Tag Archives: economics

More of the Same

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…from the best damn change-maker [Bill Clinton has] met in my entire life.  Indeed,

Mrs Clinton has been clear. She wants to serve as Mr. Obama’s political and policy heir, as she and he now admit. This won’t mean “change” unless the Clintons have an unusual personal definition of that word, as they do for “classified material.” A de facto third Obama term will mean the status quo, only more of it.

Here’s what Obama has accomplished with his policies, and Clinton has made no bones about wanting to do even more of it.

The slowest recovery from a recession since WWII—a period that encompasses a dozen recessions, culminating in the Panic of 2008.

  • labor force participation rate is at a 40 year low
  • median real household income remains lower than it was before the Panic
  • unemployment rate, even accounting for that greatly depressed labor force participation rate, didn’t recover even nominally until 5-6 years after the official end of the Panic against a normal interval of 2-3 years after the end of a recession
  • the national debt has been doubled and is growing because
  • the budget deficit, exploded in the years immediately following the Panic and dropping for a time after that has begun growing again

Rapid retreat from the world

  • Russia now occupies a partitioned Georgia and Ukraine (yes, Russia had invaded Georgia prior to this administration’s accession, but Obama has accepted the resulting partition)
  • Russia has attacked with impunity the Baltic States and Poland with cyber war
  • Russia threatens nuclear war against any European nation that builds is military defenses beyond what Russia would permit with this administration’s silence on the matter
  • abrogation of commitments to Poland and Czech Republic to deploy missile defense systems on the demand of Russia. We have yet to see whether this administration will follow through on a new commitment to Romania
  • People’s Republic of China occupation of the South China Sea
  • PRC repudiation of the International Court’s ruling against the PRC regarding the South China Sea, answered with US…silence
  • conclusion of an agreement with Iran that not only permits it to develop nuclear weapons, codifies that “right”
  • weakening of our ties with Israel
  • weakening of our ties with Great Britain, including Obama’s economic threat that if Great Britain leaves the EU, they will be pushed to the back of the bus queue on any trade deals with us

Here’s how Clinton wants to extend the domestic same old-same old, acceding to the demands of Independent Socialist Senator Sanders (I—he walked away from the D as soon as that no longer was convenient—VT).  We can’t afford four more years of no change, especially from a change-maker who’s promising unchanged-making.

  • subsidies ages 0 to 5
  • spending allegedly earmarked for public works (read, her crony capitalists)
  • wage controls for higher federal minimum
  • a right to child care
  • free college; a Medicare-like public health insurance option and administrative prices for new drugs;

With all of this paid for by even higher taxes, including a nearly doubling of the top tax rate on long-term capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%, which is about as anti-investment and job-killing as it’s possible to get.

Another Out of Control Agency

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…that’s overcome with its own self-importance.  I’ve written before about how the Securities and Exchange System abuses its own system of in-house judges for SEC purposes rather than for the public’s interest.

The Federal Trade Commission is another such agency that’s showing it’s outlived its usefulness and for the same reason.  In 2008, LabMD was “found” to have inadvertently exposed a file containing personally identifiable patient information.  I write “found” because the company that “found” the exposure then tried to use their discovery to peddle its data security services to LabMD.  The FTC brought a case against LabMD over the exposure, but last year an FTC in-house judge ruled against the FTC and tossed the case.

That judge, D Michael Chapell, tossed the FTC’s case last year because the commission could not identify any consumers who’d been harmed by LabMD’s allegedly weak security practices. Because no one had been harmed in the seven years since the patient file was exposed, it was unlikely that anyone would be harmed in the future, Judge Chappell concluded.

Wrong answer, Judge.

The FTC, which has the authority to review the rulings issued by its administrative court, said Friday the judge used an incorrect legal standard that was too stringent.

The ruling, being inconvenient to the FTC’s narrative, was rejected out of hand.

Here is the usefulness of an in-house system of judges.

Progress

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James Pethokoukis, at AEIdeas, recounted part of a response by Bill Gates to economist Robert Gordon’s view that we’re in a period of economic stagnation.  Gordon sees the period from 1870-1970 as a special century during which

Economic growth really picked up after glacial advancement since pretty much forever. This had never happened before. Big thanks here to electricity, the internal combustion engine, and public sanitation. Second, things haven’t been so special since.

Indeed,

We’ve had plenty of inventions since 1970 but it’s been focused on the narrow sphere of entertainment, information, and communications technology. …Those innovations are everything that we talk about today, but in perspective they’re just a small slice of what human beings care about.

Gates’ response was, essentially, “No, it’s not.  The digital revolution is much more than that.”

My own take on the matter, posted there, is reproduced in part here.  Gates said,

How buyers and sellers find each other, how we amass information, how we can create models to simulate things before building them, how scientists collaborate across continents, how we learn new things—all of this has changed dramatically thanks to digital innovation.

All of these things, though, only represent engineering improvements, they’re not fundamentally new things, or new energy sources to help produce newly conceived things, the way the outset of the industrial and scientific revolution generated fundamentally new things and the energy sources with which to produce them in useful quantities.

