“In interviews with Reason and elsewhere, Andrew Yang, the most recently prominent of the Forward Party organizers, comes off as a sincere, solutions-oriented guy. But it’s not obvious that he recognizes that Americans of conflicting values and preferences want to live in different ways and by divergent rules. That blindness is apparent in the claim that “Every problem has a solution most Americans can support (really).” What if we can’t even agree on what constitutes a problem? What happens when the solutions embraced by some repulse others?
Like most centrist technocrats, the organizers of the Forward Party mistake governance for an engineering problem that requires a few tweaks to get it properly running. But governing involves messy moral arguments over the use of coercive force. Political debate assumes ongoing disagreement, and if people are sufficiently at-odds, there may be no easy solutions, let alone “commonsense” ones.”
“To armchair economists, industrial policy seems like a solution for the country’s economic woes: “Infuse money into Industry A, add trade protections for Industry B, protect workers in Industry C from automation, and the economy will soar! New technology will arrive sooner, domestic firms will outcompete foreigners, and steady employment will ensure a chicken in every pot.” That indeed was the thinking behind Depression-era policies which extended that crisis by seven years.
Economies are not deterministic like physics or chemistry. You can’t pull a lever to achieve a particular effect. A better analog is biological or ecological systems, where there are second- and third-order effects to any given stimulus.
Think about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park: Increased predatory pressure keeps elk herds on the move, leaving more young willow trees for beavers. Growing beaver populations dam more waterways, altering the habitat and spurring additional difficult-to-predict effects. That’s economic policy: You must plan for unexpected downstream effects (pun intended).
That thinking has been missing in Congress this past month. I don’t know what microchip subsidies or a mistitled inflation-fighting bill will ultimately do, but neither do our elected officials.
Compounding the problem is that people, not some agnostic supercomputer, determine which industries and companies are considered worthy of a boost. Humans are subject to influence and pressure, turning industrial policy into a contest of who can secure the most government favoritism—a political game of Hungry Hungry Hippos.
Policies protecting companies from competitive pressure, like subsidies or tariffs, allow them to take their eye off the ball. This “X-inefficiency” means they’re less efficient and pay less attention to customers’ desires.”
“Despite the bill’s name, independent analysts have found it will have virtually no impact on inflation. In reality, it is a pared-down version of what Biden originally pitched as the “Build Back Better” plan—it leaves aside much of the original bill’s spending, but it maintains a huge corporate tax increase, huge spending on green energy initiatives, and a plan to swell the ranks of IRS agents. What was originally a roughly $4 trillion proposal that would have relied heavily on borrowing ended up being something of a rarity in Washington: a bill that will raise more revenue than it spends.
And where will it get that revenue? Quite possibly from you. Households earning as little as $50,000 annually are more likely to see a tax increase than a tax break from the legislation.
In the final hours before the House vote, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) completed a breakdown of how the bill’s corporate tax increases would affect households at various income levels. The JTC, a nonpartisan number-crunching agency within Congress, found that households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 are more likely to see a tax increase than a tax decrease next year.
Higher-earning households are more likely to see tax increases, but households earning more than $1 million next year are actually far more likely than lower-earning households to get a tax break.
That fits with what The Tax Foundation, a tax policy think tank, found when it analyzed the bill. The Inflation Reduction Act will “would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income quintile over the long run,” the Tax Foundation reported on Wednesday. Those tax increases will reduce long-term economic output by about 0.2 percent and could eliminate 29,000 jobs, the group found.”
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” Tax increases on corporations get passed along from the board room table to the kitchen table in a variety of ways: lower pay for workers, higher prices for consumers, and smaller investment returns for shareholders.”
“Republican state officials have been waiting decades for the chance to ban abortion.
Now that they can, red state lawmakers are mired in partisan infighting and struggling to agree on how far to go. The most fervently anti-abortion lawmakers are accusing their colleagues of capitulating on rape and incest exceptions, while those calling for compromise or moderation believe more strident Republicans are ignoring political realities.”
“Out of the 13 states with abortion bans in effect, only a few of them have these exceptions: Mississippi has an exception for rape but not for incest, while South Carolina’s and Georgia’s exceptions extend to both. (Oklahoma has passed multiple bans — some with exceptions, some without — and it’s still unclear which takes precedence.)
