Tag Archives: political economy

Population and Income Redistribution

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People are moving from politically blue States to politically red ones, and they’re taking their money with them.

Four states have lost population since 2010 including West Virginia (-3.3%), Illinois (-1.2%), Vermont (-0.3%) and Connecticut (-0.2%), but 10 experienced declines last year. New York was the biggest loser as a net 180,000 people left for better climes. Over the last decade New York has lost more of its population to other states (7.2%) than any other save Alaska (8%), followed by Illinois (6.8%), Connecticut (5.6%) and New Jersey (5.5%).

And

[Illinois] lost $5.6 billion in adjusted gross income last year to other states, about twice as much as in 2012.
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In the last two years New York has lost a net $18 billion in adjusted gross income.
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Last year California lost $8 billion in adjusted gross income to other states, up from about $135 million in 2012.

And

Where are high-tax state exiles going? Zero income tax Florida drew $16.5 billion in adjusted gross income last year. Many have also fled to Arizona ($3.5 billion), Texas ($3.5 billion), North Carolina ($3 billion), Nevada ($2.3 billion), Colorado ($2.1 billion), Washington ($1.7 billion) and Idaho ($1.1 billion).

Just so long as those transplants don’t bring with them the same foolish politics that generated the economic failures of the States they’re leaving.

European Keynesianism

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Europe’s investors are hoping for some Keynesian stimulus—or what passes for Keynesian stimulus—in the coming year to continue 2019 boomlet in stocks.

Getting stocks to propel higher however, may require faster growth. Some see that slug of faster economic activity coming from a possible government ramp up in stimulus spending.
“Whichever way you slice it, there is a much greater burden on governments to do more” said Anik Sen, Global Head of Equities at PineBridge Investments.

That’s not stimulus; that’s investors addicted to government spending.  Not even Keynes (to stimulate this horse once again) said higher spending was stimulative. He held that it was the spike in spending that did that, following which spending needed to go back to its original level and the debt resulting from the spike soon repaid.

Which brings me to the second item in this European Keynesian nonsense.

During the European sovereign-debt crisis in the early part of the last decade, governments in the region adopted austerity budgets to rein in spending and calm bond markets. Many investors now say such frugality has been counterproductive….

Again, no. It’s not austerity to lower government spending and thereby get government to stop competing with private enterprises for resources, which is inflationary, and to get government to stop competing with the private economy for borrowable funds, which applies upward pressure on interest rates (for all that governments fix rates by arbitrary fiat), which is also inflationary.

It’s a Start

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TikTok is a People’s Republic of China company (for all its public moves to resite its headquarters outside the PRC) that’s a popular social-media app that’s used for posting short videos.

However.

TikTok collects information about its users, including data that could be used to track the location and movements of individuals….

As a result, tour military is banning the use of the app on government devices; the Coast Guard and Air Force have joined DoD, the Navy, the Army, and the Marines in the ban.

That’s a good start, but it needs to go much farther.  The app needs to be banned from use by anyone while they’re on any government installation or in any government facility, including civilian facilities.  The app also needs to be banned from use by anyone in an overseas military operations area of responsibility.  Location and movement data are just too important to make it easy for our enemies to have access to them.  Recall the Fitbit fiasco, from an American company, and Pokémon Go, from a Japanese company.

Maybe Build Their Own Connections

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Idaho wants to connect several of its western communities to a renewable energy hub in eastern Oregon, and the green citizens of eastern Oregon agrees with the sentiment.  Just don’t use actual power lines to do the connection.  Brian Kelly, Restoration Director for the Greater Hells Canyon Council in eastern Oregon:

We need to develop more renewable energy, of course, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of damage to our last remaining wild places….

Yep.  Dan Shreve, Head of Global Wind Energy Research at Wood Mackenzie:

Regardless of where you go, there’s always some issues—whether it’s bats, whether it’s birds, whether it’s wealthy landowners who don’t want their view interrupted. As a consequence, you see these initiatives drag on forever.

These worthies put greater value—economic and otherwise—on sights and terrain than they do on actual power to support the folks living there to enjoy those sights and that terrain, as well as telling others elsewhere that local sights and terrain are more important than those others’ access to power.

Perhaps utilities should walk away from such areas, build their hubs and their transmission lines elsewhere, and let these folks who think energy is not all that important develop their own clean power sources and provide their own accesses to them. Surely, they’ll be able to do so much more cheaply and efficiently while preserving their views than can utilities.

Wage Growth

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It’s been almost entirely missed by Progressive-Democrats and almost entirely ignored by the Left and its NLMSM.

Rank-and-file workers are getting bigger raises this year—at least in percentage terms—than bosses.
Wages for the typical worker—nonsupervisory employees who account for 82% of the workforce—are rising at the fastest rate in more than a decade, a sign that the labor market has tightened sufficiently to convey bigger pay increases to lower-paid employees.

Of course, it’s understandable that Progressive-Democrats have missed this. They’ve trained their fire on the Evil Rich and demands that those folks should give up their wealth for redistribution to the…middle class.  All along, Progressive-Democrats have ignored the bottom of the employed and want-to-be-employed spectrum.  Other than, of course, those worthies’ virtue-signaling and anti-employment minimum wage increase demands.

It’s also understandable that the Left and its NLMSM have done their best to ignore this wage increase development.  After all, it comes on the heels of the slowest post-recession (let alone post-Panic) reemployment development since WWII, and it comes so quickly after wages for the typical worker stagnated, and real wages actually declined, during the Obama administration’s post-Panic pseudo-recovery.

Progressive-Democrats also want to talk about the evils of income inequality, while carefully ignoring the opportunity inequalities that would result—have resulted—from their policies.  See, for instance, the results of their mandated minimum wages: net lower income for those still employed low-skill workers and the lower employment rates in thin-margin businesses, second-job family seekers, teenagers looking for their first jobs.  Here are a couple of graphs depicting income inequality.How terrible are these inequalities?