April 27, 2015
By Rob Nikolewski │ Watchdog.org
This may come as bad news for parents who have spent tens of thousands of dollars sending their kids to expensive universities, but one path for young people getting a good job requires just a two-year degree or, in some cases, no college degree at all.
Continue reading Rise of the ‘silver collar’ workforce: When a four-year degree isn’t the right move
Alfred Poor
The fact is that our recent college graduates are already costing our country billions of dollars every year. Not long ago, the average tenure for an entry-level worker was five years. Now, that average is below two years.
U.S. companies report that the average cost of replacing a single entry-level worker is $20,000 (lost productivity, recruitment, training, and other costs). Amortized over five years, that’s an annual overhead of $4,000. Amortized over just two years, however, it soars to $10,000 per year.
Our young workers have a hair-trigger when it comes to changing jobs, or even just quitting a job without a replacement in hand. This is costing our country $6,000 more per year per new entry-level worker. That’s money that could be much better spent on creating new jobs or paying higher salaries.
Our high schools and colleges need to start paying more attention to the “soft” career skills that our young workers need to land and keep good jobs after graduation.
Northern Bergen office vacancies skyrocket as companies flee New Jersey’s Anti Business Climate
MARCH 29, 2015 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 2015, 1:21 AM
BY LINDA MOSS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
* Shifting preferences are likely to alter the look of many now-empty large corporate campuses
Northern Bergen County, once a magnet for corporations, has lost some of its luster as a number of companies leave the area, sending its office vacancy rate soaring to nearly 40 percent, according to one real estate firm.
In the first quarter so far, the northern corridor of the county, including towns like Montvale and Park Ridge, had 2.25 million square feet of its total 5.8 million square feet of office space unoccupied, according to JLL, a real estate firm with offices in East Rutherford.
That translates to a 39 percent vacancy rate in the quarter, up 70 percent from the year-ago period’s 23 percent, JLL reported.
The Hertz Corp.’s former headquarters in Park Ridge, a 226,000-square-foot property, is on the block after the auto-rental giant’s relocation to Estero, Fla. And Pearson Education’s exit a few months ago from its leafy campus in Upper Saddle River added 475,000 square feet of vacant office space.
“You’ve got almost a million square feet just in Montvale,” said JLL Managing Director Tom Reilly.
Vacancy rates could rise even higher when Mercedes-Benz USA moves its U.S. headquarters from Montvale, where it has three buildings, to Atlanta over the next couple of years. That relocation, announced in January, would add as much as 310,300 square feet of vacant space in the region.
https://www.northjersey.com/news/business/the-wide-open-office-spaces-1.1298328
What the Domino’s CEO Would Change on Taxes, Obamacare
Stephen Moore / @StephenMoore / March 22, 2015
Here’s a question that has been puzzling Patrick Doyle, the CEO of Domino’s, for months, as he puts it: “How do we list the calorie content of our pizzas on a menu when we have 34 million different variations of pizza?” The new menu labeling law, a creation of the Affordable Care Act, could require his company to do just that.
It’s a textbook case of a mindless and arcane regulation, of Washington bureaucrats imposing on businesses costs that will have no effect on public health. “We’ve been voluntarily doing menu labeling for over a decade,” Doyle says. “We even have an online calorie calculator we call the ‘Calo-Meter’ for every possible pizza order, and it tells customers what happens if they substitute, say, sausage for mushrooms, because we strive to be very nutrition-conscious.”
That isn’t good enough for the feds. The Food and Drug Administration is now insisting that every one of the chain’s 5,000 stores post menu boards on the wall with calorie counts. “It’s crazy and it doesn’t help consumers,” Doyle says, because “90 percent of Domino’s orders arrive by phone or Internet and are for delivery, so fewer than one of 10 customers will ever see these signs.” The signs will cost about $2,000 at every store, and each change of menu will require new ones. That is about $10 million of extraneous costs nationwide for Domino’s. Thank you, Washington.
Other than that, Doyle is having a good day when I visit him at the Domino’s world-wide headquarters in Ann Arbor, Mich. And a very good year, with sales up 12 percent in the past quarter alone.
The headquarters are a few miles up the road from where the original Domino’s Pizza opened in 1960. Doyle, who is 51, is tall, stocky, affable and appropriately a Michigan man through and through, having grown up in Midland and earned a degree at the University of Michigan. In his five years as CEO, annual sales have climbed to $9 billion from about $2 billion. Some 250,000 workers wear a Domino’s uniform and sell roughly one billion pizzas each year. During the Super Bowl, Domino’s was taking a dizzying 1,400 orders a minute.
Making pizzas may not be the sexiest business—though it’s a $125 billion world-wide market. But while investors obsess over finding the next Facebook, the share price of Domino’s has soared from $13 in 2010 to just over $100 today. It has been among the top performing stocks in the Fortune 100.