Another nine states have passed bans that are on hold. Four of those states include exceptions, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health rights think tank.”
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“Most of the rape and incest exception clauses in abortion bans say that an abortion seeker must report the sexual assault to the police and then give the police report to their abortion provider, a process advocates say creates added stressors and hurdles for pregnant people.
In Mississippi, where a ban is in effect, the law states that, “No abortion shall be performed or induced […] except in the case where […] the pregnancy was caused by rape. For the purposes of this act, rape shall be an exception to the prohibition for an abortion only if a formal charge of rape has been filed with an appropriate law enforcement official.” The law does not specify who an “appropriate” law enforcement official is.
In Utah, where a judge is keeping the state’s abortion ban on hold due to a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood, the trigger law would ban almost all abortions but allow them in the case of rape or incest. Under this ordinance, the responsibility to verify that there was a rape falls on the health care provider.”
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“Abortion advocates see all kinds of issues with these requirements. They create additional roadblocks for abortion seekers who are already facing challenges in a country where anti-abortion advocates want to ban the procedure outright, and who have undergone a traumatic experience already. The majority of sexual assaults — two out of three — are not reported to the police, and rape victims are often assaulted by someone they know, which further complicates their decision to file a report since they fear retaliation or believe the police won’t help, among other reasons.
And when people do report having been sexually assaulted, they are often not believed by law enforcement: The story of the 10-year-old Ohio rape survivor wasn’t believed, with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost claiming that “there was not a damn scintilla of evidence” to support the story. Onlookers only believed the story when news broke that the 27-year-old perpetrator came forward and confessed to raping the child at least twice.”
“On its face, the idea of increasing semiconductor manufacturing in the US seems like it would help address the global supply crunch for computer chips, which has made it harder to buy everything from cars and laptops to sex toys and medical devices during the pandemic. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has even suggested that the funding package could help fight inflation, presumably by making these goods cheaper.
But while it’s certainly fair to call the legislation a victory for bipartisanship, this plan is primarily focused on keeping up with China’s growing investment in its own domestic chip industry — not solving the present issues with the tech supply chain. The chip factories produced by this package won’t be complete for years, and the bulk of the funding won’t necessarily go toward basic chips, also known as legacy chips, which account for much of the ongoing shortage. And that shortage may be nearing its end anyway.”
“There’s one policy the US can pass today that can also save lives: stopping utility shutoffs in the summertime because a customer has missed one or more payments.
Right now, only 18 states have any protections that prevent utilities from shutting off a customer’s power in a heat wave because of missed payments, while 41 states have these protections for the cold. That leaves most of the population vulnerable to utility shutoffs during the deadliest extreme weather window of the year.”
“Governments have successfully addressed past housing shortages through publicly developed housing in places like Vienna, Finland, and Singapore, but citing these examples often leads to glazed eyes and weary skepticism that such models could ever work in the US, with our more meager welfare systems and our strong cultural attitudes toward private homeownership. America’s 958,000 units of federal public housing have also long suffered from reputation problems both real and exaggerated, with many seen as ugly, dirty, or unsafe. Few understand that many of the woes of American-style public housing have had to do with rules Congress passed nearly 100 years ago that predictably crippled its success and popularity, rules like restricting the housing to only the very poor.”
“Known as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, the measure was sponsored by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.) and Dan Newhouse (R–Wash.) and passed the House twice last year. It aims to improve the immigration mechanics behind the U.S. agricultural workforce, expanding legal pathways available to foreign workers and the domestic farmers who hope to hire them.
The ability to hire more agricultural workers translates into more helping hands for farmers and increased production of goods, which then means fewer food shortages and lower prices at the grocery store.”
“You don’t have to believe that the market produces perfect outcomes to understand that government can rarely outperform private enterprise. Political decisions aren’t driven by any market signals, profit motive, or consumer preferences. These decisions are inherently political, suffer from a serious knowledge problem and are mostly untied to any accountability regimes when they fail. Government often proves to be biased against large, successful companies that provide new technology that legislators often don’t understand well but consumers love. This is why government so often fails, and this policy is no exception.”