But what is a reasonable percentile for someone to "comfortably" afford the monthly payment for a median new car? Maybe 80 is on the high side. But it certainly isn't 50%.
10% of income as a heuristic for a car payment isn't too terrible.
It should have been clear enough from reading the abstract of Khan's law review note https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p.... Quote: "This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust policy--specifically pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—-is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy." In other words, the current law is wrong, and it should be this other way instead.
Courts, especially U.S. District Courts, apply the law as it is, not the law as the FTC chair wishes it to be. If I was a hedge fund manager with a law degree, I would draw the same conclusion, and make similar bets.
> In other words, the current law is wrong, and it should be this other way instead.
The "current framework in antitrust policy" was not legal at all. It was a set of interpretations and standards agreed upon by judges and enforcement agencies.
In particular, the "consumer welfare standard" appears _nowhere_ in our current law. It is a framework that is used as a fig leaf to allow agencies to refuse to enforce the law as written.
The last two decades of anti-trust regulation failure can essentially be chalked up to a divide by zero bug.
"But we offer our product for free to consumers, so we can't be a monopoly" was used as a get-out-of-jail-free card, coupled with legislator and regulator ignorance on who the consumer was.
Hopefully, we'll look back at 2005-2025 as a silly period where government forgot its place in the market.
She's referring to case law. The WSJ and the US Chamber of Commerce have been gunning for Lina Khan for a while now but I wouldn't bet against her. Even when losing, she's expanding how antitrust should be enforced, eg in the FTC v Meta case, the court seemed to accept [1] the FTC's argument about "actual potential competition", setting a precedent that the FTC will likely use in future cases.
The current law is more general; it’s the current policy’s consumer price heuristic that has become a bad approximation to the law. I like “The Economists’ Hour” on the topic.
However, precedents can also be changed by the court system. So using the FTC as a lever to change precedent is in fact potential route to change the law. It may even be the only option with congress's dysfunction.
This isn't the FTC denying these arbitrarily though so isn't just "executive action", this is using the enforcement making power that congress duly granted to agency to bring law suits. If the courts agreed that precedent needs to change that's checks and balances working.
Please tell me what major question this is violating? Anti-trust law is explicitly given in its ability to bring suit to these companies. The consumer harm standard isn't even a part of the law arguably the consumer harm standard should be overturned by the major questions doctrine since the court wrote the rule into the law wholesale without congresses directive decades after the law was written.
Both are, the FTC was created with shared jurisdiction on matters of anti-trust. However, the supreme court recently limited that to injunctive powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMG_Capital_Management,_LLC_v.... relief would be through a DOJ suit or via state AGs
As I said elsewhere, betting on whether mergers will go through has a long, long history.
Ivan Boesky sought his edge with insider information, which of course is illegal. If Lina Khan gives you a legal edge by making spurious objections, the smart trader takes it.
Eventually everyone figures out that an FTC objection doesn't mean much, and the edge goes away.
It feels like a very truncated version of the translator's preface. Maybe someone will post a review.
I am partial to Pevear and Volonkhonsky. I find the English fine, despite everyone complaining it is too close to the Russian. I don't read Russian, so the closer the translator can get me, the better.
What happens when they lose this one too? Just because the commissioner has a law review Note setting forth a legal theory does not mean the law has changed.
I have trouble seeing Khan's continuation at the FTC as anything but an olive branch to Big Tech. Activision is a recent failure. The glaring one was Facebook, where the FTC did "not even provide an estimated actual figure or range for Facebook's market share at any point over the past ten years" [1]. That's the judge! In his opinion!
However the FTC abilities may be limited because of two situations. First a surpreme court case that could limit federal agencies in general, likely because of the conservative majority.
"Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control."
But your concern is that the head of the FTC, after making serious effort within the law to rein in Big Tech, fails Biden will give her a cabinet position.
It was a mistake putting these agencies under the executive in the first place. Gives the president too much power by far. No reason they can't be run directly by congress.
> No reason they can't be run directly by congress
What does this mean? You want the FTC to be more toothless? Because that's what removing it from the executive and placing it under the legislature does: it turns it into a fact-finding outfit with zero enforcement powers.
> If an executive agency can have legislative powers, then a legislative agency can also have executive powers
Sure. This isn't a hot take. The legislature can order the executive to take specific actions. It does so all the time. The reason every society in history separates or delineates its executive functions is because many tasks of government require faster action than a deliberative body can continuously commit to.
