413 private links
A groundbreaking new study commissioned by Revolver News concludes that COVID-19 lockdowns are ten times more deadly than the actual COVID-19 virus in terms of years of life lost by American citizens. //
Revolver News set out to commission a study to do precisely that: to finally quantify the net damage of the lockdowns in terms of a metric known as “life-years.” Simply put, we have drawn upon existing economic studies on the health effects of unemployment to calculate an estimate of how many years of life will have been lost due to the lockdowns in the United States, and have weighed this against an estimate of how many years of life will have been saved by the lockdowns. The results are nothing short of staggering, and suggest that the lockdowns will end up costing Americans over 10 times as many years of life as they will save from the virus itself.
Jeff S Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
15y
8,465
Subscriptor++
jandrese said:
This is actually somewhat impressive. 12,600 victims means each one was extorted for around $135, which seems like the amount of money you might expect an average 14-17 year old boy to have. That's an enormous amount of work on the scammers part. Day in and day out camming and scamming.
One of the things that often ends up being the case for groups committing organized crime is that, when you look at the hours worked to perpetrate the crime, most of the people in the crime ring don't get paid very well. The people at the very top of the gang usually make some decent money.
There have been a few studies on the economics of gangs primarily involved in drug dealing, and most of the people in the gang were making minimum wage or much less - despite taking enormous risks both legally, and the risk of getting shot or beat up or whatever by rival gangs or even your own gang if they decide it's time to 'fire' you.
On top of that, if the criminal enterprise has some success, there's a very real risk that as soon as you start making some money, now you gotta start paying out protection money to crooked cops, politicians, judges, etc.
Even that people at the top of the gangs topped out at around $130k annually, which would be a very good wage for a middle class professional, but really low for an 'executive management' person, which is the closest analog for those groups.
Makes you wonder why they don't get the idea if they are starting up what basically constitutes a business, to sell something legal instead.
First: Eliminate withholding. Everyone, every quarter, has to send money to the IRS. Everyone gets their entire paycheck and then has to pay up. The withholding system is too painless; most people scarcely glance at their paycheck stub, and if everyone were required to write a check for quarterly estimated taxes and send it to the various levels of government, I'd wager a substantial sum that they would suddenly become a lot more interested in what government does with their money.
Second: Eliminate “progressive” taxation. Implement a single-rate flat tax with no exemptions or deductions for individuals. Everyone pays something. I’d be willing to consider exempting the first, oh, $40k from taxation, if that’s what it took to get it done – in return, I’d want major welfare reform, to include lifetime limits and severe restrictions on how public aid is delivered – no more open-ended debit cards.
Third: How about eliminating the capital gains tax next? You want people to invest their hard-earned in business ventures, then stop double-taxing them on income earned from money they already paid taxes on once. Want businesses to start bringing capital back from overseas? Eliminate the capital repatriation penalty. Both of those taxes are well to the left of stupid if economic growth is on the agenda, but these taxes were sold by the “We’ll soak those rich guys” school of political campaigning.
Janet - Stop #FreelanceBusting @webcodepro
·
Both #AB5 and fast food minimum wage law were written by UNIONS
BOTH bills HARM the very people they are meant to "help"
Tons of independent contractors LOST their incomes because of AB5
Now it's fast food workers turn
California policies show what other states SHOULDN'T do
Janet - Stop #FreelanceBusting @webcodepro
California's #AB5 reduced self-employment AND overall employment by 10% and 4.4% respectively
Now CA fast food employees are getting laid off or losing hours because of new minimum wage law
Would love to see @mercatus examine this CA fiasco too
https://youtu.be/FWZd0JRKmH4?si=HZOlcvg0CyiGnHZv
12:19 AM · Apr 2, 2024 //
anon-9s7n
8 hours ago
Dollars are not what drives an economy, value is. These workers are providing WAY less than $20 of value per hour which is why consumers aren't paying, causing business to close. It's consumers that determine the price of value, not government.
And at the end of the day a new equilibrium will be established that'll make $20 have the buying power of $10 and low skill workers, who think low skill jobs are something they should be able to make a career out of, will end up even worse off than when they started. Like they have every single time this has happened before.
That's the result every time government puts it's finger on the scale. The lowest end of the economy get the worst impact. But the people in CA have the government they deserve. Suck it up and change how you vote in November. //
anon-a755
6 hours ago edited
As Thomas Sowell said, "Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero..."
