The Freedomnomics Blog

Newest Fox News piece: President Obama's strange definition of fairness

2012-01-26T19:54:00.000-08:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Obama pushed for higher tax rates on what he called “the wealthiest Americans.”

He declared: “Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.” As usual, the president motivated the higher taxes with references to “fair play” and getting the wealthy to pay their “fair share” of taxes.

“Fairness” was the codeword of the State of the Union address, not the chronic problem of lingering high unemployment, something the president never even mentioned.

Of course, Obama emphasized “fairness,” but his newest attacks on the wealthy not paying their “fair share” very conveniently comes right after Mitt Romney revealed that he has averaged paying a 14 percent tax rate over the last two years.

Unfortunately, some Republicans come across as confused about capital gains taxes. Romney pushes a weak defense . . . .

New Fox News piece: Lessons to be learned from Europe's debt downgrades

2012-01-23T14:44:00.000-08:00

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

As we watch the Eurozone struggle with its financial challenges Keynesians keep telling us the solution to our economic problems is to spend more money, to pile up bigger debts.

A week and a half ago, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of more than half of the Eurozone's countries, and the failure of those policies should be very obvious by now.

Solving the Greek debt crisis hit yet another snag on Sunday afternoon. New aid for Greece from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank would have relied on private bondholders “voluntarily” agreeing to a 50 percent cut in the value of the Greek bonds they hold as the Greek government claims it can't afford the interest rates demanded on the remaining debt. Unfortunately, for the Greek government, it lacks the power to abrogate the rights of foreign bondholders.

Greece can't simply apply the Obama administration's method of doing away with the rights of GM's and Chryslers' bondholders.

The European countries that have fared the best, such as Germany and Poland, rejected the Keynesian medicine. In contrast, countries following the Keynesian path with massive deficits to try to "stimulate" the economy -- such as Greece, Portugal, and Ireland -- have done poorly, with low growth and increased government debt. . . .

New Fox News piece: Should New York tourists have their lives destroyed because of concealed carry laws?

2012-01-18T01:24:00.000-08:00

My newest piece starts this way:

Just a few days before Christmas, Meredith Graves made a mistake that could end her medical career and send her to prison for at least 3 ½ years. The 39-year-old fourth-year medical student was carrying a permitted concealed handgun when she saw the sign at the 9/11 Memorial saying “No guns allowed.” She did the responsible thing and asked a security guard where she could check her weapon. Unfortunately, while her Tennessee concealed carry license is recognized in 40 states, New York isn’t one of them. Meredith was arrested.
A week earlier, Californian Mark Meckler told LaGuardia Airport officials that he had licensed handgun in a locked safe in checked baggage. At virtually any other airport in the country, checking a gun locked in a box wouldn’t be a problem. Meckler was arrested and charged with second-degree possession of an illegal weapons. He faces up to 15 years in prison.
Even New York’s second most powerful Democrat and a strong gun control advocate, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver thinks that tourists who accidentally break the state’s strict carry laws shouldn’t have their lives destroyed. “Her actions show a clear indication that she didn’t know she was breaking the law, and when she saw the sign, she said, ‘OK, I do have a gun. Take it from me.’ There was no criminal intent,” said Silver.
As the Tennessean newspaper (Nashville) put it: “[Meredith’s] arrest highlights the confusing patchwork of concealed weapons laws across the nation.”
But New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the local District Attorneys don’t seem interested in showing mercy. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Obama Has Learned Nothing From the Mortgage Meltdown Mess

2012-01-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Just days before Christmas, the Obama administration gave Bank of America a big lump of coal, levying a hefty $335 million dollar fine on the company for discriminating against minorities in its lending practices.

Supposedly Countrywide, a mortgage company bought by Bank of America in 2008, had not given out enough low interest rate loans to minorities from 2004 to 2008.

What the large fine reveals is that President Obama hasn’t learned anything from the recent financial crisis.

What the president sees as discrimination in awarding a mortgage, lenders saw as wise business decisions.

If a borrower can’t afford a down payment, Obama appears to view charging a higher interest rate as discrimination. Lenders also think that they shouldn’t treat borrowers whose sole source of income is welfare or unemployment insurance, the same as those applicants who have a job. But Obama, again, appears to view this as discrimination.

There is obviously a problem with no down payments: if the price of the house falls so that it is worth less than the loan, some people will default and walk away. Similarly, when unemployment insurance or welfare runs out, borrowers might find they can’t keep paying their mortgage.

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act the Obama administration used to impose this fine was exactly what helped cause the mortgage crisis by forcing lenders to make risky loans that they didn’t want to make.
Yet, just last month, Obama put the blame for these risky loans going bad on banks for their “breathtaking greed” that “plunged our economy and the world into a crisis.”

Countrywide, a leading lender of subprime mortgages, was already issuing too many risky loans. Indeed, it was the poster child for doing what the government wanted.
In 2002, Countrywide adopted its “No Income/No Asset Documentation Program.” Borrowers could get a loan with just 5 percent down. The big government mortgage bundlers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bought these mortgages and encouraged Countrywide to expand the program. By the first half of 2006, almost two-thirds of Countrywide’s subprime loans lacked any down payment. . . .

Why do dinners cost more than lunches at the same restaurant?

2011-12-15T22:12:00.000-08:00

Well, I am glad that my book Freedomnomics mentions a couple of those explanations (I don’t have the one about the A-team). The competition explanation doesn’t seem right. You can see this phenomenon in DC with a whole row of restaurants right next to each other. Lunch might compete with “in-house cafeterias, the dirty water hot dog cart, chain restaurants, and delivery businesses,” but for dinner you are also less likely to eat right near where you work or live. Jonas M Luster has this discussion:

. . . Some things are static, such as my lease, power, linens, licenses, etc. Other things vary between lunch and dinner:

Lunch isn't prepared and served by my A-team. Many times waiters and cooks have to prove themselves during lunch before being allowed on the dinner line. This means I pay less in payroll.
Lunch doesn't usually serve a full menu. The menu is optimized for faster production and oftentimes smaller portioned. Smaller menu means less storage, smaller dishes mean less storage, and faster turnaround means less secondary storage costs (hot/warm holding, etc.)
Lunch diners spend an average of 45 minutes from entry to exit, dinner guests take over twice as long. This means faster turnaround during lunch hours, which either means more covers or less staff needed. Both saves me money.
Lunch guests don't want/need candles and expensive bottles of water. They want food. We cater to this by dropping down to the bare bone of fine dining hospitality, removing fluff.

Last, but not least, lunch is a competitive market. We compete with in-house cafeterias, the dirty water hot dog cart, chain restaurants, and delivery businesses. By pricing ourselves competitively we ensure good covers every day of the week (low day is Tuesday, high day is Thursday, by the way) and a hot, pre-stocked, kitchen for dinner. That saves us money (I don't have to pay someone to come in at 3pm and set up stocks and sauces, for example, I can have the lunch crew do those during slows and as part of their prep) and time, which in and by itself is money. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Fast and Furious Scandal Cries Out for Answers

2011-12-10T08:52:00.001-08:00

The way my newest Fox News piece starts:

The "Fast & Furious" scandal is getting messier and messier. New e-mails finally released late this past Friday reveal that the Department of Justice personal viewed the then-secret operation as a way to push for more gun control laws. Despite administration promises to the contrary, whistleblowers have endured "isolation, retaliation and transfer."
Meanwhile the operation's managers have done pretty well, some have even received promotions.
Thursday Attorney General Eric Holder admitted that the operation was "wholly unacceptable," but he still offers absolutely no explanation to explain why the program was instituted.
What's going on here? Let's see...
- You have a government agency ordering gun dealers to make sales to suspected criminals that the dealers didn't want to sell to. - You have government agents testifying that the guns being purchased were not being traced. No attempt was made to even alert the Mexican government that the United States of America was given guns to drug gangs in their country. . . .

$3.42 for the Kindle version of the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime

2011-12-05T18:11:00.001-08:00

‎$3.42 for the Kindle version of the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime! The third edition came out last year and it has about 200 pages of new material over the second edition (2000) and about 300 pages over the first edition (1998). I am going to have to give them a call tomorrow a find out what is going on because at that price I am getting a royalty of a couple of dimes. At least a lot of people will hopefully final get a copy at that price! The book is available here.

Newest Fox News piece: What the New Unemployment Numbers Are Telling Us

2011-12-02T10:40:00.001-08:00

My newest piece starts this way:

The new unemployment numbers are a lot worse than the headlines indicate. The news media breathlessly reports that 120,000 jobs were created in November, but the working age population increased by about 160,000 people. But with job creation not even keeping up with the number of people entering the work force, how is it possible for the unemployment rate to fall from 9.0 to 8.6 percent?

The explanation is actually pretty simple. People are only counted as unemployed as long as they are actively looking for work. The obviously good for it to fall is from people getting a job. It is bad reason is if people simply give up looking for work.

In November, the numbers could hardly have been worse -- 487,000 people simply gave up looking for work and left the labor force. It is the 6th worst report since the recession started 48 months ago. Even more startling, 5 of those 6 worst reports have occurred since the “recovery” supposedly started in June 2009 (See this link here). . . .

A discussion of the costs of abortion

2011-11-30T22:39:00.001-08:00

Bill Flax has a useful discussion of the abortion debate and the costs of abortion available here.

Newest piece at Fox News: "What's Wrong With Making It Easier to Carry a Gun Across State Lines?"

2011-11-15T17:40:00.001-08:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Congress is expected to vote Tuesday on whether concealed carry gun licenses should be treated the same way we treat driver's licenses for cars. With 245 co-sponsors in the House, the only question is whether there are the 290 votes necessary to override President Obama's veto.
For decades, treating licenses for guns like those for cars was something that gun control advocates wanted.
In his 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore promised: "We require a license to drive a car in this nation in order to keep unsafe drivers off the road. As president, I will fight for a national requirement that every state issue photo licenses [for handgun buyers]. We should require a license to own a handgun so people who shouldn't have them, can't get them."
Handgun Control Inc., as well as its later incarnation as the Brady Campaign, has pushed licensing plan since the 1970s. But what would this actually mean for gun control? After all, what does a driver's license let you do?
You don't need a driver's license to drive a car on private property, merely on public roads. And once you get a license, you are allowed to drive any car on any public road anywhere in the United States. You are responsible for obeying the different traffic regulations in different states, but as long as you do, you are fine. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Blame Bush -- Is That Holder's Strategy to Get Out of the 'Fast and Furious' Mess?

2011-11-08T11:03:00.001-08:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Blame Bush. It has been almost three years since President Obama took office, yet he still blames Bush for the bad economy. Now the Obama administration is following the same strategy to get out of the "Fast and Furious" mess.
"Fast and Furious," also called the "Gunwalker" case, involves the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF) agents ordering American gun dealers to sell guns to obvious Mexican drug gang members during 2009 and 2010. This was done over the objections of the gun dealers.
Both Fox News and the Washington Post started covering this scandal in early February this year. It may be excusable that Attorney General Eric Holder did not read the press reports, but, if we are to believe his congressional testimony Tuesay, he and his staff also neglected to pay attention to the 100 or so page "weekly reports" summarizing activity in the Justice Department. . . .

New National Review piece: Goolsbee’s Gaffes

2011-11-02T02:00:00.000-07:00

My piece at National Review Online starts this way:

The Obama administration is having a difficult time explaining the unemployment rate, which has been above 9 percent for 27 consecutive months and is today 1.3 percentage points higher than it was when Obama took office. The October numbers, due to be released on Friday, are unlikely to look any better. So, his administration goes to great lengths to spin its own unique set of facts.

Just look at Austan Goolsbee’s Friday interview on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Despite having stepped down as Obama’s chief economic advisor in August, Goolsbee continues to do media shows supporting Obama’s economic policies. Goolsbee declared: “I deal only in facts, Sean.” Here is a simple fact check of Mr. Goolsbee’s claims.

Hannity: We heard that unemployment wasn’t going to go above 8 percent.

