Tag Archives: political economy

0% Inflation

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That’s what President Joe Biden (D) said, just a few days ago, when overall inflation came out unchanged in July vs June. (I’ll elide, here, the year-on-year inflation rate of 8.5% in July, which is a little different from 0%.)

Today we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July. Here is what that means: while the price of some things went up last month, the price of other things went down by the same amount.

Among those things whose price went up is food, which all of us need for survival, even as we don’t need gasoline or airline tickets just to survive.

…in July, food prices accelerated further, the Labor Department reported on Wednesday. The food at home category, which tracks the cost of groceries, surged 13.1% over the last year, the most significant increase since March 1979. On a monthly basis, prices jumped 1.4%.

The increase in the cost of food for our families was somewhat more than zero. In fact, annualized, that 1.4% month-to-month increase works out to 18.2%, even larger than that realized annual increase of 13.1%.

Biden is determined to make a big deal about one short-term inflation statistic, and he’s equally determined to pretend another short-term inflation statistic, one that’s critical to families, doesn’t exist. He’s speaking Newspeak, not English.

Public Pension Fund Bail-out

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The Editors’ subheadline illustrates the mistake.

As stock prices fall, public pensions may need taxpayer help.

Quite a large number of public pension funds are in serious financial trouble as a result of their excessively optimistic expected rates of investment returns and the last several weeks of stock market drop.

No, they don’t need taxpayer “help.” What the public pension funds need is to be allowed to fail as a result of their politically-driven, rather than fiscally- or financially-driven, management.

Term Limits

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There are a number of term limits proposals on offer regarding politicians.

Then, as James Sherk pointed out in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed,

Career employees fill almost all federal jobs. Only 4,000 of the 2.2 million federal employees are political appointees. Career federal employees consequently do almost all the work of government.

Here’s my term limits offer, this one regarding civil servants/career federal employees—and I’d apply it to Federal contract employees, also.

Term limit all of them—say 10 years—and after that term, they’d no longer be eligible for Federal employment in any guise whatsoever. That won’t actually hurt them: with the valuable experience of those 10 years of government employment under their belts, they’ll have no problem finding employment on the private economy.

One more limit: cap Federal civilian employment at one million, including individual contractors. Only the uniformed military should have no cap, but should remain sized to the threat faced.

Think, too, what that would do for us taxpayers, who are on the hook for those already enormous government pensions.

A limit on initial eligibility: a minimum of 10 years of employment in the private sector, unrelated to government work, in order to be eligible for Federal employment or contract work. Yes, that includes entry level secretaries/administrative assistants.

Chamber of Commerce and the Progressive-Democratic Party

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The US Chamber of Commerce decided in 2020 to endorse a number of first-term Progressive-Democratic Party Congressmen on the theory that Party would control Congress after the elections and in the expectation, tacitly agreed to if only by their silence, by those Party endorsees. Fifteen of those twenty-three first-termer endorsees were reelected.

So, how’d they do regarding Chamber of Commerce wishes and expectations?

Every one of the 15 voted for the $1.9 trillion spending bill in March 2020, despite Chamber opposition to sweeping jobless benefits that stoked labor shortages and stimulus checks that fed inflation. They also voted for the PRO Act, a radical pro-union rewrite of labor law.

That’s no-for-two, so far.

Now comes President Joe Biden’s (D) Build Reduced Back Act, just passed by the Party-controlled Senate and tossed over to the House, which likely will vote on it by the end of this week—that’s tomorrow, or maybe (unlikely) Saturday.

The chance of Democratic defections is slim. Despite aggressive Chamber lobbying, all 15 rolled over for the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill last year, so they are unlikely to oppose something that has Senator Joe Manchin’s (D, WV) approval.

Did the Chamber miss? No, those folks knew what they would be getting.

…most of the Chamber Democrats had a voting record of hostility to business.
Twenty had voted in the previous Congress for a bill to abolish right-to-work states. Eighteen voted for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. Nearly all had publicly expressed support for scrapping the 2017 corporate tax reform, and for new climate, banking and healthcare regulations.

This is what anyone can expect from a Party politician. And from a political power-driven weather vane Chamber of Commerce, which has shown through its incompetence that it is no friend of American business or businesses.

Climate and Party

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Here is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal with the Build Reduced Back Act just passed unilaterally by Party in the Senate and about to be passed unilaterally by Party in the House, in a nutshell as summarized by the Wall Street Journal:

[It] won’t reduce inflation, won’t reduce the budget deficit, and it won’t reduce the world’s temperature. What it will do is transfer some $369 billion from taxpayers and drug companies to the pockets of green energy businesses and investors.

Notice that. The Act isn’t about correcting the planetary climate. Never mind the arrogance of claiming the US can impact the planet’s climate when the People’s Republic of China and India are rapidly expanding their use of/dependence on fossil fuels and the associated alleged pollution output of CO2, or that Africa cannot switch to “renewable” energy. It’s strictly about passing billions of American taxpayer dollars to the Climate Funding Industry in return for (Party hopes) Climate Funding Industry campaign funding, votes, and political power maintenance/enhancement.