Tag Archives: political economy

“Tax Us”

Posted on by
Reply

Some members of the rich class have formed a group and extended a demand that governments should tax all members of their clique.

Over 80 men and women worth seven figures from the US, UK, Germany, New Zealand, Canada, and the Netherlands calling themselves the “Millionaires for Humanity” have signed an open letter asking their governments to “raise taxes on people like us. Immediately. Substantially. Permanently.

The Americans in that crowd first must prove they mean it by committing—with publicly available means for verifying that they’re honoring that commitment over the succeeding years—to making donations to the US Treasury of the amounts they’d pay under this “tax us” plan.

They don’t get to force their taxes on the rest of us, especially when they don’t believe in them themselves.

More Disingenuosity

Posted on by
2

The Supreme Court has ruled—7-2—in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor and other organizations. The Court upheld the Trump administration’s rule exempting these employers from an Obamacare requirement to provide insurance coverage that includes contraception.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the Court:

We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption. We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

…this Court leaves women workers to fend for themselves, to seek contraceptive coverage from sources other than their employer’s insurer, and, absent another available source of funding, to pay for contraceptive services out of their own pockets.

Ginsburg is being disingenuous in this. Contraceptives are dirt cheap in Walmart and drug stores. It’s no great burden for “women workers” to pay for contraception “out of their own pockets.” If it’s a burden to seek “contraceptive coverage” from other sources, that’s the direct result of Obamacare driving up the cost of all coverage.

Ginsburg is being sexist in this. Condoms are nearly as cheap and even more widely available. But Ginsburg is blithely assuming that contraception is solely the responsibility of the woman.

Markets

Posted on by
Reply

Zimbabwe, in attempt to protect its currency—already a close neighbor of worthless—has decided to close its stock exchange.

If there is no market for the currency, then it has little value in terms of purchasing power. If there is no convertibility of the currency into other currencies, then there is both high risk in holding the currency and reduced interest in holding it.  And so reduced purchasing power.

If the currency has little value and limited convertibility—or either alone—there is little interest in investing in the country or in simply buying its goods or selling foreign goods in—especially if the investments must be done in the domestic currency.

Without foreign trade or investment, domestic production of goods and services is strongly limited—especially when the nation is so far from self-sufficient in necessary resources—the inputs to any production.

Limited production, limited buying—the stuff of economic stagnation moving into decline.

Closing a stock exchange in such an environment is a move with no relevance to the failure of the ZWL. Aside from the fact that only the very rich Zimbabweans and foreign investors traded on that market, the failure of the currency is a failure in citizens’ belief in the government, a failure of their confidence in the nation, and a disbelief in the citizens to keep what they’ve earned, whether hard goods or money. It’s a failure in confidence in the future.

Getting the future back is more serious business than closing a stock market.

Distractions

Posted on by
Reply

Much is being made of the cybersecurity threat, the national security threat, that the People’s Republic of China’s Huawei represents. For instance, Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE) has said it’s good for the British government to be removing Huawei from the core of the British Internet.

Senator Mark Warner (D, VA):

Huawei has been and will continue to be a national security threat….

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) on the Brits’ initial decision to allow Huawei into their Internet infrastructure:

[t]he Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will now have a foothold to conduct pervasive espionage on British society.

But a question arises in my peabrain.

Huawei and ZTE, with their backdoors and outright spyware, have been remarkably easy to identify. Suppose they were intended to be seen. What are we missing in Xi’s left hand while we focus on the glitter in his right? Or more aptly, are we missing Xi’s dagger while we let ourselves be distracted by his épée?

New Case Rates and Death Rates

Posted on by
Reply

Current data indicate a reduction in new (read: confirmed) cases of Wuhan Virus—45,000 cases on Independence Day vs 50,000 cases the day prior.  Fun with statistics: that’s a 10% drop—wow.

It is promising, but a single datum isn’t very dispositive.

What really interested me, though, is this, also presented in the article at the link:

In contrast to the surge in positive diagnoses, the death rate has slowed mostly to the hundreds a day in recent weeks, from a peak of more than 2,000 daily during several weeks in April.

And:

Infectious-disease epidemiologists caution that deaths typically lag behind other indicators, as the disease often progresses over the course of weeks in the most severe cases.

The rise in new case detections has only been in progress for a week, or so, and many of those detections are the result of massively increased testing finding massively increased existing infections (hence my correction above to consider “confirmed” rather than solely “new”).

With this virus’ incubation period of 2-14 days, and the fact that, if the infection proves fatal to an individual, that will occur generally from 4-11 days after hospitalization, I’ll be looking at hospitalization rates over the next week, or so, and mortality rates over the latter half of July. Those are the data most likely to be associated with the recent rise in cases detected.

New/confirmed infection rates by themselves are pretty meaningless.