Archive for 2018
January 19, 2018
WAR ON WOMEN UPDATE: Andrew Klavan: Democrats Play Women for Fools.
BLUE STATE BLUES: That New York Condo Just Got a Lot More Expensive. “Apartment buyers in New York are pausing to figure out how the new tax law will affect ownership costs.”
After four consecutive months of increases, the number of contracts signed in December declined both for new condo buildings and older co-ops and condos.
Overall the number of contracts signed in December, the month the tax overhaul was finalized, declined 12% from the same month in 2016, according to real-estate listing and data site UrbanDigs.com.
Brokers said it was too soon to tell whether the pullback is temporary or may be the beginning of a reassessment of the value of homeownership in light of higher after-tax ownership costs.
If New York is genuinely interested in affordable housing, they could start cutting taxes and regulations.
ENFORCING THE LAW WILL BE NOT BE TOLERATED: ‘We will prosecute’ employers who help immigration sweeps, California AG says.
YES, PROVIDED YOU’RE ALREADY WELL-OFF: Does the California Model Really Work?
There’s a new data point to inform the debate that hopefully will be more difficult to ignore: California is the poverty capital of America.
The Census Bureau has come up with a new and better way to measure poverty. The standard model doesn’t take into account all sorts of factors that matter in the real world — the overall cost of living, including food, housing prices, utilities, medical care, and taxes.
This is just common sense. The median household income in Mississippi is about $41,000 per year. In California it’s about $65,000. Does anyone doubt that $41,000 goes a lot further in Biloxi than in Los Angeles?
According to the standard poverty measure, Mississippi ranks first in the nation with a rate of 20.8 percent. California ranks 16th. The Census Bureau’s “Supplemental Poverty Measure” places California first in the nation with a poverty rate of 20.4, and Mississippi falls to fifth.
Wealthy liberal Californians can be quite smug about how they can afford their strict land-use policies, draconian environmental regulations, and high taxes. And wealthy Californians can afford them — but poor Californians are paying the price.
Trickle-up economics.
IT’S LIKE IT’S ALL A BUNCH OF HOOEY: A Bunch Of Politicians Who Complain About Trump’s Authoritarian Tendencies Just Gave Him 6 Years To Warrantlessly Spy On Americans.
LOOKS LIKE WE DRILLED OUR WAY OUT OF THAT PROBLEM:
And despite many learned assurances to the contrary, too.
NEWS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE: UT, Harvard, Penn Team Up on Major Materials Breakthrough. We have an excellent Materials Science program.
THIS IS NOT A GREAT SALES JOB: Toxic Extract Used in Poison Arrows Could Be The Future of Male Contraception.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Employee Lawsuit Reveals Google As Intolerant Race Cult.
CHANGE IS COMING: Jordan B Peterson, Critical Theory, and the New Bourgeoisie.
HEADLINES FROM 2016: Jimmy Kimmel jumps the partisan shark.
For whatever reason, Kimmel on Wednesday night felt qualified to lecture a low-level Paul Ryan aide on Twitter about a short-term, stop-gap continuing resolution with an attached six-year reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program but without permanent reform to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Or as Kimmel oversimplified, making kids “a bargaining chip.”
Altogether Kimmel got somewhere around fifty-thousand likes and retweets for his platitudes because apparently the public thinks it’s normal to get parliamentary analysis from comedians. But they got duped.
Whether Kimmel realizes it or not, the shutdown drama surrounding DACA and CHIP has nothing to do with sick kids or immigrant kids without papers. It has everything to do with politics. The statements and the subsequent silence of the senior Democrat senator from Ohio bear this out.
Shortly before Christmas last year, Sen. Sherrod Brown declared that CHIP reauthorization was “ready to go” and added that if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “put it on the floor today, it would pass. There is no excuse for this delay that is hurting families.” Less than a month later, that legislation is rolled up in the CR and waiting. Brown is conspicuously silent.
That’s what passes for comedy gold these days.
THIS IS NOTHING TO BE PROUD OF: Tennessee’s Haircut Cops Bust Barbers Who Lack High School Diplomas.
So we got some reform last year with legislation from State Sen. Mark Green (now running for Marsha Blackburn’s congressional seat) and Rep. Martin Daniel’s bill to make licensing boards justify their requirements. If it were up to me I’d get rid of them root and branch. But at the very least, these boards should have a majority of members who aren’t in the profession being protected from competition. Er, I mean, “regulated for the benefit of the public.” Okay, no, actually I was right the first time.
YOU DON’T SAY: The Media Has a Very Different Attitude Toward Donald Trump’s Health Than Hillary Clinton’s.
Devastating video put together by the Free Beacon’s Andrew Kugle, who tweeted, “I had 6 minutes of extra clips that I had to cut from this.”. I believe that’s known as riches of embarrassment.
