Tag Archives: political economy

A Bureaucrat with an MD…

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…chimes in. Robert Califf, MD, two-term US FDA Commissioner, and long-time government bureaucrat wants the government’s bureaucracy left alone.

As the world’s largest bureaucracy, the US government has ample room for improvement.

Awfully decent of the old boy to acknowledge some minor issues. Then he writes this in his Letter:

…a broad call for support from the workforce would be much more likely to succeed than castigating the workers who have chosen to serve the American public. Instead of suggesting “large-scale firings” and asserting that “if federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” Messrs Musk and Ramaswamy would be well-served to inspire the workforce to work with them to become more efficient.

This is an example of why bureaucrats who happen to have medical degrees must have their words taken only skeptically.

No one is castigating the workers; Musk and Ramaswamy instead are insisting that those let go not be stigmatized by that while insisting they be given generous severance packages and plenty of notice to find other work before their government jobs end.

Government isn’t the only place employees need to resume working from workplace offices or cubicles—corporate America also is waking up to the need for in-place, face-to-face interactions and collaborations. It’s entirely appropriate to require government employees work full time in the offices and cubicles alongside their colleagues. Those who resist are those resisting the teaming and collaboration that is so necessary to work and so much more effectively done when done in person, and those persons are reducing the efficiency and limiting the potential of their teams. They should be let go.

On that matter of efficiency, this is best achieved with a smaller workforce operating under narrower scoped of responsibilities, tasks, and goals.

Califf is a senior bureaucrat in a government “medical” bureaucracy looking to preserve bureaucrats’ job. Nothing more.

Defund PBS and NPR

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Howard Husock, of American Enterprise Institute, thinks that is a bad idea. Unfortunately, his argument for continuing to send taxpayer money to these entities is pie in the sky irrationality. He does acknowledge the deep progressive tilt of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, and his own abuse by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a Congressionally-created entity that partially funds PBS and operates NPR, when he was a member of CPB‘s board of directors over a pro-ideology diversity op-ed he’d written: CPB stripped [him] of [his] committee assignments and accused [him] of violating [his] fiduciary duties. Because thought diversity is intolerable.

Nonetheless, he wants our taxpayer money to continue flowing to this left-wing “public” company and its subordinate formations.

Were PBS and NPR (and, I say, CPB) successfully shorn of taxpayer funding, Husock worries that

liberal foundations—many of which already support NPR and individual PBS programs—will step in to keep NPR and PBS alive. The Ford, Gates, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Kellogg, MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson, and Open Society foundations have been NPR financial supporters and could easily fill a funding gap or even donate directly to the CPB, a chartered nonprofit.

He didn’t recognize the so what in his own words. Those entities already financially support those left-wing outlets; it won’t matter that those entities, and others, would step in to fill the gap from the loss of taxpayer funding. It won’t matter because what those three outlets publish won’t change.

Husock had this rationalization, too:

There would be no more congressional hearings about NPR‘s ideological bias, as were held in May. But the imprimatur and implied government seal of approval—the “national public” branding—would remain.

The former is another so what. Congress doesn’t do anything about that naked bias other than waste time on public virtue-signaling—by both parties—hearings. The latter is a matter of messaging, something the Republicans are heroically bad at. The outlet, in fact, wouldn’t be public anymore because it wouldn’t be receiving public funds anymore.

Husock closed his fantasy with posits of what Congress should do instead of cutting off the taxpayer dollar spigot: emphasize the purpose of promoting local “journalism,” ban advertising for “causes,” make CPB board budgeting debates and decisions public.

See above regarding Congressional inaction. Ask also—which Husock did not ask—about definitions of such things as “cause” and “journalism.” Then ask—which Husock also did not ask—about enforcement mechanisms.

Skip over the messy pie in the sky time-wasters. Defund NPR, PBS, and CPB.

“Pay Their Fair Share”

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Once again, I challenge all those Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, including but not limited to (in no particular order), Senator Elizabeth Warren (MA); soon-to-be-ex-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY); former Senator (DE), Vice President, and soon-to-be-former President Joe Biden; former Senator (CA) and soon-to-be-former Vice President Kamala Harris (D); Senator Martin Heinrich (NM); and Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury (NM) to identify, specifically, what is the fair share of income taxes that the rich should pay—hard dollar amount, or tax rate, or percent of income, or…. Cynically, all they’re willing to say is their feelz: pay up and pay more; it’s not “fair,” otherwise.

Here, though, in concrete terms, is the situation with that especially evil bunch of Americans, those in the top 1% of income-tax filers:

  • 22.4% of the country’s total reported earnings
  • share of income taxes paid 40.4%
  • average federal tax rate of 26.1%

Here is what the smaller people pay in the way of income taxes:

  • • bottom 10%: no taxes
  • second income decile: -4.8%–yes, negative, due to all the refundable tax credits they get
  • third income decile: 2.8%

Back to the top:

  • top decile—which includes those 1%-ers: 27%
  • especially evil top 0.1% earners: 33.5%

This graph shows the trend from 2001 to 2022:

Of course, those Party politicians know all of this; they being so much smarter than us poor, ignorant average Americans, and all. It’s a measure of their dishonesty and of their contempt for us that they foist their cynical class divisiveness on us. It’s also an indication of what their natural limit and purpose on taxing is: their limit is all of it from their definition of rich, who aren’t all that numerous; their purpose is to give it to enough of the rest of us to buy enough votes to stay in power.

It hasn’t worked yet, but the rest of us need to remain vigilant and active, lest the outcome of last month’s elections become just a one-off bump in Party’s march. A warning of that is given by the outcome in the House of Representatives elections, where not enough Progressive-Democrats were tossed.

Erroneous Analysis

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John Cogan, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has one. In his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed regarding a suggestion for fiscal federalism in government spending—an otherwise sound idea for leaving State and local projects to be funded solely by the States and local jurisdictions doing the projects—he had this:

My analysis of federal budget data shows that the chronic federal budget deficits since the 1950s are due to the federal government’s failure to raise tax revenues required to finance its spending on state and local activities.

No. The chronic federal budget deficits have been caused by the Federal government nationalizing the spending on those State and local activities, not by any failure to raise taxes to pay for spending that ought not to have been done in the first place.

It’s not too late to go back to the restraints that federalism places on government spending, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that that federalism never should have been abandoned in the first place. That’s how we have a chance to learn the lessons of that error, rather than repeating it in future.

It’s Worse Than That

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Seth Jones, President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department, is worried about our ability to deter war with the People’s Republic of China.

[M]y colleagues and I led members of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party in a simulation of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The goal was to understand how the US defense industrial base would perform in a protracted war with China and to assess the implications for deterrence. The results weren’t reassuring.
The simulation began with a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in 2026. Both sides suffered heavy losses, but the US defense industrial base was severely stressed. The US military spent its entire inventory of Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles by the end of the first week and ran out of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range missiles after a month.

Running out of critical ammunition in the middle of a war means we no longer even can fight that war. With the PRC well aware of that likelihood, Jones is correct that we’re losing our ability to deter the PRC.

It’s much worse than that, though, and it’s surprising that Jones didn’t take the next step in his analysis. Such a military strait means we’re losing our ability to defeat a PRC attack, and unlike Japan after its devastating attack on us at the outset of our participation in WWII, the PRC has the wherewithal and the will to follow up its initial attack(s), win outright the war—proximately over the Republic of China, but really a proxy war against us—and impose its will on us.