March 31, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Notable from here:

Relativism allows everyone to be right, and puts our feelings ahead of everything else. We all know that it is not fun to find out that we are wrong about something, but a part of growing up is learning to cope with this negative feeling and learn from the experiences of failure. It would seem that many people today, however, would prefer to shield themselves and their children from ever being wrong or from feeling that hurt. This is true on the Little League diamond, where every player now makes the team, and in the school classrooms, where every assignment is given a modification to make sure every student can easily get by.

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March 31, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Notable from this article:

I’m not saying that I don’t like some politicians more than others. I like those who vote the way I want them to and I dislike the ones who don’t. But when you get right down to it, most politicians on either side of the aisle are pretty mediocre human beings. What is their great accomplishment, after all? These are people who have devoted their lives to convincing other people to hand over their hard-earned money so that they can get or keep a job that essentially consists of spending other people’s tax dollars. Often enough to keep the tabloid press occupied, these palookas are caught taking bribes, using drugs and getting involved in sex scandals. In other words, they often behave like the rock stars they aspire to be, even though they can’t sing, cavort around a stage or play a musical instrument.

…

I don’t happen to think it’s a coincidence that left-wingers are much more juvenile than conservatives when it comes to making idols of politicians. As psychiatrist Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., points out in his new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness,” liberals are very much “like spoiled, angry children. They rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from the cradle to the grave.”

For over 35 years, Dr. Rossiter has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients and examined nearly 3,000 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist. Regarding the sort of liberalism being espoused by Obama, Clinton and their devout worshippers, he states: “A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity, as liberals do. A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population, as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state, as liberals do.”

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March 31, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

 Below is  notable from here:

Something is holding back lower-income Americans from going to college, says Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the Cato Institute.  It’s not that there aren’t major incentives for them to go.  In fact, the college wage premium — the difference between the average wages of college grads and those of high school grads has climbed to around 85 percent, up from less than 50 percent in 1980.

If more money isn’t the answer, what does have an impact?  In a word: culture. Everything we know about high performance in all fields of endeavor tells us that, while natural talent is a plus, there is no substitute for long hours of preparation and hard work, explains Lindsey.

Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley tested the effect of class on the differences in how parents interact with their young children.  They were able to document dramatic differences in the intensity and nature of the verbal stimulation the kids were getting:

• Professional parents directed an average of 487 “utterances” per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for working class parents and only 176 for welfare parents.
• Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two to one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one.
• By the time the children in the study were around three years old, the ones from professional families had average vocabularies of 1,116 words; the working-class ones averaged 749; the welfare kids, 525.

Once kids reach school age, the growing influence of peer groups reinforces the early patterns established at home.  College-educated professional parents make sure their kids are in college-bound peer groups, while working-class and underclass kids tend to gravitate toward others like them.  Consequently, children on either side of the class divide grow up with very different attitudes about the importance of school achievement — which leads to different expectations about future life plans and different self-conceptions in relation to larger society, says Lindsey.

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March 31, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Education and economic growth from Education Next.

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March 31, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

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March 31, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

The four-day Democratic National Convention in August is expected to pump $160 million directly into the regional economy.

The economic shot-in-the-arm, whatever the total actually ends up being, will be a welcome boost. But we’re beginning to question whether the short-term benefit is worth the long-term expenses.

Denver, and Colorado, could be left holding the bag for years to come.

Even before the Democrats awarded their national convention to Denver, Mayor John Hickenlooper had to promise a union-run hotel, the city’s first. He delivered.

Then, with the memory of picket lines set up by Boston police during the 2004 DNC convention hanging quietly over negotiations, Denver cops received at least a 14 percent salary increase for the next three years. The contract nearly tripled the percentage raise handed out in the previous three-year contract.

And last spring, after Gov. Bill Ritter wisely vetoed a bill making it easier to form labor unions in Colorado, the AFL-CIO threatened to ask national Democrats to find a new city for the convention if the state didn’t adopt a pro-labor measure.

