Georgia Senate Candidates Against Factories in Georgia
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-03-01 Tu
CONDITION: Hoping to Win Some Sort of Darwin Award?
Stephanie Mencimer: At CPAC2022… the last person I expected to run in to here is Alex Kozinski, former 9th circuit judge… [me too] casualty… just here “to get some germs” for his immune system. Kozinski flew here with a friend on a private jet because he won’t wear a mask, is unvaccinated…
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First: Georgia Senate Candidates Against Factories in Georgia
Is this really how you win a Republican senatorial primary these days?
Margaret Newkirk: Rivian’s Soros Connection Becomes Issue in Georgia Governor Race: ‘A $5 billion Rivian Automotive Inc. electric-vehicle plant planned for central Georgia…. Former U.S. Senator David Perdue… holding a Tuesday rally… to protest the plant and investor George Soros…. “Brian Kemp is selling us out to George Soros…. He’s pledged our tax dollars to lure a California company funded by George Soros to Georgia and is calling it ‘economic development…. Kemp thought he could get away with this under the guise of ‘economic development,’ but all he is doing here is selling us out and lining George Soros’s pockets.”… Soros Fund Management… owns more than 2% of Rivian’s shares… the 10th-largest shareholder….
Perdue… has campaigned largely on his support from Trump—and his embrace of the ex-president’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election…. The planned plan… 45 miles… east of Atlanta, is… promising to employ more than 7,500 people and pump out 400,000 electric vehicles annually…. The plan has local detractors, who complain that it would bring environmental problems and Atlanta-style sprawl to the community. They’ve launched a Facebook page and a GoFundMe site to raise money to hire a lawyer…. The company’s November IPO was the sixth biggest in U.S. history, generating $13.5 billion in net proceeds…
As I understand it, Georgia will commit $125 million in subsidies. If the direct-employment number is an accurate forecast, that is a $10,000 state-tax capital cost per-job-created number. I see the substantive equities of the subsidies this way: They are almost surely not a good use of tax money for the nation as a whole, for which industrial-location decisions are close to being zero-sum. But they are almost surely a good use of tax money, from the perspective of generating enough economic activity within Georgia to allow for lower state tax rates on George's current residents. Brian Kemp—and Rivian—are playing the subsidies-for-industrial-location game as it is currently played in America, which is not a very good game. And Brian Kemp is representing the narrow interests of his constituents (and not exhibiting much American civic virtue).
Brian Kemp is not cheating his constituents to enrich George Soros and other Rivian investors.
But David Perdue is trying to cheat his constituents.
It may well be that behind the scenes Purdue in these people are attempting to reassure Rivian, saying: Don’t worry—this is only boob-bait for the bubbas; actually, we are not opposed to economic development in order to make Georgians richer. The problem, of course, is that there is only one way to react when somebody says: I’m a liar, but I’m not lying to you—I’m lying to the other guy. The way to react is to think: There are low-wage areas of Maryland and Colorado, and even of New York and California, where we could locate, and not have to worry about the state government going mushugannah against economic development because some wrong-kind-of-Black person from Atlanta might get a job, or some rootless-cosmopolite foreign-born liberal Jew might be involved.
