India has begun offering financial incentives to entice businesses that could move from China as a result of its trade war with the United States, RT reports. Preferential tax rates and tax holidays appear to be two of the financial incentives that are being considered in India. According to an Indian Trade Ministry document, the industries it is seeking out include electronics, consumer appliances, electric vehicles, footwear and toys.
It is all part of a larger plan by the Indian Trade Ministry to cut the country’s reliance on imports, while at the same time boosting exports. The goal is to grow India’s manufacturing base and facilitate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship ‘Make in India’ initiative, especially after the country’s top economic advisor admitted that a change in the method used to calculate India’s GDP led to “a significant overestimation of growth,” and estimating that India’s economy grew at an average of 4.5% a year between March 2011 and March 2017 — far weaker than the 7% average rate reported by the government over that period.
The goal of the program is to boost the country’s manufacturing to 25% of the economy by 2020.
Due to their geographical adjacency, China is India’s largest commercial partner, although that could soon transform to competitor. The plan could help India narrow its massive trade deficit with the world’s second largest economy.
Investments by Chinese companies could be diversified across various sectors of the Indian market, including smartphones and components manufacturing, consumer appliances and day-to-day use items, 95% of which are already imported from China.
There have also already been 150 items identified by the Indian government where exporters could increase business with China. They include “prepared or preserved potatoes, synthetic staple fibers of polyesters and t-shirts, hydraulic power engines, and superchargers for motors.”
A plan similar to India’s – to attract foreign countries by providing financial incentives – has already been successfully implemented by countries like Vietnam and Malaysia.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2xfpyAd Tyler Durden
So many people want to be president. Unfortunately, many have terrible ideas.
Sen. Kamala Harris wants companies to prove they pay men and women equally. “Penalties if they don’t!” she shouts. But there are lots of reasons, other than sexism, why companies pay some men more than women.
Harris also wants government to “hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms.” But “holding them accountable” means censorship. If politicians get to censor media, they’ll censor anyone who criticizes them.
Sen. Bernie Sanders wants the post office to offer banking services. The post office? It already loses billions of dollars despite its monopoly on delivering mail. Sanders also wants to increase our national debt by forgiving $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.
He wants to ban for-profit charter schools and freeze funding for nonprofit charters. That’s great news for some government-school bureaucrats and teachers unions that don’t want to compete but bad news for kids who flourish in charters when government schools fail.
Sen. Cory Booker once sounded better about charters, saying, “When people tell me they’re against school choice … or charter schools, I say, ‘As soon as you’re willing to send your kid to a failing school in my city … then I’ll be with you.'”
Unfortunately, now that Booker is a presidential candidate, he says little about school choice. He also wants government to guarantee people’s jobs and to pay more Americans’ rent.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wants to force everyone to buy fertility treatment insurance.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to impose a wealth tax on very rich people. That would certainly benefit accountants and tax lawyers while inspiring rich people to hide more assets instead of putting them to work.
Warren also wants to ban all oil and gas drilling on federal land, have government decide who sits on corporate boards and make college free.
The Democrat who leads the betting odds, former Vice President Joe Biden, also says, “College should be free!”
Free? Colleges have already jacked up their prices much faster than inflation because taxpayers subsidize too much of college. Biden and Warren would make that problem worse.
The Republican incumbent has bad ideas, too: President Donald Trump imposes tariffs that are really new taxes that American consumers must pay. Trump says tariffs are needed because our “trade deficit in goods with the world last year was nearly $800 billion dollars. (That means) we lost $800 billion!”
But it doesn’t mean that, Mr. President. A “trade deficit” just means foreigners sent us $800 billion more goods than we sent them.
We got their products, and in return they only got American currency, which they’ll end up investing in the U.S. That’s good for us. It’s not a problem.
Luckily, the president has good ideas, too. He says he wants to shrink the code of federal regulations back to its 1960 size. It would be great if he actually did it. Trump slowing the growth of regulation is one of the best parts of his presidency.
Some Democratic candidates have sensible ideas, too.
Cory Booker proposed legalizing marijuana.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg criticizes his opponents for their “college for all” freebie, saying:
“I have a hard time getting my head around the idea that a majority who earn less because they didn’t go to college would subsidize a minority who earn more.”
And all candidates could learn from Hawaii’s Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who served in Iraq.
“I know the cost of war!” she says. “I will end the regime change wars — taking the money that we’ve been wasting on these wars and weapons and investing it in serving the needs of our people.”
Sadly, she wouldn’t give that money back to the people. She’d spend it on other big-government programs.
Politicians always have ideas other than letting you keep your money.
I bet we’ll hear other bad ideas this week when 20 of the Democratic candidates debate.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZJTr7S Tyler Durden
Earlier this week the internet went crazy over just how bold the communist People’s Republic of China government’s lies are becoming. A viral video showed a press briefing in which a foreign ministry spokesman coolly presented the still raging Hong Kong protests as the complete opposite of the reality:
“As far as I know, over 800,000 Hong Kong citizens participated in the pro-extradition bill demonstration,” the Chinese government official said.
He continued to present what are in reality popular anti-Beijing protests in condemnation of the controversial China-backed extradition bill as actual confirmation of Beijing’s line. “I think this amply demonstrated that the mainstream public opinion of Hong Kong supports this legislative work,” the official stated in his brazen lie:
Ha!!! Watch this chinese Foreign Ministry fool explain what happened in Hong Kong (with chinese characteristics). This revisionist version is a bit too soon for everyone to forget what really happened. #HKexit#lies#NoExtraditionToChinapic.twitter.com/0pxLMY1fgW
The ultimate in communist Orwellian trolling perhaps? Maybe the talking head functionary himself doesn’t understand what’s going on?
Or just Beijing’s par for the course propaganda packaged for domestic consumption. Regardless, it’s among the most brazen of many whoppers for the history books.
If you can’t beat’em… well then just make shit up and hijack a mass protest movement as if it’s yours.
Anti-extradition bill protesters have filled the streets of Hong Kong for the second straight Sunday, calling for the bill to be scrapped altogether. pic.twitter.com/sxznHwAEuZ
The continuing anti-extradition protests, which had witnessed an estimated 2 million hit Hong Kong’s streets two Sundays ago, fast became a lightning rod for those angry about growing Chinese presence in the semi-autonomous city, and potential diminishing freedoms.
