Category: Current Events

Safety Creep: TSA Comes to the Interstate

UPDATE: There is less reason to freak out than previously suspected, although there is still reason to be concerned..

Attention, conservatives! Did you get the latest memo? There’s a new Thing For Conservatives To Be Freaked Out About. The TSA now has checkpoints on Tennessee highways.

Now sometimes conservatives get a little hysterical about all the evil, socialist things that Obama and the government are doing. Remember when the food bill was going to make backyard gardens illegal? Whatever happened to that anyway? But some actions by the government do seem legitimately frightening. (Don’t forget about the Gibson guitar raid.) And with as much reasonableness I can muster, I think this new venture by the TSA is something to be rather concerned about.

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Competition In The Texting Marketplace

I wasn’t as fast as the typical Apple fanboy, but over the weekend I finally upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS 5.0. Among other things, this means that any text I send to or receive from another iPhone will no longer count towards my $5 limit of 200 texts per month, because Apple will send it as data instead of through AT&T’s texting system. Over 3G the texts will instead count as a little bit of data, and when I’m in wi-fi the texts are now essentially completely free. My economic beliefs have led me to expect this event for several years, and even though it took longer than I expected, and did not take the form I expected, it is finally here. (Aside: I realize Blackberry has had a similar feature for some time, but I never had a Blackberry, and neither did most of my friends. The effects of the marketplace competition have finally reached me.)

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The Right To Keep Exotic Animals

It’s not the kind of news story you read every day. “Dozens of exotic animals, including bears, lions, tigers, cheetahs, wolves, giraffes and camels… on the prowl in eastern Ohio…” I found the media’s ubiquitous use of the word “exotic” interesting, as I had always considered the word to have an “unusual” connotation, and I don’t think lions and tigers are all that unusual since pretty much any zoo worth visiting has a few. (Let’s talk about Komodo dragons or a giant squid!) But I suppose it’s pretty unusual for Bengal tigers to be running free around a town like Zanesville, Ohio.

By now we all know the basic facts: 62-year-old Terry Thompson owned a “wild animal farm,” and on Tuesday he apparently set his animals free and killed himself. Local sheriffs and deputies ended up having to kill most of the animals as tranquilizing was not really in the logistics for public safety as nightfall ensued – something that even animal rights activists seem to be conceding, though sadly.

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The Negative Externalities of Occupying Wall Main Street

Paul Krugman is at his best when he points out silly things Republicans say:

Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

But Krugman is at his typical biased worst when he claims:

there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

I think that’s an outright lie.

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Steve Jobs Proves We Are NOT The 99%

So the Occupy Wall Street protests are continuing and reverberating around the country. I sympathize with some of the grievances and demands pertaining to the unjust influence of corporations on our government. But in reading accounts and viewing pictures of the crowds and signs, it seems that the vast majority are expressing a more generic reaction against “corporate greed.” The most popular slogan of the movement seems to be “We Are The 99%,” suggesting that the top 1% wealthiest Americans have all the money and influence and that this is unjust. “We Are The 99%” is meant to bring solidarity to the lower classes, uniting 99% of the country under a common position.

Some of this may simply be, as an Econlog commenter suggests, a natural emotional reaction to the fact that life seems to be getting harder for a lot of us but not any harder for those at the top. Such a reaction is understandable, but I believe it is misguided to channel this reaction into anger at those at the top. Additionally, I believe the very slogan “We Are The 99%” reveals a defeatist mindset that I would encourage you to overcome. (Besides, you can arbitrarily define a group of people that includes 99% of the population, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of that 99% is mad at the other 1% like you are.)

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How Occupy Wall Street Illustrates Left and Right Philosophies

I’ve been trying to decide if I had any thoughts worth blogging about the whole Occupy Wall Street protest thing. The general consensus is that they’re not really sure what their goals are but it’s something about “corporate greed” and perhaps something about the disproportionate influence of major corporations on our legislative process. I don’t feel like picking at the low-hanging fruit of the most hypocritical protestors or digging into whether or not there’s hypocrisy in the news coverage or speculating about whether or not they will become the “tea party of the left” or trying to analyze the nuances of the different kinds of protests and how many people got arrested and how long they were there and all that.

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Are Unemployment Benefits Unsustainable?

I saw an article on Yahoo! Finance yesterday about rising unemployment taxes for employers:

Companies have yet another reason not to boost hiring: rising unemployment taxes.

Employers around the nation are getting socked with higher state unemployment tax bills as states are forced to shell out more than $1 billion in interest payments this month. More than 30 states have had to borrow billions from a federal fund to cover unemployment benefits for their jobless residents in recent years.

