Students Slam Obama Immigration Quote... When They Think It's From Trump The indoctrination is complete our youths have been reduced to fools who know nothing, see nothing, hear nothing, do nothing. Sigh!
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Progressives are not begging to be taxed more; they are begging for others to be taxed more!7/22/2019 Wealthy New Yorkers are ditching city’s high taxes for Miami
Remember guys, once you move there do not pollute the political waters with the same effluent you dumped into the New York political waters! Vote wisely. Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Minimum Wage Increases Are Mostly Paid for by Consumers
"Apparently there is a new CBO report on the effect of a Federal minimum wage hike to $15. Before I get into the economic impacts, I want to observe that the $15 Federal minimum wage is a political smart bomb that hits mostly red states in much the same way as the reduced Federal tax deductions for SALT (state and local taxes) was a smart bomb that mostly hit blue states. From an equity standpoint it is insane to have the same minimum wage in rural Alabama as in San Francisco, but since its main negative employment effects will be in red states I think this may be a feature rather than a bug for Democrats. Anyway, for years folks have made the argument that government-mandated minimum wages are necessary because of the power imbalance between employers and low-skill workers which allows employers to exercise monopsony power and keep wages below some theoretical market clearing price (which is a total laugh -- if you really believe this you can come to my company and try to hire for unskilled positions at the top of the economic cycle and see how much power we have). The progressive theory is that companies therefore earn excess profits due to this power. But that is almost impossible." True. "You can see that the CBO obviously does not buy the progressive argument about excess corporate profits. 90% of the wage increase is paid for by consumers in the form of higher prices. My bet is that most of the business income loss is not margin compression as much as lost sales due to higher prices. Note also the inefficiency of the minimum wage even in these optimistic numbers -- consumers and businesses contribute $53 billion in value to increase wages by $44 billion. The rest is a net loss to the economy and my bet is that these numbers underestimate this loss." This is how one replays the moribund Obama economy. Why progressives want the economy to stultify, I have no idea but they seem to believe this is the way to prosperity. "If you want to help poor people, economic growth and reducing barriers to hiring low-skill workers (combined with efficient transfer programs) is the way to go -- in this context the minimum wage increase can actually be counter-productive. One other reason minimum wage increases are a bad anti-poverty program is that most of the data I have seen points to about a third of minimum wage jobs held by earners in families below the poverty line. So 2/3 of the increased wages from a minimum wage increase go to non-poor households." But is the goal poverty reduction? Nothing I have ever seen would indicate this is a real goal of the progressives. To the contrary, the goal would seem to be to create a permanent underclass which the progressives can promise economic fixes which never fix anything but which cause the permanent underclass to continue to vote Dem/progressive. "Last summer I had the cover story in Regulation Magazine titled, "How Labor Regulation Harms Unskilled Workers." I fear we are heading to a European model of very high minimum costs of employing anyone, which tends to result in a two-tier system of well-paying jobs for skilled and educated employees and lifetime government relief for the unskilled and under-educated." I hope not. We are at a crossroads, do we double down for another helping of the now long dead progressive model or do we move on, find a new socio-economic model and perfect it? Down one of these roads lies prosperity, down the other lies societal death, watch Europe, and vote wisely. Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Slavery Made the US Less Prosperous, Not More So
Reparations are a nonsensical idea, a Unicorn wish horse which would do much harm. The goal is to retrospectively compensate the slave for his "incarceration" and his wages. But there are none living who were American slaves. On the other hand, the idea is to require those who gained the benefit of slavery to make the payment, but, likewise, there are no living slave owners. So, what seems to be the goal is to force payment of money from one group, many or even most of whom had no relationship to American slavery, to another group many of whom will also not have had any relationship to American slavery. The only sensible model would be to tie these groups via some logical connection which continues to exist today. So, those who can prove their heritage is greater than a specific percentage slave, say 50% should be able to recover from the group or groups of people who fought for slavery, which is the Democratic Party. Trump should propose