Protests earlier this month against the extradition bill, via South China Morning Post
Meanwhile, protesters this week are appealing for international support, per Reuters:
Holding placards with messages such as “Please liberate Hong Kong”, the demonstrators, some wearing masks, marched to consulates of nations represented at the Japan summit of the Group of 20 major economies.
These included Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Russia, Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
The “one country, two systems” policy that’s long governed Hong Kong is seen as under threat by the extradition bill, which critics worry will be used to unjustly deport political activists and dissidents to mainland China and its more oppressive laws.
Last week Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi slammed the protests as a “foreign plot”, saying the “black hand” of Western forces were trying to the mass demonstrations to “stir up trouble” in the city. So given the above viral clip, it appears Beijing can’t get its own messaging straight.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Nj6gVq Tyler Durden
One of the main themes of my writings on climate change at IER has been warning the public that the “consensus science” they are hearing from the media, pundits, and certain political figures is utterly divorced from the actual published literature, especially when it comes to the economic analysis of government policy. A new, cutting edge working paper from some big-name economists — including Laurence Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs — confirms my point.
In this case, here is the shocking fact that their paper tries to grapple with: Even with a relatively modest carbon tax, the rise in energy prices is so painful that it swamps the benefits of slower climate change, and this is true for our kids and grandkids.
It is only when we get to our great-grandchildren that humanity on net would start to actually benefit from even a modest carbon tax introduced today. So the next time you hear someone say, “We need to take vigorous action on the climate for future generations!” you can clarify, “Actually, your proposals would hurt the next two future generations. You want to hurt us, our kids, and our grandkids, in order to help our great-grandkids and beyond — who will all be fantastically rich compared to us, by the way.”
The Kotlikoff et al. paper is quite technical, so I’ll just summarize the take-away points for a lay audience. I will also spend time at the end of the article explaining what their proposed solution is, for this thorny problem. To avoid confusion, I want to be clear: The authors of this new paper are for a (modest) carbon tax. But they are warning that the current discussion, even among economists, tends to look at “what’s best for humanity from now until the end of time,” rather than checking to make sure each generation gains from a new climate policy. As we’ll see, Kotlikoff et al. suggest a massive fiscal transfer that allows present generations to run up a huge (additional) government debt that our descendants must then effectively pay back with higher taxes, in order to compensate their forebears for suffering through higher energy prices due to a carbon tax.
The point of my article isn’t to endorse the overall recommendation of Kotlikoff et al.; along with climate scientists at Cato, I’ve published a comprehensive critique of the usual economist’s case for a carbon tax. Rather, by shining a spotlight on the cutting edge in the development of the literature on carbon taxation, I want readers to see just how detached the actual discussion among experts is from the breezy claims about “we have 12 years left to save our children” that we hear from pundits and political officials.
How An “Optimal” Carbon Tax Can Punish Into the Third Generation
To set the stage for my interpretation, let’s first quote from the authors’ own description of their results. (Note, readers who don’t have access through the NBER link above can also see a version of the paper posted at Kotlikoff’s website.) The title of the paper is, “MAKING CARBON TAXATION A GENERATIONAL WIN WIN.” Here’s an excerpt from the Abstract:
Carbon taxation has been studied primarily in social planner or infinitely lived agent models, which trade off the welfare of future and current generations.Such frameworks obscure the potential for carbon taxation to produce a generational win-win. This paper develops a large-scale, dynamic 55-period, OLG [Overlapping Generations — rpm] model to calculate the carbon tax policy delivering the highest uniform welfare gain to all generations. The OLG framework, with its selfish generations, seems far more natural for studying climate damage. Our model features coal, oil, and gas, each extracted subject to increasing costs, a clean energy sector, technical and demographic change, and Nordhaus (2017)’s temperature/damage functions. Our model’s optimal uniform welfare increasing (UWI) carbon tax starts at $30 tax, rises annually at 1.5 percent and raises the welfare of all current and future generations by 0.73 percent on a consumption-equivalent basis. Sharing efficiency gains evenly requires, however, taxing future generations by as much as 8.1 percent and subsidizing early generations by as much as 1.2 percent of lifetime consumption. Without such redistribution (the Nordhaus “optimum”), the carbon tax constitutes a win-lose policy with current generations experiencing an up to 0.84 percent welfare loss and future generations experiencing an up to 7.54 percent welfare gain. [Kotlikoff et al., bold added.]
Although I realize this is difficult technical language for the layperson to parse, here’s what the authors are saying: If we take the “gold standard” (their term later on) in this literature and use Nordhaus’s 2017 model calibration, it will recommend an “optimal carbon tax” that correctly — according to standard economic theory and the best estimates from the climate science research — balances the tradeoff between reducing emissions and harming economic growth.
However — and this is a huge caveat — Nordhaus’s approach assumes there is a benevolent, overarching “social planner” who lumps all of humanity together, and only makes a technical allowance for a (modest) discount on the happiness of future generations in accordance with standard economic theory.
In practice, the authors point out, Nordhaus’s “optimal carbon tax” would actually mean that people living or born today and in the near future will be harmed on net by the policy, because they will suffer worse economic harm from higher energy prices, than they will be spared in climate change damages from reduced emissions. It’s only when we get several generations into the future, that Nordhaus’s “optimal carbon tax” actually starts making human beings better off, compared to the status quo.
This is a critical point for Americans to realize. They are constantly being hectored that if they “cared for their children” they would support a large carbon tax and other aggressive interventions. But we see that this isn’t true: If we even adopt a modest carbon tax — one that still allows 4 degrees Celsius warming (over twice the 1.5 degree currently touted by climate activists as the necessary target), according to the authors (p. 22)1 — then we are harming ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren, relative to the “do nothing” baseline. It’s only our great-grandchildren, who (on average) are going to be fantastically wealthy compared to us, who will actually start reaping net benefits from even this modest reduction in the path of emissions.
