The week of Monday, January 29: Musk’s canceled billions, LNG, the Fed, Miami, and much, much, more.
The week of Monday, January 29: Musk’s canceled billions, LNG, the Fed, Miami, and much, much, more.
In January 2018, Elon Musk agreed a new compensation package with Tesla’s board that, if Tesla did astonishingly well, could have amounted, over time, to $55.8 billion. The package was approved by the company’s stockholders two months later. Tesla did astonishingly well. Too bad: In January 2024 the package was struck down by a Delaware judge.
Reuters described how the package was structured:
[It] created 12 tranches of options – each equivalent at the time to 1% of Tesla’s outstanding shares – potentially giving him a 12% stake in the automaker. Musk would receive no salary.
Under the 10-year deal, Musk was eligible to win an options tranche every time Tesla hit a series of up to 12 targets. Those targets were tied to increases in Tesla’s market capitalization in $50 billion increments, and to aggressive hurdles for revenue and EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization] growth. Musk went on to hit all 12 targets…
Ford is today valued at around $48 billion, slightly more than in January 2018. So, for Musk to be eligible for each grant of options, Tesla had to hit escalating revenue and EBITDA targets and see its valuation increase by a sum roughly equivalent to another Ford. Tweeting a few days ago, Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC and t he New York Times explained that :
[In 2018] I thought the comp plan was the most “skin in the game” in history. I still do. I have criticized CEO comp a lot — but not this package. Without the incentives, he could have easily stepped down as CEO and then where would [Tesla] have been? Admittedly, I was skeptical he’d hit the most ambitious targets of the package. But he did — having put his entire comp at risk. Isn’t that what we want when we say “pay for performance?”
Tesla ( January 23, 2018 ):
For vesting to occur when the milestones are met, Elon must remain as Tesla’s CEO or serve as both Executive Chairman and Chief Product Officer, in each case with all leadership ultimately reporting to him. This ensures that Elon will continue to lead Tesla’s management over the long-term while also providing the flexibility to bring in another CEO who would report to Elon at some point in the future. Although there is no current intention for this to happen, it provides the flexibility as Tesla continues to grow to potentially allow Elon to focus more of his attention on the kinds of key product and strategic matters that most impact Tesla’s long-term growth and profitability.
Writing in t he New York Times in January 2018, Sorkin noted that :
[Musk] gets paid only if the company succeeds over the long term with significant gains in market cap. And it’s impossible for him to manipulate the system by trying to prop up the stock price for a temporary period. Under the terms of the arrangement, even once his shares vest, he has to hold them an additional five years before he is allowed to sell them…
The company continues to lose money; at one point last year, it was losing almost a half-million dollars an hour, according to Bloomberg News . Jim Chanos, a short-seller who has bet against Tesla’s shares — and has thus far been on the losing side of that trade — has contended that Tesla is worthless.
Chanos has been one of Wall Street’s most successful short sellers.
Reuters :
At that time, Tesla was struggling to manufacture its Model 3 sedan and critics believed Tesla would be unable to survive brewing competition from larger competitors planning to launch their own electric cars.
The company was also seeing a lot of senior departures, not a good sign.
Back to Reuters :
Tesla’s stock market value was $53 billion when Musk’s package was approved, and it surged by more than 2,000% to exceed $1.2 trillion in 2021 before retreating more recently to $605 billion. An investor who bought and held shares when Musk’s package was approved would currently be up about 1,000%.
Oh yes, the company reached the final target years ahead of schedule.
In 2018, however, Richard Tornetta, who held nine shares in Tesla , sued the company’s board (some defendants were later dropped). To the Guardian , this former heavy metal drummer was “ an unlikely opponent,” but:
Many law firms that represent shareholders keep a stable of investors they can work with to bring cases, says Eric Talley, who teaches corporate law at Columbia Law School….The plaintiff signs paperwork to file the lawsuit and then generally gets out of the way, says Talley. The investors do not pay the law firm, which takes the case on contingency, as the lawyers did in the Musk case.
I have no idea whether that was Tornetta ’s arrangement (the Wall Street Journal came up with a similar theory), but his lawyers will cash in (they may make billions ).
Kathaleen McCormick , the judge who voided the package, heavily criticized the process by which it was approved.
“In the final analysis, Musk launched a self-driving process, recalibrating the speed and direction along the way as he saw fit. The process arrived at an unfair price,” she wrote.
