Tag Archives: political economy

Don’t Risk a Government Shutdown?

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The Progressive-Democratic Party’s House representatives are urging Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) not to take that risk—to the extent the risk from a partial shutdown even exists—in their letter to him last Friday. They want no spending cuts, or policy changes, in any bill that would avert such a shutdown; those are poison pills in their lexicon.

That’s the Progressive-Democrats’ veiled threat that they will shut down the government if they don’t get their own way entirely, and they’ll blame the Republicans for that shutdown.

Were Progressive-Democratic Party members serious about avoiding a shutdown, they’d agree to both the spending cuts—so our economy can have a chance to resume growth—and to policy changes that would firm up the processes of reducing spending and subsequently keeping it under control. Instead, these Wonders are holding our government functioning hostage with their demand to spend without limit, their obstructionism, and their threats.

Speaker Johnson’s Job

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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) has a job to do, and The Wall Street Journal tried to characterize it this way:

…Johnson has to decide whether to cut a government funding deal with Democrats that risks costing him his job.

No. The House’s job, and so Speaker Johnson’s job, is to control the Federal government’s spending. That job, that spending control, most assuredly does not include cutting deals with a Progressive-Democratic Party that is bent on profligate spending. That he’s confronted with so many timid Republicans desperate for the comfort of loyal opposition rather than the hard reality of governing only makes his own job harder. That timidity, no more than spendthriftiness, alters his job not a whit.

If the government partially shuts down, that’s on those obstructionist Progressive-Democrats, even as they’re aided and abetted by timid Republicans.

How Good is Good Enough?

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The EPA has finalized, despite a plethora of public comment decrying the move, a pollution regulation that, among other things, tries to vastly reduce the amount of soot particles in the air we breathe. Vastly reduce: from the current standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 9 micrograms per cubic meter—from almost nothing to even more almost nothing.

Never mind that the ordinary march of technology and ordinary free market forces have already reduced the amount of soot in our air by 42%, or that there’s vanishingly small [sic] room between the existing almost nothing and nothing.

Never mind, either, most of these fine particles are produced by construction sites, unpaved roads, and agriculture fields.

As much as 30% of all counties in the US…would have to block permitting of manufacturing facilities and new infrastructure projects.

So much for Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s highly touted infrastructure project spending. There is an upside, though. John Kerry and his climatista syndicate would be moved closer to their goal of putting farming out of business.

What is this EPA’s limiting principle? It doesn’t have one.

Vulnerability of our Electric Grid

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Much is being made, and justifiably so, regarding the lack of capacity of our electricity distribution grid to support growing electricity demands.

…assessments of the national electric grid’s ability to deliver power during peak demand periods, such as heat waves and cold snaps, have shown increasing risk for blackouts.
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Environmental groups are pushing to transition home heating from natural gas to electricity, and electric vehicles are also adding to the grid’s thirst for power.
Among this mix of increasing electricity needs are data centers.

That’s not our grid’s only set of vulnerabilities, though. Our grid remains vulnerable to EMP strikes, whether high altitude nuclear or more targeted and localized conventionally driven EMPs. Such attacks would be especially destructive since the wiring in the grid would act as a wave guide and feed the pulse into every electronic device connected to the grid, from home computers to those in our financial and data centers, frying those computers. This is…disappointing…in that it would be relatively cheap to harden our grid against EMP (and relatively cheap to harden those computer assets, too, especially the nationally important ones).

An additional vulnerability is cyber attacks against key control nodes in our electricity distribution grid, a vulnerability that continues to be given short shrift by both the Federal and State governments and by the grid-associated utilities. This vulnerability is amply demonstrated by the multiplicity of denial of service attacks, ransomware attacks, hacking-based data thefts, and on and on.

No CR

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The House Freedom Caucus wants House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA) to attach a House-passed border security bill that’s sitting in the US Senate to the next spending bill that Congress must pass to avoid a government shutdown. Freedom Caucus member Bob Good (R, VA):

I think we ought to be willing to have a fight over securing the border. I think we ought to refuse to fund the government if the administration continues to be unwilling to secure the border, then we ought to tie the funding of the government to border security implementation where some funds are held back until the measurables are met, the performance metrics that demonstrate that the border is being secured. And we do it to through Sept. 30 at the FRA levels[.]

No, that’s a typically Republican timid temporization, and as such, it continues to cede the budget—and our border security and support for our friends and allies—to the not-tender mercies of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Republicans, including the apparently courage-fading Freedom Caucus, need to be willing to engage in a fight over securing the border (et al.) by not having another CR.

Let the Progressive-Democratic Party and Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden eat their government shutdown over their flat refusal to secure our border and to pay for the spending they want for Ukraine, Israel, and the Republic of China, however badly that spending is truly needed.

Of course that means Republicans need to stop being so timid when talking about government shutdowns—when they’re not actively ducking the subject—and they mustn’t hesitate to identify, by name, those Congressmen and Senators who are actively blocking the agreements necessary to conclude the bills.