Doyle has helped take the company global, with stores operating in 80 nations and expansion plans throughout Asia. In sales, Domino’s is now the No. 1 restaurant chain in India. Sub-Saharan Africa is also among the company’s fastest-growing markets, with a billion people and a growing middle class. “We’ve discovered Africans love pizza,” he says. “They order them on their mobile phones.”
Things weren’t always flying so high in Ann Arbor. Doyle became CEO after two of the company’s worst years, and sales were still sliding. One of his first decisions was to take an unorthodox approach: “We held a series of focus groups with consumers and we discovered that people hated the pizza. So we ran these TV ads featuring Americans complaining about how bad Domino’s pizza tasted.” Then Doyle appeared on screen with an apology and promise: “We hear you America. Sometimes you know you’ve got to make a change. Please give us another try.”
He adds with a laugh that the one thing in his career that impressed his children was when they were in a New York restaurant and comedian Amy Poehler spotted him and shouted, “Hey, you’re the pizza guy.”
In the three months following those ads, Domino’s had its fastest rise in sales in company history. “I think consumers really appreciated that we were direct and honest with them,” he explains. That ad campaign is now considered a textbook crisis-management story, with its lesson in honesty as a best commercial policy.
Domino’s is also riding the digital revolution. “In a lot of ways we’re really a technology company,” Doyle says. “We’ve adapted the art of pizza-making to the digital age. Globally, we’re already at a run rate of about $4 billion of digital sales.” He adds that digital drives sales by making ordering easier and more efficient, and saves money on bad orders because customers “take their own orders so they make fewer mistakes.”
His goal is to have every iPhone in the world equipped with a Domino’s app, and the company is working with Ford Motor Co. on a voice-activated technology that will let motorists order a large thin-crust pepperoni with onions while driving home from work.
The atmosphere at company headquarters feels more like Silicon Valley than a fast-food company. Most employees here are computer programmers and technicians monitoring in real time what people are ordering, how long it is taking to fill an order, and the online complaints and comments that stream in. Their mission is to streamline the pizza-making process from the time the order arrives to when the pie is handed off at the customer’s front door. If the goal is delivery in 30 minutes or less, every innovation that shaves 10 or 15 seconds is a major money saver when you’re selling a billion pies a year. Although the Domino’s menu also includes such things as sandwiches, pasta and chicken wings, 80 percent of its sales are pizzas.
Doyle is unconditionally bullish on the U.S. economy. “The big story since the recession is that American households and businesses have become lean and efficient and have paid down debts. Consumers finally have money and they are starting to spend it,” he says.
Meanwhile, as the head of one of the nation’s biggest employers, Doyle sees the effects of what he calls a “tightening of the labor market” firsthand. “Frankly, right now, it’s getting harder and harder to hire. We have shortages of truck drivers and delivery people.”
Such real-world experience makes Domino’s a barometer of sorts. “My take is that the official statistics are underestimating the strength of the labor market. Look, it has been a long, slow recovery. We’re now six years into it and we’ve finally reached the point where there seems to be more demand for labor than there is trained supply.” For job seekers “that is great news, right?”
As for those who fret that only the rich are getting richer and upward mobility isn’t possible, Doyle says they should pay more attention to what happens at Domino’s. “Over 90 percent of our 900 franchisees started as an hourly worker in the store,” he says. “Most of them started as delivery drivers at minimum wage. They work their way up. They become a manager. Then they come in, they apply to buy a store.” So from earning $7 or $8 an hour, they now earn $80,000 to $100,000 by operating a franchise. Many have become millionaires. “This is absolutely a story of upward mobility in America.
If he were economic adviser to the president, what reforms would he recommend to accelerate growth and hiring? Without hesitation he says: “Simplify the corporate tax. It’s a killer. We pay 38 percent at Domino’s.” He’s including state and local taxes, but that’s a huge burden, especially given that many large corporations pay below 10 percent. “Just get rid of all the loopholes—and make it fair with a broad base and lower rates.” Then he adds, only half-kidding: “No one in Washington ever woke up and said ‘let’s have a loophole for pizza makers.’” Sounds like he needs a lobbyi
One of Doyle’s biggest worries is that the Domino’s franchise-owner model—which is also used by thousands of other retail and restaurant stores—has come under assault from trial lawyers, unions and the National Labor Relations Board. These groups want to treat a Domino’s or Popeyes franchise store and the parent company as “joint employers.” This would mean a locally owned store with a few dozen staff would still have to comply with, for instance, the ObamaCare rules that only apply to firms with more than 50 workers. Seattle passed a minimum-wage law last year that treats franchise restaurants as big businesses that must pay a super-minimum-wage that phases up to $15 an hour.
“You’ve got 20 million people today employed in the franchise industry in the U.S. Part of why small business owners want to be in a franchise is because they’re getting support from each other, and they’re getting support and ideas from a company. Franchise stores have dramatically higher success rates than people who are just doing it all on their own,” Doyle says. “Why destroy a model that is almost uniquely American and has been a tremendous success for 50 or 60 years? This would be horribly detrimental.”
