“Anti-War” Trump Goes Full Neocon
Trump appointing war hawks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJL6VUOZFTY
Tag: Marco Rubio
Marco Rubio Is Wrong About Industrial Policy
“Rubio doesn’t even get through the first paragraph of the piece before making a significant error. “Today,” he writes, Congress no longer views industrial policy with the same skepticism that it once did, but “what replaces unfettered free trade remains hotly debated.”
Unfettered free trade? That’s hardly an accurate description of the current status quo in the United States—a fact that Rubio surely knows, since Florida’s sugar and fruit industries are the beneficiaries of some of the most aggressive protectionist policies on the books. Even before former President Donald Trump ramped up the use of tariffs, America had more protectionist policies than other large, developed economies: A 2015 report from Credit Suisse called the United States the world’s most protectionist developed nation.
Rubio’s inability to describe the current status quo matters. It’s a failure of the ideological Turing Test, and it reveals that he misunderstands the economic policies he’s trying to shift—or that he is deliberately misinforming readers about them. Either way, this ought to call the rest of his claims into question.
Unfortunately, that’s far from the only mistake in the piece.”
https://reason.com/2024/04/04/marco-rubio-is-wrong-about-industrial-policy/
Marco Rubio Wants To Make Your Groceries More Expensive
“Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) led a bipartisan group of lawmakers—all of them from Florida—in submitting a petition to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai seeking “an investigation” into what the lawmakers call “the flood of imported seasonal and perishable agricultural products from Mexico.” They ask Tai to invoke Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose “trade remedies” that will protect American growers from the scourge of…low-priced produce.
While they don’t come out and say it directly, it’s obvious from the letter that Rubio and his colleagues are seeking tariffs on Mexican produce. Section 301 is the same mechanism the Trump administration used to impose wide-ranging tariffs on goods imported from China. It’s a law that grants the executive branch broad, unilateral power over trade.
Rubio and the other lawmakers say the Mexican government is subsidizing its domestic agricultural infrastructure as part of a scheme to undercut the prices charged by U.S. growers. “Mexico poses a direct threat to Florida’s seasonal and perishable agricultural industry,” they conclude.”
…
“Anyone who has taken a basic economics class should be able to explain what’s happening there. A high level of supply tends to push prices downward. Whether grown in Mexico or Florida, it makes sense that cucumber prices would be at their lowest when there are a lot of cucumbers in the market.
But that’s not how Rubio and his colleagues see it. Instead, the petition describes this minor pricing difference as “a clear attempt to displace Florida cucumbers from the U.S. market.”
Take a moment to enjoy the fact that some of the most powerful men and women in the U.S. government are freaking out over the idea that American consumers might get to save a few cents on their next cucumber purchase. Then amuse yourself with the optics of American agricultural special interests—which are, of course, pulling Rubio’s strings here—complaining about subsidies, as if “direct government aid” doesn’t account for nearly 40 percent of American farmers’ annual income.
“These Florida politicians are following a time-honored tradition of trying to help their local constituents at the expense of Americans in other states, who benefit from low-priced fruits and vegetables regardless of where they are grown,” says Bryan Riley, director of the free trade initiative at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. “
Marco Rubio Wants To Fight Abortion and Trans Battles in the Tax Code
“With the passage of state laws intended to restrict access to abortion, some companies like Bumble, Yelp, and Salesforce have announced programs to assist employees who have to travel to other states in order to obtain the procedure. After the apparent leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion which would overturn the right nationwide, Amazon announced that for any employees who have to travel in order to receive an abortion, it would reimburse up to $4,000 annually.
Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) responded by threatening legislation.
Employees’ health care costs are typically tax deductible as business expenses for their employers. Rubio’s bill, the No Tax Breaks for Radical Corporate Activism Act, would bar a company from deducting the costs of reimbursements not only for abortions but also for gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender children. In a statement accompanying the legislation, Rubio said, “Our tax code should be pro-family and promote a culture of life.”
But directly disincentivizing behavior is a fundamental misuse of the tax code, and it’s unlikely to work anyway.
To be sure, government policies are inherently incentivizing: For example, laws against robbery and murder are intended to keep people from robbing and murdering. Regarding taxes, people with incomes near the top of their tax brackets are disincentivized to increase their income, to avoid paying a higher rate.
But writing specific incentives into the tax code is an inherent market distortion, where politicians choose what products and activities they think people should be buying and partaking in. This can take the form of cronyism when certain types of products are favored. Even something as seemingly benign and beneficial as a tax credit for purchasing electric vehicles can just become a giveaway to favored companies. Additionally, when a benefit exists, it makes it that much easier for a politician to threaten to take it away: Even the health cost deduction Rubio is targeting is, itself, a distortion that incentivizes employer-provided health insurance plans.
Politicians use the tax code to achieve social policy goals because it is typically easier to insert a targeted tax credit than to pass a bill creating a new welfare program. But in practice, these carve-outs make everything more complicated: When the various COVID-19 relief bills apportioned money for stimulus checks, even with funding for additional staffing, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was slammed with calls from people awaiting their payments. When the tax code is the means by which benefits are distributed, then the tax collectors must also function as a social services agency.
Worse, it’s not even apparent that these benefits have their desired effect. A 2014 study of a tax on high calorie foods showed that such a tax can lead to more purchases of high calorie foods. In 1997, Iris Lav of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, told The New York Times, “There’s very scant evidence that the tax code has ever changed people’s behavior.”
Ironically for Rubio, this used to be Republican orthodoxy. In 1964, Ronald Reagan declared, “We cannot have [true tax] reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure.” But since then, Republicans as well as Democrats have used the tax system as a shortcut to achieving their desired policy outcomes. As a result,filing one’s annual taxes is an expensive, grueling process.
To the extent that taxation has any legitimate purpose, it is to fund the basic function of the federal government. Anything further, like incentivizing family or “a culture of life,” is simply government coercion by another name.”