Like most medium- and small-sized towns, it has been hurting economically. Several business have opened up there and found themselves in need of labor.
Without commenting on the rest of the post, these sentences seem contradictory. Generally when we say that a town is hurting economically, we mean that it has high unemployment and few job opportunities. Employers having more business than they can find workers for is generally a phenomenon associated with an economic boom.
Based on BLS data, it seems to be doing okay; the unemployment rate is a bit above the national average, but not that bad, and seems inconsistent with employers having a great deal of difficulty filling job openings that don't require specialized skills. The entire state of Florida has an overall 3.3% unemployment rate.
I assume he's not the only guy hiring Haitian refugees, so these almost certainly aren't the top 30 out of 20,000. But it's also very unlikely that they're just average. The reason he can't find native workers who are that good is that they all went to college, or at least into the skilled trades, and got better jobs.
If there were actually major structural barriers to escaping poverty in the US, the lower classes would be full of smart, hard-working people for employers like this guy to hire. The fact that he has to rely on refugees from a country that actually has major structural barriers to escaping poverty shows that those barriers don't really exist in the US.
I'm all for using the term "blood libel" to refer to unfounded accusations of murder, such as those made by BLM activists, but I think maybe accusations of killing ducks and cats is setting the bar a bit low.
It's worth noting that the homicide rate was higher when this kind of thing was considered so shocking that it would have been national news for days.
In fact, the homicide rate continued falling for 16 years after the Columbine shooting, and didn't start rising again until 2015, when we decided that keeping violent criminals off the streets was less important than having prisons that look like America.
Actually, do we know for a fact that this has anything to do with the extra funding, and isn't part of their regular enforcement operations that they would have done anyway?
I was skeptical from the beginning, and to be honest, even I'm surprised at how little money this has yielded so far. The so-called "Inflation Reduction Act" gave the IRS $80 billion in extra funding, later reduced to $60 billion. After two years, they've collected a grand total of $1.3 billion.
They've collected an average of less than $1,500 per person from people making $400,000 per year and haven't filed taxes for six years. A person making $400,000 per year will typically have an effective federal personal income tax rate in the low to mid 20s. Let's lowball it and say they made $2,000,000 each over the past six years (maybe they don't make $400k every year), paying a total of $400k in taxes. Even if they've only collected money from a third of the people they contacted, withholding covered 99% of their tax liability!
Look, I understand that it takes time to train the new agents, and ramp up. Fine. I concede that it's likely that recovery of unpaid taxes will accelerate in the coming years. But taking a victory lap after recovering 2% of the extra funding they received just tells me that they know that their base is really fishing stupid.
I read the whole thing and don't think that the part Jaybird quotes was unrepresentative. The weird thing is that they reached a fairly reasonable conclusion while going out of their way to justify it in the dweebiest terms possible.
You don't have to pay taxes, but you do have to pay interest. Over 20-30 years, that interest is going to cost you more than just taking that one-time tax hit from selling the stock, which is why I'm skeptical that this is actually practiced all that much, except maybe by people who expect to die within the next decade or so.
ProPublica's "expose" heavily insinuated that the richest people in the country were doing this to evade taxes, but the actual data they presented showed that those people were paying quite a lot in income taxes, plausibly consistent with selling stock to fund all their personal expenditures, though of course without knowing what they actually spent, we can't know for sure.
Income taxation is actually a pretty lousy tax system. It's basically a broken consumption tax that taxes future consumption much more heavily than present consumption. The obvious solution is to stop taxing income and just rely on a mixture of consumption and Pigovian taxes.
Have you ever actually read the Constitution? Harris is campaigning on flouting Constitutional limits on Federal and Executive power.
Is she the lesser evil? Probably, if Republicans win at least one house of Congress, enough to stop her from actually implementing the idiotic ideas she's campaigning on. But she's going to continue her predecessor's policy of governing with open contempt for the actual Constitution, defending only the fantasy version of the Constitution that contains only the parts consistent with Democratic policy preferences.
There is a wealth of polling, including this Morning Consult poll from March, that indicates that taxing the wealthy is a popular bipartisan position.
