Tag Archives: economics

Trust and Integrity

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Regarding the trade fast track authority bill that failed Friday’s House vote, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had been negotiating with Speaker John Boehner (R, OH) regarding the structure of the Trade Adjustment Assistance sub-bill that was a part of the fast track bill.

Over the course of the week she had helped negotiate a deal…designed to assuage Democrats’ concerns over how the workers’ assistance program would be funded.

Then Pelosi went onto the floor of the House and said this:

I will be voting today to slow down the fast track [measure], to get a better deal for the American people….

And she voted against the TAA that she’d agreed with Boehner.

With that performance, how can Boehner ever trust any other agreement Pelosi might say she accepts? How can Boehner, or any Republican, ever trust any other Pelosi commitment?

Over-Regulation

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…Texas style. An eight-year-old girl and her seven-year-old sister were selling lemonade and kettle corn at their homemade stand in front of their house in Overton, TX. You recognize the deal: kids selling cool drinks (with a snack added this time) on a hot summer day to give passersby some relief and to pick up some spending money.

However.

A police officer on Monday approached the stand, which offered lemonade for 50 cents and “kettle korn” for $1.

In patrol-car video, the officer can be heard asking the girls’ mother…for a permit. She says she wasn’t aware they needed one.

The stand was shut down for that lack of permit. When a family friend went to the town’s government to get the needed permit, the town offered to waive the $150 fee. $150 to be allowed to set up a lemonade stand that might make ten bucks over the three or four days it’s likely to be open.

In the end, it remained too hard for the little girls to do: the town said that health department officials needed to inspect the stand, too. Because of all the food poisoning that occurs at lemonade stands around the country. You remember the epidemics caused by the lemonade stands dotting the neighborhoods when we were growing up, don’t you?

Understand: my beef isn’t with the town or the cop—waiving $150 is no small thing for a metropolis with a population of 2,500, and the cop is doing his job (cops aren’t allowed discretion in these days of politically correct zero tolerance). My beef is with the regulations and with the foolishness of one-size-fits-all rules. Where’s the common sense? Why can’t little boys and girls set up a stand to earn some spending money sometimes without official interference?

In the event, the little girls have decided to stay open, more or less. They’ll give away their lemonade and kettle corn, accepting only donations. If you’re in Overton the next few days, or even if you’re only nearby, head on over to the stand and make a generous donation. And enjoy some cool lemonade and a snack on a hot Texas day.

Random Paranoid Thought on Future Tech

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In just 15 years, [Ray, inventor, futurist, and a director of engineering at Google] Kurzweil believes, the human brain will become a hybrid of biology and technology, and we will “put gateways to the cloud in our brains.” And as the cloud becomes more and more advanced and is able to store increasing amounts of information, so too will our brains. By the late 2030’s or early 2040’s, Kurzweil said, the majority of brain function, at least in terms of information processing and thought processes, will be non-biological.

Our brains in the cloud. Hmm…. With the cloud’s notoriously poor security. Our brains get snooped on or hacked by anyone with a kiddy script or by any government with a wild bug up its….

Or peer pressure not just up close, but inside, as the denizens of that cloud decide they don’t like what you’re doing or thinking. So they think otherwise, en masse, from within your own brain.

Like I said, paranoid. Or not.

Health Care Subsidies

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President Barack Obama sent his HHS Secretary, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, to Congress to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee about, among other things, his plans should the Supreme Court rule against Federal subsidies for those who bought health plans through ObamaMart and not through state exchanges as Obama’s ACA requires. He said, through her,

If the court says that we do not have the authority to give subsidies, the critical decisions will sit with the Congress and states and governors to determine if those subsidies are available[.]

This is openly cynical. “If the court says…” the subsidies are not available, they’re not available. Full stop.

The Governors and states made their own critical decisions clear five years ago when, in full view of the ACA’s statement that Federal subsidies are available only through state exchanges, they carefully and with forethought declined to create state exchanges.

The Congress made its own critical decision all those years ago when it wrote the law that said Federal subsidies would not be available except through state exchanges.

Of course the better policy wonk than his policy wonks knows this, and he knew it when he sent Burwell up there to spout that nonsense. The only way the Court can upend those critical decisions will be through a twisted interpretation of the text of the law that leads them to uphold the Federal subsidies.

Hmm….

The SEC and its In-House Judges

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I wrote about this a bit ago; here’s a follow-up via a related case.

A federal judge ruled Monday that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of an in-house judge to preside over an insider-trading case was “likely unconstitutional,” a potential blow to the agency’s controversial use of its internal tribunal.

This is another case concerning the SEC’s practice of stacking cases it brings against alleged miscreants by using its own judges to decide the matter.