“American citizens and firms deal with partners all over the world,” reports Cato adjunct scholar Daniel Griswold. “There is no rational economic reason why Americans should be expected to sell exactly the same value of goods and services to people in a particular foreign nation than they buy from them.”
Trade deficits or surpluses will always occur and will vary by product and from country to country. Keep in mind, you may buy lots of things from Amazon or Whole Foods yet they never buy anything from you. That’s a huge trade deficit on your end. But it does not matter because both parties benefited. The same economic relationship exists on the international level.
Kevin Corinth explains that Kamala Harris’s child-tax-credit plan will punish working families. A slice:
Vice President Kamala Harris recently announced an economic plan for her presidential campaign. A centerpiece is the transformation of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a child allowance. If it became reality, the policy would discourage parental employment and risk harming the long-run prospects of children. These unintended consequences together with the plan’s cost should lead voters to reject it.
The irony is that Mr. Trump is mimicking Barack Obama and his Affordable Care Act, which demanded that insurers offer the federal government’s preferred benefits regardless of expense. The cost of fertility procedures for some will be buried across higher premiums for everyone else. If Mr. Trump forces Affordable Care Act plans to cover IVF, he will encourage more Americans to move to taxpayer subsidized plans from small business offerings that often can’t afford to cover IVF.
Ramesh Ponnuru is understandably skeptical of Kamala Harris’s pronouncements about fracking.
“Don’t buy the scare tactics from Big Oil. California’s clean air policies aren’t the problem—greed is,” according to the video posted by the governor’s office. His main evidence: Oil company profits hit record highs as California gas prices soared.
Yet X’s readers explained the obvious (citing the Los Angeles Times): “State leaders and experts…listed ‘the relative lack of competition’ among refiners, supply constraints of California’s ‘unique clean-burning gasoline,’ and higher state taxes as three of the main points driving up prices. They have found no hard evidence of price gouging.” Oil companies are national, so it really is hard to fathom why greed isn’t a problem in other states.
This shocks progressives, but prices are determined by supply and demand. Every seller tries to get as high of a price as possible, while buyers want the lowest possible price. There is no “gouging” in a competitive market. By the way, I’ve yet to meet even the most progressive person who would willingly sell his home at a price below the going rate. Newsom touted a new state law to help battle price gouging, but his own government policies are the root of the problem.
So why exactly is there so little competition among refiners in California?
First, the state mandates an environmentally friendly formulation, which means we can’t buy gasoline that’s sold in Nevada or Oregon.
Instead of instilling into the new arrivals the culture of the institutions, the institutions accommodated the new arrivals. They dumbed down their curriculum to enable less qualified students to obtain diplomas. They limited free inquiry in order to appease women’s higher levels of emotional sensitivity. And they created the DEI bureaucracy both to employ minority administrators and to put pressure on professors and admissions officers to apply disparate standards to minority students.
Now who’d a-thunk it?: “Covid Relief Money Paid for a Water Park and Luxury Hotels.” A slice:
Most absurd, nearly $2 billion of American Rescue Plan funds were earmarked for nonexistent county governments in Connecticut and Rhode Island. It’s hard to say what’s more embarrassing about this oversight: that so much federal money was allocated to phantom administrations, or that not a single member of Congress did the research to verify whether these county governments existed.
[DBx: While I realize that it’s déclassé to ask the following question to smart and caring people who propose all manner of new ways for the government to run our lives, I ask the question anyway: What earthly reason is there for anyone to believe that a government that behaves in the way described in this essay is to be trusted with yet more power over our purses and persons?]
