Tag Archives: political economy

She’s Right

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But for the wrong reasons.

US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says billions of dollars in upgrades are needed to the power grid in the US to prepare for widespread electric vehicle adoption.

If that’s the spur needed to get the upgrades started and seriously underway, then cool. However, our power grid badly needs upgrade and strengthening in its own right. It’s old, near capacity under normal draw, and highly fragile—as the California portion of the grid demonstrates continually, and as the Texas grid demonstrated a couple of winters ago.

Indeed, nothing has been done since the Northeast blackout of 2003—which itself was a geographic repeat of the blackout of 1965. The proximate causes of these actually were quite trivial, but the fragility of the grid was demonstrated by how fast and far the effects spread: throughout the American northeast (and deep into Canada, which illustrates, also, international implications for strengthening, or continuing to ignore, the decrepit state of our grid).

It’s a national security matter, too, beyond the economic aspects of security.

We also need to drop some dimes (though not as many as might seem) on hardening all of our power grids (plural: not only electricity, but grids distributing natural gas and oil from the well through refiners to end users) against EMP attacks—which needn’t be nuclear weapon-originated, or even large, but merely carefully targeted—and against being software-hacked, as the Russians did when they shut down Colonial Pipeline.

Export Controls Regarding the PRC

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It has come to light that we really don’t have any serious export controls covering technology-related exports to the People’s Republic of China.

Of the US’s total $125 billion in exports to China in 2020, officials required a license for less than half a percent, Commerce Department data shows. Of that fraction, the agency approved 94%, or 2,652, applications for technology exports to China. The figures omit applications “returned without action,” meaning their outcomes were uncertain.
The result: the US continues to send to China an array of semiconductors, aerospace components, artificial-intelligence technology, and other items that could be used to advance Beijing’s military interests.

Why is this being allowed to occur?

Some warn tighter restrictions on US tech sales to China will backfire because allies such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea will step in to fill the void. For export restrictions to be effective, “we need our allies to have the same controls,” said Kevin Wolf, a senior Commerce official during the Obama administration, while testifying on Capitol Hill last year. “It is that simple and logical.”

That would be silly if it weren’t, at bottom, rankly defeatist. We shouldn’t be waiting around on putting curbs on technology transfers to an enemy nation. Instead of looking for consensus first, we need to act, to lead, to let the consensus build as we go, and to give our allies something to follow and a consensus to join. After all, if we don’t care enough to do, there’s no reason anyone else should care enough to do.

Beside that, if we stop exporting our technology to the PRC and our putative allies step in to fill the gap, at least we’ll be stopping our own transfers, and our allies’ technologies, for the most part, aren’t as good as ours. The PRC would be getting second best, continuing to trail us, and that would be to the good for our security.

Government Spending on Fast Internet Service

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The Federal government has a $42+ billion program for expanding broadband Internet access to Americans who don’t currently have that access. In a rare application of sense, the law has an entry criterion:

The broadband plan, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden last November, stipulates that money to improve service can’t be doled out until the Federal Communications Commission completes new maps showing where homes and businesses lack fast service.

Like I said, an application of sense. But there’s one more little fillip that’s necessary. That’s the need to define “fast Service.” Absent that, the maps won’t necessarily be useful.

Such a definition is needed because Internet speed is constantly increasing as the underlying technology is constantly improving. We’ve gone, after all, in just three decades, from 300baud dial-up access to the Internet at the start to today’s 100s of gigabit/sec access, and that’s getting faster as 5G access spreads and subsequent xG accesses are developed.

What’s the speed for which the FCC’s maps are required to indicate the need on the part of those of us who don’t currently have it? Will that be a static requirement, or will the speed be required to increase along with the general population’s access speed?

An Interesting Exercise

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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced that Chicagoans can look forward to her planned bump in their property taxes of 2.5%, effective next year.

Maybe the increase is warranted, maybe it isn’t. Here’s the exercise. Lightfoot needs to release, for each of the prior five years, detailed line-item allocations of budgeted property tax collections and the production schedule for each of those allocated-for items.

In parallel with that and for each of those same five years, she needs to release detailed line-item actual expenditures, supported by receipts for each expenditure, for every step of the supply/expense chain from allocation through intermediate purchases/expenses—including identifying intermediate and final suppliers, wages suppliers paid for production of each item at that stage of the chain, the services and hard goods bought, the date of each purchase, the date of actual delivery of each purchase—through to final allocated-for product delivery and the date of that final delivery. For those projects not yet completed and those items not yet finally delivered, she needs to release the originally scheduled dates, their current status, and concrete, measurable reason(s) for the delay, if any.

The exercise, also, would be as informative as it would be interesting.

Just the News Has a Question

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The news outlet ran a poll over the weekend. The question was this:

How concerned are you that additional IRS funding through the Inflation Reduction Act will lead to more audits for typical taxpayers?

As of Sunday morning, the enormously unscientific poll—consisting solely of JtN readers—was running 96% Extremely concerned.

Keep in mind that the IRS has been targeting Conservatives and conservative organizations at least since early in the Obama administration (if not sooner; that’s just when it became exposed).

Keep in mind, too, that Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, since Obama’s first Presidential campaign, have characterized typical taxpayers as merely bitter Bible- and gun-clinging denizens of flyover country, as irredeemable and deplorable, as 15% of us being just no good.

How is this even a question?