Tag Archives: political economy

No Surprise

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Howard Kurtz was on the right track when he wrote that Republicans shouldn’t be surprised that President Donald Trump cut a deal with Congress’ Progressive-Democratic Party* leadership regarding our debt ceiling and financial aid for Harvey and Irma victims.

However, Kurtz’ laying the blame on House Speaker Paul Ryan (R, WI) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) is misplaced, though.  Ryan did get one Obamacare compromise repeal passed in the House.  McConnell did get 49 out of his 52 Senators to vote for that bill.  It’s the rank and file—the party as a whole—who are failing their duty.

The question of whether the Trump deal is good or bad in its own right also is irrelevant.

Trump has been saying since the Republicans collectively chose the first time to perpetuate Obamacare rather than pass a compromise, however flawed but that would have been an important first step toward remove and replace that he would have to work with the other party.

Since that initial failure, since that initial betrayal of each Congressman’s home district constituents (and yes, that includes Senators, whose home district is statewide) and of their not-too-distant secondary constituents, all of us Americans, those Republicans have continued to choose to inflict Obamacare on us rather than pass successive efforts at compromise toward remove and replace.  They have quibbled with each other over budgets, spending, and on and on, rather than passing Conservative budgets, spending bills, and on and on.  In the Senate, the Republicans won’t even take action on a House-passed bill that would rescind a destructive CFPB regulation.

Republicans still have no plan for removing and replacing Obamacare.  They still have no plan for reforming our mendaciously byzantine tax code.  In fact, here, they’re behaving even more shamefully: instead of acting on their own initiative, they’re meekly pleading for Trump’s tax reform plan details.

Since the Republicans in Congress have chosen not to act for the good of their constituents—either set of them—instead preferring to engage in the personal ego boost of virtue signaling, or preferring to wait to be told what to do, Trump had to act on his threat.

No, his deal with the Progressive-Democrats is no surprise.  Who else is he going to work with, since the Republicans won’t work?

 

*My term, not Kurtz’, which I use because there’s no daylight between today’s “Democrats” and the Progressive beginnings of Herb Croly, TRoosevelt, Woodrow Wilson.  Even today’s party bigwigs brag about being Progressives.

Another Bit of Foolishness

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And another incentive for businesses to relocate.

San Francisco is looking to tax robots because they are taking rote jobs that humans do.  They’re not the first to consider such a thing, but it’s still foolish.  Never mind, especially with minimum wage laws pricing the unskilled and/or poorly educated out of work, that robots do the jobs more cheaply.  Robots are more reliable, too, as Security guard Eric Leon noted about a security robot:

He doesn’t complain.  He’s quiet.  No lunch break.  He’s starting exactly at 10.

The robot also doesn’t take sick leave or parental leave or any of the other labor froo-froo that San Francisco has mandated, regardless of what an employer and employee might work out between themselves without Know Betters’ dubious help.

If a business is going to be prevented from lowering its cost of doing business, it has little incentive to stay put.  And human consumers, facing artificially elevated prices, aren’t helped a whit.

Dithering

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A brief word.  There are three speeds that are important in this world: the speed of politics, the speed of business, and the speed of national security.

The speed of politics can be useful when trying to build Congressional and Congress-White House coalitions to enact legislation of a general domestic nature.  Such a speed can be useful, for instance, in developing such coalitions to enact legislation for local and national infrastructure repair and development, or for serious tax reform, or for reducing Federal spending (as opposed to reducing the rate of growth in Federal spending), or for immigration reform.

The speed of business, on the other hand, is optimal when rescinding overweening Federal regulations (for instance, eliminating unnecessary regulation-mandated spending), canceling or creating Executive Orders, pushing nominations through the Senate, enacting specific legislation—spending bills for each of the twelve appropriations venues, for instance.  There’s no need for politics here; businesses—our free market economy—are hurting, and such specifics do not need to be dithered over while politicians virtue signal.

