Tag Archives: ethics

The Left’s Mantra

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And I offer an equally oft-repeated alternative.

The Left wants to ever more heavily tax the rich, and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians can’t conceive of any taxing or spending alternative. Conservatives want to lower taxes and cut government spending. A current example of the former is playing out in California.

Federal cuts to the state’s Medicaid program will leave its health system short of billions of dollars. A California healthcare union wants an emergency, one-time 5% levy on the wealth of any resident worth over $1 billion to plug the hole.

Those Federal cuts are a small and rare spending cut victory. Raising taxes on the rich (for those who truly think that 5% tax is a one-off, I might have some beachfront property north of Santa Fe that might interest you) is the only answer Progressive-Democrats and rent-seeking union managers can think of.

The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer is cut from the same cloth. She opened her piece with this:

The risk is that the US economy becomes increasingly dependent on a narrow group of very rich households, whose spending is tied to the performance of the stock market. This could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction.

It’s inconceivable to the denizens of the Left that alternatives exist. There are two—closely intertwined—that come readily to mind. In no particular order, they are cutting tax rates and cutting government spending.

Don’t just willy-nilly do allegedly targeted tax cuts, instead, lower the tax rates on the bottom 80% of us tax payers to the level paid by the top 20%. An easy, but all too difficult politically, way to do this is simply to reform our tax code to charge a single low flat rate on all income regardless of source—a rate in the range of 10%-15% on the sum of an individual’s income from all sources. Of course, that would include the market value of stock options on the date of an award’s vesting and other such moves to transfer income from W-2 forms into other venues. That guarantees all of us are paying the same rates and it eliminates the news writer’s plaint: that claimed dependency of the government on tax revenue from the rich.

The other component of the intertwining is to reduce government spending. Exercise true fiscal discipline, and spend taxpayers’ money only on those things truly, critically needed; stop spending on the nice-to-have goodies.

A wealth gap will still exist, but that’s neither good nor bad in itself. The gap—especially under the more equitable tax regime—is, and would be, the result of differences in luck, work ethic, and innate talent. The increased economic mobility that would obtain also would have folks on the lower rungs moving up the economic ladder as their fortune, ethic, and talent have it, and folks on the upper rungs moving down as their fortune, ethic, and talent have it.

An Idiotic Move

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It turns out that Hennepin County, MN, has some 3,000 persons on its registered voter rolls that are missing key identifying data, such as birthdates, names and addresses. Many of those incomplete records suggest a registered voter age of more than 100 years including many with birth years listed as 1900. According to Alpha News, though, that bogus birth year was just a placeholder, since Minnesota law did not require a birth date before 1983.

That’s just idiotic, though. It would have been simple enough to set the “placeholder” year to 1962, so those voters, for good or ill, could be adjudged old enough to vote, and then year by year to walk that placeholder year forward until 1983 and then freeze the placeholder to that year.

Even better, when that 1983 law required birth dates and the fields (month-day-year) created in the voter registration database, it would have been simple to fill in the birth date fields associated with the year 1900 with NA and then send requests to those voters for their birth dates—and then remove altogether those voters who did not respond within some reasonable period of time, say three months.

Whether 1900 was chosen out of laziness, incompetence, or an overt effort to masquerade the ineligible as eligible is anyone’s guess.

End of Start-Stop

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The Trump administration announced Thursday noon-ish a complete end to automatic start-stop in our cars. This is a mistake IMO, and it’s a sad example of a nominally conservative administration turning toward nanny-state-ism.

It’s certainly true that many of us American drivers don’t like the technology and wish it gone. It’s also certainly true, though, that many of us American drivers do very much like the technology. Count me in the latter group.

With my 2023 model Ford Escape, I get much improved mileage in city driving when my car’s engine shuts off while sitting at a red light waiting for it to go back to green. My car does this utterly reliably and with no discernable wear and tear on the car’s starter or on the car’s engine-start battery—even in the Texas summer heat or the (surprisingly ugly) Texas winter cold. Only my battery’s aging OEM status interferes with the function: my car complains of not enough charge to support start-stop. Which is to be expected for a car that’s parked on the street in the Texas sun.

There is an easy solution to this one-size-fits-all disconnect among us Americans over start-stop. Taking my Escape as an example, I have a button on the panel just in front of my center console that turns off the start-stop function, but that only lasts until I arrive at my destination and shut everything down. When next I start my Escape, which involves much more than just turning the engine on, the car’s automatic start-stop function is itself restarted.

