dark-matter: “Far as I can tell, mostly those treaties are there to prevent the gov from picking winners and losers …
J_A: By the time the agreement is signed, both parties have agreed on the winners (industries covered by the treaty) and the losers (industries not covered). The rights of the winners are strengthened. Those of the losers weakened.
Free trade is politically painful and everyone agrees to how much they're going to allow. We'd be better off with just turning it on full but whatever.
However, as imperfect as these agreements are, they're still FAR better than letting every politician at every level put his finger in the pie and try to 'protect' whoever is giving him 'contributions' that day/week/month.
The solution thus is either some sort of mandated redistribution of gains (German style), higher taxes more welfare transfers (Scandinavian style) or a bloody revolution.
As an alternative, how about a per person payment. Say, $5k to $10k, not linked to anything (meaning Bill Gates would get it). Welfare has problems with discouraging work, mandated redistribution of gains probably punishes employment.
But the concept of Unions is something that has value even today, because it does, perhaps imperfectly, balance out the power of the employer/employee relationship.
I think the 'concept' of Unions has value as far as keeping management in line. Meaning if management lets things degenerate to the point where a union is needed, then they've earned what they get.
RE: Reforms
I think being a member of a union needs to be voluntary, as opposed to involuntary. If a union is adding value to it's members, then that shouldn't be a problem. If it's not adding value, then it should instantly be a problem and this is a good way to accomplish that.
I also think gov unions unbalance the relationship between the employees and the consumer/taxpayer. The 'employer' isn't the politician sitting across the table, it's the taxpayer whose money he's going to spend. Having a union elect a politician with taxpayer money and then 'negotiate' with him on how much taxpayer money he's going to give them seems corrupt on the face of it.
I think these show pretty substantial increases in local+state spending, mostly between 2000 and 2010 (although it hasn't gone down since). It looks like state spending basically doubled and local increased by 50%.
I realize my own biases are creeping in here, if people are upset at an economic problem, my first thought it to look at what the gov is doing and seeing if it's making things worse... but I think there's an argument that it is. I haven't found good 'after tax take home historical income' charts, but I suspect they'd show downward trends because of taxes going up.
This is where our elites should have had a plan, for how to enable those displaced workers to get retrained.
IMHO you're giving our 'elites' FAR too much credit for their competence, foresight, and control over events. Being able to figure out who the market winners are going to be a decade down the line is an exceptionally rare and profitable skill. Saying it was obvious and should have been expected is much easier.
Further, how many federal jobs training programs do already we have? 49? 47? Is one more really going to move the needle?
Treating workers better is a negative in the market and to powerful people so there is no incentive to do it.
Not "better", "better than the market wants". From a corp's standpoint, ideally they'd be paying every one of their workers Zero. That doesn't work because the number of people who'd sign on is zero.
As awful as the market is, all the other alternatives have shown themselves to be worse. The market lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, communism's gov decrees resulted in mass starvation.
Three of my cousins decided to not get married to the fathers of their kids so they could get more gov 'help'. Each was open to the family as to what they were doing and why.
You can think Welfare has issues and enabled bad decisions without pulling irrational emotion into it.
Where does the “taxes have probably been going up” part come from?
Federal is only about half of all gov spending. Here's a graph of state+local spending as a percentage of gdp
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3bGnkNeoPxk/SbEbx4MWJrI/AAAAAAAACfA/AIxIVAJ5tTc/s400/Government-Spending-Graph.PNG
The trends look a lot like a linear line upwards, and presumably state+local are more prone to have balanced budgets, which strongly implies more taxes.
This is not proof... but if people feel they're falling behind, perhaps they are. All that gov spending needs to come out of someone's pocket, and most local communities don't have a handy billionaire to soak.
I mean, cars are not merely free to move from Japan to America, but the property and capital are protected by newly empowered government forces, the contracts enforced by jurisdictional agencies created by treaty.
Far as I can tell, mostly those treaties are there to prevent the gov from picking winners and losers, i.e. to reduce the gov's ability to let politics distort economic outcomes.
The thing about preventing that, i.e. letting the gov pick who wins and who loses, is it won't be the little guy who benefits (although he will be paying for it). If we're going to decide things based on political connections, then the way to bet is political connections will trump everything else.
On the face of it this seems like a good way to make people poorer.
It wasn’t all rainbows and ice cream, but Engineers didn’t worry about serious votes to strike every 4 years.
Yes, but no union would also mean no strikes.