Teamster president James Hoffa Jr. confronted Ritter, saying if he and Hickenlooper didn’t work out some key issues, the convention could be plagued with protests and picket lines.

“It could blow up,” Hoffa told Ritter.

Months later, right on cue, Ritter delivered his Friday afternoon executive order, granting state workers unnecessary collective bargaining rights that will drive up the cost of state government.

Unions have been thriving only in the public sector, and Ritter’s order ensured that they will continue to flourish there — at least until there’s a new governor to overturn the order.

And now, parking lot workers at Denver International Airport are the latest to hold the city hostage as they negotiate a new contract.

The Service Employees International Union’s chapter director for parking employees, Dennis DeMaio, said the union will strike during the DNC if it needs to. The union is concerned about which company may get the contract to manage parking at DIA.

The threat of a strike is enough to perk up most ears on the city council. After all, what would happen if 40 percent of the more than 6,000 delegates who are union members refused to land at DIA while their brethren were striking?

Then we learned that three city councilmen, two with strong union ties, met privately with representatives of the union and one of the companies vying for the parking contract. Not only was the meeting in violation of Colorado’s open meetings law, it raised questions about who those councilmen are working for: the union or Denverites?

Hickenlooper has promised that not a penny of taxpayer money would be spent on the convention. Yet it appears taxpayers could pay more indirectly for having the convention here.

Read it all here. (HT: Division of Labour)

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March 31, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

More from Don Boudreaux and free trade.

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March 28, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Outtake from this article:

For the market economy to function well, it needs to be a profit system and a profit-and-loss system, with the losses being the penalty for bad decisions.

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March 28, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

New York City residents are growing obese at a rate nearly three times that of other Americans, prompting some who cited a link between weight gain and smoking cessation to question whether the city’s crackdown on smoking may have had an unexpected result.

Read it all here. (HT: Club for Growth)

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March 27, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

WASHINGTON - U.S. audio historians have discovered and played back a French inventor’s historic 1860 recording of a folk song — the oldest-known audio recording — made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

“It’s magic,” audio historian David Giovannoni said on Thursday. “It’s like a ghost singing to you.”

Lasting 10 seconds, the recording is of a person singing “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit” (”By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied”) — part of a French song, according to First Sounds, a group of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists and others dedicated to preserving humankind’s earliest sound recordings.

It was made on April 9, 1860, by Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on a device called the phonautograph that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp, Giovannoni said.

Read it all here.

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March 27, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

From today’s WSJ: 

The claim that deregulation went too far is coming from many sides. We need more regulation, the argument goes, and even a single regulator to bring stability. Former SEC chairman, Arthur Levitt, Jr., made some of that case on this page. House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank has prepared legislation, and others are rushing forward with their own plans.

Their diagnosis is wrong. Mistaken regulation contributed greatly to the current problems in financial markets. Take the 1970s Basel agreement between developed country governments, which followed bank failures in Germany and the U.S. The idea was to have equivalent risk standards in all the principal lending countries. The agreement required banks to increase their capital if they increased mortgage loans and other risky assets.

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March 26, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

From the Tax Foundation.

Tax Freedom Day, the day on which Americans have earned enough money to pay all their federal, state and local taxes for the year, will fall on April 23 this year, according to the Tax Foundation’s annual calculation using the latest government data on income and taxes.

Tax Freedom Day is calculated by dividing the official government tally of all taxes collected in each year by the official government tally of all income earned in each year. Governments—federal, state and local—took 29.6% of income in 1970, 30.4% of income in 1980, 33.6% in 2000, and so on. This percentage is the nation’s total tax burden. We then use the historical trend and the most recent economic data to make a projection of what the tax burden will be in the current year and we convert that burden into a date—a percentage of the year—on which Americans will have earned enough income to pay their total tax bill for the year.

This year’s Tax Freedom Day falls three days earlier than in 2007. Fiscal stimulus rebates and a projection of slow growth in 2008 are the principal reasons for the earlier celebration. However, if the large projected deficit for 2008 were counted as a tax in the current year, Tax Freedom Day would fall on May 3.

