Archive for 2018
July 27, 2018
BECAUSE SOCIALISM. NEXT QUESTION? Venezuela could eventually have 1 million percent inflation. How is that possible?
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: Michael Barone: Will the trend toward low birth rates be reversed?
Sometimes a society’s values change sharply with almost no one noticing, much less anticipating the consequences. In 1968, according to a Gallup survey, 70 percent of American adults said that a family of three or more children was “ideal”—about the same number as in Gallup surveys starting in 1938. That number helps explain the postwar baby boom that exploded after Americans were no longer constrained by depression and world war.
Those values and those numbers didn’t last. By 1978, Gallup reported that only 32 percent considered three or more children “ideal.” The numbers have hovered around there ever since, spiking to just 41 percent amid the late 1990s tech boom.
The change in values and behavior took time to register. Just before the 1972 election, Richard Nixon and a Democratic Congress goosed up Social Security benefits. They figured the baby boom generation was just delaying producing a baby boom of its own. They were wrong, and Social Security has needed patching up ever since. . . .
The trend varies among demographic groups. Native-born Hispanics and blacks used to have above-replacement (2.1 births per woman) rates. Now they’re below-replacement, almost as low as native-born whites and Asians, which are down only a bit. Immigrant birth levels remain above replacement levels among blacks, but only barely above among Hispanics and below among whites and Asians.
One possible consequence: Those often gleeful predictions that whites will soon be a minority will not be realized so soon, or maybe ever. Nor is it clear, as sociologist Richard Alba has suggested, that often-intermarrying Hispanics and Asians will see themselves as aggrieved minorities. They might, as Italians and Poles once did, just blend in.
Also, the sharp drop in Hispanic birth rates, combined with the sharp drop in Hispanic (especially Mexican) immigration post-2007, means a lower proportion of immigrants with low skills competing for jobs with low-skilled Americans. Asian immigrants may outnumber Hispanics and arrive with significantly higher skill levels. So do immigrants from African countries like Nigeria and Ghana. Their capacity for expanding the economy rather than competing for low-skilled jobs may point to unexpected growth. And neither group arrives with grievances rooted in slavery and American racial segregation.
Other familiar trends may be reversed. Demographer Lyman Stone, citing various data, argues that “the decline in fertility is mostly due to declining marriage,” as he writes in IFS Studies. The issue lies with black and lower-income white women having difficulty finding suitable spouses. They might have more success if the recent increase in downscale wages continues.
Similarly, fewer young people would get caught in the trap of incurring huge college debt for worthless degrees (or no degrees at all) if, as the Manhattan Institute’s Aaron Renn suggests, higher education enrollments, already declining, start plunging precipitously around 2025. Might young people who bypass college find constructive jobs and marry and raise families as their counterparts did in the postwar years?
That would be good.
WE’LL BE LUCKY IF THE TRUE FIGURE ISN’T AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE LARGER: Watchdog says U.S. wasted more than $15 billion in past 11 years in Afghanistan.
BYRON YORK: Why didn’t FBI tell court about Christopher Steele bias? “There has been bitter debate about the release of a heavily-redacted version of the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap onetime Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The debate centers on whether the FBI gave the FISA court judges enough information to assess the anti-Trump motives of the people behind the Steele dossier. . . . The release last weekend of blacked-out copies of the original application and three renewals confirmed Nunes’ description; the documents did not mention the DNC or Clinton campaign’s role in funding Steele. . . . It is generally accepted that evidence of a source’s bias, including the source’s own acknowledgment of it, should be disclosed in warrant applications that are predicated on that source. The FBI simply did not do that in Steele’s case.” Read the whole thing.
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CONGRESS HAS TO FUND IT FIRST: Inside the Ring: Pentagon Policy Chief on Space Force.
My understanding is that Zuckerberg structured the company’s shares in such a way, pre-IPO, that he can’t be ousted from his company like Steve Jobs was from Apple in 1985.
But can anything protect a CEO from a 100,000,000,000-dollar loss?
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Media Gaslighting Can’t Hide Fact Trump Campaign Was Spied On.