Useful quantities: that brings me to my next point, introduced by Gates further to his response to Gordon.

How do you calculate the value of millions of pages of free information at your fingertips?

That’s not so hard. What’s the value of all the millions of dollars someone has in his bank account? Or the value of all the hundreds—or tens—of dollars an ordinary man has in his bank account? The answer here is that those dollars have no value at all until they’re converted into something useful by spending them. So it is that all of those millions of pages of free information have no value until they’re turned into something useful. The difference between dollars and information, though, is that our brains can only process so much information at a time—even with computers to help.

However.  Gates added to his response to Gordon:

Implicit in Gordon’s analysis is that nearly all the big problems have been solved, and any improvements over the coming decades will be at the margins.

If I understand Gates’ disagreement here, I think he’s right. We haven’t solved all the big problems, only those that we conceive as problems. A man once said that if a thing has no solution, it’s not a problem, it’s an aspect of the universe in which we live. There’s a hint there.

I think the current economic stagnation—which in this context is a productivity/technological stagnation—is not the end, but an interruption during which we consolidate the progress we’ve made before we enter another period of explosive growth and development, another special century.  And the start of that century may not be so far off.  The pace of technology and productivity development has been enormously accelerated, so too has been intervening consolidation.  Those computers, at the least, have made us faster than printing presses and…telephones.

Flip-Flop or Copycat?

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Here’s Democratic Party Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on international trade.

As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton helped negotiate the yet-to-be-ratified Trans-Pacific Partnership and gave some 45 public speeches for TPP [TransPacific Partnership].

Then

…to fend off the Sanders challenge, she renounced the final TPP text in October 2015….

This isn’t new.  When Bill Clinton was pushing NAFTA, so did Hillary Clinton, and she repeated that in her memoir.  Then in her first Presidential campaign, she vowed to “renegotiate” NAFTA.

In that campaign, she assured her hoped-for union voters that she’d not conclude the sort of trade deals then in the offing with Cambodia and the Republic of Korea.  Once safely ensconced in the State Department, though, she put all of that Cabinet’s influence to work pushing for passage of exactly those deals (and tried to delete from her official State Department business personal email server NAFTA-related emails).

Here’s her chosen nominee, Senator Time Kaine (D, VA) on international trade, with the proposed TPP as his vehicle.

I am having discussions with a lot of groups around Virginia about the treaty itself. I see much in it to like.  I think it’s an upgrade of labor standards, I think it’s an upgrade of environmental standards. I think it’s an upgrade of intellectual property protections.

That was just prior to the Democratic Party Convention.  Here he is, now that he’s running for Vice President.

Kaine said he agreed with Clinton—who had helped negotiate the trade deal as secretary of state but now opposes as the Democratic presidential nominee—that the TPP did not meet certain standards on wages and national security.

Either way, this doesn’t predict a very stable administration, rather it suggests that Clinton and Kaine would change course with the winds of convenient politics.

Do We Really Need Four More Years?

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Here’s what nearly eight years of Progressivism, accomplished by President Barack Obama (D) and his Progressive-Democrat acolytes in the Democratic Party, have done.  As The Wall Street Journal put it:

  • largest stimulus spending bill in decades
  • Obamacare
  • nationalized the student-loan industry
  • turned the banks into public utilities answerable first to government

All of these have created the slowest recession recovery since WWII.  The nominally low unemployment rate that has been achieved is measured against the backdrop of the lowest labor participation rate in 40 years—in two generations.  Banks as government-managed public utilities, no longer responsive exclusive to the banks’ owners and creditors—which includes us individual savings and checking account holders?  That’s just another means for government to collect revenue.

Progressivism has been bypassing our republican democracy form of representative government for the last several years, too.  Obama has ruled by Executive diktat Executive Order, Executive Action, Department/Agency rulemaking to achieve

  • climate change
  • organizing

Then there’s foreign affairs.

  • deals with adversaries—the nuclear weapons deal with Iran, for instance, and acceptance of Russian partitions of Georgia and Ukraine
  • distanced us from our allies—denigrating Israel over their efforts to defend themselves against Palestinian terrorism, for instance
  • with Progressivism’s cynical budget maneuvering there’s less ability to support military spending—to the tune of defense spending falling to 3% of GDP and less—down from 4.6% those eight years ago

All of this is Progressivism’s pell-mell retreat from our responsibilities on the global stage, and that world is far more unstable and dangerous to us and to those friends and allies than it was eight years ago.

Then there’s Progressivism’s attitude toward us plebeian Americans.  They’ve plied the politics of identity to divide us by ideology, age, race, class, gender, and any other cleverly defined separation they could create, and then they’ve played these artificial distinctions (we used to be all Americans, after all, who happened to be of one gender or the other, have one skin color or another, one ethnic heritage or another) against each other in Progressives’ cynical effort to maximize their personal power.

Do we really need—can our nation really afford—four more years of the same?