Tag Archives: politics

What We Have on our Northern Border

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This is Canada under its PM Mark Carney.

  • refusing to honor its financial commitment to NATO; subsumed within that refusal is a betrayal of all of its fellow alliance members by rendering it needily dependent on their blood and treasure for defense while shamefully refusing to supply its own blood and treasure for their defense
  • concluding trade deals with the People’s Republic of China, a nation of avowed enmity toward us, that favor the PRC while producing little of material substance for Canadians
  • concluding similarly one-sided trade deals with Qatar, a nation that while nominally aligned with us actively supports and funds terrorists on the southern reaches of the Arabian Peninsula
  • leaving wide open to illegal alien flows and drug and human trafficking its border with us

Maybe the risk is greater than that from having Mexico on our southern border. At least, Mexico is taking steps to work with us on curbing illegal immigration and human and drug trafficking across that border, along with curbing imports of the PRC’s fentanyl constituent drugs.

Wrong Distinction

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There’s a new challenge, allegedly, for grocers and their junk food sales; although their problem is whether, and if so how much and where, they should stock junk food on their shelves. This is suggested by the headline:

Is a Cookie a Type of Candy? Supermarkets Have a New Food-Stamp Conundrum

This is a trivial question, though, one that awaits only a government definition of what foods are eligible for food stamps. The larger, and the far more serious problem is posed by this claim, buried in the middle of the article:

Critics said that limiting grocery options ignores the real causes of poor diets, such as low incomes, high food prices and access to healthy food. Studies, they said, show little difference between what SNAP recipients buy and the purchases of non-SNAP households.

Say the critics are correct, and food stamp food eligibilities don’t address those root causes. Say, further, that those studies are accurate in their conclusions.

Those criticisms are wholly irrelevant. The fact remains, and it remains unaddressed, as well, that there is no reason for the rest of us to pay with our tax dollars for the poor diet choices those eating on our dime—those food stamp programs—make. If they want those junk foods, let them pay for them on their own dime, just as the purchasers in non-SNAP households do.

How dare we presume so, some might bleat. It’s a simple dare. We’re the ones paying and with our money. We’re the ones who should be determining how our tax dollars are spent.

It’s that straightforward, and it should be that simple.

Electricity Price Controls

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New Jersey’s newly elected Progressive-Democratic Governor, Mikie Sherrill wants them.

Ms Sherrill used her maiden speech to lay out her plans to ease electric rates. “In short, you are sick of the status quo,” she said, “Well, guess what, guys, so am I.” Guess what: Her proposals are more of the same progressive policies that have fueled higher prices: Subsidies, mandates, and price controls.

Especially those price controls.

Her worst idea is a pause on utility “rate increases or cost recoveries to the extent permitted by law.” This is a price control that will reduce grid investment, including in new supply. ….
If utilities can’t pass on their costs, they will skimp on maintenance. It’s that simple.

Of course, those rate increases or cost recoveries permissions are specified by State laws, and Sherrill and her legislature can alter those laws at will. Her “extent permitted” is disingenuous.

Maintenance skimping is well-known to renters in rent-controlled apartments.

If the provider—landlord or utility (or any other)—can’t recoup his costs as those increase, whether they’re supply costs, regulatory compliance costs, or taxes, he has less money to spend on procuring the items he needs to produce electricity or rental housing or… and especially critically, he has less to spend on simply maintaining what he has. Rental homes/apartments and power generators deteriorate, those residences become badly substandard to the point of uninhabitable, and power generation becomes unreliable. That last is bad in a hot summer, and it’s deadly in a cold winter.

With unreliable power generation, we get rolling blackouts where broad areas in succession see the lights go out; oil, natural gas, and coal generators, all of which depend at bottom on electricity, stop; and electric heating (or cooling) systems stop. On-off cycling from those rolling blackouts, even if in longer intervals than shorter, adds to the wear and tear on the generators, and on the heating and cooling systems, requiring increased maintenance for which those price controls, and rent controls, severely limit the money available to pay.

But never mind. Progressive-Democrats want those price controls because that’s their exercise of political power.

Housing Affordability

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A letter-writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section offered a number of ways to break the housing cost problem for folks on the lower end of our economic ladder, folks that include established families and newly graduated young adults. The most cogent way IMNSHO is this one:

The market badly needs deregulation to unlock capital. Tax regulations have frozen large swaths of our existing housing stock. And state and local land use regulations lock millions of acres of land out of higher and better uses by making it illegal to build starter homes on smaller lots.

Especially those starter homes on those smaller lots. Tax regulations, mostly on existing homes up for inheriting, can be handled directly and immediately by the Federal government. The land use regulations consist primarily of State and land use laws and local zoning ordinances, and those are the primary responsibility of the State and local governments. Still, the Federal government has considerable influence that it can bring to bear, from jawboning to financial carrots and sticks.

These starter homes and smaller lots are reminiscent of the Levittowns that were built right after WWII to open up housing for returning white GIs, and their rapid take-up both fired up the housing market and contributed heavily to the nation’s economic reconversion from war to peace and the associated private economic revival. The first Levittown house sold for $7,900, about $80,000-$85,000 in today’s money.

Today’s analog would be shorn of the racial bars and should be shorn, also, of ethnic and religious bars. But that larger target market would only enhance the salability and thereby contribute heavily to breaking the existing cost barrier.

Call them TrumpTowns.

Neville Chamberlain Reborn

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has gone to Beijing to bend the knee and sell his nation to the communist tyrant. Or is it Vidkun Quisling who’s alive and well on Downing Street?

…Britain’s gift to President Xi Jinping arrived early. The UK last week granted approval for China to build its biggest diplomatic outpost in Europe in central London. The question now is what Mr Starmer will get in return.

It’s not just the PRC’s biggest “diplomatic outpost” in Europe. It’s far bigger than it needs to be merely to house the PRC’s embassy to a middle tier nation. It’s the PRC’s biggest headquarters for an espionage operation that’s the most aggressive in the world, and one designed and now equipped courtesy of the estimable Starmer to spy on and steal from the UK, the EU, the EU’s constituent nations (including eastern European nations fronting on the PRC’s BFF Russia), and the United States. This spanking new and oversized embassy also will be the seat of efforts to spy on, harass, and ultimately kidnap Chinese nationals and emigrants living in the UK and throughout Europe.

That’s a huge supplicant’s offering to the Emperor.

What’s in this kowtowing* for the UK? Nothing at all. The PRC has offered nothing, and it has no reason to offer anything. The most the timid Starmer can hope for is to return to the UK with both hands still attached.

Starmer is moving to deliver one more gift to the Emperor: he’s going ahead with the British plan to surrender its Diego Garcia, along with the rest of that Chagos Island group to Mauritius. It doesn’t matter that the US has a joint use agreement with the Brits for the military base on Diego Garcia that nominally long outlives the surrender to Mauritius. With Mauritius in the PRC’s back pocket, the days of that joint use agreement are severely numbered. Just see the PRC’s attitude to other nation’s possessions and agreements in the South China Sea.

Starmer is no Winston Churchill, and the UK, a product of a number of recent governments of both parties, not only Starmer’s, is not the UK that faced down and ultimately contributed heavily to the crushing defeat of a different tyrant.

 

*In traditional China this ritual was performed by commoners making requests to the local magistrate…or by foreign representatives appearing before the emperor to establish trade relations.