A big part of this is that people have no idea how high taxes on high-income households are, due to a steady diet of misinformation from low-rent populist demagogues like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. If you actually asked people how much someone with an income of $X should pay in taxes, rather than "Should rich people pay more taxes?" it's very likely that, for high incomes, the median would be about the same as or lower than the actual effective tax rates on the very wealthy, which is about 30% of income in federal taxes alone. I've only seen one such poll actually done, back in 2012, and the median answer was 25%, presumably including state taxes.
The punchline is that these taxes would disproportionately reduce savings and investment by high-income taxpayers, rather than consumption, which slows economic growth and hurts everyone in the long run.
A few months ago, there was a minor moral panic, including here, over North Carolina's anti-mask law. They're actually pretty common; people using masks to avoid identification while committing crimes is an actual problem.
Question that I'm embarrassed never to have thought of before: How do MRI headphones work? Headphones use magnets, right?
The answer, it turns out, is that they're glorified cup-and-string telephones: The sound is generated outside of the MRI machine and conveyed to your ears via a long hollow tube.
I'm curious about something: Why did everyone on both sides so readily adopt the term "pro-Palestinian?" It seems pretty loaded to me, so I would expect the other side to prefer to call them "anti-Israeli" protesters (or rioters, where appropriate), but I've hardly seen that at all.
There are at least two different stories you can tell here:
1. Small landlords face a difficult decision when pricing rental units. If they price above the market-clearing price, they risk losing money due to a long period of vacancy. If they price below the market-clearing price, the unit rents quickly, but they lose money due to renting at a lower price than they could have. Because units priced too high don't rent until the rents are lowered, and units priced too low do rent as is, there's a systematic underpricing of the rental units that actually rent. By helping landlords find the market-clearing price, RealPage simultaneously increases rents and reduces vacancies without facilitating monopolistic pricing, which is totally legitimate.
2. RealPage facilitates collusion and monopolistic pricing, increasing rents above the market-clearing level. A telltale sign of this is rising vacancies that can't be explained by increased supply, since monopolistic pricing reduces the quantity demanded.
#1 is definitely part of what's going on here, the important question is whether #2 is also happening. Frankly, we're not seeing strong evidence of an effect on vacancies, at least at the national level. There may be some evidence that it's pushing up vacancies in locales where it has the highest market penetration, and I have no strong objection to, e.g., prohibiting RealPage from requiring its customers to follow its pricing recommendations, but reducing underpricing improves allocative efficiency and is probably a net social good.
That said, let's put this in context: Rent of primary residence is 7.6% of the CPI basket (shelter is 36.1%, owner-equivalent rent is 26.8%, and lodging away from home accounts for the other 1.3%). No serious analysis suggests that RealPage is driving rents even 10% above market prices in markets where it has the highest penetration, much less nationally. But let's say for kicks and giggles that it has increased rent 10% nationally: That's a less than one percentage point cumulative (not annual) increase in the overall CPI.
Is it a problem? Maybe, but in the grand scheme of things it's a sideshow. It does not absolve the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the President of responsibility for overstimulating the economy, and it does not absolve local governments of responsibility for restricting the development of new housing supply over the past decade. These are the real cause of excess general and housing-specific inflation.
I laid out the evidence last week that the increase in nominal consumer purchasing power is sufficient explains the entire increase in consumer prices since 2019. It's unfortunate that it went over your head and you're still looking for scapegoats.
I was once invited to a wedding party in Japan by the groom, who I had met the same day. I thought he was just being friendly; then I showed up found out that there was a 10,000 yen cover charge. I was later informed (not by the groom) that I got off light and 30,000 is more typical.
I'm pretty sure you're old enough to remember 1992. I'm not saying it's likely to happen again, but in point of fact a third party candidate has done quite a bit better than 5%, in living memory.
You sound like a vintage 2020 Bernie Bro. There are many things wrong with every single person mentioned in this story, but there's nothing wrong with a nonviable candidate dropping out and endorsing his preferred viable candidate in order to avoid splitting the vote. That's what you're supposed to do in a first-past-the-post election. It's how Biden won the primary.
Sure. But let's not pretend that the people claiming that Biden simultaneously deserves full credit for everything good that happened during his administration and no blame for any of the bad things are not either liars or morons.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Missing the Forest for the Trees on Springfield”
Without commenting on the rest of the post, these sentences seem contradictory. Generally when we say that a town is hurting economically, we mean that it has high unemployment and few job opportunities. Employers having more business than they can find workers for is generally a phenomenon associated with an economic boom.