Doyle is optimistic about the world economy and how the digital revolution will continue to lift living standards for billions in the coming decade. Even in sub-Saharan Africa per capita incomes are growing at 5 percent annually. “I’m a free trader. I just believe in my core that free markets, technology, innovation, cheap energy and globalization will be triumphant and will make people better off.” They will also, not coincidentally, make people order more pizzas on their smartphones.
https://dailysignal.com/2015/03/22/what-the-dominos-ceo-would-change-on-taxes-obamacare/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=thf03222015Dominos
Ridgewood Concert Band : The Lincoln Legacy
Sunday, March 8, 2015 , 7:00 PM
West Side Presbyterian Church ,Ridgewood, New Jersey
Special Guest
Ramapo College Chorale – Dr. Lisa Lutter, Director
Soloist
Diana Powers Rettie – Flute
Buy Tickets Now https://ridgewoodband.org/purchase/singleticket.aspx
Program Highlights
Major Dwayne S. Milburn is a native of Baltimore, Maryland. In 1986 he graduated from UCLA with a BFA in Music and received a Masters of Music in Orchestral Conducting from the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1992. In 1993 he became the Director of Cadet Music for the Unites States Army Military Academy at West Point. He received his Ph.D. in Music from UCLA in 2009 and is in great demand as a conductor, composer, arranger and clinician. Milburn notes that “American Hymnsong Suite is firmly rooted in [his] family history as church musicians.” He grew up singing and playing many different hymns, including the four hymns featured in this work: Prelude on “Wondrous Love” (“What Wondrous Love Is This”), Ballad on “Balm in Gilead,” Scherzo on “Nettleton,” and March on “Wilson.” Milburn says that “whilst many audience members will certainly make various religious connections to the piece, the ongoing goal is to introduce all listeners to the richness of our American musical heritage.”
Program notes compiled by Marcie Phelan.
Lincoln Portrait – Aaron Copland
Lincoln Portrait was commissioned by Andre Kostelanetz for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in early 1942. Copland initially chose Walt Whitman as his subject, but immediately picked Lincoln instead when Kostelanetz suggested a historical government figure. For the narration, which occurs only in the Portrait’s third and final section, Copland used Lincoln’s words, adding his own brief descriptions of the former president. Characteristic of Copland’s populist and patriotic music, Lincoln Portrait quotes traditional popular tunes: “Springfield Mountain” and Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,” while the largest portion of the musical work is Copland’s own genius.
Program notes compiled by Marcie Phelan.
Battle Hymn of the Republic- Peter Wilhousky
Battle Hymn of the Republic originated when Julia Ward Howe, the wife of a prominent Boston abolitionist, visited a Union army camp in Virginia during the Civil War. There she heard soldiers singing “John Brown’s Body” to a tune attributed to William Steffe, a Philadelphia insurance salesman, and probably composed in 1855 or 18566. Howe decided to write new verses more fitting to the conflict between the North and theSouth. Her “Battle Hymn” was published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862 and has expressed America’s resolve during every conflict since. The arrangement heard here was prepared by Mr. Wilhousky, a New York-based chorus master. This setting has become the definitive rendition of the work as it never fails to stir the emotion of its audience.
Program notes compiled by Marcie Phelan.
Washington Greys – Claudio Grafulla/L. Schissel
This classic march is Grafulla’s most widely known composition, and it has been arranged and rearranged for countless contemporary bands. Research indicates that The Washington Greys were the 8th Regiment of New York, based at Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. Their name is chiseled in stone in the Armory entranceway. The 8th became the 258th Field Artillery and is still part of the 42nd InfantryDivision (Rainbow) of the Army National Guard. Prior to the Civil War, gray was a standard color for military uniforms; it was not until the development of the Confederacy that the Union uniform color became blue. The Washington Greys were the original honor guard for George Washington when he was welcomed back to New York City after the British evacuated in 1783. The Washington Greys March is Grafulla’s most famous work because of the way the march is constructed. It is musically cohesive, with its running sixteenth notes and a responding rich bass voice making a magnificent counterpoint. This very spirited march demands virtuosity from its performers.
Program notes compiled by Marcie Phelan.
Marching through Georgia – John Philip Sousa/Brion
Sousa marches often bear a dedication to people, places, or events. Marching Through Georgia is a powerfully inventive patrol setting of Henry Clay Work’s immensely popular 1865 civil war song. It was written to commemorate William Tecumseh Sherman’s famed and decisive Union Army “March to the Sea” which historically broke the backbone of the rebellious Confederacy. The patrol setting gives the listener the aural view of the band approaching from the distance, sounding full as it passes, and fading in its retreat.
Program notes compiled by Marcie Phelan.
