• About
  • Contact
  • Editorial
  • Policies
  • Archives
Angry Bear
Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.
  • US/Global Economics
  • Taxes/regulation
  • Healthcare
  • Law
  • Politics
  • Climate Change
  • Social Security
  • Hot Topics
« Back

Open thread Oct. 29, 2021

Dan Crawford | October 29, 2021 5:31 am

Comments (20) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
20 Comments
  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    October 29, 2021 at 7:55 am

    Climate Change Became the Largest Part of Biden Spending Bill

    As paid family leave and other priorities were taken out of the president’s plan, the largest piece became a $555 billion plan to fight climate change.

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    October 29, 2021 at 7:58 am

    Climate Change Became the Largest Part of Biden Spending Bill

    As paid family leave and other priorities were taken out of
    the president’s plan, the largest piece became a $555
    billion plan to fight climate change.

    (NYT link won’t post.)

    Climate has emerged as the single largest category in President Biden’s new framework for a huge spending bill, placing global warming at the center of his party’s domestic agenda in a way that was hard to imagine just a few years ago.

    As the bill was pared down from $3.5 trillion to $1.85 trillion, paid family leave, free community college, lower prescription drugs for seniors and other Democratic priorities were dropped — casualties of negotiations between progressives and moderates in the party. But $555 billion in climate programs remained. …

    • Fred C. Dobbs says:
      October 29, 2021 at 8:02 am

      (Ok, so the link did post.)

      …

      It was unclear on Thursday if all Democrats will support the package, which will be necessary if it is to pass without Republican support in a closely divided Congress. Progressive Democrats in the House and two pivotal moderates in the Senate, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, did not explicitly endorse the president’s framework. But Mr. Biden expressed confidence that a deal was in sight.

      If enacted, it would be the largest action ever taken by the United States to address climate change. And it would enshrine climate action in law, making it harder to be reversed by a future president.

      In remarks Thursday, Mr. Biden called it “the most significant investment to deal with the climate crisis that ever happened, beyond any other advanced nation in the world.”

      The centerpiece of the climate spending is $300 billion in tax incentives for producers and purchasers of wind, solar and nuclear power, inducements intended to speed up a transition away from oil, gas and coal. Buyers of electric vehicles would also benefit, receiving up to $12,500 in tax credits — depending on what portion of the vehicle parts were made in America. …

       

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    October 30, 2021 at 8:06 am

    America is broken, and only Josh Hawley can fix it.

    (paraphrasing Donald Trump from 2016.)

    The Only Way to Solve Our Supply Chain Crisis Is to Rethink Trade

    (starting with our Supply Chain.)

    America is mired in a supply chain crisis. Imports are slow to arrive, items on store shelves are becoming more scarce, and prices are rising. President Biden’s reckless spending policy is the immediate cause of these higher prices, but the problems have been brewing for decades. Now we must change course. We can rebuild what made this nation great in the first place by making things in America again. …

    … America is a strong nation. We should start acting like one. While distribution problems are a factor right now in the crisis, structural reforms are imperative to reassert our economic independence. We need to fundamentally restructure our country’s trade policy and decouple our security and safety from the profit-seeking of multinational corporations. I’m proposing new legislation to take a big first step: the Make in America to Sell in America Act. …

     

     

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    October 30, 2021 at 8:08 am

    Under this plan, officials at the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense will identify goods and inputs they determine to be critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base. These goods would then become subject to a new local content requirement: If companies want access to the American market for these critical and essential goods, then over 50 percent of the value of those goods they sell in America must be made in America. Companies will have three years to comply, and can receive targeted, temporary waivers if they need more time to reshore production. In effect, the legislation applies the domestic sourcing principles of the Buy American Act — a law that governs federal government procurement — to the entire commercial market.

    When it comes to our most critical goods, this “majority-made” standard is just common sense and harder to game than more complicated rules. And the requirements of this standard will be enforced with a compliance mechanism that closely mirrors one of the nation’s oldest trade remedy regimes: anti-dumping. Under my proposal, domestic producers can petition the U.S. International Trade Commission if they suspect that corporations or importers have violated the local content requirement, and the secretary of commerce can take enforcement actions such as civil penalties following an investigation to ensure the new standards are met. …

    • Fred C. Dobbs says:
      October 30, 2021 at 8:16 am

      Indeed, under the plan proposed by the junior GOP

      senator from Missouri, it will be up to tight regulation

      from the ever vigilant Dept of Commerce ably assisted

      by the Pentagon to finally put things right in America.