Second-guessing the board’s decision in this way is unusual. Typically, courts follow the business judgment rule, a rule designed to avoid directors being forever embroiled in litigation over business decisions that did not work out. Via Cornell Law School, a brief description of how it works:
[A] court will uphold the decisions of a director as long as they are made (1) in good faith , (2) with the care that a reasonably prudent person would use, and (3) with the reasonable belief that the director is acting in the best interests of the corporation.
As a practical matter this operates as a presumption that the director (or directors) met those standards. However, that presumption can be overridden and even reversed under certain circumstances. In Delaware, explained McCormick, “the law recognizes unique risks inherent in a corporation’s transactions with its controlling stockholder.”
If she found that Musk had such control, there would be an exponential increase in her ability to scrutinize the compensation package and the process by which it was approved. If she concluded that, whatever the board may have thought, the deal was unfair, she then could try, so far as the law allowed, to put things right.
Musk only owned 21.9 percent of Tesla’s stock at the time, but in Delaware defining “control” is more than a numbers game.
In McCormick’s view:
Musk was the paradigmatic “Superstar CEO,” who held some of the most influential corporate positions (CEO, Chair, and founder), enjoyed thick ties with the directors tasked with negotiating on behalf of Tesla, and dominated the process that led to board approval of his compensation plan. At least as to this transaction, Musk controlled Tesla.
And on the basis of McCormick’s recital of the facts, it does indeed appear that Musk enjoyed, to a greater or lesser extent, “thick” relationships (whether based on friendship, financial ties, or both) with almost all Tesla’s directors. Does that necessarily mean they were incapable of acting independently? No, but they failed to convince McCormick that they had.
Once the judge had decided that Musk controlled the company (for the purposes of this transaction anyway), the defendants had to overcome the “burden of proving at trial that the compensation plan was entirely [my emphasis added] fair.” This is widely acknowledged, in McCormick’s words, as “Delaware’s most onerous standard of review.”
Another law firm has explained it this way:
[D]irectors must prove that both the price of the transaction and the course of dealing – including structure, negotiations, disclosures and timing – were fair.
McCormick rightly observed that the shift in the burden of proof left the defendants:
“[W]ith the unenviable task of proving the fairness of the largest potential compensation plan in the history of public markets. If any set of attorneys could have achieved victory in these unlikely circumstances, it was the talented defense attorneys here. But the task proved too tall an order.”
That would have been true under any circumstances, even more so, with a judge, I suspect, unwilling to contemplate that any one man could either be worth, or paid, so much, even one she recognized (how could she not?) as “unique” and who had “been singularly instrumental to Tesla, and…[was] genuinely motivated by highly ambitious goals.” She wasn’t persuaded that the fear that Musk was a flight risk should play much of a part in assessing what he should be paid.
And, to be sure, during the trial Musk had said that he would have remained at the company even if the plan had been rejected because he was “heavily invested in Tesla, both financially and emotionally, and viewed Tesla as part of his family.” But Musk says a lot of things. Prior to the deal, he had been rather more ambiguous about how long he would stay at Tesla.
In this context, it’s worth noting that on January 15 of this year, Musk (who, following sales of Tesla stock to help pay for the acquisition of Twitter, now owns 13 percent of the company, a holding that would have increased to 20 percent if he had exercised the options he had received under the 2018 compensation plan) tweeted this :
I am uncomfortable growing Tesla to be a leader in AI & robotics without having ~25% voting control. Enough to be influential, but not so much that I can’t be overturned. Unless that is the case, I would prefer to build products outside of Tesla…Tesla is not one startup, but a dozen. Simply look at the delta between what Tesla does and GM. As for stock ownership itself being enough motivation, Fidelity and other[s] own similar stakes to me. Why don’t they show up for work?
Judging by the publicly available information , “Fidelity and others” must be a generic reference to large institutional investors.
McCormick argued that, after taking into account the money Musk could make from growing the value of his existing position in the company, a compensation package with much less upside ought to have sufficed to keep him involved and engaged. Given the nature of the mind in question, this was a bold exercise in mindreading. Musk, after all, had put forward a proposal that showed he was hunting for a fresh source of billions — there was no secret about this — to fund other dreams. Mars!