something like this. Let the fireworks begin. "This notion that slavery somehow benefited the entire economy is a surprisingly common one and I want to briefly refute it. This is related to the ridiculously bad academic study (discussed here) that slave-harvested cotton accounted for nearly half of the US's economic activity, when in fact the number was well under 10%. I assume that activists in support of reparations are using this argument to make the case that all Americans, not just slaveholders, benefited from slavery. But this simply is not the case. At the end of the day, economies grow and become wealthier as labor and capital are employed more productively. Slavery does exactly the opposite. Slaves are far less productive that free laborers. They have no incentive to do any more work than the absolute minimum to avoid punishment, and have zero incentive (and a number of disincentives) to use their brain to perform tasks more intelligently. So every slave is a potentially productive worker converted into an unproductive one. Thus, every dollar of capital invested in a slave was a dollar invested in reducing worker productivity. As a bit of background, the US in the early 19th century had a resource profile opposite from the old country. In Europe, labor was over-abundant and land and resources like timber were scarce. In the US, land and resources were plentiful but labor was scarce. For landowners, it was really hard to get farm labor because everyone who came over here would quickly quit their job and headed out to the edge of settlement and grabbed some land to cultivate for themselves. In this environment the market was sending pretty clear pricing signals -- that it was simply not a good use of scarce labor resources to grow low margin crops on huge plantations requiring scores or hundreds of laborers. Slave-owners circumvented this pricing signal by finding workers they could force to work for free. Force was used to apply high-value labor to lower-value tasks. This does not create prosperity, it destroys it. As a result, whereas $1000 invested in the North likely improved worker productivity, $1000 invested in the South destroyed it. The North poured capital into future prosperity. The South poured it into supporting a dead-end feudal plantation economy. As a result the south was impoverished for a century, really until northern companies began investing in the South after WWII. If slavery really made for so much of an abundance of opportunities, then why did very few immigrants in the 19th century go to the South? They went to the industrial northeast or (as did my grandparents) to the midwest. The US in the 19th century was prosperous despite slavery in the south, not because of it." Slavery is a primer on how to make an economy as unproductive as possible. So, the rest of us should also be able to sue the Dems and other modern progressives to recover this massive deadweight loss. Cool. Today the Demsa and other progressives continue to follow the same conceptual policies they followed under slavery. In the past, Dems followed a policy which guaranteed minimal human productivity from the group of slaves. Today they follow policies which keep lower class and inner city Americans on what amounts to a Democratic Party voting plantation. Welfare has replaced slavery but has similar productivity destroying effects. To be fair, the old Dems were pikers, since they paid slaves a minimal amount in food, clothing, shoes, healthcare, and housing for a minimal amount of work, while they destroyed productivity, some productivity remained. Today the progressive politicians pay the poor through welfare for all of the same things, but the payments are far greater. The progressives constantly pursue policies to ensure that the poor do not have to work, so the policies do not just erode productivity; they eliminate it. In the olden days, the piker Dems of yore provided minuscule payments in return for small productivity. Today progressives take our money to provide huge payments for zero productivity. They call this improvement. We need reparations from the Dems and other progressives to the rest of the nation. Warren nails it when he notes that the plantation economy was an American cut at the old feudal socio-economic model. Slavery was even more brutal than serfdom, although only fractionally. Today the progressive model continues to impose new feudalism wherever it can. At the heart of the mind of the socialist/progressive is a desire to enslave the rest so they can become one of the new aristocrats. They believe the economic fallacy that the pie is set and cannot be expanded. These people must be ignored now, and forever, whenever they are discovered since their policies, and goals are utterly destructive of the human soul, the economy, the polity, everything. Following progressivism, or socialism or any of its siblings is a recipe for a return to brutal feudalism and serfdom. Things Keep Getting Worse For The Fake "Science" Of Human-Caused Global Warming
Nor should I forget to watch Tony Heller's videos. Tony Heller You Don't Need To Be A Scientist To Know That The Global Warming Alarm "Science" Is Fake