And this is only the first of two tax spikes employers are contending with, on both the state and federal level. Come January, companies in 24 states could have to shell out between $21 and $63 more per employee in federal unemployment taxes.

There are plenty of details at the link as far as how and why the pricing varies at different states and levels of government, but the gist of it is that as unemployment remains high, governments are running out of money to pay the unemployed and are looking at ways to increase that revenue stream. Of course, since that revenue stream comes from businesses, raising those taxes pushes incentives for hiring in the exact opposite direction of what the government wants.

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Should Missouri Raise Its Cigarette Tax?

The Show Me Institute helps me stay informed about local politics in my state of Missouri, and from the articles I’ve read they generally take a pretty pure libertarian perspective on things. Yesterday they posted an article about another potential attempt to raise the state’s cigarette tax of 17 cents per pack. Similar attempts have failed twice in the last few years, but the attempts keep coming back because there’s something attractive about trying to raise a cigarette tax rate that’s the lowest in the nation by almost 50%.

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Who Is Gary Johnson?

I’ve been learning a bit about one of the candidates running for the Republican nomination. Gary Johnson polls about 2% and doesn’t get as much attention as Romney or Perry, but there are some interesting things about him so I thought I’d talk about him a bit here. Gary Johnson is almost like the reasonable version of Ron Paul for libertarian-minded people who are too cool to like Ron Paul because of the way he seems obsessed with the Federal Reserve and conspiracy theories.

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How Good Is GDP Growth At Reducing Child Mortality?

Last weekend I wrote about UNICEF’s report that child mortality had declined by large amounts across the globe from 1990 to 2010 (UNICEF defines child mortality rates by the number of children per 1000 live births who do not make it to age 5). Of course, the report did not speculate about how much economic growth may have contributed to this decline, but the capitalist in me wanted to know. Wouldn’t it be good to know if it was better to save children’s lives by encouraging the growth of government programs or by encouraging the growth of the marketplace? So I spent some free time in the last few days gathering data from Wikipedia to see how well GDP numbers correlated with child mortality numbers.

The quick summary is, yes, countries that had stronger GDP growth tended to see greater reductions in child mortality, although the correlation wasn’t as strong as a pure capitalist might like to see. There is perhaps nothing surprising or remarkable about this, but I’m trying to stimulate more discussion of the great news about world reduction in child mortality, which I don’t feel has gotten nearly as much attention as other recent reports like the one on US poverty. A few disclaimers before I present the data:

  1. I am assuming that the child mortality numbers from UNICEF are reliable. Gathering comparable data from every single country in the world is quite difficult, and there was much surveying and modeling.
  2. I am assuming that Wikipedia’s GDP numbers are reliable. (The third Wikipedia link has three different sources for 2010 GDP; I went with the CIA World Factbook source because it listed the most countries.)
  3. I am assuming that I copied and pasted all of those numbers inerrantly.
  4. I decided to compare a percentage of child mortality reduction with a percentage of GDP growth per capita, as opposed to with a percentage of GDP growth, or comparing absolute numbers for any of them. I also did not account for inflation or changes in the value of the dollar. By using the same basic reported numbers for every country I thought this was the simplest and best way to analyze the average rise in living standards per person, but you may disagree.
  5. Because I decided to use percentages, I did not analyze every country in the entire UNICEF report. I arbitrarily excluded countries that had a reported 1990 child mortality rate below 30 deaths per 1,000 live births because I don’t think that a 60% reduction from 10 to 4 says as much about the living standards of a country as does a 60% reduction from 100 to 40. In other words, once your country gets to a relatively decent child mortality number, the marginal cost of reducing that number by a given percent is much higher than reducing that number by the same percent for a country with a much more horrid child mortality number. I’m just looking at the “bad” countries and seeing how much their economy grew on their way to getting better, but you may argue that I should have chosen a different number than 30 as my cut-off. Additionally, you may argue that I should have chosen high or low cutoffs for GDP per capita to exclude outliers from that dimension.
  6. I also excluded a few ad hoc countries for which I could not find GDP data for both 1990 and 2010, but this should not greatly affect the overall averages and trends based on the 134 countries that I did analyze.

So this is not a report on “How Child Mortality Reduction Correlates With GDP Growth By Country.” It’s a report on “How Child Mortality Reduction Correlates With GDP Growth From High Child Mortality Countries For Which I Could Find Decent Data Under A Variety Of Hopefully Reasonable Assumptions.” Here we go…

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