The degree to which Barack Obama is now phoning it in – sleepwalking perfunctorily through his second term, amid golf rounds and dinner parties – is astonishing
By Matt K Lewis
12:04PM BST 26 Jul 2014
President Obama has emotionally checked out of his job a couple of years early, it seems. How can one tell?
Candidates for president who brazenly assume they are the inevitable victor are sometimes accused of “measuring the drapes” for the White House.
Obama, conversely, seems to be prematurely packing his bags in hopes for an early departure.
Just last week, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported that “The First Family is believed to be in escrow on a contemporary home in a gated community where entertainers Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby once maintained estates”.
The economy’s big mystery: Why workers are disappearing from the job market
JULY 20, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2014, 1:21 AM BY ZACHARY A. GOLDFARB THE WASHINGTON POST THE RECORD
* Unforeseen factors could keep many Americans out of the labor force — permanently
WASHINGTON — Ever since the job market began to recover in 2010, the decline in the unemployment rate has come with a big fat asterisk. The unemployment rate has been going down, the argument goes, but largely because people have stopped looking for work. That’s why the labor force participation rate — the percentage of the population looking for a job or employed — stands at 62.8 percent, down from 66 percent before the recession. The joblessness rate, as a reminder, stands at 6.1 percent.
Now comes a new White House report, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers, that offers fascinating insights into what might be happening in the job market. The biggest headline in the report is the least surprising. It finds that about half of the decline in participation is the result of the baby boomer generation’s beginning to retire. For years, economists have known and predicted that this would happen. It should be no reason to worry. The report also finds that a sliver of the decline in participation is simply due to the elevated unemployment rate, which is still half a point or so above normal. In all recoveries, some people opt out of looking for work while the unemployment rate is higher than normal. This, thus, is “cyclical,” and also offers little reason for concern.
But the most interesting and alarming part of the report examines what White House economists call the “residual” — the factors beyond aging and cyclicality that explain why people are disappearing from the labor force. This is what we should worry most about. It’s these people who may never return to jobs. The report finds that about a third of the decline in participation is attributable to these disappearing workers. If their exit from the labor force proves permanent, the nation’s economy could suffer for years, never achieving the growth and prosperity it once could.
What’s behind this residual is one of the big mysteries in economics today. As in why, according to the report, it emerged only in 2012. That’s right: For the first two years of the recovery, the decline in labor force participation appears to have been normal, driven by aging and temporary effects from the recession. Only later on — as the unemployment came down and the economic recovery continued — did an unusually large number of workers start to abandon the labor force.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/business/biggest-threat-to-economy-comes-from-disappearing-workers-1.1054355#sthash.527eptbX.dpuf
This idea that we live in a world where government cares about us is just the biggest propaganda ever. Everyone one will only pursue their own self-interest.The OECD has interesting come out and warned that if governments are unable to stop the transfer of wealth to a small financial elite, the displeasure of the dispossessed middle class could easily turn and go against the prevailing governmental systems. The OECD has claimed to have discovered the existence of a veritable “lumpenproletariat” in the supposedly rich Germany. Even though the systems attempt to provide citizens with bread and circuses in the traditional Roman style to keep them quiet, such tactics they warn may have now become obsolete after the ultimate circus is over – the World Cup.
The problem with all of these studies is the look at class warfare and not at the consumption of government. They do not follow the breadcrumbs. What if you take everything from the elites? Who will start businesses to create jobs? Who will be left to take as government pensions keep ticking away. In Germany, it has now surpassed 50% of the average persons labor goes to taxes. There are a host of books coming out all about just taxing the rich more ignoring reducing the cost of government. The German bestseller “The plunder of the world” presents just another socialist agenda arguing that the rich get richer even in times of crisis, while the consequences of a crisis are always carried by the lower-income groups and the middle class. It fails to explain that the rich get richer from investment, not wage income. This is an argument to effective tax investment substantially to even out the disparity? But who then creates the jobs that produce anything? Is it that those who invest unfairly make money when the others pay too much in taxes and do not invest? Anyone who thinks that these books are real must be insane. If you think for one second raising the taxes on the rich will mean your taxes will decline – good luck. In Germany, Tax Freedom Day has passed the 50% and even in Canada it is now June 9, 2014. In the United States it is April 21st for 2014.
