Tag Archives: political economy

Social Safety Nets

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The nearly $2 trillion Wuhan Virus “relief” bill, the American Rescue Plan Act, wending its way through Congress on strictly party lines, is being masqueraded as a safety net for folks badly impacted by the Wuhan Virus situation.

Aside from the plain fact that no such bill is needed anymore—our economy is rapidly recovering, and would continue to do so were it not for the Biden administration’s burgeoning reregulation imperative, explosive spending plans, and its impending tax increases—there’s another aspect of this bill.

I’ve written elsewhere about the 91% of spending in this bill that has absolutely nothing to do with the virus. This is about the “safety net” spending. That spending includes items like these:

  • the largest direct stimulus payments ever provided in legislation at $1,400 per adult who filed tax returns with a Social Security number—which is nearly every working, or was working, person. It includes retirees, who lost no income due to the virus, and so they do not need virus stimulus/replacement money
  • expands the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit to the largest amount on record.
    • increases the Child Tax Credit amount to $3,000 per child and $3,600 for children under age six
    • increases the maximum Earned Income Tax Credit in 2021 from $543 to $1,502
  • continues the temporary weekly federal unemployment payments of $300 on top of state jobless benefits
  • recipients will get a tax waiver on $10,200 of unemployment payments. Heretofore, unemployment payments, as income replacement payments, were taxable as ordinary income
  • $86 billion bailout for union-managed multi-employer pension plans and single employer pension plans
  • $27.4 billion for rental and utility payment assistance
  • 15% benefit increase for food stamp recipients
  • reparations—direct payments, to the tune of 120% of outstanding indebtedness, for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers
  • “aid”—bailouts—for State and local governments—every bit as much handout to these political entities as are the above to individuals

All of these are handouts paid to folks who aren’t working and encourage, however weakly, those folks to continue not working and collecting the handouts. They’re not hands up paid to folks who are looking for work, are working temporarily reduced hours, and especially there are no criteria tying the payments to actively seeking work or increased work.

A legitimate social safety net would be a program that offers limited hands up to folks who’ve had a run of bad luck, or who have exercised bad judgment and learned their lesson, or who have misbehaved and mended their ways. Those hands up also would be tied to measurable efforts to find work or increased hours of work.

Giving handouts—especially broadly targeted or altogether untargeted handouts—making them repeatably renewable or outright permanent, and not keying them to working is no safety net. It’s

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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Here’s a partial list of what’s in the Progressive-Democrats’ Wuhan Virus “Relief” bill, just passed in the Senate and sent to the House for its concurrence.

A bill, incidentally, passed on strict party lines, after Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) showed his word to be worthless after he swore up and down that he’d not support any bill that didn’t have support from “his Republican friends,” and then voted for its passage.

  • $350 billion for state and local governments—never minding that many States, such as California, Virginia, Arizona, and Colorado, had revenue increases over 2019
  • Over $128 billion for schools—never minding that 95% of that won’t be paid out until after 2021
  • $570 million—$280 per day(!), up to $21,000—for Federal employees to take up to 15 weeks off from work
  • $45 billion for Obamacare
  • $300 per week in enhanced unemployment, the first $10,200 would be tax-free to households with incomes under $150,000—even though unemployment benefits, as replacement income, heretofore was taxable as that income
  • $4 billion for agriculture, including $1 billion for, among other things, “socially disadvantaged” farmers getting their loans forgiven up to 120% of their loan. Never minding the intrinsically racist and sexist nature of that, since non-disadvantaged farmers don’t get a penny of loan forgiveness, at all, and that the 20% excess “forgiveness” is naked “reparation”
  • $50 million in “environmental justice” grants
  • $91 million in “outreach to student loan borrowers
  • $270 million for the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities
  • $200 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services
  • $10 million for the “preservation and maintenance of Native American languages”

The sad thing—or would be sad were it not for its dishonesty—is that some of these inclusions would be worthy of straightforward debate on their merits, did the Progressive-Democrats have the integrity to propose them separately and on those inclusions’ merits.

That partial list, by itself, works out to $1 trillion of money wholly irrelevant to (unneeded, with a recovering economy) Wuhan Virus “relief,” money that would be better spent on Biden’s—and Trump’s—vaunted infrastructure repair and buildout.

Or on making permanent the personal income tax rate reductions from the Trump tax reform.

Or in addition to the miserly $1,400 “stimulus” payments, make it $3,000 in our pocket direct payment checks.

We need to remember this in 2022.

Yes, It Is

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But for reasons different from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘ (D, NY). Or it would be, if Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t slept through so many of her economics classes.

[Congresswoman] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D, NY] called the debate over raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour “utterly embarrassing” and reiterated her push for the Biden administration to override the Senate parliamentarian and include a pay floor increase in the Democrats’ coronavirus relief package.

It is embarrassing that a Boston University cum laude BA in economics could have so little understanding of basic economics. It is embarrassing, too, that so many grown adults alongside her in Congress could have so little understanding of basic economics.

