Category Archives: Economics

Miscellaneous economy stuff

Income Inequality

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According to a recent Fox News poll, most Americans don’t agree with President Barack Obama’s emphasis on income inequality, nor are we as dumb as Obama makes us out to be on the matter.

Obama’s latest squirrel is income inequality.  However,

  • all of 21% of voters with annual household incomes below $30,000 think the government should do something about it
  • 12% of those with incomes $100,000 or more feel that way.

What’s up with that?  It turns out that most Americans understand that economics in a free market isn’t a zero-sum game.

  • 84% of voters understand that if someone makes a lot of money, it does not mean someone else has to make less

It’s income agnostic, too:

  • 83% of voters with incomes below $50,000 say that
  • 84% of those with incomes $50,000 or more say that

Most Americans also understand that “spreading the wealth around” isn’t the path to prosperity.

  • 55% of voters think giving unemployment benefits to people who have been out of work for a long time discourages them from looking for a job.

Again, it’s income agnostic:

  • More voters than not in both higher and lower income groups say the benefits keep people from trying to find work.

We’re Gonna Keep the Stall Going

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…move along.

At a joint appearance with Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, [Secretary of State John] Kerry said he has not received a crucial environmental report on the $7 billion pipeline, which would carry oil from western Canada to refineries in Texas.

“My hope is that before long, that analysis will be available, and then my work begins[.]”

Never mind that the “analysis” has been going on for the better part of a decade.

Then Kerry added this bit of mendacity:

I can promise our friends in Canada that all the appropriate effort is being put into trying to get this done effectively and rapidly.

Who does he think he’s kidding?

A Lawless Law

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President Barack Obama is at it again.  Now he’s unilaterally, without legal authority, delaying another aspect of Obamacare.  He’s having his IRS—his Un-American Activities Committee (at least the members of HUAC were elected by us)—not enforce through tax collections a provision that prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than to other employees.  His excuse is that, four years after Obamacare was enacted, the IRS hasn’t bothered to write the rules that would effect the collections.

This isn’t the only section of Obamacare that Obama has chosen to…waive.  He has chosen to waive for an entire year the Employer Mandate.  He has chosen to waive for three months enforcement of the Individual Mandate.  He has chosen to waive, for a time, the Small Business mandate.  He has chosen to waive, for a time, provisions that forced cancelation of existing policies that individuals already had and preferred—and begun browbeating insurers into allowing those plans to be renewed if a customer wishes.  He has chosen to provide hardship exemptions, for a year, for those who find buying an Obamacare policy a hardship.  He has chosen….

The Obamacare law is quite specific on these provisions: each one must occur; there are no caveats or except-fors that say “no need to enforce if it’s inconvenient to do so, no need if it’s politically expedient to do otherwise.”  Similarly, the Constitution is quite specific: Art II, Section 3 requires the President to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.  No weasel words here, either, about picking and choosing those laws or those parts of laws that can be ignored whenever the President feels like it.  If Obama, or any President, doesn’t like a law or a part of a law, he must go to Congress and persuade them to pass appropriate legislation making the desired modification.

Whatever we might think of the “benefits” of any aspect of Obamacare or of the “fairness” of any section of it, it is, as the Democrats are wont to say, the law of the land.  It takes a lawless, arrogant President to choose, on his own recognizance, which parts of a law will not be enforced.

Obama has transformed his own signature law, his very legacy, into a monument to Executive lawlessness.

China and “Partnership”

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Sun Guoxiang, Ambassador and New York Consul General for the People’s Republic of China had some remarks about Chinese-American partnership.  I have some thoughts on those remarks.

Over the past three decades, both countries have learned that it is always better to engage in dialogue rather than confrontation, cooperation rather than containment, and deal with each other as partners rather than rivals.

When will the PRC actually act in accordance with this…learning?  Today, the PRC is confronting Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia with land and sea grabs in the South and East China Seas, despite having no legitimate claims, cynically manufacturing, instead, “claims” on the basis of ancient maps that showed that Chinese sailors had sailed there sometime.  On that premise, should Portugal assert its claim to suzerainty over the Philippines on the basis of Magellan’s having sailed there some time ago?  Of course not; it’s a facially specious claim.

Further, the PRC actively is confounding our efforts to prevent a terrorist state from getting nuclear weapons and confounding our efforts to get northern Korea’s nuclear weapons program under control and stood down.  The only purpose in this is to demonstrate the PRC’s ability to face us, with the added fillip that when Iran obtains nuclear weapons, those weapons will be turned against our allies and against us—extending the PRC’s military reach without the military expenditures.

This is not partnership.  The PRC is doing this to confront nearby nations and to provoke us.  And to seize the territory and the resources within those Seas.  And to arm the most aggressive and dangerous of our enemies.

[A]t the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee, comprehensive economic and social reforms were presented that will boost China’s economic development and provide even more opportunities for China-U.S. cooperation.

These “reforms” still demand PRC companies to be majority parties in joint ventures with foreign companies, retain PRC government…influence…in foreign business ventures, lack intellectual property protections while demanding technology transfers.  And the “reforms” do nothing to stem the Chinese tide of technology and intellectual property theft, and they do nothing to halt the economic cyberwar the PRC is waging against our allies and against us.

Partnership, indeed.

Another Thought on Economic Mobility

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Gerald Auten and Geoffrey Gee wrote about “Income Mobility in the United States: New Evidence from Income Tax Data.”  It’s an extensive paper; I’m abstracting a couple of points in this post [emphasis added].

  • More than half of taxpayers…moved to a different income quintile over this period [1996-2005]. About half…of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005.
  • Median incomes of taxpayers in the sample increased by 24% after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two–thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period.  Furthermore, the median incomes of those initially in the lowest income groups increased more in per centage terms than the median incomes of those in the higher income groups.  In contrast, the real median incomes of taxpayers who were in the highest income groups in 1996 declined by 2005.
  • The composition of the very top income groups changed dramatically over time.  Less than half…of those in the top 1% in 1996 were still in the top 1% in 2005.  Less than one–fourth of the individuals in the top 1/100th% in 1996 remained in that group in 2005.

Those evil 1%-ers not only had trouble staying in the 1%, a significant fraction of them were erstwhile bottom%-ers.

Taking economic mobility—income changes—relative to all taxpayers, Auten and Gee found this:

  • About 56% of taxpayers…in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher quintile by 2005.  While 29% moved up to the second quintile, nearly as many (27.4%) moved up two or more quintiles and 4.5% moved all the way to the top quintile.
  • More than twice as many middle–income taxpayers moved up to a higher income quintile…as dropped to a lower one[.]

Thomas Sowell had this comment on the matter three years ago:

Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a “problem” for which a “solution” is necessary.  They have created a powerful vision of “classes” with “disparities” and “inequities” in income, caused by “barriers” created by “society.”  But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the “barriers” assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.

And now comes President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party colleagues decrying exactly that static income inequality folderol in the middle of their failed economic recovery and the outcomes of their failed social control policies.  Truly, they are desperate to change the subject in this election year.