I stopped by Biden-Mart.com and was greeted with the message:
Putting food on the table has become harder than ever thanks to "Bidenomics." As costs for everyday items continue to rise, American families are struggling more and more to foot the bill.
Check off the items from the list below to compile your weekly grocery list and see how much more expensive your bill has become under Joe Biden. //
Grocery prices have jumped by 25 percent over the past four years as Americans are routinely shocked by the cost of a typical visit to the store. //
And now Biden is proposing a $7.3 trillion budget bloated with social justice efforts and green energy giveaways.
recently I stumbled across the fact that, indeed, there is still such a thing as government cheese. In fact, there's a whopping huge amount of it, hidden away in caves in Missouri, and what's more, according to this March 2023 article in the Science Times, the story behind government cheese is a brilliant example of how screwed up things get when the government fiddles with markets.
Missouri cheese caves are deep within the Ozark Mountains' heart under Springfield. Made of converted limestone mines, the caves are perfectly kept at 36 degrees Fahrenheit to give an ideal environment for storing stockpiles of government-owned cheese.
It all started in the 1970s when the U.S. suffered from a national dairy shortage which was made worse by 30% inflation on dairy products. In response to the economic crisis, then-President Jimmy Carter decided to spend money on the dairy industry to encourage dairy production.
The government set A [sic] new policy where a two-billion-dollar budget was allotted to subsidize dairy products over the next four years. This plan was favorable to farmers but also led them to overproduce dairy products. The farmers became motivated to produce as much dairy as they could because they knew that whatever was not sold on the market would be bought by the government. //
Most dairy products were converted to cheese because they have a longer shelf life. By the early 1980s, the government-owned more than 500 million pounds of cheese. Because of this, the next U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, had to pass a law in 1981 enacting the public distribution of government-owned cheese. //
In the years that followed, the demand for cheese declined, but the production rate remained the same as the government continued to support dairy producers. As of 2019, the collection comprises almost 1.4 billion pounds of surplus cheese in the U.S.
So, the federal government, with your tax dollars, has produced 1.4 billion pounds of cheese and has it stored in caves in Missouri. //
All the cheese is still there, presumably awaiting another Ronald Reagan, who will crack open the cheese vaults and give back to the American people the cheese that they have, after all, already paid for. The problem is, that dumping a billion-and-a-half pounds of cheese on the market will have a brutal effect on cheese prices and American dairy farmers. It's difficult to see a good way out of this mess now. Once again the federal government has tossed a bunch of taxpayer money after a problem that would have resolved itself if just left alone. Forty years later, we are still paying for it. //
I'll keep saying it until I turn blue: Markets aren't perfect, but they generally get things right if they are left alone. The problem is that the government just can't leave them alone. And this is what happens.
Warren, along with leftist Democrat Reps. Pramila Jayapal (WA) and Brendan F. Boyle (PA), have reintroduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax, which would impose a wealth tax and captivity tax ("exit tax"), and would also allot $100 billion for increasing tax audits on the the wealthy.
As law professor, author, and political commentator Jonathan Turley called it in a Wednesday column, an "Eat the Rich" plan. As you might imagine, Turley isn't a fan of a wealth tax — and that's just the beginning.
The wealth tax is back. We have previously discussed the constitutional and policy concerns surrounding the push by Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) to introduce a wealth tax that would start with billionaires. It would not likely end there. //
It is worth noting that the top 1 percent’s income share rose from 22.2 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 42.3 percent to 45.8 percent.” The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.7 percent federal income taxes,. The bottom 50 percent paid the only 2.3 percent.
Even more stark, in 2021, the bottom half of taxpayers earned 10.4 percent of total adjusted gross income and paid 2.3 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the top 1 percent earned 26.3 percent of total AGI and paid 45.8 percent of all federal income taxes.
IBM Vice Chair and former Trump economic advisor Gary Cohn slam-dunked Biden's claim, and he brought the receipts.
"If you actually look at who pays taxes in this country, the bottom 50% of earners in the United States pay 2.3% of tax collected, and the top 10% pays over 70% of tax collected in this country," Cohn said, adding that this is in large part thanks to how the Trump administration redid the tax code in 2017.
