New research from the American Consumer Institute, using FCC and OECD data, finds that U.S. telecoms are charging, on average, ten cents less per minute than their counterparts around the world. Evidence, it seems, of a healthy competitive process.
Tell me again why antitrust authorities are investigating telecoms?
I am slowly being convinced that Obama’s so-called “stimulus” plan is really just a piece of neo-Dadaist performance art. Today’s evidence supporting my theory comes from The Morning Call in Allentown, PA:
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is spending $60,000 of its stimulus money on $2,000 road signs to highlight projects funded by the massive economic recovery package.
The large green signs mark about 30 of what PennDOT calls ”higher visibility projects” statewide. Each denotes the project is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and features the act’s logo.
Nationwide, several million dollars are being spent producing the signs.
Senate Democrats and organized labor leaders are reportedly near a deal on removing the card-check provision from the s0-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). That provision, if enacted, would have made secret ballots in union organizing elections a dead letter.
Naturally, it generated a lot of opposition. Having lost that public opinion battle, Big Labor is now trying to push through the other parts of the bill, including its bindig arbitration provision, which would subject newly unionized companies to the whims of a federally appointed arbitrator — who is unlikely to be knowledgeable about a company’s operations.
Union chiefs and their Congressional allies are still trying to salvage some form of easier organizing method from the old card check provision’s wreckage. As The New York Times reports, “key senators are considering several measures. One would require employers to give union organizers access to company property. Another would bar employers from requiring workers to attend anti-union sessions that labor supporters deride as ‘captive audience meetings.’”
Whatever “compromise” emerges from this round of sausage making, it is almost certain to include binding arbitration as it stands in the current bill. Binding arbitration could impose not only onerous work rules, but millions in new liabilities on companies, including payments into severely underfunded union pension funds.
For the unions that have mishandled those funds, this would constitute an indirect bailout, as more employers are corralled into paying into those funds. Yet no one should expect unions’ management of their pension funds to improve, since they have shown no indication of ending their established pattern of shareholder political activism, which has done nothing for shareholder value.
For more on binding arbitration, see here.
For more on EFCA in general, see here.
Most of us knew that the European Union’s system of farm subsidies, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) gives out huge amounts to farmers in the EU countries. What hasn’t been clear is that a lot of the monies go to businesses only tangentially connected — if at all — with farming.
Now the New York Times has an in-depth article detailing how large sums of CAP money go to such businesses as asphalt manufacturers, and to such people as the Queen of England, Prince Charles and other royal and — very wealthy — individuals.
Here’s some NYT information about the cost of these subsidies:
The E.U. pays out more than half its annual budget, around €53 billion, in farm subsidies, four times as much as the United States. The subsidies cost each European Union citizen around €110 a year, according to the European Commission, a healthy chunk for a family of four. The money is raised from customs duties, sales taxes and a contribution made by each E.U. country based on its wealth.
“Individual families are paying double for their food — one for their higher prices in the stores and then for the taxes that they pay out for subsidies,” said Stefan Tangermann, an agricultural economist.
The article details some of the more far-fetched of the non-farm recipients:
That is how a gravel manufacturer like Arids qualifies for farm subsidies, as did Pasquina, which collected €1.13 million for its new asphalt factory in Spain. The Spanish utility Endesa also was eligible — it received €466,000 for installing electrical connections.
These aren’t just funny stories, but the policy has real economic consequences for taxpayers and the poor in developing countries:
Farm subsidies are a controversial economic tool — a sacred cow for politicians in the United States and Europe. But some economists view them as trade-distorting instruments that hit the pocketbooks of taxpayers and destroy the livelihoods of farmers in some of the world’s poorest countries by prompting Western states to dump surplus food there while also reaping the benefit of subsidies.
Check out CEI’s video on U.S. farm subsidies, “Farming for Dollars.”
This story in the San Francisco Chronicle just shows the insanity of the conventional wisdom these days advanced by greens and anti-corporate farmers. They blame big agriculture for E. coli problems and some propose foolish laws and regulations that will simply create other problems.
