Welfare Is Great—for the Welfare Bureaucrats
https://reason.com/2024/01/05/welfare-is-great-for-the-welfare-bureaucrats/
Tag: economy
New Tariffs on Tin Cans Get Biden Administration Approval
“The Commerce Department has officially declared a trade war on cheap tin cans.
Last week, the department gave a green light to placing new tariffs on tinplate steel—the metal used to manufacture tin cans and a wide variety of other consumer goods—imported from Canada, China, Germany, and South Korea. While the new tariffs are far less extensive than the absurdly high trade barriers originally requested by Cleveland-Cliffs, an Ohio-based steel company that is one of the few companies in America to make tinplate steel, the tariff decision once again underlines the arbitrary and cronyist nature of federal trade policy.”
…
“Because the tariff-petition process is heavily skewed in favor of companies seeking protectionism—among other things, the Commerce Department is forbidden from considering how higher tariffs might impact other parts of the economy, including consumers—industries that need reliable access to tinplate steel were prepared to take a hit.
The Consumer Brands Association (CBA), which represents more than 2,000 companies including Campbell Soup Company and other brands that stood to be harmed by the tariffs, estimated that Cleveland-Cliffs’ proposed tariffs would have added about 58 cents to the cost of the average canned food product. A separate study by the Trade Partnership Worldwide LLC, a pro-trade think tank, found that 600 jobs would be put at risk for every steel-making job protected by the proposed tariffs.”
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“A single American company was able to file a petition asking unelected bureaucrats to punish its competitors (along with many downstream businesses and consumers) in order to goose its bottom line, triggering a review process that cost taxpayer resources and forced other businesses to play defense in a game that’s deliberately rigged against them.”
https://reason.com/2024/01/09/new-tariffs-on-tin-cans-get-biden-administration-approval/
Something Weird Is Happening in Japan
Why Are These Companies Making Everything Worse?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6UdZxr5lLE
This Christmas, Americans Can Afford More Toys Than Ever
“Inflation has been a nasty grinch for the past few years—seemingly stealing away our hard-earned dollars while we sleep.
But the rising prices throughout much of the economy make it a little easier to appreciate the things that seem to be inflation-proof.
Like video games. When The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was released in 1998, it cost $69.99 to order through the Sears catalog. Another Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, was released this year—25 years later—and it retailed for $70. That actually made it one of the most expensive games of the year, since most new Nintendo games these days sell for about $60.
Do the math. If Zelda games had kept pace with inflation, the new one should have cost about $130 today.
Sure, games today achieve some cost-savings because they’re digital downloads. That means production companies like Nintendo don’t have to pay for a physical game cartridge or CD-ROM, packaging, or shipping. But games today are also far, far more advanced than anything you could have bought for any amount of money a quarter-century ago.
It’s not just video games that have defied inflation’s steady creep. Toys in general are less expensive today, even before adjusting for inflation, than they were a few decades ago. That’s despite the fact that wages have grown significantly over the same period of time. The average worker in the United States made about $13 an hour in December 1998, compared to about $29 dollar per hour now.
This is true over longer periods of time too. As I wrote earlier this year, the amount of work necessary to buy a single new Barbie has fallen quite a bit since the doll was introduced. According to what University of Central Arkansas economist Jeremy Horpedahl has termed the “Barbie Price Index,” the average American woman has to work about 30 minutes to afford a Barbie—down from about two hours in 1959, when the doll first appeared on store shelves.
In fact, toys are so much cheaper today that some columnists say it’s a problem. “A toy that cost $20 in 1993 would cost only $4.68 today,” writes Katie Notopoulos, a senior correspondent at Business Insider.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/22/this-christmas-americans-can-afford-more-toys-than-ever/
California’s New Minimum Wage Is Predictably Killing Food Delivery Jobs
“A new California law will require that most food-service workers get paid at least $20 per hour starting next year.
But hundreds of pizza delivery drivers in the Los Angeles area are about to discover Thomas Sowell’s famous adage that the true minimum wage is zero.
Pizza Hut announced Wednesday that it would lay off about 1,200 delivery drivers in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside counties, CBS News reported. Pizza Hut franchises are outsourcing delivery to third-party apps like GrubHub and UberEats as a cost-saving measure in advance of the new law taking effect.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/27/californias-new-minimum-wage-is-predictably-killing-food-delivery-jobs/
Counterbalance | China’s Hobbled Economy (feat. Thomas Duesterberg)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frWXGx5EZoM
Nations don’t get rich by plundering other nations
” in the past, no country was rich. There’s lots of uncertainty involved in historical GDP data — plenty we don’t actually know about populations, prices, and what people consumed in those eras. But even allowing for quite a bit of uncertainty, it’s definitely true that the average citizen of a developed country, or a middle-income country, is far more materially wealthy than their ancestors were 200 years ago”
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“whatever today’s rich countries did to get rich, they weren’t doing it in 1820. Imperialism is very old — the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, and many other empires all pillaged and plundered plenty of wealth. But despite all of that plunder, no country in the world was getting particularly rich, by modern standards, until the latter half of the 20th century.
