Lou Dobbs has lied about: 1. Leprosy; 2. Immigrant Crime Rates (immigrants ACTUALLY commit less crime, on average, than natives); 3. The "North American Union" (which doesn't exist); 4. Immigration in general; 5. Trade in general; He has also hosted known white supremacists. I wonder why rumors have it that he will be going to FOX after having left CNN?
Wait till you see this. And, by the way, it's from the conservative Ludwig von Mises Institute, not some hippie liberal thinktank. This is why a negative income tax on income below a certain threshhold (first proposed by Milton Friedman) would be a better way to flatten out the income distribution than lump-sum cash subsidies.
Think you can do it? Good luck - I cut the 10-year estimated deficit substantially, but there's no way I'm getting re-electid because I had to screw seniors, and raise some taxes. I wonder if anyone can do it without raising taxes. My guess is no.
Found this interesting summary of a paper by Gavin Wright on Free Exchange:
What broke the south's isolation? According to Mr Wright, it was the labour policies of the early 20th century and the New Deal, which served to increase southern labour costs. That's right—policies which pushed southern wages above the market rate saved the southern economy. And what's fascinating to note is that northern industrialists favoured many wage-increasing policies specifically because they believed that those policies would limit job growth in the south, and low-wage southern industrial competition. As Mr Wright notes, the 1939 minimum wage increase affected only 6% of northern workers, but 44% of southern workers.
How could this have benefitted the south? Well, the region's isolation was in no small part self-chosen. Southern leaders wanted to maintain a certain way of life and culture, and they resisted any policy out of Washington which would lead to increased interdependence with the rest of the nation. Suddenly high southern wages broke this world open. Farmers and other producers rushed to trim labour forces and adopt labour saving technologies, which led to high unemployment and waves of migration to the north. This meant, first, that there was finally significant cross-regional labour movement involving the south and, second, that southern leaders had to begin attracting investment or face total depopulation.
FE offers another interesting parallel from East Germany:
Of course, everyone knows the argument in favour of rapid wage convergence, i.e. the danger of migration, time and again castigated by politics. If wages lagged, there might be west-migration of many people and that had to be prevented. But why? ... Even under favourable conditions, it would take at least one decade for the necessary investments to restore an industrial base. ... In the end, East Germany would have grown faster without the push for higher wages, and most people would meantime have returned home again when a flourishing economy would have developed.
Mass unemployment, caused by aggressive wage politics, probably resulted in much more emigration [emphasis mine] (and much less immigration) than would have been the case with lagging wage convergence. The wage push became a program for “deconstruction of the east” and, if at all, “reconstruction of the west“, i.e. the opposite of what had been intended.
So, might imposing "higher labor standards" in the rest of the world (India and China being the usual scapegoats) actually lead to technological innovation in China, increased emigration pressure from South and East Asia, and ultimately hurt workers in the US? We'll see. Oh, and by the way the net direction of capital flow for china is OUT.
I first visited Berlin in 1985, while traveling with Randall Kroszner. We drove to West Berlin by car and we were terrified for the few hours we were underway in East Germany. Randy did not drive over the speed limit once. I was hardly a communist sympathizer but still I was unprepared for the day trip to East Berlin. I saw soldiers goose-stepping down one of the main streets. In the stores old ladies yelled and swung their brooms at me. Many buildings still had bullet marks or bomb damage from World War II. In a restaurant we ate a rubber Wiener Schnitzel and shared a table with an East German family; they did not have enough trust in their government to speak a word to us. I was unable to spend my mandatory thirty-mark conversion on anything useful; I carried back some Stendahl and Goethe but didn't want the Lenin. This was in the capital city in the showcase of the communist world.
My biggest impression was simply that I had never seen evil before.
This sums up my feelings about why all this nonsense people are histrionically throwing around about tyranny and oppression in a simple social welfare bill in a democracy with free speech is so disgusting. Most of us have never seen tyranny, oppression or evil in our own lives. In Leipzig and East Berlin there are a museums devoted to documenting the horrors of the East German Communist secret police, the "Stasi." I've visited them.
I guess this makes me ruminate about the importance of getting a little perspective and not being a psychotic lunatic who pretends that the health care bill is the end of democracy in America. Maybe more folks (especially college students at VMI and around the country) would benefit from taking real trips abroad and seeing some of the museums and monuments established around the world in memory of those who were terrorized, imprisoned, and killed by truly tyrannical governments; usually for no more than speaking out.
As a last ditch effort, I grab an air sickness bag from out of the wall pocket. Using one of the rejected crayons I scrawl a face on the bottom of the bag. I reach inside, turn it into a hand-puppet and say the funniest thing I can think of: “Ooga booga.” The child stops crying. Then smiles. Then giggles.