Cohn then identified a problem with Biden's talking point about billionaires, noting that a billionaire is a measure of net worth, not a description of one's taxable income. //
Cohn went on to clarify the difference between wealth and income:
"We do a very good job in this country of taxing income," he said. "There is no income in this country, unless you buy a tax-free bond, that doesn't get taxed at a minimum of 20%, whether it's interest or dividends or capital gains. So, there's no billionaire in this country that has income that is not paying at least 20%." //
a person may hold wealth - say, in the form of a family farm that has no paper on it but may be worth several million dollars - without seeing any income from the mere existence of that asset. Taxing a person on that basis would be ruinous for that person and for the economy. //
MCPR
4 hours ago
Republicans and economists have been “fact checking” the Democrats on this since LBJ, but it doesn’t do any good. When it comes to worldly wealth, everyone who has less than another is jealous. Thinking people can overcome this and use logic to decide on reasonable policies. The rest vote on emotion. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Robin Hood gonna give me all their money! Emotional people don’t see the world is filled with people who have less than they, and when Robin Hood comes around, it’s gonna be them that lose.
Keep “fact-checking” and keep losing. Reduce taxes and win.
We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. Until the craven Republicans in Congress can get together and CUT spending (not rate-of-increase) we are going to lose to jealousy, every time. //
anon-201n
4 hours ago
Remember, Joe Biden is absolutely brilliant - was in the top of his law class - 76 out of 85 - so it must have been at the top of a page with 25 in a column! I would rank his financial acumen less than that of a 10 year old so that's the reason why the whole Biden family had to be involved in its (illegal) financial dealings, with 10% for the big guy.
Taxing assets is, at present, constitutionally illegal but raises all sorts of questions. If assets decrease in a year, are the tax levies given back (fat chance)? As Reagan said, we don't have a revenue problem but a spending problem. Until federal spending is addressed, pressures to increase taxes will persist.
Once a paragon of quality, Boeing's focus on its stock price has caused hundreds to die.
When asked how Boeing’s recent door plug incident came about, company CEO Dave Calhoun cryptically explained “a quality escape occurred.” That kind of corporate doublespeak is indicative of the problem at hand. Boeing used to have quality, but it escaped, apparently sometime around when it merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997.
For the last three decades, the company has spent substantial amounts of money buying back its own shares to pump up the stock price, and issuing dividends, instead of researching and developing new high-quality high-efficiency airplanes. The results have been catastrophic, as HBO’s funny Sunday night news man John Oliver explains. //
Prior to Reagan-era deregulation, stock buybacks were considered illegal market manipulation. If a company wanted to boost its stock, it had to do something worth crowing about, like develop good product. //
The desire to push R&D costs off to the company’s suppliers meant that Boeing was essentially building its planes from kits that weren’t designed together, didn’t fit together, and didn’t meet the standard of quality the company had once been known for. This move may have been a short-term boon for company profits, the share price, or for CEO bonuses, but the reduction in quality has given rise to the phrase “If it’s a Boeing, I ain’t going.” //
Saigon_Design
Bradley Brownell
3/07/24 9:55am
It began when Boeing took over Mcdonnell-Douglas and transplanted their board and C-suite into Boeing’s, effectively making it a MDD takeover of Boeing when it was actually Boeing that actually bought MDD.
MDD failed precisely because of their shitty leadership, and they had the opportunity to try their shenanigans again at Boeing and... look where we are now.
Boeing has literally no answer to Airbus and other competitors’ products, and won’t for at least a decade precisely because they focused on their stock price instead of the business. They claimed it would cost too much to invest in a new design - well, now you don’t have anything to offer airlines except the 777, 787, and 737Max, with big holes in the product lineup (e.g. a product to rival the A220). //
Mosko
Saigon_Design
3/07/24 10:31am
Somebody put it brilliantly in another comment on a previous article:
“McDonnell-Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money”.
That story had to do with an abandoned McDonald's outlet on Adak Island out in the Aleutians, which still had its prices listed. //
According to the prices listed on the old-school menu, a Big Mac was $2.45, a Big Mac meal was $4.59, a six-piece McNuggets cost $2.35, a Happy Meal cost $3.36 and an egg McMuffin was $1.95.
Now, a Big Mac meal — which includes a burger, fries and a drink — has increased to $18 in some locations.
Now Biden has been saying prices are coming down and claiming credit, even though prices are still up more than when he came in. In his latest remarks in South Carolina, he also blamed the greedy corporations for Bidenflation. //
But now, Treasury Janet Yellen just threw him under the bus with what she had to say about inflation. She was being interviewed by ABC when she was asked how she would convince people that prices might not go back to what they were before the pandemic. This is an astounding statement, especially in light of what Biden keeps saying now. //
"Well, I think most Americans know that prices are not likely to fall," Yellen said. "It's not the Fed's objective to try to push the level of prices back to where they were."
