Feb
15
2025

Also Knock Down Their Ugly-Ass Building, Part II

My apologies for recycling (1) a headline and (2) a Getty image from twelve days past. But additional lessons concerning the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau must be learned. First is provided by Eric Boehm: Elizabeth Warren’s hubris allowed Trump to defund the CFPB.

When Warren and Obama created the CFPB, they designed that unorthodox funding structure specifically to prevent a future Republican-led Congress from trying to defund the bureau. Remember, this was in the age when Republicans were running around the country telling voters they intended to repeal Obamacare too. By isolating the CFPB from Congress' budgetary powers, Warren was trying to make it invulnerable to attack.

Instead, she simply gave it a fatal flaw.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration submitted its CFPB funding request to the Federal Reserve. It asked for…$0.

To adapt an Oscar Wildism: One must have a heart of stone to read the death of the CFPB without laughing.

Also: Veronique de Rugy writes a mean obituary, listing The 5 Worst Things About the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Number One ("Unelected Regulator With a Blank Check") was partially covered by Eric above. So let's skip down to Number Two ("A Duplicative Mission"):

It's not as if financial fraud was legal before the CFPB swooped in to save the day. There were already plenty of agencies "policing" financial misconduct. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, has long been responsible for protecting investors, big and small, from fraud. The Federal Reserve has a security function. Then there is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which supervises financial institutions to prevent reckless banking practices. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversees the futures, options, and swaps markets; it's supposed to make sure that trading in commodities like oil, wheat, gold, and financial derivatives isn't rigged by bad actors or overly destabilized by excessive speculation. The Federal Housing Administration enforces fair lending practices in the mortgage market, while agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have historically handled deceptive financial practices. And so many more are also on the beat, including common-law actions against fraud.

Yet the CFPB was created under the premise that these agencies and the law were somehow asleep at the wheel as evidenced by the financial crisis, and only a new, unaccountable bureaucracy could finally rescue consumers from their own financial decisions. The reality is that no new protection was created for consumers by the CFPB. Creating the CFPB was merely replication, duplication, centralization, and the employment of thousands of people. What we got was simply more officious harassment of financial actors, all of which raised costs to consumers.

Click over for Worst Things 3-5! If you need more. So long, CFPB; you will not be missed.

And there is further <voice imitation="professor_farnsworth">Good news, everyone!</voice>:

OK, it's not utter destruction, followed by earth-salting, but I'll take it.

And not that it matters, but: the "@USOCC" is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Which Vero mentioned above. Which, despite its name, seems to have nothing to do with US currency; instead it claims to "[ensure] that national banks and federal savings associations operate in a safe and sound manner, provide fair access to financial services, treat customers fairly, and comply with applicable laws and regulations." They have a $1.2 billion budget which they get, not from Congressional appropriation, but by "assessments levied on national banks and federal savings associations."

And (left unsaid by the OCC) those "assessments" are quietly passed along to the customers of those banks and savings associations.

Also of note:

  • In (very) local news… Pun Salad Manor is about 200 yards away from Rollinsford (NH) Grade School. So I couldn't help but notice an op-ed from John Shea, who is (for the current school year) superintendent of the Rollinsford School District: Future of universal public education is under threat. And, geez, John turns out to be kind of a partisan who sees an authoritarian conspiracy hiding in plain sight. Cue ominous music, perhaps the soundtrack from The Parallax View:

    Let me be clear what I think about where we are now. And I am by no means alone. There are powerful forces — elected and unelected, federal, state, and local, inside and outside government — that are deliberately, strategically, and openly working to destroy universal public education. They do not like the system, they see it as a burden (not an investment), and they are indifferent to the ideals of equitable opportunity. In terms of their larger and varied agendas, they simply have no need for it.

    Regardless of your own values, beliefs, and political convictions, what we are witnessing today is undeniable. The current president and his allies are seizing complete control of the federal government. Not just the office of the president, but a president above the law, intent on redefining executive powers, and with loyalists in the most important cabinet posts. Not just majorities in both chambers of the U.S. Congress, but representatives and senators who understand they will be squashed if they step out of line. Not just a majority of appointments in the U.S. Supreme Court, but a court to be utilized as a political instrument of the executive branch.