Then there was the message contained in that January 15 tweet (which predated the publication of McCormick’s judgment), which was followed by another a few hours later in which he elaborated on the first while revealing that Delaware was on his mind:
I should note that the Tesla board is great. The reason for no new “compensation plan” is that we are still waiting for a decision in my Delaware compensation case. The trial for that was held in 2022, but a verdict has yet to be made. I put “compensation plan” in quotes, because, from my standpoint, this is primarily about ensuring the right amount of voting influence at Tesla. If I have 25%, it means I am influential, but can be overridden if twice as many shareholders vote against me vs for me. At 15% or lower, the for/against ratio to override me makes a takeover by dubious interests too easy. I would be fine with a dual class voting structure to achieve this, but am told it is impossible to achieve post-IPO in Delaware.
To McCormick, “the incredible size of the biggest compensation plan ever…seems to have been calibrated to help Musk achieve what he believed would make “a good future for humanity.” Of course, she — imagine a discreetly hidden smirk — conceded, a “good future for humanity is a really good thing,” although (here comes the dagger), “some might question whether colonizing Mars is the logical next step.” Twenty years ago, she would probably have questioned what Musk was doing fooling around with a rocket company. Well, SpaceX was recently valued at around $180 billion, and has become an important strategic asset for the U.S.
How Musk might choose to spend his extra billions ought to be irrelevant. Would the judge agree that she should be denied a pay raise on the grounds that she might use it in ways that her employer thought foolish? When it came to the (potential) cost of the compensation package, all that should matter is whether the board had agreed to pay (potentially) more than was needed to keep Musk on the premises and incentivized.
The judge also rejected the “hindsight” argument that the compensation plan was fair because it worked. The defendants, she said, had “failed to prove that Musk’s less than-full time efforts [ouch] for Tesla were solely or directly responsible for Tesla’s recent growth, or that the [compensation plan] was solely or directly responsible for Musk’s efforts.” How that could have been proved was unclear.
Nor, unlike Sorkin, was McCormick impressed by the fact that Musk’s compensation under the package was totally dependent on Tesla meeting some highly demanding targets. She pointed to Tesla internal projections suggesting that some of the earlier performance benchmarks were less “audacious” or “extraordinarily ambitious” than had been claimed. But that does nothing to alter the fact that another key element in the targets was that Tesla should achieve far higher future market valuations — all those incremental Fords. Forecasts of market valuations are something that, whatever Wall Street analysts may claim, are rarely more than (sometimes) informed guesswork. If Tesla had any valuation forecasts, they would not have been much (or at all) better. The merit of including market valuations as a benchmark is that, despite the distortions introduced by macro factors, sectoral rotation, and market noise, they represent the collective verdict of outsiders on the company’s prospects and performance. In any event, after the plan was announced, Musk had said that Tesla “could become a trillion-dollar company within a 10-year period,” a view that institutional investors would almost certainly have known, and his admiring retail shareholders would probably have assumed.
McCormick took issue with other aspects of the package too. The approval of the compensation plan at a special meeting of Tesla’s shareholders was not enough to save the day. Seventy-three percent of the votes cast were in favor. This total excludes Musk and his brother Kimbal — adding their votes would have taken the total to some 80 percent. Normally that would have been enough to insulate the plan from attack, so long as the shareholders had been properly informed, but in McCormick’s view they had not been. The paperwork sent to shareholders had not contained adequate disclosure about the actual or potential problems that she had identified in the board’s approval process.
And so she ordered that the deal be rescinded (Musk’s options would be canceled), brushing aside objections that this would leave Musk uncompensated for his work since 2018: Given the rise in Tesla’s share price since then, Musk’s “preexisting equity stake [had] provided him tens of billions of dollars for his efforts.” That that stake reflected both his own investment in the company and stock he had received in return for past services didn’t worry her. Replacing a $55.8 billion package with $0 seems extraordinarily harsh. Was there really no scope to scale it back rather than to wipe it out altogether? If there had been, that might (at a guess) be the most promising route to take in an appeal.
So, what now? Absent a sufficiently acceptable appeal, which is likely to be an uphill struggle , there is no easy way ahead for Tesla’s board. Attempting a reworked, legally defensible, and even remotely comparable version of the 2018 package would, in the end, have to involve shareholders agreeing to Musk being paid billions of dollars for past services, and that looks like a long shot . The deal that Musk sketched out in January is unlikely to go much further. And in the background, there must be the question whether there will have to be changes in the composition of the board in order to restore some of its credibility, changes with consequences that might leave Musk — how to put this — feeling hemmed in.