The Specifics
The general point of this new paper has been made before; I myself have frequently pointed out to audiences that the entire climate change approach involves making relatively poor people (i.e., us) even poorer, in order to shower benefits on relatively rich people (i.e. future generations). However, the benefit of the Kotlikoff et al. paper is that they quantify exactly how much each generation wins or loses under the latest Nordhaus calibration, by taking his (Nobel-Prize winning) model and changing as little as possible to make their calculations. Furthermore, since Jeffrey Sachs (one of the co-authors) is a prominent proponent of “action against climate change,” the skeptical outsider can be reassured that these results are genuine and not the result of bias or disinformation.
Here are some specific results of their model, which I have adapted from one of their tables:
In the table, I’ve highlighted the rows pertaining to people who are born 15 years before the year the Nordhaus carbon tax is implemented, all the way up through people born 35 years afterwards. This group of humans can roughly be summarized as the “children and grandchildren” of the adults who make the decision to go ahead and install the carbon tax.
As the right side of the table indicates, this entire segment of the humanity, spanning the next two generations, is hurt on net by the carbon tax. That is, the economic damage resulting from the penalty on fossil fuels hurts the kids and grandkids more than they gain from mitigated climate change during their lifetimes, relative to what would have happened under “business as usual.”
According to the simulations of the authors, it is only when you get to people born 45 years after implementing the carbon tax — many of whom would be the great-grandkids of adults who supported the tax decades earlier — that humanity actually starts reaping net benefits from the whole scheme. It’s only from this point forward that the accumulated difference in climate change is large enough to compensate for the higher energy prices created by the carbon tax.
In the bottom two rows of the table, I’ve shown what happens 100 years and 200 years out: We see that people born at these times experience a net gain of 4.56% and 7.50% in “welfare” (the technical economic term in the paper), respectively.
(A parenthetical note for purists, so that no one accuses me of skullduggery: I’ve also included at the top of the table the results for people who are born decades before the carbon tax. The authors report that these people gain too, because they own reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, and hence benefit from higher energy prices. However, this seems to be a mistake in economic reasoning. Yes, a tax on emissions will drive up the price of energy, but that hardly helps the owners of coal; that’s why people accuse certain energy companies of lobbying against carbon taxes. I have emailed the authors of the paper for clarification.)
Making Sense of the Results
Here’s some intuition (from me, not the authors) to help the reader understand the big picture: Suppose the Nordhaus model of the damages from emissions and climate change were basically correct, and the environmental economists recommended a carbon tax of around $30/ton that would steadily rise over time.
But then engineers discover a new technique that will eventually allow them to very easily and cheaply remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, beginning in the year 2060. In other words, suppose we suddenly realize that only climate change damages that occur between now and the year 2060 will matter, because afterwards scientists will be able to very easily calibrate atmospheric concentrations of CO2, much like setting the thermostat in a household.
In this thought experiment, what would happen to the “optimal carbon tax”? It would obviously collapse to about $0/ton (with Nordhaus’ other parameter choices for his model). The main point of humanity slamming the brakes on emissions was the flow of avoided climate change damages that would accrue to humanity after 2060. The human race would effectively be making a large upfront investment for several decades, in order to eventually start reaping the payoff.
This intuition is what the authors of the new NBER study have quantified, shown in the table above. They are showing that when you take the leading model in the literature (i.e., Nordhaus’ with its 2017 calibration), and then decompose “humanity” into discrete groups who are born in different years, it turns out that the costly investment project doesn’t begin reaping net dividends until 45 years after it’s begun.
The odd fact about climate change policy is that the current generation, the next generation, and the third generation are being asked to reduce their standard of living, in order to shower benefits on our great-grandkids and their descendants. Incidentally, this is why the seemingly arcane debate over the proper “discount rate” to use in climate change analysis is so crucial — the costs of a carbon tax are concentrated in the first few decades, while the ostensible benefits are spread out into the far distant future.
“But What About the (Great-Grand-) Children?!”
The obvious response to my above reasoning is to say, “Okay sure, the present generation — and I guess, the next two as well — are being asked to make sacrifices for our distant descendants. But isn’t that the responsible thing to do? We don’t want to saddle our great-grandchildren and beyond with an unlivable world!”
But again, this type of language is not supported by the “gold standard” (the term used by Jeffrey Sachs et al. in their paper) modeling of climate change damages. Look again at the bottom two rows in the table above. The “optimal carbon tax” boosts the welfare (it’s fine to think of it in terms of “real lifetime income”) of the people born 100 years later by 4.56%, and the people born 200 years later by 7.50%.
But hang on a second. If we didn’t have to worry about climate change, there would presumably be standard economic growth on average, over the next two centuries. Let’s be conservative and say real income per capita would grow 1% per year, without worrying about climate change. That means people in 100 years would have a standard of living 170% higher than ours, while people in 200 years would have a standard of living 630% higher. Then if they got ravaged by unchecked climate change — because we selfishly refused to harm our own narrow self-interest by restricting emissions — the people in 100 years would “only” have a lifestyle about 160% richer than ours, while the people in 200 years would “only” have a lifestyle 580% richer than ours.
Kotlikoff Et Al.’s Proposed Debt Solution
This post is already long, so let me very briefly explain the actual proposal in the Kotlikoff et al. paper. Since Nordhaus’ “optimal carbon tax” would — as shown above — hurt early generations in order to benefit distant generations, the authors propose to use fiscal policy to effectively transfer wealth from future generations to present ones.
In other words, they propose to flip the standard fiscal debates on their head: When people usually talk about our need to “stop running deficits at the expense of our children and grandchildren,” Kotlikoff et al. say that’s exactly what we should do, to compensate ourselves for the pain we are suffering by implementing a new carbon tax. (Incidentally, this discussion has nothing to do with the use of carbon tax receipts to offset other taxes, as the authors make clear on page 7.)
This twist in their paper is another reason I was so fascinated by the article, as I happened to have taken part in a big debate among economists over whether it even makes sense to say government debt could “burden future generations.” (My allies and I said “yes,” while Paul Krugman and Dean Baker said “no.” See my article here or a PowerPoint lecture here.) So it was interesting to see Jeffrey Sachs et al. implicitly throw Krugman under the bus, in a double way: (1) We can make future generations poorer by running up the government debt, thank you very much, and maybe we should do so, because (2) a carbon tax will impose large net damages on humanity for the next few decades. (In case readers miss my joke, Krugman also denies that a carbon tax will be painful.)