Congress (big and slow) granting agencies (small and faster) limited rule-making powers increases the agencies' power. The executive granting the Congress limited executive powers (e.g. prosecuting contempt of Congress) doesn't confer an equal power transfer. The executive branch of any system is built to amplify and focus power; the legislature, to distribute it. That executive power, if vested in the Congress, would dissolve across the body.
An FTC under the Congress would have the same authority as any Congressional subcommittee: infinite in theory, but relatively toothless in practice.
Why would an FTC whose officers were appointed by congressional committee rather than the president be any slower to act? Also, why does the FTC need to act so quickly? It operates through the court system, which is itself a slow moving deliberative body as it should be.
> Why would an FTC whose officers were appointed by congressional committee rather than the president be any slower to act?
Because its every action would be subject to Congressional rules and procedure. It's part of the Congress. That's what putting it under the legislature means.
> why does the FTC need to act so quickly?
Injunctions? Compelling testimony? Conducting investigations? You're confusing Congress with a sovereign Parliament.
The head of such an agency can be given authority to act without consulting congress in just the same manner that the current FTC does not need to ask for presidential approval for every single thing it does.
> head of such an agency can be given authority to act without consulting congress
No, they can't. Congress isn't sovereign, but it isn't bound by any prior Congress. You could create an exception to parliamentary procedure for the agency, like we do for e.g. CBO, a legislative agency, but it wouldn't be able to actually do anything.
> the same manner that the current FTC does not need to ask for presidential approval
The FTC was created as an independent agency by the FTCA of 1914. A law passed by the Congress and signed by the President. It exercises Article II powers freely and limited Article I rule-making powers delegated to it by the Congress.
When the FTC takes executive action, it does so as an independent agency. When it invokes its rule-making authority, it's subject to all manner of checks and balances, from the President through the courts all the way to the Congress. Inverting that makes the agency useless. It would have rule-making authority similar to the Congress (i.e. subject to full passage and Presidential veto) but none of the executive powers.
I'll admit, this is one of the more creative ways of de-fanging an unpopular agency that I've seen. (I still can't tell if it's parody criticism of Chevron.)
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. There are no rules for delegation of congressional powers in the constitution. There are no rules for administrative agencies in the constitution. We have made them all up, and can rewrite them at will. We can move the "FTC" box on the org chart to be under a congressional committee rather than the president and let it operate exactly how it does today, just without delegating power to the executive branch, which already has too much.
I understand what you're saying. That's why I threw out the aside about your reasoning being a parody of Chevron. It's cute, but ungrounded.
There is nothing in the Constitution that explicitly prohibits legislative power being delegated to the executive nor vice versa. The Courts are sorting this out, people are upset, they're tabling stupid suggestions--whatever.
What you're failing to grasp is how those transfers weaken the power and shape it to their vessels. An agency has less rule-making power than the Congress has in legislating. It also exercises it subject to the rules and restrictions of the executive branch. (You can't FOIA the Congress.) Moving Congress's power to the FTC changes that power; the same if you move enforcement to a glorified Congressional committee. Every matter of enforcement would either require a full act of Congress, or, could be endlessly dragged out in the courts until the Congress changes and everything resets. (We aren't on the 109th FTC. We are in the 117th Congress.)
Congress delegating its authority to agencies simply results in a more durable transfer of power than the executive deputizing a committee of Congress.
We can move the "FTC" box on the org chart to be under a congressional committee rather than the president and let it operate exactly how it does today, just without delegating power to the executive branch, which already has too much
What about other agencies? The EPA for example? Now environment regulations will be a political game and could change drastically as congress swings right and left.
Why would an FTC whose officers were appointed by congressional committee rather than the president be any slower to act?
I believe you are misunderstanding the potential change the Supreme Court ruling could have. Each regulation would have to be approved by congress, not appointments.
There are so many regulations that congress would have to approve each one. They could have a large bill that has them all but imagine how often they would change especially if contentious.
One year there could be a requirement about emissions from cars then the next none. It would create chaos and damage the country in my opinion.
Your link is not how the branches of government work either. We changed that with the creation of agencies like the FTC. Most of the legislating in the US is now one by agencies under the executive branch that have had their authority delegated by congress. If we changed it once, we can change it again to give power back to congress and make it work more like it was supposed to.
