by Tevi Troy, Commentary2025.
Fragments:
The Obama team held a series of internal meetings to discuss what to do after losing the Senate supermajority. Most aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, suggested they would work with Republicans at this point on a “skinny” compromise plan that Pelosi derisively called “child care.” Pelosi told Obama, “We are in the majority. We will never have a better majority in terms of numbers in your presidency than we have now. We can make this work.”
Obama sided with Pelosi. He told his team, “We are so close to the top of the mountain. We have to try again.” Democrats doubled down on their commitment to the partisan approach — and began the process of crippling the effectiveness of governance in Washington for a generation.
And:
By excluding the input and oversight of the vast majority of the country’s elected representatives, the bill turned the American system inside out. The legislation would rely on the administrative state to write and implement much of Obamacare’s policy details. For example, the law contains more than 1,000 mentions of the phrase “the Secretary shall” – the Secretary in this case being the unelected head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In other words, to avoid negotiations and controversy, the authors in Congress effectively took power away from Congress and gave it to the executive branch bureaucracy. This transfer of responsibility from Congress to administrative agencies would have several negative consequences.
This is one of the best articles, perhaps the best article, I have read about how the Obamacare experience has diminished the role of Congress, not only for Obamacare, but also in the long run. The entire piece, which is very well written, is worth reading.
HT2 Don Boudreaux.
by Adam N. Michel, Cato at FreedomJanuary 21, 2025.
Extract:
President Donald Trump issued a series of Executive Orders (EOs) on January 20, his first day in office. One of the orders government officials have given orders to do so “inform the OECD of this [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] that any commitments made by the previous administration on behalf of the United States regarding the Global Tax Deal have no force or effect within the United States. The notice is a welcome relief from Biden’s Treasury Department ruthless advocacy for a global tax system that would raise taxes on American companies and depress investment.
Here’s what I wrote about the issue in 2009. Forbes called it: “Will Obama and Gordon Brown Set Up a Tax Cartel?,” ForbesMay 2, 2009.
And while they’re at it, they can discuss a global tax cartel. Several European governments want to “harmonize” taxation, their euphemism for agreeing to keep tax rates high so that high-income workers and investors have less incentive to seek out countries with low tax rates. This high-tax strategy is hampered by small countries, often former British colonies, that have the audacity to keep tax rates low. In recent years, the OECD has strongly pushed to blacklist such countries, with the idea of imposing sanctions on them. In their book, Global tax competitionEconomists Chris Edwards and Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute write that Gordon Brown “has a long track record of undermining the interests of the British areas blacklisted by the OECD.”
Edwards and Mitchell also point out that in 2000, when he was President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers claimed that tax competition between governments was “the dark side of international capital mobility.” Fortunately, with the Clinton administration at its end, Summers made little effort to support the OECD’s anti-tax competition agenda. But now Summers is President Obama’s chief economic adviser. If you think Summers has forgotten his schedule, that’s not the case. In an article published in JanuarySummers and co-author James Hines recognized that the increasingly global economy is making people and capital more mobile and will therefore make governments reluctant to raise corporate and individual tax rates. But they have found a way around this problem: reducing tax competition between countries.
by Richard Hanania, Newsletter from Richard HananiaJanuary 21, 2025.
Extract:
There are few things that pro-abundance agenda types hate more than the overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires mountains of paperwork and years of lawsuits before federally and federally funded projects can be built if they are expected to they will have a substantial impact on the environment. Here’s one article about how bad things have gotten. Groups filed lawsuits demanding more paperwork, even though they have no interest in what the resulting reports actually show. The whole point is delay and making building things harder and more expensive.
The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) was created to oversee NEPA and ensure agency compliance and coordinate efforts across the federal government. Section 5 of Trump’s major energy EO is called “Unleashing Energy Dominance,” in which the president directs the CEQ to focus on revising NEPA regulations to expedite the permitting process. Agencies should emphasize speed and certainty in issuing permits over other considerations. They are also intended to limit environmental considerations to legal requirements, and remove additional elements that cause delays. This is important because most out-of-control laws don’t actually require that much in the underlying legislation. Rather, their mandate is ultimately expanded by actions of courts and the executive branch. The new executive order has the potential to scale back environmental review by narrowing the scope of impact assessments and accelerating timelines for project approvals.
by Katarina Hall, RodeJanuary 21, 2025.
Extract:
In a major effort to overhaul Argentina’s food trade policy, Javier Milei’s government on Monday officially deregulated food imports and exports. The reform, described in Decree 35/2025aims to stimulate foreign trade, reduce red tape and lower consumer prices.
Federico Sturzenegger, head of the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, explained in a post on
Under the new policy, food products and packaging certified by countries with “high sanitary oversight” can now enter Argentina without additional registration or approval processes. These items are automatically recognized under the Argentine Food Code, reducing administrative delays and costs for importers.
The legislation identifies countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, as well as the European Union, with comparable or higher sanitary standards than Argentina.
I have long advocated doing the same thing with drug approval: requiring the FDA to approve a drug if one of the countries listed above has done so. This would occasionally shave years off the approval process and save lives.
by Timothy Taylor, Conversable economistJanuary 23, 2025.
Extract:
First, here is a graph showing manufacturing jobs as a percentage of total US employment since 1939. There is a boom and bust in manufacturing jobs, looking at World War II manufacturing, but after that the line declines steadily until about the last ten years. In particular, the share of manufacturing employment is declining well before the forces of globalization take hold in the 1970s or 1980s, and well before China joins the World Trade Organization and enters the global markets that were in place in the early 2000s. A similar pattern of decline in the share of manufacturing jobs holds true around the world. The main underlying factors in recent decades appear to be steadily growing productivity in the manufacturing sector (think automation and robotics, along with just-in-time inventory), along with a general shift towards an economy more focused on services than goods is focused. These productivity gains leveled off for a few years after the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and the decline in the share of U.S. manufacturing jobs slowed accordingly for a few years. But lower productivity growth is not a path to future prosperity.
Don Boudreaux often points this out, as do I when I give lectures.