Still Not Tired

MORE WINNING: Germans Fear Huge Loss of Jobs from U.S. Tax Cuts

German economists are warning that the tax overhaul bill that now awaits the signature of President Donald Trump will mean that “significant amounts of new investment and jobs will shift from Europe to the United States,” according to the German business news publication Handelsblatt.

The United States has had a much higher tax rate for businesses than Germany and most of Europe. Under the tax reform bill, the corporate rate in the U.S. will fall to 21 percent, lower than the estimated 28.2 percent effective rate in Germany and close to the European average of 20.9 percent.

The proper tax rate for business is zero. Taxing business is surreptitious taxation of individuals, because business just increases retail price by the amount of their taxation. So the consumer pays, the unemployed pay, the economy pays and foreign imports gain.

The consumer pays the business tax, the freight fuel tax, all the regulatory fees and other government obstructions, PLUS the consumer pays his own income tax and until today had to pay a health insurance tax as well.

The tax bill reduces the cost of goods sold (COGS) to consumers, increases growth potential for businesses of all types, encourages business to stay and expand in the USA.

Just like Trump promised.

The Left has shifted into Hyper-Lying about the contents of the tax bill and its effects. They are terrified of losing even more of the middle class voters to the reality of rational governing. The Post-Truth Left depends purely on emotion, hence the emotional breakdowns of Pelosi and Schumer the past few days.

And Not Just HIS Job

Pizza shop worker loves Seattle’s new $15 minimum wage, until he finds out that it cost him his job

Pizza shop worker Devin Jeran was excited about the raise that was coming his way thanks to Seattle’s new $15 an hour minimum wage law. Or at least he was until he found out that it would cost him his job.

Jeran will only see a bigger paycheck until August when his boss has to shut down her Z Pizza location, putting him and his 11 co-workers out of work, Q13 Fox reported.

He said that while the law was being discussed all he heard about was how the mandatory minimum wage increase would make life better for him, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“If that’s the truth, I don’t think that’s very apparent. People like me are finding themselves in a tougher situation than ever,” he told the TV station.

Owner Ritu Shah Burnham said she just can’t afford the city’s mandated wage hikes.

“I’ve let one person go since April 1, I’ve cut hours since April 1, I’ve taken them myself because I don’t pay myself,” she told Q13. “I’ve also raised my prices a little bit, there’s no other way to do it.”

Small businesses in Seattle have up to six more years to phase in the new $15 an hour minimum wage, but even though she only has 12 employees, Z pizza counts as part of a “large business franchise.” As a result, she is on a sped up timeline to implement the full raise.

“I know that I would have stayed here if I had 7 years, just like everyone else, if I had an even playing field,” she said. “The discrimination I’m feeling right now against my small business makes me not want to stay and do anything in Seattle.”

Shah Burnham said that she is “terrified” for her employees after she closes up shop.

“I have no idea where they’re going to find jobs, because if I’m cutting hours, I imagine everyone is across the board,” she said.

The organization that pushed for the higher minimum wage, 15 Now Seattle, wouldn’t comment directly on the closing to Q13 and didn’t offer any sign of sympathy.

“Restaurants open and close all the time, for various reasons,” Director Jess Spear said.

It's never their fault. Never. But in this case, economics is non-compressible: it can't be forced into the Leftist lie, unlike people.

'Nother Day at the Treasury...

Treasury Department burning through cash as debt ceiling approaches

Don't Worry, Be Happy - just print more money, no sweat. It's not like it's backed by anything, say gold or mud. Ship all that paper over to China, then inflate the value right out of it. That's what the founding fathers did after the Revolution, right? [note 1]

Notes:
1. Right.

Why Free Range Capitalism is Organic

A Hippie Discovers Economics, And You’ll Never Guess What Happens Next!

This is funny - go there for the full effect.

"I, Pencil" and Economic Freedom

Creationists of the Secular Kind

"“Secular theists” — economist Don Boudreaux’s term — produce governments gripped by the fatal conceit that they are wiser than society’s spontaneous experimental order. Such governments’ imposed order suffocates improvisation and innovation. Like religious creationists gazing upon biological complexity, secular theists assume that social complexity requires an intentional design imposed from on high by wise designers, aka them.

In The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, Matt Ridley refutes the secular creationists’ fallacious idea that because social complexity is the result of human actions, it must, or should, be the result of human design. In fact, Ridley says, “Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organizing, self-changing place.”

...

