Question 74

Question 74

Is the Taiwan crisis manufactured? Is Pelosi trying to eclipse Biden? Is her trip consistent with the State Department's policy? Is the Chinese response to this photo op reasonable? Was Biden's support of the House Speaker being threatened by a foreign power adequate? Who leaked this trip and why? Is this brinkmanship worth the risk? Is all this being done by the same giant brains that managed the Afghanistan withdrawal and the economic shutdown? This is so stupidly dangerous, was it all choreographed?

A paper tracing incomes from 1960 found that income inequality increased but consumption inequality did not.

Gregg on what happens when the government tries to impose a moral or social vision on an economy (as advocated by Brooks): "And here’s the problem: The more you allow the government to intervene in the economy—whether through regulation, subsidies, tariffs, or industrial policy—to try and, say, diminish wealth differentials, the greater the opportunities for what economists call rent-seeking. This is when an individual or business tries to attain wealth by extracting resources from others (e.g., the government) but without actually doing much by way of economic productivity—in short, without adding value. There’s no reason why government interventions to address some of the wealth differentials and their effects that Brooks laments would not become yet another source of rent-seeking."

Senate voted to hand $66 billion in new subsidies to computer chip manufacturers as part of an overall effort to boost domestic manufacturing of high-end electronics. But the corporate tax increases included in the Inflation Reduction Act would fall most heavily on the manufacturing sector, according to the JCT.
As a result, senators voting for both bills would effectively be voting to hike taxes on the very industries they just voted to subsidize.--boehm

Apparently, consistency is not a requirement of good government.

The rise of the newspapers was itself an aspect of the explosion in publishing which took place in the mid-seventeenth century. In the year 1500 just over fifty books were printed in England, in 1600 the number was 300, come 1648 more than 2,300 titles poured off the presses in a single year. Perhaps 30 percent of all men and 10 per cent of all women could read, and over double those percentages in the capital, a readership now offered an addictive weekly news fix that involved them as never before in the turbulent goings on of their kingdom.-- Keay

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has collected Americans’ financial records in bulk, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
Wyden revealed the existence of a DHS financial surveillance program in a March 8 letter to the department’s inspector general, calling for an investigation into the previously unknown activities.
Wyden said he has recently learned that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)—a law enforcement component of DHS—was operating an “indiscriminate and bulk surveillance program that swept up millions of financial records about Americans.”
“After my staff contacted HSI about the program in January 2022, HSI immediately terminated the program,” Wyden wrote to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari.

But surely it was in a good cause.