Feb
3
2025

Also Knock Down Their Ugly-Ass Building

Hal Scott (Harvard Law School Prof Emeritus) takes to the WSJ to cheer one thing and recommend another: Rohit Chopra Is Out. Now Shutter the CFPB.

President Trump’s decision on Saturday to fire Rohit Chopra as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is welcome if slightly belated. Since Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Chopra has been on an antimarket rampage, seeking to tie the new president’s hands by proposing or finalizing 10 new regulations, among them rules limiting bank overdraft fees and restrictions on terms bank can impose on the financing of green-energy purchases.

In fiscal 2025 the CFPB will cost taxpayers an unnecessary $1 billion. These funds are being spent on antimarket enforcement actions and regulations that actually harm consumers. And the CFPB is performing a function that could be done more efficiently by other agencies.

Mr. Trump should go a step further and shut the CFPB down. As I pointed out in these pages in May, the bureau is operating illegally. Congress mandated that it be funded by the earnings of the Federal Reserve, but there have been no earnings since the Fed began incurring losses in September 2022 due to rising interest rates. These losses currently total $219.6 billion. The CFPB’s defense, in 13 pending enforcement cases where defendants have raised the illegality of funding, is that “earnings” really means revenue, an absurd claim under accounting standards. It is telling that the Fed, the source of illegal funding, has been silent on the issue.

That would probably put Senator Warren on the warpath, but that's better than OK. Keep her busy on defense.

Also of note:

  • Gee, sounds like a bad idea. Maybe worse than a "folly". The NR editorialists examine Trump’s Tariff Folly. I think I detect some sarcasm in the first paragraph. What do you think?:

    After months of uncertainty, the White House has finally announced tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. The uncertainty since the election and especially the lack of clear communication in the past several days have caused apprehension in the stock market, which is likely part of the reason why these measures were announced on a Saturday, when the markets are closed — always a sign of confidence that an economic policy decision is the right one.

    The stated purpose is to reduce the flow of illegal drugs and immigrants to the U.S. Trump has had success using blunt-force threats in the past, but this is a costly, disruptive way to pursue the supposed goals, and Trump may just want the tariffs for their own sake.

    The White House is perpetuating the fiction that foreigners pay tariffs. We know from previous efforts that roughly the entire cost of the tax is passed on to American consumers and businesses. And retaliation from other countries will only make the taxes increase, as the order contains automatic hikes when the other governments respond. It is a downward spiral in which all countries will be made worse off.

    The editorial is just one of the links provided by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek this morn, all relating to Trump's Tariff Tomfoolery. Example, from Commie National Public Radio reporter Brian Mann's Twitter thread, debunking Trump's attempt to connect this to fentanyl:

    As I noted, NPR. So…

  • Let's set these guys free too. Jonathan Turley is down on Commie Radio: “This is NPR”: America’s Public Media Faces Reckoning on What it is.

    “This is NPR.” That tagline has long been used for National Public Radio, but what it is remains remarkably in doubt. NPR remains something of a curiosity. It is a state-subsidized media outlet in a country that rejects state media. It is a site that routinely pitches for its sponsors while insisting that it does not have commercials. That confusion may be on the way to a final resolution after the election. NPR is about to have a reckoning with precisely what it is and what it represents.

    While I once appeared regularly on NPR, I grew more critical of the outlet as it became overtly political in its coverage and intolerant of opposing views.

    Even after a respected editor, Uri Berliner, wrote a scathing account of the political bias at NPR, the outlet has doubled down on its one-sided coverage and commentary. Indeed, while tacking aggressively to the left and openly supporting narratives (including some false stories) from Democratic sources, NPR has dismissed the criticism. When many of us called on NPR to pick a more politically neutral CEO, it instead picked NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who was previously criticized for her strident political views.

    Perhaps NPR (actually the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting) could just become a subsidiary of Viking Cruises.

  • Your tax dollars at work… We missed saying anything about Groundhog Day. Sorry. This story comes a day late: NOAA study ranks groundhogs for weather-predicting accuracy.

    The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a study analyzing the annual prognostications of weather-predicting groundhogs and found the most famous, Punxsutawney Phil, didn't even crack the top 10.

    NOAA released the study ahead of Groundhog Day, which falls on Sunday, to analyze which groundhogs -- along with one prairie dog statue and a tortoise -- were the most accurate in predicting whether spring would come early or late.

    Perhaps NOAA could be replaced by the winner, Staten Island Chuck.

  • It's an idea whose "time" (heh!) has come. Steve Hanke agrees with Pun Salad about time zones. Or I may be agreeing with him, I'm not sure who came first. But here's his WSJ LTE:

    Joseph Epstein’s op-ed “Enough with Changing the Clock” (Jan. 24) argues for eliminating daylight-saving time and adopting standard time throughout the U.S. While Mr. Epstein goes in the right direction, he doesn’t go far enough.

    The U.S. should scrap its current system of time zones and daylight saving in favor of worldwide adoption of Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. This would mean that everyone’s watches would be set at exactly the same time. The only difference they would notice, depending on where they’re located, would be where the sun is in the sky at a particular hour. Midday would be as it is today, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. What would be different under UTC is the time on your watch. In New York, midday would no longer be noon but rather 5 p.m., or 17:00 UTC.

    The adoption of UTC wouldn’t mean people would be going to work in darkness. Business hours would be adjusted. In New York, under UTC, instead of the usual 9 to 5 schedule, businesses would open at 2 p.m. and close eight hours later at 10 p.m.

    Adoption of UTC would allow for a return to “true time,” or solar time. With that, everyone would rise with the sun in the morning and go to sleep when it’s dark at night according to their natural circadian rhythm, not some artificial time constraint.

    Pilots, for the obvious reason of safety, already use UTC. Global markets, including Wall Street, operate with UTC. Virtually all modern technologies, including the internet and GPS, use it too. It’s time for the rest of us to do the same.

    Yes. Separation of time and state. And I'm slightly more libertarian than Steve. Instead of "everyone’s watches would be set at exactly the same time", I'd say: Set your watch however you want. Spring forward, fall back, do the hokey-pokey and turn yourself around. Your call.


Last Modified 2025-02-07 5:39 AM EST