Goolsbee: When they made that 8 percent prediction, that was the same prediction being made by everyone. But you forget the other half of the thing, which is if you did nothing, the rate would go to 8.9 percent, and it was already above that before the first part of the stimulus even went out.

Mr. Goolsbee is just plain wrong. When the Obama administration got into office, they made optimistic promises about their stimulus program, claiming that during 2009, unemployment would stop rising and then fall. The unemployment rate in January was 7.8 percent. In late February, the administration claimed that it would average just 8.1 percent for the year if the Stimulus was enacted. . . .

Discussing Canada's gun registry program on the Sun News Network

2011-10-31T16:31:00.000-07:00

A video of the interview can be seen here.

My Newest Fox News Piece: Yes, the Economy Is Growing But Obama's Policies Are Not Helping

2011-10-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

The economy grew slightly faster during the third quarter. But the newly released numbers mean that for the year GDP has only grown at an incredibly slow 1.4 percent, barely keeping pace with population growth. The change in per capita GDP so far this year is essentially zero.

Normally the more severe the recession, the faster is the recovery. During the Reagan administration, for same three quarters, GDP grew at 4.8 percent. Since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, GDP growth has averaged 2.5 percent, compared to 6 percent over the same time period under Reagan. The quarterly growth rates for the two recoveries are available here.

Obviously, more people working would result in more income. The slow GDP growth is tied to the continued record high unemployment. Unemployment has remained at least at 9 percent for 27 months and counting, a post World War II record. While the unemployment rate during the recession in the early 1980s went higher, reaching 10.8 percent, the high rates did not last as long, staying above 9 percent for a relatively short 19 months. . . .

Newest National Review piece: Is the Public Sector Hurting?

2011-10-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

My piece at National Review Online starts this way:

‘It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid claimed last week. Senator Reid is simply wrong: The private sector has suffered from much deeper job cuts than public-sector workers have faced.

Obviously, Americans are hurting, with some 7 million losing their jobs since the start of the recession. And that doesn’t include the 7.2 million people who should have entered the work force over the same time period. But the pain hasn’t been in the public sector.

The only group of workers who are “doing just fine” are those working for the federal government, where employment has increased by 11 percent since the start of the recession. Both private-sector and state- and local-government employment have fallen. While private-sector employment has recovered slightly from 7.5 percent drop it originally suffered, it is still down 5.4 percent. . . .

New health care regulations seemed destined to force many off of private health insurance

2011-10-08T00:38:00.001-07:00

Almost everyone would like a Porsche or a Volvo, but the question is are we willing to pay the price. For the vast majority, the answer is obviously "no." No matter how much it would nice to own such a car, the cost simply outweighs the benefit. Not everyone wants to buy even a mid level car. Sure it would be nice for many people to own a somewhat nicer car, but the costs aren't worth it either. Notice this news article at Fox News reporting:

The advisers recommended that the package be built on mid-tier health plans currently offered by small employers, expanded to include certain services such as mental health, and squeezed into a real-world budget. . . .

Newest Fox News Piece: The China Currency Bill Will Make Americans Poorer, Not Richer

2011-10-07T01:30:00.000-07:00

My newest piece starts this way:

We seem determined to repeat the policy mistakes that made the 1930s Great Depression so deep. Already we have seen the massive increases in government spending and regulation. Today's vote on the China currency bill by the Senate adds another mistake. It resembles the infamous 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff law.

True, China is manipulating its currency to lower the value of the Yuan relative to the US dollar. This manipulation makes it cheaper for Americans to buy their exports, be it toys, furniture, or manufactured goods. It also makes it cheaper for us to purchase whole companies or shares in Chinese companies. It also means that the Chinese have to pay “too” much for American bonds and American products.

If passed, the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011 would force China to raise the value of the Yuan. And if they refuse to comply, we will increase the tariffs on what we buy from them, equivalent to putting a special tax on the goods we buy.

China’s currency manipulation is a mistake. Yet, their mistake doesn’t mean we should make one also. If Chinese leaders are stupid enough to subsidize Americans by selling their goods and assets too cheaply, why should we stop them? . . .

An easy way to find illegal aliens

2011-10-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

The new Alabama law shows that illegals respond to incentives. Will the schools look at those who started not showing up to school after the judge's decision? From the Associated Press:

Education officials say scores of immigrant families have withdrawn their children from classes or kept them home this week, afraid that sending the kids to school would draw attention from authorities.
There are no precise statewide numbers. But several districts with large immigrant enrollments -- from small towns to large urban districts -- reported a sudden exodus of children of Hispanic parents, some of whom told officials they planned to leave the state to avoid trouble with the law, which requires schools to check students' immigration status.
The anxiety has become so intense that the superintendent in one of the state's largest cities, Huntsville, went on a Spanish-language television show Thursday to try to calm widespread worries. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Media Silence Is Deafening About Important Gun News

2011-10-01T02:16:00.000-07:00

My newest piece starts this way:

Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Politicians predicted disaster. "More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence," Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision.

Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would "go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we'll settle it in the streets . . . ."
The New York Times even editorialized this month about the Supreme Court's "unwise" decision that there is a right for people "to keep guns in the home."

But Armageddon never happened. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Has Your Job Been 'Saved'?

2011-09-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

My newest piece starts this way:

During Obama's first two years in office, he passed five stimulus/jobs bills. If you add up the promises, he boldly promised something well over 5.5 million jobs "created or saved." But reality turned out very differently: there are now 2 million fewer people working than when the first Stimulus passed. On top of that, the number of jobs should have increased as the country’s population has grown by almost 5 million. Population growth by itself should have generated more than 3 million new jobs.

President Obama claims that instead of our economy being short of over 5 million jobs, things would have been even worse without his policies. We would have lost 10.5 million jobs without all his spending. No matter how bad the job numbers get, Obama points to some hypothetical economic meltdown that was avoided by his policies. Thus, no evidence whatsoever, no matter how bad, can be used against him.

With all the different “Stimulus” and “jobs” programs, it is hard to remember all the promises and to keep track of where all the money has gone. . . .

New Fox News piece: Obama Gets the Numbers Wrong In His Tax Plan!

2011-09-20T01:00:00.001-07:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

The justification for President Obama's new proposed tax on the wealthy is wrong on the numbers. Despite the president's claims, millionaires don't pay lower tax rates than middle class workers. His proposed surcharge on capital gains and dividend taxes will raise already high tax rates on high income individuals and force even more investment outside the United States. The so-called "Buffett rule" is based on Warren Buffett's claim:
"The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

It is true that the 15 percent capital gains and dividend tax rates are lower than the marginal income tax rate paid by a lot of workers. Of course, this ignores that because of deductions the average tax rate for the middle class is much lower than the marginal rate. . . .

Texas Unemployment Miracle

2011-08-25T09:06:00.001-07:00

Appearance on Aug. 23, 2011 at 12:35 PM.

Newest Fox News piece: Liberals and the Texas Unemployment Miracle

2011-08-20T05:12:00.000-07:00

If this is the best that the Democrats can do to attack Rick Perry's Texas, the election might already be over. Democrats feel that they have to attack Texas because they don't have any way to defend Obama's policies. This is how my newest Fox News piece starts:

With Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry officially entering the presidential race last week, liberals have started attacking Texas' economic record.
Paul Krugman in the New York Times went first last Sunday. "So what you need to know is that the Texas miracle is a myth, and more broadly that Texan experience offers no useful lessons on how to restore national full employment," Krugman claimed.
With the latest Gallup poll showing that just 26 percent of Americans approve of President Obama's performance on the economy, liberals have little choice but to try to distort what is happening in Texas.
"In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. . . ."

The Texas unemployment rate is about one percentage point lower than the national average, and it is true that other states such as New York and Massachusetts also have very similar rates (see the diagram here). . . . .

Please leave comments and link to this piece. Thank you.

Krugman's ill considered claims about Texas

2011-08-18T21:48:00.001-07:00

Krugman makes several claims about why Texas' economy really isn't looking that good. An economist shouldn't be making the mistakes that Krugman does. Here are his claims:

"In June 2011, the Texas unemployment rate was 8.2 percent. That was less than unemployment in collapsed-bubble states like California and Florida, but it was slightly higher than the unemployment rate in New York, and significantly higher than the rate in Massachusetts. . . ."

Anyone who has been following the US unemployment numbers knows that things are a lot worse than the simply unemployment rate number indicates, and they are worse for a simple reason: people have given up looking for work and have completely left the labor force. People can stop being unemployed either when they get a job or when they give up looking for a job. Obviously, everyone wants to lower the unemployment rate through only the first option. Yet, unfortunately, people giving up looking for work has been the hallmark of the Obama administration. People are supposed to start looking for work during recoveries. It is during a recession that Americans give up looking for work. During the Obama "recovery" about 2.8 million more Americans have given up and completely stopped looking for work.

The data for individual states is available at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Texas' unemployment rate is better than the national average, and it is true that there are other states such as New York and Massachusetts who have very similar rates.

So how is it that Texas is creating all these jobs but not showing a drop in the unemployment rate? The answer is that unlike Texas workers in the nation as a whole as well as Massachusetts and New York have completely given up looking for work. While Texas' labor force has grown by 350,000 since the recession ended in June 2009, Massachusetts has remained virtually unchanged and New York's has fallen by 140,000. Keeping a similar unemployment rate to Texas isn't quite the wonderful accomplishment when so many people have given up looking for work. The rest of the states will suffer a long term unemployment problem that Texas won't face because eventually when the economy does recover those who have given up looking for work will start looking again.

"It’s true that Texas entered recession a bit later than the rest of America, mainly because the state’s still energy-heavy economy was buoyed by high oil prices through the first half of 2008. . . ."

If Krugman can see significant swings in either the number of people employed or the number in the labor force as gas prices change, he has better eyes than I do. Krugman notes that Texas benefited from gas prices rising in 2008, but he fails to mention how Texas still did well relative to other states even when gas prices plummeted in late 2008 and stayed low through most of 2010.

"Also, Texas was spared the worst of the housing crisis, partly because it turns out to have surprisingly strict regulation of mortgage lending. . . ."

The reason that Texas didn't have a meltdown is largely because it didn't have the huge rise in housing prices preceding it and the reason that happened was because Texas has relatively few zoning regulations that restrict growth.

The Washington Post's Brad Plumer and Harold Meyerson largely get marching orders from Krugman, mentioning Texas' "oil boom" economy and then going after the high rate that Texans earn the minimum wage.

Plumer: "And Texas’ job surge hasn’t necessarily led to high-paying jobs: The state boasts the highest percentage of minimum-wage workers in the country, and its per capita income still sits below, say, California’s. . . ."

Meyerson: "It has the fourth-highest poverty rate of any state. It tied with Mississippi last year for the highest percentage of workers in minimum-wage jobs. . . ."

Unfortunately, neither of these writers really understand what these numbers mean. The biggest problem with both sets of claims is that Texas has the second largest percent of its population under age 18 at almost 28 percent. (Mississippi by the way is 8th.) Children ages 0 to 17 don't make much income if any, but obviously they go into calculating per capita income numbers. If you want to compare what people are making across states, a much more useful approach is to compare GDP per adult and in 2008 Texas ranked 8th, not too shabby. California ranked at 11th. This high rate of young people also dramatically raises the rate that people in the population are earning the minimum wage. Given that single women with kids make up such a large portion of those in poverty, it isn't surprising that this high rate of having children also drives up the poverty rate.

Another discussion of Krugman's claims can be found here.

The Dennis Miller Posts interview on "The Danger of Gun-Free Zones"

2011-08-12T22:42:00.001-07:00

For those interested, I had an interview with Dennis Miller available here. Dennis was nice enough to have me on his show again, and he was extremely nice to let me talk as much as I did (I probably talked much too much). Anyway, it is well worth it to subscribe to Dennis's show.

C-SPAN.org: Should Students Be Allowed to Carry Guns on College Campuses?