"Here is the very simple check. When confronted with a claim that a scientific proposition has been definitively proven, ask the question: What was the null hypothesis, and on what basis has it been rejected? Consider first a simple example, the question of whether aspirin cures headaches. Make that our scientific proposition: aspirin cures headaches. How would this proposition be established? You yourself have taken aspirin many times, and your headache always went away. Doesn’t that prove that the aspirin worked? Absolutely not. The fact that you took aspirin 100 times and the headache went away 100 times proves nothing. Why? Because there is a null hypothesis that must first be rejected. Here the null hypothesis is that headaches will go away just as quickly on their own. How do you reject that? The standard method is to take some substantial number of people with headaches, say 2000, and give half of them the aspirin and the other half a placebo. Two hours later, of the 1000 who took the aspirin, 950 feel better and only 50 still have the headache; and of the 1000 who took the placebo, 500 still have the headache. Now you have very, very good proof that aspirin cured the headaches. The point to focus on is that the most important evidence — the only evidence that really proves causation — is the evidence that requires rejection of the null hypothesis. Over to climate science. Here you are subject to a constant barrage of information designed to convince you of the definitive relationship between human carbon emissions and global warming. The world temperature graph is shooting up in hockey stick formation! Arctic sea ice is disappearing! The rate of sea level rise is accelerating! Hurricanes are intensifying! June was the warmest month EVER! And on and on and on. All of this is alleged to be “consistent” with the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. But, what is the null hypothesis, and on what basis has it been rejected? Here the null hypothesis is that some other factor, or combination of factors, rather than human carbon emissions, was the dominant cause of the observed warming. Once you pose the null hypothesis, you immediately realize that all of the scary climate information with which you are constantly barraged does not even meaningfully address the relevant question. All of that information is just the analog of your 100 headaches that went away after you took aspirin. How do you know that those headaches wouldn’t have gone away without the aspirin? You don’t know unless someone presents data that are sufficient to reject the null hypothesis. Proof of causation can only come from disproof of the null hypothesis or hypotheses, that is, disproof of other proposed alternative causes. This precept is fundamental to the scientific method, and therefore fully applies to “climate science” to the extent that that field wishes to be real science versus fake science. Now, start applying this simple check to every piece you read about climate science. Start looking for the null hypothesis and how it was supposedly rejected. In mainstream climate literature — and I’m including here both the highbrow media like the New York Times and also the so-called “peer reviewed” scientific journals like Nature and Science — you won’t find that. It seems that people calling themselves “climate scientists” today have convinced themselves that their field is such “settled science” that they no longer need to bother with tacky questions like worrying about the null hypothesis. The centrality of focusing on the null hypothesis is the reason that studies like those covered in my last post (“Things Keep Getting Worse For The Fake ‘Science’ Of Human-Caused Global Warming,” July 12) are so important. Is there some other factor that could plausibly be causing global warming that more closely correlates with observed temperatures? How about clouds? Or ocean circulations (El Niño/La Niña)? Or volcanic activity? When climate scientists start addressing the alternative hypotheses seriously, then it will be real science. In the meantime, it’s fake science. A final word about my favorite subject, the ongoing systematic alteration of the world’s surface temperature (ground thermometer-based) records. Readers here are undoubtedly familiar with my now 23 part series, The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time. The alteration of the surface temperature records only relates to making the surface temperature record correlate more closely with the increase in atmospheric CO2. As noted in the Wallace, et al., May 2018 paper, without the alterations, the correlation between atmospheric CO2 and the surface temperature record is low. In other words, without faking the data, they can’t even show consistency between atmospheric CO2 and temperature increase. And that’s before even getting to dealing with problem of the null hypotheses." Good luck finding the non-existent climate science null hypothesis. And, no, it is not Fake Science, it is religion plain and simple. Climate science is a cult. Read all of his work on climate science here: The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time |
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