A dispatch from CBS News and the Associated Press reports that the Hispanic Federation and the New York State branch of the NAACP, as well as the Korean-American Grocers Association of New York, are participating in a legal fight against Mayor Bloomberg's ban on sales of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces.
I'm against the soda ban, but I'm also against the use of race-based disparate impact litigation to overturn policies that would be better overturned through the political process. So I'd prefer if the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation withdrew from the court action and instead concentrated on getting a new mayor elected who would overturn the size limit. Nonetheless, the participation of the black and Hispanic groups is a useful reminder that excessive or arbitrary regulation often does have negative effects on small businesses, minority-owned businesses, or poorer consumers who lack the clout to win exceptions to the regulations.
It was divisive -- more divisive than it needed to be. …It was as though the need, say, to preserve Medicare in exactly its present form is a self-evident moral truth, admitting of no legitimate countervailing argument or principled compromise.
Obama repeatedly jabbed Republicans, reminding them who just won the election ... That's fine, I suppose, but almost half the country voted for the other party's candidate, and they're U.S. citizens, too. A little generosity to the losers wouldn't have cost Obama anything, but he offered none.
There wasn't much respect, either. How could there be? If you cast all your policy ideas as moral imperatives, what does that say about people who disagree with you? Obama made it plain he thinks Republicans are not just wrong but morally impaired.
"We conclude that the evidence still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others, and that policymakers need to bear this tradeoff in mind when making decisions about increasing the minimum wage." — Working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2013.
"a proposal by the governor to increase the state's hourly minimum wage to $8.75, from $7.25." — "Cuomo Unveils Proposed State Budget," New York Times, January 22, 2013.
Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the New York City school bus drivers strike:
a more sober look at the overall consequences of this strike indicates that a much more radical cure is needed to deal with the situation…. The only way in which to stop both the disruption of strikes and featherbedding is to return to market principles that allow an employer to refuse to bargain with unions and to hire individual workers on whatever terms are mutually agreeable.
Pray for the best, prepare for the worst. Two scenarios for Obama's second term are outlined in my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), and Newsmax (here).
My impression has always been that Garrison Keillor was a big liberal Democrat, but the opening bit on "A Prairie Home Companion" tonight was something about a wolf targeting a man as prey because the wolf deduced from the Barack Obama bumper sticker on the man's car that he was almost certainly unarmed. The Obama-bumper-sticker-car-driving man tried to negotiate with the wolf, offering an unopened package of tofu from the front seat, and explaining that, as a member of the Sierra Club, the driver was on the wolf's side.
When even Garrison Keillor is making fun of Obama supporters, it's not a good sign for the president.
The governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, is proposing to increase the state's flat-rate income tax to 6.25% from 5.25%, while cutting the state's sales tax to 4.5% from 6.25%, the Boston Globe reports. It seems to net out to a $1.9 billion tax increase on a one-year basis.
I predict that if passed, this plan will be good for New Hampshire and Florida, which have no state income tax. But it's worth thinking about just what the change in incentives would do. It would punish saving, earning (working), and investing more, while encouraging spending and consuming. It's basically the polar opposite of the Yankee virtues of thrift and industry that Massachusetts originally prospered on.
NPR has an article from its "partner" Global Post about the "deep economic divide" between Greenwich, Connecticut and Bridgeport, Connecticut. It reads like something from Pravda back during the Cold War:
The distance between these two places is not much, about 20 miles, but the gulf that separates them often seems too great to navigate for many residents on both sides of the divide. The vastly different experience of growing up in either cannot be exaggerated. Bridgeport, with its dilapidated factories and graffiti-scarred public housing projects, is a world away from the half-dozen other affluent communities that line the Connecticut shoreline between them, such as Westport and New Canaan.
But the affluent enclave of Greenwich tops them all. Swimming in the wealth extracted from Wall Street, the hedge fund and private equity groups nestled in the downtown business districts anchor communities centered around lavish country clubs, colonial mansions and public schools that send dozens of children to the Ivy League each year.
Holman Jenkins Jr. has a column in the Wall Street Journal about solar energy: "Exchange-traded indexes of solar shares are up 60% since Election Day....Mr. Obama's new Treasury chief will be Jack Lew, once a K Street lawyer for alternative energy interests. Obama supporter Warren Buffett, meanwhile, has suddenly emerged as America's second biggest solar operator....The political networks here consist of owners who aren't in business to risk capital on technological advances, but to extract cash from political favoritism."
Keith Hennessey writes that President Obama "is afraid of getting jammed by small short-term debt limit increases (as I have recommended). Really afraid. This path would keep fiscal issues front-and-center when he wants to punt them, and it would force him to pay a price every few months. Just as in 2011 his top priority was to get a debt limit increase that lasted past the election so he would not have to negotiate again, his top priority is to make certain he isn't forced to do this often. The primary leverage Congressional Republicans have on this bill is the size and duration of an increase, not the ability to deny any increase. The President will pay to do this infrequently."
The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib has a column previewing President Obama's second term based on "conversations with those in the Obama world." Mr. Seib writes that in addition to work on energy and immigration, the president plans "a new assault on income inequality." The vehicle would be "a broad overhaul of the American tax code to make it more efficient and more progressive at the same time, through a combination of flatter tax rates for all and fewer exemptions and loopholes at the top." I don't quite follow how a tax code can be both "more progressive" and "flatter" at the same time (I suppose the flattening would be less than the loophole-reducing), but the key point to remember is that Obama and his allies aren't satisfied with an assault on poverty, and they aren't satisfied with a tax code that merely raises the required revenues for the necessary work of government. They instead see the tax code as a way to rectify income inequality by redistributing income from the upper income earners to the lower income earners. A lot of the administration's tax moves that are not comprehensible in terms of deficit-reduction or growth-promotion or simplification all of a sudden start to make sense in a framework in which reducing income inequality is an end goal.
Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about a lawsuit by "a group of determined small government libertarians" who want to opt out of Medicare, but who don't want to lose their Social Security benefits as punishment.
The Los Angeles Times asked Rupert Murdoch about his desire to acquire that newspaper and got Mr. Murdoch's response: "It won't get through with the Democratic administration in place."
The newspaper explains further:
Murdoch was alluding to federal regulations that seek to limit media consolidation. A Federal Communications Commission rule adopted in 1975 bars the same company from owning newspapers and television stations in the same market. News Corp. owns two television stations in Los Angeles: KTTV-TV Channel 11 and KCOP-TV Channel 13. Adding the L.A. Times to the portfolio would put Murdoch in violation of the cross-ownership rules....
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, has an op-ed in USA Today about the debt ceiling:
Before we consider raising the debt limit, the American people deserve a real debate about how to ensure we don't have to keep raising it. The mountain of debt we are accumulating is mortgaging our children's future.
Without real spending cuts, future generations will be weighed down by high interest payments on our debt and won't be able to afford basic government functions, such as a strong national defense and social safety-net programs.
That is why any future increase in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by real spending cuts and reforms to unsustainable entitlement programs.
President Obama should view this not as a political nuisance, but as a real chance to adopt a plan that solves our debt problem and builds a stronger middle class.
America is approaching the point where the government employee unions are so powerful that even the liberals like Mayor Bloomberg think it's getting out of control. That's the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Newsmax (here) or Reason (here). And just for fun, here is the particularly nasty union-sponsored YouTube video with the claim that rich people "love their money more than anything in the whole world." The video, mentioned in the column, is on the home page of the New York City school bus drivers union that is scheduled to strike tomorrow. It really has to be seen to be believed.
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