“Ah,” the clever reader may now say, “you had been leading us to believe that a carbon tax was a bad idea. But Kotlikoff et al. have found a way to salvage it! Win-win for everybody!”
But hang on a second. Do you know how big a “fiscal transfer” is necessary, in order for early generations to compensate themselves for the cooler planet they’re handing off to the future? According to the study: “The size of the debt to GDP ratio required to effect the win-win is significant [for Nordhaus’ default parameters]. The…debt to GDP ratio [from the compensatory transfer program] is 0.52 in year 50, 0.78 in year 100, 0.82 in year 200, 0.70 in the year 1000, stabilizing at 0.48 in the long run…” (p. 25).
This is shocking. And to be clear, this is putting aside the other government debt. What the authors are saying is that we, our kids, and our grandkids should give ourselves a big tax cut, letting the government debt mushroom to an additional 52 percent of GDP a half-century after the tax, and hand that off to our heirs, who will be saddled with a large tax hike to service this extra burden of Treasury debt.
To borrow a line from Al Gore, this strikes me as a “risky scheme.”
Conclusion
The public is being grossly misled about the economics of climate change policy. It’s true that many prestigious economists endorse a modest carbon tax, but their recommendations would still allow vastly more warming than the UN’s popular goals, which have become the norm in policy discussions with little explanation.
Moreover, even using fairly pessimistic projections, future generations will be far richer than we are, with or without any government actions on climate change. And as a clever new working paper from Laurence Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs (among others) reveals, even a modest carbon tax will cause net damages to us, our kids, and our grandkids. It’s only when we get to the fourth generation that the “optimal carbon tax” from the literature starts yielding more climate change benefits than it causes in economic harm.
Those who have the training to actually read and parse the economics of climate change literature can appreciate just how awful the reporting and typical “policy wonk” discussion is. It’s almost as if the self-anointed experts are science deniers.
In any event, opponents of a carbon tax can now adopt the slogan: “Do it for the children!”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IPohqf Tyler Durden
“If Cuba extradites me, I will be silenced forever,” John McAfee told me today by phone from Cuba, his new home base for a campaign to be the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee in 2020.
The founder of the ubiquitous anti-virus computer software company named for him, McAfee finished third for the Libertarian Party’s (L.P.) presidential nomination in 2016. Now a cryptocurrency booster and entrepreneur, he’s having another run.
McAfee knows there’s essentially no chance that an L.P. presidential candidate can win the presidency in 2020. But he is also confident that a grand jury is currently convening and will indict him for tax-related crimes. He admits he hasn’t paid income taxes in eight years and says he does not intend to do so ever again. McAfee announced back in January he’d have to campaign in exile.
For the past few months, he had been hanging out in the Bahamas. He chose the Carribean nation because the U.S.-Bahamian extradition treaty says that extraditable crimes must be a crime in both nations, and the Bahamas have no income tax.
However, McAfee said today that he became aware, through means he won’t specify, that either the CIA or FBI was about to nab him on trumped-up charges of “murder, money laundering, racketeering, whatever racketeering is, under guise of forcing extradition, then dropping those charges” when they got him back to the U.S. and nailing him for the income tax evasion. “I cannot tell you how I know, but I am John McAfee, one of the greatest cybersecurity experts in the world, and nothing gets by me,” he says.
Despite being forced to Cuba by circumstances beyond his control, McAfee says he’s enjoying his stay. While U.S. propaganda paints the country as relentlessly grey due to decades of communism, McAfee is finding it to be “party central” with wonderfully congenial people. He added that since the U.S. never let Cuba alone, we can’t be sure how much of their relative economic stagnation is the fault of their system or our meddling, though he grants their economic system was far from libertarian. He also believes that the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, recently made worse by the Trump administration, leave him relatively safe to wage his campaign for president of the United States without worrying Cuba will extradite him, should official charges against him be issued.
That most of what we know and understand about our government and the world is the result of “propaganda” was a recurring theme in our phone conversation. That conviction explains why McAfee refuses to play the candidate game of spitballing about policy for the Middle East, immigration, or any other realm where he thinks the government is hiding the truth. For instance, because media and government stories depict a Cuba far grimmer than the one he’s currently living in, McAfee wonders “how on earth are [Americans] to have a fucking clue about what to do about Cuba? Anyway it’s not our goddamn problem, is it? We have problems of our own, what the fuck are we worrying about Cuba for?”
He also tweeted praise this week for Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, which lost him at least some Libertarian support. McAfee insists most who hate Guevara “haven’t actually read history, his biography, his actual diary.” McAfee believes Guevara “freed a couple of countries from the worst kinds of fascist dictatorship.”
In the poll-free world of Libertarian primary politics, it’s difficult to know which candidates have juice and which don’t. Last night, McAfee called on his supporters on Twitter (where he has 980,000 followers) to email me directly to state their support for his candidacy; about 75 folks have done that as of this writing, with many claiming they are millennials, a demographic to which McAfee thinks he has special appeal.
“I hear very little buzz about McAfee this time around,” Libertarian National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark says via email. “Most of the activists who were supporting him last time have moved on to other things or other candidates and are not even keeping up with his travels through the Caribbean.” Additionally, says Sarwark, “making a defense of Che Guevara from Cuba may ingratiate him with the Cuban government, but it didn’t resonate well with Libertarians.”
Christian Ehmling, a Libertarian supporter who has run for state office as a Republican, announced on Facebook yesterday that although McAfee had once been his “top choice,” the virus software pioneer’s apparent affection for Guevara lost him the goodwill Ehmling felt for his “dodging the IRS.” McAfee’s tax evasion was something Ehmling “could get behind,” but he “cannot ever support anyone who is defending a man whose ideology led to the deaths of millions, and who called for the killings of racial minorities, homosexuals, and those with different beliefs.”
Joshua Smith, an at-large member of the L.P.’s national committee, also wrote on Facebook that “as someone who has been able to travel around the country talking to Libertarians, [McAfee] has very little support within the party currently, and with his newest comment applauding the communist who had gays and minorities executed, he will have even less.”
“Go ahead and get upset” was McAfee’s message to Libertarians unhappy with tweeted support for a bloody Communist revolutionary. “I’m for revolutionary people. What does that mean? It means not just talking bullshit, saying ‘Hey I hate taxes.’ Look at what people actually do, for fuck’s sake. I stood up and said ‘no’ [to being taxed] and I deserve respect for that. At least I stood up and did something and that’s what Che did.