It would be a simple, one-line coding effort to turn that start-stop button into a toggle: push it once, and the function is turned off, and stays off even after a complete shutdown and restart of the car. After starting the car anew, pushing the button again would toggle the start-stop function back on, to remain on through successive car shut downs and restarts until the button is toggled again. Let the car come from the dealer with the function defaulted to Off; those of us who like the function are fully capable of turning it on with that button push and then leaving it on.

Another option, albeit much more expensive, would be to make start-stop an option for car buyers to purchase as an add-on when they buy their car.

Either of these would let those of us who do not want the start-stop function to not have it working, and those of us who do to have it; even if one of them would more expensive for car buyers to buy and more expensive for car makers to make.

In either case, though, both groups of us American drivers would do fine without the nanny state dictating our choices.

A Couple of Regulatory Environments

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These need to be dealt with along with the EPA’s effort to deregulate energy production. “These” are the FAA’s regulation of rocket launches—the conservative right blames the FAA’s climate impact concerns, but those are not the only ones—and the FCC’s regulation of satellite deployment. Here, Progressive-Democrats are letting their hatred of all things Evil Rich get in the way of intelligent decision making.

The Federal Aviation Administration separately evaluates the environmental impact of rocket launches in the US, which has in the past delayed satellite launches.

And

Maria Cantwell objected because the bill [that would streamline and accelerate FCC satellite approvals] would help Mr Musk’s AI space ambition.

As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors closed their piece,

Permitting difficulties are America’s economic Achilles’ heel. Let’s hope they don’t get in the way of US space innovation.

It’s a Legal Question

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It’s most assuredly not a medical question, nor is it a climate question. The EPA is going to announce (if it hasn’t already at the time this post is published) a roll-back of its Gina McCarthy-Barack Obama era “finding” that atmospheric carbon dioxide was a pollutant, a finding that enabled the exploding and increasingly intrusive and costly regulatory environment over a host of CO2 emission items.

The final rule, set to be made public later this week, removes the regulatory requirements to measure, report, certify, and comply with federal greenhouse-gas emission standards for motor vehicles, and repeals associated compliance programs, credit provisions and reporting obligations for industries, according to administration officials.
It wouldn’t apply to rules governing emissions from power plants and other stationary sources such as oil-and-gas facilities, the officials said. But repealing the finding could open up the door to rolling back regulations that affect those facilities.

Many of those latter regulations do need to be removed, but not all. Sulphur and mercury in smokestack emissions, for instance, still are things, but these are easily controlled—and have been for years—even with now-aging technologies and will remain regulated. CFC impacts on atmospheric ozone is less settled, but will remain regulated until a more definitive answer—by actual scientists, not government bureaucrats with science degrees or degreed folks employed by the climate funding industry—is reached.

The kicker is in this:

Public health and environmental groups have said federal climate regulations help prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year.

Even were that true, it is, or it would be in a properly objective court, irrelevant to the question of whether the McCarthy/Biden EPA finding can be repealed. Notice that: can be, not should be. This is a purely legal question: can one administration withdraw a regulatory finding and associated regulations that a prior administration enacted? Of course it can, and a current administration can rescind such things unilaterally. Only Congressionally-enacted statutes require subsequent Congressionally-enacted statutes to be rescinded. All it takes is judges and Justices who will honor their oaths of office and hew themselves to what our Constitution and the statutes before them say rather than what they might wish they said.

Of course, many of today’s District and appellate judges are badly trained by such claptrap as the chapter in the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, used by the Federal Judicial Center to “train” judges on climate systems, attribution science, and methodologies used to link greenhouse gas emissions to specific impacts by representing these things as settled science. The chapter has since been removed from the manual, but not necessarily the separate “training” associated with it, and certainly not the “training” already done.

As the WSJ correctly noted, here come now the climate-funding industry and its fee-seeking lawyers.

Environmental groups have said they would challenge a rollback in the courts, and it could be years before litigation is resolved.

Because of course they will. There’re tons of money to be made from their manufactured climate hysteria, and that income pig trough needs to be protected. There also are fees to be collected from those lawsuits.

Never mind that atmospheric CO2 is plant food, without which humans and plants aren’t the only species that don’t eat.