2011-08-08T16:59:00.001-07:00

Students for Concealed Carry had their National Convention today. There were a range of different talks from victims of gun-free zones; a debate that I participated in with a representative of the Brady Campaign starts about 28 minutes into the clip and lasts for 50 minutes; some academics such as Nelson Lund, Bob Cottrol, and Jim Purtilo; and Alan Gura. The link to their video of the event is available here. The entire video is 3 hours and 32 minutes. I think that this convention went very well.

C-SPAN has placed this event at the top of its website page right now.

Responding to Jack D'Aurora's piece in the Columbus Dispatch

2011-08-07T17:13:00.001-07:00

A little over a week ago, Jack D'Aurora had a pretty amazing piece in the Columbus Dispatch (available here), where Mr. Jack D'Aurora made the mistake of accepting what Ayres and Donohue wrote in their 2003 law review piece as being accurate. The mistakes listed below are basically mistakes in the Ayres and Donohue paper. My Letter was finally published on Saturday (available here).

Will letting law-abiding citizens carry concealed handguns deter criminals and offer protection? Or is Jack D'Aurora right (Forum column, July 29) when he states that “heated arguments can escalate into shootings” and that criminals will become “more inclined to pack heat”?

He alleged that my research, published in my book More Guns, Less Crime, ignored such concerns. But obviously D'Aurora did not trouble himself to actually read any edition of my book.

According to D'Aurora, my research found a benefit from concealed-handgun laws merely because it covered the time period from 1977 to 1992, and, supposedly, if I had studied the seven years up to 1999, the results would have been different.

This is absurd. Even the first edition of my book covered up to 1994. I updated the evidence with each new edition, and by the third edition in 2010, I covered county- and state-level data for all the years from 1977 to 2005. No matter the time period, the results remained very similar.

D'Aurora also conveniently ignored the massive amount of work by other researchers during the past 15 years. Among peer-reviewed studies in academic journals by criminologists and economists, 18 studies examining national data found that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime, 10 indicated no discernible effect, and none — absolutely none — found a bad effect from the law.

D'Aurora further mischaracterized the law-review article he cites by Ian Ayres and John Donohue. That paper claimed to find a small temporary increase in crime, subsequently followed by a downward trend in crime rates. Other evidence of theirs shows no temporary increase.

His accusation that I “did not account for the large increase in crack cocaine use” is false: I did so in five different ways, such as studying county-level cocaine prices.

Questions about whether heated arguments can escalate into shootings were not ignored. If permit holders did these things, they would be put in jail and lose their permits. But permit holders are extremely law-abiding. In Ohio, about 178,000 had concealed-handgun permits last year, but just 206 — 0.1 percent — had their permits revoked. Most revocations involved people losing their permits because they moved out of state, died or decided not to hold their license anymore.

Other states provide more detailed data. Florida is typical. From Oct. 1, 1987, to June 30, 2011, more than 2 million people were issued permits, with the average person possessing one for more than a decade. One hundred sixty-eight (about 0.01%) had their permits revoked for any type of firearms-related violation, mostly for accidentally carrying a concealed handgun into a gun-free zone.

There is no research showing that criminals are more likely to “pack heat.” In fact, right-to-carry laws cause gun crimes to drop more than non-gun crimes.

Finally, the most telling fact may be this: No state that has adopted a right-to-carry law has ever even held hearings on rescinding it.

Newest Fox News piece: Looks Like We're In a Recession, Not a 'Recovery'

2011-08-05T20:29:00.001-07:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

There seems no place to hide. Americans have seen the value of their stock portfolios crash this week. The S&P 500 and NASDAQ have both lost about 8 percent of their values, and they are headed down again today.
This week the Japanese NIKKEI stock market also lost over 9 percent of its value. And the UK's FTSE has lost over 11 percent. The German DAX about 13 percent.
So much for promises that if we only passed the debt ceiling increase the stock markets would be calmed.
Everyone was waiting for today's unemployment numbers to be released. The 117,000 new jobs temporarily lifted spirits because the number was better than what many had expected, but it was still not enough new jobs to even absorb more than three-quarters of the growing working-age population. Unemployment fell because 193,000 more people simply gave up looking for work.
Indeed, people giving up looking for work has been the hallmark of the Obama administration. . . . .

Newest Fox News piece: The S&P Downgrade Is a Wake Call for All Americans

2011-08-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

When Standard & Poors downgraded Spain's bonds from AAA to AA+ in January 2009, its interest rates increased from 4.1 to 4.3 percent.
When the same ratings agency downgraded Ireland's from AAA to AA+ in March 2009, their interest rate rose by about 0.4 percentage points.
So what does that mean for Standard & Poors in terms of downgrading the U.S. bond rating?
With our $14.6 trillion in national debt, raising the U.S. government interest rates by the same amounts would eventually add about $29 to $58 billion a year in increased interest costs -- small change when we are already facing a $1.63 trillion deficit this year. And not all of that increase would be immediately felt since we only face the higher interest rate on newly issued bonds.
The problem with these downgrades is that they have a tendency to quickly spiral out of control. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: The Debt Deal's Three Biggest Winners and Losers

2011-08-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

My newest piece starts this way:

With a debt ceiling agreement finally in place and the Senate on track to approve it today congratulations are being handed out all around.

Armageddon and catastrophe has supposedly been averted. And politicians are rushing to put the best face on the deal.

Unfortunately, the new agreement does not accomplish as much as many had hoped, or as much as it should have, in terms of curbing spending and continued deficits. This explains why stock markets continued to fall despite the supposedly "good" news. The reason is because, once again, politicians are continuing to push the problem to the future.

Here's a look at the winners and losers in the aftermath of the "catastrophe" that's just been averted:

The Winners:

1. Stimulus Recipients and Big Government: President Obama’s “Stimulus” was supposed to just be temporary. Alas, the debt agreement locks in big government and the extra spending President Obama initiated will continue.

After government spending soared by 28 percent from 2008 to 2011, the debt deal only starts cutting a meager $22 billion next year. That is an incredibly trivial cut -- just 0.6% of expenditures planned for next year. The cuts agreed on are heavily back-loaded towards the end of the 10 year budgeting cycle, when President Obama and many members of Congress will be out of office.

Short of a constitutional amendment mandating balanced budgets, . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Seven Myths About the Looming Debt-Ceiling 'Disaster'

2011-07-15T10:03:00.001-07:00

My newest piece starts this way:

If Congress and the president don't raise the debt ceiling, the consequences will be disastrous, politicians and pundits tell us, -- the equivalent of an economic Armageddon. And President Obama warns that the consequences are so dire that he cannot possibly tolerate any delay in making an agreement. He announced yesterday that any debt deal must be completed by today, July 15th.
According to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, failure to raise the debt ceiling limit will cause the United States to default and "cause a financial crisis potentially more severe than the crisis from which we are only now starting to recover.”
On Thursday, he renewed these warnings. And President Obama alarmed retired Americans this week: "I cannot guarantee that those [Social Security] checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it."
But the list of terrible things to come, if the government is stopped from continued deficit spending, goes on. Failure to raise the ceiling, it is warned, will dramatically raise mortgage interest rates, cause housing sales to plunge, create panic on world financial markets, and destroy the value of the dollar.
Austan Goolsbee, Obama's head of his Counsel of Economic Advisers, went so far this week as to blame the continued slow economic recovery on those few politicians who are against raising the debt ceiling. "[I]t's important we remove this wet blanket of uncertainty that is permeating the private sector where they don't know that the government -- there are people actively advocating that the government declare it's not going to pay its bills," he told MSNBC. Yet, the slow recovery has been going on for over two years, well before Republicans obtained control of the House of Representatives.
A new CBS News/New York Times poll finds that Americans oppose increasing the debt ceiling, by a 69 to 24 percent margin.
Mr. Obama dismissed this finding recently and, as usual, he believes he knows better. According to him, Americans just don't understand the complexities of the arguments: "Let me distinguish between professional politicians and the public at large. The public is not paying close attention to the ins and outs of how a Treasury (bond) auction goes. They shouldn't. . . . They've got a lot of other things on their plate. We're paid to worry about it. . . . Now, I will say that some of the professional politicians know better. And for them to say that we shouldn't be raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible. They know better."
But the general public is right. There is an overload from all the doomsday predictions. Earlier this year, before the debt limit was hit on May 21, the Obama administration already used the same scare tactics.
Here's a look at seven myths that the Obama administration is pushing on the American people: . . .

Newest New York Post piece: Canada's cold proof: Job growth without 'stimulus'

2011-07-10T05:37:00.000-07:00

My piece at the New York Post starts this way:

President Obama insists that our sluggish recovery would've been even worse without his $830 billion "stimulus." Last Friday, the White House released a report purportedly showing that passage of the "stimulus" created up to 3.6 million jobs (even though the economy actually lost 1.8 million jobs since then).

But if Obama's program -- including a 28 percent hike in spending since 2008 and more than $4 trillion in deficits -- worked so well, why has our unemployment rate risen more since those policies were adopted than have the rates of the European Union, South America, Japan, Australia or New Zealand?

Just look north: The recession hit Canada hard. Because its economy and ours are connected, our unemployment rates moved similarly from July 2008 until the "stimulus" passed; both countries' rates were 6.1 percent in August 2008 and rose in lockstep through February 2009, to around 8 percent. . . .

Obama's top campaign adviser says that unemployment won't be very important in the 2012 election.

“The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers,” Plouffe said, according to Bloomberg. “People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate, they’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’ ” . . .

Obama's Press Secretary, Jay Carney, expanded on this point:

JAKE TAPPER, ABC NEWS: "Lastly, comments by Senior Adviser David Plouffe were criticized today. Earlier this week, he said, quote, “The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers. People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate, they’re going to vote based on how do I feel about my own situation: Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?”
And Republican front runner Mitt Romney said that those comments were — he suggested they were out of touch, and he said that if Plouffe worked for him, he would fire him."

JAY CARNEY: "Well, I understand that we’re engaged in the – or rather, the Republicans are engaged in a primary campaign, trying to get some media attention. I don’t know where, you know, the voters that some other folks might be talking to — but — or — but most people do not sit around their kitchen table and analyze GDP and unemployment numbers. They talk about how they feel their own economic situation is. And they measure it by whether they have a job, whether they have job security; whether their house – whether they’re meeting their house payment, whether their mortgage is underwater; whether they have the money to pay for their children’s education or they don’t; whether they’re dealing with a sick parent and can afford that, or whether they can’t.
They do not sit around analyzing The Wall Street Journal or other — or Bloomberg to look at the — you know, analyze the numbers. Now, maybe some folks do, but not most Americans. I think that’s the point David Plouffe was making; that’s the point the president was making just moments ago in his statement in the Rose Garden."

A copy of Obama's remarks from today is available here. Can't Obama say something new once and a while? Meanwhile the Obama administration has "new talking points" and is blaming Congress for the slow recovery.

"This jobs report and the last one should be calls to action, let's stop with the bickering, let's do at least those things we can agree on," White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said on MSNBC.

When President Obama appeared in the Rose Garden Friday to address the latest jobs report, he was a little more circumspect and lighter on the blame.

To get serious on jobs, Obama said Congress should create an infrastructure bank, pass three trade agreements, pass patent reform and extend the payroll tax cut.

"I urge Congress not to wait," Obama said.

Goolsbee, sounding way more exasperated, echoed the same points on cable later but took it further, blaming "bickering" by "folks in Washington."

"My point is, if we get numbers like the ones we've seen, which reiterate how important it's going to be that we get the growth rate back up to what it was for the previous 15 months so we can add millions of jobs, we need to stop with the bickering," he said. . . .

Just take the trade agreements. Obama could get these passed by just forwarding them to Congress, but OBAMA HASN'T FORWARDED them. He wants to have a side piece of legislation that would give money to those who might lose their jobs from foreign competition. But Obama failed to mention his role in not getting this passed.

