Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The federal government posted a $1.8 trillion budget deficit during the fiscal year that ended on September 30, despite an increase in tax revenue, thanks to higher spending and the rapid growth of interest costs tied to the $35.6 trillion national debt.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/09/budget-deficit-hit-1-8-trillion-after-huge-increase-in-borrowing-costs/
“big study gave 1,000 low-income people $1,000 per month for three years—no strings attached. What happened?
Not the great things that were promised. After three years of getting $1,000/month, UBI recipients were actually a little deeper in debt than before.
Why? Because they worked less. Their partners did, too.
Some recipients talked about starting businesses, but few actually tried it. Most who said they did start a business waited until the third year of the study—when their free money was about to end.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/09/universal-basic-income-shows-why-giving-people-free-money-doesnt-work/
North Korea has been showing no signs of serious negotiation with the U.S. or South Korea. They are not interested and want to develop their military capabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoVYMBqNKa8
“Last fall, Milei eliminated what The Wall Street Journal termed one of the world’s “strictest” rent-control laws. Per its report: “The Argentine capital is undergoing a rental-market boom. Landlords are rushing to put their properties back on the market, with Buenos Aires rental supplies increasing by over 170 percent. While rents are still up in nominal terms, many renters are getting better deals than ever, with a 40 percent decline in the real price of rental properties when adjusted for inflation.”
With price controls, businesses flee the market because they cannot get a sufficient return on investment. As a result, supply for whatever is controlled falls even as demand stays steady or rises. That’s why price controls on gasoline lead to long lines at gas stations. If prices can’t adjust to reflect supply and demand, then people simply can’t get the items they want.
Sure, removing controls initially raises prices—but then new businesses jump into the fray to capitalize on the market and the boost in competition then reduces prices. By contrast, tightening up government price controls just leads to increasing levels of scarcity and misery.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/11/argentina-ended-rent-control-guess-what-happened-next/
“”The China tariffs are, in my view, a significant piece of leverage—and a trade negotiator never walks away from leverage,” U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said at that time. The Biden administration, she added, was seeking to turn that “leverage into a strategic program that will strengthen American competitiveness and defend our interests in a global economy in which China will continue to play.”
More than two years later, and nearly four years after Biden took office, what has that supposed leverage accomplished? Tai provided the answer to that question this week during an interview with Bloomberg.
“We really haven’t seen the [People’s Republic of China] make any changes to its fundamental systemic structural policies that would make sense for us to provide any relaxation,” Tai told reporter Eric Martin for his Supply Lines newsletter.
In fact, Tai noted that there aren’t any ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and China right now—but don’t worry, she’s still insistent that the tariffs are useful for…something. “At the moment we are not negotiating anything with the PRC on trade,” she told Martin, “but one day we may be back at the table, in which case these tariffs will be useful as leverage, right?”
In summary, Tai’s position seems to be that American businesses and families must continue bearing the cost of the Trump-Biden tariffs even though those tariffs have plainly failed to achieve their primary policy goal (changing China’s behavior) because there’s a chance that someday, somehow, that might make a difference.”
https://reason.com/2024/10/15/bidens-top-trade-official-just-admitted-tariffs-havent-changed-chinas-behavior/
“Eberstadt’s work shows that the decline in work force participation of American men has been steady and ongoing since the 1960s. It has continued steadily during periods when immigration has been high, and when it has been low.
Other economic factors also fail to explain this steady decline, as Eberstadt wrote in an essay for National Affairs in 2020: “The tempo of workforce withdrawal appears to be almost completely unaffected by the tempo of national economic growth, which varied appreciably over this period. Even recessions—including the Great Recession—appear to have scarcely any impact on the trend. Likewise, the NAFTA agreement, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and other ‘disruptive’ trade events with major implications for the demand for labor in America do not stand out,” Eberstadt wrote in 2020.
In other words, it’s not the natcon boogeymen of free trade and immigration that are driving this outcome. Eberstadt has argued that a lack of educational options for low-income men is the primary cause, though a number of cultural changes have also played a role, including “family structure, government-benefit dependence, and mass incarceration.””
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“Contrary to Vance’s claim, it does not seem like most of those men have been forced out of the work force by employers who are eager to “import somebody from Central America who’s going to work under the table for poverty wages.” Rather, they’ve left the work force for a variety of reasons. Some are in jail, some are disabled, some are caring for family members or otherwise unable to commit to a full-time job. The notion that America has 7 million able-bodied men who would be working if only they could find a job is misguided.
Vance’s argument also ignores other relevant details, like the fact that men’s participation in the labor force has increased over the past four years. It’s not what you’d expect to see if the Biden administration’s immigration policies were forcing working-age American men out of jobs.”