Oh.
So sorry, just accept we broke everything //
anon-372u
2 hours ago
Inflation was the objective. Make no mistake about that. Inflation is an incredible tool for raising taxes without ever having to discuss it, write legislation or pass a bill in to law. Inflation raises income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, you name it. It depletes your savings, destroys your emergency fund, and crushes your retirement. But it does get the government a lot more $$$ and most people never get that. //
Here’s the funny thing: Biden’s 8 percent estimate is derived from that same tax data on the top 400 taxpayers. So what’s going on? The president is describing a tax system that he wishes existed — not the system in place.
As Kessler noted, under the 16th Amendment of the Constitution, ratified in 1913, “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived.” //
Biden and the Democrats dishonestly use a definition of income, to Kessler's previous point, that they wish existed, vs. the definition that does exist, per federal tax legislation and the IRS. //
Note that unrealized capital appreciation is not included in the above definition of income. //
Here's more from Kessler:
In 2021, two White House economists — Greg Leiserson of the Council of Economic Advisers and Danny Yagan of the Office of Management and Budget — published a blog post that estimated what the tax rate would be for the 400 wealthiest households if unrealized capital gains were considered part of income. ... The report estimated that these households had an average federal individual income tax rate of 8.2 percent for the 2010-2018 period.
The steep run-up in stock prices in recent years has meant the wealth of super-wealthy Americans has risen significantly, even if they never sell stock that would trigger a tax liability. In fact, when interest rates were low, it was more cost-effective for a billionaire to borrow money against the value of those shares than sell them. The White House economists estimated what the tax rate would be if that income — now not subject to taxation — were included on their tax returns.
It turns out that this was the first time an artificial intelligence tool translated a speech by a world leader in real-time. //
fscarn | January 22, 2024 at 9:48 am
When the Founders/Framers spoke of freedom, they meant freedom FROM government,
Javier Milei gets it.
“It wasn’t what government did that made America great; it was what government was prevented from doing that made the difference,
“What set America apart from all other lands was freedom – for the individual. Freedom to work, to produce, to succeed and, especially, to keep the fruits of one’s labor.
“America became great precisely because the stifling effects of too much government had been prevented [by means of Constitutional limitations].”
Part of narration of Overview of America,
https://jbs.org/video/featured/overview-of-america/?mc_cid=aab99f82ce
Aaron Slodov @aphysicist
·
Jan 18
Milei's 2024 Davos talk, directly translated to English by AI (by heygen), in his own accent. Better than the dubbed version imo.
Rafael Fontana @RafaelFontana
WELCOME TO DAVOS
The place where:
-
Men who hire prostitutes deliver speeches on gender equality.
-
Tycoons arrive in private jets to persuade you to ride a bicycle.
-
Billionaires assure you that you can be happy without having anything.
#Davos
1:51 PM · Jan 18, 2024
If one drop was $1, the national debt would fill an Olympic pool... 4000 feet deep...
KilRoy-db
3 days ago
Fill a tractor trailer with 18,000# of $100. bills it would take 1225 of them to carry 1 trillion
dollars.
So it would take 41,650 truck loads of hundred dollar bills for 34 trillion dollars.
MIND BLOWING THE AMOUNT WE PISS AWAY FOR SHITTY PROJECTS.......
In today’s enlightened digital age, your purchase is simply an entry at your broker’s computer, and you do not own what you think you own. Under laws in all 50 states, what you actually own is a “securities entitlement.” This is a new form of “property ownership” that is more like a contract between you and your broker. Progress.
But if the financial system were to totally collapse—think 2008, but much bigger—nearly every stock and bond that is in electronic form can be legally taken as collateral by the largest “too big to fail” financial institutions. Sure, it would crush many millions of individual investors. But it’s all for a good cause: saving the systemically important financial institutions. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?
This will happen without your knowledge and without any action or fault on your part—even if you are entirely debt free. If that sounds wrong, it’s because it is. It is also legalized fraud.
