Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“A widespread avian flu outbreak devastated the poultry industry in 2022, causing the deaths of more than 43 million hens. December egg inventories were down nearly 30 percent from the year before, just in time for the holiday baking season. Under the basic rules of economics, a persistent drop in supply leading into a time of increased demand is bound to have this result.”
“”We find that excess inflation is significantly correlated to each country’s own domestic stimulus and to various exposures of foreign stimulus,” concluded a trio of economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve in a report published last month. In the U.S., they found that “fiscal stimulus during the pandemic contributed to an increase in inflation of about 2.6 percentage points.”
That’s a significant increase, even if it doesn’t account for the full run-up of inflation that took place during the past 18 months. Price increases accelerated in late 2021 and throughout 2022, ultimately peaking at an annualized rate of 9.1 percent in June.
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“Other recent reviews of COVID-era stimulus bills have come to a similar conclusion. In a paper published in September, economists at Johns Hopkins University and the Chicago Federal Reserve said “fiscal inflation” accounted for “approximately half” of the recent price increases.
That’s troubling, they added, because “fiscal inflation tends to be highly
persistent…When inflation has a fiscal nature, monetary policy alone may not provide an effective response.”
So far, the chief response to inflation has been a monetary one.””
“Social Security will be insolvent by 2034. One of the trust funds for Medicare will be insolvent even sooner. When insolvency hits, both programs will be subject to mandatory benefit cuts. The exact size of the cuts will depend on payroll tax collections in that year, but the current estimate is that Social Security will be able to pay only 80 percent of promised benefits in 2034.
As I wrote last month, when Republicans such as former President Donald Trump were making similar vows not to cut Social Security benefits: Promising to do nothing amounts to promising a roughly 20 percent benefit cut in a little more than a decade. There is no getting around that fact.”
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“Standing up for seniors (and everyone else who has been paying into Social Security and Medicare for their entire working lives) requires acknowledging that there is no reality in which the politicians do nothing and the entitlement programs continue functioning normally. The choice is between making changes now or accepting mandatory cuts in about a decade.”
“These requirements have long been found to increase the costs of infrastructure projects, but the promise of creating even more cost-increasing American jobs makes them a popular provision.
The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which Biden signed into law in November 2021 re-upped requirements that federally funded infrastructure use American-made iron and steel. It also expanded those requirements to construction materials like drywall, copper wire, fiber optic cables, and lumber.”
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“Those requirements were supposed to kick in within 180 days of the law’s passage. Right before they did, the Biden administration’s Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a sweeping 180-day waiver for new Buy America provisions for construction materials, citing the cost and complexity of complying with those provisions.
Public comments from state departments of transportation, public transit agencies, and contractors all generally supported this waiver and, in fact, asked that it last for at least 18 months and as long as four years.
The reason is pretty straightforward: Buy America provisions greatly increase the costs of infrastructure projects.”
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“Expanding Buy America provisions, and cracking down on waivers, are a staple of all administrations and most State of the Union addresses. The fact they keep exempting themselves from these requirements shows that Biden—and his predecessors—understand at some level that they’re a bad idea.”
“The U.S. cannot adequately address its national security challenges related to China, which are increasingly driven by technology, without the help of a potentially surprising partner: the Department of Commerce.
Unfortunately, the department itself lacks the critical support needed for these efforts. Most crucial: Commerce needs its own intelligence agency.”
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“The cases that come before CFIUS are privileged and not publicly disclosed. But I can say this: The most challenging ones usually revolved around issues of advanced or dual-use technology, an area in which the Department of Commerce plays a critical role given its international trade and export control responsibilities.
Today, the Department of Commerce is an agency unexpectedly on the frontlines of vital U.S. national and economic security challenges, most prominently demonstrated by its leading role on ensuring critical access to semiconductors, and as evidenced by the CHIPS Act and recent rules promulgated by the department to protect against even knowledge transfers between the United States and China.
But these efforts are certain to be a beginning for Commerce, not an end. And a dedicated in-house intel agency can better identify emerging threats and challenges from China that Commerce needs to tackle, including potential spyware and other intrusions embedded in foreign technology. For instance, in late November, the U.S. issued a ban on new Huawei and ZTE equipment — along with that of three other Chinese companies — for fear it would be used to spy on Americans. Last month, Congress proposed limiting U.S. exposure to Chinese 5G leaders, including Huawei, by restricting their access to U.S. banks, adding them to Treasury’s Specifically Designated Nationals List.
In fact, Commerce’s current position is not unlike that of the Treasury Department’s in 2004.
That year — as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act — Congress established the current iteration of Treasury’s intelligence agency, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and formally made it part of the broader intel community. Since then, OIA has played a critical role for almost two decades combating terrorist financing, helping support sanctions efforts and providing financial intelligence to Treasury policymakers.
OIA’s successes would simply not have been possible without it being a full, integrated member of the intelligence community. Indeed, its assessments often find their way to the White House and to other senior policymakers across town, even as its primary focus is supporting the Treasury Department.
In the same way, the Commerce Department cannot be expected to play a more fulsome role in U.S. national security if its leaders are not fully informed of the strategic goals and illicit tactical efforts of U.S. adversaries. To meet that expectation, requires the launch of a new, 19th intel agency to be housed at the department.”
“There is one key factor explaining why imports to the EU from Russia haven’t fallen further: energy — and its price. During the five years that preceded the war, energy-related products represented two-thirds of all imports from Russia, in monetary terms.
European countries needed to find alternative providers before they could stop buying from Moscow — and even when they reduced their energy purchases, soaring prices meant that cash flows to Russia did not decrease proportionally.”
“Meta laying off 11,000 people and Goldman Sachs 3,200 sounds like a lot. But when you put it in context, it’s quite tiny — there are some 165 million people in the workforce. It’s also important to keep in mind when looking at websites like layoffs.fyi, which tracks tech sector layoffs, that in the grand scheme of things, some of these totals are not that much.”
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23569504/ticketmaster-monopoly-live-nation-taylor-swift-antitrust-clyde-lawrence
“The answer to why companies make it hard or impossible for people to call them is simple: It saves them money. It’s more expensive to hire a person in a call center — assuming they can find people who want to work there — than it is to engineer some chatbot that offers up canned answers on a website. The result is sort of a sliding scale of cost-saving terribleness.
“There’s a straight-up clear hierarchy,” Buell said. “The cost to talk to a live person face-to-face is always going to be greater than the cost to talk to a live person on the phone, which is going to be greater than the cost to talk to a live person over chat, which is going to be greater than the cost to talk to some kind of automated solution. In the middle there is also email, and chat is more expensive than email, which is more expensive than non-human.””
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“Even if companies do have options to call, they’re often ineffective and have a ton of automated options before you get to a real person, if you ever do. “You have to go through all the menus, you say, ‘I want to talk with a person,’ you have to wait for an hour,” Hu said. “Even though they have the call option, it’s almost like no call at all.””
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“Talking to customers about their products and services may lead businesses to discover deficiencies they might not otherwise notice. This allows them to improve their offerings so that, in the long run, they build something better — and ultimately field fewer complaints.”
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“recently found herself on the “holy hell” end of the customer service frustration experience. She couldn’t get the electricity turned on in her new house because her credit was frozen, and the credit bureau she needed to reach out to to have it unfrozen had shuttered its call center. She had to send copies of her driver’s license and Social Security card to a random post office box in Texas. She ultimately waited months for her credit to be unfrozen and her lights to be turned on.”