      One can imagine his GOP colleagues getting behind

      this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious idea right after

      they get Biden out of office. Unless he is just Joshing US.

      • Fred C. Dobbs says:
        October 30, 2021 at 8:47 am

        GOP must make things all good

        with the Commerce Department

        after Rick Perry slighted it back

        in the day…

        Back in 2011, during the GOP presidential primary, Rick Perry spoke during a debate and tried to list the three federal agencies he’d abolish if elected to the White House.

        “And I will tell you,” Perry said, “it is three agencies of government when I get there that are gone. Commerce, Education, and the … what’s the third one there? Let’s see.” …

        ‘Um. Err, I think it was the Department of Commerce.’

        • Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
          October 31, 2021 at 11:11 am

          If Rick Perry abolished the Department of Commerce twice, then would that be the same as a double negative in that Perry would not actually abolish the Department of Commerce at all and just do away with the Department of Education?

          • Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
            October 31, 2021 at 11:13 am

            BTW, the agency that Perry infamously forgot that he had intended to abolish was the Department of Energy.

          • Fred C. Dobbs says:
            October 31, 2021 at 11:42 am

            Since Rick Perry ended up as Trump’s

            Energy secretary, apparently he forgot

            that he was going to abolish the department.

            (I don’t think the double-negative rule

            applies in this case.)

          • Fred C. Dobbs says:
            October 31, 2021 at 11:53 am

            Though probably, Rick Perry being

            from Texas, he might have decided

            that as Energy secretary he was also

            empowered to disband the Commerce

            department, that being within the

            purview of Cabinet secretaries.

            But he forgot.

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    October 31, 2021 at 11:38 am

    A Halloween story from the NYT.

    Why the Vampire Myth Won’t Die

    Bloodsucking monsters are avatars for our cultural anxieties. Especially now. …

    • Fred C. Dobbs says:
      October 31, 2021 at 11:46 am

      Have you heard that the Covid vaccine turns you into a vampiric monster — and that the proof is right there in the 2007 Will Smith movie “I Am Legend”?

      This conspiracy theory appeared online last year and spread so widely that Reuters actually ran a fact check debunking it (and clarifying the plot). One of the screenwriters of the movie also felt compelled to tweet that it was fictional.

      While such ludicrous disinformation may seem peculiar to the social media era, it’s also a throwback to the origins of our most famous monster.

      No, the first vampires did not appear in books or movies. They weren’t debonair Transylvanian counts or good-looking, disaffected teenagers. Rooted in folklore, they were symbols of epidemics — and a plausible explanation for disease, at least for the time.

      Some of the earliest accounts date back to 11th- and 12th-century Europe when outbreaks of tuberculosis, rabies and other diseases were blamed, in part, on vampires.

      William of Newburgh, a medieval English historian, recorded one account of a town devastated by such a monster, who was accused of filling “every house with disease and death by its pestiferous breath.”

      The offending creature, which came out of his grave at night, was eventually dug up and stabbed by two brothers “who had lost their father by this plague,” Newburgh wrote. Blood flowed out of the monster as if it were a “leech filled with the blood of many persons”; with the monster defeated, “the pestilence which was rife among the people ceased.”

      If such scapegoating sounds unlikely, consider life during those medically primitive times. People would die of disease. Then their loved ones would be exposed to them before they were buried, causing more sickness and death. Because of the incubation period of certain diseases and the ignorance about how microscopic viruses traveled, no one could understand the slow-moving catastrophe.

      “When people lack science to explain things, they rely on magic and religion,” said Stanley Stepanic, an assistant professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Virginia who teaches a popular course on “Dracula.” “When there was a void in knowledge about disease, the vampire filled in.” …

      The most influential vampire novel after “Dracula” is Richard Matheson’s 1954 book “I Am Legend,” the movie version of which became the subject of those recent anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.

      The story focuses on the last man on Earth after a pandemic spreading airborne disease wipes out humanity, replacing some people with vampires. The cause was not a vaccine; it was an attempt to cure cancer, gone wrong. …

      Joe Dante, a veteran horror director, speculated that we have so much more to be scared of today than in recent years, both politically and medically, that “it may be difficult to go back to the purely supernatural approach.” But Larry Fessenden, who starred and directed in one of the best vampire movies of the 1990s, the intimate New York indie “Habit,” sees new opportunities for horror.