“It’s hard to judge a person’s life based on isolated instances here or there. He stood up and acted on his beliefs and whether I believe the same [as Guevara] or not, I could give a shit; he stood up and acted and how many people in the L.P. are standing up for what they fucking believe, I ask you that?”
Desarae Lindsey, who coordinated volunteers for McAfee in 2016, once thought he could be the Libertarians’ Donald Trump. She was involved with an operation McAfee helped launch after his presidential run called Vote Different, but thinks he dropped the ball in continuing to push for that endeavor, which made her lose enthusiasm for him. She is now campaign manager for Vermin Supreme, and believes she’s not alone in moving on from McAfee. (Lindsey believes that the L.P. needs colorful, humorous, outrageous standard-bearers).
Rob Loggia, McAfee’s current campaign manager and a veteran of his 2016 operation, said in a phone interview this week that they still intend to have masked surrogates appear on McAfee’s behalf at L.P. conventions and events through the campaign season, which doesn’t end until the assembled delegates of the Libertarian Party’s national convention choose their candidate in May 2020. The masks “are real, and in the hands of hundreds of volunteers already,” Loggia said.
As for McAfee’s lack of personal availability: it is only an issue “if you are thinking in terms of the way a campaign is traditionally run,” Loggia said. That’s not McAfee’s goal; Loggia notes his candidate has promised that if he’s elected to the presidency, he will “lock himself in a room and not come out on inauguration day.”
Running a campaign from Cuba is something Loggia thinks “people have to pay attention to” and doubts that it will be a deal-killer in winning the L.P. nomination, though he admits the eventual delegate mix at the 2020 national convention in Austin would have to be more McAfee types and less L.P. traditionalists if McAfee hopes to win. Because delegates to the national convention are chosen at state conventions, that would require quite a ground game.
But while Loggia says his candidate is seriously running for the nomination, he admits that even if McAfee loses, the exiled candidate “will not feel he’s wasted his time” and will appreciate the opportunities along the way to “be part of the national conversation.” While they have not yet begun reaching out directly to supporters in a traditional campaign messaging way, Loggia says their email blasts could probably reach 15,000 people, and that McAfee’s tweets reach nearly a million.
Loggia has never voted for president and thinks his candidate’s most likely audience is some portion of the vast near-majority of Americans who also sit out each national election for lack of a candidate who doesn’t seem just one more tool of a corrupt system. Loggia, who has worked with McAfee on both campaigns and in crypto businesses, says his candidate is the greatest “mirror” he’s ever encountered, and that if you have a bad time relating with John McAfee, the problem might well be with yourself.
They are not fundraising for the campaign right now, Loggia says, and McAfee says he is on his travels “living off the kindness of friends; quite frankly, in my life, I’ve benefitted thousands and some of those people are now benefitting me.”
McAfee has no illusions about his chances in a general election, but still thinks he’s in there swinging with the L.P. “Running for president gives me the right to stand up and say I’ve got coordinators in five regions of the U.S. and tons of volunteers and I’m actually doing something, and if that’s not running for president I don’t know what is.”
It also gives him a forum to “talk to the press, tell my opinions to everyone” and get across his message that the U.S. government is more or less an impenetrable criminal conspiracy of liars, and that he’s against it—so against it he’s chosen to stop funding it and has, in fact, left it. For now.
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“If Cuba extradites me, I will be silenced forever,” John McAfee told me today by phone from Cuba, his new home base for a campaign to be the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee in 2020.
The founder of the ubiquitous anti-virus computer software company named for him, McAfee finished third for the Libertarian Party’s (L.P.) presidential nomination in 2016. Now a cryptocurrency booster and entrepreneur, he’s having another run.
McAfee knows there’s essentially no chance that an L.P. presidential candidate can win the presidency in 2020. But he is also confident that a grand jury is currently convening and will indict him for tax-related crimes. He admits he hasn’t paid income taxes in eight years and says he does not intend to do so ever again. McAfee announced back in January he’d have to campaign in exile.
For the past few months, he had been hanging out in the Bahamas. He chose the Carribean nation because the U.S.-Bahamian extradition treaty says that extraditable crimes must be a crime in both nations, and the Bahamas have no income tax.
However, McAfee said today that he became aware, through means he won’t specify, that either the CIA or FBI was about to nab him on trumped-up charges of “murder, money laundering, racketeering, whatever racketeering is, under guise of forcing extradition, then dropping those charges” when they got him back to the U.S. and nailing him for the income tax evasion. “I cannot tell you how I know, but I am John McAfee, one of the greatest cybersecurity experts in the world, and nothing gets by me,” he says.
Despite being forced to Cuba by circumstances beyond his control, McAfee says he’s enjoying his stay. While U.S. propaganda paints the country as relentlessly grey due to decades of communism, McAfee is finding it to be “party central” with wonderfully congenial people. He added that since the U.S. never let Cuba alone, we can’t be sure how much of their relative economic stagnation is the fault of their system or our meddling, though he grants their economic system was far from libertarian. He also believes that the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, recently made worse by the Trump administration, leave him relatively safe to wage his campaign for president of the United States without worrying Cuba will extradite him, should official charges against him be issued.
That most of what we know and understand about our government and the world is the result of “propaganda” was a recurring theme in our phone conversation. That conviction explains why McAfee refuses to play the candidate game of spitballing about policy for the Middle East, immigration, or any other realm where he thinks the government is hiding the truth. For instance, because media and government stories depict a Cuba far grimmer than the one he’s currently living in, McAfee wonders “how on earth are [Americans] to have a fucking clue about what to do about Cuba? Anyway it’s not our goddamn problem, is it? We have problems of our own, what the fuck are we worrying about Cuba for?”
He also tweeted praise this week for Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, which lost him at least some Libertarian support. McAfee insists most who hate Guevara “haven’t actually read history, his biography, his actual diary.” McAfee believes Guevara “freed a couple of countries from the worst kinds of fascist dictatorship.”