Based on BLS data, it seems to be doing okay; the unemployment rate is a bit above the national average, but not that bad, and seems inconsistent with employers having a great deal of difficulty filling job openings that don't require specialized skills. The entire state of Florida has an overall 3.3% unemployment rate.
On “The Minecraft Trailer Needs to be Fed To a Creeper”
I concede that few people have a better grasp on the mentality of a nine-year-old than Kotaku writers do.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/9/2024”
I assume he's not the only guy hiring Haitian refugees, so these almost certainly aren't the top 30 out of 20,000. But it's also very unlikely that they're just average. The reason he can't find native workers who are that good is that they all went to college, or at least into the skilled trades, and got better jobs.
If there were actually major structural barriers to escaping poverty in the US, the lower classes would be full of smart, hard-working people for employers like this guy to hire. The fact that he has to rely on refugees from a country that actually has major structural barriers to escaping poverty shows that those barriers don't really exist in the US.
"
I'm all for using the term "blood libel" to refer to unfounded accusations of murder, such as those made by BLM activists, but I think maybe accusations of killing ducks and cats is setting the bar a bit low.
On “Apalachee Killer’s Father Now Charged”
It's worth noting that the homicide rate was higher when this kind of thing was considered so shocking that it would have been national news for days.
In fact, the homicide rate continued falling for 16 years after the Columbine shooting, and didn't start rising again until 2015, when we decided that keeping violent criminals off the streets was less important than having prisons that look like America.
On “Open Mic for the week of 9/2/2024”
Actually, do we know for a fact that this has anything to do with the extra funding, and isn't part of their regular enforcement operations that they would have done anyway?
"
I was skeptical from the beginning, and to be honest, even I'm surprised at how little money this has yielded so far. The so-called "Inflation Reduction Act" gave the IRS $80 billion in extra funding, later reduced to $60 billion. After two years, they've collected a grand total of $1.3 billion.
They've collected an average of less than $1,500 per person from people making $400,000 per year and haven't filed taxes for six years. A person making $400,000 per year will typically have an effective federal personal income tax rate in the low to mid 20s. Let's lowball it and say they made $2,000,000 each over the past six years (maybe they don't make $400k every year), paying a total of $400k in taxes. Even if they've only collected money from a third of the people they contacted, withholding covered 99% of their tax liability!
Look, I understand that it takes time to train the new agents, and ramp up. Fine. I concede that it's likely that recovery of unpaid taxes will accelerate in the coming years. But taking a victory lap after recovering 2% of the extra funding they received just tells me that they know that their base is really fishing stupid.
"
On the other hand...
"
I read the whole thing and don't think that the part Jaybird quotes was unrepresentative. The weird thing is that they reached a fairly reasonable conclusion while going out of their way to justify it in the dweebiest terms possible.
On “Kamala’s Taxing Policies”
If you do that, you're outlawing margin trading.
"
You don't have to pay taxes, but you do have to pay interest. Over 20-30 years, that interest is going to cost you more than just taking that one-time tax hit from selling the stock, which is why I'm skeptical that this is actually practiced all that much, except maybe by people who expect to die within the next decade or so.
ProPublica's "expose" heavily insinuated that the richest people in the country were doing this to evade taxes, but the actual data they presented showed that those people were paying quite a lot in income taxes, plausibly consistent with selling stock to fund all their personal expenditures, though of course without knowing what they actually spent, we can't know for sure.
Income taxation is actually a pretty lousy tax system. It's basically a broken consumption tax that taxes future consumption much more heavily than present consumption. The obvious solution is to stop taxing income and just rely on a mixture of consumption and Pigovian taxes.
"
Have you ever actually read the Constitution? Harris is campaigning on flouting Constitutional limits on Federal and Executive power.
Is she the lesser evil? Probably, if Republicans win at least one house of Congress, enough to stop her from actually implementing the idiotic ideas she's campaigning on. But she's going to continue her predecessor's policy of governing with open contempt for the actual Constitution, defending only the fantasy version of the Constitution that contains only the parts consistent with Democratic policy preferences.
"
A big part of this is that people have no idea how high taxes on high-income households are, due to a steady diet of misinformation from low-rent populist demagogues like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. If you actually asked people how much someone with an income of $X should pay in taxes, rather than "Should rich people pay more taxes?" it's very likely that, for high incomes, the median would be about the same as or lower than the actual effective tax rates on the very wealthy, which is about 30% of income in federal taxes alone. I've only seen one such poll actually done, back in 2012, and the median answer was 25%, presumably including state taxes.