New Fox News piece: Greece Needs to Pay Off Debts While It Still Has a Chance

2011-06-22T18:07:00.000-07:00

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Tuesday night the Greek government survived a no confidence vote, with relative ease, thus allowing the Greek government to go forward negotiating a new bailout. The government faces a vote over "new austerity" measures, but there is no more reason to believe that Greece will keep its promises to sell assets and cut spending this time than it has over the past year.
Last year's mammoth €110 billion ($157 billion) European Union and International Monetary Fund bailout was supposed to cover Greece's financial problems for three years. But just one year later Greece is seeking another €100 billion.
The G-7 countries and major banks met well into Monday morning but failed to reach an agreement on any more than a temporary bridge loan.
Despite Greece's promises, government spending is up over last year's already bloated levels, the deficit is bigger than ever, and it has utterly failed to meet the promised sell-off of some government assets. Not a single public bureaucrat has been laid off so far. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Who Has the Best Plans to Rescue America from the Budget Crisis?

2011-05-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

My newest Fox News piece starts out this way:

Who has the best plans to fight the budget crisis? Well, it seem that the Democrats do not even have a plan, or perhaps they secretly have one but are embarrassed to release it. Either way, Democrats are stubbornly refusing to release any budget plan. Instead, they just complain about the two that have been presented so far.

Thus when the Senate voted on budget plans this week, Senators considered two options but neither one received a single yes-vote from a Democrat.

One proposal, the House Republican budget, the so-called "Ryan plan," was attacked by Democrats as "draconian” or “unconscionable."

The other option was President Obama's plan from February. But as The Hill newspaper reported: “the Democratic caucus would not support the [president’s February] plan because it has been supplanted by the deficit-reduction plan Obama outlined at a speech at George Washington University in April.”

So why not vote on the April plan? . . .

New Fox News piece: Team Obama's Debt Limit Scare Tactics Are Getting Old -- Fast

2011-05-19T14:04:00.001-07:00

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Wasn't the world supposed to end on Monday? No, I'm not talking about May 21. But on Monday, the U.S. government officially hit its debt limit, but where are disasters that the Obama administration have been predicting for months? We were warned that hitting the debt limit would be "deeply irresponsible" or “insanity” or “abrupt contraction would likely push us into a double dip recession.” But Americans woke up today to find nothing really changed from last week.

The Obama administration’s scare tactics are getting old. Unfortunately, they keep on getting away with this and aren’t held accountable when their scare stories prove false.

Take the warning Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made on January 6th. He wrote Congress a letter asserting: "the debt limit will be reached as early as March 31, 2011, and most likely sometime between that date and May 16, 2011. . . . it is strongly in our national interest for Congress to act well before the debt limit is reached” (italics added). Failure to act before this deadline would lead to "default on legal obligations," "catastrophic damage to the economy, potentially much more harmful than the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009." Spending will be "discontinued [or] limited" on everything from Social Security and Medicare, U.S. military salaries, Medicaid payments to states, to "forced default on legal [interest] obligations."

The debt limit increase was so critical that President Obama has long opposed any attempts by Republicans to use the debt limit increase to cut the debt, claiming that it had to be a “clean” bill. White House Budget Director Jack Lew told lawmakers in March that it had to be “clean -- it’s irresponsible to do anything but extending the debt limit.” . . .

New Fox News piece: Where Are the Jobs, Mr. President? The Jobless Obama Recovery Continues

2011-05-09T13:34:00.000-07:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

There has been no recovery in the job market during the Obama recovery. Despite all the cheerleading by the Obama administration and the media, job creation has been horribly sluggish. The jobs created recently are noteworthy only in comparison to the lack of jobs created during the rest of the “recovery.” In contrast to other recoveries over at least the last half century, job creation has never been more anemic.

When the new employment numbers came out on Friday, Austan Goolsbee, the head of the President Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, boasted about "the solid pace of employment growth in recent months" and that "The overall trajectory of the economy has improved dramatically over the past two years." Headlines in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times were equally glowing, trumpeting "solid growth" and "strong growth."

During the 23 months since the Obama recovery started, an average of 23,000 jobs a month have been created. The same 23 month period into the Reagan recovery saw that an average of 285,800 jobs were added each month.

So what about the last three months? . . .

What will the new GDP numbers show this week?

2011-04-23T23:00:00.001-07:00

The gross domestic product estimate for the first quarter of 2011 is due Thursday. For the first six quarters after the recovery under Obama, GDP growth has averaged about 2.95 percent. Under Reagan, given what was probably at least as bad of a recession, GDP growth averaged 6.63 percent, more than twice as much. Already the poor growth numbers expected to be released on Thursday are being explained away by high oil prices. With prices reaching $3.896 per gallon on April 20th, they are indeed quite high. But this is akin to leaving out oil and food price increases in measuring inflation. Obama blames speculators for the high prices, while Obama should look at government for responsibility.

Fox News: Credit Rating Wake Up Call on Debt?

2011-04-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

Obama still doesn't get it on economics

2011-04-19T21:25:00.001-07:00

Reuters writes: "Obama blames speculators for rising fuel prices"

Obama doesn't understand that "speculators" smooth the swings in prices. Speculators make money by eliminating price differences over time. If they think that prices will rise, they buy oil now and store it to sell when those higher prices arise. If prices don't rise, those speculators LOSE money, losing their OWN money. Obviously there is a lot of turmoil in the Middle East. If Saudi Arabia has political trouble or other oil countries have problems, what happens to the price of oil then? BY storing some oil in case those events occur, speculators will make oil available when that short fall occurs.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday blamed speculators for driving gasoline prices higher and straining American consumers, saying there was enough oil in world markets to meet demand.

Speaking at a community college in suburban Virginia, Obama said increasing production of U.S. oil and creating a market for fuel-efficient cars would help meet the country's energy challenges. . . .

Rising fuel prices are a persistent concern for the White House, which is concerned about their impact on the economy and on voters' wallets as Obama runs for re-election.

Average U.S. gasoline prices hit $3.84 a gallon last week, the most expensive since August 2008, as oil prices have soared above $100 a barrel. . . .

Obama said that global oil supply is adequate and that speculators are driving up prices significantly.

"It is true that a lot of what's driving oil prices up right now is not the lack of supply. There's enough supply. There's enough oil out there for world demand," Obama said.

"The problem is ... speculators and people make various bets, and they say, you know what, we think that maybe there's a 20 percent chance that something might happen in the Middle East that might disrupt oil supply, so we're going to bet that oil is going to go up real high. And that spikes up prices significantly." . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Don't Single Out Standard & Poor's for Being 'Political'

2011-04-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

If you think it's hard now to balance the budget, just wait until our credit rating gets trashed. Monday’s warning from the Standard & Poor’s rating agency -- that the U.S. government’s credit rating could be revised downward -- produced a firestorm in Washington. Republicans called it a "wake-up call," while the Obama administration's chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, lambasted Standard & Poor’s actions as purely "political."
Credit ratings aren’t just a matter of national pride. Less dependable, risky borrowers have to pay a higher interest rate to get people to buy their bonds. Right now the our government only has to pay 3.4% annual interest to borrow money for 10 years. But for countries who have had trouble paying their debts, interest rates are much higher. Portugal is forced to pay 9.1%, Ireland 9.8%, and Greece 14.6%.
But America's financial problems are catching up to what these other countries face all too quickly. . . .

My Newest Fox News piece: "Paul Ryan Is Right About the Budget -- Americans Cannot Afford Another Decade of Massive Government Spending"

2011-04-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

Please leave comments and click the "recommended" link at the Fox News website. My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

The deficit is a spending problem. That's the simple truth. If federal government spending after President Clinton's last budget had simply grown fast enough to keep up with inflation and the growth in population, the 2012 budget would be running over a $70 billion surplus. Instead, federal expenditures more than doubled from $1.86 to $3.82 trillion in the ten years from 2001 to 2011, causing this year’s enormous $1.65 trillion deficit.

During President Obama's first three years in office the government's deficits are adding up to over $4.3 trillion. And there is no let up in sight. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the President Obama's budget plans will add another $10.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade from 2012 to 2021.

Americans can't afford to ignore this problem. The pricetag for that expected addition to the federal debt over the next decade comes to over $134,000 for a family of four. That doubles the debt the CBO expects that families will already face by the end of this year. . . .

The Truth About Obama and Budget Cuts

2011-03-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

Here is my appearance yesterday on Fox News Live.

Newest Fox News piece: Should Bans Against Carrying Concealed Weapons Be Lifted On College Campuses?

2011-03-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Should permitted faculty and students have the right to carry a concealed handgun on college campuses? Right now once someone qualifies for a permit they can carry a concealed handgun with them virtually anywhere in a state except for a few designated gun-free zones. Prominent among those "protected" areas are universities and schools. Yet, twelve states, including two large ones, Texas and Florida, are currentlly engaged in the debate over whether to end these bans.

Florida and Idaho have legislative hearings scheduled for Wednesday. The Idaho House should be voting on the bill by the end of the week. Legislative committees in Arizona and Oklahoma have already passed bills. Texas is planning votes during the week of March 21st.

But are these changes dangerous? Would faculty and students pose a danger to others? Wouldn't police accidentally shoot permit holders who are trying to stop an attacker? . . .

Newest Fox News piece: The Truth About Obama, Democrats and Budget Cuts

2011-03-08T10:20:00.002-08:00

My newest piece starts out this way:

With major budget votes set for Tuesday, Senate Democrats spent the weekend dismissing House Republicans' plans to cut the budget as “ideological, extremist, reckless." President Obama advocated “a government that lives within its means,” but he also charged “there’s nothing responsible about the Republican budget cuts.

Following the same script, news headlines described the House Republicans cuts as "dramatic" and "outrageous."

The magnitude of this year’s deficit might be hard for many to appreciate. But the monthly budget deficit for February of $223 billion is larger than the $160.7 billion deficit for all of 2007, the last time we had a federal budget that was approved when Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and presidency.

Democrats say that they can only come up with one-thirteenth the deficit cuts that the Republicans have put forward – just $4.7 billion, though Obama claims that these cuts meet the Republicans “halfway.” Democrats assert that there is not even enough waste in the federal budget to cut it by two-tenths of one percentage point. . . .

How incentives backfire

2011-03-08T10:20:00.001-08:00

Recently I had a post about what might go wrong with Saudi Arabia bribing people not to riot against the government. Well, here is a strange example of how such bribes can be counterproductive.

And although Paris Hilton told us in 2009 that she would never get breast implants out of a fear of needles, a decade before that Strauss claims to have met the then18-year-old party princess (prior to her days in the limelight) and she allegedly told him quite a different story.
“I had a breast job when I was 14, but my mother made me take them out,” Hilton apparently told Strauss, according to the book. “I’m thinking about posing for Playboy. They love famous people’s kids. And the only reason I’d do it is because when my dad finds out, he’ll pay me double the money not to do it.” . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Illinois Gun Info Plan Is Misguided and Dangerous

2011-03-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

My newest Fox News piece starts off this way:

Suppose you or your family are being stalked by a criminal who intends to harm you. Would you feel safer putting a sign in front of your home saying "This home is a gun-free zone"? Would it frighten criminals away?

Most people understand that guns deter criminals. But, despite strong opposition from the Illinois State Police, Democrat Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan seems determined to publicly identify gun and non-gun owners across the state. For some unknown reason, The Associated Press made a Freedom of Information Act request to the police.

One would think that people in Illinois of all places would understand this problem. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: So How Much Do Public Union Workers Really Make?

2011-03-01T13:28:00.001-08:00

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

President Obama lashed out at Republicans Monday for having "denigrated or vilified" public union employees. Without collective bargaining and the ability to go on strike, he said we wouldn't be able to attract "the best and the brightest to public service." Are public employees simply the best and the brightest? Or are we simply lavishing them with much better employment deals than their private counterparts?
To measure how attractive a job is, economists study how employees vote with their feet -- that is, comparing the rate at which different categories of employees voluntarily quit their jobs.
Over the last six months, private workers have been 3.4 times more likely to quit their jobs than either state and local or federal workers. Indeed, no private industry comes close to the low "quit rate" for government employees. Manufacturing, which has the lowest rate, still faces twice the quit rate as the government. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: GAO Report and Government Waste -- Can You Spell O-U-T-R-A-G-E?

