Tag Archives: political economy

Why Must They Be Mutually Exclusive?

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A letter-writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section objected to an op-ed whose writer touted Federally mandated IVF insurance provided by private economy insurers as a means to elevate our nation’s too low birth rate.

The letter-writer proposed, instead, a tiered cash baby bonus: bigger for married women, smaller for unmarried women.

My question: why must it be one or the other? Why not both?

Follow-on question: why not consider the system of which these are just two components? If the Federal government, or at least the Republicans in the government, are going to work for increasing our birth rate and against the related universal and easily obtained abortion rate—and they should, on both—and on the underlying economic situation of the middle and lower class individuals and families, why not provide women—married or not—in parallel with a range of incentives to have more babies, with financial, educational, and medical support during their pregnancies and in the period surrounding birth, and in the first years (until kindergarten?) of the baby’s life, expanding that to include the baby/toddler/child in the support mechanisms?

If our government and us are going to be serious about birthrates and about right to life, government and we need to get serious about achieving those goals.

A New US International Trade Regime

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As thought of by me.

The beauty of it, if I do write so myself, it that it’s wholly independent of tariffs, whether foreign policy or protectionist.

The idea, at a level of generality, is this. Congress, the President, and his Cabinet Secretaries develop a list of all goods and services critical to our national defense. The list must necessarily include dual use goods and services, those items that can serve both the private economy and our defense systems.

Then Congress and the President draw a hard line and require that 15% (to pull a number from the æther) of everything needed for production of those critical goods and services, from ore through intermediate components to the last components needed for final assembly or service provision, be produced entirely domestically. This would serve two purposes. One is that it would relieve our dependence on other nations, particularly enemy nations, for any of those goods or services, the denial of any one of which would stop our economy and our ability to defend ourselves beyond stocks already in place—a few weeks to a couple of months worth in an active shooting conflict.

The other purpose is that it would give us an extant production core from which we could surge production and expand production facilities much more quickly than if we had to attempt to start from scratch just to begin to surge.

The last step is to require a review of the list of goods and services every five years, de novo, adding to/removing from the list as necessary to keep it current. Every five years to relieve the review cycle, at least a little bit, from political cycles while keeping the update rapid enough to keep up with evolving technologies.

Of course, this will cost more than a classical Ricardian free trade, Smithian free market environment, but that’s the cost of national security. If we can’t protect a capacity for self defense, we’ll pay a far higher price.

Tariffs and Economic Growth

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The good editors at The Wall Street Journal spent a lot of ink and pixels decrying President Donald Trump’s (R) tariff moves. They saved the money bit for the end, though maybe not in the way they intended.

The best response to the warning from the first-quarter GDP decline would be for Mr Trump to call the whole tariff thing off. Short of that, settle for 10% across the board and call it a day. If that’s too much of a come-down, Republicans will need to pass a pro-growth tax cut and accelerate their deregulatory push as their best chance to liberate the economy from its tariff kidnapping.

Those first two sentences are irrelevant, whatever one might think of Trump’s tariff moves. Republicans need to pass a pro-growth tax cut and accelerate their deregulatory push—and pass serious spending cuts—independently of any tariff moves.

Another Alternative

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A letter writer in an earlier WSJ Letters section took issue with Allysia Finley’s op-ed in which Finley favored removing sugary foods from SNAP eligibility, characterizing Finley’s position with typical Leftist exaggeration:

[U]nder Ms Finley’s principle it would be appropriate for the government to withhold such benefits for given people unless they adhere to government diktats on such lifestyle choices as individual diets, exercise habits and so forth….

In Wednesday’s Letters section, another letter writer responded:

[T]hose who support taking sugary treats off the SNAP menu aren’t suggesting that the government monitor lifestyle choices—they’re simply encouraging the government to restrict harmful foods from the program. … Given that taxpayers are paying for that food, this would help fulfill the government’s fiduciary responsibility to manage taxpayers’ money wisely in another way: the policy would also minimize food-stamp recipients’ healthcare bills, for which taxpayers are also paying.

She’s absolutely right on this. There is, though, another alternative to the earlier letter writer’s exaggeration: if a citizen doesn’t want to have to adhere to government diktats, the citizen shouldn’t take the government’s schilling in the first place. This choice often involves hard, uncomfortable tradeoffs, but in the vast majority of cases, they’re entirely possible while in the medium- and longer-run being beneficial.

A Good Start

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President Donald Trump (R) has signed an Executive Order that sets up a mechanism for the US to mine and harvest minerals and metals from the ocean floor under international waters. It’s for more than just international waters, but this is the part of importance to me.

Environmentalists and legalists don’t like it, the former because they don’t want the pristine sea floors disturbed at all. It seems unimportant to them that the metals and minerals are critical to our nation’s economy and our defense establishment and that without them, we’d be unable to provide any sort of environment within which environmentalists could environmental.

The latter don’t like it because there’s no international law that regulates or even permits such mining. It’s apparently lost on these that the lack of regulation or permission means that the mining and harvesting is entirely legitimate to do.

At least one mining enterprise, The Metals Co, a Canadian firm that’s still interested in doing business with the US, has said that given the EO and a 40-ish year old American law, the Deep Sea Hard Mineral Resources Act, it can start mining in a year or so.

Given that, the first mines should be set up in the Gulf of America, and done so promptly. The second mines should be set up in the South China Sea, and done so just as promptly.