Saturday, September 2, 2017
Friday, September 1, 2017
Thursday, August 31, 2017
My third favorite economist,
GARY SHILLING: PRODUCTIVITY AND ECONOMIC GROWTHductivitygrowth averaged 0.53 percent per year in the 2011-2016
Gary Shilling Blog"Productivity growth averaged 0.53 percent per year in the 2011-2016 period, far below the earlier norm of 2 percent to 2.5 percent. Reasons for the slowdown are many, but some economists suggest that such growth is being significantly understated. Mobile phones and other high-tech gadgets probably enhance efficiency of doing business far beyond their cost. Consider the value of time saved by shopping online, which is not captured in the statistics. The costs of new wonder drugs, high as they are, probably do not measure their value in saving lives.The output in service industries is hard to measure, especially since quality can vary widely. One lawyer may bill twice as much time for reviewing a contract as another but make twice as many mistakes. The problem of measuring output in services only grows as services become an ever-greater share of spending.Another explanation for slow U.S. productivity growth is that American multinationals have moved intangible assets such as patents and other intellectual property overseas in order to avoid paying taxes. Such actions slowed reported U.S. productivity gains by an estimated 0.25 percentage point per year between 2004 and 2008.Although new technologies that enhance productivity are mushrooming, they often take decades before becoming big enough to move the overall productivity needle. The Industrial Revolution began in England and New England in the late 1700's, but only after the Civil War had it expanded to the point of hyping nationwide productivity. Ditto for railroads. As a result, between 1869 and 1898, real GDP per capita leaped at a 2.11 percent annual rate. It’s now rising around 1 percent annually.Other forces may well push productivity, such as significant tax reform, education reform, deregulation, unifying state licensing requirements that now often impede labor mobility and reforming entitlements to encourage people to work. Also, there’s nothing like a stronger economy to create labor demand and the resulting high employment and wages."period, fabelow the earlier norm of 2 percent to 2.5 percent. R
easons for the slowdown are many, but some economists suggest that such growth is being significantly understated. Mobile phones and other high-tech gadgets probably enhance efficiency of doing business far beyond their cost. Consider the value of time saved by shopping online, which is not captured in the statistics. The costs of new wonder drugs, high as they are, probably do not measure their value in saving lives.
The output in service industries is hard to measure, especially since quality can vary widely. One lawyer may bill twice as much time for reviewing a contract as another but make twice as many mistakes. The problem of measuring output in services only grows as services become an ever-greater share of spending.
Another explanation for slow U.S. productivity growth is that American multinationals have moved intangible assets such as patents and other intellectual property overseas in order to avoid paying taxes. Such actions slowed reported U.S. productivity gains by an estimated 0.25 percentage point per year between 2004 and 2008.
Although new technologies that enhance productivity are mushrooming, they often take decades before becoming big enough to move the overall productivity needle. The Industrial Revolution began in England and New England in the late 1700's, but only after the Civil War had it expanded to the point of hyping nationwide productivity. Ditto for railroads. As a result, between 1869 and 1898, real GDP per capita leaped at a 2.11 percent annual rate. It’s now rising around 1 percent annually.
Other forces may well push productivity, such as significant tax reform, education reform, deregulation, unifying state licensing requirements that now often impede labor mobility and reforming entitlements to encourage people to work. Also, there’s nothing like a stronger economy to create labor demand and the resulting high employment and wages." growth averaged 0.53 percent per year in the 2011-2016 period, far below the earlier norm of 2 percent to 2.5 percent. Reasons for the slowdown are many, but some economists suggest that such growth is being significantly understated. Mobile phones and other high-tech gadgets probably enhance efficiency of doing business far beyond their cost. Consider the value of time saved by shopping online, which is not captured in the statistics. The costs of new wonder drugs, high as they are, probably do not measure their value in saving lives.
The output in service industries is hard to measure, especially since quality can vary widely. One lawyer may bill twice as much time for reviewing a contract as another but make twice as many mistakes. The problem of measuring output in services only grows as services become an ever-greater share of spending.
Another explanation for slow U.S. productivity growth is that American multinationals have moved intangible assets such as patents and other intellectual property overseas in order to avoid paying taxes. Such actions slowed reported U.S. productivity gains by an estimated 0.25 percentage point per year between 2004 and 2008.
Although new technologies that enhance productivity are mushrooming, they often take decades before becoming big enough to move the overall productivity needle. The Industrial Revolution began in England and New England in the late 1700's, but only after the Civil War had it expanded to the point of hyping nationwide productivity. Ditto for railroads. As a result, between 1869 and 1898, real GDP per capita leaped at a 2.11 percent annual rate. It’s now rising around 1 percent annually.
Other forces may well push productivity, such as significant tax reform, education reform, deregulation, unifying state licensing requirements that now often impede labor mobility and reforming entitlements to encourage people to work. Also, there’s nothing like a stronger economy to create labor demand and the resulting high employment and wages."