Today, the political landscape is littered with earnest, well-intentioned, and often, incredibly sanctimonious liberals who insist that they are simply pursuing truth and fact regardless of ideology.
The Dogma Business
The Goldberg File By Jonah Goldberg National Review July 18, 2014
Dear Reader (including the president of the United States whenever he gets to this after dealing with many important fundraisers),
If you’ve been reading my stuff over the years, you’ll find a number of common themes (“And recycled jokes. Let’s not forget those.” — The Couch). One such theme is that liberalism hides behind seemingly value-neutral or benign language in order to advance a value-laden and not necessarily benign agenda. That was the basic idea behindThe Tyranny of Clichés. Conservatives argue as conservatives. Liberals tend to argue not so much as liberals, but in a variety of disguises, each of which tries to draw on authority unearned by liberalism itself. Indeed, the history of American liberalism can be understood as a series of costume changes. A new nominally non-ideological discipline emerges— political science, engineering, public health, psychology, environmentalism, neuroscience and, these days, various forms of data prestidigitation — and liberals flock to it. They don the latest fashionable version of the white smock and say— à la Bill Murray in Ghostbusters — “back off man, we’re scientists.” Or to be more fair, they claim to be speaking for the scientists, engineers, psychologists, and other experts. “We’re not ideologues, we go with the facts.” This game was old when Walter Lippmann came out with his Drift and Mastery. After all, Karl Marx, the Babe Ruth of this sport, had long before insisted that his shtick wasn’t opinion or even mere analysis, but a new science.
In 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address at Yale. He explained that “political labels and ideological approaches are irrelevant to the solution” of today’s challenges. At a press conference the same year, he expanded on the idea. “Most of the problems . . . that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems.” These problems “deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men” and should therefore be left to the experts to settle without subjecting them to divisive democratic debate.
Today, the political landscape is littered with earnest, well-intentioned, and often, incredibly sanctimonious liberals who insist that they are simply pursuing truth and fact regardless of ideology. This, of course, remains Obama’s favorite pose. It runs through the “scientific consensus” argle-bargle on global warming. When Chris Hughes took over what has long been considered the flagship magazine of American liberalism, he ridiculously vowed that, “the journalism in these pages will strive to be free of party ideology or partisan bias.” The same conceit is behind Vox.com and “explanatory journalism,”which everyday sinks further and further into liberal Ronburgundyism. (Coming soon at Vox: “Fifteen Reasons Why San Diego Really Does Mean ‘Whale’s Vagina’ in German — And Why That Has To Change.”)
It’s Biden’s Party
Speaking of Ron Burgundyism, remember Joe Biden’s vice-presidential debate with Paul Ryan? He’d flash those teeth like a flounder that accidentally picked up a set of dentures. He’d laugh like the crazy guy on the bus who knows the driver is really following the chem trails in the sky because you can still get a Snickers bar for less than a dollar. He’d guffaw at any suggestion he or the president did anything wrong — ever— and shout “malarkey” at the idiots and knaves who thought otherwise. And, sadly, it largely worked. I’m beginning to think Biden was simply ahead of his time. So much of elite liberalism these days is little more than bluster and self-satisfied blather.