      “The pandemic has heightened our fear of each other, of infection and contagion, invisible droplets delivering a cataclysmic blow to our physical beings, leading in turn to an atmosphere of deep mistrust and isolation,” he wrote in an email. “And always, there will be those who don’t believe the monster even exists. I think a wave of vampire stories that captures a claustrophobic preoccupation with death and paranoia may be filling our screens next.”

       

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    October 31, 2021 at 1:47 pm

    A Global Tax Deal Is at Hand. Here’s How It Would Work.

    President Biden will sign on to an international pact aimed at ending profit-shifting by large companies. Here’s a look at what it means.

     

    • Fred C. Dobbs says:
      October 31, 2021 at 1:49 pm

      Leaders of the Group of 20 nations are set to sign off on the most sweeping overhaul of the international tax system in a century when they gather in Rome this weekend, ushering in a 15 percent global minimum tax and changes to how governments can impose levies on large, profitable multinational companies.

      The agreement is the result of years of sputtering international negotiations that gathered pace this year when the Biden administration took office. When the pact is fully enacted, most likely by 2023, it could have significant implications for the global economy, corporate investment and government coffers.

      Some details will continue to be refined in the coming months. But tax experts and officials around the world have hailed the agreement as an achievement that will reverse decades of a “race to the bottom” in corporate taxation that have deprived nations of revenue as companies sought low-tax jurisdictions for their headquarters.

      • Fred C. Dobbs says:
        October 31, 2021 at 1:54 pm

        Here’s a look at how the deal will work.

        A 15 percent global minimum tax

        The most prominent feature of the deal is the 15 percent global minimum tax, which is expected to be enacted by each country that has agreed to the deal. That rate will apply to multinational corporations with annual revenues of more than $867 million. The idea is to discourage companies from being able to avoid paying taxes by finding havens with low rates. Companies that do park money in a country that is not part of the deal would be required to pay the difference between that nation’s rate and the 15 percent minimum rate to their home country. …

        Pay where you play

        Another crucial part of the agreement involves a shift in how governments can tax companies in the digital era. Taxes have traditionally depended on where a company operates, but the deal will update rules for the 21st century and allow countries to levy taxes on some large and profitable companies based on where their goods and services are sold.

        The agreement was a response to an attempt by European countries to impose digital services taxes on American technology giants such as Google and Facebook, which operate all over the world, even if they do not have a physical presence in every country. Those taxes prompted the United States to threaten retaliatory tariffs. …

        American companies are expected to bear the brunt of this new policy. Treasury Department officials contend that, on balance, the United States will gain about as much tax revenue as it loses once the plan is enacted. However, some analysts predict that the United States would be a net loser. 
        The money at stake

        The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that the agreement will raise $150 billion a year globally from companies that have parked their operations in low-tax nations, avoiding a higher tax bill.

        The Biden administration hopes that the agreement will make American companies more competitive globally while reducing incentives for them to move jobs abroad.

        The White House estimates that the changes it is making to the international side of the tax code will raise $350 billion in revenue over a decade as American companies are forced to pay higher taxes on profits they earn abroad and are more likely to invest in operations in the United States.

        What’s next

        In some respects, reaching the agreement was the easy part. Now 136 countries must enact it. That will be easier in some countries than others.

        It could be most challenging in the United States, which took a leading role in brokering the deal this year. Democrats are likely to be able to make the required changes to comply with the new minimum rate in the tax and social welfare package that they hope to pass next month. …

         

        • Fred C. Dobbs says:
          November 1, 2021 at 12:39 am

          Hmmm. Remember when Wilson went to Versailles

          after WW1 and instituted the League of Nations, which

          the US Senate refused to ratify. One can see that

          happening again, totally.

          • Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
            November 1, 2021 at 6:19 am

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace

             

            “The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) is a book written and published by the British economist John Maynard Keynes.[1] After the First World War, Keynes attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as a delegate of the British Treasury. In his book, he argued for a much more generous peace, not out of a desire for justice or fairness – these are aspects of the peace that Keynes does not deal with – but for the sake of the economic well-being of all of Europe, including the Allied Powers, which the Treaty of Versailles and its associated treaties would prevent.

            The book was a best-seller throughout the world and was critical in establishing a general opinion that the treaties were a “Carthaginian peace” designed to crush the defeated Central Powers, especially Germany. It helped to consolidate American public opinion against the treaties and against joining the League of Nations. The perception by much of the British public that Germany had been treated unfairly was, in turn, a crucial factor in later public support for the appeasement of Hitler…”

             

            *

             

            [Go Woodie!]