Another cloud on the horizon is that roughly half of Musk’s current shareholding in Tesla has been pledged as collateral for various borrowings, an unhealthily high percentage. This would have been reduced to around a third had Musk been able to include shares acquired after the exercise of options received under the 2018 deal, but that will be off the table if McCormick’s judgment stands.
How Musk will react to all this is anyone’s guess, an uncertainty that Tesla’s shareholders cannot relish. That the electric vehicle sector, including Tesla , is under some pressure at the moment won’t help their mood either. As I write, Tesla is trading at about $177, down from $253 at year end, and down from $191 the day before the judgment was released. The shareholders the plaintiff’s lawyers were supposedly representing must find it difficult to contain their gratitude.
So far, the only action Musk has proposed is, following a vote taken on X (Twitter), to ask Tesla shareholders to change the company’s state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas . He had earlier recommended incorporating “in Nevada or Texas if you prefer shareholders to decide matters.” Of the two, he argued, Nevada should be the choice for “most companies,” but he thought that Texas was better for Tesla because it is “physically headquartered” there.
It’s worth noting that as Chancellor (chief judge) of Delaware’s Court of Chancery, McCormick is able to choose which cases to take on. She could have quite justifiably picked this one because of its significance and the billions at stake. Musk, however, seems to have seen something else at work. Referring to her judgment, he tweeted : “She is an activist and politician, first and foremost, as her language clearly indicates.”
McCormick’s (carefully argued) judgment betrayed no overt signs of conventional political bias, but traces of a leftist sensibility can be detected. Thus, she began with a question: “Was the richest person in the world overpaid?” Perhaps that was just a good hook for the “story” that McCormick, a stylish, clear, and sometimes amusing writer, was telling, but (to me) it came with a hint that she was none too enamored with the idea of “the richest person in the world,” a title, in fact, that Musk had yet to earn — yes, earn — at the time the pay package was awarded. If her judgment survives any appeal, Musk will be downgraded to number three. Her reference to the $55.8 billion as an “unfathomable sum” is unmistakably disapproving and would be in keeping with her underlying view that Musk’s existing stake (and the money he could make from it) should be enough. Incidentally, it was no secret that Musk could make all those billions if all went exceptionally well (and the proxy statement sent to shareholders ahead of the vote spelled that out in detail). Unlike the head of Delaware’s Court of Chancery, most Tesla shareholders, it seems, could “fathom” a (very) big number. And they could live with it.
In some ways, this case was a battle between two sections of this country’s elite. Musk may be infuriating, reckless, eccentric, ornery, and (insert additional adjectives here: There are plenty to choose from), but he contains multitudes. He is also the most extreme contemporary incarnation of the individualism, creativity, and freewheeling spirit that has made the American entrepreneuriat what it is. And then there is McCormick, a member in good standing of a ruling class not generally known for any of the latter three qualities. Moreover, as a senior member of the judiciary she is ex officio a protector of the broader interests of the legal profession, custodians of a system in which an excessive premium is put on process and procedure, a premium that all too often has been a source of hugely profitable rent-seeking — at enormous cost to everyone else.
To Musk, the case against him must have seemed ridiculous. He’d taken an enormous gamble. It had worked out very well for him and his shareholders, and now he was being punished for it. It was a brutal reminder that reasonability and the law do not always coincide. Tesla investors had approved the deal knowing, at some level at least, about Musk’s clout within the company (in fact, that’s why, in many cases, they would have bought the stock), as well as how high his upside might be. But it had made no difference.
Of course, there was more than a touch of arrogance in the way Musk went about arranging the deal. He’s smart enough to know the rules (or to understand what his lawyers presumably told him about them). A deal of such size was almost certain to come under legal attack, but he could have reduced the risk such attacks would succeed by making more effort to show that the package had passed truly independent muster. Not for the first time in his career, Musk had made things worse for himself by his refusal to acknowledge obligations laid down, one way or another, by the law. He may have found them absurd (not always wrongly), but so was the idea that he could soar above them. Tesla, after all, was a public company . “The parasitic load of being a public company has become extremely high,” tweeted Musk grimly in the aftermath of McCormick’s judgment (I wouldn’t expect a SpaceX IPO anytime soon). Moreover, particularly since the acquisition of Twitter, he has been transformed, to many on the left, from Tony Stark into Lex Luthor, and, as such, become a target.
