Tag Archives: political economy

Priorities

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Another fail by the Progressive-Democrat Mayor of New York City Eric Adams.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said with the expiration of Title 42, the Big Apple may be forced to cut public services to prioritize an expected influx of an additional 1,000 migrants arriving every week.

He said it explicitly:

Truth be told, if corrective measures are not taken soon, we may very well be forced to cut or curtail programs New Yorkers rely on, and the pathway to house thousands more is uncertain[.]

There’s this bit of context, too:

In the past several months, New York City has already received more than 31,000 asylum seekers….

That in a city with a population of 8.8 million residents, of whom, more than 350 thousand already receive public assistance. And Adams seriously thinks the 31 thousand are a serious drain on so large a city with a welfare system so broad.

Adams seriously thinks American citizens should take a back seat to a small collection of illegal aliens.

Why is this mayor prioritizing illegal aliens over his city’s American residents in meting out his city’s finite support resources? Well, he is a Progressive-Democratic Party politician….

Progressive-Democratic Party Welfare Cliff

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I’ve written about this on a few occasions. The New York Post has current data, and they’re even worse. Here’s a table illustrating the matter (as usual, right click|Open in New Tab to get a bigger image).

And some specific data:

  • In 24 states, unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies for a family of four with no one working are the annualized equivalent of at least the national median household.
  •  In a dozen states, the value of unemployment benefits and Obama­Care subsidies exceeds the salary and benefits of the average teacher, construction worker, electrician, firefighter, truck driver, machinist or retail associate.
  •  In New Jersey, a family of four can receive benefits equal to an annualized earned income of $108,000 with no one working.
  •  In Connecticut and New Jersey, a family earning $300,000 a year can receive ObamaCare subsidies
  •  New Jersey is a state where a family can earn the equivalent of $100,000 a year if both parents are collecting unemployment benefits and ObamaCare subsidies for health care. In Connecticut the benefits can reach $80,000.

Party is bent on keeping average Americans trapped in Party’s welfare cage and dependent on Party largesse in return for votes.

More Biden-Inspired Censorship

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It seems that Senators Josh Hawley (R, MO) and Chuck Grassley (R, IA) requested a collection of documents and answers to 10 questions from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Mayorkas sent back non-responses to the questions and heavily redacted documents in not responding to the docs request (“two documents already in the public domain” and “500 pages of material, approximately half of which are mostly or entirely redacted”).

DHS cited Freedom of Information Act disclosure privileges in making the redaction[.]

This is yet another example of the Biden administration’s intrinsic dishonesty and its penchant for censorship.

The Senators shouldn’t have had to respond with the obvious:

We remind you that the oversight letters we send to the Executive Branch are signed in our capacity as sitting members of Congress, a separate and co-equal branch of government.

And

Noting that DHS cited Freedom of Information Act disclosure privileges in making the redaction, Hawley and Grassley pointed out that FOIA provisions “do not apply to the oversight requests we submit in our capacity as constitutional officers and should not be applied to the materials that DHS produces in response to congressional requests.”
“Simply put, Congress controls when to make documents within its possession public, not DHS….”

2024 can’t come soon enough, and the Republicans better not blow that one.

Decreasing Rate of Inflation

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It’s still inflation, and it’s still growing. Wall Street Journal editors point out that

The 12-month inflation rate fell to 7.1% in November, which is down from 7.7% in October and is the fifth annual rate drop in a row since inflation peaked at 9.1% in June.

That decline, though, is against a higher rate of inflation that year ago—2021—than in 2020, the last year of the prior administration, which also was the last year of our economic burgeon.

In addition, greatly mitigating any beneficial effects of that reducing inflation rate, the prices generated by that inflation persist, and they will into the future. Those prices will be paid—into that same future—out of real wages that have shrunk by 3% year-on-year.

All of which suggests the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has good reason to stick to its leaked intention to lift rates by another 50 basis points on Wednesday.

No. The Fed should have stuck to its 75 basis points (0.75%) benchmark interest rate increase pattern, instead of its meek .50% increase of last Wednesday. Kill this inflation spiral. Kill it dead. Dragging things out only runs up the costs for us average Americans who continue to pay those increasing prices with shrinking dollars.

Even those editors seem to agree:

The better policy is to break inflation now and return sooner to the Fed’s target of 2%. That’s a stronger foundation for growth and a rising standard of living for workers whose budgets have been savaged by inflation.

The Editors’ headline is spot on: Inflation Isn’t Vanquished Yet.

Far from it. And neither are its pocketbook effects.

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

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Lots of folks tout cryptocurrency as the be-all and end-all of currency and liberation of our money from Evil Government.

However.

Here’s a bit about blockchain.

A blockchain is a distributed database or ledger that is shared among the nodes of a computer network. As a database, a blockchain stores information electronically in digital format. … The innovation with a blockchain is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data and generates trust without the need for a trusted third party.

Guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data—the fidelity part of that is that each transaction of good in a sequence of transactions is explicitly tracked and its provenance known: who or what did the transaction and who or what received the transaction. At every step of the way from first origin of the first transaction to the last recipient of the last transaction.

Here’s a bit about cryptocurrency, using the hoary Bitcoin as a canonical example.

The key thing to understand here is that Bitcoin merely uses blockchain as a means to transparently record a ledger of payments, but blockchain can, in theory, be used to immutably record any number of data points.

Cryptocurrencies use blockchain—and that ledger, here, of payments (from whom or what to what or whom)—to track the financial transactions.

That immutable record of transactions is just what governments love to have in order to track their subjects’ doings.

Cryptocurrencies are encrypted, though—that’s the “crypto” part. Except that any encryption mechanism can be cracked, and governments have the resources to do exactly that should the men in government decide they have a “need” to.

On the other hand, cash transactions still are untrackable.