One Video: Drone Warfare:
One Picture:
Very Briefly Noted:
Michael Worobey & al.: The Huanan Market Was the Epicenter of SARS-CoV–2 Emergence: ‘Geographical clustering of the earliest known COVID–19 cases and the proximity of positive environmental samples to live-animal vendors suggest that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the site of origin of the COVID–19 pandemic… <https://zenodo.org/record/6299116#.Yh4vhi-B1R9>
Martin Wolf: Putin Has Reignited The Conflict Between Tyranny & Liberal Democracy: ‘A war of choice on the children of a peaceful democracy is not an action we can allow ourselves to forget… <https://www.ft.com/content/be932917-e467-4b7d-82b8-3ff4015874b3>
Ryan Best & Elena Mejía: The Lasting Legacy Of Redlining: ‘We looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated—just like they were designed to be… <https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redlining/>
Sergei Guriev: The Implications of Sanctions on the Russian Economy <https://bcf.princeton.edu/events/sergei-guriev-on-the-implications-of-sanctions-on-the-russian-economy/>
Josh Marshall: ’The “no fly zone” slogan is just a feel-good phrase you learned from watching other wars on CNN but it means declaring war on the Russia over Ukraine. That’s nuts and you need to take a deep breath and think about what you’re saying. End…
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Paul Krugman: Overheaters, Skewers & the Nonlinear Economy: ‘If demand is skewed… people are buying much more of some things than usual, but less of others, so some parts of the economy are running hot while others run cold… price increases in the booming sectors… outweigh price cuts in the slumping sectors, raising the average rate of inflation above what you’d expect given the overall level of demand…. We agree that both overheating and skewed demand are driving inflation, [but] their relative importance matters. If you think it’s mainly overheating, you want the Federal Reserve to slam the brake… maybe even pushing us into recession. If you think it’s mainly skew… you want a much milder response, easing off the gas pedal but mostly counting on supply and demand adjustments to bring inflation down. But an argument about relative magnitudes isn’t the same as a fight over fundamentals…. There’s far more consensus about inflation among serious thinkers than many people, including some of the participants in this debate, may realize…
LINK: <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2>
Trevon Logan: Slavery Was Never an American Economic Engine: ‘Assessments of efficiency and productivity consider only the perspective of the enslavers… takes the traditional logic of “firms/owners” and “workers/labor” much further than it should go…. Emancipation unlocked immense value for formerly enslaved Black people. Simply coming and going as they pleased during leisure time was a remarkable source of freedom and agency. Mundane tasks took on new meaning when done outside of chattel bondage. Neglecting to account for the value of freedom ignores those most affected by the institution…. Emancipation didn’t destroy an efficient system and lead to economic decline. On the contrary: Freedom, which for too many remains elusive, is the engine of economic growth…
LINK: <https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/slavery-was-never-an-american-economic-engine>
Tyler Cowen: Putin as a Man of Ideas: ‘The Russian attack and possible dismemberment of Ukraine reflects the power of ideas…. Putin has embraced a coterie of Russian intellectuals, marketing what is sometimes called Eurasianism, who parrot and develop the notion of Russia as a power-deserving Eurasian civilization…. If you write books, whether good or bad ones, and wonder whether your work matters, I suggest the answer lies before you on your TV screen each evening. Russia is a nation of ideas, led by people who are obsessed with ideas. The rest of the world, most of all Europe, will need better ideas in turn…
LINK: <https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/putin-as-a-man-of-ideas.html>
Matt Yglesias: 23 Thoughts on the War in Ukraine: ‘The westernizers were right then and right today. The high points of Russian culture—Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bely, Bulgakov, Tchaikovsky, Eisenstein, etc.—are firmly part of the western cultural tradition. Liberal democracy now has firm roots in places as far afield as Japan and South Korea, and there’s nothing about the orthodox soul that prohibits it from blossoming in Omsk and Perm and Nizhny Novgorod. Despite its considerable natural resource wealth, today’s Russia is poorer than Latvia or Lithuania. With reform, peace, and integration into the European mainstream, Russia would be a richer, better place to be. On its current course, it’ll be the junior partner in an alliance with a China that has its own nationalist schemes…
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Michael Kofman: ’The initial Russian operation was premised on terrible assumptions about Ukraine’s ability & will to fight, and an unworkable concept of operations. Moscow badly miscalculated. The Russian operation was focused on getting to Kyiv quickly, forcing a surrender, and pushing a small number of units forward quickly in a way that avoided large engagements with UKR forces. They’ve been skirting major cities, going for key road junctions/smaller towns, etc. Why did Moscow choose this course of action? A few theories: they didn’t take Ukraine & its military seriously. They wanted to avoid attrition & devastation because of consequences for pol goals in Ukraine, costs of casualties, and they want to hide the costs from the public. It is also possible that Russian military planners genuinely wanted to avoid inflicting high levels of destruction given how unpopular this war was going to be at home. Most Russian soldiers are young & have little interest in fighting Ukrainians as an opponent…. This is… unworkable…. It seems they tried to win quickly and cheaply via ‘thunder runs,’ hoping to avoid the worst of sanctions & Western outrage. They’ve ended up in the worst of all worlds, trickling more resources into a failed strategy. However, this is barely a few days into the war…. The bulk of the Russian military has yet to enter the fight…
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The correct Yiddish form for "going crazy" would be "going MESHUGGAH". Not "going MESHUGGANAH." MESHUGGANAH is the noun, while MESHUGGAH is the adverb or verb, as the case may be.
Thank you,
Sheldon Teicher
sheldont2@nyc.rr.com