2011-03-01T13:27:00.000-08:00

My newest piece starts this way:

We are used to hearing about fraud and government programs that fail to accomplish their goals. It now appears that yet another category might be important: duplication. Hundreds of major government programs have been discovered to duplicate what other government programs are doing. If we are to believe a new Government Accountability Office report, consolidation of programs could easily save up to $200 billion over the next decade.

Call it "press release government." For politicians, the best way to be seen as being actively involved and to viewed as caring about a problem is to set up a new government program and then claim credit for it. It doesn't seem to matter if there are already 17 other programs that help people get nutritious food or 79 other programs to provide transportation for the disadvantaged, adding another program shows that the politician really cares. It is the equivalent of building on another living room to a house when there are already several of them.

Creating new additional government programs spread across different government agencies also means that additional congressional committees can try claiming oversight. Government housing programs are spread across every place from the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health & Human Services, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Interior, Department of Labor, Federal Housing Finance Board, Neighborhood Reinvestment Corp, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Thus, when there is a housing problem, congressmen and Senators from a range of different committees can claim legitimate reasons to run before the television cameras and hold committee hearings. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: The Stimulus, Not Oil Prices, Is Hammering Consumers

2011-02-23T08:13:00.000-08:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

U.S. crude oil prices soared by 8.5 percent Tuesday, stunning financial markets. The financial media fretted that the oil price shock from the Middle East turmoil would slow or stop the fragile economic recovery. Crude oil prices soared even though gas prices at the pump are already the highest in any February since 1990. The reaction was swift, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than 178 points (1.4 percent) and NASDAQ and S&P 500 both also falling by more than 2 percent. This morning, with Libya teetering on the brink of civil war, gas prices continued rising.
While the media clearly and instantly understands the detrimental impact that higher oil prices have on the economy, the impact is really no different than President Obama's stimulus or his deluge of new government regulations, from the EPA to health care to financial markets.
The logic for how higher oil prices will harm economic growth is pretty simple. . . .

One way to raise the cost of food to college students

2011-02-18T07:33:00.001-08:00

Guess what. When the marginal cost of food is zero students waste huge amounts of food. Rather than putting a price on the food, colleges are trying to raise the cost of students carrying away the food.

When Virginia Tech's largest dining hall reopened several years ago, some administrators jokingly dubbed it the "freshman 25" cafeteria, for the number of pounds some students might gain from the tasty fare.

Students loaded their trays with Belgian waffles, brick-oven-baked pizza, falafel, Brazilian skewered meat, pad Thai, fruit juice concoctions and elaborate desserts - so much food that even the biggest of guys with the biggest of appetites could not always clean their plates.

As food service workers watched thousands of pounds of food go to waste, the university decided to make a move increasingly common at higher-education institutions nationwide: It got rid of cafeteria trays.

The change was immediate. "The plates were coming back basically cleaned," said Ted J. Faulkner, Tech's senior associate director of housing and dining services. "It was astounding."

Most schools in the Washington region have gone "trayless" in at least one dining hall, and several nationwide have banned them altogether.

But perhaps inevitably, there has been a backlash - in part because cafeteria trays had alternative lives as sleds and collegiate souvenirs. When the University of Massachusetts at Amherst got rid of trays in several dining halls last academic year, a group of students formed a "Bring back the trays" Facebook group. One argument posted on the group wall: "What will we use for sleds now?"

Without a tray, students have to be pickier during the first sweep of the cafeteria line and make trips back for more. It results in as much as 25 to 30 percent less wasted food, according to a 2008 study of 25 campuses by food services provider Aramark.

"It's a better pace. You have to get up and walk it off" in between courses, said Cody Erickson, 20, a junior horticulture major from Sandy Spring, sitting with a small pile of cleaned-off lunch plates in Virginia Tech's D2 dining hall last week. . . .

New Chinese edition of Freedomnomics

2011-02-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

This is still my favorite book. If anyone knows how to find the order link for the Chinese version, I would appreciate finding out. The English version can still be found here.

Discussing the Obama Administration’s effort to create jobs in the United States

2011-02-08T11:38:00.001-08:00

Newest Fox News piece: Why Can't Obama Do the Math On Jobs?

2011-02-07T08:38:00.001-08:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

President Obama has a message for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce today: You have an obligation to start creating jobs. The government has done what it needs to do and any failure lies with the private sector.
Indeed, the job numbers are bleak. Unemployment fell last month, but only because Americans have given up looking for work in record numbers. On net, 319,000 quit looking for work and left the work force in December. In November, it was even worse, 434,000. Over 1.5 million American have left the workforce since August.
Just 36,000 net jobs were added in December. -- That is far fewer than the about 150,000 needed just to keep up with the growth in the population.
This is a strange "recovery." Recoveries almost always add people to the labor force. As more jobs open up, recoveries are supposed to mean that people who had previously left the labor force during the recession hope they now have a chance to get a job and start looking again. Thus, they officially rejoin the labor force.
It is simply unprecedented that 19 months into the recovery, more and more Americans keep on quitting the labor force. (Here is a diagram that compares the growth in the number of people "not in the labor force" during the recoveries that started in 1982 and 2009.) . . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Another Mistake in The New York Times

2011-02-04T23:24:00.000-08:00

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Since the tragedy in Tucson, the New York Times has started an all-out campaign for gun control, with a relentless number of pieces -- news, editorials, and op-eds. In its advocacy, even the news stories are heavily biased by selectively quoting only academics who support pro-gun control positions. These seemingly unbiased sources are then contrasted with opposing views from clearly biased people on the other side, such as an NRA spokesman or a right-wing politician. The implied conclusion: scientific evidence favors gun control, but self-interest stands in the way.

Take two recent news stories by Michael Luo (here and here). He quotes seven academics who agreed with the New York Times position, but no one on the other side was even interviewed. Talk about misrepresenting academic opinion. The overwhelming majority of studies actually supports the claim that more guns mean less crime. Among peer-reviewed studies in academic journals, criminologists and economists studying right-to-carry laws have produced 18 national studies showing that these laws reduce violent crime, 10 indicate no discernible effect and none finds a bad effect from the law. One would never guess that 294 academics from institutions as diverse as Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA released an open letter to Congress during 1999 warning that new gun laws were “ill advised.”

A frequent claim in these recent New York Times articles has been that more guns mean more gun deaths (see also here). . . .

Recent debate on CSPAN's Washington Journal

2011-01-24T20:41:00.001-08:00

Video of my discussion with Paul Helmke today on CSPAN's Washington Journal.

Letter published in today's New York Times

2011-01-22T09:07:00.001-08:00

With all the recent articles and editorials calling for gun control, the New York Times ran letters responding to their pieces today. Of the five letters, four supported more gun control and mine took the other side (that is 503 words versus 162). Mine was the fourth in the list.

To the Editor:

Nicholas D. Kristof attacked my research in his Jan. 13 column. While conceding that “concealed weapons didn’t lead to the bloodbath that liberals had forecast,” Mr. Kristof asserted that “many studies have now debunked” my finding that more guns lead to less crime.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of studies support my results. Among peer-reviewed studies in academic journals by criminologists and economists, 18 studies examining national data find that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime, 10 indicate no discernible effect and none find a bad effect from the law. Among non-refereed studies, three find drops in crime and two say either no effect or possibly small increases in crime.

Mr. Kristof cites a public health professor’s suggestions for one-gun-a-month sales limits, gun safes and further background checks, but I know of no academic criminologists or economists who have found that these laws reduce any type of violent crime. No gun ban has reduced murder rates.

John R. Lott Jr.
Alexandria, Va., Jan. 17, 2011

The writer is the author of “More Guns, Less Crime.”

Newest Fox News piece: Most Americans Don't Want the Health Care Law That Was Passed and Efforts to Repeal It Must Continue

2011-01-21T16:22:00.000-08:00

My newest piece starts this way:

Americans are unhappy with ObamaCare. The House’s 245-189 vote to repeal ObamaCare on Wednesday was never really in doubt. In fact, The latest Rasmussen survey shows that 55 percent of Americans want ObamaCare repealed, the same number that showed up in polls when people voted in early November. Seventy five percent of Americans want the law changed.

The repeal measure now goes to the Senate. But despite holding a majority in the Senate, Democrats are refusing to hold a vote and publicly support the law. The public opposition shouldn't come as a surprise as the health care law signed by President Obama bears little resemblance to the one he promised during the 2008 campaign. The law broke multiple different promises on taxes and costs twice as much as what Obama said that it would cost during the campaign. ObamaCare was sold to Americans as an essential law to reduce health care costs.

"Then there's the problem of rising costs. . . . Everyone in this room knows what will happen if we do nothing," President Obama warned . . . .

Newest Fox News piece: The Arizona Shootings, Gun Violence Research and the Facts vs. The New York Times

2011-01-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

You know you’re doing something right when two New York Times columnists, Gail Collins and Nicholas Kristof, attack your research on the same day. Kristof followed up on criticism leveled earlier in the week by others writing for The Times. I must have said something substantial enough to warrant this attention. Let us check the facts.

Gail Collins worries that law-abiding citizens carrying concealed handguns can't be trusted:

"One can only hope that Saturday's horrible attack in Tucson encourages more citizens to carry concealed handguns," wrote John Lott, Jr. . . . on Wednesday. As a model, he pointed to Joseph Zamudio, . . . Lott's theory was that Zamudio was able to lend a hand "because his legally carried 9 mm semiautomatice offered him protection." He neglected to mention that while Zamudio never fired at the gunman, he almost drew on an innocent man by mistake.

No, it was not my mere speculation. Zamudio himself told Fox News' “Fox & Friends” that he though that carrying a gun made him willing to run towards the shots while almost everyone else was running for cover. . . .

Newest Fox News piece: Obama Officials Play Chicken Little With the Debt Ceiling

2011-01-06T15:51:00.001-08:00

My newest piece starts this way:

Two years into the Obama administration and the overused tactic of claiming crises to push legislation is becoming tiresome.

Remember, immediately after President Obama came into office, we were warned that if the massive Stimulus program wasn't passed immediately, unemployment would go up above 8.1 percent. And the health care takeover had to be passed by August 2009 or public and private health care costs would spiral out of control.

Of course, it is now obvious that neither the stimulus program nor Obamacare had any prospect of accomplishing their stated goals. And then there was the start treaty with Russia which absolutely had to be passed quickly last month or real damage would be done to US-Russian relations. Yet, in what was widely seen as a slap against President Obama, the Russians didn't see any urgency in passing the treaty, and indeed they still haven't passed it.

Now the Obama administration is warning of disaster if Congress doesn't quickly pass an increase in the debt limit. . . .

New Fox News piece: Americans very gloomy about the economy

2010-12-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

My new piece starts off this way:

All the economic numbers being thrown around as the year draws to a close are bewildering. Some are positive, some are negative, but for many this week it is hard to get an overall feel for how well the economy is doing.
On the upside, GDP is rising, though slowly, and economists have raised their forecasts for next year's economic growth. Retail sales this holiday season increased by 5.5 percent over last year. Inflation has remained low, just 1.1 percent over the last year. And the stock market has rebounded.
Yet, there are major negatives. Most seriously, the very high and long-lingering unemployment rate. Unemployment is not only rising, but it has set a post-World War II record with unemployment remaining at least at 9.5 percent or higher for 18 months.
Adding to job-seekers' problems, the new employment consists almost exclusively of temporary service sector jobs, a poor replacement for the lost permanent ones. Home prices also fell again last month. Yale Professor Robert Shiller who collects these data, warned on Tuesday: The outlook has become steadily more pessimistic over the last few months." Huge deficits at the federal and state level add to long-run concerns.
So what do all these numbers mean for the average American? New Consumer Confidence numbers were released on Tuesday and they aren't encouraging, . . .

Obama administration keeps claiming that a million jobs would have been lost without car company bailouts

2010-07-30T10:15:00.001-07:00

From yesterday's WH press briefing.

one that is adding rather than shedding jobs, and a decision in and of itself that likely saved a million jobs and communities -- certainly saved communities from economic devastation. . . .