As far as I can tell the purpose of a union is to prevent management from killing/abusing the workforce. That was a real problem before 80 years ago, thus the glorious history of unionism. In the modern era unions appear to be mostly serving as a fund raising arm of the democratic party and advocate for the expansion of government.
I fully admit that a management which abuses it's work force deserves to deal with a union, so from that standpoint society needs unionism... but the ongoing reduction of unionization as a percentage of the workforce is the market saying it's not worth the cost.
American management hasn’t exactly been covering itself with glory either for the last 35 years. Union power is a fraction of what it was in the 60s and 70s. If companies have been failing, management needs to look in the mirror.
The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of upper management. A union has a gun pointed at management's head which both consumes attention and prevents flexibility. That's over and above the problem that gov unions create.
Remember Fordism? If you don’t pay your workers a living wage, eventually you’re not going to have anyone left to buy your product.
That's a myth which pops up every now and then, sometimes even by Ford itself. Ford's problem was retention, average time on the line was 3-4 months, ergo his productivity was crazy low. By increasing pay and reducing hours work, he massively increased his productivity.
In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/#694490dd1c96
There are 24 hours in a day and running two 9 hour shifts meant that his factories were sitting idle for 6 hours a day, 2/3rds of a full shift. By going to an eight hour workday and a five day standard work week, Ford was able to run his factories with three shifts, 24 hours a day. Eliminating the half shift on Saturdays meant that, with overtime, FoMoCo plants could run 24/7/365 if he wanted.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/10/henry-ford-paid-workers-5-day-wouldnt-quit-afford-model-ts/
Economic growth is a good idea, but only counts as a solution if you can work out how to make it happen.
Things which increase our economic freedom ranking are probably the place to start. IMHO we have huge economic distortions imposed by the gov. Ergo we have a high return on investment for political lobbying, a tax code which isn't humanly understandable, and so forth.
Unfortunately the people responsible for fixing this, the politicians, also have the most to lose if they do because they'd be handing back to the market various "opportunities" for politicians to "help" people.
This was why I was wondering about take home pay vs income. Income has been stagnant for large groups of people, taxes have probably been going up, it's possible actual take home pay has been going down... but I can't find good numbers for this.
For that matter even 'stagnant' is probably pretty bad for a lot of people. IMHO many people spend up to where their income is, so if that income isn't going up then eventually they're going to have problems.
It's easier for me to see him managing the country to help his business interests than him stepping down. But yeah, I can totally see him delegating everything the president does (other than the microphone) to minions.
The thing is, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It worked decently well for Reagan.
My expectation is he mimics Arnold Schwarzenegger on steroids. There are big picture things that should be done, he doesn't really know what they are or how to do them, dude just wants to be popular.
First of all, really, really good post. This ties together a number of things which should be without jumping to some predetermined conclusion not supported by the evidence.
I do wonder if take home pay (meaning after taxes) is decreasing (as opposed to salary).
In terms of solutions, the big one is probably "Economic growth".
Oscar Gordon:
ETA: I know there are unions and companies in the US that do have mutually beneficial relationships.I would bet that if those sets were looked at, we’d find that they are newer companies and newer unions.
OK, I'll bite. What do unions bring to the table to make it "mutually beneficial" which couldn't be better done if they didn't exist? What can they do other than not blow up the company?
The long term experience in the US appears to be that companies with unions go bankrupt.
‘Eleven percent of the American citizens surveyed responded that they do not have current, unexpired government-issued identification with a photograph, such as a driver’s license or military ID.’
There are counter arguments, like a survey showing 4% of the population agreeing that they'd been decapitated (NPR on some game show), and one would hope that 'unexpired' wouldn't be necessary.
However I think I need to concede the argument instead.
I think the general idea is a good one, I also think that people would benefit from having access to IDs, but it seems there are serious flaws in the on-the-table implementation which don't take into account everyone's real world situation.
It’s possible Hogan was willing to face a jury because he’d managed to get the case tried in his hometown, where he enjoyed status as a local hero. Or maybe he was willing (or obligated) to risk trial because someone else was bankrolling his legal team.
Or maybe Hogan was a multimillionaire who was out for revenge and didn't really care about the money, just exactly like the billionaire who was out for revenge and didn't care about the money.
My expectation is Thiel didn't fund only Hogan, he probably funded *everyone* he could get his hands on who he figured had a shot. Some settled, Hogan was out for blood.