Spring Song – Jean Sibelius arr. Patrick Burns
Sibelius wrote extensivelyand wonderfully for orchestra, yet relatively few of his tone poems are performed regularly in this country, apart from Finlandia, and the Swan of Tuonela. Spring Song is a hymn to nature tinged with a hint of the wintry melancholy that can linger into the sub-arctic spring of Sibelius’s beloved Finnish homeland. Mr. Burns has honored both the composer and the Ridgewood Concert Band with his concert band arrangement of this Sibelius jewel composed originally in 1894. Although gentle and wistful in its opening, the work also contains some lovely and memorable melodies that will now be available to performers and audiences alike in this delightful new setting, as the Ridgewood Concert Band premiers this new arangement.
Program notes compiled by Marcie Phelan.
Precious Metal – D.J. Sparr
Precious Metal is a concerto for flute and winds and is based on the three metals of which the flute is made. Each metal is a descriptive title that influenced the construction and materials of each movement of the work. In the first movement, Silver Strettos, the flute is heard as bright and pristine within the simple and pure melodic material and the call and response canonic orchestration. In the second movement, Platinum Sheen does not have the glimmer of silver, so the orchestration in this movement is not as flashy as in the first movement, but as with platinum, the orchestration is strong and durable – using the low instruments of the ensemble for a strong foundation. Gold Rush begins with a solo flute motive based on material from the first movement but now in a minor key. The ensemble interrupts with a pulsating crescendo that leads to a virtuosic flute cadenza. The middle section of this movement features a long accelerando with a soaring flute melody that ultimately leads to a musical accompaniment to a westward bound journey into the sunset, a search for gold and riches.
Program notes compiled by Marcie Phelan.
US budget deficit running 6.2 percent higher than last year
Feb 11, 4:49 PM (ET)
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government ran a bigger deficit in January, pushing the imbalance so far this budget year up 6.2 percent from the same period a year ago.
The Treasury Department said Wednesday the deficit for January stood at $17.5 billion compared to $10.3 billion a year ago. For the first four months of the budget year that began in October, the deficit widened to $194.2 billion from $182.8 billion during the same period last year.
The budget deficit has gradually narrowed since 2012, which was the fourth straight year in which it topped the $1 trillion mark. The improvement reflects the country’s economic recovery from recession. The government is seeing higher tax revenues as people go back to work and smaller payments for safety-net programs such as unemployment assistance. It also represents efforts by Congress to control deficits through higher taxes and across-the-board spending cuts.
Last year’s deficit benefited from a $24 billion special payment Freddie Mac made for the support it received during the financial crisis. The Congressional Budget Office forecasts a deficit of $468 billion for the full 2015 budget year, 3.1 percent lower than in 2014.
For the current budget year, government revenues total $1.05 trillion, an increase of 8.7 percent from the same period a year ago. Government spending totals $1.24 trillion, up 8.3 percent over last year.
The deficit in 2014 narrowed to $483.3 billion from $680.2 billion in 2013. Before that, the deficits soared to record heights as the government grappled with revenue losses from the Great Recession and increased spending in such areas as unemployment benefits and food stamps.
President Barack Obama unveiled last week his new budget proposal, which projects the 2015 deficit to rise to $583 billion, sharply higher than the CBO’s latest estimate. Obama’s new budget is asking Congress for authorization to spend $4 trillion next year and projects a 2016 deficit of $474 billion.
https://apnews.myway.com/article/20150211/us–budget_deficit-503db25ece.html
The Legacy of Debt: Interest Costs Poised to Surpass Defense and Nondefense Discretionary Spending
By JOSH ZUMBRUN
The U.S. has come a long way since the days of trillion-dollar deficits, just a few years ago. The White House projects 2016 will have the smallest budget deficit in eight years. Yet the budgetary impact of the debt that’s been accumulated–$18 trillion in total, $13 trillion of that owed to the public–will reassert itself.
Currently, the government’s interest costs are around $200 billion a year, a sum that’s low due to the era of low interest rates. Forecasters at the White House and Congressional Budget Office believe interest rates will gradually rise, and when that happens, the interest costs of the U.S. government are set to soar, from just over $200 billion to nearly $800 billion a year by decade’s end.
The Union-Driven Crisis That Could Be Coming to a City Near You
Stephen Moore / @StephenMoore / January 11, 2015
For “Outrageous Government Scam of 2014,” it’s hard to compete with the news of the supersized public employee pensions in California. If you haven’t already heard: In 2013, an assistant fire chief in Southern California collected a $983,319 pension. A police captain in Los Angeles received nearly $753,861.
Talk about a golden parachute. And the report on Golden State government pensions contains a list of hundreds of “public servants” who have hit the jackpot with annual pensions of a half million dollars a year. It’s like they’re playing the game “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” with taxpayer money.
By some estimates, the unfunded public-sector pension liabilities in California have eclipsed $750 billion, which means in a few years residents will be paying their already-highest-in-the-nation income and sales taxes not for roads, bridges, schools and public safety, but for retired employees living like Daddy Warbucks.
