You may remember that we informed you about friends of PolicySphere raising money to help residents in eastern Tennessee affected by Helene. We're pleased to report that they have met their fundraising goals and are on their way there. You can still follow their updates on GiveSendGo.

Interesting piece from Mark Muro and Joseph Parilla at Brookings on the Biden Administration's "place-based" industrial policy. This was a smaller, little-noticed $80 billion slice of the American Rescue Plan Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The idea there was to target specific regions and local economies.

They include creating "Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs" administered by the Economic Development Administration, "Regional Innovation Engines" administered by the NSF to "foster innovation ecosystems." Many of these initiatives involve grant competitions where regions or organizations submit proposals for funding, and emphasize bringing together government, business and academia, and have some sort of focus on technology and innovation. Examples include the semiconductor sector in Phoenix and advanced mobility in Tulsa.

The article avoids evaluating these projects, in part because they're recent, but in part, we suspect, because they're not doing much except giving grants to places to either do things that would have happened anyway, or to do bureaucracy.

This is where the industrial policy rubber meets the road: making these kinds of policies work in the real world, generating actual economic activity that becomes self-sustaining over time rather than being a jobs program, is actually rather difficult.

Do all these local programs work? The answer, it seems to be, is: stay tuned. That sounds about right to us.

Interview Of The Week

Our interview series is back, and we really enjoyed this week's product. We interviewed Harry Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative. After 25 years as the CEO of an important machine tool company, Moser's retirement project has been a non-profit that, instead of focusing on white papers and lobbying Congress, produces data and software tools that help actual American businesses make it economic for them to reshore production to the US.

Moser is full of insights from both the real world and the world of policy and economics about what the reality of reshoring is, and how we can get more of it.

We encourage you to read the full interview →

Policy News You Need To Know

#Chyna — An underappreciated story out of China is that Xi Jinping seems to genuinely be a Maoist, and as a result entrepreneurial activity in China seems to be screeching to a halt. See for example these recent reports about local government officials engaging in crime against local entrepreneurs in order to extort money from them. The rule of law and dynamism are such key and unique and precious aspects of what makes America great.

#Energy #Chyna — Taiwan just shut down its penultimate nuclear reactor, as part of a plan to copy Germany's disastrous energy policy. This will make it even more dependent on energy imports. Why should the US care? Well, because the US is charged with Taiwan's security, and it's hard to provide good security to a country that doesn't seem interested in its own national interest. (See also Taiwan's disastrous underspending on its own military, given the very real threats it faces.)

#Chyna #Trade — The US Commerce Department is forging ahead with new measures to bar Chinese-made vehicles as well as certain software and hardware from the US market. Global automakers and their suppliers will now have to restructure their supply chains to comply with the new rules, reports the Rhodium Group. The rules, part of the Information and Communications Technology and Services (ICTS) regulations, aim to address national security concerns related to connected and autonomous vehicles. They could have wide-ranging impacts, such as the exit of Chinese-owned companies from the US market, and the halting of vehicle exports from China by Ford and GM. The rules also introduce stringent reporting requirements and expand definitions of Chinese state influence.

#FamilyPolicy — A blockbuster new paper from NBER shows that universal pre-K does basically nothing to help children; instead, all of the positive economic returns come from allowing the parents to work more and earn more. If you're interested in helping children and all families, this should make you support universal pre-K less. Of course, if you're interested in promoting and subsidizing specifically the two-earner family model favored by liberal elites, this may be a feature and not a bug.

#Immigration — Yet another blockbuster report from Chris Rufo, investigating how, precisely, thousands of Haitian migrants appeared seemingly overnight in small struggling towns like Charleroi, PA. "The answer: an open conspiracy between the federal government, publicly funded NGOs, and private corporations." Read on at City Journal.

#Immigration — When the Biden-Harris Administration took charge, they put a gag order on border patrol officials to hide the extent to which they were opening the border, according to a new bombshell report by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

#WasteManagement — You know we like a good report on some nerdy, unsexy topic. So what about waste management? We today are more sensitive to how consumer waste affects the environment. At the same time, the costs of waste collection, disposal, and recycling have continued to grow as we produce more waste. "The result is a strong desire to reduce pollution and waste through public policies that improve recycling and align taxation with better outcomes," writes the Tax Foundation in a new report. "Governments have sought policies that effectively reduce waste, promote the recycling and reuse of materials, and shift the cost of waste management back to the producers of the waste—all while avoiding undue burdens on already suffering economies," they write. So far so good. It seems that the buzzword du jour is "Extender Producer Responsibility" (EPR), which "encompasses a broad array of policies that seek to accomplish one or more of these goals by making producers responsible, in some way, for the management of their products at the end of their use cycle." But, as ever when it comes to such buzzwords, not all is good. "EPR may not be the optimal vehicle to meet all environmental goals, enable recycling, and/or promote a circular economy, but it is highly likely to be a part of the policy toolkit, and there are certainly policy options under the EPR umbrella that are better than others," the authors write. Sounds right to us.

#Econ101 — A real-world lesson from Argentina: ending rent control boosts housing supply. Yes, you know that, and we know that, but not everybody knows that, and so it's nice to see it confirmed in the real world once again.

#Politics — You may have seen that President Trump's odds of reelection have jumped on prediction markets. Nate Silver thinks it may not reflect genuine market activity. "One way you can tell the Polymarket numbers likely reflect whale activity rather than new information is because the popular vote contract isn't moving toward Trump at all and it should be heavily correlated with the Electoral College contract."

#Politics — Elon Musk's America PAC is entering politics with a bang, offering Americans $47 for each registered voter they refer in a swing state that signs its petition. Earlier, at President Trump's rally at Butker, PA, and then in an interview with Tucker Carlson, Musk stated his belief that if Kamala Harris wins the Presidential election, the US will no longer have a competitive two-party system.