URLs du Jour

2022-07-08

  • That toddlin' town. No flags at half staff for one of these numbers:

    It's not news that some Windy City residents consider one of their normal weekend activities to be "shooting at each other".


  • Another item that may not have made your local news‥ Eric Boehm reports the latest from President Wheezy: Biden Celebrates $90 Billion Bailout of Private Union Pension Plans.

    President Joe Biden jetted off to Cleveland on Wednesday evening to announce the official launch of a $90 billion bailout of union retirement plans—one that's completely paid for with federal borrowing.

    The bailout was approved last year as part of the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion emergency spending bill that was ostensibly meant to combat COVID-19 but included an impressive array of spending that had nothing to do with public health. The bailout will direct funds to more than 200 nearly insolvent multiemployer pension plans, which are established jointly by unions and the private companies that contract with them through collective bargaining agreements.

    "With today's actions, millions of workers will have the dignified retirement they earned and they deserve," Biden told the cheering crowd at a Cleveland high school.

    Millions of union workers, that is. If you're not part of that select club, there's no bailout coming your way—even as a sagging economy eats into private retirement savings, inflation makes every saved dollar worth less, and Social Security looms on the brink of insolvency.

    Don't worry, I'm sure my bailout is coming soon.

    For some reason, I'm reminded of the Frédéric Bastiat quote: "The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."

    It's just that a few of us are getting to the trough ahead of the rest.


  • Sounds like a book series. Robert E. Wright writes the first entry: The Amtrak Abomination.

    The same policymakers who wanted to shut down the American economy for an indefinite period to save just one person from dying with Covid refuse to shutter an increasingly dangerous and expensive government-supported monopoly, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, better known as Amtrak. Instead of leading with substantive policy improvements, America’s leaders prefer to mislead the nation with weak virtue signals. Until the Federal Reserve gets inflation under control, though, the only real virtue will be increasing economic efficiency with bold reforms, including selling Amtrak to the (second) highest bidder.

    The weekend before the 2022 Independence Day holiday, one Amtrak train in California struck a vehicle, killing three and injuring two others. In Missouri another derailed, killing multiple passengers and injuring many more. Accidents can never be eliminated entirely, but Amtrak’s record is poor relative to other countries, especially given its snailrail speeds. Other economically advanced countries sport trains that travel at hundreds of miles an hour with much better safety records. Trains in Eastern Europe are also safer than Amtrak, even adjusted for passenger miles traveled.

    On a tax dollar basis, Amtrak’s overall performance is abysmal. Passengers pay a pretty penny for their tickets, but those traveling the northeast corridor routes subsidize those traveling America’s vast western expanses. And all Americans subsidize Amtrak through increasing bailouts. Amtrak’s leaders learned, for example, that they could spend $450 million over 11 years to save Acela passengers a little over a minute and a half on the Philly to New York run and not get fired for it. Annual taxpayer subsidies average over a billion dollars since Amtrak’s formation in 1970-71.

    Upcoming volumes: The Homeland Security Horror; The FDA Folly; The IRS Idiocy; The Medicare Mendacity