“A popular myth about early American fiat money claims that various colonial and state governments created hyperinflationary disasters after they experimented with currency finance. But while New England and the Carolinas occasionally made a mess of things before the Revolutionary War, most colonies had a lot of success in issuing their own currency.”
…
“Early American currency finance was kept in check by several political feedback mechanisms.
First was local democratic control. Because of much smaller populations, legislatures were easier to discipline.
Second was jurisdictional competition. If a legislature let currency finance get out of hand in one place, a jurisdiction whose government had its books in order was never too far away.
Third was economic independence. Because of agriculture’s prevalence, subsistence farming and barter with neighbors provided an outside option, especially in rural areas.
Fourth was that currency finance responded to specific needs. Relatively small and targeted governments could employ fiat money as a financing mechanism more safely.
None of these conditions exist anymore. MMT advocates think their system can work on a national scale, but they’re wrong. It’s much harder for citizens to discipline the fiscal authority today, whether by “voting with their feet” or “taking to the hills.” And because MMT would transform the fiscal-monetary landscape of the entire country, it is anything but “timely, targeted, and temporary.”
Furthermore, even assuming taxes can keep inflation low, does anybody trust today’s feckless politicians to enact unpopular levies? Without the supporting economic mechanisms, MMT is exactly what its detractors claim: a sure way to turn a functioning economy into a financial basket case.”
“The group aims “to align conservatives on the narrow and limited view of antitrust that Robert Bork popularized in the 1970s, called the ‘consumer welfare standard,'” notes Washington Monthly. This standard says consumer interests—not breaking up companies just for being big or inducing artificial competition just for the sake of competition—should be the primary concern of antitrust law enforcement. It is not a “pro-monopoly” argument but an argument against excessive government intervention in private industry and for a conception of antitrust enforcement that puts protecting consumers—not any particular economic ideology—first.
“Under the consumer welfare standard, which has anchored U.S. antitrust law for over four decades, consumer harm is measured through tangible economic effects and empirical evidence,” notes Tom Herbert, federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform, in a recent opinion piece in The Hill. “Antitrust law under the consumer welfare standard allows business conduct that benefits Americans through lower prices, better quality products and greater access to goods and services.”
Just a few years ago, the fact that Republicans would turn against such a standard in favor of a leftist vision of antitrust enforcement would be weird, to put it mildly. But antitrust law is now seen as another tool in fighting the culture war. “Large businesses [are] increasingly viewed as the enforcement arm of the cultural Left,” notes Klein, and “the cancel culture and anti-PC debates have become more animating for a lot of conservatives than traditional social issues.””
“In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would link the two bills together, to prevent the party’s left from losing heart. “There ain’t going to be an infrastructure bill unless we have the reconciliation bill passed by the United States Senate,” Pelosi said Thursday.
This is an attempt to put the moderate Democrats in a box. It’s a promise from Pelosi to hold their cherished bipartisan deal hostage unless they fall in line with Biden’s reconciliation plan. It’s not clear whether this was necessary, since Manchin had already started speaking positively about the reconciliation effort. It also may be a bluff — if the reconciliation effort does fall apart, would Pelosi and House Democrats really choose doing nothing over settling for whatever got through the Senate? But Democrats hope the moderates will simply fall in line, so they don’t have to find out.”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/minimum-wage-101-with-arin-dube/id1382983397?i=1000513208878
“American institutions could do their part to weaken the CCP regime, though it would mean sacrificing profits”
LC: American companies do not have the power here. Our government needs to take a hard stance against China limiting our institutions’ and people’s speech as a condition to doing business with the Chinese people.
“So far, Democrats and Republicans have made some headway on the bipartisan deal. They have agreed to a very vague framework that includes funding for roads and bridges, public transit, passenger and freight rail, electric vehicle infrastructure, clean drinking water, and broadband internet, among a few other areas. The agreement goes into almost no detail beyond those broad categories — with lawmakers now working to get more specific as they transform that framework into actual legislation.
Where both sides haven’t reached any agreement yet is how all of this will be paid for. Democrats want to pay for it largely by undoing parts of former President Donald Trump’s tax law, while Republicans suggested raising the gas tax and electric vehicle charging fees. With both sides rejecting each other’s ideas, they instead put out a list of potential revenue sources, ranging from stronger enforcement of current tax laws to spending caps to public-private partnerships. But the sides haven’t reached any concrete agreements here, and all of these ideas may not even be enough to fund the full bill.