Finally, the speed of national security must needs be very rapid: our nation’s safety demands it.  The speed of national security, to take a current example, involves working with the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Israel to beef up their missile defense capability.  Why Israel?  Iron Dome works.  The speed of national security includes advising the People’s Republic of China that it no longer can dither, stall, engage in idle chit chat; concrete action must be taken by them to cut off their client’s access to the outside world’s economy, resources, funds, technology.  It must force northern Korea to stand down from their nuclear weapons and missile programs and do so with more concreteness and permanence than past efforts—by us, too—have done.  The PRC must do this now, or we’ll act in concert with the RoK and Japan or unilaterally, but without the PRC’s involvement; we won’t wait on them.  And the PRC won’t like the outcome.

Three speeds, each useful in its own milieu.  Using the slower speed in the faster lanes is just dithering, and it threatens our national welfare.

Prioritize, Guys

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President Donald Trump’s national infrastructure plan centers on glorified seed money directed to the localities looking to improve/build out their infrastructure.  The idea is that the locals know their needs best, those needs should be funded primarily locally or from within the nation’s private economic sector, and the building out will aggregate into a vastly improved national infrastructure—real bottom up development, with a little help from the Feds.

To that end, Trump is going to propose $200 billion in Federal spending be committed to a total $1 trillion infrastructure development collection of projects (OK, considerable help).

Right now the dynamic is: come, ask for a whole lot, bang on the table, have your economic studies showing the tens of thousands of jobs that will be created, have your regional study saying this will transform America, bang on the table some more, hire some lobbyists and you get money.  We’d rather have people come and say, “Listen, we’re chipping in this much, give us this little increment and we can make this thing happen.”

Naturally, the locals are getting their knickers twisted.  The ones with the biggest projects

say that local cost-sharing and private financing efforts would fall well short of making up for sharply reduced federal funding.

Nonsense.  You don’t get to freeload off Uncle Sugar, anymore.  Project leads in Chicago or Dallas don’t have a claim on the (tax) money of the good citizens of New York or California, and under the administration plan, they won’t be allowed to exercise their false claim to OPM.  New York and California will be able to keep their money for their own local projects.

This is an example of the deer in the headlights response of folks so used to the Government teat that they can’t conceive of better alternatives [emphasis added]:

Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo have said they expect the federal government to cover half the cost of the Gateway project, which also includes bridges and track improvements.

“There’s no people or economic activity in that region that could possibly cover the cost of that?” said the administration official, when asked about a recent appeal by Mr Cuomo for federal aid for the project. “I think that’s a tough sell, would be my response.”

The suggestion that New York and New Jersey could pay their own way on the project…shocked some of the tunnel’s advocates.

Prioritize, guys.  On what are you spending your citizens’ money that you think is more important than your Gateway?  Say that out loud, so your citizens—your constituents, your bosses—can hear you.

Republicans and Obamacare

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Too many now are begging for surrender on repeal and replace.

[F]ew congressional Republicans have signaled they are ready to let the health-care market deteriorate while their constituents are still battling higher premiums and fewer insurers to choose from on the individual marketplace.

This means those Republicans are signaling that they don’t have the stomach to repeal Obamacare at all, which would be the ultimate deterioration of it.

This is a betrayal of their constituents along two dimensions: the cynical destruction of their promise to repeal and replace, and their decision to continue inflicting Obamacare with its steadily increasing premiums and fewer insurers to choose from on their constituents.

President Donald Trump’s move to just let Obamacare die on the vine and hope for something better to rise out of the sewage is just as foolish and immoral.  Republicans need to remember what they promised and who sent them to Congress to honor their promise and get back to work on repeal and replace.  On that score, Trump is entirely correct, even if the doable path is stages as originally proposed last winter or via another path proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham (R, SC) and Bill Cassidy (R, LA) whose bill (as an interim step, I say) would “take ACA funding and distribute it to the states through block grants.”

Voters should remember this pending abject failure in the upcoming primary elections.