 In 2008, Americans will work 74 days to afford their federal taxes and 39 more days to pay state and local taxes. Meanwhile, buying food requires 35 days of work, clothing 13 days, and housing 60 days. Other major categories are health and medical care (50 days), transportation (29 days), and recreation (21 days).

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March 26, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Love this site–it’s been a great time saver for me. They have Javascripts, FavIcon generator, htaccess password generator, htaccess banning generator, and more. No, I not being paid to advertise them (I do not earn money from this blog). The site has been a time saver for me, and students in my beginning Web page design class benefit from it.

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March 26, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Zimbabwe’s new 10 million dollar bill is red. One side has the official stamps of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and some meaningless serial numbers. The other is a pastiche of a fish jumping out of a lake and a giant dam in the background. The bill, released for the first time last month, is actually not a proper currency note at all but rather a “bearer check.” Zimbabwe stopped printing real money long ago, when its inflation rate was still at a manageable level. Today these bearer checks are the only currency remaining. Last week in Zimbabwe 10 million dollars could buy exactly two rolls of toilet paper. By now it probably won’t get quite that much.

Read it all here.

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March 26, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Click on image to augment.

Reverse Convertibles

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March 25, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

 From City Journal:

The economic impact of this breakdown has been profound. Researchers estimate that the entire rise in poverty in America since the late 1970s can be attributed to “changes in family formation,” a euphemism for the decline of families headed by two married parents. The latest Census data illustrate the problem. Only one out of ten American kids living in two-married-parent families is in poverty—and about one-third of these families are recent immigrants whose poverty is temporary. By contrast, 37 percent of children living with single mothers are impoverished.

Marriage seems to be the defining characteristic of economically successful families. With out-of-wedlock birth rates in America soaring, so that many traditional families aren’t so much breaking up as never getting started, the percentage of children living with cohabiting parents is growing. Yet these kids are three times more likely to be in poverty than the children of married parents. The data actually demonstrate that poverty rates for families headed by two unmarried parents more closely resemble the poverty rates of single-parent families than those of two-married-parent ones.

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March 24, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Some claim Wal-Mart deserves Nobel Peace Prize.

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March 24, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

A 2005 Don Boudreaux article on gasoline price controls.

(HT: Cafe Hayek)

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March 24, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. has announced plans to establish stringent national licensing standards for mortgage brokers. This is not a good idea.

The relationship between licensure in various professions and the quality of service is ambiguous at best. In the specific case of mortgage brokers, a comparison of states that license mortgage brokers and those that don’t suggests that national licensure could lead to more foreclosures, not less.

Morris Kleiner of the University of Minnesota and Richard Todd, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, examined mortgage-broker licensing requirements in the 50 states and District of Columbia between 1996 and 2006. They found no significant relationship between licensing requirements and subsequent outcomes in the housing market, with one exception.

States that require brokers to post a large bond or to have a minimum net worth tend to have fewer mortgage brokers and fewer subprime mortgages. They also have a higher foreclosure rate on subprime mortgages, and a higher percentage of mortgages with high rates of interest.

Read it all here.

Most mortgage brokers will love this plan. This is what happens with licensure requirements: Consider that when Albert Einstein retired, he would have had to go back to school for a year or more if he wanted to become “qualified” to teach high school physics in Princeton, N.J. Lengthy licensure requirements will just deter high-quality career changers and other productive people. I am certified to teach high-school economics, although I don’t. But given the licensure requirements, N. Gregory Mankiw could not teach economics in high-school, because he is not “highly qualified” to do so (to my knowledge). So, because of the crazy licensure requirements, one of the most prominent economists in the world–and a person who teaches economics at Harvard–cannot teach economics in high school. Crazy.

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March 22, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Many in the federal government are demanding banks and taxpayers be forgiving to those who either can’t pay or don’t want to pay their mortgage payments. I’d like to see these people be as forgiving in people’s times of need.

