Tag Archives: economics

The EU Strikes Again

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In a 130-page decision from August that was made public on Monday, the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, asserted that two Apple units registered in Ireland brought in $130 billion in profit over an 11-year period that should have been taxed at Ireland’s 12.5% corporate tax rate, but instead remained largely untaxed anywhere.

As the WSJ noted, this is an early volley in the struggle by European Union authorities to impose their tax will on scofflaw sovereign nations who are so impertinent as to apply to multinational corporations doing business within them national tax schemes and such emoluments as these nations deem useful rather than acceding to their EU Know Betters.

Never mind that the members of the EU still are sovereign nations.

Never mind that, in the present case, Ireland simply applied its domestic law to that subset of an international corporation doing business from within Ireland.

Never mind that Ireland has an unacceptably low (to the EU Know Betters) corporate tax rate, and so it’s winning the competition with continental Europe to attract business.

Maybe Ireland should reevaluate its relationship with the European Union.

A Disingenuous EPA

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Talk about cost shifting.

The EPA is proposing a rule that will shift the cost of complying with its diktats—Superfund cleanups this time—onto private enterprise.  The rule

would cost the [mining industry] industry $171 million a year and save the EPA $527 million over 34 years

were the rule to be finalized.  Notice that: The EPA would save $527 million dollars over the 34 years–$15.5 million per year—while those $171 million per year inflicted on the industry works out to more than $5.8 billion over the 34 years.  And that’s per the EPA’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis.

Never mind that the EPA already has cost shifted at one environmental disaster that it caused, when it’s people blew out a closed mine in Colorado through their own idle carelessness and have yet to pay for the damage done and the cleanup.

Merry Christmas from the EPA.

A Redistribution

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Erik Cafarella had a Letter to the Editor in Friday’s The Wall Street Journal in which he took notice of the added costs of ethanol mandates for our gasoline fuels.  The headline of his letter suggested that ethanol should be required to compete in a free market rather than be given a free ride via government mandate.

I offer a redistribution alternative that Progressives and their Democrat cronies should love.

Tax ethanol-laced gasoline, in that competitive market, at a higher rate than unadulterated gasoline.  Then send the extra tax money to the poor, whose food costs are elevated by the Federal mandate to produce ethanol.

How could a Progressive or Democrat deny our poor this boon?

Of Course It Is

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Now that the Obama administration’s end is near, and a new guy is being put forward to run Obama’s EPA, that agency is changing its mind about the impact of fracking.

Fracking can affect drinking water supplies in certain circumstances….

The report, written by Environmental Protection Agency scientists, includes findings that are more open-ended than those in a draft version last year, when the agency said fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, isn’t having “widespread, systematic impacts on drinking water.”

When pressed on the “updated” report, which contradicts that earlier draft, EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Thomas Burke conceded the draft’s prior conclusion that only a small number of cases of contamination had been found—even though that was left out of this later iteration of the report.

While the number of identified cases of drinking water contamination is small, the scientific evidence is insufficient to support estimates of the frequency of contamination[.]

Even the identified instances of contamination—surface spills of fracking fluids or poorly done cement casing of a wells—have little to do with fracking, but are failures to execute.

Of course this drives the conclusion that when you can’t find the needle in the haystack, you don’t have enough evidence to say that there aren’t many needles in the haystack.  That’s some science the EPA has there.

Keep in mind, too, that this is same agency whose pseudo-science concluded that plant food—atmospheric CO2—is a pollutant.

Apparently rigorous thinking was outside of these guys’ school safe spaces.

A Bad Deal in the Offing

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The Wall Street Journal had a piece on a potential deal concerning the FCC.

We hear Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Democrat Harry Reid are negotiating for an FCC transition in which Chairman Tom Wheeler would leave in January. GOP leaders would then reconfirm two commissioners: Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel, whose five-year term has expired; and Republican Ajit Pai, who is not up until next year and is in the mix to be the next chairman.

The WSJ suitably addressed the foolishness of the overall deal.

I have a related concern.  Why deal with Senator Harry Reid (D, NV) at all?  That man is wholly untrustworthy, and besides, he’ll be gone in January.  Why deal with the Senate Democrats at all?  As a group, all they’re interested in doing is obstructing anything Republican.  Senator Tim Kaine (D, VA) has said he’d do everything he could to prevent Republicans from acting.  So has Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D, IL).  So has Senate Minority Leader-in-waiting [sic] Chuck Schumer (D, IL).  And on and on.  These folks’ word cannot be taken as reliable except as they promise to get in the way of the nation’s business for their own personal political gain.

And, courtesy of Reid’s prior dishonesty regarding the filibuster, most of the Senate’s nearby business doesn’t need these obstructionists’ participation to conclude in any event.