It is well-known that the more something costs, the less of it that will be bought or otherwise acquired—or even sought after. Of course, that applies to labor as well as to the goods and services that labor produces.

It is well-known that if the output of labor isn’t worth the cost, the laborer won’t be hired in the first place.

It is well-known that minimum wage jobs—the jobs allegedly targeted by the Progressive-Democrats’ drive for $15/hr—are low/no skill jobs.

It is well-known that the primary workers in those low-no skill jobs are teenagers trying to earn some summer money for a number of reasons, earning some college money; existing college students looking to earn money for their current expenses; first-time workers looking to gain work experience and resume material; single parents looking to plus up their family’s income; two-parent families with one or both parents looking to plus up their family’s savings. Very few of these minimum wage jobs are the sole job held by the worker.

From that, it should be easy to understand that the ones who will be hurt the most by a mandated minimum wage increase will be precisely those folks, as they’re the ones who will be priced out of their jobs, and the small businesses who can’t afford to pay that much in wages.

It’s also lost on the Progressive-Democrats, or they simply don’t care, that the ones most hurt by such a move are minority low-skill workers and the minority-owned or -operated small businesses that can’t afford the labor cost.

We even have empirical evidence of the failure of such a minimum wage: in Seattle, where employment has fallen off in the aftermath of that city’s mandated wage increase.

Yet the Progressive-Democrats push on, with their eyes wide shut.

Do It Our Way

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…or else.

The Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled the [minimum wage] increase cannot be included in the effort to pass the [Wuhan Virus] relief package through a procedure known as budget reconciliation….

The Progressive-Democrats can’t get their way legally, within the boundaries of our Constitution, so

Ilhan Omar @IlhanMN
Abolish the filibuster.
Replace the parliamentarian.
What’s a Democratic majority if we can’t pass our priority bills? This is unacceptable.

Get rid of anyone and anything that gets in our way.

This is what Government looks like under a Progressive-Democratic Party reign of any duration. This is the fate of individual liberty under a Progressive-Democratic Party reign of any duration.

This is the damage that can be done, and is being done, to our republic in only a couple of months, much less the two years of a session of Congress with Progressive-Democrats controlling each house of Congress and the White House.

Stop Worrying about Drilling Bans on Federal Land

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The United States actually had the right idea—several of them, in fact—years ago. Today, the Federal government “owns” around 640 million acres of land—28% of the land area of our nation. That’s way too much, and it’s the largest source of leverage the Feds have over oil and natural gas production by our private economy.

There are a couple of things Congress can do to reduce to irrelevance Executive Branch volatility regarding Executive Orders and access to Federal land for mineral extraction; both of them involve reduction of American land that the Federal government presumes to own.

One is to transfer the vast majority of those acres back to the States from which the acres were seized. Examples of this excessive “ownership” include

State Federal Land Acreage Total State Acreage Per Centage of Federal Land
Nevada 59,681,502 70,264,320 84.90%
Utah 34,202,920 52,696,960 64.90%
Idaho 32,621,631 52,933,120 61.60%
Alaska 223,803,098 365,481,600 61.20%
Oregon 32,614,185 61,598,720 52.90%
Wyoming 30,013,219 62,343,040 48.10%
California 45,864,800 100,206,720 45.80%
Arizona 28,064,307 72,688,000 38.60%
Colorado 23,870,652 66,485,760 35.90%
New Mexico 26,981,490 77,766,400 34.70%

Notice that: the Feds “own” over 50% of each of the top five States, and we have get below the top 10 before the Feds possess less than a third of a State.

The Federal government legitimately controls land important for protecting monumental land like the core of Yosemite, land holding military facilities, and the like. The Feds don’t need all those hundreds of millions of acres of land for that, though. Instead, the bulk of the currently possessed land should be restored to the States within whose boundaries the land sits. The States in our federal republic should be the ones managing their domestic affairs of mineral access.

Then there are moves for transfers to individual ownership—moves of those several years ago.

The Bounty-Land Acts of 1776 awarded tracts of land to veterans of the Revolutionary War (assuming, of course, that we won the war, which we did).

The Public Land Act of 1796 authorized the sale of Federal land in 640-acre blocks for $2/acre, or roughly $1,600/acre today (more or less, given the heroic assumptions regarding inflation over so long an interval).

The Preemption Act of 1841 gave squatters living on Federal land first call to buy up to 160 acres at $1.25/acre, or roughly $1,000/acre.

The Homestead Act of 1862 granted outright 160 acres to squatters who had lived on the land for at least five years and improved it (along with a couple of other requirements that amounted to filing intent, proof of improvement, and filing for ownership).

These and similar Acts, or some combination of them, could be modernized and used to transfer vast tracts of Federal lands to private ownership. Once there, the owners could sell/lease their mineral extraction rights to those evil drillers and earn income while the oil and gas companies could extract and continue to provide cheap energy to our nation and export cheap energy to the world.

‘Course all of that, or any of it, will be more likely with a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Republican President, or veto-proof Republican majorities in each of the House and Senate.