This same scandal – only on a slightly smaller scale – is happening in most states. The crisis dates back 20 to 30 years ago, when public employee unions negotiated fat pension deals with state and local politicians that were like ticking time bombs in municipal budgets. The politicians who bought union votes didn’t care much. They’d be long gone when these grenades detonated, and the fiscal carnage began.
Americans know instinctively that this is no way to run a city or state, and that the enormous pensions border on larceny from public treasuries. This will eventually cause rip roaring problems for state and local budgets. But now we have a story from middle America of what happens when the crisis hits a financial boiling point. Look no further than Scranton, Pa.
Scranton is a middle-class, blue-collar town of 76,000 with severe financial problems. The city recently raised its property taxes for 2014 by more than 50 percent, and those taxes are expected to rise by another 20 percent in 2015. The city had to also raise various fees, such as the charge for garbage collection, by two-thirds. It’s becoming a tax hell.
These taxpayer costs are skyrocketing because the city’s auditors calculate that the police and fire pension funds will be completely depleted in three to five years. The local Times-Tribune newspaper reported last week that “pensions increased by as much as 80 percent” after a court order in 2011 awarded millions of dollars of added pensions to firefighters and police officers.
This is a town that has already been struggling for years to pay its bills. The Times-Tribune reports: “The increased pensions come at a time when Scranton, in distressed status since 1992, is struggling to survive [and faces] a $20 million deficit.” City officials admit that to pay these lucrative pensions will mean less money for school children, public safety and infrastructure needs.
Finances are so tight in this town that, late last year, the city auditor put out an advisory memo to city agencies: “Only in the event of an extreme emergency can a purchase be made. … This is a serious matter and your cooperation is expected.”
So, now, homeowners are getting squeezed on basic city services as they pay ever escalating property taxes. What a deal. Don’t be surprised as more leave Scranton, further depleting the tax base. And who would want to move there now?
When the mayor requested that the unions help keep the city afloat by renegotiating these soaring pension costs, the answer from these militant “public service” union leaders was, Hell no.
One option is for Scranton to take the Detroit route and declare bankruptcy. This is also what several California cities – such San Bernardino and Stockton – have had to do.
The California Policy Center notes that this option has the virtue of “forcing the unions to renegotiate and take a haircut.” If that doesn’t happen, cities like Scranton, and many more working-class towns, will continue to raise taxes at a time when families are already walking a financial tight rope.
The Left loves to talk about “fairness” and “inequality,” but where the inequities really exist are in towns like Scranton. Middle-class private-sector workers pay higher and higher taxes to fund public-sector pensions that, as the Manhattan Institute has shown, are often twice as generous as what most workers will receive themselves. The money for supersized pensions isn’t going to come from millionaires and billionaires like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. It is coming right out of the paychecks of working-class America.
The crisis isn’t going away. Nationwide, public employee pensions are running $1 trillion to $5 trillion in the red, depending on the rate of return expected on stocks and bonds. This could be the next housing bubble to burst. Some states like Utah have smartly moved to head off this crisis by closing down open-ended pensions and putting public sector union members in 401(k) plans that won’t bankrupt the state or municipalities. The unions are fighting this reform everywhere.
If something isn’t done quickly, the crisis in Scranton will soon be coming to a town near you.
Originally appeared in the Orange County Register.
An Autopsy for the Keynesians
By John H. Cochrane
This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 21, 2014.
This year the tide changed in the economy. Growth seems finally to be returning. The tide also changed in economic ideas. The brief resurgence of traditional Keynesian ideas is washing away from the world of economic policy.
No government is remotely likely to spend trillions of dollars or euros in the name of “stimulus,” financed by blowout borrowing. The euro is intact: Even the Greeks and Italians, after six years of advice that their problems can be solved with one more devaluation and inflation, are sticking with the euro and addressing — however slowly — structural “supply” problems instead.
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne wrote in these pages Dec. 14 that Keynesians wanting more spending and more borrowing “were wrong in the recovery, and they are wrong now.” The land of John Maynard Keynes and Adam Smith is going with Smith.
Why? In part, because even in economics, you can’t be wrong too many times in a row.
Keynesians told us that once interest rates got stuck at or near zero, economies would fall into a deflationary spiral. Deflation would lower demand, causing more deflation, and so on.
“We were warned that the 2013 sequester meant a recession. Instead, unemployment came down faster than expected.”
It never happened. Zero interest rates and low inflation turn out to be quite a stable state, even in Japan. Yes, Japan is growing more slowly than one might wish, but with 3.5% unemployment and no deflationary spiral, it’s hard to blame slow growth on lack of “demand.”
Our first big stimulus fell flat, leaving Keynesians to argue that the recession would have been worse otherwise. George Washington’s doctors probably argued that if they hadn’t bled him, he would have died faster.
With the 2013 sequester, Keynesians warned that reduced spending and the end of 99-week unemployment benefits would drive the economy back to recession. Instead, unemployment came down faster than expected, and growth returned, albeit modestly. The story is similar in the U.K.
