The Demographic Transformation of Germany
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9LZBjWzF4g
As the Israel-Hamas War Governs the World’s Attention, Iran Is Quietly Marching Towards Nuclear Breakout
“Tehran has enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear weapon in only 12 days according to data collected from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Iran is essentially a nuclear threshold state given their stockpile of uranium, with estimated enrichment levels as high as 84%. For context, 90% is the benchmark for full breakout capability. International sanctions on the regime’s ballistic missile program have also been allowed to expire, giving the regime carte blanche to further develop and proliferate the delivery vehicles necessary for a potential strike with the ability to reach Tel Aviv, Haifa, or even a European capital.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israel-hamas-war-governs-worlds-163112591.html
German police seize bomb-making material in raids on Hamas suspects
“German police have removed boxes of ice pack gels used to make explosives from properties linked to four men arrested on Thursday night over a Hamas plot to attack Jewish institutions in Europe.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-police-seize-bomb-making-121256171.html
The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment
“GiveDirectly has been conducting the world’s largest test of basic income: It is giving around 6,000 people in rural Kenya a little more than $20 a month, every month, starting in 2016 and going until 2028. Tens of thousands more people are getting shorter-term or differently structured payments.”
…
“It matters whether someone gets $20 a month for two years or $480 all at once. Those add up to the same amount of money; this isn’t a Side Hustle King situation. But how you get the money still matters. A certain $20 every month can help you budget and take care of regular expenses, while $480 all at once can give you enough capital to start a business or another big project.”
…
“By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group.
The explanation they arrived at was that the big $500 all at once provided valuable startup capital for new businesses and farms, which the $20 a month group would need to very conscientiously save over time to replicate. “The lump sum group doesn’t have to save,” Suri explains. “They just have the money upfront and can invest it.”
Intriguingly, the results for the long-term monthly group, which will receive about $20 a month for 12 years rather than two, had results that looked more like the lump sum group. The reason, Suri and Banerjee find, is that they used rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). These are institutions that sprout up in small communities, especially in the developing world, where members pay small amounts regularly into a common fund in exchange for the right to withdraw a larger amount every so often.
“It converts the small streams into lump sums,” Suri summarizes. “We see that the long-term arm is actually using ROSCAs. A lot of their UBI is going into ROSCAs to generate these lump sums they can use to invest.””
…
“As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol — two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result.
And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. “The lump sum group gets a huge amount of money and has to invest it, and this might cause them some stress,” Suri speculates. In any case, the long-term monthly recipients are happiest of all, and “some of that is because they know it’s going to be there for 12 years … It provides mental health benefits in a stability sense.””
…
“you could design it such that a recipient could opt into a $500 payment every two years or a $20 payment every month.
But barring that, long-term monthly payments seem to offer the best of all worlds because they enable people to use ROSCAs to generate lump sum payments when they want them. That enables flexibility: People who want monthly payments can get them, and people who need cash upfront can organize with their peers to get that.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/12/1/23981194/givedirectly-basic-income-experiment-abhijit-banerjee-tavneet-suri
American Distillers Brace for Huge E.U. Tariff Hike
“The E.U. imposed retaliatory tariffs on American whiskey (along with other quintessentially American products like blue jeans and motorcycles) in June 2018 after the Trump administration unilaterally slapped tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum. Trump’s tariffs were sold as an anti-China measure, but covered imports from allies like the E.U. and South Korea as well. The E.U.’s retaliatory tariffs, meanwhile, occurred despite promises from Trump’s top trade adviser that other countries would not respond with tariffs targeting American goods.
Due to those 25 percent tariffs, whiskey exports to Europe fell by about 20 percent between 2018 and 2021, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), which lobbies on behalf of American booze producers. That decline in foreign sales cost American distilleries over $100 million.
Those tariffs were temporarily suspended in 2022, and exports to Europe rebounded almost immediately, according to DISCUS’ data. Over the past two years, exports to the E.U. increased by 29 percent and exceeded pre-tariff levels.
Now that recent growth is at risk. If no deal is reached by January 1, the E.U. could decide to reimpose the tariffs at 50 percent—double the previous levels—when the temporary reprieve expires.”
…
“Trump’s been out of office for nearly three years, but the consequences of his half-baked trade wars are still spiraling out of control—in no small part because of Biden’s unwillingness to end them. Another escalation in that conflict now looms over American distillers.”
https://reason.com/2023/12/11/american-distillers-brace-for-huge-e-u-tariff-hike/
San Francisco’s APEC Cleanup Hasn’t ‘Fixed’ Its Homelessness Problem
“there’s the one homelessness problem experienced by the homeless themselves through a lack of housing. Then there’s the other homelessness problem experienced by the public generally through exposure to a bunch of vagrancy and disorderly behavior spilling out into streets because of that lack of homes.
San Francisco’s APEC cleanup did nothing to address the first homelessness problem, which is what the local homeless advocates are complaining about. The city simply moved some homeless people from one area of the city to another. Some have plausibly ended up inside homeless shelters or less visible spots on the street. But, the number of homeless people in the city remains as high as ever.
San Francisco did make some progress on the second homelessness problem by dismantling tent encampments, replacing people on the streets with flower boxes, and creating a heavily policed security cordon covering a few city blocks.
Even still, the city hardly “fixed” its second homelessness problem. It just shifted encampments and vagrant behavior away from the downtown.”
…
“San Francisco is one of the richest cities in the free world. Its residents shouldn’t have to choose between a degraded quality of life that comes with thousands of people living on the streets and an aggressive police state that keeps those thousands of homeless out of sight and out of mind.