Think about all the imperial plunder that was happening in 1820. The U.S. had 1.7 million slaves and was in the process of taking land from Native Americans. Latin American countries had slavery, as well as other slavery-like labor systems for their indigenous peoples. European empires were already exploiting overseas colonies. But despite all this plunder and extraction of resources and labor, Americans and Europeans were extremely poor by modern standards.
With no antibiotics, vaccines, or water treatment, even rich people suffered constantly from all sorts of horrible diseases. They didn’t have cars or trains or airplanes to take them around. Their food was meager and far less varied than ours today. Their living space was much smaller, with little privacy or personal space. Their clothes were shabby and fell apart quickly. They had no TVs or computers or refrigerators or washing machines or dishwashers or toasters or microwaves. At night their houses were dark, and without air conditioning they had trouble escaping the summer heat. They had to carry water from place to place, and even rich people pooped in outhouses or chamberpots. Everyone had bedbugs. Most water supplies were carried from place to place by hand.
They were plundering as hard as they could, but it wasn’t making them rich.
Nor were colonized and exploited nations and peoples rich before the European empires arrived. Yes, Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia were harshly exploited by European empires for their natural resources. But although Africa, Latin America, and Asia were closer to Europe in terms of living standards back then, they were all very, very poor by modern standards.
This should be the first very strong clue that modern rich nations’ wealth didn’t come primarily from plunder, but from something else — something that nations started doing over the last century and a half. In fact, we know what that something is — it’s industrial production, coupled with modern science.”
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“there are two more sophisticated cases you can make for the “imperial plunder” theory of national wealth. The first is that continuing plunder is responsible for income differences between countries. The second is that plunder was necessary to initiate the process that eventually led to industrial production and modern science. The first of these arguments is wrong; the second can’t easily be disproven, but there’s major reason for doubt.”
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nations-dont-get-rich-by-plundering
Chris Christie Is Right, Trump’s Trade War Accomplished Nothing
“Trump’s presidency overturned decades of a generally pro-trade Republican consensus and ushered in an era of assuming that trade is bad for American workers and consumers. He hiked tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels, washing machines, and a wide range of Chinese goods. For Trump and his allies, those higher tariffs—which were directly paid by American importers and consumers—were meant to reconfigure the trading relationship between America and China.
But Christie is exactly right. It failed.
The one material thing Trump’s trade war accomplished was a so-called “phase one” trade deal with China, which he signed with Chinese President Xi Jinping to much fanfare in December 2019. That deal included a promise that China would buy $200 million more American exports annually. Those increased purchases were supposed to be spread across multiple sectors of the American export economy, something Trump promised would provide much-needed relief to farmers, manufacturers, and other businesses harmed by the tariffs he’d imposed since taking office.
China didn’t do that. According to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, American exports to China didn’t even reach pre-trade-war levels in the first year that “deal” was in place. Both countries seem to have quietly dropped any pretense of following through on the agreement.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/07/chris-christie-is-right-trumps-trade-war-accomplished-nothing/
The problem isn’t inflation. It’s prices.
“The actual problem here is prices.
They’re not going up nearly as much as they were in, say, the middle of last year, but they’re by and large not declining en masse, either. And in most cases, they won’t get back to where they were in the Before Times.
“Inflation in the US is falling relatively quickly compared to all of our other peer countries, and we have the strongest growth out of the recession,” said Felicia Wong, president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. “But people don’t just want falling inflation numbers, they actually want deflation.”
Deflation probably isn’t in the cards (and the rub is we don’t want it to be). Higher prices might just be the sort of thing we’ve all got to get used to. The truth is we’re never going back to how things were in 2019 — we won’t be returning to the office at the same levels, we’ll never hear “corona” and only think of beer, and that night on the town is going to cost us more than it did before.”
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“Basically, if I get a raise at work, I think it’s because I’m awesome. That may be partly true, but that’s not all that’s going on — it’s also that the labor market is tight and wages broadly are going up. My current employer doesn’t want to lose me, and my future employer would have to pay me a little more to lure me away.
While many people see their employment situations (good or bad) as something they’ve earned, they see inflation as something that’s happening to them and that it’s the government’s fault. “The reality is inflation takes away and it gives back. It takes away, prices go up, and it gives back, wages catch up,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. “But you code what it takes away as inflation’s fault but what it gives back as your own genius.””
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“The rate of inflation really is slowing (and, if all goes well, will continue to do so), and the disorienting nature of what’s happened in the economy over the past few years will likely fade. Post-pandemic prices will eventually feel normal, and post-pandemic wages should make those prices more feasible — or at least not significantly less feasible than they were before. Sooner or later, sticker shock will feel a little less shocking.”
https://www.vox.com/money/2023/11/8/23951098/economy-inflation-prices-job-market-sticker-shock