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    November 1, 2021 at 11:33 am

    The Republican Party controlled the United States Senate after the election of 1918, but the Senators were divided into multiple positions on the Versailles question. It proved possible to build a majority coalition, but impossible to build a two thirds coalition that was needed to pass a treaty. One block of Democrats strongly supported the Versailles Treaty. A second group of Democrats supported the Treaty but followed President Woodrow Wilson in opposing any amendments or reservations. The largest block, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, comprised a majority of the Republicans. They wanted a treaty with reservations, especially on Article 10, which involved the power of the League of Nations to make war without a vote by the United States Congress. The closest the Treaty came to passage, came in mid-November 1919, was when Lodge and his Republicans formed a coalition with the pro-Treaty Democrats, and were close to a two-thirds majority for a Treaty with reservations, but Wilson rejected this compromise and enough Democrats followed his lead to permanently end the chances for ratification. …

    ‘Irreconcilables’

    (Apparently, no one in the Senate was concerned about onerous penalties levied on Germany for starting WW1 imposed by the Treat of Versailles. They should have.

    It is said that the treaty was not ratified because of a feud between Wilson & Lodge.)

  • Fred C. Dobbs says:
    November 1, 2021 at 12:19 pm

    Climate Change Is ‘Ravaging the World,’ Biden Tells Summit 

     

    • António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, opened the conference with
    • a blistering critique of the world’s failure to unite to address global warming.
    • President Biden urged tougher action on emissions but did not announce new US pledges or call out China’s absence at COP26. 

    ‘Digging our own graves’: With the planet in peril, leaders call for urgent action

    With humanity already struggling to cope with rising seas, more powerful storms, deadly heat waves and rapidly changing ecosystems needed to sustain life, the global climate summit in Glasgow opened on Monday with a series of speeches that amounted to desperate pleas for action from nations large and small.

    “Climate change is already ravaging the world,” President Biden said in a speech at the summit, known as COP26, on Monday afternoon. But even while global warming is causing widespread economic damage and upending lives, he said this was also a moment of opportunity to reshape the way humans live in better harmony with nature.

    “We are standing at an inflection point in world history,” he said, calling climate change an “existential threat to human existence as we know it.”

    “None of us can escape the worst that is yet to come if we fail to seize this moment,” he said.

    Underscoring the urgency of the moment, with leaders of more than 120 countries gathered for the summit, the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said that the effects of a warming planet were being felt “from the ocean depths to the mountaintops.”

    “Sea level rise has doubled from 30 years ago,” he said. Oceans are hotter than ever, parts of the Amazon rain forest emit more carbon than they absorb, and in the last decade about four billion people were affected by events related to the changing climate.

    “Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper,” Mr. Guterres said. “We are digging our own graves.” …

Featured Stories

Index of leading indicators says recession almost certain; so what of the coincident indicators?

NewDealdemocrat

Extending Capital to Nature, Reducing Nature to Capital

Peter Dorman

Trump and the debt ceiling

Eric Kramer

And the King of Coincident Indicators rolls over

NewDealdemocrat

Contributors

Dan Crawford
Robert Waldmann
Barkley Rosser
Eric Kramer
ProGrowth Liberal
Daniel Becker
Ken Houghton
Linda Beale
Mike Kimel
Steve Roth
Michael Smith
Bill Haskell
NewDealdemocrat
Ken Melvin
Sandwichman
Peter Dorman
Kenneth Thomas
Bruce Webb
Rebecca Wilder
Spencer England
Beverly Mann
Joel Eissenberg

Subscribe

Blogs of note

    • Naked Capitalism
    • Atrios (Eschaton)
    • Crooks and Liars
    • Wash. Monthly
    • CEPR
    • Econospeak
    • EPI
    • Hullabaloo
    • Talking Points
    • Calculated Risk
    • Infidel753
    • ACA Signups
    • The one-handed economist
Angry Bear
Copyright © 2023 Angry Bear Blog

Topics

  • US/Global Economics
  • Taxes/regulation
  • Healthcare
  • Law
  • Politics
  • Climate Change
  • Social Security
  • Hot Topics
  • US/Global Economics
  • Taxes/regulation
  • Healthcare
  • Law
  • Politics
  • Climate Change
  • Social Security
  • Hot Topics

Pages

  • About
  • Contact
  • Editorial
  • Policies
  • Archives