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Politico/Morning Consult Poll:
Republicans Still Want the Wall, Even if it Means a Government Shutdown
Poll Results and Article
Republicans Still Want the Wall, Even if it Means a Government Shutdown
Poll Results and Article
On this day 50 years ago,
Marshall began as a civil rights lawyer who fought against long odds for his race:
Thurgood Marshall Confirmed As First African-American Justice of Supreme Court
[T] he great achievement of Marshall's career as a civil-rights lawyer was his victory in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of black parents in Topeka, Kansas on behalf of their children forced to attend all-black segregated schools. Through Brown v. Board, one of the most important cases of the 20th century, Marshall challenged head-on the legal underpinning of racial segregation, the doctrine of "separate but equal" established by the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson.
Much more here with his biographyOn May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore racial segregation of public schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. While enforcement of the Court's ruling proved to be uneven and painfully slow, Brown v. Board provided the legal foundation, and much of the inspiration, for the American Civil Rights Movement that unfolded over the next decade. At the same time, the case established Marshall as one of the most successful and prominent lawyers in America.
Andrew McCarthy
Stop Making Excuses for Antifa Thuggery
Antifa benefited enormously from the horrific events in Charlottesville. It became Nazis versus the people standing up to the Nazis, and in that formulation the people standing up to the Nazis always win. There can be no moral equivalence, we were told, between Nazis and their opponents. But that depends on who the opponents are — there is a vast difference between peaceful counterprotesters and violent thugs, even if they are marching on the same side.
There was certainly moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin. Likewise, bully-boy fascists spoiling for a fight and black-clad leftists looking to beat them up exist on the same moral plane. They both thrill to violence and benefit from the attention that comes from it. They both reject civility and the rule of law that make a democratic society possible. They both are profoundly illiberal.
All this was lost in the reaction to Charlottesville. Liberal commentators spread memes comparing antifa to American GIs who stormed the beaches at Normandy. The comparison would be apt if the 1st Infantry Division got together to spend an afternoon beating up fellow Americans rather than giving its last measure of devotion to breaching Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.More here National Review
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
The man who presaged Trump,
Pat Buchanan: Can the GOP's Shotgun Marriage Be Saved?
Pat Buchanan Article
First rate, must-read article from Victor Davis Hanson
Trump Haters, Supporters, Neither, and Both
National ReviewReagan Also Pardoned High Profile Law Enforcement Officers Convicted of Civil Rights Violations
One of the most controversial aspects of the Arpaio pardon is the fact that he was convicted for flouting a judge’s order to stop violating Latinos’ constitutional rights. However, it’s not the first time a pardon has been granted for civil rights violations: in 1981, President Ronald Reagan granted pardons to W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, former FBI agents who were convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of antiwar radicals in the early 1970s. (Felt was later identified as Deep Throat.) Felt and Miller had authorized government agents to break into the homes of friends and relatives of fugitive members of the Weather Underground, the group that had taken responsibility for bombings at the U.S. Capitol, Pentagon and other government buildings. Reagan said he pardoned them because they acted without criminal intent “to bring an end to the terrorism that was threatening our nation.”Nate Silver
Monday, August 28, 2017
On this day in 1955,
Emmett Till Killed - Murderers Acquitted
While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His assailants–the white woman’s husband and her brother–made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.Till grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and though he had attended a segregated elementary school, he was not prepared for the level of segregation he encountered in Mississippi. His mother warned him to take care because of his race, but Emmett enjoyed pulling pranks. On August 24, while standing with his cousins and some friends outside a country store in Money, Emmett bragged that his girlfriend back home was white. Emmett’s African American companions, disbelieving him, dared Emmett to ask the white woman sitting behind the store counter for a date. He went in, bought some candy, and on the way out was heard saying, “Bye, baby” to the woman. There were no witnesses in the store, but Carolyn Bryant–the woman behind the counter–claimed that he grabbed her, made lewd advances, and then wolf-whistled at her as he sauntered out.Roy Bryant, the proprietor of the store and the woman’s husband, returned from a business trip a few days later and found out how Emmett had spoken to his wife. Enraged, he went to the home of Till’s great uncle, Mose Wright, with his brother-in-law J.W. Milam in the early morning hours of August 28. The pair demanded to see the boy. Despite pleas from Wright, they forced Emmett into their car. After driving around in the Memphis night, and perhaps beating Till in a toolhouse behind Milam’s residence, they drove him down to the Tallahatchie River.Three days later, his corpse was recovered but was so disfigured that Mose Wright could only identify it by an initialed ring. Authorities wanted to bury the body quickly, but Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, requested it be sent back to Chicago. After seeing the mutilated remains, she decided to have an open-casket funeral so that all the world could see what racist murderers had done to her only son. Jet, an African American weekly magazine, published a photo of Emmett’s corpse, and soon the mainstream media picked up on the story.Less than two weeks after Emmett’s body was buried, Milam and Bryant went on trial in a segregated courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. There were few witnesses besides Mose Wright, who positively identified the defendants as Emmett’s killers. On September 23, the all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before issuing a verdict of “not guilty,” explaining that they believed the state had failed to prove the identity of the body. Many people around the country were outraged by the decision and also by the state’s decision not to indict Milam and Bryant on the separate charge of kidnapping.
