Tag Archives: political economy

Not Unless…

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…he can guarantee, also, a “No” on Lael Brainard. She, after all, was the only other serious potential nominee for Fed Chairman.

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) wants a no vote on Jerome Powell’s nomination for a second term as Fed Chairman.

I disagree.

At least Powell is a devil we know and so whose behavior we have a chance to predict. Brainard, on the other hand, refuses to confirm whether she’s a capitalist or a socialist, forcing us to reject her on the risk that she’s a socialist. Alternatively, Brainard is unable to say whether she’s a capitalist or a socialist, forcing us to reject her on her incompetence.

Permanent Marks

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The WSJ editors cited Fed Chairman Jerome Powell as saying, on the matter of our current relatively high inflation rate,

…some people define transitory to mean “short-lived.” But at the Fed “we tend to use it to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation.”

This is misleading. It’s good that he’s not anticipating permanently higher inflation—if he’s right—but that’s unlikely in nearly any event—so far.

The permanent mark of importance here is the higher price levels that have already resulted from the present inflation level. Even when the inflation rate falls to a more normal level, those price levels will be unlikely to fall commensurately in nominal terms, and it’ll be a long while before productivity or wages or both rise enough to reduce those price levels, in real terms, to their prior level.

Politicizing Things

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Congressman and Vice Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Jake Auchincloss (D, CT) had an op-ed in Tuesday’s Fox News Online in which he complained about the lack of bipartisanship regarding and the politicization of the current inflation period—and blamed it all on Republicans.

Never mind the irony of decrying partisanship and politicization while blaming partisanly.

But the irony—no, the dishonesty—didn’t stop there. Here are just a couple of examples; he led off with them.

…game of chicken with the debt-ceiling….

Here is Auchincloss’ first move of partisanly politicizing the dire strait of our economy. There’s no game of chicken here; the Progressive-Democrats have the votes to raise the debt ceiling. All they need to do is to set their number for the raise, and then vote it into law. Auchincloss knows that full well.

Then there’s this:

First and foremost, that means working together to shift consumer spending towards services and away from goods.

Because the Progressive-Democrats, with their Big Government ideology, insist they know better than us ignorant average Americans what we want—what we should want—than we do. They’re looking to dictate to us what we will buy, with the money they choose to leave us after they’ve taken most of it via their taxes.

Auchincloss’ nonsense went on in that partisan, wholly political, vein.

This self-absorption, if not outright duplicity, is all too typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Dislocations of a Non-Competitive Market

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It turns out that when there’s no market competition, and when there’s no price signaling in any sort of market, some producers charge more than others, and consumers pay the price (to coin a phrase).

Some hospitals charge up to 10 times as much as others for standard medical scans, according to the latest analysis of previously secret market rates.
Median prices for taking images of the brain, legs, abdomen and chest differed across hospitals by thousands of dollars in some cases….

And

Hospitals and insurers have long set prices in confidential negotiations, which has frustrated employers seeking to curb costs by shopping for better deals under worker health-benefit insurance plans. The average premium for family insurance offered as a workplace benefit increased 4% this year….

Think how us consumers, feel.

There’s this, too:

Cost difference can’t explain the price spreads…. Other factors that determine prices, the researchers said, include negotiating skills or how much leverage hospitals have in contract talks with insurers.

All of which is strongly potentiated by the prices and pricing mechanisms being kept hidden from the market at large.

Ge Bai, a Professor in Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Health Policy and Management facility, is being polite:

This is very far away from a competitive market[.]

Go figure.

Partisanship

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Gerald Seib had a piece on this in the context of gerrymandering. Along the way, he had these as examples of partisanship:

Yet when the bill [the $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill] came to a final vote, six of the state’s [Michigan’s] seven Republicans voted against it. Nor was the phenomenon limited to Republicans. Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib also voted against it, in part because Congress wasn’t also passing a giant social-spending and climate-change package that she and other progressive Democrats have been demanding.

Seib expressed surprise/dismay at those votes, along with the fact that 13 Republicans who did vote for it came in for some opprobrium. Seib apparently missed the part where bill has little to do with actual infrastructure and much to do with “social justice” questions, “green-ness” (just not enough to suit Tlaib). It was a bill worthy of voting against.

Seib also missed here: lawmakers try to perform their most basic tasks: prevent a government shutdown by passing a spending bill, and prevent a national debt crisis by raising the debt ceiling.

Were Congressmen truly concerned about their districts and then our nation ahead of other considerations, they’d produce a Spending Reduction bill, not a spending bill; they’d lower tax rates, which actually increases revenues to Government; and they’d pass a debt ceiling raise large enough only to cover already committed spending, and then only on condition the prior two items also are passed.