/or poorly educated out of work, that robots do the jobs more cheaply.  Robots are more reliable, too, as Security guard Eric Leon noted about a security robot:

He doesn’t complain.  He’s quiet.  No lunch break.  He’s starting exactly at 10.

The robot also doesn’t take sick leave or parental leave or any of the other labor froo-froo that San Francisco has mandated, regardless of what an employer and employee might work out between themselves without Know Betters’ dubious help.

If a business is going to be prevented from lowering its cost of doing business, it has little incentive to stay put.  And human consumers, facing artificially elevated prices, aren’t helped a whit.

Interagency Coordination

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Despite being dead for years, hundreds of veterans remained on the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) payroll and received nearly $38 million in benefits, according to a report from the Social Security inspector general.

The SSA says this is the fault of the VA for not supplying accurate information, and it may well be.

Unfortunately, though, this failure isn’t unique to the VA.

The SSA, Medicare, and the IRS badly coordinate routinely, so that it’s often the case that Medicare recipients get overcharged for their Medicare premiums until the IRS and CMS (which runs Medicare) catch up with each other or the recipient appeals (which actually is a pretty prompt process, but it needn’t occur in the first place).

It’s also the case that the IRS and ObamaMart don’t coordinate well, so that Obamacare subsidies either are wrongly withheld or are wrongly paid.

It’s also the case at the State level, most blatantly in our voting records where the State agencies don’t coordinate to remove ineligible or non-existent voters from the rolls, or (more rarely, but at a non-zero rate) eligible voters are absent from the rolls.

Most Cabinets and Agencies fail to share information—sometimes for good reasons, but too often from laziness or incompetence or turf imperatives.

Dithering

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A brief word.  There are three speeds that are important in this world: the speed of politics, the speed of business, and the speed of national security.

The speed of politics can be useful when trying to build Congressional and Congress-White House coalitions to enact legislation of a general domestic nature.  Such a speed can be useful, for instance, in developing such coalitions to enact legislation for local and national infrastructure repair and development, or for serious tax reform, or for reducing Federal spending (as opposed to reducing the rate of growth in Federal spending), or for immigration reform.

The speed of business, on the other hand, is optimal when rescinding overweening Federal regulations (for instance, eliminating unnecessary regulation-mandated spending), canceling or creating Executive Orders, pushing nominations through the Senate, enacting specific legislation—spending bills for each of the twelve appropriations venues, for instance.  There’s no need for politics here; businesses—our free market economy—are hurting, and such specifics do not need to be dithered over while politicians virtue signal.

Finally, the speed of national security must needs be very rapid: our nation’s safety demands it.  The speed of national security, to take a current example, involves working with the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Israel to beef up their missile defense capability.  Why Israel?  Iron Dome works.  The speed of national security includes advising the People’s Republic of China that it no longer can dither, stall, engage in idle chit chat; concrete action must be taken by them to cut off their client’s access to the outside world’s economy, resources, funds, technology.  It must force northern Korea to stand down from their nuclear weapons and missile programs and do so with more concreteness and permanence than past efforts—by us, too—have done.  The PRC must do this now, or we’ll act in concert with the RoK and Japan or unilaterally, but without the PRC’s involvement; we won’t wait on them.  And the PRC won’t like the outcome.

Three speeds, each useful in its own milieu.  Using the slower speed in the faster lanes is just dithering, and it threatens our national welfare.

Prioritize, Guys

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President Donald Trump’s national infrastructure plan centers on glorified seed money directed to the localities looking to improve/build out their infrastructure.  The idea is that the locals know their needs best, those needs should be funded primarily locally or from within the nation’s private economic sector, and the building out will aggregate into a vastly improved national infrastructure—real bottom up development, with a little help from the Feds.

To that end, Trump is going to propose $200 billion in Federal spending be committed to a total $1 trillion infrastructure development collection of projects (OK, considerable help).

Right now the dynamic is: come, ask for a whole lot, bang on the table, have your economic studies showing the tens of thousands of jobs that will be created, have your regional study saying this will transform America, bang on the table some more, hire some lobbyists and you get money.  We’d rather have people come and say, “Listen, we’re chipping in this much, give us this little increment and we can make this thing happen.”

Naturally, the locals are getting their knickers twisted.  The ones with the biggest projects

say that local cost-sharing and private financing efforts would fall well short of making up for sharply reduced federal funding.

Nonsense.  You don’t get to freeload off Uncle Sugar, anymore.  Project leads in Chicago or Dallas don’t have a claim on the (tax) money of the good citizens of New York or California, and under the administration plan, they won’t be allowed to exercise their false claim to OPM.  New York and California will be able to keep their money for their own local projects.

This is an example of the deer in the headlights response of folks so used to the Government teat that they can’t conceive of better alternatives [emphasis added]:

Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo have said they expect the federal government to cover half the cost of the Gateway project, which also includes bridges and track improvements.

“There’s no people or economic activity in that region that could possibly cover the cost of that?” said the administration official, when asked about a recent appeal by Mr Cuomo for federal aid for the project. “I think that’s a tough sell, would be my response.”

The suggestion that New York and New Jersey could pay their own way on the project…shocked some of the tunnel’s advocates.

Prioritize, guys.  On what are you spending your citizens’ money that you think is more important than your Gateway?  Say that out loud, so your citizens—your constituents, your bosses—can hear you.