Have It Your Way, or the Federal Government’s

On those rare occasions when we resort to fast food we’ll sometimes drop by a Burger King. There’s one nearby, and although it’s on a shady strip of North Broadway the drive-through service is usually prompt and the food is a more or less fair trade for the meager amount of money being charged, especially by the standards of two o’clock in the morning in our early-to-bed town, and we don’t always insist on gourmet fare. Now that Burger King is becoming Canadian we’ll probably be expected to boycott the chain, but we won’t willingly forgo those greasy burgers and salty fries for any political reasons.

According to news reports the Burger King company is purchasing a controlling share of the Tim Horton’s chain of coffee and donut stores in Canada in order to reincorporate itself as a Canadian entity, which means it will be paying a cumulative corporate income tax rate of slightly more than 26 percent rather than the world-decor 40 percent that the federal and state and local governments take here in the United States. This strikes us as a sound business move, and a good way to keep those Whoppers and fries affordable and the pimply-faced fellows at the drive-through windows employed, but the left is already denouncing the chain for its lack of “economic patriotism.” So far as we understand the concept, it means that when companies respond to the economic incentives that the federal government has created according to a rational self-interest rather than the way the government would prefer it is somehow the company’s fault rather than the government’s. This hardly seems a good reason not to have our burgers our way, which involves lots of mustard and no ketchup or mayonnaise and little regard for the tax liabilities of the burger chain.

America’s high corporate tax rates have been driving an increasing number of American corporations to friendlier shores in recent years, including most of the country’s former pharmaceutical giants, and the administration’s response has been to ratchet up the attacks on those companies’ reputations. This does nothing to increase the revenues to the federal government, of course, but it seems to make the administration happy. A better idea would be to make America’s tax code competitive with such countries as a Canada, which would almost certain provide the feds more money to spend on punitive corporation regulations and any other nonsense they might come up with, but that would be good for corporations and thus anathema to the modern left.

If you’ve seen any movies from the big-time and tax-coddled Hollywood movie studios lately you already know how much the left hates those dastardly corporations, which are supposedly so evil that they substituted for the International Communist Conspiracy in a remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” a few years ago. The left’s more idealistic sorts are constantly sending out anti-corporate messages on Facebook over their Apple computers while driving their General Motors hybrid cars to the local Starbucks, usually with money they’ve been paid by some profit-driven corporation, and they always seem surprised that while their war on corporations is going so well the economy doesn’t seem to be gaining any steam. They’ll definitely be boycotting Burger King, which will probably provide the next villain for the next bit action-adventure epic starring some muscle-bound Hollywood leftist, but at least we won’t have to sit behind them in line at the franchise at North Broadway.

— Bud Norman

Good Enough For Government Work

Having failed to avert the catastrophic Obamacare train wreck, the Obama administration has lately been working hard to convince the public it likes the health care reform law anyway. This is a difficult chore requiring all sorts of silly arguments, but we were especially struck by the administration’s boast that the program is operating with “private sector velocity and efficiency.”

The claim is laughably untrue, of course, but at this point no one expects candor from the administration. What’s striking abut the statement, rather, is its admission that the private sector sets a standard of effectiveness which the public sector aspires to meet.

Some significant amount of the administration’s pride had to be swallowed in order to make such a confession. A white-hot hatred of those evil top-hatted, moustache-twirling businessmen and a warm fondness for the selfless virtues of government employees was the basic rationale of Obamacare, and of modern liberalism in general, so it must be embarrassing to the high-minded bureaucrats of the Obama administration to be reduced to bragging that they can get things done just as well as those profit-motivated private sector folks. The fact that the boast is not even close to true, and that this is now objectively apparent to even the most gullible observers, can only compound the embarrassment.

Our extensive experience of private sector workers tells us that they are, on the whole, as ethical and intelligent as their public sector counterparts, and we offer due respect for the good works they occasionally accomplish. Their consistent inability to match the performance of the average small business or large corporation is all a matter of incentives. Even the best of us respond to incentives, and it is inherent in the nature of the public sector that it offers all the wrong ones. The public sector offers incentives to give a major computer programming project to a firm with a poor business record but rich political connections, overpay for its services with money that the Federal Reserve is printing up as fast as the presses can roll, and never worry that anyone will be fired when it all goes spectacularly bad. Meanwhile, over at the private sector, where money has to be earned rather than printed, there is an overriding incentive to get things done right, on time, and in the least expensive way.

Back when Obamacare was still being debated its proponents made much of the obscene 3.3 percent profit margin that the insurance companies were making, which ranked a shocking 88th place among the nation’s industries, and the implication was that the altruistic bureaucrats would put all that filthy lucre to better use by healing the sick and exetnding the lives of old folks. By now it is clear that bureacratic inefficiencies will eat up at least that small slice of the nation’s health care costs, and spend at least a similar amount on advertising campaigns intended to convince the public otherwise, and the rationale for Obamacare is harder to defend.

— Bud Norman

The Shutdown, Obamacare, and the Jobs Report

As we write this the latest jobs report has not yet been released, but it is so widely assumed to be horrible that the stock markets took an early plunge on Thursday and the administration has already started blaming the Republicans.

This time around the administration’s rationale is that nobody was hiring because of the government shutdown, which of course was entirely the fault of those mischievous Republicans, but the familiar ploy might prove harder to execute. This time around will require reminding a forgetful public that there was a government shutdown, which went largely unnoticed by anyone who wasn’t so unfortunate as to be taking trip to a national park during the brief interregnum, as well as a plausible explanation for why anyone in the private sector would have been deterred from hiring someone just because some non-essential public sector employees were enjoying a paid vacation at some private sector and happily operating locale. There was a chilling terror of a governmental default and consequent economic apocalypse, we are told, but anyone who had such an irrational fear could have only gotten such a crazy idea from the administration.

Blaming the government shutdown also runs the risk of reminding voters that it had something to do with the Republican’s unified opposition to Obamacare, which the administration is now hoping will be soon forgotten. Even the most loyal media were compelled to concede that the roll-out was a glitch-ridden fiasco, and the resulting ridicule was followed by harrowing stories of disillusioned Obama voters suddenly finding themselves without health insurance and facing exorbitantly higher costs as a result of Obamacare, and attempts to blame the Republicans and their unified opposition to the law have thus far proved unconvincing. The poll numbers have reached such a sorry point that the president went to the endlessly forgiving reporters of the NBC network to say how sorry he was for all the people who liked their insurance but lost it despite his repeated pledges that if they liked it they could keep it, period, even if it is the greedy insurance company’s fault. Even such a half-assed apology, delivered with the apparent arrogant expectation that it somehow will make things right to the president’s screwed-over former voters, amounts to an act of desperation by an administration so disinclined to apologize to anyone but Islamist terror regimes and communist tyrannies.

Today’s dismal jobs report does reflect the economic activity during the government shutdown, a point that will be widely noted in the obligatory news reports, but it also coincided with the botched Obamacare debut. That event also called into question in the full faith and credit of the federal government, and in ways that are seemingly permanent. Obamacare offers incentives for workers to cut back on their hours and earnings in order to qualify for its subsidies, and irresistible incentives for employers to cut back on their workers’ hours and earnings, and the administration is left with the unenviable task of convincing people those workers and companies are to blame to reacting according to their economic self-interests.

As the government shutdown fades further into an already memory, and the consequences of Obamacare linger in the jobs reports, apologies and finger-pointing will prove even less persuasive.

— Bud Norman