    Arguably the greatest obstacle to maintaining such an authoritarian takeover and pursuing an ideological agenda without regard for democratic process is an engaged, educated, critical-thinking general public. And foundational to this are (1) a free and independent press and (2) a quality universal public education system. The new administration has, of course, been attacking and undermining the press for well over a decade now — and is establishing its own alternative sources of news and information. And it’s been painting public education, for many years now, as ineffective, expensive, liberal, unionized, godless, etc., and so on. The plan of attack is to undermine public support for our schools, drain the system of funding however possible, undo our commitment to the ideals of universal access, and essentially recast education as a private good better served by the free market (for those who can afford it).

    Well, John's tirade speaks for itself. Because it boils down to Shut up and give me more money.

    I can only imagine what this means for the education of the Rollinsford kiddos.

  • Obviously, they are in on the conspiracy. Let's click over to the Josiah Bartlett Center, providing a counterpoint to John's nasty drivel: Gov. Ayotte proposes education freedom for public school students starting in 2026.

    That’s a huge win for school choice supporters and for students who have struggled to succeed in their government-assigned public school.

    New Hampshire’s own state test scores show majorities of students failing to reach proficiency in science and math, and bare majorities performing at a proficient level in English, despite massive increases in school spending in the past quarter century.

    New Hampshire public schools spend about $4 billion a year on K-12 public education, breaking down to an average of $26,320 per student in total spending. In addition, thousands of students experience bullying and other negative social interactions in schools that they don’t choose but are assigned to by their local governments. While most parents report being satisfied with their local public schools, many families want other options.

    Ayotte’s budget would give most public school students the option of spending their state adequate education grant on an alternative education to the one provided by the school district in which they happen to live.

    Unfortunately, I can report no progress on Pun Salad's favorite educational reform: abolition of mandatory attendance laws.

    That's right, John Shea: I'm your worst nightmare: an "authoritarian" who wants to stop forcing parents to submit their kids to your tutelage.

  • Yeah. That too. Warning: Christian Schneider's headline is easy to misread: Impeach the Precedent.

    In Federalist No. 70, Alexander Hamilton stressed the need for “energy in the Executive,” arguing it would provide “steady administration of the laws.”

    Hamilton couldn’t have foreseen the energetic Donald Trump, whose steadiness rivals that of a raccoon that found a bottle of cough syrup in the garbage.

    This week, President Trump barred the Associated Press from an Oval Office event after the news service declined to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s executive-ordered new name. The White House said the news organization must refer to it as the Gulf of America or risk being excluded from future press events.

    No need to call 911, as you have not ingested any hallucinogens and you are not imagining that last sentence. It actually happened, the AP says, and in fact the White House press secretary has defended it.

    Yet it is far down on the list of crazy things Trump — by his own account a supporter of free speech — has done this week. Flip open any website and you’ll see something new, from Trump’s idea of reconstructing Gaza — “owned” by the U.S. — as a resort, to his plans to make Canada America’s 51st state. (Canada has the same politics as California and roughly the same population, so annexing our neighbor to the north would guarantee that no Republican ever wins nationwide office again.)

    Christian notes the obvious in his headline: we desperately need to de-imperialize the presidency. Because the next Democrat to occupy the Oval Office will ape Trump's methods, and probably push the envelope further.

  • An Econ 101 lesson from Kevin D. Williamson. Channeling his inner George H.W. Bush, KDW says Read My Lips: Tariffs Are Taxes.

    The Trump administration has a plan for inflation: Make it at least a little worse. 

    I didn’t say it was a good plan.

    It is not the case, as one so often hears, that higher prices inflicted on producers or retailers—in the form of higher taxes, regulatory burdens, or, today’s topic, tariffs—are necessarily “passed on to consumers.” That is a myth based on the fiction that sellers in the marketplace have the power to set prices unilaterally, which they do not—buyers have the power to say “no,” which is why sellers in very price-sensitive markets (fast food, many big-box stores) do not just jack up their prices every time there’s an increase in their expenses. A big seller such as Walmart is much more likely to try to pass along expenses to its vendors, its business partners, and (unhappily for them!) its employees than to try to pass them on to customers who have a dozen different places to buy oatmeal or socks. A business that relies on Walmart for 70 percent of its sales, on the other hand, has fewer options. 

    Nevertheless, as KDW details, Trump's tariff's—are they still just "proposed", or have they gone into effect? It's hard to keep track—will certainly "put upward pressure on a lot of things you need to build houses: lumber, steel, aluminum, copper, etc."

    My take: Inflation is not a certainty, but that's the way to bet.


Last Modified 2025-03-14 5:41 AM EDT