Tag Archives: political economy

An Alternative Move

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Vice President JD Vance (R), in his new capacity as leader of President Donald Trump’s (R) newly formed anti-fraud facility, has paused transfer of some $260 million in Medicaid funding to Minnesota until that State begins to do a better job of accounting for how it spends those American taxpayer dollars. Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Tim Walz, promptly claimed that Vance’s move was nothing more than a

campaign of retribution. Trump is weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota. These cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.

There is a valid concern buried under Walz’ manufactured hysteria—the loss of financial support for the groups of Americans he named. As Vance noted,

Vance…recalled his own experience growing up depending on government programs and said the money should be there for people and children who need it. “It’s disgraceful that fraudsters out there are taking advantage of programs like Medicaid[.]”

There is an alternative solution to a blanket cutoff, however temporary. Who the individuals are in those groups about whom Walz so piously pretends to care is known to the Federal government. Those $260 million should be sent directly to those individuals, entirely bypassing the State and the third parties Walz’ administration uses to distribute and funnel the money.

The shift would go a long way toward reducing the corruption in the State’s Medicaid facility by bypassing it entirely. Remaining fraud would be limited to the Federal government’s distribution facility, and that, as a one-time affair, would be minimal. The Trump I administration’s distribution of a one-time followed by a smaller one-time distribution of Wuhan Virus shutdown funds to American taxpayers shows the way.

An Overblown Concern

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Citrini Research wrote a report that’s associated with Monday’s stock market spike down. Its report centered on the risk of heavy white collar job losses from AI’s alleged ability to do white collar work and completely replace those white collars.

For the entirety of modern economic history, human intelligence has been the scarce input. We are now experiencing the unwind of that premium.

And so on.

Not so much, though. It took more mental acumen to run the steam drill than John Henry needed to run his hammer. It takes more mental acumen to work a modern auto production line, with all of that automated equipment, than it did—and does—to work an artisan, unautomated auto production line. The move extends into the white collar milieu, also. It begins with requiring more mental acumen to check AI’s work than it does to work the spreadsheets or do the research oneself. It takes a great deal of mental acumen to ask the right questions and then give AI the tasks of answering them—and then checking AI’s responses. Creativity is something AI cannot do.

AI is good at the artificial part; it’ll be quite some time before AI gets good at the intelligence part. Alan Turing once said that when a computer can answer certain kinds of questions, they’ll be impossible to distinguish from humans. That doesn’t prove computers’—AI’s—superiority, though. Answering questions isn’t the same as asking them.

A Cynically Irrelevant Argument

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Here’s the lede:

A coalition of climate and health organizations sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday in an effort to combat its repeal of a landmark climate finding.

Because of course they do. The landmark climate “finding” that has been repealed is the finding that plant food in the form of atmospheric CO2 actually is a pollutant. That fiction has expanded costs of living for us American citizens for decades, and its removal is good riddance. Nevertheless, the climate funding industry is waxing hysterical over the nation’s turn toward rationality.

Their suit proceeds, cynically, from an irrelevancy. Peter Zalzal, of the Environmental Defense Fund:

Repealing the endangerment finding endangers all of us. People everywhere will face more pollution, higher costs, and thousands of avoidable deaths.

Even were that true—it isn’t—it’s irrelevant. The question is an economic, and so a political, one. Our courts have no jurisdiction for hearing this argument. Our judges and Justices are bound by our Constitution and their oaths of office to uphold and defend it, and by their oaths they’re further constrained to rule based on the text of any statute that comes before them. They cannot, legitimately, rule based on what they wished our Constitution and statutes said, nor can they, legitimately, rule based on their personal views of what’s good or bad for our society.

This sort of suit should be tossed at the outset, with prejudice, and with sanctions on the lawyers and their employing firms for bringing frivolous suits.

Who Owns our Economy?

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Greg Ip, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, says those of us older than 65 do.

As of the third quarter of last year, people 70 and over controlled roughly 39% of all equities and mutual funds owned by households, compared with 22% in 2007, according to Federal Reserve data. Their share of net worth—assets minus debts—was 32%, up from 20% two decades earlier.

And

Wealth accumulates with age, so people at retirement tend to have much more than younger generations, a pattern evident in Fed surveys back to 1989.

And so on.

Even were that true, it’s only a temporary ownership. What Ip missed is this truism: we can’t take the economy, or our wealth, with us when we relocate to Dirt Nap Acres. We leave that wealth to those younger generations, our children, and to a variety of charities and endowments, all of which benefit those younger generations.

All that means that tomorrow, those younger generations will own our economy, starting well before they become the next geezer owners of the economy.

It’s a generational cycle, and that background is the framework within which the economy’s business and political cycles play out.

California Teacher Strikes

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More accurately, teacher union strikes in California.

A wave of teacher contracts is up for renegotiation now, thanks to a strategy the unions implemented a few years ago to synchronize expiration dates. Dozens of California school districts are in talks, with some already at an impasse or in mediation.
…
By coordinating negotiations across the state with the threat of strikes, the unions aim to escalate funding battles from local school boards to the state legislature, said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, a union representing more than 300,000 educators. …
“This resets the power dynamic,” Goldberg said.

There’s this, too:

Total enrollment in the district has fallen by about 37% since 2018-19 to just over 390,000 students, officials say. Over that span, the number of teachers has held steady at around 25,500 while overall staffing has increased 15%.

Can you say “featherbedding,” boys and girls?

Kids’ public school education would suffer from a strike prolonged by school boards’ refusal to deal with unions “negotiating” in blatantly bad faith? How would anyone tell the difference? Kids in California already are afflicted by an education regime in those public school environments that’s so bad as to border on child abuse.

School boards need to screw their collective courage to the sticking post and tell the unions and their baldly excessive demands to go…pound sand.