So, how did we get here? It is a fascinating story involving some of the most boring and dense state laws on the books. Hat tip to ZeroHedge for posting an article titled “Intentional Destruction: First COVID, Now Comes ‘The Great Taking’” by Matthew Smith that was in part based on the work of David Webb and his book The Great Taking. //
The Uniform Law Commission (ULC) was formed for the purpose of developing state-level laws that would change the patchwork quilt of state laws into a more uniform set of statutes. The most prominent uniform law is the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), and this issue centers around UCC Article 8. The ULC presented a model law revising Article 8 in 1994, and the law was passed by all 50 states over the next several years.
Sitting inside the new Article 8 language are several provisions that put the rights of individual investors at risk. The first significant change is the concept of “securities entitlement.” //
The individual investors have no role in the lending practices of their broker, why does the law allow the taking of their assets?
To answer that question, you need to know the fundamental objective of the Article 8 revisions. The driving motivation was systemic risk in the financial markets (if they were worried about systemic risk in 1994, what do they think about it now?). Importantly, the Article 8 revisions did not do anything to reduce the likelihood of systemic risk. In fact, the committee made it worse by removing risk and consequences for shady financial activity. Instead, what the changes actually do is protect the “too big to fail” banks if a systemic financial collapse occurs.
The UCC has turned the concept of property rights upside down, but the UCC is also a state law, and state legislators can, therefore, take steps to restore the rights of investors or, at the very least, require informed consent. //
any system that requires the people to sacrifice their property to support the financial institutions that built this mess in the first place is not a system worth saving. //
anon-cugn
14 hours ago
From The Two Towers:
Theoden: I will not risk open war!
Aragorn: Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not.
We have an enemy. We are at war.
1 Peter 5:6-11
Rod Adams says:
December 15, 2023 at 10:13 AM
I believe that many (perhaps most) observers are confused about the economies of scale and believe that the term only applies to ever larger machines.
Scale is also related to the enterprise that develops the power plant and the supply chain that produces the parts for the machines. If the power plants are so large that all of their components are produced in limited quantities, their supply chain never has the chance to develop economic scale.
NuScale’s system includes many simplifications that might enable it to achieve competitive pricing, especially when the kWh that they sell get appropriately differentiated and valued as superior to similar units of electricity that do not include valuable characteristics like cleanliness, reliability, stability, inertia and power factor.
As I pointed out in my post, the $89/MWh price tag for NuScale output is competitive in a number of different markets. Their mistake was trying to sell to reluctant customers in a place where power is generally cheap and where the customers have no real reason to take risks and bet on FOAK technology.
My sources tell me that the fatal decision to focus on UAMPS as the initial customer was a result of strong pressure by INL to host US’s the pioneering SMR.
That might have worked if NuScale had planned to offer a single 50 MWe module. That power output that could be handled by INL, perhaps with the help of Idaho Power. But NuScale decided they needed to achieve scale more quickly and chose initially to build a 12 unit, 600 MWe power plant in the middle of a vast, nearly unpopulated desert. (The initial plan was rescaled to 6 units of 77 MWe each, but that is still a 462 MWe facility on an 860 square mile site with a total local consumption of roughly 80 MWe.
Consuming the power from their proposed plant required a much larger customer base, but the only utility available was a consortium of 40+ small town cooperatives.
Abandoning the UAMPS project before wasting any more money was a good decision. NuScale has a number of additional potential customers in its pipeline, though it still needs to overcome the FOAK challenge.
“It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be… This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.” – Isaac Asimov //
There is no argument for our complacency that is better represented than the current social movement against producing energy, which perhaps began with Boomers, but is now being led mostly by Gen Z, also known as ‘the sustainability generation’, and also to some degree by Millennials. The irony is that these generations have been the most comfortable of all (and –full disclosure – I am a Millennial); unlike my parents who grew up in poverty in India, and were then manual labourers in Britain, we have had it easy. We haven’t suffered through truly gruelling labour, we don’t need to know how electricity grids work, and most of us have never stepped foot in a mine or experienced electricity blackouts. The divide between what it takes to maintain a high quality of life and the understanding of this has also widened over generations; //
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Thanks to years of development and growth, we live in a time of prosperity, facing fewer core challenges than past generations. //
The problem is that thanks to all of this, a disconnection has occurred between our lifestyles and what it has taken to get us here. The lack of understanding of the skilled labour, need for industries, and mining for raw materials that enabled these lifestyles, and the fact that the toll those things took on the environment was inevitable, but not permanent, has repercussions for society. I was once part of the problem, fighting to forge a society that would be independent of fossil fuels, without thinking about our continued and growing need for reliable electricity and fighting for the alternatives. My argument was the standard traditional environmentalist argument: that we need to live with less. I was wrong.