He has now discovered just how vulnerable that left him, and how expensive that can be. His shareholders are beginning to discover that his loss is being followed by their loss, a loss that will accelerate should fears grow that he will quit the company. And, if the effect of Musk’s loss is that he has less of a platform, or less of an inclination, to maintain his pursuit of the future at its current pace, America will be poorer, too.
February 7: Book Launch for David Bahnsen’s Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life
On February 7, National Review Institute will host the official launch of David Bahnsen’s latest book, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life (Post Hill Press, 2024), at the Union League Club in New York City.
Here’s an extract:
We know that what people do matters, but we often choose to pretend it is just an abstraction. It is not. Activity and achievement are very much a part of our identity, and the only real question is how comfortable one is in saying so. Note that I did not say it’s only career achievements that determine one’s life or identity. The material prosperity that flows from one’s career is not the core of one’s identity. But how one works, whatever the outcome, is an important part of one’s identity— one’s passion, discipline, service, and purpose.
Those familiar with David’s writing, television appearances, or the Capital Record , his weekly podcast for Capital Matters, will know that he is well worth listening to.
The event will serve as a chance to hear an enthusiastic defense of the dignity of work, in an age when its essential value is too often minimized.
David will be giving a talk and then will be interviewed by National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty. This will be followed by a panel (chaired by yours truly) featuring Anne Bradley, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, and Andy Puzder.
Registration details here.
The Forgotten Book
Capital Matters has a fortnightly feature, The Forgotten Book, which is written by our new National Review Institute fellow, the writer and historian, Amity Shlaes. We live in an age of short attention spans, and one of Amity’s objectives is to introduce readers to books or other primary sources that warrant a second look.
With her Capital Matters column, Amity will dedicate herself to sharing with Capital Matters readers older, forgotten books, along with new books that aren’t getting the attention they perhaps warrant.
Her latest column can be found here , and is devoted to one topic covered in a new book on Henry Wallace.
Here’s an extract:
In a forthcoming print edition of National Review, I will have a separate review of The World That Wasn’t . (It’s a book that covers a great deal of ground.) Steil concludes Wallace was in this period “unaware” Magdoff’s Soviet connection. But what is sure is that Wallace, through his reliance on Magdoff’s report and other efforts, was making the case for the kind of wholescale planning that had so impeded recovery in the decade prior…
The Capital Record
We released the latest of our series of podcasts, the Capital Record . Follow the link to see how to subscribe (it’s free!). The Capital Record , which appears weekly, is designed to make use of another medium to deliver Capital Matters’ defense of free markets. Financier and National Review Institute trustee, David L. Bahnsen hosts discussions on economics and finance in this National Review Capital Matters podcast, sponsored by the National Review Institute. Episodes feature interviews with the nation’s top business leaders, entrepreneurs, investment professionals, and financial commentators.
In the 155 th episode David is joined once again by the brilliant Dr. Alexander Salter, economic scholar and co-author of a provocative new book ( The Medieval Constitution of Liberty ) on the origins of the “great enrichment.” As always, the discussion takes some detours, but the whole thing will find you enriched, with real clarity on how you got to be so.
The Capital Matters week that was . . .
Renewable Energy
One of the problems often associated with central planning is that its interference with market mechanisms and characteristically swollen ambitions can easily take the planners into a position where they are in pursuit of contradictory goals. So, Brussels wanted a lot of solar power to be installed (advantage mercantilist China), and for this to be achieved very quickly (advantage mercantilist China), and for it to be attractively priced (advantage mercantilist China) while simultaneously developing a competitive European solar sector…
LNG
Even though the administration’s permit pause will not have any short-term effect on the amount of American LNG that goes to Europe (new LNG facilities take a long time to build), it risks damaging the credibility of the U.S. as an ally at a critical time. It also sends a clear (negative) signal to American companies thinking of investing the billions needed to build new facilities, or investing more generally in LNG production.
The Kremlin will have every reason to celebrate the administration’s “pause.” …
If the “pause” becomes permanent, the LNG will, as the editorial writers point out, still be bought somewhere. That means that the U.S. will have (a) thrown away export revenues and jobs, (b) weakened its credibility with its allies, (c) squandered an opportunity to increase its influence with countries that are . . . less friendly, and (d) handed extra profits to countries less likely to let TikTok influencers influence their energy policy. Sheer brilliance, I tell you.