Escaping that unhappy tradeoff would require the city, and the surrounding region, to radically liberalize housing construction.
That would bring housing prices down and bring a lot more people inside. That wouldn’t solve everyone’s problems, but it would mean a lot of dysfunctional behavior playing out in public will instead move behind closed doors.
A less overwhelmed San Francisco city government (and voluntary philanthropic actors) could also more judiciously deal with those remaining people that insist on pitching a tent in the park or smoking meth on the street.”
https://reason.com/2023/11/14/san-franciscos-apec-cleanup-hasnt-fixed-its-homelessness-problem/
The ‘Monster’ Isn’t the Drug, It’s the Prohibition
“People who disapprove of drugs want to end their use, but consumers have never demonstrated a willingness to comply. Sellers always arise to meet their demand. Drug innovation to evade prohibitionists, and making cocktails of those drugs, is inherently more dangerous than legal markets.”
…
“Singer attributes endless innovation in ever-stronger drugs and the rise in resulting overdoses to the competition between prohibitionists and illicit suppliers to outwit one another.
“The iron law of prohibition — ‘the harder the law enforcement, the harder the drug’—means we can expect more potent and dangerous forms of drugs to continue to arise,” he adds.
If you blend “more potent and dangerous forms of drugs” in “polysubstance use” (or just speedball it) you’re going to add risks on top of risks. The results can be tragic, but they’re less the result of drugs than they are of restrictions and prohibitions that inevitably drive consumers to seek intoxicants from illegal suppliers.”
…
“”Like opioids, which originally came from the poppy, meth started out as a plant-based product, derived from the herb ephedra. Now, both drugs can be produced in bulk synthetically and cheaply. They each pack a potentially lethal, addictive wallop far stronger than their precursors,” Hoffman wrote.
Why grow a crop in a field, which can be targeted for destruction by prohibitionists, when you can synthesize the active ingredients in a hidden laboratory that’s difficult to find and can be moved if necessary? And if you’re going to synthesize it, why not find ways to make it more concentrated so that large numbers of doses can be moved in compact shipments? You can always cut it at the distribution end and sell it in lower-concentration doses.
Unfortunately, illicit laboratories aren’t always as reliable as aboveboard ones and underground chemists aren’t necessarily as competent or diligent. When somebody screws up or just doesn’t care, it’s much harder to hold a criminal network to account than it is to go after a corporation that has a mailing address and a reputation to maintain. The end result, for the drug trade, is illness and death from intoxicants of unknown purity and potency, if the formulation was even safe to begin with.”
…
“People have always wanted to alter their consciousness in ways great and small. They will continue to want to get high no matter how much disapproval their activities draw from sober scolds. The only question is whether those getting high will acquire their intoxicants of choice from legal, responsible suppliers who have to maintain their brands and explain themselves in court, or from illegal suppliers who meet demand by any means necessary.”
https://reason.com/2023/11/15/the-monster-isnt-the-drug-its-the-prohibition/
Americans Are Still Fleeing High-Tax States
“”The IRS data show that between 2020 and 2021, 26 states experienced a net gain in income tax filers from interstate migration—led by Florida (+128,228), Texas (+82,842), North Carolina (+40,828), Arizona (+32,636), and Tennessee (+30,292)—while 24 states and the District of Columbia experienced a net loss—led by California (-158,220), New York (-142,109), Illinois (-53,910), Massachusetts (-25,029), and Louisiana (-14,113),” write Yushkov and Loughead.
“Consistent with last year’s version of this publication, it is clear from the 2020-2021 IRS migration data that there is a strong positive relationship between state tax competitiveness and net migration,” they add. “Overall, states with lower taxes and sound tax structures experienced stronger inbound migration than states with higher taxes and more burdensome tax structures.””
https://reason.com/2023/11/17/americans-are-still-fleeing-high-tax-states/
What American Conservatives Can Learn From Argentina’s Javier Milei
“While there might be some overlap with American conservatives when it comes to cutting certain taxes and regulations, the rest of Milei’s political agenda is expressly libertarian and often directly at odds with the aims of the so-called “New Right.”
On social and economic issues, Milei has advocated reducing or eliminating the role of government. (The one arguable exception is his support for abortion laws, but that is an issue that has long divided libertarians.) America’s conservatives are moving in the opposite direction: ginning up culture wars to justify further intrusions into individuals’ right to live as they see fit, and competing with the progressive left to pander with promises of more economic interventions: tariffs, industrial policies, direct subsidies to the working and middle classes. The loudest contingent of the American conservative movement has been promising that a more muscular and centralized government is the answer.
Milei’s victory is not a part of that narrative. In fact, it should undermine it.
His is undeniably a populist victory, but it seems to have more in common with the so-called “Tea Party” era of Republican politics—when American conservatives called for slashing government programs and spending, even though they rarely followed through—or to the surprising presidential runs by former congressman Ron Paul than with anything Trump or his acolytes have supported.”
…
“Milei’s election looks a lot like a rejection of the kind of economic nationalism that leading politicians in America are pushing, from Biden’s “Buy American” mandates to Trump’s anti-trade and anti-immigration views.
There are, of course, limits to how useful any foreign election can be as a guide for U.S. politicians. The political terrain in Argentina is not the same as it is in the United States. Most notably, the place suffers an inflation rate that makes what we have experienced in recent years look mild by comparison.”
https://reason.com/2023/11/20/what-american-conservatives-can-learn-from-argentinas-javier-milei/