Because approximately *11%* of the adult population does not have a government-issued photo IDs.
Source?
Are you willing to accept that, I dunno, *1%* of the people who currently do not have IDs do not have IDs because they cannot prove who they are?
So they do not and can not drive, they don't have birth certificates, bank accounts, enough contact with the gov to ask for a free id, and so forth?
It's trivial to think of cases where that's going to be true (extreme mental illness/disfunction, extreme age to the point of disfunction, people on the run from the law, illegal aliens, etc). It's harder to see how that wouldn't also prevent them from voting.
Please source who you're talking about because you've lost me.
With eleven weeks until the election, Trump can’t win without a massive Clinton stumble or a powerful black swan event.
I would hope this was true for many weeks before this point. :)
RE: Picking good people.
Yes, his picks thus far have been poor... although to be fair, I'm more impressed with the 'fire the failures' thing he's got going than I was with W's 'he's failed, but he is loyal, keep him on'.
A lot of this is because it's Trump's first time being a politician and/or running for anything. Note this *also* wouldn't imply good things for a President Trump, he'd make a bunch of 'rookie' mistakes and it'd be years before he figured out the job.
Most of your post is devoted towards claiming fraud on this level is fairly rare, and I agree, this is a corner case. But that still leaves us with the issue of which is better, having voter id or not having it? Preventing a legit person from voting causes constitutional issues, but so does letting someone who shouldn't. Further the gov has a legit interest in showing it takes voting seriously.
Dark Matter: To the best of my knowledge, we have no evidence that IDs prevents, or even suppresses, legit voters from voting.
DavidTC: To the best of my knowledge, we have no evidence that you are not John Wayne Gacy and this isn’t an attempt to murder people as they get photo IDs.
*That's* your actual answer? No evidence, no support, just a raw non sequitur.
Let's just count. I have 4 picture ids trivially accessible right now, 2 or 3 of which I *always* have on me. I probably have another dozen cards of various types which have my name, I also have several hundred utility bills of various sorts which prove I live where I claim I do depending on how old they can be.
I use these picture ids to do various every-day things (like work or eat lunch), I'm required to use them for various activities. Some constitutionally protected activities already require id (the most extreme being buying guns). I get that I'm probably an extreme case, but the bulk of society is structured so it's somewhere between challenging and impossible to function without an id.
So, again, how big a problem would voter id cause?
I'm pretty sure everyone asking those questions knew that Elena Kagan had graduated from college.
Further, even asking those questions is unworkable in real life.
200 resumes on your desk, you want to select for intelligence and determination (among other things). Bringing them all in for interviews is a non-starter, ditto even calling them up.
We have numerous people who have the legal right to vote, from various jurisdictions which have implemented voter ID requirements, bringing complaints because, for them, getting an acceptable ID is, at best, a serious obstacle to voting.
Source?
You may not find the evidence conclusive, but the idea that it doesn’t exist is just wrong.
Oh I absolutely agree the idea is out there. The issue is whether it's wishful thinking on a bullet issue or not.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@j_a
Free trade is politically painful and everyone agrees to how much they're going to allow. We'd be better off with just turning it on full but whatever.
However, as imperfect as these agreements are, they're still FAR better than letting every politician at every level put his finger in the pie and try to 'protect' whoever is giving him 'contributions' that day/week/month.
"
@j_a
As an alternative, how about a per person payment. Say, $5k to $10k, not linked to anything (meaning Bill Gates would get it). Welfare has problems with discouraging work, mandated redistribution of gains probably punishes employment.
"
@oscar-gordon
I think the 'concept' of Unions has value as far as keeping management in line. Meaning if management lets things degenerate to the point where a union is needed, then they've earned what they get.
RE: Reforms
I think being a member of a union needs to be voluntary, as opposed to involuntary. If a union is adding value to it's members, then that shouldn't be a problem. If it's not adding value, then it should instantly be a problem and this is a good way to accomplish that.
I also think gov unions unbalance the relationship between the employees and the consumer/taxpayer. The 'employer' isn't the politician sitting across the table, it's the taxpayer whose money he's going to spend. Having a union elect a politician with taxpayer money and then 'negotiate' with him on how much taxpayer money he's going to give them seems corrupt on the face of it.
"
@j_a
Agreed, I'm not real happy with that chart either. I dug a bit more and...
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/state_chart_gallery
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/local_chart_gallery
I think these show pretty substantial increases in local+state spending, mostly between 2000 and 2010 (although it hasn't gone down since). It looks like state spending basically doubled and local increased by 50%.