In the poll-free world of Libertarian primary politics, it’s difficult to know which candidates have juice and which don’t. Last night, McAfee called on his supporters on Twitter (where he has 980,000 followers) to email me directly to state their support for his candidacy; about 75 folks have done that as of this writing, with many claiming they are millennials, a demographic to which McAfee thinks he has special appeal.
“I hear very little buzz about McAfee this time around,” Libertarian National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark says via email. “Most of the activists who were supporting him last time have moved on to other things or other candidates and are not even keeping up with his travels through the Caribbean.” Additionally, says Sarwark, “making a defense of Che Guevara from Cuba may ingratiate him with the Cuban government, but it didn’t resonate well with Libertarians.”
Christian Ehmling, a Libertarian supporter who has run for state office as a Republican, announced on Facebook yesterday that although McAfee had once been his “top choice,” the virus software pioneer’s apparent affection for Guevara lost him the goodwill Ehmling felt for his “dodging the IRS.” McAfee’s tax evasion was something Ehmling “could get behind,” but he “cannot ever support anyone who is defending a man whose ideology led to the deaths of millions, and who called for the killings of racial minorities, homosexuals, and those with different beliefs.”
Joshua Smith, an at-large member of the L.P.’s national committee, also wrote on Facebook that “as someone who has been able to travel around the country talking to Libertarians, [McAfee] has very little support within the party currently, and with his newest comment applauding the communist who had gays and minorities executed, he will have even less.”
“Go ahead and get upset” was McAfee’s message to Libertarians unhappy with tweeted support for a bloody Communist revolutionary. “I’m for revolutionary people. What does that mean? It means not just talking bullshit, saying ‘Hey I hate taxes.’ Look at what people actually do, for fuck’s sake. I stood up and said ‘no’ [to being taxed] and I deserve respect for that. At least I stood up and did something and that’s what Che did.
“It’s hard to judge a person’s life based on isolated instances here or there. He stood up and acted on his beliefs and whether I believe the same [as Guevara] or not, I could give a shit; he stood up and acted and how many people in the L.P. are standing up for what they fucking believe, I ask you that?”
Desarae Lindsey, who coordinated volunteers for McAfee in 2016, once thought he could be the Libertarians’ Donald Trump. She was involved with an operation McAfee helped launch after his presidential run called Vote Different, but thinks he dropped the ball in continuing to push for that endeavor, which made her lose enthusiasm for him. She is now campaign manager for Vermin Supreme, and believes she’s not alone in moving on from McAfee. (Lindsey believes that the L.P. needs colorful, humorous, outrageous standard-bearers).
Rob Loggia, McAfee’s current campaign manager and a veteran of his 2016 operation, said in a phone interview this week that they still intend to have masked surrogates appear on McAfee’s behalf at L.P. conventions and events through the campaign season, which doesn’t end until the assembled delegates of the Libertarian Party’s national convention choose their candidate in May 2020. The masks “are real, and in the hands of hundreds of volunteers already,” Loggia said.
As for McAfee’s lack of personal availability: it is only an issue “if you are thinking in terms of the way a campaign is traditionally run,” Loggia said. That’s not McAfee’s goal; Loggia notes his candidate has promised that if he’s elected to the presidency, he will “lock himself in a room and not come out on inauguration day.”
Running a campaign from Cuba is something Loggia thinks “people have to pay attention to” and doubts that it will be a deal-killer in winning the L.P. nomination, though he admits the eventual delegate mix at the 2020 national convention in Austin would have to be more McAfee types and less L.P. traditionalists if McAfee hopes to win. Because delegates to the national convention are chosen at state conventions, that would require quite a ground game.
But while Loggia says his candidate is seriously running for the nomination, he admits that even if McAfee loses, the exiled candidate “will not feel he’s wasted his time” and will appreciate the opportunities along the way to “be part of the national conversation.” While they have not yet begun reaching out directly to supporters in a traditional campaign messaging way, Loggia says their email blasts could probably reach 15,000 people, and that McAfee’s tweets reach nearly a million.
Loggia has never voted for president and thinks his candidate’s most likely audience is some portion of the vast near-majority of Americans who also sit out each national election for lack of a candidate who doesn’t seem just one more tool of a corrupt system. Loggia, who has worked with McAfee on both campaigns and in crypto businesses, says his candidate is the greatest “mirror” he’s ever encountered, and that if you have a bad time relating with John McAfee, the problem might well be with yourself.
They are not fundraising for the campaign right now, Loggia says, and McAfee says he is on his travels “living off the kindness of friends; quite frankly, in my life, I’ve benefitted thousands and some of those people are now benefitting me.”
McAfee has no illusions about his chances in a general election, but still thinks he’s in there swinging with the L.P. “Running for president gives me the right to stand up and say I’ve got coordinators in five regions of the U.S. and tons of volunteers and I’m actually doing something, and if that’s not running for president I don’t know what is.”
It also gives him a forum to “talk to the press, tell my opinions to everyone” and get across his message that the U.S. government is more or less an impenetrable criminal conspiracy of liars, and that he’s against it—so against it he’s chosen to stop funding it and has, in fact, left it. For now.
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Calling him the “famed German that co-authored The Communist Manifesto”, as if the work should be celebrated, the historical scholars over at Teen Vogue are now indoctrinating their young readers as to why they should be reading Karl Marx.
A recent article in Teen Vogue celebrates Marx’s 200th birthday and says Marx’s ideas “can still teach us about the past and present.”
Yeah, here’s what didn’t work – any why we should never attempt it again.
And perhaps in an attempt to align themselves with the 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates (we’re only half joking), Teen Vogue tweeted out “The legacy of Karl Marx’s ideas” to its 3.3 million Twitter followers just days ago.
The legacy of Karl Marx’s ideas and how they’re relevant to the current political climate: https://t.co/G9L2xUhkk1
Then, the article goes on to cite high school English teacher Mark Brunt, who encourages his students to “learn the legacy of Marx’s ideas”.
Brunt said: “I do a little role-playing with [my class]. [I tell them,] I’m the boss, you’re my workers, and you want to try to take me down. I have the money. I own the factory. I control the police. I control the military. I control the government. What do you guys have?”
He continued: “It’s always just one student, whose hand shoots up and goes, ‘We outnumber you!’”