Now, the argument has gone so far that activists argue that we should just stop oil overnight. But can it be done without causing immense harm to people? //
About 45% of a typical barrel of crude oil is refined into gasoline, and an additional 29% is refined into diesel fuel. The remaining 26% is used to make plastics and other products. There is good news in these figures, as it means that we can reduce a lot of our dependence on oil by making the switch from petrol and diesel cars to electric vehicles, which is a trend that is taking place in many countries already. //
Instead of going ahead anyway and virtue signalling that they are now plastic-free, Lego has ditched plans to switch to PET, since doing so would have had a greater impact on the environment.
Of course, many anti-oil activists would argue that Lego should stop making the bricks altogether. They would argue that they are unnecessary and wasteful. But I disagree. I recall many years of constructing large and complicated architectural designs with my brother when we were children; he was fascinated by the way things work and are put together, and he later trained to become an engineer (a field he now holds a senior position in). This link between playing with Lego and developing engineering skills has been well-documented elsewhere. The irony of wanting to just stop oil is well represented in the idea that we don’t ‘need’ Lego. We don’t ‘need’ to build housing, railways, or power plants either – if we are happy for society to stagnate and for future generations to suffer.
Let’s ignore the idea of an immediate transition, then, and consider what can be done to stop oil eventually. //
This brings me back to a point I’ve been making for years: we should be aiming for energy abundance.
As we shift towards electrifying everything, switching from gas boilers to heat pumps, and diesel cars to electric vehicles, much of our demand for oil will be replaced naturally. But the alternatives will require more electricity, and unless the electricity grid is supplying us with clean power, we have a problem. //
As I’ve explained before, we can build all the wind and solar power people want, but we will still need baseload power to back them up, and historically this has always either come from fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Although the upfront costs for the alternatives appear to be cheaper than for nuclear, this is incorrect when the figures are viewed in context. As well, we need to be aware of shift-loading the costs of wind and solar power onto ordinary working people. I’ve also seen NGOs arguing for building wind and solar in less wealthy countries, and I find this tactic appalling. Intermittent energy is not what we in the wealthy West used to escape poverty. We burned a lot of fossil fuels to develop. We don’t get to deny other countries of that now. //
The truth is that I am a shill. I am a shill for the human race. I want to see the end of needless suffering and death from preventable diseases. I want to see all poverty eradicated. Apart from a few specific war-mongers, who doesn’t want to see the end of all war? I want all life on this planet to thrive. I want to see the best of humankind during my brief presence on this pale blue dot that we are so fortunate enough to inhabit. I want us to live long and prosper.
Humans are capable of solving immense problems and achieving great things, through forging strong values and working together. I am a shill for progress because I want to see what we do next, once the immediate – and entirely solvable – problems like air pollution, poverty, and climate change have been solved.
JUST STOP OIL
JUST START NUCLEAR
With 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, most U.S. households could use a raise. But an arbitrary, one-size-fits-all increase in the minimum wage imposed by lawmakers in Washington would only exacerbate the struggles of these households.
According to a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, proposed legislation to increase the federal minimum wage to $17 per hour by 2029, a jump of 134%, would reduce employment and increase prices, interest rates, and federal deficits.
Any one of these consequences of the so-called Raise the Wage Act of 2023 would be bad news; all four together would add insult to injury for struggling workers and families.
Things like price controls have long been a staple in Argentina, and they've been an absolute disaster (just as they have been in every other country throughout history). Protectionist trade policies have also led to increased prices because of a lack of competition in the market (while allowing the left-wing unions to cash in). Also targeted are landlord policies that have forced owners to allow delinquent tenants to stay while limiting what they could charge for rent.
Of course, because Milei is making some tough choices to save his country that just so happen to clash with left-wing orthodoxy, he's being called a fascist. //
Apparently, one of the hallmarks of fascism is limiting the power of government. Who knew? Of course, that's nonsense. Milei is selling off the state-owned industries because they are failing under government control just as they did in Venezuela and elsewhere. He's selling off government housing and removing rent controls because the current housing market in Argentina was completely warped, making investment nearly impossible.
There is nothing fascist about that. On the contrary, fascism is marked by increased government control of every aspect of society. That control just occurs in a different way than communism, with the latter relying on direct ownership while the former relies on direct control. Anyone claiming that Milei is a fascist is either incredibly ignorant or shamelessly dishonest.