1) General Motors would have gone into bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is not the same thing as eliminating the company. Viable operations that could make a profit would continue.
2) Where did the government bailout money come from? The government "creates" some jobs only by taking money away from where other jobs would have existed.

The inefficiency of Electric cars

2010-07-28T17:26:00.001-07:00

Buying these cars is the same thing as throwing out almost $20,000 dollars (the price of a Chevrolet Malibu starts at $21,800). Note that these costs don't include the cost of replacing the car batteries after four or five years. From the Washington Post:

The long-anticipated Chevrolet Volt, General Motors' electric car, will cost $41,000, the company announced Tuesday, leaving consumers to decide whether its environmental appeal is worth a price far above that of similarly sized conventional autos.

Electric-car technology has been around for years, but the high cost to make the vehicles has prevented automakers from producing them for the mass market. The price announcements for the Volt and its electric rival, the Nissan Leaf, have been highly anticipated as a result. Nissan, the only other major manufacturer expected to bring such a vehicle to market this year, said the Leaf will cost $32,780.

GM and Nissan are relying on a $7,500 federal tax credit for buyers of electric vehicles to offset some of the added cost, and they're hoping that the allure of their novel power source will make up the rest. . . .

UPDATE: This does not look very promising.

For the price of the Volt, you could buy almost two hybrids from competitors. But in these early days of electric vehicles, a cold economic analysis doesn't really apply. . . .

GM figures that if you drive within the Volt's 40-mile battery range, it will cost $1.50 a day to drive, compared to about $3.50 per day for a 30 mpg sedan. . . .

So let's take those numbers, that I assume are picked by GM to make the car look at its best. At $2 for a whole year that comes to $730. Even assuming a zero interest rate, over ten years that comes to $7,300. That doesn't come close to make up the cost difference.

Economists say that the Stimulus didn't help economy

2010-04-26T15:36:00.001-07:00

It is disappointing that only 73 percent of National Association for Business Economics respondents had no impact of the recovery. I wish that some more of them had said that it had harmed the recovery.

The [National Association for Business Economics] April 2010 Industry Survey report presents the responses of 68 NABE members to a survey conducted between March 25, 2010, and April 10, 2010, on business conditions in their firm or industry and reflects first-quarter 2010 results and the near-term outlook. . . . The vast majority (73%) of respondents reported the fiscal stimulus enacted in February 2009 has had no impact on employment to date. While 68% also believe a jobs bill, such as the one recently enacted into law, will have no impact on payrolls, 30% do believe it will boost payrolls moderately.

New Fox News piece: Obama's Plan -- A Regulatory Mess

2010-04-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

My newest piece starts this way:

If President Obama's financial regulations are adopted, there will be fewer loans, credit will be more costly, and individuals will face more risk. Obama argues today that his reforms are necessary to prevent "a second Great Depression" from occurring, but he does nothing to fix what the government did. Nothing is done to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, despite their problems with fraud and costing taxpayers $400 billion in bailouts. Nothing is done to change government regulations that force banks to make risky mortgages.

The powers that would be given to the president and the Federal Reserve are unprecedented. The bill gives the government the power to regulate the capital, liquidity and permissible activities for a long list of firms, including securities firms, insurance companies, bank holding companies, hedge funds, finance companies as well as others. The government will be also able to limit the size of these companies.

The president claims today that he "believe(s) in the power of the free market." Yet, he is constantly demonizing companies. Even liberal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned: The bashing of Wall Street is something that should worry everybody. According to Obama, there is "an ethic of greed, corner cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system." In contrast, for government, Obama identifies its only failure as not doing enough regulation, not doing enough to control companies.

The regulations demonstrate that the president ignores or doesn't care to know how markets operate. Take one . . .

Speeding tickets based on the driver's income?

2010-01-10T22:42:00.000-08:00

Europe has all sorts of progressive taxation, so why not have progressive income based penalties for speeding? It doesn't make any more sense than having the price of cars or bread or anything else based on income. Efficiency requires that people buy goods up to the point where the marginal benefit that they receive is equal to the marginal cost. Varying prices with income will move the market away from that optimal output. The traditional argument for penalties for speeding is the same. There is a cost from speeding in terms of increasing the likelihood of accidents, and there is a benefit in terms of saving time by getting to the driver's destination faster. Unless one wants to argue that the expected damage from a wealthy speeder going a certain speed is greater than a poorer one going the same speed, one wouldn't want the penalty for speeding to vary with the wealth of the speeder. The only exceptions would be if wealthier criminals were some how harder to catch to begin with. From Fox News:

European countries are increasingly pegging speeding fines to income as a way to punish wealthy scofflaws who would otherwise ignore tickets.

Advocates say a $290,000 speeding ticket slapped on a millionaire Ferrari driver in Switzerland was a fair and well-deserved example of the trend.

Germany, France, Austria and the Nordic countries also issue punishments based on a person's wealth. In Germany the maximum fine can be as much as $16 million compared to only $1 million in Switzerland. Only Finland regularly hands out similarly hefty fine to speeding drivers, with the current record believed to be a $190,000 ticket in 2004.

The Swiss court appeared to set a world record when it levied the fine in November on a man identified in the Swiss media only as "Roland S." Judges in the eastern canton of St. Gallendescribed him as a "traffic thug" in their verdict, which only recently came to light.

"As far as we're concerned this is very good," Sabine Jurisch, a road safety campaigner with the Swiss group Road Cross.

She said rich drivers were lightly punished until Swiss voters approved a 2007 penal law overhaul that let judges hand down fines based on personal income and wealth for moderate misdemeanors including excessive speeding and drunk driving. Before, they had to assign relatively small fixed penalties or — rarely — a few days in prison.

The fines were traditionally insignificant for rich people, and in the rare cases where prison terms for small-time offenders were handed down, they were usually suspended anyway. And even when they were sent to jail, the deterrent was limited compared with the costs of incarceration borne by the taxpayers, officials said. . . .

Hardcover Freedomnomics at new low paperback price

2009-09-27T14:28:00.001-07:00

Freedomnomics is now 63 percent off and selling for only $10.26, cheap even for most paperbacks.

Another review of Freedomnomics

2009-09-18T18:43:00.000-07:00

The review is available here:

Reading Freedomnomics will enlighten the reader relating facts which will astonish and sometimes make you want to applaud the free market system. John Lott educated me with other examples of how the free market works, and further explains in a narrative and easy to follow manner why we should continue to allow the free markets to prevail. The statistics and examples he uses are indisputable. This book should be retained as an affirmation when you doubt the benefits of the free market system.

Higher Prices, Lower Sales: It works even for music

2009-04-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

If you understand that demand curves slope downward, you will understand all of economics that it is worthwhile to understand. Apple iTunes Music Store had to raise the price of some individual tracks as part of an agreement with the music industry. Guess what? The songs that increased in price, songs that tend to be the most popular, saw their rankings on iTunes fall. Billboard has the story here:

Two days after the Apple iTunes Music Store raised prices on some individual tracks, there was evidence the increases have hurt the sales rankings of songs given the higher $1.29 price.

While it is difficult to say with certainty whether a price increase had resulted in less revenue, rough estimates reveal slight, negative changes in chart position would result in a positive change in revenue. The changes in chart position between Tuesday and Thursday, however, clearly show that higher prices had forced many songs to cede chart position to lower-priced songs.

On Wednesday, one day after the price increase, the iTunes Top 100 chart had 40 songs priced at $1.29 and 60 with the original $0.99 price point. The $1.29 songs lost an average of 5.3 places on the chart while the $0.99 songs gained an average of 2.5 chart positions.

Seven of Wednesday’s $1.29 songs had been priced at $0.99 on Tuesday (there were 33 songs priced at $1.29 on Tuesday morning). Those seven songs lost an average of 1.9 chart positions from Tuesday to Wednesday; one of them gained ground, eight lost position and one remained the same. The remaining 33 songs priced at $1.29, whose prices went unchanged from Tuesday to Wednesday, lost an average of 7.7 chart positions.

A similar trend was seen the following day. The 53 songs priced at $0.99 rose an average of 1.66 places on the chart; 24 rose on the chart, 18 dropped and 11 remained even. The 47 songs priced at $1.29 lost an average of two chart positions; 11 rose on the chart, 27 dropped and nine remained even. Ten of the $1.29 tracks were priced at $0.99 the day prior and they lost an average of 12.4 chart positions. A number of the tracks with a Tuesday-to-Wednesday price increase that gave up chart position were from Rascal Flatt’s Unstoppable (and one track from Unstoppable dropped off the Top 100 altogether). . . .

New Kindle Version of Freedomnomics is available

2009-01-03T18:17:00.001-08:00

For those who are interested, a Kindle version of Freedomnomics is now available. A Kindle version of the book works with Amazon.com's portable electronic book reader. I don't have one yet, but a few friends tell me it is a handy way for they to travel with multiple books at the same time. If you haven't read Freedomnomics yet, I think that it is my best book.

Thanks.

Reviews at Facebook of Freedomnomics

2009-01-03T18:15:00.001-08:00

Many are extremely nice, a few aren't, but I still appreciate people reading the book. The reviews are here.

Walter Williams discusses Freedomnomics

2008-08-19T14:52:00.001-07:00

Walter's entire piece can be seen here:

By taking a couple of courses in economic theory, we could immunize ourselves from nonsense spouted by politicians and pundits, but in the meantime check out Professor John R. Lott's "Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works."

His first chapter is "Are You Being Ripped Off?" It addresses myths about predation where it's sometimes alleged that corporations will charge below-cost prices to bankrupt their rivals and then charge unconscionable prices. There's little or no evidence that corporations would choose predation as strategy; there are too many pitfalls. A major one is that in order to recoup losses from charging low prices to bankrupt rivals, the predator would later have to charge higher-than-normal prices. That would attract new rivals who might have purchased the bankrupt assets of the predator's prey and be able to undercut the predator's prices. . . .

Thanks, Walter.

UK Surgeons to have pay based on how patients do after surgery

2008-07-20T10:37:00.001-07:00

Paying surgeons based upon how good of a job they do seems to have generated all sorts of concerns in the UK. The most bizarre response though is this:

Patients' groups said those facing surgery would be "horrified" by the proposals and questioned why doctors should be paid a premium for fulfilling their basic duty. . . .

Why should patients mind this? After all, they don't have to pay directly for the service and if it generated higher quality care, they are better off. Of more concern is this:

Leading surgeons said that this could deter doctors from taking on higher-risk patients, such as the frail and elderly, and from carrying out complex operations. . . .

But the simple way to deal with this is to figure out what the right yardstick is to measure the job that the surgeons are doing. If they save a high risk life, they could get paid more. Indeed, if the pay was enough, you would have the opposite of what the surgeons here fear -- everyone would want to do the high risk patients. Yet, it sounds from the discussion that the payment schemes are not going to differentiate the risks involved.

Incentives matter, an example of where students want to work

2008-07-02T08:40:00.000-07:00

Higher salaries do attract people to study for those jobs.

It was these gender differences that Katz and Goldin set out to study with their survey, dubbed “Harvard and Beyond,” conducted in 2006 and 2007. Men still command higher salaries, on average, than women with the same educational attainment, and even in some cases with the same type of job; this appears to be due to women’s preference for family-friendly jobs and employers (see “Girl Power: What’s Changed for Women and What Hasn’t,” January-February, page 34). Goldin is the author of Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, and the two previously collaborated on a study of the role of the birth-control pill vis-à-vis women’s decisions regarding career and marriage.

But the new survey also turned up plenty of other things, including the size of the shift into finance, and the reason for that shift. For the entire respondent pool, across all occupations, the median income for men was $162,000, and for women $90,000; graduates working in finance earned nearly three times that median, in a pool of people already paid far more than average. (Among the general U.S. population in 2006, men’s median income was just over $42,000, and women’s was under $33,000.)

