From CNN:

The U.S. Commerce Department announced stiff tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels Thursday, a move critics said could raise costs for consumers and further inflame trade tensions with Beijing.

The preliminary ruling came as a result of a finding that Chinese solar cell manufacturers are “dumping” their products on the American market below production costs.

Some claim that Chinese manufacturers are artificially driving prices down.  Others say most solar industry jobs in the U.S. relate to installation of the panels, and that cheap prices increase sales.  Low overall costs related to solar energy also help to keep it competitive with fossil fuels.

But the tariffs that the Commerce Department has imposed are extremely high.

The tariffs are two-tiered. The first comprises a group of 61 exporters, including Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar, who face rates of roughly 31%.

The second level encompasses all other Chinese producers not currently exporting to the U.S., who would be hit with a 250% rate should they begin doing so.

Of course, the companies can always find a way to avoid the tariffs, so it is unclear if the Obama Administration will really be able to raise any revenue or prevent the import of foreign solar panels.

From Fox News:

A Democratic congressman is trying to give the federal government the power to regulate pizza in public school lunches, following a failed attempt last year.

The legislation proposed by Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., would end pizza being counted as a vegetable in school lunches and allow the government to set nutritional standards.

Pizza currently counts as a vegetable in school lunches due to its tomato paste content, though most would question that logic.  The slight regulatory change would not eliminate pizza from school lunches, but would prevent schools from serving it in the place of actual vegetables.

Bruno Iksil, a London-based trader for JPMorgan Chase, assembled a huge portfolio of investments designed to hedge against risks the company takes with its own money. Iksil’s bet was so big he became known as the London Whale. It’s incredibly complicated, but basically he was selling a form of insurance to other investors based on his belief that certain U.S. corporate bonds would be very secure. He sold so much of it that any blip in the market could have caused him enormous pain. The market blipped. JPMorgan suffered losses of at least $2 billion, and potentially much more.

There won’t be a bailout; $2 billion is a drop of bucket compared to the over $2 trillion in assets under JP Morgan’s management.  Indeed, despite the loss the company is still turning a profit.

President Obama called for tougher banking regulations following the incident, giving J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon an odd backhanded compliment on the TV show The View:  “JPMorgan is one of the best-managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got and they still lost $2 billion and counting.  We don’t know all the details. It’s going to be investigated, but this is why we passed Wall Street reform.”

The company’s share price has tumbled more than 10% since the loss, causing nearly $20 billion in market value to evaporate.  Many have already been forced out the door in the office where the mistakes were made, but so far Dimon has managed to stay in place as CEO.

California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown was elected on the premise that he could fix the state’s financial woes, which date back decades.  However, he took to YouTube on Saturday to announce that the projected deficit for the fiscal year beginning on July 1 is now $16 billion, up from the $9 billion that had been anticipated in January.  The original budget plan had relied on a number of risky assumptions, including that tax revenue would grow by $4 billion.

Gov. Brown is demanding a tax increase Reuters called “the center of his fiscal plan”, and putting some of the most popular and visible state services on the chopping block if voters reject the plan.  Brown’s plan calls for automatic targeted spending cuts if the tax increase fails.

The proposal would increase the sales tax by a quarter of a cent for four years. It also would boost the income tax for seven years by either one, two or three percentage points for people making more than $250,000 per year. The highest rate increase would affect those making more than $500,000 per year.

Under the governor’s January budget proposal, the automatic cuts would fall almost entirely on K-12 public schools and community colleges, with the UC and CSU systems also receiving significant midyear cuts. It is not clear if that would change under the governor’s revised budget.

This is, of course, a classic tactic of proponents of big government:  instead of focusing on efficiency or gutting wasteful programs, cuts are made where they will hurt middle class taxpayers the most.  What Brown is doing here is in practice, if not in principle, blackmail.

The worst part is that nothing about this proposal will actually help to solve California’s fiscal problems.  Demanding more tax revenue from a shrinking middle class will only cause even more people of means to leave the state.  Serious structural reforms are also not truly expected from a legislature that can pass a budget with a simple majority vote of only Democrats.

Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company. Saverin’s stake is about 4 percent, according to the website Who Owns Facebook. At the high end of the IPO valuation, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. His holdings aren’t listed in Facebook’s regulatory filings.

The move is obviously intended to be a tax dodge.  Saverin has apparently chosen to take up residency in Singapore on an indefinite basis.  While the U.S. has a relatively high capital gains tax, Singapore has none.  President Obama has made raising the capital gains tax a priority for his Administration and many of the nation’s wealthiest people have begun considering taking their money elsewhere.

A recent editorial on Forbes.com hailed Saverin as a hero for his decision to make a move toward sparing as much of his wealth as possible from U.S. taxes.  It seems likely that Saverin will now go on to use his billions as venture capital or another form of investment, putting capital into productive enterprise instead of government.

From the Washington Times:

The Institute for Justice finds that “occupational licenses” — essentially permission slips from the government to work in a particular field — have proliferated under modern state governments. In the 1950s, IJ writes, only 1 in 20 workers needed to be licensed, but today, almost 1 in 3 face some kind of licensing requirement.

Some key findings of IJ’s study reveal that workers in the occupations they examined on average must spend $209 in fees, take one exam, and take nine months of education and training. Interior designing is the most difficult occupation to enter (though it is only licensed in three states and the District of Columbia), while cosmetology trades, truck and bus drivers, and pest control workers face the most stringent licensing requirements. And strangely, the licensing requirements don’t necessarily correlate with the need to protect the public from harm — for example, the average cosmetologist spends 372 days in training while the average emergency medical technician only needs 33 days of training.