I realize my own biases are creeping in here, if people are upset at an economic problem, my first thought it to look at what the gov is doing and seeing if it's making things worse... but I think there's an argument that it is. I haven't found good 'after tax take home historical income' charts, but I suspect they'd show downward trends because of taxes going up.
"
@oscar-gordon
IMHO you're giving our 'elites' FAR too much credit for their competence, foresight, and control over events. Being able to figure out who the market winners are going to be a decade down the line is an exceptionally rare and profitable skill. Saying it was obvious and should have been expected is much easier.
Further, how many federal jobs training programs do already we have? 49? 47? Is one more really going to move the needle?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-there-are-49-different-federal-jo/
"
@greginak
Not "better", "better than the market wants". From a corp's standpoint, ideally they'd be paying every one of their workers Zero. That doesn't work because the number of people who'd sign on is zero.
As awful as the market is, all the other alternatives have shown themselves to be worse. The market lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, communism's gov decrees resulted in mass starvation.
"
@leeesq
Three of my cousins decided to not get married to the fathers of their kids so they could get more gov 'help'. Each was open to the family as to what they were doing and why.
You can think Welfare has issues and enabled bad decisions without pulling irrational emotion into it.
"
@j_a
Federal is only about half of all gov spending. Here's a graph of state+local spending as a percentage of gdp
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3bGnkNeoPxk/SbEbx4MWJrI/AAAAAAAACfA/AIxIVAJ5tTc/s400/Government-Spending-Graph.PNG
The trends look a lot like a linear line upwards, and presumably state+local are more prone to have balanced budgets, which strongly implies more taxes.
This is not proof... but if people feel they're falling behind, perhaps they are. All that gov spending needs to come out of someone's pocket, and most local communities don't have a handy billionaire to soak.
"
@chip-daniels
Far as I can tell, mostly those treaties are there to prevent the gov from picking winners and losers, i.e. to reduce the gov's ability to let politics distort economic outcomes.
The thing about preventing that, i.e. letting the gov pick who wins and who loses, is it won't be the little guy who benefits (although he will be paying for it). If we're going to decide things based on political connections, then the way to bet is political connections will trump everything else.
On the face of it this seems like a good way to make people poorer.
"
@oscar-gordon
Yes, but no union would also mean no strikes.
As far as I can tell the purpose of a union is to prevent management from killing/abusing the workforce. That was a real problem before 80 years ago, thus the glorious history of unionism. In the modern era unions appear to be mostly serving as a fund raising arm of the democratic party and advocate for the expansion of government.
I fully admit that a management which abuses it's work force deserves to deal with a union, so from that standpoint society needs unionism... but the ongoing reduction of unionization as a percentage of the workforce is the market saying it's not worth the cost.
"
@francis
The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of upper management. A union has a gun pointed at management's head which both consumes attention and prevents flexibility. That's over and above the problem that gov unions create.
That's a myth which pops up every now and then, sometimes even by Ford itself. Ford's problem was retention, average time on the line was 3-4 months, ergo his productivity was crazy low. By increasing pay and reducing hours work, he massively increased his productivity.
In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/#694490dd1c96
There are 24 hours in a day and running two 9 hour shifts meant that his factories were sitting idle for 6 hours a day, 2/3rds of a full shift. By going to an eight hour workday and a five day standard work week, Ford was able to run his factories with three shifts, 24 hours a day. Eliminating the half shift on Saturdays meant that, with overtime, FoMoCo plants could run 24/7/365 if he wanted.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2014/10/henry-ford-paid-workers-5-day-wouldnt-quit-afford-model-ts/
"
@james-k
Things which increase our economic freedom ranking are probably the place to start. IMHO we have huge economic distortions imposed by the gov. Ergo we have a high return on investment for political lobbying, a tax code which isn't humanly understandable, and so forth.
Unfortunately the people responsible for fixing this, the politicians, also have the most to lose if they do because they'd be handing back to the market various "opportunities" for politicians to "help" people.
This was why I was wondering about take home pay vs income. Income has been stagnant for large groups of people, taxes have probably been going up, it's possible actual take home pay has been going down... but I can't find good numbers for this.
For that matter even 'stagnant' is probably pretty bad for a lot of people. IMHO many people spend up to where their income is, so if that income isn't going up then eventually they're going to have problems.
