Drones, Worker Strikes, and the Spending Bill
Today's Media Hit (12/23/24)
At 5:45 PM or so, I’ll be joining Carl Higbie on NewsMax’s show, Frontline. I’ve never been on this show before, so I’ll have to do some homework on Mr. Higbie to see what he’s like on camera, but really that’s just me trying to figure out how much I can push things, if I’ll have to tone anything down, or if I can drill down into particular issues.
I will say that I’ve been sitting in my Caplan Bubble, blissfully unaware of hardly any details on this whole “drones” thing, so I’ll have to do some homework on this one. It’s currently 2:15 PM and I’ve already got the links. Time to make the talking points and then wrap up with what happened.
Links
Drones
I’ll be completely honest, when I first heard this story, I thought it was a big nothing-burger. Further, the more I saw it being covered on the news, the more I sighed in disdain. Of course the nation is in hysterics about some drones flying around the New Jersey area; don’t we have more important things to think about?
But then… the Biden Administration asked Congress for fast-track authorization to expand the government’s ability to “detect and destroy drones that could pose security threats over stadiums and other areas.”
Now look, Sen. Gary Peters (one of the Senators from the great state of Michigan, from which I HAIL), even said on the floor when introducing this bill, “recently in New Jersey, we’ve seen reports of loud and menacing drones. And while the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and other key agencies have assured the public that these drones pose no immediate homeland security threat, they have certainly caused unease and concern for many Americans.”
So… if there’s no immediate homeland security threat, why are we devoting precious Senate time debating this when, at the time, they had a budget bill that was looming ever closer to a government shut down?
And we’re going to do this because the drones were/are “loud and menacing?”
First, I’m pretty sure we already have laws on the books covering things that are “loud and menacing.” They’re called curfews, quiet hours, or local noise ordinances. While these are typically used to prevent loud, raucous parties in neighborhoods late, it seems like this is perfectly within the scope of that.
Second, what are we going to be doing here, allowing local municipalities to shoot the drones down?
Third, does this really require, as Sen. Paul said, the surveillance of millions of Americans’ cell phones? Most if not all drones are piloted remotely by actual remotes, not through some cell phone app. And sure, the drone might sync some data to an app on a phone (pictures, flight data, etc.), that will only be after the drone is done flying.
Now look, I get that drones can be annoying to deal with when they’re flying around a stadium or an airport or, well, anything for that matter. And I get that sometimes this requires some serious delays and responses out of security concerns. But does this require Congress to actually do something? To force us to give up some of our freedoms and rights to privacy? Hardly.
Amazon/Starbucks Strikes
I mean look, these are not great for consumers and the timing at some level couldn’t be worse.
Workers go on strike because they feel that they are not being treated right by their employers and want to do whatever they can do right this injustice.
And to be completely honest, these people absolutely have my sympathies. Right now especially cannot be a fun time to be employed by Starbucks or as an Amazon driver.
But all strikes face the same fundamental issue: both parties are better off together than they are separately. Amazon and Starbucks don’t make money while their workers are on strike. The workers don’t earn income while they’re on strike.
Both sides have strong incentives for this to end and to end quickly.
The best way to make this happen is to allow both parties to negotiate with one another.
This invites a win-win solution where neither party gets everything that they want, but both parties walk away feeling like they’ve gotten something and feeling better about it than they did previously.
What we absolutely DO NOT need is for government to come in and put additional pressures on these groups to get a deal done. Both sides already want this to be resolved and quickly! More pressure isn’t going to make this happen any “better.”
If anything, the government will put its thumb on the scale in favor of the workers and against the employers, if only because there are more workers than there are employers and politicians will want to secure votes in future elections.
This means that instead of a win-win between employers and employees, we’ll have a lose-win-win between employers, employees, and government.
There’s no reason to add a loser to an exchange that was going to be win-win.
Spending Bill Shenanigans
I’m going to take a controversial stance and say that the ultimate bill that we ended up with, which really kicks the budget can down the road to March, was the correct move in spirit but not in execution.
The current federal debt stands at $36.2 trillion. On August 1, that number was $35 trillion, meaning that Congress overspent by $1.2 trillion in just the past four and a half months.
For some context: do you know who the president was when the US first crossed the $1 trillion debt mark? Ronald Reagan!
Meaning: This happened in 1981, which means that it took almost 200 years of our nation’s history to get to one trillion in debt. This Congress and Administration did that in four months.
So does Congress need a new budget? Absolutely. But that’s not what this question is about. This is about a more important topic: who should write the new budget?
Frankly, I don’t want the 118th Congress anywhere near “budgets.” They’ve shown nothing but a stunning inability to manage fiscal affairs.
It’s hard for me to imagine the 119th Congress being worse than this, so let them write the new budget, which is what this continuing resolution allows them to do.
So what’s in this bill? Vance Ginn provides a great discussion over at The Daily Economy.
Disaster aid of $100.4 billion for states hit by hurricanes.
Infrastructure funding for e.g. the Key Bridge
And this WSJ article is excellent:
Debt ceilings do not impose fiscal responsibility, they promote playing games of political chicken.
What Happened
Between the other guest (whose name I didn’t catch and I can’t find a recording anywhere) and I, we covered all three topics. Fortunately, I got to talk about the spending bill and the Amazon/Starbucks strikes, which were the two I really wanted to talk about.
The first question was about the spending bill that was passed. As I found out in my digging, Higbie doesn’t like it and almost seems like he’d rather the government shut down. So naturally, I started off my remarks with how I liked that they passed a continuing resolution. I don’t think Higbie liked this, but fortunately he was professional enough to not jump in and to let me speak. I quickly pivoted to my talking points: that the federal debt is currently at $36.2 trillion and that in August it was $35 trillion. I then gave the context that it wasn’t until 1981 that we had ONE trillion in federal debt and that this Congress/Administration has done in four months what took us almost 200 years: growing the federal debt by $1 trillion. I wrapped it all up nicely with, “frankly, I don’t want these people anywhere near a ‘budget’ and would rather let the next Congress/Administration handle that because they HAVE to be better than this.” Higbie laughed, said that was a good point, and agreed with me. I wish I could find the clip, unfortunately the only one I could find from tonight’s recording ends after the segment right before mine. Oh well.
The other guy got asked about drones, thankfully. He made largely the same points I would have made, which was also nice.
On the Amazon/Starbucks front: I was asked, “how badly will this affect the US economy?” so I answered that very quickly (tl;dr, it’s not good) but pivoted to my talking points above, namely that I believe both parties have a strong incentive to resolve this quickly and that I didn’t want the federal government to get involved in any way. The other guy got the last ten seconds of the segment, said he agreed with me completely, and wasn’t worried at all about the Starbucks strike since that only affects the upper well-to-do segment of the population and only meant that they wouldn’t get their fancy coffee drinks in the morning.
All in all, I’ll admit that I was nervous about going on when I watched some of this guy’s stuff. He is intense. But it seemed to go well and his staff were incredibly gracious afterwards, saying that they really liked it, thought I did great, and that the whole thing went really well.