Tag Archives: economics

A Thought on Immigration

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A couple of early warning signs for us.  One I’ve written about before (here’s one such): the demographics of Social Security.

When Social Security was instituted…there were roughly 7 workers paying into the system for every retiree and a retiree lifespan in retirement was about 6 years.

Today…the number of workers paying into the system is around 3 for each retiree, and that number is falling.  Then, each retiree is expected to live for 17+ years in retirement.

Now we’re seeing the beginnings of a regional realization of that demographic crisis.  Although this example specifically concerns the legal industry in the Midwestern rust belt, I think it’s symptomatic of the larger problem.

  1. The Great Lakes/Midwest region…will fall short of recreating the base of manufacturing activity that produced a strong upwardly mobile middle class of the kind that sustains high-level educational activity.
  2. The region’s populations are static, aging, or declining with the result that the applicant pool for law schools in the geographic area is falling.
  3. The region’s lawyer job markets are saturated to the point that there are not a significant number of new jobs being created, and the replacement market that depends on the deaths or retirement of lawyers currently in practice is slow moving.

These come against a backdrop of our national fertility rate, the average number of children born to a healthy woman over her lifetime, of around 1.9.  This is relatively high compared to most other nations, but it’s below a population replacement, the rate at which a population is maintained at its current level rate of around 2.1.

This is the beneficial effect of immigration.  Immigrants easily make up for these population shortfalls.  Immigration, for instance, will contribute to alleviating the population/labor shortage in the Midwest, and by their existence, those workers will contribute to mitigating the worker-to-retiree ratio.

Certainly, we need secure borders, and certainly, we need to allow in only those who do us economic good.  But just as certainly, if we don’t make legal immigration easy to do, if we don’t have a positive immigration rate, we won’t solve this problem.  We’ll just continue our slide.

My Irony Meter is Pegged

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Facing a $220 million budget shortfall, Democrats in Hartford have proposed taxing the unspent earnings of university endowments with more than $10 billion in assets.  Only Yale’s $25.6 billion endowment—the country’s second largest after Harvard—fits the tax bill.  Yale’s tax-exempt investments earned $2.6 billion last year, eight times more than the University of Connecticut’s $384 million endowment.  Oh, the inequality!

Indeed.  Hartford’s Progressive government plainly thinks that, at a certain point, Yale has made enough money.

No one is safe when progressives run out of other people’s money.

Not even fellow Progressives.

YGTBSM, Again

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This one is just ridiculous.

A theme park has bizarrely banned visitors from screaming on one of its newest rides.

Parkgoers have been urged to stay as quiet as possible when riding The Big One at The Big Sheep amusement park in Bideford, Devon, in order to not upset neighbours.

Half the enjoyment of a roller coaster ride is the screaming.

What’s up with this?

“Long-Lasting Effects of Socialist Education”

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That’s the title of a paper published at the end of last year by Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln of Goethe University Frankfurt and Paolo Masella of the University of Sussex.

Here’s the abstract:

Political regimes influence contents of education and criteria used to select and evaluate students.  We study the impact of a socialist education on the likelihood of obtaining a college degree and on several labor market outcomes by exploiting the reorganization of the school system in East Germany after reunification.  Our identification strategy utilizes cut-off birth dates for school enrollment that lead to variation in the length of exposure to the socialist education system within the same birth cohort.  An additional year of socialist education decreases the probability of obtaining a college degree and affects longer-term male labor market outcomes.

And yet, we’re getting just that sort of leftist “education” in our secondary schools, colleges, and universities.

Hmm….

 

h/t AEIdeas

Supreme Court Damage

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This is why we so desperately need a Republican President and a Republican Senate from 2017 on.

The Supreme Court split 4-4 Tuesday on a challenge brought by public school teachers who objected to paying union dues, delivering a big win for the unions[.]

The Liberal block on the Court has continued to vote in lock step, rather than on what the law actually says, this time damaging—as they surely know—not only the Free Speech Clause, but the Free Assembly Clause as well, of the 1st Amendment.

This particular ruling is not “final;” the split ruling only leaves intact the 9th Circuit’s ruling.  The appellate courts remain split on the matter, and a later, full court can hear another case along these lines and strike unions’ ability to collect dues from non-members and to use the dues from members and non-members for political purposes those dues payers do not approve.

That full Court badly needs a conservative, textualist Justice to replace Antonin Scalia.  Our Republic is badly endangered by a bloc-voting Liberal Court that sees the Constitution as malleable in accordance with their own interpretation of today’s needs rather than malleable only through Article V and the folks who make up today’s society, We the People.