These are only the latest failures. Keynesians forecast depression with the end of World War II spending. The U.S. got a boom. The Phillips curve failed to understand inflation in the 1970s and its quick end in the 1980s, and disappeared in our recession as unemployment soared with steady inflation.
Still, facts and experience are seldom decisive in economics. Maybe Washington’s doctors are right. There are always confounding influences. Logic matters too. And illogic hurts. Keynesian ideas are also ebbing from policy as sensible people understand how much topsy-turvy magical thinking they require.
Hurricanes are good, rising oil prices are good, and ATMs are bad, we were advised: Destroying capital, lower productivity and costly oil will raise inflation and occasion government spending, which will stimulate output. Though Japan’s tsunami and oil shock gave it neither inflation nor stimulus, worriers are warning that the current oil price decline, a boon in the past, will kick off the dreaded deflationary spiral this time.
I suspect policy makers heard this, and said to themselves “That’s how you think the world works? Really?” And stopped listening to such policy advice.
Keynesians tell us not to worry about huge debts, or to default or inflate them away (but please, call it “restructuring” or “repairing balance sheets”). Even the Obama administration has ignored that advice, promising long-run solutions to the debt problem from day one. Europeans have centuries of memories of what happens to governments that don’t pay debts, or who need to borrow for a new emergency but have stiffed their creditors once too often. More debt? Nein danke!
In Keynesian models, government spending stimulates even if totally wasted. Pay people to dig ditches and fill them up again. By Keynesian logic, fraud is good; thieves have notoriously high marginal propensities to consume. That’s a hard sell, so stimulus is routinely dressed in “infrastructure” clothes. Clever. How can anyone who hit a pothole complain about infrastructure spending?
But people feel they’ve been had when they discover that the economics is about wasted spending, and infrastructure was a veneer to get the bill passed. And they smell a rat when they hear economic arguments shaded for partisan politics.
Stimulus advocates: Can you bring yourselves to say that the Keystone XL pipeline, LNG export terminals, nuclear power plants and dams are infrastructure? Can you bring yourselves to mention that the Environmental Protection Agency makes it nearly impossible to build anything in the U.S.? How can you assure us that infrastructure does not mean “crony boondoggle,” or high-speed trains to nowhere?
Now you like roads and bridges. Where were you during decades of opposition to every new road on grounds that they only encouraged suburban “sprawl”? If you repeat in your textbooks how defense spending saved the economy in World War II, why do you support defense cutbacks today? Why is “infrastructure” spending abstract or anecdotal, not a plan for actual, valuable, concrete projects that someone might object to?
Keynesians tell us that “sticky wages” are the big underlying economic problem. But why do they just repeat this story to justify inflation and stimulus? Why do they not advocate policies to undo minimum wages, labor laws, occupational licenses and other regulations that make wages stickier?
Inequality was fashionable this year. But no government in the foreseeable future is going to enact punitive wealth taxes. Europe’s first stab at “austerity” tried big taxes on the wealthy, meaning on those likely to invest, start businesses or hire people. Burned once, Europe is moving in the opposite direction. Magical thinking — that, contrary to centuries of experience, massive taxation and government control of incomes will lead to growth, prosperity and social peace — is moving back to the salons.
Yes, there is plenty wrong and plenty to worry about. Growth is too slow, and not enough people are working. Even supporters acknowledge that Dodd-Frank and ObamaCare are a mess. Too many people on the bottom are stuck in terrible education, jobless poverty, and a dysfunctional criminal justice system. But the policy world has abandoned the notion that we can solve our problems with blowout borrowing, wasted spending, inflation, default and high taxes. The policy world is facing the tough tradeoffs that centuries of experience have taught us, not wishing them away.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/autopsy-keynesians?utm_content=buffereb570&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Weather Channel Morning Show Beats CNN, MSNBC
“Morning Joe” has been shedding viewers for about a year. “New Day” is shaping up to be one of television’s all-time titanic disasters. In other words, it’s not that Al Roker’s numbers are so high, it’s that CNN’s and MSNBC’s numbers are so low.
Overall, this is another sign of the slow-motion fall of left-wing cable news networks. While — thanks to great producing, on-air talent, and a willingness to cover news stories the left-wing MSM ignore — Fox News soars, there is just no reason anymore to tune into CNN or MSNBC.
With some notable exceptions, CNN’s anchors are mostly tired, left-wing, smug, or a mixture of all three; and unless it’s a poop cruise or an airliner that CNN suggests might have been abducted by aliens, the Zucker Network offers the same old-left-wing narratives presented in the same old left-wing way.
For its part, MSNBC is nothing more than left-wing talk radio with pictures.