"
The punchline is that these taxes would disproportionately reduce savings and investment by high-income taxpayers, rather than consumption, which slows economic growth and hurts everyone in the long run.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/26/2024”
That's the joke.
A few months ago, there was a minor moral panic, including here, over North Carolina's anti-mask law. They're actually pretty common; people using masks to avoid identification while committing crimes is an actual problem.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The MRI”
I usually use it as an opportunity to take a quick nap.
"
Question that I'm embarrassed never to have thought of before: How do MRI headphones work? Headphones use magnets, right?
The answer, it turns out, is that they're glorified cup-and-string telephones: The sound is generated outside of the MRI machine and conveyed to your ears via a long hollow tube.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/26/2024”
Well, they finally did it. Those hicks in North Carolina arrested someone for wearing a mask.
"
I'm curious about something: Why did everyone on both sides so readily adopt the term "pro-Palestinian?" It seems pretty loaded to me, so I would expect the other side to prefer to call them "anti-Israeli" protesters (or rioters, where appropriate), but I've hardly seen that at all.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/19/2024”
Hey! This comment didn't get kicked to moderation for having more than one link.
"
There are at least two different stories you can tell here:
1. Small landlords face a difficult decision when pricing rental units. If they price above the market-clearing price, they risk losing money due to a long period of vacancy. If they price below the market-clearing price, the unit rents quickly, but they lose money due to renting at a lower price than they could have. Because units priced too high don't rent until the rents are lowered, and units priced too low do rent as is, there's a systematic underpricing of the rental units that actually rent. By helping landlords find the market-clearing price, RealPage simultaneously increases rents and reduces vacancies without facilitating monopolistic pricing, which is totally legitimate.
2. RealPage facilitates collusion and monopolistic pricing, increasing rents above the market-clearing level. A telltale sign of this is rising vacancies that can't be explained by increased supply, since monopolistic pricing reduces the quantity demanded.
#1 is definitely part of what's going on here, the important question is whether #2 is also happening. Frankly, we're not seeing strong evidence of an effect on vacancies, at least at the national level. There may be some evidence that it's pushing up vacancies in locales where it has the highest market penetration, and I have no strong objection to, e.g., prohibiting RealPage from requiring its customers to follow its pricing recommendations, but reducing underpricing improves allocative efficiency and is probably a net social good.
That said, let's put this in context: Rent of primary residence is 7.6% of the CPI basket (shelter is 36.1%, owner-equivalent rent is 26.8%, and lodging away from home accounts for the other 1.3%). No serious analysis suggests that RealPage is driving rents even 10% above market prices in markets where it has the highest penetration, much less nationally. But let's say for kicks and giggles that it has increased rent 10% nationally: That's a less than one percentage point cumulative (not annual) increase in the overall CPI.
Is it a problem? Maybe, but in the grand scheme of things it's a sideshow. It does not absolve the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the President of responsibility for overstimulating the economy, and it does not absolve local governments of responsibility for restricting the development of new housing supply over the past decade. These are the real cause of excess general and housing-specific inflation.
I laid out the evidence last week that the increase in nominal consumer purchasing power is sufficient explains the entire increase in consumer prices since 2019. It's unfortunate that it went over your head and you're still looking for scapegoats.
"
I was once invited to a wedding party in Japan by the groom, who I had met the same day. I thought he was just being friendly; then I showed up found out that there was a 10,000 yen cover charge. I was later informed (not by the groom) that I got off light and 30,000 is more typical.
"
I'm pretty sure you're old enough to remember 1992. I'm not saying it's likely to happen again, but in point of fact a third party candidate has done quite a bit better than 5%, in living memory.
"
You sound like a vintage 2020 Bernie Bro. There are many things wrong with every single person mentioned in this story, but there's nothing wrong with a nonviable candidate dropping out and endorsing his preferred viable candidate in order to avoid splitting the vote. That's what you're supposed to do in a first-past-the-post election. It's how Biden won the primary.
On “Is Harris Limiting Press Access Helping Her?”
Sure. But let's not pretend that the people claiming that Biden simultaneously deserves full credit for everything good that happened during his administration and no blame for any of the bad things are not either liars or morons.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.