On “Switching Horses Midstream”
It's easier for me to see him managing the country to help his business interests than him stepping down. But yeah, I can totally see him delegating everything the president does (other than the microphone) to minions.
The thing is, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It worked decently well for Reagan.
My expectation is he mimics Arnold Schwarzenegger on steroids. There are big picture things that should be done, he doesn't really know what they are or how to do them, dude just wants to be popular.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
First of all, really, really good post. This ties together a number of things which should be without jumping to some predetermined conclusion not supported by the evidence.
I do wonder if take home pay (meaning after taxes) is decreasing (as opposed to salary).
In terms of solutions, the big one is probably "Economic growth".
"
OK, I'll bite. What do unions bring to the table to make it "mutually beneficial" which couldn't be better done if they didn't exist? What can they do other than not blow up the company?
The long term experience in the US appears to be that companies with unions go bankrupt.
On “What the Trump/Khan Debate Really Says About America”
There are counter arguments, like a survey showing 4% of the population agreeing that they'd been decapitated (NPR on some game show), and one would hope that 'unexpired' wouldn't be necessary.
However I think I need to concede the argument instead.
I think the general idea is a good one, I also think that people would benefit from having access to IDs, but it seems there are serious flaws in the on-the-table implementation which don't take into account everyone's real world situation.
"
Thank you.
No, I think I need to concede the point. Which in turn means the ACLU's lawsuit will most likely succeed, and that it most likely should.
On “Did I Kill Gawker?”
Or maybe Hogan was a multimillionaire who was out for revenge and didn't really care about the money, just exactly like the billionaire who was out for revenge and didn't care about the money.
My expectation is Thiel didn't fund only Hogan, he probably funded *everyone* he could get his hands on who he figured had a shot. Some settled, Hogan was out for blood.
On “What the Trump/Khan Debate Really Says About America”
Source?
So they do not and can not drive, they don't have birth certificates, bank accounts, enough contact with the gov to ask for a free id, and so forth?
It's trivial to think of cases where that's going to be true (extreme mental illness/disfunction, extreme age to the point of disfunction, people on the run from the law, illegal aliens, etc). It's harder to see how that wouldn't also prevent them from voting.
Please source who you're talking about because you've lost me.
On “Switching Horses Midstream”
I would hope this was true for many weeks before this point. :)
RE: Picking good people.
Yes, his picks thus far have been poor... although to be fair, I'm more impressed with the 'fire the failures' thing he's got going than I was with W's 'he's failed, but he is loyal, keep him on'.
A lot of this is because it's Trump's first time being a politician and/or running for anything. Note this *also* wouldn't imply good things for a President Trump, he'd make a bunch of 'rookie' mistakes and it'd be years before he figured out the job.
On “What the Trump/Khan Debate Really Says About America”
Given how much of society is based on having this (i.e. how messed up you are if you don't have an id), I agree totally.
"
Most of your post is devoted towards claiming fraud on this level is fairly rare, and I agree, this is a corner case. But that still leaves us with the issue of which is better, having voter id or not having it? Preventing a legit person from voting causes constitutional issues, but so does letting someone who shouldn't. Further the gov has a legit interest in showing it takes voting seriously.
*That's* your actual answer? No evidence, no support, just a raw non sequitur.
Let's just count. I have 4 picture ids trivially accessible right now, 2 or 3 of which I *always* have on me. I probably have another dozen cards of various types which have my name, I also have several hundred utility bills of various sorts which prove I live where I claim I do depending on how old they can be.
I use these picture ids to do various every-day things (like work or eat lunch), I'm required to use them for various activities. Some constitutionally protected activities already require id (the most extreme being buying guns). I get that I'm probably an extreme case, but the bulk of society is structured so it's somewhere between challenging and impossible to function without an id.
So, again, how big a problem would voter id cause?
On “Movie Review: Jack Strong”
Snowden became public in May or June of 2013.
Jack Strong (the film) was released in Feb of 2014 (July 2015 in the US) but shot in January of 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Strong_(film)
On “What the Trump/Khan Debate Really Says About America”
I'm pretty sure everyone asking those questions knew that Elena Kagan had graduated from college.
Further, even asking those questions is unworkable in real life.
200 resumes on your desk, you want to select for intelligence and determination (among other things). Bringing them all in for interviews is a non-starter, ditto even calling them up.
"
Source?
Oh I absolutely agree the idea is out there. The issue is whether it's wishful thinking on a bullet issue or not.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.