For instance, I am so disappointed in John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight. I like Oliver’s stand-up and his stints on Community. But his approach is simply Bidenism refined. The show begins from the premise that liberal conventional wisdom is not only right but obviously so and then simply works backward to “prove it.” In Britain, populist tabloids are condemned by people of Oliver’s persuasion for simply confirming the prejudices of the working class. Last Week Tonight is a similar effort for the more upscale — and often more prejudiced — HBO demographic. He doesn’t tell his audience anything it doesn’t want to hear, he just gives them new and occasionally funny reasons to feel good about themselves. The only difference between his show and the typical MSNBC host’s is that Oliver is funny on purpose.
The Dogma Business
Anyway, I kind of wandered off from where I planned on going with all of this. For the record, I’m not saying that politicians, pundits, and other partisans should not consult the opinions of scientists and other experts. Of course they — we — should. We learn new and interesting things all of the time. What I am saying is that liberalism is constantly rebranding itself as solely an explanation of reality and it constantly needs to rebrand itself because reality keeps revealing that it isn’t.
What worries me — a lot — is that reality is coming to the rescue of liberalism. No, I don’t mean that the crooked timber of humanity has grown straight or that it now makes sense that the Pentagon hold bake sales to pay for bombers. What I mean is that progressives are quicker to seize on the political opportunities created by a changing culture.
What is commonly called “political correctness” doesn’t get the respect it deserves on the right. Sure, in the herstory of political correctness there have been womyn and cis-men who have taken their seminal ovulal ideas too far, but we should not render ourselves visually challenged to the fact that something more fundawomyntal is at work here.
Political correctness can actually be seen as an example of Hayekian spontaneous order. Society has changed, because society always changes. But modern American society has changed a lot. In a relatively short period of time, legal and cultural equality has expanded — albeit not uniformly or perfectly — to blacks, women, and gays. We are a more heterodox society in almost every way. As a result, many of our customs, norms, and terms no longer line up neatly with lived-reality. Remember customs emerge as intangible tools to solve real needs. When the real needs change, the customs must either adapt or die.
Many conservatives think political correctness forced Christianity and traditional morality to recede from public life. That is surely part of the story. But another part of the story is that political correctness emerged because Christianity and traditional morality receded. Something had to fill the void.
I wish more conservatives recognized that at least some of what passes for political correctness is an attempt to create new manners and mores for the places in life where the old ones no longer work too well. You can call it “political correctness” that Americans stopped calling black people “negroes.” But that wouldn’t make the change wrong or even objectionable. You might think it’s regrettable that homosexuality has become mainstreamed and largely de-stigmatized. But your regret doesn’t change the fact that it has happened. And well-mannered people still need to know how to show respect to people.
Identity politics is only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Medical, technological, and economic changes are almost surely far more important than changing demographics alone. A society where individuals are vastly more autonomous than they were a century ago is simply going to have different codes of conduct and manners. The telephone, television, and the car did more to liberate young people from the moral cocoon of their families and communities than any libertine intellectual fad (you can be sure that driverless cars, for instance, will change society inunimaginable ways). Democrats recognize this, which is why they’ve cynically exploited changes in family structure, female labor participation, and reproductive technology and declared that Republicans have declared war on women. It’s not remotely true, but it is effective.
Now, I don’t actually think Christianity is necessarily inadequate to the task of keeping up with the changes of contemporary society. (The pagan Roman civilization Christianity emerged from was certainly less hospitable to Christianity than America today is. You could look it up.) But Christianity, like other religions, still needs to adapt to changing times and the evolving expectations of the people. I’m nothing like an expert on such things, but it seems to me that most churches and denominations understand this. Some respond more successfully than others. But it’s hardly as if they are oblivious to the challenge of “relevance.”
My concern here is more about mainstream conservatism. I think much of what the Left offers in terms of culture creation is utter crap. But they are at least in the business of culture creation.