"Ridley applies to everything the perspective of Leonard E. Read’s famous 1958 essay “I, Pencil.” In it a pencil explains that “I am a mystery” because not a single person knows how to make me. The seemingly simple pencil is wood harvested by loggers using saws and ropes made elsewhere, wood transported by trucks and trains made by many thousands of people, to mills where machines — the products of ore mined by thousands and steel mills staffed by thousands more — prepare the wood to receive graphite mined abroad and the eraser from foreign rubber, held in place by aluminum mined somewhere and smelted somewhere else, before lacquer (castor beans and other ingredients) is applied, and . . .

Behind a pencil stand millions of cooperating people, but no mastermind. Which is why worshipers in the church of government, the source of top-down authority, disparage a free society’s genius for spontaneous order: It limits the importance of government and other supposed possessors of the expertise that supposedly is essential for imposing order from above.

No one, writes Ridley, anticipated that when Gutenberg made printed books affordable, increased literacy would create a market for spectacles, which would lead to improved lenses and the invention of telescopes, which would produce the discovery that the Earth orbits the sun. No one planned that one particular book’s argument for the fecundity of freedom would bolster the case for limited government the way Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations did when published in 1776."

The totalitarians are not creative, not engineers, not entrepreneurs, not even intelligent. What they are is arrogant, self-worshipping, Atheist, intellectual deviates.

And there is this:

The Godfather of American Liberalism

"Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But [H.G.] Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

But if these people were leading the world on the path to hell, there were also the redeemers, the “New Republicans,” the “capable men” of vision who might own the future. These scientist-poets and engineers could, Wells thought, redirect the Darwinian struggle away from a descent into savagery and toward a new and higher ground. Building on the social and sexual ideals of nineteenth-century utopian reformers, Wells generated a complete cosmology, a scientific socialism to compete with Marxism, which, he thought, reduced the complexities of life to simpleminded slogans of class war. Outflanking the Marxists on their own ground, he called for a different kind of struggle, a “revolt of the competent” against the confines of conventional middle-class morality."

Wells was a story teller who wanted a real life story of his own design to "come true". But it already was coming True in Russia; all he had to do was to look and observe the "elites" in action, as they slaughtered their way to power and they implemented foolish and stupid programs which never, ever produced economic security. Today's Prog/lib/Leftists are similarly ignorant of history. Ignorance is an essential element of arrogance.

More Bad Science "Fact" Bites The Dirt

If you can call economics a science. But it is used for political policy.

From the Kaus Files:

Mariel, Farewell?

"The law of supply and demand suggests that an increase in immigrant labor will lower wages. That’s what opponents of increased immigration (including opponents of Rubio-style “comprehensive” reform) say. For decades, the major bit of discordant data has been Prof. David Card’s study of the Mariel boatlift — a “natural experiment” in which 125,000 Cubans landed in Miami in 1980. Did they suppress local wages? Card found that they didn’t — a counterintuitive finding often cited in surveys of the academic debate on immigration, such as this New York Times Magazine article

Card documented that blacks, and also other workers, in Miami actually did better than in the control cities. …

Not so fast! Prof. George Borjas, whose work tends to uphold the conventional supply-demand view, has just gone back and reexamined the Mariel data, looking specificially at what happened to less-skilled workers (high school dropouts). It turns out they took a beating!

The absolute wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, as did the wage of high school dropouts relative to that of either high school graduates or college graduates. The drop in the relative wage of the least educated Miamians was substantial (10 to 30 percent). … [E.A.]

Card may have missed this because he lumped high school dropouts in with high school graduates, whose wage was unaffected. (At least 60% of the Marielitos were in the lowest skilled, high-school dropout group.)

Borjas also compares Miami’s experience with cities that had similar growth patterns before the Mariel labor “supply shock” (as opposed to Card’s “control” cities, which were chosen partly because they had similar growth patterns after the shock). Borjas finds “the relative decline in the wage of low-educated workers in Miami is much larger when we compare Miami to cities that had comparable employment growth.” It makes sense that if wages in Miami went down, but you compare Miami only with cities where wages also went down, you’ might miss some of the relative Miami decline.

In both academic and political terms, this is a BFD. It looks like the law of supply and demand works. More immigrant workers translates into lower wages. The most conspicuous, unassailable finding to the contrary has apparently just been demolished. A major prop in the arguments for greater low-skilled immigration (including arguments for amnesty) –‘What about Mariel?’ — would seem to have disappeared, though the other side has yet to be heard from. (And they will be heard from.) Borjas’ study only just went public."

Card compared apples to oranges and got wrong answers. That is the problem in using science - unreplicated and untested for falsification - as political policy. The law of Supply and Demand goes directly and diametrically opposite to Marxist, top down control of everything. The Left will wail and flail at this falsification of "the failure of Supply and Demand economics" in massive immigration influx conditions.

Actual fact: it did and it will affect black Americans and poor people.

Does the Left really care about blacks and the poor? We'll see.