Tag Archives: political economy

Obstruction

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With full control of Congress and the White House, Republicans have anticipated being able to repeal the law using a special budget maneuver that would allow them to get around a filibuster by Democrats in the Senate.

Yes and no.  The budget maneuver is reconciliation, and it’s usable only on budget matters.  That means that Obamacare will be defunded pretty straightforwardly, but the law itself still will be on the books—for a future Progressive-Democratic Party-controlled Congress to re-fund using the same budget reconciliation maneuver.  The law itself needs to be fully repealed, too; defunding it can only be a stop-gap measure.

Eight honest Progressive-Democrats are going to have to find the moral courage to step up and support actual repeal.

And there’s this.

[T]o replace it, they likely would need the support from eight Democrats and all 52 Republicans in the Senate (if Republican John Kennedy wins a December 10 runoff in Louisiana) to reach the 60 votes needed to clear the chamber’s procedural hurdles.

That procedural hurdle is the filibuster.  For this, too, eight honest Progressive-Democrats are going to have to find the moral courage to step up and support replacement with legitimate health insurance market paradigms.

Fat chance, but the fight needs to be carried out loudly, with no room for Senate Progressive-Democrats to hide behind their excuses and their crocodile tears over Americans being too stupid to take care of themselves and so need these Know Betters to do for them.

Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, predicts Republicans will have difficulty passing a replacement health law.

Yup.  Look for continuation of Progressive-Democrats’ past six years of obstructionism into the next two or more years.

Nominations for HHS and CMMS

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President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated Congressman Tom Price (R, GA) to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and Seema Verma to be Administrator of HHS’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.  The two are well positioned and experienced to spearhead the effort to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a health insurance environment that actually will provide low-cost, broad-ranging health insurance in a competitive market.

Senate Democrats already are digging in their heels, though.

The incoming Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, said he’s urging his Democratic colleagues to give Mr Price “a thorough, thorough vetting,” and said Mr Price’s Medicare proposals are tantamount to privatizing the program.

Here comes another Democrat effort at Borking a nominee.

And about that bit concerning privatizing Medicare: Schumer and his colleagues loudly object to that (recall their dishonesty about pushing Grandma off a cliff), but they also very carefully decline to say either what is so bad about Americans exercising their own judgment concerning their money and their health care (instead of Democrats’ judgment) or what a Democrat solution would look like—except to continue throwing money at the problem even though their prior 40 years of throwing money at it has produced nothing but wasted dollars.

Tax Cuts and Deficits

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The Wall Street Journal had a piece earlier in the week that focused on Republicans’ dismay over President-Elect Donald Trump’s tax cut plans, his infrastructure spending plans, and the deficits that would seem to result from the two.

However.

Once again, the pundit takes tax cuts (and individual spending items) in isolation. Of course, he knows better: broad spending cuts must accompany tax cuts—and isolated spending items—even dynamically, in order to achieve budget surpluses and so reductions in our debt.

The last two times Republicans reclaimed the White House from Democrats—in 1981 and 2001—they also successfully pushed for large tax cuts. Deficits nonetheless rose during their administrations.

This happened because both times Republicans accepted Democrat promises to support spending cuts “later,” and both times Democrats welched on their promises. Since Democrats cannot be trusted, the Republicans this time around will have to cut taxes and spending while arranging spending increases on particular items without Democrat “help.”  And they have the numbers to do that, including without Democrat involvement at all, since all those worthies are interested in is their knee-jerk obstruction of all things not Democrat.

The Courts Get Another One Right

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This case involves how much Federal control over land deeded by the Feds to a State the Feds retain when they make the deed.  In the particular case, the Feds, ‘way back in 1949, deeded land to Ohio (in particular, the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District) subject to the criteria that the land had to be used for flood control, conservation, and recreation.  Lately, Ohio began allowing fracking under the land.

“Environmentalists” objected and sued to try to force the land back into Federal hands.  The relevant Federal district court dismissed the suit, and it wound up in the Sixth Circuit.  The Sixth waived the BS Flag at the suit.  Although much of the Court’s ruling was based on a technicality (the suit was brought as a violation of the False Claims Act perpetrated by Ohio for allowing the fracking; the Court demurred), there is another reason to applaud the outcome.

In ruling that there was no violation of the FCA, the Court also said in part,

neither the relators’ [the “environmentalists”] complaint nor their proposed amended complaint includes facts that show how MWCD would have known that the fracking leases violated the deed restrictions or how MWCD “act[ed] in deliberate ignorance” or in “reckless disregard” of that fact.

Indeed, fracking occurs well underground and so well away from any activities related to flood control, conservation, and recreation, which are surface or near-surface activities.  Thus, since fracking does not interfere with or otherwise impact such activities, it cannot violate deed restrictions that involve strictly those activities.

This was just a naked attempt by these relators to prevent us from getting cheap energy out of the deep earth cheaply.

The Sixth Circuit’s ruling can be seen here.

 

h/t Institute for Justice

Foreign Investment Risk

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The People’s Republic of China seems about to illustrate one form of this risk.

The State Council, China’s cabinet, will soon announce new measures that subject many overseas deals to reviews of “strict control,” according to people with direct knowledge of the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Targeted for particular scrutiny by the pending measure are “extra-large” foreign acquisitions valued at $10 billion or more per deal, property investments by state-owned firms above $1 billion, and investments of $1 billion or more by any Chinese company in an overseas entity unrelated to the investor’s core business.

This is nothing but an overt attempt to restrict capital flows across the PRC’s borders.  Restricting such flows from one nation to another, no matter the rationale, elevates the risk of foreign investment.  The investor, whichever the nation of his domicile, cannot count on a reliable income flow from his investment or even being able to get his money back from that investment at the expiration of the arrangement.

Separately, it demonstrates an attitude toward law and government that’s been extant in the PRC and its antecedents for thousands of years: “I don’t like what you’re doing—this investment plan of yours—here’s a nice ex post facto law that makes your activity illegal.”