The New Manners
And that brings me back to where I started. I began this “news”letter talking about how liberalism hides behind seemingly non-ideological language in order to advance an ideological cause. Think of political correctness in those terms. Progressives are steadily dismantling the beautiful cathedrals of traditional manners and customs, arguing that they’re too Baroque, too antiquated. They use the sledgehammer of liberation rhetoric to destroy the old edifices, but their fidelity to liberty is purely rhetorical. In place of the old cathedrals they build supposedly functional, modern, and utilitarian codes of conduct. But these Brutalist codes are not only unlovely, they are often more prudish than traditional approaches. Like some Six Sigma seminar participants holed up in a Holiday Inn conference room, Harvard is currently gathering its finest minds to draw up the procedures for sexual conduct and consent. The end result will surely be a clipboard check-list to rival that of any Jiffy Lube manager’s in both romantic appeal and sexiness.
What I would like to see from conservatives is recognition that some of the cathedrals are outdated. But instead of arguing that they should be razed and replaced with Jacobin Temples of Reason with rites and rituals grounded in abstraction, why not argue for some long overdue updating and retrofitting? I guarantee you more women prefer a modified version of the traditional process of wooing, courting, and dating before sex than the “modern” schizophrenic system of getting drunk enough for a same-day hook up but not so inebriated to forget to get a signature on the consent form. Traditional notions of romance and respect are far better tools than the mumbo-jumbo campus feminists have to offer. The problem is that the mumbo-jumbo feminists are fighting largely uncontested.
This country has undergone a seismic shift in its values in recent years. Our two main parties pretty much followed the same principals of self-reliance and hard work. One was just a little more to the left of the other, but nevertheless, the entrenched sense of American entrepreneurship shone through. Because of the fairly narrow gap in philosophies, common ground was fairly do-able in a divided Government. These last few years have seen a very dangerous move to increase support on the left by enhancing and pushing programs that encourage people to work less and even not at all, through hand-outs and a tax system where almost half the population pays no income tax. Now call me crazy, but even I would vote for the party that absolved me from paying income tax. Add to that, years of sending cryptic signals to people south of the border that we aren’t all that serious in preventing your border crossing, and it’s no wonder we are seeing droves flooding in. We no longer have a diligent media in this country. We have a media business model that caters to segments of society. The majortiy of these segments are to the left, and we therefore have a media that mostly acts as a cheerleader for this President.
I’m not sure if it’s even possible to get the psyche of this country back to where it used to be. I am truly worried about the future of my kids, and if this woman gets elected, I think 4-8 more years of this current way of thinking will be catastrophic.
Joseph Stalin estimated over 20 million people were murdered under his Socialist Rule
Millennials Don’t Know What “Socialism” Means
Emily Ekins|Jul. 16, 2014 9:14 am
Young people don’t know what socialism is.
Recent polls have suggested that millennials are far more positive to socialism than older cohorts. For instance, the Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of 18-29 year olds had a positive reaction to the word socialism, compared to 33 percent of 30-49 year olds, 23 percent of 50-64 year olds, and 14% of 65+. The older you get the more you hate socialism.
But do young people even know what socialism means?
Perhaps not. A new Reason-Rupe report on millennials finds that young people are more favorable to the word “socialism” than a government-managed economy, even though the latter is lessinterventionist. Millennials don’t like government intervention in the economy when you spell it out precisely, rather than use vague terms like “socialism.”
In fact, a 2010 CBS/New York Times survey found that when Americans were asked to use their own words to define the word “socialism” millennials were the least able to do so. According to the survey, only 16 percent of millennials could define socialism as government ownership, or some variation thereof. In contrast, 30 percent of Americans over 30 could do the same (and 57% of tea partiers, incidentally).
Millennials simply don’t know that socialism means the government owning everybody’s businesses. They don’t understand that socialism means the government owns the banks, the car companies, Uber, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc. They don’t even want the government taking a managerial role over the economy, let alone nationalizing private enterprise.
In fact, millennial support for a government-managed economy (32%) mirrors national favorabilitytoward the word socialism (31%). Millennial preferences may not be so different from older generations once terms are defined.