Whatever you think about Trump’s reaction to the release of the FISA application, the media reaction to the story was disingenuous and even more hyperbolic than the president’s tweets. After a year of continuous and alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign, and used dubious partisan political research to justify their surveillance.
The media reaction to both the redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications and President Trump’s tweets was pure gaslighting. They claimed the FISA applications hurt the critics’ case. It wasn’t that they reported the news that critics of the FISA application felt vindicated while defenders of the wiretap applications also felt vindicated. They wrote as partisans in a war with those skeptical of FISA abuse.
It is a war, albeit thankfully one without brigade combat teams moving around the map.
HMM: GOP pollster predicts record turnout for both parties in the midterms.
GOP pollster Jim McLaughlin predicted on Thursday that there would be record turnout among Republicans and Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.
“I think on both sides you’re going to see a record turnout among both Republicans and Democrats this time,” McLaughlin told Hill.TV’s Joe Concha on “What America’s Thinking.”
The pollster’s comments come nearly 100 days before the November midterm elections.
Democrats, who have seen high turnout in a slew of their party’s recent primary elections, are hoping to utilize grassroots enthusiasm heading into the fall elections.
Republicans, meanwhile, are seeking to defend their majorities in the House and Senate and defy historical trends that show the party that controls the White House typically seeing midterm losses.
Polling from Gallup going back to 1946 shows that a president whose approval rating is below 50 percent in midterm elections loses an average of more than 36 House seats, which is more than enough for Democrats to win control of the lower chamber this fall.
A recent poll from American Barometer, a new joint project by Hill.TV and HarrisX, showed President Trump’s approval rating at 48 percent.
The question is whether these metrics going back to 1946 apply today. Maybe, maybe not.
H. W. CROCKER III: America’s Next Civil War Will Be Worse Than Our Last.
North and South venerated the Founders. They shared the same language, the same religion, and, in large part, the same general stock. Most of all, they shared what Jeff Sessions was recently rebuked for calling an “Anglo-American heritage” of liberty under law, stretching from the mists of medieval England — even before Magna Carta — to our own Bill of Rights.
Today, however, our divisions are so deep and fundamental that Americans cannot even agree on what marriage is or what a man or a woman is (which is pretty darn fundamental).
The lunatic self-righteousness of the Left (and yes, I’m afraid one must point fingers here), where disagreement is bigotry to be prohibited by law or even condemned and prosecuted as treason, is a consuming, destructive fire that will not be easily quenched, and cannot be reached by cool waters of rational argument.
Read the whole thing.
HUMPTY-DUMPTY COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Is the Syrian Civil War Finally Over? “Bashar Assad has won…what?”
SINCE UT GOUGES FACULTY FOR PARKING, WE’RE SAFE: A Tax On Free Campus Parking?
But hey, academics favor higher taxes and fatcats paying their “fair share,” right?
THE… WHAT? Really? A women Only Parking Place?
GUN CONTROL IS LIKE SOCIALISM. WHEN IT FAILS, THE ANSWER IS MORE GUN CONTROL: Gun control a topic in Canada again. Inevitably.
BUREAUCRACY IS THE DEATH OF CIVILIZATION: Return of the Permit Raj.
THEY ARE AGAINST ANY AND EVERYTHING THAT ALLOWS PEOPLE TO MAKE THEIR LIVES AND THEMSELVES BETTER: College Socialists Seek To Block Jordan Peterson From Speaking In San Antonio.
FACTS ARE FACTS: Meghan McCain Is Right. Socialism Leads To Misery And Destitution.
LIKE THE NEVER ENDING STORY, ONLY GROSS: Mueller is still looking for the pony: the never-ending investigation.
TO ANSWER THE ARTICLE’S QUESTION, HE’S A US SENATOR BECAUSE OUR PRESS IS A CORRUPT MESS AND OUR VOTERS ARE UNINFORMED: Udall wonders why.
THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: New York Times Targets Kavanaugh’s Wife.
YEP. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN AND WORK: The Polls Are Crazy.
July 26, 2018
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What would happen if an illegal immigrant used a plastic straw in California?
The 21st century is not working out as I hoped, to coin an Insta-phrase.