Brunt then ostensibly uses that line of logic to try and empower students to rebel, teaching them about the tension between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, and reminding students that workers in factories “had very little control over their work, including their working conditions, compared to the profiteering factory owners.”
But then, almost comically, the article dryly notes: “…if such a revolution occured in Brunt’s classroom, his students would overthrow him as a teacher — and the principal, the superintendent, and so on.”
But the indoctrination doesn’t stop there, with Brunt working to convince his students that they are being tricked, and could be playing into false consciousness. Brunt tells his students: “False consciousness is when you think that the social conditions are different than they actually are. You’re tricked into thinking your allies are different and your enemies are different than they actually are.”
And it’s not just Brunt the article cites. Teen Vogue also pointed out former Drexel professor George Ciccariello-Maher, who reminds his students that capitalism emerged through a “state of violence”:
“When I teach Marx, it’s got a lot to do with questions of how to think critically about history. Marx says we live under capitalism [but] capitalism has not always existed,” Ciccariello-Maher tells Teen Vogue.
“It’s something that came into being and something that, as a result, just on a logical level, could disappear, could be overthrown, could be abolished, could be irrelevant. There’s this myth of the free market, but Marx shows very clearly that capitalism emerged through a state of violence.”
Maher continues: “Dialectics means that the history moves forward not slowly or gradually or bit by bit, but it moves forward through the sort of crushing blows of struggles between generally two opposing ideas or groups or concepts or people.”
And of course, even if you don’t “identify” as a Marxist, the article notes, “…you can still use Karl Marx’s ideas to use history and class struggles to better understand how the current sociopolitical climate in America came to be.”
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Some friends at the time told me I was being paranoid. The crowd in Washington, they assured me, would never be foolish enough to impose such a levy, especially when other nations such as Sweden have repealed wealth taxes because of their harmful impact.
But, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the foolishness of politicians.
I already wrote this year about how folks on the left are demonizing wealth in hopes of creating a receptive environment for this extra layer of tax.
And some masochistic rich people are peddling the same message. Here’s some of what the Washington Postreported.
A group of ultrarich Americans wants to pay more in taxes, saying the nation has a “moral, ethical and economic responsibility” to ensure that they do. In an open letter addressed to the 2020 presidential candidates and published Monday on Medium, the 18 signatories urged political leaders to support a wealth tax on the richest one-tenth of the richest 1 percent of Americans. “On us,” they wrote. …The letter, which emphasized that it was nonpartisan and not to be interpreted as an endorsement of anyone in 2020, noted that several presidential candidates, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke, have already signaled interest in addressing the nation’s staggering wealth inequality through taxation.
I’m not sure a please-tax-us letter from a small handful of rich leftists merits so much news coverage.
Another guilt-ridden rich guy wrote for the New York Times that he wants the government to have more of his money.
My parents watched me build two Fortune 500 companies and become one of the wealthiest people in the country. …It’s time to start talking seriously about a wealth tax. …Don’t get me wrong: I am not advocating an end to the capitalist system that’s yielded some of the greatest gains in prosperity and innovation in human history. I simply believe it’s time for those of us with great wealth to commit to reducing income inequality, starting with the demand to be taxed at a higher rate than everyone else. …let’s end this tired argument that we must delay fixing structural inequities until our government is running as efficiently as the most profitable companies. …we can’t waste any more time tinkering around the edges. …A wealth tax can start to address the economic inequality eroding the soul of our country’s strength. I can afford to pay more, and I know others can too.
When reading this kind of nonsense, my initial instinct is to tell this kind of person to go ahead and write a big check to the IRS (or, better yet, send the money to me as a personal form of redistribution to the less fortunate). After all, if he really thinks he shouldn’t have so much wealth, he should put his money where his mouth is.
Today’s column is about the destructive economics of wealth taxation.
A report from the Mercatus Center makes a very important point about how a wealth tax is really a tax on the creation of new wealth.
Wealth taxes have been historically plagued by “ultra-millionaire” mobility…
The Ultra-Millionaire Tax, therefore, contains “strong anti-evasion measures” like a 40 percent exit tax on any targeted household that attempts to emigrate, minimum audit rates, and increased funding for IRS enforcement. …Sen. Warren’s wealth tax would target the…households that met the threshold—around 75,000—would be required to value all of their assets, which would then be subject to a two or three percent tax every year. Sen. Warren’s team estimates that all of this would bring $2.75 trillion to the federal treasury over ten years…
a wealth tax would almost certainly be anti-growth. …A wealth tax might not cause economic indicators to tumble immediately, but the American economy would eventually become less dynamic and competitive…
If a household’s wealth grows at a normal rate—say, five percent—then the three percent annual tax on wealth would amount to a 60 percent tax on net wealth added.
Alan Viard of the American Enterprise Institute makes the same point in a columnfor the Hill.
Wealth taxes operate differently from income taxes because the same stock of money is taxed repeatedly year after year.
…Under a 2 percent wealth tax, an investor pays taxes each year equal to 2 percent of his or her net worth, but in the end pays taxes each decade equal to a full 20 percent of his or her net worth. …Consider a taxpayer who holds a long term bond with a fixed interest rate of 3 percent each year. Because a 2 percent wealth tax captures 67 percent of the interest income of the bondholder makes each year, it is essentially identical to a 67 percent income tax. The proposed tax raises the same revenue and has the same economic effects, whether it is called a 2 percent wealth tax or a 67 percent income tax….
The 3 percent wealth tax that Warren has proposed for billionaires is still higher, equivalent to a 100 percent income tax rate in this example. The total tax burden is even greater because the wealth tax would be imposed on top of the 37 percent income tax rate.
…Although the wealth tax would be less burdensome in years with high returns, it would be more burdensome in years with low or negative returns. …high rates make the tax a drain on the pool of American savings. That effect is troubling because savings finance the business investment that in turn drives future growth of the economy and living standards of workers.
And the implicit marginal tax rate on saving and investment can be extremely punitive. Between 67 percent and 100 percent in Alan’s examples. And that’s in addition to regular income tax rates.
You don’t have to be a wild-eyed supply-side economist to recognize that this is crazy.
Which is one of the reasons why other nations have been repealing this class-warfare levy.
Here’s a chart from the Tax Foundation showing the number of developed nations with wealth taxes from1965-present.