Finance’s extremely high compensation has lured Harvard graduates who might otherwise have pursued law or medicine: the prevalence of those fields, combined, declined from 39 percent to 30 percent between the two cohorts. Although some of those employed in finance have M.B.A.s, many of the jobs, unlike those in law and medicine, require no advanced degree.

This pattern among Harvard graduates reflects a similar pattern in the wider society. The finance sector’s contribution to the U.S. gross domestic product swelled from 4.4 percent in 1977 to 7.7 percent, or roughly $950 billion, in 2005, according to a report on the survey by Wall Street Journal columnist David Wessel. One of every 13 dollars of employee compensation in the United States today goes to people working in finance, the column noted, and in 2004, the combined income of the top 25 hedge-fund managers exceeded the combined income of the CEOs of all Standard & Poor’s 500 companies. . . .

Hat tip to Craig Newmark on this.

New Op-ed at Fox News: Why Political Flip-Flopping Matters

2008-06-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

My newest op-ed at Fox News can be read in full here:

What restrains politicians and businesses from acting dishonestly? A lot of people would answer: nothing.

Periodic political and corporate scandals have created a popular image of politicians and businessmen as little more than a collection of cheats, liars and crooks. However, while there will always be some dishonest people in any profession, the vast majority of American politicians and businessmen do not end up being frog marched out of their offices in handcuffs with their heads held low in shame before a gaggle of news cameras.

What helps keep companies honest is the threat that if they cheat customers, people won’t buy from them again. But that won’t work for politicians. Politicians don’t always have the incentive of re-election because eventually they all face a last term in office. Politicians retire at some point. They can’t live forever.

So, if it isn't the threat of facing the voters, what could ensure that politicians keep their promises?

There has been a lot academic work studying this question, and the way to solve the problem is to elect politicians who inherently value the policy positions that they take. . . . .

Discussion of impact of women's suffrage on government growth

2008-06-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

Gaston Phebus has this discussion of Freedomnomics:

Celui qui a découvert pourquoi l’État-Providence (qui s’est subséquemment révélé comme le parfait aspirateur d’immigration) a été mis en place, c’est John Lott. Je le considère comme l’un des meilleurs économistes américains de la jeune génération, même s’il est loin d’avoir recueilli les lauriers qu’il méritait. Il a une fâcheuse tendance à s’intéresser à des questions si chargées au niveau politique qu’elles peuvent torpiller une carrière. Il s’est plus d’une fois fait éjecter d’une université prestigieuse sous la pression du maire ou du gouverneur parce qu’il avait dit haut et fort ce qu’il fallait taire.

Ses recherches montrent que l’inflation sans précédente (et insoutenable) du rôle de l’État est due au vote des femmes. Dès qu’on permet aux femmes de voter, bingo ! l’État commence à s’occuper de corriger tout un tas d’ « injustices sociales » en mettant en place des mécanismes de redistribution massifs – qui aspirent aussi toute la misère du monde.

Voici un graphique montrant comment, dans les 10 années qui suivent l’obtention du droit de vote par les femmes, les dépenses de l’État doublent. Ce doublement est dû à la mise en place des allocation en tous genres qui forment l’État-Providence. C’est extrait de la page 163 du livre Freedomnomics de John Lott.

Brave or foolish?

2008-06-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

A nice note on my work can be found here:

John R. Lott, economist and senior research scientist at the University of Maryland is a brave man. In 2001 he published a study that concluded that legalized abortion increased murder rates from 1/2 to 7%. This refuted the study by the authors of Freakonomics.
According to this article in Cybercast News Service, the Economist magazine tells of two Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economists who said the Freakonomics study was error-filled and went on to say, "To be politically incorrect is one thing; to be simply incorrect, quite another." . . .

A French Review of Freedomnomics

2008-05-05T07:32:00.000-07:00

The website Copeau Reloaded has this review here (I hope that the translation isn't too bad):

That's how in 2007 John Lott published Freedomnomics, which is meant not to be an answer little by little in Levitt, but to be a series of examples which, by drawing inspiration from the same method of presentation as Freakonomics, defends and illustrates the intrinsic superiority of free market [15]. Here are someone of his examples:

He explains that the increase in prices linked to the passage of the hurricane Katrina allowed to restrict losses linked to this one, and that the price controls by the government have contrario, as it was case for similar facts in the seventies, would have returned more hard life to the victims of the hurricane.

Other example, it supports that it is necessary that the Americans pay their medicaments a lot, not only to guarantee the dynamics of the innovation of laboratories, principally American, but also make it be of benefit the rest of the planet.

On the other hand, it shows that reputation is more important in economy than penalties caused by law or disadvantageous judgement [16].

Last example given by Lott, the abortion and the positive discrimination played in the police, augmented crimes and offences; he asserts more than the death penalty, the application of law and troubles, and right given to the citizens to hit weapon favours the fall of crime considerably. Always according to him, the age, the breed and the control of weapon would have little effects on the rate of crime.

New Op-ed up at Fox News: Obama Bitter About Free Markets

2008-04-14T20:12:00.001-07:00

My new Fox News piece is here:

But, while his left-wing economic views are much less well known, they show a similar pattern.

Obama also never seems to have found a market that can work without extensive government regulation. During Obama’s big economic address at the very end of March, little attention was given in the American press to his deep distrust of the free market and his laundry list of failures of deregulation.

From telecommunications to electricity to banking to accounting, he blamed the failures as a product of markets out of control, with not enough government regulations to rein in "an ethic of greed, corner cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system." . . .

Appearance on Fox & Friends from this past Thursday

2008-04-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

Here is a discussion that I had on how well the economy is doing.

New Op-ed up at Fox News: The 'Recession' Is a Media Myth

2008-03-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

My new op-ed can be found here:

During the 2000 election, with Bill Clinton as president, the economy was viewed through rose-colored glasses. According to polls, voters didn’t realize that the country was in a recession. Although the economy started shrinking in July 2000, most Americans through the entire year thought that the economy was fine.

But over the last half-year, the media and politicians have said we were in a recession even while the economy was still growing.

Gas prices are going up. The economy is slowing. Talk of recession is seemingly everywhere. While the majority of people rate their personal finances positively, consumer confidence in the economy has plunged to a 16-year low, well below what it was during the last year of the Clinton administration when we were in a recession.

A Google search on news stories during the three-month period from July 2000 through September 2000 using the keywords “economy recession US” produces 1,610. By contrast, the same search over just the last month finds 50,763. Or, even more telling, take the three months from July through September last year, when the GDP was growing at a phenomenal 4.9 percent. The same type of Google search shows 7,310 news stories. . . .

New Op-ed up at Fox News: "Financial Markets Are in a Mess"

2008-03-17T21:25:00.001-07:00

This is a pretty detailed piece:

Politicians always seem to know better. Not satisfied with telling people what types of light bulbs to use and the size of cars they can drive, politicians in Washington have decided to replace financial markets and try legislating away the laws of supply and demand.

Last week congressional democrats introduced regulations to stop what they complained were "wild interest rate hikes" on credit cards. Before that Hillary Clinton advocated a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and a five-year freeze on interest rates for sub-prime mortgages.

Yet, price controls don’t solve the problems with high interest rates. If people want to borrow more money than is available, interest rates rise, both to attract more to lend and insure that those who need what scarce money there is, are the ones who get to borrow it. If regulations prevent interest rates from going up, you get shortages and credit rationing. . . .

The main point of the op-ed is how government regulation created the current mess.

So where do you think that the best teachers are going to go?

2008-03-07T21:03:00.001-08:00

To the New York Times, this is an open question. The title on their article asks: "Would six-figure salaries attract better teachers?" Obviously, higher salaries mean that more teachers will apply for the jobs. The schools might not select the best teachers (public schools might hire people based upon tenure or political views or whatever. Charter schools have more of an incentive to pick the best teachers, though not as much as a private for profit operation would. From the Times:

The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide.

The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success.

“I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of students and give them all the technology in the world,” said Mr. Vanderhoek, 31, a Yale graduate and former middle school teacher who built a test preparation company that pays its tutors far more than the competition. . . .

Some express doubt:

Yet the model is raising questions. Will two social workers be enough? Will even the most skillful teachers be able to handle classes of 30, several students more than the city average? . . .

As someone who has taught for many years, I think that a good teacher can accomplish a lot with a bunch of bureaucrats being around. If the teacher doesn't work, the key is being willing to replace them with someone else.

New Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: Campaign-Finance Breakdown

2008-03-04T20:20:00.000-08:00

Bradley Smith and I have a piece on public financing of presidential campaigns:

Is 2008 the last hurrah for public-that is, taxpayer-financing of presidential campaigns? Since 1976, taxpayers have shelled out about $3 billion in current dollars to pay for presidential campaigns, including campaigns by John Hagelin, Lyndon LaRouche, Lenora Fulani, Ralph Nader, Sen. Alan Cranston, Milton Schaap, Ruben Askew, and other also rans. Funds have also paid for balloon drops at the party's conventions, negative TV ads, robocalls and more.

But this year, most leading presidential contenders refused to take the public subsidy-and accompanying spending limits-during the primaries. One exception has been Sen. John McCain. But faced with certain campaign realities, he too is now looking for a way out and is arguing that he has a constitutional right to withdraw from the public funding system for the primaries and, instead, rely on private money. Sen. Barack Obama said last year that he would accept taxpayer financing in the general election if the Republican nominee did too, but he has backed away from that promise.

All this is happening despite the fact that Republicans are nominating their champion of campaign finance reform, Mr. McCain, and a year ago Mr. Obama was lauded in the headlines and media coverage for his dedication to saving public financing of presidential campaigns. . . .

"Columbine To Va. Tech To NIU: Gun-Free Zones Or Killing Fields?"

2008-02-26T08:53:00.000-08:00

I have a new op-ed at Investors Business Daily:

As Northern Illinois University restarts classes this week, one thing is clear: Six minutes proved too long. It took six minutes before the police were able to enter the classroom that horrible Thursday, and in that short time five people were murdered, 16 wounded.

Six minutes is actually record-breaking speed for the police arriving at such an attack, but it was simply not fast enough. Still, the police were much faster than at the Virginia Tech attack last year.

The previous Thursday, five people were killed in the city council chambers in Kirkwood, Mo. There was even a police officer already there when the attack occurred. . . .

UPDATE: Fox News is reporting a gun threat at at small Ferrum College (1,000 students). I guess I would like to know if this is a concealed handgun permit holder. If it is the school's president is threatening suspension as a first initial response. The president obviously doesn't understand the notion of deterrence. From Fox News:

Ferrum College canceled classes and went on lockdown Tuesday as police searched for a suspicious person on campus.

A Franklin County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman said college President Jennifer Braaten activated an alert system and ordered the lockdown after receiving reports of a suspicious male on the campus. Classes were canceled for the day. . . .

No shots have been fired and there have been no injuries.

Is the "high price" of everything from coffee in restaurants to popcorn in movie theaters due to monopoly power?

2008-02-26T08:52:00.001-08:00

A new paper by Richard Gil and Wesley Hartmann provides an explanation for the "high price" of popcorn in movie theaters:

Prices for goods such as blades for razors, ink for printers and concessions at movies are often set well above cost. This paper empirically analyzes concession sales data from a chain of Spanish theaters to demonstrate that high prices on concessions reflect a profitable price discrimination strategy often referred to as metering price discrimination. Concessions are found to be purchased in greater amounts by customers that place greater value on attending the theater. In other words, the intensity of demand for admission is metered by concession sales. This implies that while some consumers' surplus may be reduced by the high concession prices, surplus of other consumers on the margin of attending may increase from theaters' decisions to shift their margins away from movies and toward concessions.

