Utopia, you are standing in it!

In Part I of this series, I pointed out that Biden’s plethora of proposed handouts and subsidies would lead to higher prices and more inefficiency. And in Part II, I explained that his discussion of inflation was embarrassingly inaccurate.

In today’s column, we’re going to analyze his strident support for protectionist “Buy America” provisions, which drive up costs for taxpayers by making it harder for foreign firms to compete for government contracts and thus give American firms the ability to charge higher prices.

How much of a burden are these policies? How much more are taxpayers having to pay because governments can’t opt for the lowest qualified bidder?

According to research shared by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), American taxpayers lose $94 billion per year.

The good news (if we have a very generous definition of “good”) is that procurement protectionism “only” pushes up costs in the United…

Joe Biden’s economic policy has been a disaster.

• He’s bad on the issues where Trump wasbad (spending and trade).
• He’s bad on the issues where Trump was good (most notably, taxes).
• And he’s bad on the issues where Trump had a mixedrecord (regulation).

Based on his track record as a long-time Senator, none of this is a surprise. According to vote ratings from the Club for Growth and National Taxpayers Union, Biden was to the left of even Crazy Bernie.

Unfortunately, a bad president (anyone remember Nixon?) can do a lot more damage than a bad senator.

Today is Part I of a series of columns analyzing Biden’s failure.

We’ll start with his so-called Build Back Better plan. Joe Biden didn’t explicitly mention “BBB” is his State of the Union address, but he did promote almost all of the specific policies that are in that…

Death and taxes are guaranteed, so are rocketing power prices and power rationing once intermittent wind and solar are added to the grid.

Duplicating capital costs to destabilise and undermine a generating system that works, with one that only ‘works’ when the wind is blowing just right and the sun is shining in a cloudless sky, is just the beginning.

As a matter of mathematical certainty every single MW of wind or solar generating capacity has to be backed up with a MW of instantly dispatchable generating capacity from coal, gas, nuclear or (where available) hydro.

The cultists would add giant lithium batteries to that list. But batteries do not generate electricity, they store it and waste 20-30% of the energy that goes in in the transfer process. The cost is colossal; the amount of power stored and released is trivial, which is why mega-batteries are used at the margins…

Here are the slides from a talk I gave this week to A-level students of economics and politics…

In the latest post for the Georgian Lords, Dr Stuart Handley considers the cases of peerages held by women in the 18th century, and the way in which they were able to exercise political influence even though denied a seat in Parliament.

In a note on page 4 of his biography of Winston Churchill, published in 2001, Roy Jenkins allows himself a somewhat waspish comment about the 7th duke of Marlborough being described as the 6th duke, when clearly he was not. However, such numbering was not unusual and is explicable because the second duke was in fact a duchess.

John Churchill was made duke of Marlborough in December 1702. However, his only son, also John, died in February 1703. In 1706 an Act of Parliament was passed…

Credit: BBC
Using far-fetched worst-case scenarios, the IPCC has become a cheerleader for emissions reductions. Propaganda has overtaken real science in a big way.
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an important organization with a primary purpose to assess the scientific literature on climate in order to inform policy, says Roger Pielke Jr. @ Climate Change Dispatch.

The IPCC spans the physical sciences, impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, and economics.

I have often stated that the IPCC is so important that if it did not exist we’d need to invent it because the challenge of climate change presents significant risks.

Last week I wrote about the Simpsons’ mortgage payment. In short, I found that using a reasonable assumption of Homer’s income, the median housing price, and the rate of interest, the Simpsons are likely paying less of their household budget on housing today than in the 1990s.

But what about the family’s taxes? Are they getting squeezed by the taxman? Taxes are referenced throughout The Simpsons series. Here’s an article that collects a lot of the references. And that makes sense: the Simpsons are a normal American family, and normal American families love to complain about taxes.

Using the same reasonable assumption about Homer’s income from last week’s post (that Homer earns a constant percentage of a single-earner family, rather than merely adjusting for inflation), we can calculate the family’s average tax rate and how it has changed over the year. Conveniently, “average tax rate” is just economist speak…