And here’s a tweet with a chart making the same point.
A reminder that most of the OECD has moved away from wealth taxes. 12 countries had them in 1990, while only 4 levy them today. Most countries found that the tax has high administrative and compliance costs, and didn’t meet the goal of redistribution. pic.twitter.com/pHs7Q5ehjL
P.S. I’ve tried to figure out why so many rich leftists support higher taxes. For non-rich leftists, I cite IRS data in hopes of convincing them they should be happy there are rich people.
P.P.S. I’ve had two TV debates with rich, pro-tax leftists (see here and here). Very strange experiences.
Tennessee can no longer impose a two-year residency requirement for those seeking to obtain a retail liquor license, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Wednesday.
The case hinged on whether the 21st Amendment—which repealed Prohibition—gave states full regulatory reign over the sale of alcoholic beverages, no matter how protectionist their policies might be. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that it did not.
“Because Tennessee’s two-year residency requirement for retail license applicants blatantly favors the state’s residents and has little relationship to public health and safety, it is unconstitutional,” he wrote.
That was good news for Doug and Mary Ketchum, who relocated to Tennessee in 2016 in order to run Kimbrough Wines & Spirits, a Memphis alcohol store the couple agreed to purchase while they still lived in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The couple wanted better air for their severely disabled daughter, Stacie, who suffered a collapsed lung while living in Salt Lake City. When they heard about a chance to buy Kimbrough Wines & Spirits, they applied for a license to run the store. Despite the fact that Tennessee had a law on the books requiring two years of state residency to obtain a liquor license, the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agreed to approve their application and that of another out-of-state applicant, Total Wine. Tennessee’s attorney general had, by that time, issued two opinions declaring the law unconstitutional.
Things were fine until the Tennessee Wine & Spirits Retailers Association—which lobbies for regulations that benefit state alcohol industry incumbents—sued the Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission to stop both the Ketchums and Total Wine, a privately owned retail alcohol chain, from getting a Tennessee liquor license.
“In-staters are terrified that somebody like Total Wine is going to come in and compete with them,” Institute for Justice attorney Anya Bidwell, who represents the Ketchums, tells Reason. The Retailers Association lost in the lower courts but kept appealing in hopes that they could block competition from out of state.
On paper, the law not only required that alcoholic retailers be in-state residents for two years in order to obtain a liquor license, but it also stipulated that alcoholic retailers live there for 10 in order to renew. Liquor licenses require annual renewal, meaning that, if the Ketchums had succeeded in getting a license after their first two years, they would have lost it for the next eight.
In his dissent, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the majority was engaging in judicial activism and projecting their own policy prescriptions onto the 21st Amendment.
“Like it or not, those who adopted the 21st Amendment took the view that reasonable people can disagree about the costs and benefits of free trade in alcohol,” he wrote. “Under the terms of the compromise they hammered out, the regulation of alcohol wasn’t left to the imagination of a committee of nine sitting in Washington, D.C., but to the judgment of the people themselves and their local elected representatives.”
The post-Prohibition era amendment ultimately repealed the ban on alcohol, but states also used it—and still do use it—to mold consumer behavior around the consumption of alcohol. Tennessee’s liquor license requirements, passed in 1939, were no different.
“People don’t realize there were still a lot of those pro-Prohibition forces at play in that era,” C. Jarrett Dierterle, Director of Commercial Freedom at the R Street Institute, says. “There were still a lot of efforts to limit people’s access to alcohol.”
That’s not lost on Gorsuch, who tipped his hat to pro-temperance regulation in his dissent. “Tennessee’s residency requirement reduces competition in the liquor market by excluding nonresidents or recent arrivals,” he wrote. “But even that effect might serve a legitimate state purpose by increasing the price of alcohol and thus moderating its use, an objective states have always remained free to pursue under the bargain of the 21st Amendment.”
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Dozens of cab drivers in New York marched on City Hall on Monday in protest of how ride sharing services have decimated their industry and caused financial ruin – and in many cases, suicide – among their peers. The protest came as NYC council members are considering new laws that would help bail out cab drivers, according to Bloomberg.
Some drivers offered testimony about predatory lenders (used to buy medallions) while others recanted city policies encouraging an inflated medallion market from the get-go.
“If I lose my house I’m killing myself, period. Because my house is for my kids, my future, please help me,” he continued.
There have been at least 9 driver suicides since late 2017, many of which we have documented on this site (also here). Bhairavi Desai, a political organizer who leads the Taxi Worker Alliance has requested that medallion payments be capped to $900 per month, down from the current average of $2800 now. She also called for a city-wide task force to determine what a medallion is worth and to press lenders to forgive loans above that amount. She claims that the average medallion-owning cabbie loses an average of about $28,000 a year.
Council Transportation Committee Chairman Ydanis Rodriguez responded with sympathy, but not an endorsement of their demands: “These are small business owners, many of them immigrants who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into a medallion in hopes of achieving their piece of the American Dream. We must also find a way to hold the people responsible for this financial crisis accountable. This crisis was no accident, and we must make sure the taxi medallion owners receive justice.”
Rodriguez placed the blame on Bill Heinzen, acting chairman of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, for failure to protect drivers. Rodriguez pointed out that the city advertised medallion licenses in 2014, before Uber’s surge, as “better than the stock market,” guaranteeing a “worry-free retirement.”
Councilman Ritchie Torres, who heads the Oversight Committee, put out a memo in 2011 warning TLC officials that medallion prices could collapse.
Heinzen said the city had “no record” of how many drivers had filed for bankruptcy or were at risk of financial collapse. He said: “I don’t know the exact number. I’m sure it’s painfully high.”
Recall we recently wrote about the nominal $10 million in relief that NYC was proposing to offer cab drivers. One of the additional measures before the council would require TLC officials to scrutinize the financial resources of medallion buyers and block sales that may involve unaffordable loans. The city may also seek to ban the use of so-called “confessions of judgment” in Medallion loans. Many drivers had signed those documents, “in which borrowers admit defaulting on a loan and authorize a bank to do whatever it wants to collect.”
City legislation would also direct the TLC to create yet another government agency: an “Office of Financial Stability to monitor the health of the industry, collect disclosures from medallion owners and assess the integrity of medallion brokers and fleet owners.”
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