Fewer Men Working in Prime Earning Years.

The chart below is for men 25-54 -- what should be the prime working years. If this were related to cyclical phenomena you should see a reduction in non-participation by 2010 at least. Yet it keeps going up. Economics teaches us that when you make not working less painful you will have fewer people working. It is hard to build sustainable growth when fewer and fewer people work to support more and more people that aren't working.

The Cancer of Inequality

Hillary Clinton labelled income inequality a "cancer." If it is, it's a very slow growing one.

The Explosive Growth of Federal Regulation in One Chart

And yet people are puzzled as to why business seems sluggish and less dynamic than it used to be.
Anyone think this is why companies have to spend so much on legal services?

The College Education Scam

Consider these two facts:

1.  Percent of high school graduates who enroll in college . . . 68%
2.  Percent of high school graduates who meet 3 of the 4 ACT proficiency benchmarks . . .  31%

Do you think anything here might explain this statistic:

Percent of college enrollees who fail to graduate . . . . 46%

And this.



If a private company, rather than government, were behind all this, do you know what it would be called?


A SCAM

Testing the Racial Preference Theory in College Admissions

According to affirmative action proponents, racial preferences in college admissions are desirable because greater diversity leads to a "superior education experience."

California and Michigan and Washington have banned the use of race in college admissions. As a result the admission rate for blacks has dropped.

If affirmative action proponents are correct, then the education experience at those state universities has been denigrated. I would then have expected to see these things happen:

1. Applications to these schools should be declining as parents and students react to the reduced value of education at these schools.
2. Transfers out of UW, UM, UC to more racially diverse schools should have accelerated.
3. Employers would be more reluctant to hire graduates of these school than those of more racially diverse schools.

Has anyone observed or documented any of this? After all, the root of the scientific method (which universities say they hold dear) is that the validity of a hypothesis is whether we observe the results predicted by that hypothesis.

Let's Give More Money to People We Don't Trust?

In 1964 over three-quarters of the public said they "trusted government most of the time". Today that number is a mere 19%. 1964 was, of course, right before Lyndon Johnson launched The Great Society  -- fundamentally altering the public's perspective about the scope of government.

Bottom line, as government became more pervasive and intrusive, it also became less trustworthy. That shouldn't be much of a surprise. What doesn't make sense is why people clamor for a government they don't trust to do even more. If you didn't trust American Airlines, would you give them more business or would you switch to Delta?
Of course, American Airlines isn't promising that they will get someone else to pay for your ticket . . . .

It Pays to Be on Welfare in California. Not So Much in Texas

I recently ran across this chart which shows how employment is growing in Texas versus California  since the 2007-08 recession.



There are a number of reasons why this is happening, but consider just this one. Not working pays much better in California than it does in Texas.

In California, you would have to earn $35,000 in salary to be better off than collecting all the welfare benefits available to you (TANF, SNAP, Medicaid, WIC, TFAP etc.). In Texas that threshold is only $18,000. Half the California rate. 

Like everyone else, those on welfare respond to incentives, and the incentives to stay on welfare rather than work are much higher in California than they are in Texas.

Death by Percale?

According to the Justice Department:

The U.S. homicide rate declined by nearly half (49%), from 9.3 homicides per 100,000 U.S. residents in 1992 to 4.7 in 2011, falling to the lowest level since 1963.

Let's contrast that to some other stats.



While the risk of dying from guns, knives and other weapons is decreasing, deaths from bed sheets has doubled in a decade. And yet I haven't heard a single congressman call for banning sheets. Where is the outrage? Americans must be protected here, shouldn't they?

Then there's the fact that bed sheet deaths seem to be correlated to cheese consumption. Mice? Eating in bed? GOVERNMENT MUST ACT NOW!

The Inequality of Disposable Income versus Earned Income

The chart below tracks the ratio of income of those in the 95th percentile of income to those in the 50th percentile -- in other words how well the highest earners fare compared to middle income earners. The media and hysterical liberals (admittedly there is a lot of overlap) focus on the blue line below. Market income is “wages, salaries, business and farm income, interest, dividends, rents and private transfers (such as alimony and child support), of all household members.” Disposable income is Market Income minus taxes plus government transfers like social security, welfare payments, food stamps, medicaid, etc. The former is a good measure of how much more top earners earn than middle income earners earn. The latter is a better measure of how much better off one is versus the other.

It's pretty clear from the chart below that upper earners, despite more top-line income, are relatively not any better off today than they were 20 years ago. The reason, of course, is that they are disproportionately high payers of taxes and disproportionately low receivers of welfare and other government transfers. 

The Best Way to Help the Environment is NOT More Regulation.

Does this correlation suggest that those who are most concerned about improving the "environment" are more likely to achieve that goal through heavy-handed regulation or by promoting more economic freedom and growth?