If Uncle Sam really wants to help, he could promptly and permanently cut marginal income tax rates and capital gains taxes. This, however, does not seem likely since he tends to be less willing to make the sacrifices he insists others make.

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March 22, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

I like to here people on the left make claims such as this (from here):

And far from being a threat, getting the government more involved in health care would actually reduce costs, improve quality and bolster the U.S. economy.

From his concluding paragraph:

How is it possible to cover everyone without driving up costs? The one-word answer is “government”

Wow! It’s a miracle. We can have it all–but only if the government does it. To some on the left, government is much like a magical superhero, cape flapping in the wind, who can swoop down and save us all from ourselves and, in addition, bring peace and prosperity to mankind.

If anyone can provide me an example of when a massive government welfare program reduced costs, improved the quality of the service, and benefited the economy in the process, I’ll fry up my shoes and eat them. Please don’t use examples like Social Security or Medicare–that’s just embarrassing.

By the way, the guy writing the opinion is a professor at Yale.

Read the entire opinion.

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March 21, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

American taxpayers beware.

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March 21, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

It’s a heavy squat day, so here’s my video motivation before hitting the gym.

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March 21, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Notable from this WSJ opinion:

Last year Bush rule-making agencies imposed $11 billion of net new economy-wide regulatory costs (mostly in the environmental area). The cost of new regulations has increased every year on Mr. Bush’s watch, but last year was by far the highest. What’s more, a new Heritage Foundation report concludes that the Administration’s agency czars are in a “clear the decks” mode of promulgating rules during the Presidency’s final 10 months.

With the economy stalling and capital markets looking like sludge, this red-tape roll out makes no sense. The Small Business Administration calculates that the total cost in 2005 of complying with 145,000 pages of federal rules and procedures was $1.1 trillion. This is the rough economic equivalent of imposing a second federal income tax on the economy.

George Mason University’s Mercatus Center reveals in a soon-to-be released study that every measure of regulatory activity is up in recent years — agency staffing, budgets, pages of rule making and compliance costs. Those numbers contradict the stream of attacks against this Administration for “weakening” federal consumer and environmental protections.

Excluding homeland security regulations, the budgets of Uncle Sam’s 50 largest agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Consumer Products Safety Commission, are up almost one-third since 2001. There are now some 200,000 full-time government employees writing and enforcing federal commandments.

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March 20, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Notable from this opinion:

Price controls never work because they deny economic participants the necessary information to properly allocate scarce resources and motivate people to produce needed goods and services. The Roman Emperor Diocletian (fourth century B.C.) tried price controls with food grains, and they, of course, failed. President Nixon tried them, and economists now agree they laid the groundwork for the post-1973 decline in U.S. production workers’ real wages. 

President Jimmy Carter tried them, and the results were billions of wasted hours of people waiting in gas lines. Most recently, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has imposed them on food prices, including chickens. The result, as you would expect, is a chicken shortage. 

But here we go again. Reps. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat, and Chris Cannon, Utah Republican, have just introduced a bill to have government officials set the prices credit card companies charge banks and ultimately merchants for “interchange fees.” The many credit card companies, their bank clients and the millions of merchants who accept the cards have freely negotiated fees for decades, much as businesses negotiate prices with each other for goods and services.

Consider reading it all.

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March 20, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

See the original 1913 IRS individual income tax forms (4 pages total, including all forms instructions).

(HT: Mark Perry)

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March 20, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

From the Cleveland Fed. Click to see full size.

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March 20, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

Most republicans think the US health care system is the best in the world; democrats disagree. Read the article here.

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March 20, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

This is the final video installment on the Laffer Curve.

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March 19, 2008 by Tom Armstrong.

So the US Federal Reserve cut by 75 basis points rather than 100 basis points: when the numbers are big enough, a small difference between them can seem unimportant. But with rates down to 2.25 per cent, every 25bp makes a significant difference to the Fed’s brave but perilous monetary policy.

Read it all.

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