The View from Right Field

Who Is President?

I realize the technical answer is Joe Biden, but the question I am asking is somewhat different.  I’m asking: who is making the decisions, who is running the place?  When the media reports on U.S. efforts to get a ceasefire in Gaza, who is doing that?  Who is deciding the policy on that?  After the failed debate with Donald Trump in June and the interview with George Stephanopoulos that lasted only 22 minutes, it seems pretty clear it is not President Biden.

I don’t know when this happened, or started to happen.  President Biden’s staff has been limiting his public exposure for quite a while and much of the media was not talking about it or trying to figure out why.¹  His condition may have been getting worse for some time.  But regardless of how long it has been, what do we do now?

Will Conservatives Be Happy With the Supreme Court Overturning Chevron If Trump Wins in November?

The following appears in the Letters section of today’s Financial Times under the heading “US courts vs. agencies is not a left-right problem”:

"Brooke Masters is quite right in saying that U.S. businesses may come to regret at least some aspects of the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision overturning the “Chevron deference” doctrine that held judges should defer to the decision of government agencies when laws are ambiguous (Financial Times, Opinion, “Red-tape win for US business may backfire”, July 12).  This may also be true, when political winds change, for conservatives who applauded the decision.  Progressives, on the other hand, may come to love Loper Bright.

Outlawing Noncompetition Agreements: How and By Whom?

A couple of weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission adopted a new regulation which outlawed employee noncompetition agreements on a nationwide basis.  I don’t like noncompetition agreements, and I think that employers today are overusing them.  California has prohibited them since the 1800s, and it hasn’t hurt employers in California.  In fact, it may have helped.  The ban apparently hasn’t hurt Silicon Valley.

The question, however, I have with respect to the FTC’s action is whether the FTC has the power to do this.  There have been lots of articles in the media about what the FTC is doing and whether it is good or bad, but the articles I have read, particularly in The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, didn’t really talk about the basis on which the FTC is doing this.   But I think that is a real question.

“Leaders are not mere politicians and this is why”

The following letter appeared in the Letters section of the Financial Times today (April 5)¹:

“Janan Ganesh concludes his column on the difficulties of getting Europe to spend more on defence (Opinion, March 27) with a quote attributed to what he calls ‘another European leader, in another era, in another context’. I believe he was referring to Jean-Claude Juncker, the then prime minister of Luxembourg, who quipped: ‘We all know what to do. But we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.’

“If you want to be good at this kind of job, you have to be willing to lose it”

Paul Ryan said this in 2011 when he was trying to reform entitlement spending.  Ultimately, he couldn’t get it done, though he tried and he didn’t let the possibility of losing his job stop him from trying.  He did get significant tax reforms passed in 2017, maybe not as many as he would have liked, but a lot more than anybody else had accomplished in a long time or has accomplished since.  In 2018, then-House Speaker Ryan decided to retire.  Perhaps he felt he couldn’t “be good at this kind of job” anymore. I don’t know.  In any case, he was good at it while he was there.

Unfortunately, we don’t have enough people in the Republican Party like this anymore.  Instead, they are voting against aid to Ukraine, which would help our national security, too, and voting for silly motions to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security because they don’t like President Biden’s border policies.  It doesn’t matter whether they are doing this because they are scared of Donald Trump or because they think they would lose a primary to the people who tend to vote in primaries.  If they are more worried about losing their job than they are about being good at it, then maybe they should find a new job, which they could be good at.

Lessons for the Next Pandemic from this Pandemic

The Financial Times reported on Monday¹ that Tedros Adhanon Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, is calling on China to “give full access” to a team from WHO to investigate how the pandemic emerged.  Yeah, right.  Like China is going to do that.  They haven’t done it so far; they’re not going to do it now.  It’s sort of silly to keep calling for it.

But what I found more interesting about the article was this paragraph:

“The two most prominent theories [as to the virus’s origin] envisage either a zoonotic jump from animal to humans via Wuhan’s wet food markets or contagion stemming from an accidental leak from the city’s virology laboratory.  But no scientific consensus has emerged from the debate, and Tedros reiterated that all options remained “‘on the table’.”

If Congress Can’t Deal With Our Deficits, Here’s an Idea – That Frank Wolf Had 15 Years Ago

George Will writes about the looming fiscal disaster the United States faces: we’re spending too much, and that spending will only increase (for things like Social Security and Medicare), but Congress can’t stop the spending increases – or raise enough revenue to pay for them: 

“What can be done to prevent risk-averse politics from producing this self-reinforcing doom loop?  The  Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia a suggestion: ‘a BRAC-like fiscal commission.’

Stop the Burning of the Koran – By Ignoring It

The Financial Times had an interesting article today on the issue of the burning of the Koran in Sweden and Denmark.¹  Apparently, there is a lot of it going on, especially outside embassies of Islamic countries.  The question is what, if anything, these countries, both of which have a strong commitment to freedom of speech, can do about these actions.

It seems to me there is a simple solution to the problem of Koran burning in Denmark and Sweden.  It is not for those countries to ban it.  It is, rather, for Muslims to stop paying attention to it.  I understand that, for Muslims, the Koran is their holy book and desecration of the Koran is an insult to Allah.  But the people burning the Korans are not Muslim, they do not believe in Allah, and they do not think the Koran is a holy book.

Illinois Public Employees’ Contracts: Increases Now. Pension Funding, Later.

What I found most interesting about the contract between AFSCME and the State of Illinois, which the Union recently ratified, was not the wage increases, the benefit increases, and the very limited increases in the amount union workers have to pay for health insurance.  All of those were to be expected.  Governor Pritzker is, after all, the unions’ governor.

What I found interesting was there seemed to be no mention of the workers’ pension plans – or at least there wasn’t in the articles I read about the contract.  (See here and here.)  While the contract requires the State to pay the workers more money (including a contract signing bonus, apparently called a “stipend”), give them more benefits, etc., what did it provide about how the State is supposed to fund the workers’ pension plans?  If there was anything, the articles didn’t say. 

IRS to Stop Surprise Visits on Taxpayers at Home. What Took So Long?

The Internal Revenue Service announced today its agents will no longer make unannounced visits to taxpayers’ houses.  According to an article in The Washington Post, the policy shift was “meant to protect employees’ safety due to the fear of potentially irate taxpayers answering the door.” 

The article quoted IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel as saying “[t]his is the right thing to do and the right time to end it.  We have the tools we need to successfully collect revenue without adding stress with unannounced visits.”