Democrats have also promised to pass an additional infrastructure bill through reconciliation (to bypass the filibuster on a party-line vote). This bill would aim to fill in the other parts of Biden’s agenda left out of the bipartisan deal, including broader action on climate change and “human infrastructure” measures like an expanded child tax credit and elder care.
But the party hasn’t come to an agreement on this measure. Manchin suggested the bill could be as little as $2 trillion, while Sanders has worked on a $6 trillion proposal. There is, suffice to say, a very wide space in between.
In short: A lot is up in the air. The specific details are still being worked out. It’s not clear if any of this will happen.”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/who-gets-to-say-with-john-mcwhorter/id1382983397?i=1000514986883
“nearly a decade after the Supreme Court ruled that states could choose whether to expand their Medicaid programs, the fight over whether to do so is far from over. So far, 38 states and Washington, DC, have expanded Medicaid, covering nearly 15 million people. In the dozen states that have not, 4 million people are uninsured who would receive Medicaid coverage if their state expanded eligibility under the ACA. More than 95 percent live in the South, they are disproportionately Black, and many are not eligible for subsidies to buy private coverage on the ACA markets.”
“Reports varied on whether Colonial paid the ransom or not until May 19, when Colonial acknowledged that it did indeed pay $4.4 million worth of bitcoin (which may not be worth $4.4 million anymore). CEO Joseph Blount told the Wall Street Journal that it was a difficult decision, but one that he felt was “the right thing to do for our country.”
Blount added that it will cost Colonial far more — tens of millions of dollars — to completely restore its systems over the next several months.”
“Edwards did not simply limit the scope of Ramos. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion also overruled a 32-year-old decision governing when the Supreme Court’s precedents apply retroactively. Kavanaugh did so, moreover, without following the ordinary procedures that the Court normally follows before overruling one of its previous decisions. As Justice Elena Kagan points out in dissent, no one asked the Court to overrule anything in Edwards, and the Court “usually confines itself to the issues raised and briefed by the parties.”
Edwards, moreover, is the second time in less than a month that Kavanaugh authored a majority opinion that overrules a prior decision without following the Court’s normal procedures. In late April, Kavanaugh handed down a decision in Jones v. Mississippi that effectively overruled a 2016 decision establishing that nearly all juvenile offenders may not be sentenced to life without parole.”
…
“this matters because Kavanaugh is the median vote on the Supreme Court. Last week, SCOTUSBlog published an analysis finding that Kavanaugh voted with the majority in 97 percent of cases decided so far this Supreme Court term — more than any other justice. If you want to win a case before the Supreme Court, you’ve got a tough road ahead of you if you can’t secure Kavanaugh’s vote.
And yet, Kavanaugh is signaling in Edwards, Jones, and in a few other significant opinions that he does not particularly care about precedent”
…
“When deciding whether to overrule a precedent, Kavanaugh wrote, the Court should consider whether the previous decision is “not just wrong, but grievously or egregiously wrong.” It should consider whether “the prior decision caused significant negative jurisprudential or real-world consequences,” and it should ask whether overruling the prior precedent would upset “legitimate expectations of those who have reasonably relied on the precedent.”
But Kavanaugh engaged in none of this analysis in Edwards, and it’s hard to see how Teague would qualify as worthy of being overruled under the standard Kavanaugh articulated in Ramos. Kavanaugh doesn’t claim in Edwards that Teague was egregiously wrong or that it’s led to “significant negative jurisprudential or real-world consequences.” Indeed, he claims the exact opposite — that Teague’s holding regarding “watershed” rules should be overruled because it’s had no jurisprudential or real-world consequences whatsoever.
Kavanaugh also ignored the standard he laid out in Ramos in his opinion in Jones v. Mississippi, the decision involving whether juveniles who commit homicide crimes can be sentenced to life without parole.”
…
“Kavanaugh, the median justice on most contentious issues that arise before the Court, is perfectly willing to overrule more than a century worth of precedent. And he’s willing to do so even when overruling those precedents would upend fundamental assumptions about how state election laws work — and who is in charge of deciding how our elections are conducted.
More broadly, much of American law — the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the right to an abortion, the power of the EPA to protect the environment, the power of states to require businesses not to discriminate against LGBTQ workers and customers, and numerous other laws — hinges on the Supreme Court’s willingness to honor past decisions that Republicans don’t like very much.
Liberals, in other words, are depending on the doctrine of stare decisis — the idea that courts should typically be bound by their prior decisions — to stave off a conservative legal revolution.
And as liberals shout for stare decisis to save them, the Court’s median justice is looking down upon them, and whispering “no.””