Tag Archives: spending

Disregard and Pass Their Own

Posted on by
Reply

DoD has submitted a budget request that includes $114 million for diversity, equity, and inclusion claptrap [emphasis added].

The Defense Department’s fiscal year 2024 budget request shows the federal agency’s emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion, including “ensuring accountable leadership with continued emphasis and investments in sexual assault and harassment prevention, suicide prevention, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA), and Insider Threat Programs.”
The DOD document shows that DEI is at the forefront of DOD policy.
[The request said] The Department will lead with our values—building diversity, equity, and inclusion into everything we do[.]

And this:

Six months ago, President Joe Biden asked for cuts in federal spending for border control [and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended them], which had lawmakers asking questions about why the president was reducing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) budget when the border was out of control.
[Now,] Mayorkas told the House Homeland Security Committee last week that his department was “under-resourced” and needed $14 billion in emergency funding to address the situation at the border.

These are two more reasons for the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to simply and routinely ignore Biden administration budget requests as wholly unserious. The House, instead, should put together its own budget de novo and pass its own dozen allocation bills within that framework.

So It Should Be with General Infrastructure

Posted on by
Reply

The subheadline outlines part of the problem:

Companies often need to show progress to get government cash but struggle without it

In the body of the Wall Street Journal article at the link is this:

Some of the companies are in Catch-22 situations. Washington won’t issue them loans until they raise outside money and move ahead with projects.

It’s true enough that big, established companies are better able to game the situation. It’s also true that high interest rates—especially after an extended period of no- to low rates—and inflation have hurt, but these only emphasize my point in this post.

It isn’t just “clean” energy: the problem is both broader and more narrowly defined.

What needs to happen regarding Federal funds transfers needs to happen all across the infrastructure terrain, whether the transfers are to individual businesses or to States more generally. Contracts must be let and particular projects must have a minimum of six months of concrete, publicly measurable progress before any taxpayer money can be transferred to the individual business executing the project.

Regarding States in particular, any taxpayer money must be sent directly to the business carrying out the State-identified infrastructure project (and only after the business has satisfied the above criterion), and the State must have already transferred State taxpayer funds to the particular business. Finally, before any Federal taxpayer funds can flow, the business must have a minimum of six months of concrete, publicly measurable progress with the State’s taxpayer money before any Federal taxpayer money can flow to the business.

Sent directly to the business: it’s important, too, that Federal funds entirely bypass the State and go directly to the business in question. Even in honest circumstances, the State’s middlemen siphon off entirely too much of the Federal taxpayer’s money.

Federalism and State Taxes

Posted on by
Reply

A Wall Street Journal editorial opens with this:

One great benefit of America’s federalist Constitution is policy competition among the states. Voters in Florida don’t have to live under New York’s laws, and Americans and businesses can vote with their feet by moving across state lines.

The editors proceeded to a description of State-level tax laws and the mobility of us Americans and our businesses in leaving States with high taxes in favor of States with, often markedly, lower taxes. But that lede overstates the case.

Federalism applies, often, with State taxes, but State-level business regulations are a different matter. It’s only necessary to see the outsize impact on our auto industry, for instance, or our pork industry, that California’s regulations have on vehicle requirements and on how hogs must be raised to see the lack of federalism in our regulatory environment.

With specific regard to California’s fuel requirements, there’s this from the Federal government’s EPA:

The Clean Air Act allows California to seek a waiver of the preemption which prohibits states from enacting emission standards for new motor vehicles.

The Federal government has long granted that waiver, and during the Biden administration, the feds made their latest move—overtly to refuse to rescind the waiver, effectively nationalizing a State regulation at the expense of federalism.

On the California’s hog-raising regulation, the Supreme Court upheld that regulation, which mandated the minimum space in which hogs must be raised, anywhere in the United States, in order for them to be marketable in California. The Court nationalized this State-level regulation—again at the expense of federalism.

If we’re going to preserve our federalist structure of governance, federalism must be restored to State regulations, as well as State-level taxes. Don’t look for any of that to happen under any Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Federal government, though.

Energy Subsidies

Posted on by
Reply

This table shows the size of the subsidy for the indicated energy source along with the size of the subsidy per trillion BTU produced by that energy source.

Million$/ TrillionBTU Million $ Trillion BTU
Solar 4.153 7,522 1,811
Geothermal 1.665 353 212
Wind 0.947 3,592 3,791
Coal 0.072 873 12,033
Biomass 0.06 312 5,171
Nuclear 0.048 390 8,065
Oil & Nat Gas 0.033 2,304 68,804

The table is constructed from data in the EIA report, Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy in Fiscal Years 2016–2022.

Notice that the Solar subsidy is orders of magnitude greater than those for coal or for oil and natural gas. The wind subsidy is similarly bloated.

Despite these actual facts, the Mainstream Left keeps pushing the myth of too much subsidy for hydrocarbons.

 

H/t: DrBob2 at The Motley Fool.

Federal Government Shutdowns

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve written a few times (the latest here) about the results of Federal government shutdowns. Progressive-Democratic Party politicians always and everywhere are in full-throated panic-mongering about the disaster that is a shutdown. Far too many Republican Party politicians timidly accept the Leftist Party’s claims and seek to do anything, even on bended knee, to avoid a shutdown.

I have a challenge for them, and for all you out there in reader land.

Here are two graphs, the first from Macrotrends showing our GDP growth rate from year to year from 1961 through 2022, and the second from stastica showing GDP levels over the more focused period of 1990-2022.

My challenge is this: find, in either graph, the Federal government shutdowns of 2013, 2018, and 2018-2019.

As an aside, as I write this late Saturday, the House passed a 45-day, keep the government open, funding bill; the Senate then passed the House bill and forwarded the thing to President Joe Biden (D). The bill omitted any spending cuts, steep or otherwise, and dropped any aid for Ukraine.

This, in light of the above, represents a surrender to the Progressive-Democrats forced by the allegedly Republican Chaos Caucus led by Zoo Master Matt Gaetz (R, FL), who have offered nothing beyond “No” to any bill on offer, including the prior Republican-led House stop-gap bill that included significant cuts to spending—which would have given time to work out the remaining appropriations bills with even deeper and broader spending cuts. Gaetz might as well have joined Progressive-Democrat Congressman Jamaal Bowman in deliberately pulling a Congressional office fire alarm in an attempt to stall any House action at all.