Khan and the "Neo-Brandeisians" have a legal theory, which to oversimplify, holds that the true meaning of the antitrust statutes is "big business is antithetical to democracy, and so the federal government is empowered to stop businesses getting bigger." The current precedent in antitrust holds that antitrust means that the government is only empowered to act when bigness results in consumer harm, mostly in the form of higher prices.
Note, legal theories are not like scientific theories! Courts can be influenced by legal theories. And in fact, the current mainstream in antitrust, which focuses on consumer harm, started as a legal theory propounded by the likes of Bork (yes, that Bork) and Posner. Because it has been adopted by the courts, especially by the Supreme Court, it is the precedent.
Trial courts are bound to follow the precedent! So, of course the legal strategy was bound to lead to losses in court. You can win under this strategy, but only in the Supreme Court, which isn't bound to follow the precedent, but mostly prefers to follow its own precedent. Getting to the Supreme court typically takes years, and it requires the Supreme Court wanting to take the case.
We'll see in the next stage if this was the strategy. If I were pursuing this strategy, I would say so. Then the losses wouldn't hurt morale!
I suspect that's her goal, even if implicit, to take it to the supreme court to get her precedent. It's a poor strategy though, and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of her odds and position. The emphasis on the supreme court tends to screw people up. A "vanity" as it were.
She was chosen as a celebrity on the issue, due to her paper and outspokenness, not her technically prowess. A fatal flaw with most political appointees. I suspect some of her supporters in the admin likely hoped she would be less controlling on cases but be dogged in pursuit. But perhaps
others thought the opposite. An incompetent zealot, can be a perfect buffer.
The Activision case is a fiasco, it's huge at 75b, there's lots of nice evidence, etc. It upends her core selling points.
> legal theories are not like scientific theories!
Good advice. Because unlike a scientific theory no one can really prove (or disprove) her opinion about what policy should be applied to antitrust issues. It doesn’t matter in politics who’s “right” in this way, just who can convince others that they’re right. (the “right” people too)
Use a Python.org universal install binary. Install as many versions as you want. You will always be able to get a particular version by typing, e.g., `python3.10`. Then use that version to create your virtual environment: `python3.10 -m venv env`. You can start your virtual environment with `source env/bin/activate`.
Times New Roman is less than 150 years old, Helvetica less than 100. Despite their ubiquity due to being the default fonts on personal computers, they aren't super common in publishing or signage. They're actually kind of special purpose typefaces. Times is specifically designed packing narrow columns, like newspapers, and Helvetica is for ... I dunno what, documentary filmmakers? (The documentary was great).
As another commenter has said, Garamond has been around for many more centuries.
It should really be called small-parcel-of-land-plus-a-residential-structure borrowership-with-eventual-ownership.
And it is not all upside. Changing from one "owned" "home" to another has high transaction costs compared to renting. This has all kind bad consequences: people wind up living in the wrong shape/size of house for their family size. It makes it expensive to move to follow economic opportunity.
And then there is all the downside from having such a large portion of your savings tied up in a single, often highly leveraged, asset. Nobody would let you lever up your retirement portfolio 20:1 on any other kind of asset. And home ownership turns otherwise reasonable adults into NIMBYs.
Hilariously, the explanation of the notarization typo (actually, I find that believable) is a 1746 "declaration." It's an old federal law which provides that as long as you say you are signing under oath, it is as good as an affidavit in federal court.
Why didn't he just make a declaration in the first place? Also, why would he have the lawyer who is in trouble notarize the document? Now that he has made the typo, he may now need Schwartz's testimony that actually, it was April 25, not January.
In my legal career, I worked for a judge once. He told me to never get a notary stamp. It only creates problems. There's never a good reason for a lawyer to notarize something. You ask your staff to do it instead.
I used to be a lawyer. While I never got in trouble with the disciplinary commission, I did keep up with what they were up to. And once, I was involved in a bankruptcy case where they were a party (the disbarred lawyer filed bankruptcy, and it was a whole mess).
My sense is that these are serious people who do not put up with BS. BS will only make it worse.
But what is a reasonable percentile for someone to "comfortably" afford the monthly payment for a median new car? Maybe 80 is on the high side. But it certainly isn't 50%.
10% of income as a heuristic for a car payment isn't too terrible.