GMU Econ alum Holly Jean Soto busts the myth of “greedflation.”
Scott Lincicome identifies an interesting contrast between the facts and opinion about China.
George Will decries the spinelessness the modern U.S. Congress. A slice:
The incoming president will be able, on a whim, to unilaterally discombobulate international commerce — and the domestic economy — with tariffs. Congress has lost interest in exercising its constitutionally enumerated power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”
Because of such self-diminishing actions by many previous Congresses, the new one is less central to American governance than any of its 118 predecessors. In his 2009 book, “Madison’s Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy,” Peter M. Shane, a constitutional and administrative law scholar at Ohio State University, wrote: “Adopted as an ethos of government, aggressive presidentialism breeds an insularity, defensiveness, and even arrogance within the executive branch that undermines sound decision making, discounts the rule of law, and attenuates the role of authentic deliberation in shaping political outcomes.”
[Gene] Healy thinks all powers conferred by presidential emergency declarations should expire “in a matter of weeks” unless approved by Congress via joint resolutions. Congress might, however, be aghast at being compelled into such complicity in governing.
Robin Williams was acting, but this gentleman isn’t. (HT Steve Hardy)
Jack Nicastro connects the dots between zoning and the raging fires in the Los Angeles area.
The Los Angeles wildfires are awful to behold, and perhaps they are bad enough to cause some rethinking by California’s political class. Instead of trying like Don Quixote to change the climate, they could spend their money on mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change.
Democrats blame the L.A. blazes on the changing climate, which is a convenient excuse as citizens rage against the failures of state and local government. The evidence doesn’t support the climate explanation since (among other reasons) California has had a dry climate and Santa Ana winds, even with hurricane-force gusts on occasion, for centuries. If the Democrats who run the state believe their own advertising, why not spend money in useful ways rather than on a green-energy transition to nowhere?
***
Start with water, which has become a political flashpoint after fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods ran dry. Donald Trump in particular is blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom for scrapping his first-term plan to ease fish protections to let more water flow from the north to farmers and cities in Southern California. He’s half right.
Mr. Trump has a point that Democrats in Sacramento have badly mismanaged water. The state never has enough to go around because much of the Sierra Nevada snowpack—one of the state’s largest natural reservoirs—gets flushed out to the Pacific Ocean rather than stored for dry years.
Farmers received only 50% of their allocation this past year despite two wet winters. Mr. Trump is right that the species protections he cited are largely to blame, and Democrats refuse to take on the environmental lobby.
…..
If fires are going to be more common, then overhauling water systems will be essential. But governments have limited resources and need to set priorities. And California’s politicians—state and local—prefer to spend money on income transfers and green subsidies that buy votes rather than infrastructure that pays off in the future.
Democrats have in particular given priority to reducing CO2 emissions over mitigating the effects of a variable climate. The state’s renewable-energy mandates have forced Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to spend heavily on wind, solar and battery power, at the expense of upgrading its aging power lines that have sparked some of the state’s most catastrophic fires.
Milei has been in office long enough that we are now seeing good results from his 30 percent cut in government spending. One way to test the economists’ claims is to look at the amount of poverty in Argentina. After all, if cutting the size of government makes goods and services less available to the poor, the poverty rate should rise. In the first six months of 2024, after Milei had been in power for only a few months, the poverty rate did rise—from 41.7 percent in the second half of 2023 to 52.9 percent by the end of June 2024. But by the last quarter of 2024, it had fallen to 36.8 percent, five percentage points below the rate in 2023.
