Tag Archives: economics

Disingenuosity

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At the State level, more and more legislatures are succeeding in ceasing to send taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood recently announced the shuttering of four of its 12 Iowa’s clinics in Iowa [sic] after the Hawkeye state’s Republican-led legislature voted earlier this year to cut funding to clinics that performed abortions. Also last week, the health care nonprofit announced it was closing its only clinic in Wyoming and three of its clinics in New Mexico in what it called a “realignment of resources.”

Texas and other States have similarly acted, and Congress is moving to stop transfers of taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, also.  Of course pro-abortion folks are up in arms about this.  Raegan McDonald-Mosley, Chief Medical Officer at Planned Parenthood Federation of America:

This is hardest on people who already face barriers to accessing health care—especially people of color, young people, people with low to moderate incomes, and people who live in rural areas.

And hold-overs from the Obama administration:

Estimates by the Congressional Budget Office indicate that defunding Planned Parenthood would save roughly $200 million in federal spending while reducing health care for as many as 390,000 people.

These claims are disingenuous at best.  If the reductions or removals of taxpayer money to abortion providers like Planned Parenthood are “hardest on people who already face barriers to accessing health care,” if pending cuts really would “reduc[e] health care for as many as 390,000 people,” it’s only because abortion providers insist on allocating the monies they have away from providing health care to needful women toward providing abortions instead—thereby denying health care to those needful babies as well as to the needful women, pregnant and otherwise.

Organizations like Planned Parenthood really do provide valuable health care services to needful women, and to their families.  They could continue to do so largely unabated if only they’d use the funds they bring in for that instead of for abortions.

Department of YGTBSM

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Amtrak has decided to refurbish New York City’s Penn Station, which will involve unavoidable disruption through the summer.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) doesn’t think Amtrak is up to the task, so he’s bringing New York to the rescue.

The state will step up and do it.  We don’t own Penn Station but we will step up and we’ll take over construction and we’ll do it with a private construction company or let the Port Authority do it.

So generous.  Here’s how the Democrat will execute his generosity.

As long as New York City steps up to the plate with funding, I will step up to the plate with leadership and management responsibility,

Let’s you and him get to work.  Bring your wallet and safety boots; I’ll bring my clipboard.

Hindsight

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…and learning from it for better anticipations.

Federal Reserve officials grappling with the legacy of expansive stimulus would find it difficult to return to the central bank’s precrisis role on the sidelines of financial markets, analysts and central-bank watchers say.

Well, NSS.  Frankly, these worthies should have known the outcomes likely from their intervention before they intervened.

Aside from the magnitude of the necessary rollback and its attendant difficulty—the Fed’s balance sheet has expanded four and a half times, from $1 trillion to $4.5 trillion since right before the Panic of 2008—there’s the human engineering aspect of personal political power:

The Fed has become “like an octopus,” said Jeffrey Cleveland, chief economist at Payden & Rygel, a Los Angeles money manager.  “Once you get the power and you are influencing all these markets, do you really want to retreat from all that?”

Well,…

New York Fed President William Dudley told an audience this month the portfolio isn’t likely to return to its precrisis size. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President John Williams said this month the portfolio would be “significantly smaller” than it is today, but likely above $2 trillion in assets.

Still twice the original size of the Fed’s balance sheet.  Oops.

Now the rationalization, summarized in the subheadline of the article at the link:

Pulling out of newest central-bank innovations risks market disruptions

A definite possibility, but there’s not much concern for the underlying economy in that remark.  And the economy is what’s important.

We’ll see whether these guys are worth their taxpayer-funded paychecks by how well they learn from hindsight and their mistake.  It doesn’t look promising.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Isn’t Dead

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The remaining 11 nations of the erstwhile TPP have made it clear that they intend to press on with the agreement, US participation or not, but that the US would be welcome back in, and other nations who could “meet the high standards in the TPP agreement” would be welcome, as well.

Todd McClay, New Zealand Trade Minister:

It’s clear that each country is having to consider both economic values and strategic importance of this agreement, but in the end, there is a lot of unity among all of the countries and a great desire to work together to come up with an agreement among 11 that…delivers for all of our economies and the people of our countries….

This is entirely appropriate.  The same principles the led to our initial attempts to form the 12-nation TPP—enhanced mutual economic and political security—apply to the remaining 11 nations.

Budget Cuts and Bribery

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…or budget cuts and coercion, depending on your perspective.

The president’s budget, due for release Tuesday, will spare the two largest drivers of future spending—Medicare and Social Security—leaving trillions in cuts from other programs. That includes discretionary spending cuts to education, housing, environment programs, and foreign aid already laid out by the administration, in addition to new proposed reductions to nondiscretionary spending like food stamps, Medicaid, and federal employee-benefit programs.

What’s going to be ignored in the inevitable hoo-raw over these allegedly terrible cuts to various aspects of our nation’s “safety” net is the truly terrible downside of those aspects.

The Federal monies being sent to the States for education, housing, environment programs, food stamps, Medicaid, and on and on in the seemingly endless, yet growing, list is in large part those States’ own money.  Its income and other taxes collected from each State’s citizens and businesses (which is to say each State’s citizens), with a fraction of those collections then returned to each State (the rest is sent to other States, which does the collected-from State’s citizens no good at all), but with a cynically attached value-add: Federal strings.  Use this money the way we tell you to use it, or we’ll reduce the amount of your money we return to you.

With the proposed cuts to these programs, the States actually will be gaining: the cuts will facilitate associated tax rate cuts, leaving more money in those States—those States’ citizens’—hands.  Just as importantly, though, the strings attached to the Federal funds transfers will be greatly weakened in favor of the States’ own decision-making.

We’ll find out, too and in short order, how sincere the Republican-controlled Congress, whose members ran on and were elected to effect fiscal discipline, really are, whether they’re more interested in maintaining Federal control over States’ individual and varied economic decisions, or whether we need to just keep doing what we’ve been doing the last several Congressional election cycles: firing those who fail to perform, and replacing them.

Congressman Mark Sanford (R, SC) had such a thought:

For a budget to have any meaning, it’s essential we have realistic assumptions in terms of economic growth and in terms of spending reductions.

True enough.  It’s more essential, though, that our representatives not use such excuses to block meaningful tax reform and actual spending cuts and with that continue to exercise too much control over the 50 States.

As an aside, this brings up two elephants in the safety net herd: Social Security and Medicare.  The foregoing—all of it—applies to these two things, also.  In spades.