Kurt Schlichter
Conservatism Is Not A Suicide Pact
I could't agree more re W's shabby mistreatment of Scooter Libby. We don't need any more think tank conservatives.Town Hall Opinion ArticleThe whiny wailing and rending of garments (mostly bow ties) by the True Cons over President Trump pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio brings to mind another president’s choice when a loyal supporter was the victim of a liberal witch hunt. President Bush was an honorable man, but the way he allowed Scooter Libby and the Libby family to be ruined and impoverished over what everyone knew was a skeevy liberal political vendetta before issuing a partial commutation is to W’s lasting shame. His excuse: the Rule of Law or something.But, as anyone willing to see knows, today the Rule of Law is a unicorn and it has been for a long time. I like the Rule of Law, and I’ve been warning for years about what happens when it goes away. Yet we are where we are, whether we like it or not. We’re in a land where the law is only intermittently and selectively applicable. Allowing allies to suffer in an effort to pretend that all is well is not going to bring the Rule of Law back. Nostalgia for the Rule of Law no excuse for tolerating an injustice to an ally. Hell, undoing injustices is what the pardon power is for.What will bring the Rule of Law back? How do we get to the Conserva-Eden we are expected to act like we already reside it? Perhaps another statement of principle? Maybe another post on some unread conservajournal? I know – how about more complaining about how frustrated conservatives are uncouth and should just sit there and take whatever fascist garbage the left dishes out?I always thought it was conservative to punish wrongdoers. The other side abandoned the Rule of Law, so I would think that they might – maybe – learn a lesson by experiencing the consequences of their bad choice. But apparently punishing wrongdoers is now off the table because some other principle, of which I was unaware during nearly four decades inside conservatism, requires we never ever retaliate.
On this day in 1968,
Watch Short ABC News Video
Yippies Protest Outside Democratic Convention in Chicago - Police "Riot" in Response
from This Day In HistoryOn this day in 1968, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters battle police in the streets, while the Democratic Party falls apart over an internal disagreement concerning its stance on Vietnam. Over the course of 24 hours, the predominant American line of thought on the Cold War with the Soviet Union was shattered.Since the end of World War II, the U.S. perspective on the Soviet Union and Soviet-style communism was marked by truculent disapproval. Intent on stopping the spread of communism, the United States developed a policy by which it would intervene in the affairs of countries it deemed susceptible to communist influence. In the early 1960s, this policy led to U.S. involvement in the controversial Vietnam War, during which the United States attempted to keep South Vietnam from falling under the control of communist North Vietnam, at a cost of more than 2 million Vietnamese and nearly 58,000 American lives.The “Cold War consensus,” in U.S. government, however, fractured during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Democratic delegates from across the country were split on the question of Vietnam. A faction led by Eugene McCarthy, a committed anti-war candidate, began to challenge the long-held assumption that the United States should remain in the war. As the debate intensified, fights broke out on the convention floor, and delegates and reporters were beaten and knocked to the ground. Eventually, the delegates on the side of the status quo, championed by then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, won out, but the events of the convention had seriously weakened the party, which went on to lose the following election.Meanwhile, on the streets of Chicago, several thousand anti-war protesters gathered to show their support for McCarthy and the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley deployed 12,000 police officers and called in another 15,000 state and federal officers to contain the protesters. The situation then rapidly spiraled out of control, with the policemen severely beating and gassing the demonstrators, as well as newsmen and doctors who had come to help.The ensuing riot, known as the “Battle of Michigan Avenue,” was caught on television, and sparked a large-scale change in American society. For the first time, many Americans came out in virulent opposition to the war in Viet Nam.
From my 3rd most favorite economist,
This Is One Reason Why Trump Bringing Foxconn Manufacturing Jobs To Wisconsin Is So Important
Gary Shilling BlogMovement from higher paid jobs to lower paid jobs by Gary Shilling:"In this economic recovery, the jobs that are being created are mainly in low-paid work. It’s been in sectors such as retail trade, where real wages have risen just 0.9 percent in total since the beginning of 2007. Similarly, the 3 million increase in hotel clerks, waiters and other leisure and hospitality jobs in this recovery has far outstripped the 900,000 gain in manufacturing.In June, manufacturing employees were paid $26.51 per hour, compared with the $15.43 per hour earned by leisure and hospitality workers. In addition, manufacturing employees worked 1.56 times as many hours, so their weekly pay of $1,081.61 was 2.69 times the $402.72 paid to the average leisure and hospitality employee. Even within industrial sectors, wages have been restrained as postwar babies at the top of their pay scales retire and are replaced by lower-paid new recruits."
Sunday, August 27, 2017
An Example of Berkeley Antifa Free Speech Directed at Trump Supporter Today
There's a reason these thugs wear masks.
VideoMore Antifa "Free Speech" Here
Aerial View Antifa Chase, Corner, Beat Trump Supporter
On Monday, 12 Browns kneeled for the Anthem. Jim Brown told them to stand. Yesterday they did.
Pro Football Talk
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