Tag: DEI

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free trade & free markets political economy subsidy

When the CHIPS Are Weighed Down

Taiwan, computer chips, regulations, DEI, race, racism

Has DEI “killed the CHIPS Act”?

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 created a giant package of subsidies that shouldn’t exist to begin with and is made even worse by all the strings attached.

The Act authorizes giving $52 billion of taxpayer money to microchip manufacturers to make chips in the U.S. The boost to domestic production will supposedly help us if China invades Taiwan and disrupts Taiwan’s globe-leading microchip industry.

But chipmakers eligible for the largesse are recoiling from all the embedded DEI mandates. “DEI” means “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” It’s a collectivist mantra and ideology designed to make employers fret about racial and gender quotas and DEI indoctrination at the expense of hiring qualified people and making high-quality microchips.

According to Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson, writing for The Hill, nineteen sections of the Act are devoted to DEI. One gives the Department of Commerce a mission that Commerce describes as “strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem” by ensuring “significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”

The authors believe that CHIPS is “so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.” Worse, it’s making it hard for chipmakers to move, forced to focus away from making microchips and, instead, onto the wasteful exercise of appeasing regulators.

Now that they are finally about to get CHIPS funding, Intel and others are delaying announced factories and foundries on U.S. sites and instead going ahead with more overseas plants.

I guess they want to get stuff done.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Division, Exclusion, Indoctrination

college, house of cards, money

Wisconsin has decided to stop using tax dollars to subsidize ideological assaults on academic freedom.

Under the leadership of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the Wisconsin legislature struck a blow against DEI domination of the state’s university system.

The acronym means “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Yet, the goal of DEI is to herd all participants in academic life into the same collectivist “antiracist,” anti-individualist straitjacket, no dissent permitted. What DEI really means, Vos says, is “division, exclusion, and indoctrination.”

The Vos-steered budget that passed in the last session eliminated $32 million from funding for the university system. It also hiked the pay of university employees and funded new campus buildings.

Using his line-item veto, the Democratic governor tried to thwart the move. But he couldn’t block the spending cut.

Then, after much negotiating, the university system agreed to freeze hiring of DEI officials, transfer DEI employees to other jobs, and implement race-blind, merit-based admissions policies.

Bullied by lefties, the board of rejects initially rejected the deal by a 9–8 vote. Vos wouldn’t budge. The board met again and accepted the deal.

As National Review’s editors put it, “when push came to shove, it wasn’t worth rejecting pay raises for all employees and putting building projects on hold for the sake of a handful of progressive ideologues.”

Until the whole house of cards collapses and there’s no longer any public funding of higher education, all states assailed by DEI should do the same kind of thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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