Millennials’ preferred economic system becomes more pronounced when it is described precisely. Fully 64 percent favor a free market economy over an economy managed by the government (32%), whereas 52 percent favor capitalism over socialism (42%). Language about capitalism and socialism is vague, and using these terms assumes knowledge millennials may not have acquired.
Lawmakers Throw Light on Secretive ‘Operation Choke Point’
Kelsey Harkness / @kelseyjharkness / July 15, 2014 /
‘No place to stop’: Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., on Operation Choke Point. (Photo: Flickr)
Is “Operation Choke Point” about to get choked by Congress? Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., sure hopes so.
Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is calling for the dismantling of what he calls a secretive initiative launched by the Obama administration in early 2013.
Critics say that Operation Choke Point, so dubbed by Department of Justice officials under Attorney General Eric Holder, seeks to weed out businesses from the marketplace that the Obama administration considers objectionable. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was an outgrowth of the Financial Fraud Task Force, established by President Obama’s executive order early in his first term.
The initiative, Issa said last week, is a slippery slope:
“If you empower the government to pick winners and losers within a lawful enterprise, then there is no place to stop.”
Initially, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, officials targeted small-dollar, nonbank lenders. But it grew to include other legal, legitimate businesses such as gun dealers and tobacco vendors at Walmart and Bass Pro Shop.
Issa, speaking on Operation Choke Point at Cato Institute, called it “proactive, progressive activity” by government against banks and other legitimate businesses.
“Fraud should be prosecuted,” Norbert Michel, research fellow in financial regulations at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “They don’t have to use the banking system to shut out every single player in an industry to do that.”
House Republicans already have passed legislation prohibiting funding for Operation Choke Point. This week, the Justice Department initiative comes under further scrutiny in three House settings:
This morning at 10, the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the Financial Services Committee wasscheduled to hold a hearing on the Justice Department initiative. Today at 2 p.m., the Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee on financial institutions subcommittee was set to hold a hearing on a new bill by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), the “End Operation Choke Point Act of 2014.” Thursday at 9:30 a.m., the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on regulatory reform will hold a hearing entitled “Guilty Until Proven Innocent?” on whether Justice has the legal authority to execute the operation and possible collateral damage to legitimate businesses.
One official at Justice, quoted anonymously in a Wall Street Journal report last summer, said the initiative was intended to change “the structures within the financial system that allow all kinds of fraudulent merchants to operate,” with the intent of “choking them off from the very air they need to survive.”
By “air,”the DOJ means money. The Obama administration uses Operation Choke Point to intimidates banks from doing business with merchants it deems “high risk,” Issa and other critics say.
For example, Issa said in his remarks last week, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation officials make “inappropriate” phone calls to banks and payday lenders, pressuring them to sever ties with businesses the government considers “reputational risks.”
Mark Calabria, Cato’s director of financial regulation studies, said FDIC pressure is an enormous weight over the financial industry.
“When the federal government maintains the discretion to decide which bank gets rescued and which does not, it should be clear that banks in practice have little choice but to cooperate,” Calabria said.
Despite his opposition to the initiative, Issa has yet to endorse legislation to end Operation Choke Point. Instead, he said:
We’ve got to do what baseball pitchers do anytime somebody’s crowding the plate. And that is, we’re going to put the ball close enough that either they’re going to jump back, or we’re going to hit them with the ball. … What they’re doing is wrong, and we’ve got to show that.
We, the people are violent and filled with rage: A nation spinning apart on its Independence Day
School shootings, hatred, capitalism run amok: This 4th of July, we are in the midst of a tragic public derangement
JIM SLEEPER FRIDAY, JUL 4, 2014 09:45 AM EDT
By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard ’round the world. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn,” 1837
For centuries most Americans have believed that “the shot heard ’round the world” in 1775 from Concord, Massachusetts, heralded the Enlightenment’s entry into history. Early observers of America such as G.W.F. Hegel, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke believed that, too. A new kind of republican citizen was rising, amid and against adherents of theocracy, divine-right monarchy, aristocracy and mercantilism. Republican citizens were quickening humanity’s stride toward horizons radiant with promises never before held and shared as widely as they were in America.
