Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Humor, Political Commentary, Satire

Those Lazy Job Creators

3 Comments

Frank J. gives them what for:

…that’s the tough line the government needs to take with job creators: You will spit out those jobs we demand — and good ones with health-care benefits! — or we will destroy you and your businesses.

Raising their taxes by repealing the Bush tax cuts is just the start. We need even more taxes and punishing regulations. We need to treat these people like the scum they are, and if they don’t want to watch their companies burn, they’ll yield and finally expand their businesses and create more jobs — and not make any more profit or get richer when they do that, because we find that highly annoying.

We’ve had enough of your sickening greed, business owners, so give us everything we want, and give it to us now.

Right on.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The DC Economy

8 Comments

Are we living the Hunger Games?

Washington is rich not because it makes valuable things, but because it is powerful. With virtually everything subject to regulation, it pays to spend money influencing the regulators. As P.J. O’Rourke famously observed: “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” But it’s not just bags-of-cash style corruption. Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It’s a cold calculation: You’re likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training.

So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.

I’m not the only one to notice this, or even to make the Hunger Games analogy. As Ross Douthat wrote, “There aren’t tributes from Michigan and New Mexico fighting to the death in Dupont Circle just yet. But it doesn’t seem like a sign of national health that America’s political capital is suddenly richer than our capitals of manufacturing and technology and finance, or that our leaders are more insulated than ever from the trends buffeting the people they’re supposed to serve.”

I always have a sense when I visit DC of a corrupt and decadent capital, bleeding the rest of the country, which it barely deigns to fly over, white.

[Update a while later]

Link was missing before. Fixed now, sorry.

Business, Economics, Space

The Magic Of Competition

9 Comments

Gee, it works in space transportation just like it does in any other:

The Boeing and SpaceX spacecraft both ranked high on their technical merits. But NASA raised concerns about Boeing’s financial commitment to the public-private sector partnership.

Ferguson said Boeing is thinking about upping its corporate ante, aiming to advance the date of its first piloted test flight.

“We’re looking heavily into getting some additional Boeing investment to move that (late 2016) date to the left significantly, which we think we need to do to keep pace with SpaceX,” Ferguson said.

To me, at this point, their real problem is Atlas prices. They’ll just have to hope that NASA wants to have redundancy in providers, because they can’t compete with Hawthorne on price.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Mass Transit

6 Comments

…is the new Jim Crow.

It’s funny how so many “liberal” fetishes (e.g., gun control, minimum wage, legal and rampant abortions, welfare) have such devastating consequences on the people for whom they profess to care so much.

[Via Instapundit]

[UPdate a few minutes later]

Here’s another example. The moronic war by the “progressives” on Walmart, which has done more for poor people than any government program.