Tag Archives: political economy

A Good Move

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It needs a parallel move, as well. Sadly, both are pipe dreams in the current government.

Recall that President Joe Biden (D) has pushed, through the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his Loan-Level Price Adjustment rule which penalizes Americans with good credit scores by requiring mortgage lenders to charge them higher interest rates in order to lower the rates charged those mortgage borrowers who have poor credit scores.

Senator Roger Marshall (R, KS) and Senator Mike Braun (R, IN) have introduced the Middle Class Borrower Protection Act that would block Biden’s move.

This is a good initial move, but it wants a separate, parallel move: reduce the funding of the FHFA by the aggregated dollar amount of the loan rate increase that Americans with good credit scores would be forced to pay were the Biden Rule left intact. Leave that reduction in place, and freeze the FHFA’s remaining budget at its current level for a minimum of five years (to remove it from election cycles), with automatic extensions of the freeze until Congress is satisfied that no one in the agency is working on ways to get around the MCBPA’s bar.

Sadly, both are pipe dreams at present: there are too many Progressive-Democrats in the Senate for either legislation to pass.

A Bogus Beef

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Some academics object to Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott moving to ban TikTok from Texas government devices and from personal devices used to conduct Texas official business. Texas’ legislature passed the bill creating the ban, and Abbott signed it into law last December. Now a New York State-headquartered organization, ironically named The Knight First Amendment Institute, which is a facility of New York City’s Columbia University, is suing Abbott among other governors, over the ban, claiming free speech violations.

The lawsuit said the state’s decision…is comprising teaching and research. And more specifically, it said it was “seriously impeding” faculty pursuing research into the app—including research that could illuminate or counter concerns about TikTok.

This is, to use the legalese technical term, a crock. It’s also, to use a legal technical term, a frivolous suit.

Banning TikTok in no way inhibits what these academics say or collaborate over, nor does it in any way impede those academics’ speech or collaboration; it only bans one tool, a national security risk, from being used for the speech/collaboration. There are, after all, a plethora of communication and collaboration devices available other than TikTok. To name just a few (located after 10 grueling seconds on Bing search):

  • Slack
  • Zoom
  • Miro
  • MindMeister
  • Loom
  • Asana
  • Notion
  • Microsoft Teams

There are, also, freeware tools like Hugo and Scribe.

It’s hard to believe these So Smart persons aren’t aware of these tools. Maybe they should listen more to the students in their freshman orientation courses.

It’s even harder to understand why these Precious Ones insist on leaving their personal information; their research ideas, techniques, and progresses; their speech and thought available for People’s Republic of China government personnel to freely exploit; they should be called to explain that.

Their free speech interference claim is especially pernicious, given that these august personages are of the same guild that so zealously blocks, even with violence and firings, the speech of those with whom they disagree.

Preparedness

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That seems a commodity in short supply these days. Its lack is especially expensive for student loan borrowers in today’s economic climate. The lede pretty much says it all.

Tens of millions of federal student-loan borrowers will soon owe monthly payments for the first time in more than three years. Some of them aren’t ready for it.
The payment and interest pause put extra cash into people’s pockets, but they tended to spend it rather than save it, according to recent research. Some borrowers are now concerned about being able to cover their student-loan bills this fall.

Not being required to make the payments is not the same as being barred from making the payments. Neither is it a block on putting those HIAed loan payments aside against a return to having to repay or to pay down other debts.

Some borrowers took the payment pause as an opportunity to save the extra money or use it to pay down other debts. But the more common response was to spend it….

But we’re supposed to be sympathetic to these spenders, even to spend our money, through our tax remittances, helping them cover the outcomes of their shortsightedness and irresponsibility.

Investing in the People’s Republic of China

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Foreign direct investment in the PRC has fallen to $20 billion in the first quarter of this year, compared with $100 billion in last year’s first quarter. This is strongly influenced by, if not a direct result of, PRC President Xi Jinping’s “security” policy that explicitly targets foreign investors as likely spies.

A Xi-led campaign this year has hit Western management consultants, auditors, and other firms with a wave of raids, investigations, and detentions. Meanwhile, an expanded anti-espionage law has added to foreign executives’ worry that conducting routine business activities in China, such as market research, could be construed as spying.

There’s this, also:

A senior official in a county of southern Guangdong province, which earlier this year set a goal of attracting nearly $300 billion in investment in the next five years, told a visiting American trade group recently that the county would reward any US corporate “decision maker” investing there 10% of the value of the promised deal, according to people briefed on the matter.
The trade group turned down the county official’s offer, which in the US would constitute an illegal bribe, the people said.

The Guangdong senior official knew his offer would be a bribe under US law, and he made the offer anyway.

There is no investment in anything in the PRC that’s worth the political, or the legal, risk.

More than that, as long as the PRC continues its genocide (in the present time against the Uighurs, but those people have not been the PRC’s only targets), it’s morally impossible to invest in any way, in any thing, in the PRC.

That’s apart from, and in addition to, the national security risk presented by any trade with or within the PRC, given its present control over our supply chains, particularly in critical items such as the rare earths it embargoed from Japan for a time and its current bar of gallium and germanium export to us.

We, and the West at large, have nothing to gain from investing in or trading with this enemy nation, and everything to lose.

Another Excuse…

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…for Leftist-dominated governments to grab power. Farmers Insurance, and other insurance companies, are moving to restrict policy sales in California and Florida due to rising payout costs from a recent spate of natural disaster claims. Public Citizen said that such moves are

prime example of the insurance industry’s hypocrisy on climate change.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians insist that insurance companies aren’t doing enough to combat global warming and want to impose requirements on them to do more. Connecticut’s Leftist politicians are proposing a 5% surcharge on “any premium payments from any fossil fuel company” to any insurer licensed in the state.

Insurers, in a free market economy, are in the business of insuring risk—transferring the risk of a business venture, or ownership of a home, from the venturer/homeowner to the insurer in exchange for a fee based on the risk’s likelihood of occurring and its cost should it occur.

Insurers, in the Progressive-Democrat economy, are tools of the State, usable by the State to achieve the Progressive-Democrats’ personal goals.