The creation of the United States really was a Novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages, a society’s first self-aware, if fumbling and compromised, effort to live by the liberal expectation that autonomous individuals could govern themselves together without having to impose religious doctrines or mystical narratives of tribal blood or soil. With barely a decorous nod to The Creator, the founders of the American republic conferred on one another the right to have rights, a distinguished group of them constituting the others as “We, the people.”
That revolutionary effort is not just in trouble now, or endangered, or under attack, or reinventing itself. It’s in prison, with no prospect of parole, and many Americans, including me, who wring our hands or wave our arms about this are actually among the jailers, or we’ve sleepwalked ourselves and others into the cage and have locked ourselves in. We haven’t yet understood the shots fired and heard ’round the world from 74 American schools, colleges and military bases since the Sandy Hook School massacre of December 2012.
These shots haven’t been fired by embattled farmers at invading armies. They haven’t been fired by terrorists who’ve penetrated our surveillance and security systems. With few exceptions, they haven’t been fired by aggrieved non-white Americans. They’ve been fired mostly by young, white American citizens at other white citizens, and by American soldiers at other American soldiers, inside the very institutions where republican virtues and beliefs are nurtured and defended.
“Great opinion piece in USA TODAY about how unnecessary regulation and government overreach destroys jobs, raises unemployment and hurts your ability to get better goods and services for a decent price. The author, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, uses taxis as an example, but you can apply this scenario to virtually every U.S. industry.” Rep Scott Garrett
Ride-share services benefit consumers, but the taxi commission doesn’t want to give us a good deal.
The regulatory knives are out for Uber and Lyft, two ride-sharing services that make life easier for consumers and provide employment opportunities in a stagnant economy. Why are regulatorsunhappy? Basically, because these new services offer insufficient opportunity for graft.
Services like Uber and Lyft disrupt the current regulatory environment. I have the Uber app on my phone. If I need a car in areas where Uber operates, it looks up where I am using GPS, matches me with participating drivers nearby, and in my experience gets me a Town Car in just a few minutes. It’s the comfort of a limo service, with the convenience of a taxicab. I get a better service, the driver gets a job, but now there’s competition for those entrenched companies.
In most cities, traditional taxi services are regulated by some sort of taxi commission. Similarly, limo services — the ones that provide the black Town Cars favored by big shots (and used by many Uber drivers) — are regulated by some sort of livery office. The rules strictly forbid the two sectors of the market from competing with one another. And, generally, entry is limited so that neither faces too much competition in general. In holding down competition, these regulators act on behalf of the entities they supposedly regulate for the benefit of consumers.
They do this because consumers typically pay very little attention to taxi and limo regulations while the regulated industries, unsurprisingly, pay very close attention. They express their gratitude in a variety of ways, some legal, and the regulators in turn look after the interests of the regulated. Consumer well-being is a far less significant concern.
If you think of the United States of America as a store, its recent decisions and scandals resemble a sale, perhaps a fire sale. Or maybe even a “Going Out of Business” sale.
The list of dramatic markdowns is breathtaking. They include trading away five murderous terrorists for a likely Army deserter, an open invitation to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to cross the Mexican border, and a decision to recognize the terrorist group Hamas as part of the Palestinian government.
On the home front, environmental regulations will cost thousands of coal miners their jobs and drive up the cost of electricity for millions. The ObamaCare mess is hardly resolved, and the Veterans Affairs scandal keeps getting worse. The acting agency head reported the deaths of 18 more vets who were kept off the official waiting list in Phoenix.
Ticking quietly in the background is the mother of all threats — an Iranian nuclear bomb. That ticking grew louder last week as the ayatollah mocked our nation by standing in front of a banner that proclaimed, “America cannot do a damn thing.”