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“”Inability to find a job has played a minimal role in men’s declining labor supply,” concluded Eberstadt’s colleague Scott Winship, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in an essay published last month by Fusion. After reviewing decades of data about why nonworking men are still without a job, Winship concluded that “only about a quarter of the increase in prime-age men who were jobless for a full year was explained by men who wanted a job.””
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“”The decline in work force participation among working-age men hasn’t been due to any deterioration in the labor market or economy,” Winship wrote in an email on Wednesday. “It mostly reflects rising school enrollment, increased responsibilities at home, earlier retirement, and especially increased receipt of disability benefits. The latter is primarily a problem with our disability policy rather than with our economy.””
https://reason.com/2024/10/17/j-d-vance-says-7-million-able-bodied-men-have-dropped-out-of-the-labor-force-where-are-they/
“”Every set of extractive institutions is extractive in its own way, while all sets of inclusive institutions are inclusive in pretty much the same way. For example, ancient Rome ran on slavery; Russia on serfdom, Imperial China strictly limited domestic and foreign commerce; India depended upon hereditary castes; the Ottoman Empire relied on tax farming; Spanish colonies on indigenous labor levies; sub-Saharan Africa on slavery; the American South on slavery and later a form of racial apartheid not all that unlike South Africa’s; and the Soviet Union on collectivized labor and capital. The details of extraction differ but the institutions are organized to chiefly benefit elites.
So why don’t extractive elites encourage economic growth? After all, growth would mean more wealth for them to loot. Acemoglu and Robinson show that the institutions that produce economic growth are inevitable threats to the power of reigning elites. The “key idea” of their theory: “The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people.” Thus throughout history reactionary elites naturally resisted innovation because of their accurate fear that it would produce rivals for their power.””
https://reason.com/2024/10/17/no-prosperity-without-economic-and-political-liberty/
Why Russia’s Economy is Way Worse than it Looks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2XnM4rl6F4
“The short-lived pandemic-era child tax credit expansion cut child poverty by more than a third. And the bolstered social safety net from Covid relief bills nearly halved child poverty in a single year — the sharpest drop on record. Once those programs expired, however, the child poverty rate bounced right back.”
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“Homeowners are told that their homes are the key to building wealth, so they reasonably want their property values to keep rising. For renters, on the other hand, any increase in housing costs is a loss. So while renters might want lawmakers to make room for more housing, homeowners often resist any change that could make their home prices stagnate.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/374488/ending-poverty-america-policy-choice
“Take Trump’s record on the H-1B program, the largest U.S. temporary work visa program for high-skilled workers. Jorge Loweree, managing director of programs at the American Immigration Council (AIC), described the program to Reason as a “critical tool for us to attract talent from abroad” and to continue “our leadership role in the tech sector around the world.” Every year, it provides 65,000 visas for “highly educated foreign professionals,” with an additional 20,000 reserved for “foreign professionals who graduate with a master’s degree or doctorate from a U.S. institution,” according to an H-1B visa factsheet by AIC.
“During his prior term in office. His administration implemented a series of policy changes that made obtaining and maintaining [H-1B] status significantly more challenging,” Loweree stated.
Trump increased regulation on the program, starting with the Buy American and Hire American Executive Order which instructed agencies to “propose new rules and issue new guidance…to protect the interests of United States workers in the administration of our immigration system.”
This increased denial rates for H-1B applicants and made the process of applying costlier, according to Forbes. In FY 2015 denial rates for H-1B visas were six percent. By FY 2018 they rose to a high of 24 percent, according to AIC. Attorney fees for filing an H-1B visa increased between $2,000 and $4,500 per applicant. Wait times for spouses of H-1B applicants also increased, taking up to two years, in some instances, for them to receive their H-4 dependent, which allows them to live in the U.S.
Prior deference, which allowed current H-1B recipients to avoid going through the time-consuming interview process and paperwork to extend their H-1B visa, was also eliminated by Trump, according to Loweree. It was later reinstated by President Joe Biden.”
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“H-1B workers impact the U.S. economy in many ways. Highly skilled immigrants who use the H-1B visa “directly increase the production of knowledge through patents, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” according to the Cato Institute. And, because they primarily specialize in STEM fields, foreign-born workers increase productivity, employment, and wages for native-born workers.
While Trump’s promise on the All-In podcast is encouraging, his record shows that it will unlikely be kept. A calculated attack on H-1B visas by a second Trump administration would hurt U.S. innovation and the native-born workers who benefit from the skills that legal immigrants bring.”
https://reason.com/2024/11/13/trump-promised-more-legal-high-skilled-immigration-his-record-says-otherwise/