Tag Archives: political parties

More Big Government

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And more interference from that Big Government.

President Barack Obama has signed is going to sign—and do his usual bragging about signing—an Executive Order requiring all government contractors to give their employees paid sick leave.

On top of that,

The White House wouldn’t specify the cost to federal contractors to implement the executive order, which Obama was to address at a major union rally and breakfast in Boston. The Labor Department said any costs would be offset by savings that contractors would see as a result of lower attrition rates and increased worker loyalty, but produced nothing to back that up.

Neither Obama nor Labor Secretary Thomas Perez produced any data to support their bald claim because they don’t have any. Their position is based solely on the arrogance of “We’re Big Government. We Know Best.”

There is, too, that Democratic Party ethos. Perez said

The Republican Party is out of step with similar conservative governments around the world.

Yeah. Someone else is doing it; therefore, it’s the right thing to do. The rightness or wrongness of the thing isn’t at all inherent in the thing. Popularity creates right. I’ll ignore the fact that Perez’ “around the world” is Europe, and that there aren’t any conservative governments in Europe.

It’s certainly true that paid sick leave has merit. However, the decision about paid sick leave is best left in the hands of the employer and his employees and prospective employees. What other countries, what other domestic companies are doing, has nothing to do with it.

It’s not at all true that every good idea must be turned into a government edict that everyone must follow. Including when the costs of this or that good idea will vary from time to time, situation to situation, company to company, industry to industry.

Especially since Americans are fully capable of acting on their own choices. We’re not as stupid as Big Government assumes us to be.

Dishonest, and Insulting

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Not only is Clinton dishonest, now she’s actively insulting Americans.

She’s sorry she confused us with her personal email while she was sitting in the SecState chair because we’re just too grindingly stupid to understand her explanations.

Oh, and Clinton did all her Senate business via her personal email, too, she told Andrea Mitchell in the same interview (Mitchell blithely ignored that little tidbit).

Oh, again: she says she takes responsibility for using her personal email server. But having done nothing with that responsibility, her “taking” of it is just cynically empty rhetoric.

Government Transparency

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President Obama favors government by executive order. How about this one: a Presidential directive requiring every appointee and bureaucrat to attest to the existence of any private email, texting or instant-messaging systems being used for government work. All off-the-reservation documentation must cease. Private email is for personal needs.

The chances of this happening are nil. Opacity has served the Obama Administration’s political purposes if not the country. A sunnier day will have to wait until 2017.

Here’s an action that doesn’t necessarily have to wait on an Executive Order (which, being only temporary, would be a suboptimal answer, anyway): call every Department and Agency head before the House Government Reform Committee and separately and sequentially before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee to certify under oath to each that the Department or Agency he heads has no private email correspondence going out over government servers, no government emails going out over private servers, and that all government business is conducted over and only over government servers—three separate, if overlapping, sworn certifications, each made separately to the two committees. For any such head who does not make that sworn certification, cut his organization’s budget by 10%. Do it again at the start of the next budget cycle.

Don’t ask these heads, pretty please, to come on over; subpoena their patooties to testify on the first day of the week following the subpoena.

That’ll likely have to wait until 2017, too, though, to get any teeth.

Panicky Central Planners

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…and maybe pundits, too.

For the Federal Reserve, the aftershocks threaten to set back its path to interest-rate normality yet again….

That’s how Alex Frangos and Justin Lahart opened their Wall Street Journal piece Monday, writing of the People’s Republic of China’s (second in a month) “market” meltdown last week and with it the demonstration by the PRC’s economic central planners and their panicky twitchings with interest rates, bank reserve requirements, market interventions, and the like that, once again, central planning cannot seriously impact economies for longer than the moment.

Never mind that the PRC has little impact on the global economy—as Frangos and Lahart themselves note, PRC imports from the US run to 1% of our GDP and all of 2% of the S&P500 companies’ revenue are PRC-related. The situation is little different for Europe: most of those nations’ economic interactions with the PRC represent roughly 1% of their GDPs as well.

They added this to their fandango:

September is still on the table for the Fed, but markets will need to calm before then.

No, they don’t. The markets aren’t the underlying economy. The markets are tied to the economy by a stout rope, but that rope has large and nearly randomly variable slack. The underlying economy, slow as the Obama recovery has been, nevertheless is in solid territory, and as Frangos and Lahart themselves concede, “a US recession led by China doesn’t look to be in the cards.”

The Fed needs to move on the longer-term state of the economy, not on the short-term, animal spirit vagaries of the markets. The Fed needs to stick to a plan—any plan—and move interest rates up on schedule, which means in September. Or better, loosen and then release controls, letting interest rates float in those same markets—which for all their animal spirits influence still are better at “managing” a free market economy than any central planners, including those at the Fed—determine the appropriate interest rate levels.

And this:

[T]he Fed’s problem with China is what it will do to a pace of US inflation that already isn’t anywhere close to its 2% target.

No, again. The Fed’s problem has nothing to do with the PRC. The Fed’s problem is that US inflation isn’t anywhere close to its 2% target, and it’s not going to get there anytime soon. Interest rates are intrinsically inflationary; the only way to move our present inflation rate to 2% is to raise/let rise interest rates to levels consistent with 2% inflation rather than continuing to suppress the one (and so the other) to artificially low levels.

Leverage

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In Thursday night’s GOP Presidential candidate debate, Donald Trump refused to rule out running as a third party candidate if he’s not the Republican nominee, or even if the party merely doesn’t treat him “nice.” He defended that position on a number of TV talk shows.

I’m a natural negotiator, and I like leverage to be honest with you. That’s really what the country needs. I just felt that why should I give up this leverage.

Apparently, extortion is the new leverage.