Thanks to Fox News and the New Media available everywhere online, people now have a choice and they are not choosing CNN or MSNBC.
https://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2014/11/06/weather-channel-morning-show-beats-cnn-msnbc
file photo of the Ridgewood blog Drone
Drones Could Be Next Tool for Ridgewood Real Estate Agents
Real Estate News
Jan 2, 2014
By: Erik Gunther
Scott Gerami says he’s always “had a passion for gadgets and technology,” and after 26 years in real estate, he’s still looking for an edge to make his listings stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Over the past year, the REALTOR® and managing broker of RE/MAX in Naperville, IL, has been tinkering with a camera-equipped drone aircraft to make his real estate photography really soar.
Folks in the Chicago suburb shouldn’t be alarmed if they see Gerami standing outside a home with a control panel, piloting one of his do-it-yourself flying machines overhead.
The intrepid Gerami is not alone. According to The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, the next trend in real estate photography is being deployed in increasing numbers to capture new angles on high-end homes for sale.
While regulatory issues on these unmanned aircraft are still being sorted out, the birds-eye views are enticing to agents such as Gerami. “I’m looking for unique ideas to set myself apart,” he said.
After watching one of Gerami’s drone-driven videos, you’ll get a sense of how the next wave in real estate photography is taking flight. He first built a couple of “rough and crude” devices “from the ground up,” but he’s continued to make refinements that have allowed him to explore new ways of deploying his flying machine.
He said his latest model, his fourth, cost him about $1,200 to build.
https://www.realtor.com/news/bring-in-the-drones-real-estate-from-above/#.UsuDEWRDuMQ
Why It Makes Sense for Burger King to Become a Canadian Company
Stephen Moore / @StephenMoore / August 25, 2014
How many iconic American companies have to leave or threaten to leave these shores for foreign lands before Washington acts to fix our anti-growth tax system and keep firms, profits, and jobs here in the U.S.?
Burger King became the latest Fortune 100 company to announce it is looking to leave. The company is considering a deal to merge with Canadian restaurant chain Tim Hortons and move its headquarters north across the border. The multi-billion dollar deal would make the $11.4 billion hamburger company now based in Miami a Canadian firm valued at more than $21 billion. The technical term for this transaction is an “inversion.”
Why is it happening? The combined federal and state corporate income tax rate in Florida is 38.6 percent, near the highest in the world and more than a third higher than the combined national and provincial rate of 28.0 percent in Ontario, Canada. This is costing American workers jobs and the U.S. capital investment.
No surprise that tax shares for both Tim Hortons and Burger King soared nearly 20 percent at the prospect of less of the company’s profits being taken in taxes—a boon to investors of more than $3 billion in one day. So far this year companies like Pfizer, Walgreens, AbbVie, and others have investigated similar moves to lower their tax bills.
Expect a blizzard more of these tax moves if the U.S. corporate tax isn’t reduced quickly to at most the average in the industrialized world of 25 percent. Better yet would be to abolish the corporate tax altogether and tax the shareholders on these profits. This would cause a flood of companies to come to the U.S. rather than leave.
The hamburger is a quintessential American food. What could be more unpatriotic than giving firms like Burger King a financial incentive to leave the U.S. because of the high tax rate here? Thanks, Congress!
https://dailysignal.com/2014/08/25/makes-sense-burger-king-become-canadian-company/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
Warren Buffett to Invest in Burger King’s Planned Deal for Tim Hortons
Berkshire Hathaway Expected to Provide About 25% of Financing, Thrusting Billionaire Into U.S. Tax Debate
Ferguson Unrest Shows Poverty Grows Fastest in Suburbs
By Toluse Olorunnipa and Elizabeth Campbell Aug 16, 2014 12:01 AM ET
A week of violence and protests in a town outside St. Louis is highlighting how poverty is growing most quickly on the outskirts of America’s cities, as suburbs have become home to a majority of the nation’s poor.
In Ferguson, Missouri, a community of 21,000 where the poverty rate doubled since 2000, the dynamic has bred animosity over racial segregation and economic inequality. Protests over the police killing of an unarmed black teenager on Aug. 9 have drawn international attention to the St. Louis suburb’s growing underclass.
Such challenges aren’t unique to Ferguson, according to a Brookings Institution report July 31 that found the poor population growing twice as fast in U.S. suburbs as in city centers. From Miami to Denver, resurgent downtowns have blossomed even as their recession-weary outskirts struggle with soaring poverty in what amounts to a paradigm shift.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-16/ferguson-unrest-shows-poverty-grows-fastest-in-suburbs.html
The Looming Tsunami of Discontent with Obamacare
Win or lose Halbig, Obamacare wars will continue.
Shikha Dalmia | August 5, 2014
No matter how you feel about Halbig vs. Sebelius—the recent decision that said it was illegal for the government to funnel subsidies to the 36 states that declined to build health care exchanges—the odds that this legal challenge to Obamacare will ultimately prevail in the courts are not that high. But the law’s supporters should brace themselves for even fiercer future battles: Their folly was to pass a complicated and flawed law with zero Republican support, and now they have to contend with full-bore Republican opposition as they try to make it work.