“You like the puppet?” I ask. “MO PUPPA!” she says. ... Then think to myself, “sure, one puppet is fine, but two puppets — now that’s a show!” I reach into the wall-pocket in front of my husband and take out his air sickness bag. I draw another face, this time taking a little more time and care with my creation. I give it curly hair, long eyelashes and glasses so that it looks a little bit like me. Nice touch.
I stick my hand inside. And then my world contracts.
Seems this air sickness bag has been used before, but not for a puppet show. No, it’s been used for the purpose that god intended. .... Roughly two million people fly the friendly American skies every single day. How many of those travelers feel nauseated enough to reach for, and then use, an air-sickness bag? (I travel often and can count on one clean hand the number of times I’ve seen it happen.) And of those phantom pukers, how many would choose to tuck the vomit-filled vessel back into the wall-pocket? And then, what’s the likelihood that a cleaning crew would overlook the sack o’ sick? And finally, what are the odds that all of this would become the perfect set-up for one arrogant idiot who tries to make a hand-puppet out of a barf bag?! ... Anyway, it’s possible that the occurrence of this mathematical improbability has created a statistical vortex by which we are virtually guaranteed that this plane will land safely.
Mathematician #1, Statistician, #3, Economist, #11. Have no clue how historians and sociologists beat us out, but at least we beat "philosopher," or "stand-up philosopher" aka "bullshitter" (gotta love Mel Brooks).
shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. ... [S]tudents used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges.
I'm a bit puzzled. Though the results almost certainly document an overall decline in student quality for a large number of more remote colleges and universities, I'm not sure this proves that there has been a decline in "selectivity" on the part of those universities. Schools may not be lowering their standards; they may just be getting a more average applicant pool with fewer top-talent students. I would invoke the principle that people will find your results more believable if you interpret them conservatively.
I was just wondering what the average share of the highway budget most Americans would pay if it were divided according to the "benefits received" principle (i.e. how much you use it). Turns out, on average, if you mostly commute on federal roads (not a horrible assumption, but we could easily just assume that the per-mile cost is the same for federal roads as state and municipal roads and be OK) then it would be about $110, just for your daily commute to work. According to the Department of Transportation there was about 43.5 billion allocated to federally-maintained highways in 2008. The total vehicle-miles traveled was about 3.03 trillion for the same year. The average commute (according to an ABCNews survey) is about 16 miles each way. So if you work 5 days a week about 48 weeks out of the year, and have an average commute, you'll travel about 7680 miles per year just to get to and from work, or 0.0000002535% of the total highway vehicle miles traveled. So if you paid that "share" of the transportation budget, that would come to about $110 per worker. So you might say, "GREAT, PRIVATIZE THE ROADS OVER TO THE MARKET!" Not so fast! If we ran things according to the market, many of you suburban republicans would have a higher than average commute, especially you folks in big urban-sprawl areas like St. Louis or Dallas or Chicago. Plus, some people may not use roadways at all, or they may "use" them much more lightly. I travel 3 miles and ride a bike. Why the hell should my tax dollars subsidize some jerk with a full-size pickem up truck that does more road damage??? Some folks would call that downright un-Amuhrrican! Clearly some folks should pay more. Plus, whoever owned the roads would have a monopoly, so they'd be able to price-discriminate and charge double from 7-9am and 4:30-6:30pm, and make a tidy economic profit off the deal. So you'd probably pay at least 2 or 3 hundred a year to the private company. So, on average by privatizing certain things (or not having regulation) we probably end up saving 100 so that we can pay twice or thrice that, i.e. bending over a dollar to pick up a dime.
This is an interesting twist on sampling bias. Since robopolls are less able to coax you into staying on the line, they only grab the more enthusiastic likely voters. In New Jersey, human polls and robopolls are indicating leads to opposite candidates. Human polls favor Corzine, and robopolls favor Christie.
The observer’s beliefs are different from agent A’s. They are drawn from the same distribution G but there is no reason that the observer’s beliefs are the same as agent A’s. In fact, the action agent A took will only be the best one from the observer’s perspective by accident. Actually, the observer’s beliefs will be the average of the distribution G which is lower than the belief of agent A since agent A deliberately took the action which he thought was the best. This implies that the agent A who took the action is “overoptimistic” relative to an arbitrary observer.
This article in Foreign Policy confirms what economists have said about skilled migration for the last decade or so: It helps both the recipient and the source country. One of the ways they acknowledge emigration to help is through remittances. However, the last point, "Just as fears about possible negative effects of brain drain are typically overblown, so is the hype over the ability of countries to tap their diaspora to set up trade and investment," is not consistent with recent research. There are a few papers out showing a strong positive link between skilled emigration and FDI flows in the other direction, including one that a couple of guys named Bang and MacDermott are trying to get published.
Urban economists might think taxing land is the ideal way to manage urban growth; PK thinks it wouldn't raise enough $$. Should we tax water? Like a tax on land (not a tax on property, which would include the development of land), it would likely not distort investment. I'm concerned about the distributional consequences of a tax on a necessity that many people consume inelastically.
