Tag Archives: political economy

Think about Leaving

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Portland business owners are more than fed up with the level of crime destroying their businesses. Their idea of who has the solution is misguided, though.

Frustrated business owners are calling on city and county leaders to do more to combat rising property crime in Portland….

This situation is not solely on the heads of Portland’s city councilmen or the county commissioners. The business’ fellow residents of Portland keep electing those councilmen and commissioners, politicians who’ve demonstrated their lack of commitment to order and rule of law.

Why would any business owner want as his customers folks who so consciously approve of and vote for such politicians? Those are the voters, after all, who then vandalize, rob, and otherwise trash their businesses. There are plenty of jurisdictions that do regard rule of law to be a Good Thing, and those jurisdictions have sound economies with plenty of room for businesses currently domiciled in lawless Portland.

Some Biden Admin Officials are Correct

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I’ve written about the dangers of TikTok to American children’s safety and to US security before. For two years, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US has been dickering with TikTok about ways to wall the app off from the government of the People’s Republic of China as a criterion for TikTok’s continued operation in the US.

Of course, a wall-off has no hope of success: its owner, ByteDance, would remain a PRC company and so wholly responsible to the PRC government’s intelligence community to commit espionage on demand. With TikTok still owned by ByteDance, any firewall must necessarily fail in the face of any PRC intel demand.

As a result of that, some members of CFIUS, in particular, DoD and DoJ folks, are becoming more interested in requiring TikTok be spun off by ByteDance into a separate entity. It’s an interesting idea; although I wonder about remaining sub rosa connections in the form of ByteDance-affiliated persons remaining in TikTok’s management structure, along with the risk of allegedly ex-ByteDance persons still in TikTok’s management.

Treasury has its own concerns regarding a forced sale.

[T]he Treasury Department, which chairs the panel [CFIUS], is worried that such an order might be overturned in court, and is looking for other possible solutions, according to a person familiar with that department’s thinking.

Treasury’s concern is easily enough preempted, along with my concern about ByteDance-related persons in TikTok employ: ban TikTok altogether from the US.

Preventing Future Omnibus Bills

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Chris Jacobs, Juniper Research Group founder and CEO, in his 23 December Wall Street Journal op-ed, offered a solution, but he made this error that’s fatal to his proposal.

But because the Senate parliamentarian allowed Democrats to create new slush funds for domestic spending with a simple majority via budget reconciliation in 2021, a future Republican Congress can do the same….

No. Two wrongs, as the saying goes, do not make a right. Republicans doing this because the other party does it is what Progressive-Democratic Party members do.

Aside from that, it’s simply a wrong thing to do, whether tit-for-tat or simply reconciliation. The better answer is to pass budgets and appropriations bills through truly regular order: get rid of reconciliation altogether and pass the money bills—or not—in the same way as other bills get passed or stopped.

There’s one other step required. One (ideally both) of the houses of Congress needs to enact a rule barring omnibus bills: only the single budget and the dozen separate appropriations bills can be considered.

If government shuts down as a result of money impass, there’s a big so what. The Obama Shutdown, the Schumer Shutdown, all the other shutdowns show how little government is missed.

This—Jacobs’ solution or mine—will remain pie in the sky, though, since we’re dealing with politicians and not persons representing their constituencies. That requires us, We the People, to get off our…couches…and fire those who don’t represent us once they get to DC and hire those who do. That will take two or three election cycles to drive the point home. Three to complete a cleansing of the Senate.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Overreach

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The New York banking regulator, the New York State Department of Financial Services, has announced “rules” that would require banks of all sizes to consider climate change in their risk assessment considerations. NYSDF’s rules are made the worse because it has outsized influence due to the plethora of Wall Street institutions in the State.

Banks would be called upon to look at climate-related risks when bringing on new clients and when extending credit.

This is naked government overreach, even at the State level, and it’s one more reason financial institutions should leave New York. I can suggest Miami, Austin, Dallas, Sioux Falls, and Fargo as alternative locations.

It’s more than that, though. It’s an…inaccurate…goal. The only climate-related risk any American business, banking or other, faces is Government behavior vis-à-vis government bureaucrat-perceived climate situations.

Punishing the Successful

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There are changes to Americans’ 401(k) plans that are included in the Omnibus Spendathon bill currently in front of Congress, and they are IMNSHO highly favorable. (Aside: I hope the Omnibus Spendathon gets killed in favor of a short-term bill—or no bill at all; we won’t miss the Federal government for a few days—that will let the incoming Republican-majority House have its input into the year’s spending. These 401(k) provisions could be brought up and enacted then.)

Among those changes are a raise in the age at which account holders must begin taking their Required Minimum Withdrawals from the current 72 years old to 75 years old.

Cue the outrage from the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their Leftist supporters, all of whom hate the success of others.

Some lawmakers, academics and policy analysts have criticized some of the provisions, including the move to raise the age of required retirement account distributions to 75. They argue much of the legislation benefits the wealthy and the financial-services industry.
“It will primarily subsidize the wealthy and worsen the racial wealth gap,” said a statement from Americans for Tax Fairness.

Leave aside the racist slur from ATF regarding its manufactured race beef. Never mind that the proposed legislation doesn’t harm anyone, or that it gives a path to greater prosperity to those willing to scrimp more now in favor of greater payoffs tomorrow. Those Progressive-Democrats and their Leftist supporters are desperate to hold back some because others can’t keep up. They can’t conceive of—or refuse to consider—ways to help those others do better.

Progressive-Democrats and their Leftist supporters, at bottom, have nothing but contempt for the capabilities of those of us on the middle and lower economic rungs. We average Americans are simply too grindingly stupid to be able to act on our own; we must be “taken care of” by our Betters on the Left.