Despite claims to the contrary, profits don’t cause microbes. And it’s not big “industry” farming that is the culprit. Small farms and family farmers can have just as much difficulty—if not more–eliminating pathogens.
E. coli just happens. And you can’t stop it. Deer, “wild” pigs, mountain lions, every kind of mouse, rat, ground squirrel, and whatever wild animal can carry virulent microbes. Same with irrigation water. Same with birds flying over the fields. And the barren buffer strips that some have proposed to keep these animals away don’t halt anything; they simply lead to water pollution.
Unfortunately, such foolish “wisdom” undermines good conservation efforts. For example, it discourages conservation at California vineyards. In the past, some have gone out of their way to use tail ponds to collect irrigation and rain water–and any dissolved pollutants–and then pump it back up hill for more irrigation. These tail ponds themselves become wetland habitats. Similarly, vineyards in the Temecula area, Viansa Winery, and others pioneered placing hawk roosting and nesting structures on their property to attract birds of prey to help control rodents, as well as placing nesting boxes for owls and falcons. Yet now the conventional “wisdom” is that such conservation efforts contribute E. Coli and should be dispensed with. In reality, such policies are surely more foolish than wise.
Photo: Escherichia coli bacterium, courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library.
“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation. People, when I say that, look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’ The answer is yes.”
-Vice President Joe Biden
CEI and the Pacific Research Institute recently co-hosted a Capitol Hill briefing on “California’s Meltdown” – the unprecedented combination of flawed economic, energy and environmental policies that have left the state with a massive budget deficit and facing even tougher times ahead.
Our keynote speaker was Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), a first term member of the House of Representatives but a 22-year veteran of the California state legislature. He was introduced by Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell:
After his speech Rep. McClintock took several questions from the audience:
The event continued with a panel discussion moderated by CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr. and featuring commentary by Tom Tanton of the Pacific Research Institute, Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District and Anthony Randazzo of the Reason Foundation:
Fred and the panel also took questions afterward:
The U.S. catfish farming industry. . . faces tough competition from Vietnamese imports, the value of which rose from $2 million in 1998 to $46 million in 2002. . . in 2002, they convinced Congress pass a law forbidding Vietnamese catfish, which is a different species than the one farmed domestically, from being labeled as “catfish. . . American consumers seem to like the relatively inexpensive imports, no matter what they’re called. So, in 2003, the US farmed fish industry secured a punitive tariff of up to 64 percent on the Vietnamese fish.
While the public outrage over eminent domain abuse following the 2005 Kelo ruling has waned to some degree, the controversy surrounding private property takings for purposes of “economic redevelopment” still burns in many municipalities across the country. Now a new documentary, titled Greetings from Asbury Park seeks to bring national attention to the plight of one elderly woman fighting to keep the home she has lived in for two generations.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/12/IN5618I1DR.DTL
The sixteenth in an occasional series that shines a bit of light on the regulatory state.
Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Fish and Wildlife Service ($2.32 billion 2008 budget, 7,960 employees).
After a 12-month study, the Fish and Wildlife Service has determined that the desert valvata snail is not endangered. A proposed rule would remove it from the list of endangered species.
For more information, see pages 34,539-34,548 of the 2009 Federal Register.
Courtesy of Investor’s Business Daily, via CoyoteBlog, comes this gem from the House Democrats’ health care bill:
“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.
I suppose that’s the last nail in the coffin of President Obama’s increasingly empty promise that, “if you’ve got health insurance, you like your doctors, you like your plan, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan. Nobody is talking about taking that away from you.”
Well, sure … As IBD points out, “we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.”
Obama told Dianne Sawyer in an interview last month that, “I can’t pass a law that says, ‘I’m sorry, employers, you can never make changes to the health care plans that you provide your employees’.“ But, apparently, the House Democrats can pass a law that says — more or less — ‘I’m sorry, insurers, you can never make changes to the plans you provide to individual enrollees. In fact, you can’t even enroll any more individuals — ever.”
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