Tag Archives: political economy

How Bad is a Vocational Education?

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Especially compared with a formal college education?  Oren Cass, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, had some thoughts on that in a recent Wall Street Journal piece.

Elevating vocational education, and prioritizing its students, must begin with a substantial reshaping of American high schools. Vocational education will not succeed so long as culture and public policy consign it to second-class status—a dumping ground for students who interfere with what school districts consider their real mission, college prep.

It’s absolutely true that we shouldn’t be deprecating the status of those with or who prefer, for any reason, vocational educations.  These folks—the VoTech graduates, the OO graduates—the trades and secretaries are critical to our economy. What road gets built, what office buildings or houses get built, what communications networks get laid out without the trades?  What office is operable without the secretaries and office managers who do the actual nitty-gritty of running things?

What will a designer or an engineer or an architect do without the trades and secretaries to turn ideas into action?

Cass is spot on.

US Corn Exports

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The Trump administration is working on a deal with the People’s Republic of China to reduce the trade imbalance we have with them (whether the trade imbalance really is a bad thing and whether the PRC is working the deal as hard as the Trump administration are questions outside this post).  American farmers would have trouble producing enough to meet their part of the goal, were the deal to go through.

US corn exports could jump from $150 million to about $10 billion annually within a few years if China vastly expanded its quotas and reduced its duties that are as high as 65%, according to one estimate.

The farmers—particularly corn farmers—would get a great deal of help in ramping up their exports if they weren’t…encouraged…to divert significant fractions of their crop to ethanol production.  This is another consequence of ethanol mandates and another reason to get rid of them.

Update: In 2016, the US diverted 5.28 billion bushels of corn to ethanol production, or 36% of our total corn production that year. At roughly $3.45/bushel, that works out to $18.2 billion of corn production that was diverted.  Simply eliminating this useless diversion would seem to cover that production jump cited in the quote above.  It also would seem to leave $8 billion of production to mitigate food costs that are inflated by the diversion.  This, in turn, would help our poor and mitigate the need for food stamps and therewith reduce the tap on taxpayer pocketbooks.

The Obama Legacy

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Much has been made over the last week, both favorably and unfavorably, of the magnitude of President Donald Trump’s erasure of ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) legacy.

I disagree with that coverage.  Trump has been mitigating, if not correcting, as many of Obama’s errors as he can, but he’s done nothing about Obama’s legacy, which includes the following far from exhaustive list:

  • apologizing to the world for our successes
  • bowing to world leaders, deeply on several occasions
  • alienating our friends and toadying up to our enemies
    • attacking Israel for insisting on defending itself
    • demanding that Israel accept the pre-1967 borders as the Obama administration’s price of peace
    • excusing Hamas terrorism against Israel
    • turning his back on Iraq
    • telling Great Britain to take their bust of Winston Churchill and….
    • telling Great Britain that if they leave the EU they can’t count on trade deals with the US any time soon
  • insisting that Daesh was a JV team and then refusing to confront them when they exploded over Iraq and Syria
  • drawing red lines in Syria over al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own civilians and then ducking away from those lines
  • creating the JCPOA, to which even French President Francois Hollande objected at the time
  • his State Department’s too expensive “Reset” with Russia
  • acquiescing to Russian occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine
  • acquiescing to People’s Republic of China’s seizure of the South China Sea
  • acquiescing to northern Korea’s nuclear weapons expansion in the name of “strategic patience”
  • agreeing the Paris Climate Accord
  • passing Obamacare
  • passing Dodd-Frank
  • routinely governing by diktat Executive Order rather than working through Congress

While many of these failures have yet to be addressed, substantial progress is being made.

No, Obama’s legacy is intact.  It’s a legacy of deep, abject, and unbroken failure.

It’s Not Your Company

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Seattle wants to charge a head tax on businesses operating in the city, a tax whose amount would be just what it sounds like—a tax based on the number of hours worked by each employee the business has on its payroll.

In response to the proposal, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, paused construction on a 17-story office tower in downtown Seattle.

In response to Amazon, the Left in Seattle, spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union-backed activist gang—Working Washington—wants Amazon charged with a felony.

Amazon, after all, doesn’t belong to its investors, and it’s not run by Bezos.  No, the activists, the SEIU, and the city’s governing machine that wants the tax, all insist that Amazon is public property, and it must do what they demand, not what its owners want.

Because those owners don’t own that.  They only hold it in conditional fee from these city Know Betters.

Is Seattle as much a harbinger of future Progressive-Democrat demands as is Jerry Brown’s California?

Update: The Seattle City Council on Tuesday voted 9-0 to impose the head tax, although rather than being based on hours worked per employee, it’s a flat head tax: $275 per employee per year.

Budget Commitments

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Recall the hoo-raw raised when President Donald Trump signed a Republican-authored budget-busting budget [sic] earlier this year.  Now he wants to send up some rescissions to an earlier budget, with indications that he’ll submit further rescissions to the just-signed thing.

There’s a kerfuffle brewing in the Senate, and it’s not from the Progressive-Democrats there.

…[Senator Mitch (R, KY)] McConnell, who told Fox News that rescission would jeopardize future budget negotiations with Democrats: “You can’t make an agreement one month and say, “OK, we really didn’t mean it.'”

He’s right on this. The prior agreement was Congress passing, in 1974, the law that allows rescission. McConnell needs to keep that agreement.  Unless he “really didn’t mean it.”