Halbig’s odds of being upheld are low, not because its legal argument is “stupid” or “criminal,” as its opponents claim, but because of courtroom politics. Halbig was issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but the full court tilts heavily liberal, and it is likely to reverse the decision.
Opponents of the law petitioned the Supreme Court last week to rule on the legality of the subsidies while the lower courts are still split. But the politically squeamish Chief Justice John Roberts might prefer to let matters play out at that level rather than jump into a partisan mud fight. (Theoretically, the four conservative justices would be enough to grant certiorari, but unless they know that Roberts will rule with them eventually, they wouldn’t risk egg on their face.)
But that doesn’t mean that Obamacare supporters can take a victory lap. The program’s biggest vulnerabilities are still down the road. And that’s no accident.
The administration postponed implementation of the more painful aspects of the program till after the president is safely out of office—partly through the original law and partly by altering the law through executive fiat.
Thanks to lobbying by labor, the law delayed taxing so-called Cadillac Plans, which benefit union households, till 2018. Likewise, it doesn’t require states participating in the Medicaid expansion to pick up any of the tab for their added costs till 2016.
The penalty for the individual mandate, which starts at $95 per individual and $285 per household, will soar to $695 and $2,085, respectively, by 2016.
But the real danger is the “risk corridor” provision that was meant to backstop the losses of insurance companies so that they don’t pull out, prompting Obamacare’s collapse.
“Risk corridors” essentially cap both the profits and losses that insurance companies can make. A company whose profits are higher than the capped amount has to fork over the excess to one that incurs losses.
In theory, this program, which is also due to expire around 2017, is supposed to be financed by the insurance industry. But the problem is that if the industry as a whole doesn’t make enough profits to offset its losses, then a federal bailout may be necessary when these programs are phased out and their final bill comes due.
The likelihood of a bailout is not as remote as liberals claim, given that 71 percent of the exchange enrollees are older and not as healthy, about 11 points more than optimal according to the administration’s own projections. Indeed, even before many insurersreported lower-than-expected earnings this week, Moody’s had downgraded its outlook for the industry to “negative.”
But the insurer bailout is not the only appropriation battle brewing. In the fairytale that the president told the public, Obamacare wasn’t going to cost taxpayers a “dime” because all of the necessary funds would be obtained from drastic Medicare reimbursement cuts to doctors and hospitals. How drastic? So drastic, notes Forbes analyst Chris Conover, that by 2030 Medicare would be paying providers 60 percent less than what private plans do.
https://reason.com/archives/2014/08/05/the-tsunami-of-discontent-with-obamacare
Obama’s Self-Made Border Crisis
Mike Needham / @MikeNeedham / July 30, 2014
“You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” In the case of the ongoing crisis along America’s southwest border, that someone is President Obama. When the president used his pen to sign the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, memorandum on June 15, 2012, he effectively rolled out the welcome mat to those abroad seeking to immigrate illegally.
The numbers are undeniable. From 2011 to 2013, the number of minors crossing the border illegally increased threefold, from roughly 8,000 to 24,668. Officials initially estimated that number would soar to 60,000 this year, though it is now expected to be close to 90,000.
Some have attempted to attribute the sudden wave of migration to factors other than the actions taken by the Obama administration. Most frequently cited is the stunning violence plaguing Central America, but according to United Nations data the region’s dramatic increase in violence began in 2007.
The other frequently cited cause is a little-known anti-trafficking law that gave additional protections to certain immigrant minors, but that law passed in 2008. While those two factors may intensify the crisis, there was no greater pull factor than the president’s executive decreeforbidding immigration officials from enforcing the law.
Accounts from those who have been encouraged to undertake the perilous journey from Central America to the United States confirm that the Obama Administration’s actions were their driving force. According to an internal Border Patrol memo leaked last month, the main reason minors and women from Central America had entered the U.S. was “to take advantage of the ‘new’ U.S. law that grants a free pass or permit” to stay in the country.
Some officials have defended lax enforcement, suggesting these so-called “permisos” are simply the notices to appear at a future immigration hearing issued to minors who enter the country illegally. It is important to understand, however, how the president’s DACA program works. It is not merely “deferred action,” as the name suggests, but rather a program that issues papers, identification and work permits for two years to those illegal immigrants under 30 who qualify.
What’s more, many minors believed June 2014 — two years after Obama’s DACA memo — was the cutoff for the program. In this light, one would be hard pressed to deny that the DACA initiative has been seen by minors and young adults as a “free pass” incentive program.
Earlier this month, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández seemed to confirm the notion, telling Time what we “shouldn’t forget” about “is the lack of clarity of U.S. immigration policy.” Hernández said “my call to the United States is that it defines these rules with clarity” to prevent smugglers from taking advantage of the ambiguity.
https://dailysignal.com/2014/07/30/obamas-self-made-border-crisis/