37.2%: Percentage Not in Labor Force Remains at 36-Year High June 6, 2014 – 8:05 AM
(CNSNews.com) – The percentage of American civilians 16 or older who do not have a job and are not actively seeking one remained at a 36-year high in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In December, April, and now May, the labor force participation rate has been 62.8 percent. That means that 37.2 percent were not participating in the labor force during those months.
Before December, the last time the labor force participation rate sunk as low as 62.8 percent was February 1978, when it was also 62.8 percent. At that time, Jimmy Carter was president.
In April, the number of those not in the labor force hit a record high of 92,018,000. In May, that number declined by 9,000 to 92,009,000. Yet, the participation rate remained the same from April to May at 62.8 percent.
The labor force, according to BLS, is that part of the civilian noninstitutional population that either has a job or has actively sought one in the last four weeks. The civilian noninstitutional population consists of people 16 or older, who are not on active duty in the military or in an institution such as a prison, nursing home, or mental hospital.
The American Dream is impossible to achieve in this country.
So say nearly 6 in 10 people who responded to CNNMoney’s American Dream Poll, conducted by ORC International. They feel the dream — however they define it — is out of reach.
Young adults, age 18 to 34, are most likely to feel the dream is unattainable, with 63% saying it’s impossible. This age group has suffered in the wake of the Great Recession, finding it hard to get good jobs.
Younger Americans are a cause of great concern. Many respondents said they are worried about the next generation’s ability to prosper.
Some 63% of all Americans said most children in the U.S. won’t be better off than their parents. This dour view comes despite most respondents, 54%, feeling they are better off than their own parents.
The downbeat mood is not surprising, say economic mobility experts.
“The pessimism is reflective of the financial realities a lot of families are facing,” said Erin Currier, the director of the Economic Mobility Project at Pew Charitable Trusts. “They are treading water, but their income is not translating into solid financial security.”
It’s income mobility that matters, not income inequality
By John Stossel
Published June 04, 2014 FoxNews.com
“Young people are exploited!” “Income mobility is down!” “Poor people are locked into poverty!”
Those are samples of popular nonsense peddled today.
Leftist economist Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has been No. 1 on best-seller lists for weeks (with 400 pages of statistics, I assume “Capital” is bought more often than it is read). Piketty argues that investments grow faster than wages and so the rich get richer far faster than everyone else. He says we should impose a wealth tax and 80 percent taxes on rich people’s incomes.
When markets are free, poor people can move out of their income group. In America, income mobility, which matters more than income inequality, has not really diminished.
But Piketty’s numbers mislead. It’s true that today the rich are richer than ever. And the wealth gap between rich and poor has grown. Now the top 1 percent own more assets than the bottom 90 percent!
But focusing on this disparity ignores the fact that over time, the rich and poor are not the same people. Oprah Winfrey once was on welfare. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton was a farmhand.
When markets are free, poor people can move out of their income group. In America, income mobility, which matters more than income inequality, has not really diminished.
Economists at Harvard and Berkeley crunched the numbers on 40 million tax returns from 1971-2012 and discovered that mobility is pretty much what The Pew Charitable Trusts reported it was 30 years ago.
Today, 64 percent of the people born to the poorest fifth of society rise out of that quintile — 11 percent rise all the way into the top quintile. Meanwhile, 8 percent born to the richest fifth fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Sometimes great wealth makes kids lazy and self-indulgent, and wrecks their lives.
Also, the rich don’t get rich at the expense of the poor (unless they steal or collude with government).
The poor got richer, too. Yes, over the last 30 years, incomes of rich people grew by more than 200 percent, but according to the Congressional Budget Office, poor people gained 50 percent.