These licenses are hardly a practical necessity for all of the professions where they are required.  Does anybody really believe that a florist needs to pass exams to be able to create an arrangement that is pleasing to the eye?

Oftentimes the licensing schemes are just an easy way for state governments to raise money off of a captive market and for established business interests to scare off competitors.  Depending on the profession, occupational licensing does more to kill jobs than to prevent harm to people from unscrupulous businesses.

Few were shocked when Massachusettscare ended up being more expensive than predicted.  Now the legislature is attempting to determine how to best fix the problem, and it’s worth looking at due to the program’s similarities to what will happen at the national level as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

First of all, we have the need to cut $150 billion in healthcare costs over 15 years.  That is a lot of money for one state to have to cut from a budget.

Secondly, there is the common claim that reforms will focus on “quality, not quantity”.  Whether or not this is a delicate way of referring to a complicated system for rationing health care remains to be seen, but it seems highly likely.  The federal version of the program will almost certainly call for ‘managing costs’ in a way that looks a lot like rationing.

The most telling thing though, about the attempts to reform Massachusettscare is that they have resulted in legislators turning to a very blatant mechanism of the command economy in their attempt to control costs.  The debate over the legislation focuses mostly around whether the aim should be to peg costs to above or below inflation in the state.  A direct quote:  ”The Senate would allow costs to rise just faster than Gross State Product.”

No governing body can decide whether or not to ‘allow’ costs to rise or fall for any product or service.  Only the market can do that.  It is like saying, “I will not allow the outdoor temperature to exceed 100 degrees” during a Phoenix summer.  There is no way to truly tinker with the temperature itself, but the reading on a thermometer can be made to appear to change by moving the numbers around or giving the figure in Celcius.

Sadly, unless the Affordable Care Act is repealed or struck down by the Supreme Court, all of America can look forward to similar logic being applied to health care decisions that should be made by individuals and their doctors.

An FDA panel of 37 experts tasked with reducing overdoses from acetaminophen made sweeping recommendations that, if implemented, would have a huge impact on medicine.

Percocet and Vicodin are household names, taken for pain relief by millions of Americans.  Yet the panel recommended that they be banned, because their formulas include both restricted prescription painkillers and a dose of acetaminophen (Tylenol).

Other recommendations include reducing the recommended dosage of acetaminophen in over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol or Excedrin, and changes in the labeling or allowable concentration of drugs containing acetaminophen.

Some have criticized the FDA for reacting to a nonexistent problem with its regulatory push to combat death by Tylenol overdose.  From a pharmacological standpoint, none of the changes the FDA is demanding would be difficult to implement. The drug companies, however, are understandably concerned with what the regulations could do to their business models. The panel had attempted to recommend a ban on over-the-counter medicines like Nyquil that combine acetaminophen with other drugs, but that rule was narrowly voted down.

At this point, Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen’s disparaging remarks about Ann Romney have been debated ad infinitum by the press.   By describing Ann Romney as someone who had “never worked a day in her life”, Rosen managed to infuriate both stay-at-home mothers and those suffering from multiple sclerosis or breast cancer.

Setting aside the fact that living with either of the aforementioned diseases is devastating enough to make everyday survival extremely taxing, the problem here seems to be the slur against mothers who choose not to work outside of the home.  Suggesting that spending hours upon hours, day after day and week after week with five young boys isn’t work is so ludicrously off the mark, it is laughable.

But it is also revealing.  Because when Rosen made those comments, she accomplished two things:  she eviscerated the notion that the Democratic party is the ‘only choice for women’, and she unknowingly turned the lens on a real war that occurs within womanhood.

Women constantly attack one another.  Feminists can argue until they are blue in the face about how men are constantly insulting women and trying to keep them down.  But the truth seems to be that for every one anti-woman remark made by a man, there are five hundred similar remarks made by women themselves.  Rosen’s slip of the tongue is simply a perfect example of one woman disregarding and belittling the choices of another. Women are so quick to criticize one another for the decisions they have made or their physical appearances.  Sadly, what male conservatives in Congress are supposedly doing pales in comparison to what ordinary women really do to one another every day.

Until Democratic women are willing to treat Republican women with respect and dignity despite their disagreements, they have no right to accuse Conservatives of an anti-woman agenda.  Making petty comments about individuals’ life choices does not help the cause of advancing respect for women in society.  Rosen may have apologized for her choice of words, but it is more than a little disheartening that she thought nothing of saying them in the first place.

The trustees of the Social Security program have released some new figures, and they are extremely ugly.

The general social security trust fund will not be depleted until 2035, but that is three years sooner than has been previously predicted.  The trust fund that supports Medicare will be broke in 2024.  And of course, these are analyses done by government officials, who tend to use fairly optimistic assumptions when making projections.

Perhaps the most crucial piece of information released, though, relates to the Social Security disability trust fund.

Social Security’s disability program, which helps support 11 million Americans, will run through its trust fund in 2016, two years earlier than predicted. The report attributed the fiscal stress in part to the weak economy.

Enrollment in the disability insurance program has soared in recent years. There will be 10.9 million beneficiaries this year, according to the report, up 64 percent since 2000.

Fortunately, it is unlikely that even despite America’s aging population that there are really that many more disabled people; rather, it is, as we have previously reported, the epidemic of unemployment is what has caused so many to file for disability benefits.

PHOTO CREDIT