Tag Archives: economics

Some Prosperity Data

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Courtesy of the Census Bureau, via Just the News and The Wall Street Journal. These data concern the last year.

  • median household income rose to more than $68,700 just over the last year, a 6.8% year-on-year rise
  • black median household income rose to $66,500—up 7.9%
  • Hispanic median household income rose to $56,100—up 7.1%
  • women median income rose to $47,300—up 3%
  • poverty rate fell to 10.5%
  • child poverty rate fell to 14.1%

These are all highs (or lows) over the last several decades, and the sizes of the changes are historically large, also.

Over the last three-ish years, median household income has increased by 9%. That’s associated with a decrease in income inequality, including a small decrease in the share of income held by the top 20% over the same period paired with a bottom quintile increase of 2.4%.

Notice how all of this coincides with the pre-Wuhan Virus situation unemployment rates—at historic lows for our general population and for blacks and Hispanics in particular—along with rising labor force participation rate, which remains low, but it’s climbing from the historic lows achieved during the prior administration’s eight years.

One major factor little commented on in the NLMSM is the effect on prosperity and income inequality of folks in the bottom quintile actually having a job and an income—especially minority folks.

Which administration is it, again, that’s been in charge?

Insufficient

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Recall that Oracle and ByteDance have a proposal on the table for Oracle to take a minority partnership position in ByteDance’s TikTok.  In response to objections to that, some

Trump administration officials are looking to give American investors a majority share of the company that will take over the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok[.]

Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL), Rick Scott (R, FL), Thom Tillis (R, NC), Roger Wicker (R, MI), Dan Sullivan (R, AK), and John Cornyn (R, TX), object to that, too.

Any deal between an American company and ByteDance must ensure that TikTok’s US operations, data, and algorithms are entirely outside the control of ByteDance or any Chinese-state directed actors, including any entity that can be compelled by Chinese law to turn over or access US consumer data.

The Senators are absolutely correct. Any fraction of ownership by a People’s Republic of China company that’s greater than zero is too much; giving, as it would, the PRC’s intelligence community access to all the data TikTok scoops up from the individuals and businesses that use it.

A TikTok Partnership

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Oracle Corp has become the frontrunner in the race to do a deal with the People’s Republic of China company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, for an acquisition of that app. That status seems solidified by ByteDance having submitted a proposal to the US government that lays out the terms of a deal in which Oracle would become the junior partner in a TikTok-Oracle(-ByteDance?)…alliance.

Recall that President Donald Trump has required that ByteDance divest itself of TikTok as a condition of TikTok’s being allowed to continue operating in the United States. Trump’s objection to TikTok is centered on the app’s scooping up of a vast range of personal and personally identifying data and the subsequent transmittal of those data to back to ByteDance inside the PRC.

Recall further that three years ago the PRC passed a law requiring every single company based or operating inside the PRC to cooperate with every single request for information that the PRC’s intelligence community might have.  That would include the personal and personally identifying data that TikTok vacuums up on each of its users, including the 100 million American users.

Critical aspects of this proposed “partnership” include these two:

  • the ByteDance proposal will involve expanding TikTok’s US offices to become the global headquarters
  • hav[e] Oracle certify the security of the app’s data….

The first is an insult to our intelligence, intended as it is solely to distract from the security problem.

The second is insufficient to the point of irrelevancy. Under the PRC law, to repeat, every PRC domiciled or headquartered company must comply with every information request from the PRC’s intelligence community. It matters not a whit how “secure” TikTok’s data might be; so long as a PRC company owns even a smidge of TikTok, that company will be bound by law to submit any and all TikTok data—those personal and personally identifiable data, for instance—to the PRC’s intelligence agency when asked, and TikTok will be bound to submit those data to that company for passing along.

And that should be a deal breaker.

Nice Try, Thank You for Playing

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The Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan collection of House Representatives, has produced an idea for getting help to those Americans who’ve been hit the hardest, economically, by the present Wuhan Virus situation. Aside from its trillion-and-a-half dollar price tag—a bill that American citizens will have to pay in taxes or in debt—which is future taxes—there are a couple of sound components.

The idea, though, contains one terrible component—and that one represents a full third of the total cost of this thing.

$500.3 billion in state and local aid, which includes $130 billion for documented coronavirus state and local expenses through 2021, $120.3 billion for documented local budget shortfalls and $250 billion for proven state government shortfalls. [Emphasis added]

That should be a deal breaker. American taxpayers shouldn’t be responsible for bailing out any State or locality other than their own.

Full stop.

Open New York City for Operation

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Open New York City for Operation

The city currently is closed down by order of Da Mare Bill de Blasio (I know, different city. Same guy, though, functionally), and that’s causing a lot of damage, and not just economic.

More than 160 business leaders, including executives at Citigroup Inc, Mastercard Inc, and Nasdaq Inc, have signed a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio warning of New York City’s deteriorating condition in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and growing anxiety over public safety, cleanliness, and other quality-of-life issues.

De Blasio’s response? No. Gimme money first.

Let’s be clear: to restore city services and save jobs, we need long term borrowing and a federal stimulus—we need these leaders to join the fight to move the city forward[.]

Here’s a stimulus: open the city—withdraw the restrictions—and watch the sharp and prolonged economic growth provide a ton of stimulus.

And watch the malaise that being closed down and cooped up is causing the residents of the city fade as they’re able to go back to work, go back to shopping, go back to socializing. Able to go back to earning money for their bills—the lack of which is another source of serious angst—and spending some of it on entertainment, another angst reducer.