Also at the link, video of MSNBC’s “incredibly defensive” coverage of Clinton’s campaign fainting spell.
PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”
CNBC, now: The Dow’s 31% gain during Trump’s first year is the best since FDR.
BLUE STATE BLUES: People flocking to low-tax states could swing future elections.
The new 2017 Census estimates can be used to give us a year-over-year change from 2016 or, alternatively, estimates can be based on a longer-trend line. The data gives a nice summary of estimates for congressional seat changes after the 2020 Census.
The state with the largest downside risk appears to be Illinois, which will lose one congressional seat in 2020 and is in danger of being the only state in the U.S. to lose two seats.
Illinois suffered the largest net population loss of any state in the past year, and due to that loss, it was overtaken by Pennsylvania this year as the fifth-largest state in the country. Major tax increases passed in 2017 will certainly not help this downward economic spiral.
The 2017 Census estimates also contain some troubling news for the nation’s largest state, California. While the 2010 Census was the first in state history to not add an additional congressional seat, 2020 could be worse for the Golden State.
Some current projections show high-tax California is on the bubble to actually lose a congressional seat in 2020 — a shocking development for a state that gained seven seats between 1980 and 1990 alone.
For history buffs, it is possible that high-tax Rhode Island will lose one of its two congressional seats in 2020. That will be the first time since 1789 that Rhode Island only has one congressional seat.
Meanwhile, another state with extremely high tax burdens, New York, is set to lose yet another seat in 2020, the eighth census in a row that the Empire State has forfeited seats.
They’d rather rule over the ruins than reform.
IN THE MAIL: From David Drake, The Spark.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
THE ONLY WORSE POSSIBLE OUTCOME IS IF THEY SUCCEED: Merkel’s Coalition Partner: Failure of CDU, SPD Talks Will Be ‘Catastrophe’ for Germany.
ONE YEAR AGO TODAY, Hillary Clinton did not become President.
CLOCK ON CLINTONS TICKING DOWN UNDER, TOO: Former President Bill Clinton signed a $25 million Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian government in 2006 at a time when he apparently was not legally able to do so, according to Michael Smith, an Aussie investigative journalist and retired police detective.
During the formal ceremony announcing the MOU, Smith said “Clinton spoke as the decision-maker wholly responsible for the performance of the Clinton Foundation. He held no such role and while he may have been confident in his ability to influence the board of the Clinton Foundation – his statements about control and establishment of the Clinton Foundation were false, misleading and had the effect of engendering unwarranted confidence in what turned out to be a false narrative concerning the foundation’s ability to deliver on its agreements.”
The MOU provided $25 million from Australian taxpayers and the foundation pledged to match that amount from its own funds for HIV/Aids projects in Papua New Guinea, China and Vietnam. Smith reportedly was asked to provide the FBI with evidence he’s accumulated over a multi-year effort about Clinton Foundation activities in the Pacific region and Asia, much of which appears to be extremely damning. More details at LifeZette.
WHY NOTHING WORKS: Even labor-friendly Paris uses fewer workers than New York City, and for a fraction of the cost. American public unions pervert the process.
Take a look at the cost schedule for American government services, and you are likely to walk away boggled. Who are all these people working for the government? Why are they getting paid so much? And why does it seem to take so many of them to get anything done?
Look, for example, at the recent construction of the Second Avenue subway line in New York City, recently highlighted by the New York Times as “the most expensive mile of subway track on earth.” The employees singled out in that article do not work for the city, but they might as well; it is a collection of consultants, contractors and union laborers who work largely on government infrastructure projects.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that my father used to be the head of the trade association for the contractors who do this sort of work in New York City; my views were formed by this perspective. The current head of that association is interviewed in the Times article.
I have a slightly different perspective on why everything costs so much, which is that in New York, there is a collision of all the things that conspire to drive up costs. Other places may have eminent domain trouble, or politically influential labor unions, or somewhat challenging geography, or laws that let community groups delay work, or multiple layers of government and government review that pile up costs, or high costs of living that drive wages through the roof, or dysfunctional government bidding processes. … New York has all of these things in something close to their terminal form. It’s actually sort of a miracle that anything ever gets built there, or that it costs less than “all the money in the world, plus 50 cents.”
But as the Times notes, both the cost of labor and the amount of labor that’s used contribute a great deal to those bloated bottom lines. Why does Paris, with its feisty unions, manage to use fewer workers than New York City, and get jobs done for a fraction of the cost?
Because New York unions are politically connected, and for various reasons, the American government is particularly vulnerable to capture by these sorts of interests, especially as regional partisanship hardens.
We should ban public-employee unions.