Joe Biden will block the approval of critical new liquified-natural-gas (LNG) export permits on environmental grounds, leaving America’s allies freezing in the dark and strengthening Vladimir Putin…
The Fed
The Federal Reserve will almost certainly leave its interest-rate target range unchanged at this week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. Markets currently put the odds of a rate cut at a mere 3.1 percent. FOMC members should think carefully about that decision. New data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that inflation has fallen faster than FOMC members expected, which implies that monetary policy was tighter than FOMC members thought. To keep monetary policy on its intended path, the FOMC should begin cutting its interest-rate target range…
Gas Stoves
Readers who can recall events from only one year ago might remember the passionate national debate sparked by the Biden administration’s effort to drag the country, kicking and screaming, into a carbon-neutral future.
One of the prongs in this multiaxial assault on the existing social compact featured an attack on indoor natural-gas-powered appliances . The administration and its allies lost that debate, but you wouldn’t know it from the triumphalism they have adopted in defeat…
Ike
It’s reasonable to believe that Eisenhower would give a different speech today than he did in 1961. Then, defense spending as a share of GDP and as a share of federal spending were near historic highs. Today, those measures are near historic lows. Eisenhower said it is “the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate” the many competing goals of government, and to do so “within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”
We have not heeded that portion of Eisenhower’s advice…
Net Zero
Who should set America’s environmental policies? Some of the world’s largest fund managers seem to think they should.
BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, and others have formed consortiums that are trying to push publicly traded firms to adopt the Paris agreement’s net-zero CO 2 emission target by the year 2050….
Free Trade
In Cass’s telling, economists became doctrinaire free-traders, as a class, after World War II. That isn’t correct. Many economists argued in favor of import substitution in developing countries. Developing countries implemented various forms of import substitution, the replacement of imports with domestically produced goods, and failed to develop. It was the manifest failure of this policy that induced many economists to change their minds and argue for different trade policies instead…
Child Tax Credit
There is a debate going on about the disincentive to work lurking in the child tax-credit changes proposed in new tax legislation by Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Jason Smith (R., Mo.). On one side are those who say that no one will stop working for a $2,000 annual credit per child; on the other side are those who say that workforce participation will indeed dip as a result…
Tobacco Harm Reduction
Anti-smoking activists have worked for centuries to get people to stop smoking. One successful way to do that is by recognizing that many smokers are addicted to nicotine. They need their “fix.” That’s why people endorse nicotine-replacement therapy (NRT) to help smokers quit…
Trillionaires
[T]he phrase “X group shouldn’t exist” is not a place political language should go. When discussing wealth, this dogma was applied to billionaires and has become increasingly popular among the activist Left on Reddit, Tumblr, Teen Vogue , and the like, but it shows up in slightly more serious settings such as the British parliament . The complaint is always the same: Rich men are getting richer. Yes, those who own successful businesses and have funds available to invest typically do well for themselves. The Rule of 72 , an estimate of how long it should take to double one’s money in an index fund, is not a secret reserved for the ultra-rich.
But we all know that these complaints about the wealthiest are insincere — the grousing is envy and intra–social circle virtue signaling for those a tier below the self-made billionaires. No one hates the ultra-wealthy as much as the almost-as-wealthy trust-fund class…
Social Security
Social Security needs fixing. That’s an understatement. Unless it’s fixed, benefits will be cut across the board by over 20 percent in the next ten years. But the way to go about fixing Social Security isn’t to put it on life support with revenue taken from gutting private savings…
Minimum Wage
In Colorado, the debate over the minimum wage presents a complex and contentious issue. The state legislature has avoided implementing a significant statewide increase in the minimum wage, essentially turning over that task to municipalities. The issue has sparked a unique response: Neighboring municipalities are banding together, creating ad hoc intrastate compacts, to set regional minimum-wage standards. This move raises critical questions about its impact on businesses and consumers.
Miami
Americans just can’t handle “rough-and-tumble capitalism,” to borrow a term from New York Times journalist David Leonhardt’s recent book . They need government, organized labor, and big business to protect them from rapid changes with regulation, sectoral bargaining, and corporate social responsibility.
Yet somehow, Miami seems to be doing all right…
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