Half of Americans can’t afford their house June 3, 2014, 1:58 p.m. EDT
Over half of Americans (52%) have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to the “How Housing Matters Survey,” which was commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and carried out by Hart Research Associates. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement, cutting back on health care, running up credit card debt, or even moving to a less safe neighborhood or one with worse schools.“Affordability issues are real and a major hurdle,” says Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, an industry group. Home prices have increased 20% over the past two years while wages have barely gone up, he says. “Only by adding more new supply, via housing starts, can home prices be tamed,” Yun adds. In fact, construction of housing units has averaged around 1.5 million a year for the past five decades, he says, but it’s likely to be less than 1 million in 2014.
What’s more, at least 15% of American homeowners (or residents of 78 counties across the country) were living in housing markets where the monthly mortgage payment on a median-priced home requires more than 30% of the monthly median household income — long considered the maximum for rent/mortgage repayments. Housing costs above that threshold are “unaffordable by historic standards,” says Daren Blomquist, vice president at real estate data firm RealtyTrac. In New York county/Manhattan, mortgage payments represent 77% of the median income and in San Francisco County represents 70%.
Thomas Piketty (Photo: IBO/SIPA/Newscom) Piketty’s Questionable Data Salim Furth, Ph.D May 27, 2014 at 1:36 pm
Thomas Piketty made some questionable choices in adjusting and presenting the data that underlies his bestselling economics tome, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Chris Giles, economics editor of the Financial Times newspaper, published a detailed list of apparent fudges in Piketty’s data.
Giles’ most explosive accusation is that Piketty chose data sources that were friendliest to his own preconceived ideas. For example, both the United States and the United Kingdom have two potential data sources for wealth: estate tax records and surveys of living households. In the U.S., Piketty uses the household survey, which showed rising wealth concentration. But in the U.K., he chose to use the inferior-quality estate tax data, which also showed rising wealth concentration. If he’d flipped both choices, he would have found falling inequality in the U.K. and steady inequality in the U.S. Giles is correct when he says, “Choices matter.” Giles’ estimates of U.K. wealth inequality in recent ecades are much lower than Piketty’s, and Piketty will need to defend his choices if we are to believe that U.K. wealth inequality has been rising.
Piketty presents data showing that wealth inequality rose slightly in Sweden from 2000 to 2010. But his “2000” data point actually is 2004 data, and his “2010” data point actually is an average of 2005 and 2006. When Giles used the data from 2000, he found that inequality actually fell slightly from 2000 to 2006 (the last year available). Perhaps Piketty had a good reason to use the years he did, but he has not offered an explanation.
These questionable choices have been reported as “errors” or “mistakes,” but the questions about Piketty’s data pertain to the choices he made, not the minor goofs. Historian Phillip Magness presents Piketty’s summary data on U.S. wealth inequality alongside its pre-1970 source. The graphs tell very different stories. Perhaps Piketty’s adjustments were valuable and moved the data in the right direction. But it is incumbent on Piketty to explain those adjustments, and it is incumbent on the reader to understand that the data was uncertain and incomplete to begin with and then was adjusted as the author believed necessary.
Even the best data on wealth distributions is uncertain. One of Piketty’s central ideas is that the amount and concentration of wealth has been rising steadily since 1980. He contends that the same economic forces are at work now and he projects the recent changes into the future. But if there is substantial uncertainty about each estimate and disagreement among data sources, then “trends” are highly subjective. As Yogi Berra may have said, “Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.”
So how should we read Piketty? As others have noted, Capital can be divided into three components: history, prediction and prescription. One can believe the history without agreeing with Piketty’s predictions about the future. And if Piketty’s predictions are correct, he’s still wrong to prescribe brutal, confiscatory taxation, because that would increase poverty and lower wages, especially in poor countries.
What is at stake in Giles’ critique is Piketty’s account of history. Piketty’s story makes broad claims about global trends in the 19th and 20th centuries. If the trends turn out to depend on making specific choices, interpolations and adjustments in his collection of data, then we might have to conclude that predictions are hard to make, even about the past.
