READER TOM ZAMPINO WRITES: “Wow! The Republicans have only been in control of the House for less than 48 hours and already the unemployment rate has dropped to 9.4%!”
Heh. Story here.
UPDATE: Amusing snark aside, Key Numbers In Unemployment Report Not So Good. “So half of the good news reflects that people have dropped out of the work force and have given up looking for work.”
UNDERFUNDED PUBLIC PENSION UPDATE: US Inquiry Said to Focus on California Pension Fund. “Federal regulators are investigating whether California violated securities laws and failed to provide adequate disclosure about its giant public pension fund, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Too Many Ph.D.’s and Professionals?
YESTERDAY’S LINK to the Reason item on minivans produced this email from reader Barbara Hamill:
As an unrepentant fan of my very cool Honda Odyssey, I have to point out the following: You know who will love the minivan the most in 20 years? The Social Security Administration and all those retired Boomers who were too cool to drive one. Not so much retroactive love for, just for example, the Toyota Highlander, whose owners lament as they peer into their inferior vehicles that, while they’d love to have a third child, there’s no room for the car seat.
Well, squeezing in three carseats is hard — you might manage it in mine (which has a 3d row seat) but it’s not as friendly as a minivan, even though the Highlander is really just a minivan with plausible deniability. This reminds me, though, that I wrote a column a while back on how raised societal expectations make parenting much more expensive, and have thus contributed to the “baby bust.” I even mention the carseat thing, which is a real burden.
Excerpt:
Today’s middle-class kids are always under the adult eye. It’s not clear that the kids are better off for all this supervision — and they’re certainly fatter, perhaps because they get around less outside — but the burden on parents is much, much higher. And it’s exacted in a million tiny yet irritating other ways. Some are worthwhile — car seats, for example, are probably a net gain in safety — but even there the cost is high: I heard a radio host in Knoxville making fun of SUVs and minivans: When he was a kid, he boasted, his parents took their five children cross-country in an Impala sedan. Nowadays, you’d never make it without being cited for neglect. And you can’t get five kids in a sedan if they all have to have car seats, which these days they seem to require until they’re 18. . . .
There’s also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren’t seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world. People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan’s close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn’t prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.
In these sorts of ways, parenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there’s less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.
Still true.
UPDATE: Hanah Volokh writes: “Tangentially related to your post today on how societal expectations make parenting a more difficult task, you might be interested in a forthcoming law review article by Gaia Bernstein and Zvi Triger, ‘Over-Parenting,’ about how the legal system also enforces what they call ‘intensive parenting’ norms that may not always be in the best interests of the child. Certainly they are not best if you subscribe to the Free Range Parenting school of thought. The article is available here.”
“Intensive parenting” norms have more to do with the anxieties of upper-middle-class women than with the welfare of children.
MAYBE BLOOMBERG SHOULD FOCUS ON SANITATION INSTEAD OF TRANSFATS: Waldorf-Astoria Faces Third Bedbug Lawsuit. You know, the old-school public-health stuff, from when public health people actually worried about public health.
WHAT RAHM WANTS, RAHM GETS: Reader Kevin Rahm asks for a compilation of my “They told me if I voted . . .” posts. Here it is. Enjoy!
ED DRISCOLL: The Frat Pack is Back, Baby! “Welcome back to the frat pack days of the Clinton White House. Or the Bush White House if you’re Maureen Dowd. In any case, it’s a photo that had President Bush or his aides been a part of, would have had the boys in the MSM ready to pounce for displaying such out of touch aloofness during times of domestic economic hardship and overseas tensions. . . . They told me that if if I voted for John McCain, we’d be stuck with at least four years of Animal House-style hi-jinks. And they were right!”
Hey, that’s a catchy line. . . .
CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRESS: Highest Court in D.C. Allows Second Amendment Challenges to Long-Ago Convictions for Violating D.C. Handgun Ban. “A conviction for conduct that is not criminal, but is instead constitutionally protected, is the ultimate miscarriage of justice.”
I.R.S. AGENT pleads guilty to tax fraud.
SPIKE GILLESPIE is keeping Austin weird.
OBAMA MATH: $250,000/year for a couple is “rich,” but $172,000/year for a White House flunky is “relatively modest.”
DESPERATE FOR CASH: Illinois moves to tax online purchases. But then, Illinois is the Greece of the Midwest. And if you haven’t checked out Illinoisisbroke.com, it’s worth it for the abject-Lincoln pic.
UPDATE: Illinois moves to tax online purchases, hits bloggers, small business. “This is Illinois. More stuck on stupid.”
CRONY CAPITALISM IS EASIER AND SAFER: “The truth is there is nothing most business people like less than free markets. Competition is good for consumers because it keeps prices low while increasing the quality and choices of products and services. Yet competition is hard work for businesses.”
CHANCE BALLEW ON FACEBOOK: “Instead of reading the constitution, we should make congress read IRS regulations. That would keep them occupied for a few years.”
LOOKING AFTER A FRAGILE, DELICATE PRESIDENT.
CHANGE COMES TO NPR with the firing of Ellen Weiss. Well, we can hope, anyway. “I think she represented a very ingrown, incestuous culture in that institution.”
UPDATE: NPR Goes To Defcon 1.
IT’S A FAIR COP: Typical humanocentric Heinleinism from Instapundit…
25% OFF ON FITNESS AND WELLNESS GEAR.
MORE PROBLEMS for Irish bonds.
VIRGIN GALACTIC NOW OFFERING space trips for $200,000.
A LOOK AT DISASTER PREPAREDNESS IN KNOX COUNTY:
Among the findings:
42 percent of Knox County adults said they have a three-day supply of water for each household member.
85 percent have a three-day supply of non-perishable food for each household member.
95 percent have a working flashlight and batteries.
11 percent have a written evacuation plan.
All in all, more than 17 percent of Knox Countians considered their household “well-prepared for a large-scale disaster or emergency,” while about a quarter said they’re “not prepared at all.”
Emergency response coordinator Larry Hutsell said he was “pleasantly surprised” that so many people were, at least, thinking about what they’d do in the event of a disaster – something the Health Department and other county and city agencies, working together, have gotten down to a science over the past several years.
Read the whole thing. Not bad, considering. If you’re interested, there’s more info at Bill Quick’s disaster-preparedness forum. And here’s a disaster-preparedness list too.
SEX IN AMERICA: New survey results.
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