First as a side note, most theaters, at least in the US, do not prevent people from bringing in concessions with them to the theater (I don't know about Spain), and that is at least inconsistent with the monopoly type story. It is also interesting to note that these claims about above marginal cost pricing are made for many similar product such as wine in restaurants or coffee or the differences between lunch and dinner prices, and it is hard to believe that monopoly power actually explains the "high prices" in all these cases. Russell Roberts and I provided a cost based explanation for all the phenomenon back in 1991 here. I guess that my biggest question is what else would one expect relating the log(concession revenue) with log(attendance) and Box Office revenue per attendee. Concession revenue goes up with attendance (though at a lower rate than attendance revenue -- congestion) and it goes up with box office revenue per attendee (presumably picking up the fact that higher revenue per attendee means fewer old people and very young people). What is the problem here and why is price discrimination the only answer here? By the way, when they run a regression that includes information on the number of screens and seats per screen (Table 2, specification 2), those two variables really explain all the variation in popcorn prices (something akin to the hypothesis that Russell and I advanced). I am also not clear why logs are used for concession revenue and attendance, but not box office revenue per attendee.

Another couple nice mentions of Freedomnomics

2008-02-24T20:57:00.001-08:00

Here is one mention:

After his book Freedomnomics, I think that Professor Lott is my favourite economist. He generally makes a lot of sense, although his blog tends to focus on the benefits of gun ownership a tad more than I would prefer (not that I am anti-gun ownership, it just is not a subject which interests me too much).

And another nice mention of Freedomnomics can be found here:

For those interested in more on the economy, I highly recommend Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. This easy to understand book explains the basic tenets of our free market. Other great reads include Applied Economics and Freedomnomics.

Another Review of Freedomnomics

2008-02-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

Another review of Freedomnomics:

I recommend Freedomnomics, especially in its audio format. While it didn’t convince me to take classes in economics, it did prompt me to think a little more deeply about the way that I interact with businesses, government, and audiobooks.

Overall, I thought what he thought was the main point of the book was much too narrow.

Another Review of Freedomnomics

2008-02-01T23:15:00.001-08:00

Brian Shelly has a review of Freedomnomics here:

However, I read Freedomnomics by Economist Dr. John Lott. This book was a pretty easy read and I found some of the information jaw dropping. His specialty is crime and punishment and Chapter 4, which focuses on that, just blew me away. It really showed how conventional wisdom is flat out wrong when you look at the data on crime. . . .

New Op-ed: 'Stimulus' Package Won't Jolt Economy

2008-01-28T15:11:00.001-08:00

I have a new op-ed up atFox News:

There is a lot of hysteria about the economy. Politicians worried about a voter backlash want to show voters that they are willing to do something.

Yet, the White House and Congressional proposal last week to send $100 billion in checks to Americans will not stimulate the economy, only waste taxpayers’ money. Instead of growing the economy as claimed, the expanded unemployment benefits being pushed by Senate Democrats will only shrink it. . . .

The Cost of Owning Hybrids

2008-01-26T02:00:00.001-08:00

I was reading about the Toyota Highlander Hybrids. The identical hybrid version of the Highlander apparently costs $5,100 more. On the highway, the hybrid gets 27 mpg versus 24 mpg for the regular version -- a 12.5 percent improvement. For city driving, it looks as if the improvement is much larger 18 to 25 mpg -- a 38 percent improvement. Assume an average improvement of 25 percent. A couple of simple calculations indicate that this is unlikely to be a wise investment for most people. First some assumptions:

1) Own the car for 10 years
2) Put 150,000 miles on the car
3) 22 mpg average
4) $3.00 in current dollars
5) 3 percent real interest

Over the lifetime of the car you would buy 6,818 gallons. The present value of those purchases in today's dollars over those 10 years are as follows:

Year 1 $496.46
Year 2 $482.01
Year 3 $467.97
Year 4 $454.34
Year 5 $441.11
Year 6 $428.26
Year 7 $415.79
Year 8 $403.68
Year 9 $391.92
Year 10 $380.50

$4,362.04 versus a payment today of $5,100. You are about $738 poorer for buying the hybrid. The day that you buy the hybrid you might as well throw out $738.

There is one caveat regarding resale value for the car and how much being a hybrid would increase its value. I looked up the 1997 Toyota Tacoma Xtra Cab's trade-in value (the Highlander only started in 2001). If the truck is in good condition, the value would be $2,300 (again assuming a 3 percent real interest rate that is the equivalent of $1,711). Assuming that the hybrid equipment depreciates at the same rate as the rest of the car, that would leave you with $296 from the sale.

A final net loss of $442. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to throw away $442.

The Changing cost of making decisions

2008-01-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

There are lots of costs in decision making. Most focus on the costs of information, but another important factor is the amount of time that we have to make decisions. Today's WSJ references an example of this last point and the obvious consequence of making it more costly to make decisions:

I have referred several times before in this space to Tony Blair's observation, after resigning last year, that the pressure of 24/7 electronic media has drastically cut the time available to make judgments, and so the quality of decisions has declined. The missed call in New Hampshire is the first sharp demonstration of this truth for journalism itself. Odds are that nothing will be learned from this because no one has time to think about it.

Of course, there are other costs of making decisions that have been declining. For example, it is easier to quickly get a hold of the people who you need to talk to (cell phones) and quickly search files and databases (computers).

New Op-ed: Bad Brief: The Bush DOJ shoots at the Second Amedment

2008-01-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

Here is the new op-ed that I have this morning at National Review Online:

A lot of Americans who believe in the right to own guns were very disappointed this weekend. On Friday, the Bush administration’s Justice Department entered into the fray over the District of Columbia’s 1976 handgun ban by filing a brief to the Supreme Court that effectively supports the ban. The administration pays lip service to the notion that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership as an “individual right,” but their brief leaves the term essentially meaningless. . . .

Another Review of Freedomnomics

2008-01-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

This review by Nathan was somewhat mixed:

I read it because I read Freakonomics, which, like other political (and semi-political) books, I found to be about "half-right," which is to say that a critical reading reduces it to the level of fiction; Freakonomics is opinion mixed in with statistics.

Freedomnomics proved to be exactly what I expected, which is to say, exactly the same but with different opinions. Where Freakonomics contests that Abortion decreased crime, Freedomnomics contests the opposite. Where Freakonomics says you shouldn't trust your Real Estate agent, Freedomnomics suggests otherwise.

I enjoy reading these kinds of books because I do read them through a critical lens, and I enjoy the facts that come out of them. Usually, a critical reading of these books allows the reader to examine the statistics and draw his own conclusions, often completely different than the opinions presented by the author(s).

For example, I learned from Freedomnomics that the "lemon effect" on new automobiles presented in Freakonomics is not true. This makes sense - the idea had long since made very little sense to me, as cars usually have warrantees that transfer with ownership transfers. Though Freedomnomics presented some opinions that seemed unfounded, the facts concerning automobiles (in the form of Kelly Blue Book prices) were also present, and these are indisputable . . .

Another example that incentives matter

2008-01-08T00:16:00.001-08:00

Dixville Notch, NH sure gets a lot of news attention for a town that has only 17 voters. Perhaps it is then not too surprising that the town also gets a lot of attention from the presidential candidates:

Neil Tillotson Jr.’s dad started the Dixville Notch tradition in 1960, after he ran into an Associated Press reporter who saw the humor in letting a small town “way up in the middle of nowhere be a part of the voting process.”

“Because of the publicity we get a disproportionate number of candidates coming by,” Tillotson said, noting that he’s met every president – when they were candidates – except Richard Nixon, dating back to 1972 when he took over the role as elections supervisor.

Note further that the turnout rate in Dixville Notch was 100 percent. Their votes matter more than others and they are more likely to vote.

New Op-ed: BLOOMY'S BILLIONS: 'REFORMS' BOOST HIS '08 EDGE

2008-01-07T02:05:00.000-08:00

CAMPAIGN-finance regulations keep on wrecking havoc with America's elec tions, entrenching incumbents and reducing voter turnout. Now they could help make Mayor Bloomberg our next President or at least give him great influence over who wins.

Bloomberg is reportedly talking of devoting $1 billion of his own money to win the White House as an independent - vastly outspending any conceivable combined outlays by the Republican and Democratic nominees, even if they forego public financing. . . .

Another (very long) review of Freedomnomics

2008-01-01T20:24:00.001-08:00

Economist WIlliam Sjostrom has a very nice review of my book up on his website. It was very nice of him to take this much time to review it.

The short version: my doubts are small. Read it, read it, read it, and, oh yeah, read it.

The high cost of regulation: compact fluorescent lights

2007-12-31T20:34:00.001-08:00

CFLs contain mercury. If one breaks in your home, Kazman says, EPA guidelines suggest you open windows and leave the room for at least a quarter of an hour before trying to clean up the mess. And for God's sakes don't use a vacuum, which could disperse the poison into the air. Even when they're intact, U.S. News happily tells us, "the bulbs must be handled with caution. Using a drop cloth might be a good new routine to develop when screwing in a light bulb."

I really wonder whether people have thought of these bulbs being used in real world use. How will be dispose of them? Will people actually keep them on for 15 minutes after they have been turned on? Suppose that you just want to temporarily turn on the light when you go into a room. What about the time costs of people having to come back a second time to turn it off? What about the costs of people's time waiting for these lights to warm up? What about the fact that people might have to turn on more lights because these new bulbs don't produce as much light? This has to be one of the dumber regulations in a long time.

Czechs upset at having to pay less than $2 for a doctor's visit

2007-12-31T11:45:00.000-08:00

The Czech healthcare system undergoes a minor revolution on 1 January as patients are asked to pay a small fee each time they visit their doctor.

The move is part of a widespread reform of the health sector unveiled by the centre-right government.

It is far from popular - a number of leading figures are calling on Czechs not to pay up.

Czechs enjoyed free healthcare during four decades of communist rule and in the past 17 years of capitalism.

But from 1 January, Czech patients will be asked to pay 30 crowns (£0.83; 1.1 euros) for each visit to the doctor, and 60 crowns for each day spent in hospital. . . . .

If $1.50 dissuades someone from going to the doctor, you have to wonder how badly they had to go to the doctor. It is pretty obvious that they shouldn't be wasting the doctor's time if they don't value the service at $1.50 or so. Clearly, this $1.50 is much too low.

Somebody please provide an economic justification for these different government spending items

2007-12-31T10:36:00.001-08:00

Some of the spending in the new Federal budget that congress enacted. Where is the federal issue in these spending proposals? I don't see the externality issue for the Lobster Institute. Where is the national concern with managing beavers in North Carolina or rats in Arkansas? As far as bees go, why isn't it a simply question of supply and demand (see Freedomnomics for a discussion about how the market solves free-riding problems in this problem)?

Next time you go out for seafood, remember the $188,000 lawmakers sent to the Lobster Institute in Orono, Maine. Then there was the tidy sum to the pest-control industry in the form of $2.5 million to fight grasshoppers and Mormon crickets in Nevada and Utah; $223,000 to manage beavers in Raleigh, N.C.; $3.7 million to combat termites in New Orleans; $244,000 to conduct bee research in Weslaco, Texas.

Congress, which spends millions battling roaches and rodents in the Capitol, has a thing about bugs. It can't spend enough on them: $353,000 to battle the Asian long-horned beetle in Illinois; $234,000 to help an American laboratory in Montpellier, France fight the olive fruit fly; $113,000 to go after rodents in Arkansas.

This is just a sampling of the 11,331 "earmarks" (a 426 percent increase over last year) that this Congress snuck into its annual appropriations bills and accompanying reports for fiscal year 2008 -- nearly 10,000 of them in the omnibus bill alone. Want more?

-- $700,000 for a bike trail in Minnesota.

-- $200,000 for a post office museum in downtown Las Vegas.

-- $1 million for a river walk in Massachusetts.

-- $150,000 for the Louis Armstrong Museum in Queens, N.Y.

-- $200,000 for the Hunting and Fishing Museum in Pennsylvania.

-- $113,000 for rodent control in Alaska.

-- $4 million for a Beverly Hills veterans' park.

-- $37,000 for the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

-- $8.8 million for the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium at Eastern Kentucky University.

-- $2.4 million for renovations in the Haddad Riverfront Park in Charleston, W.Va.

-- $250,000 for construction work at the Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center in Prosser, Wash.

More Reviews of Freedomnomics

2007-12-30T10:37:00.000-08:00

"These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty" writes:

More than just a response to “Freakonomics”, this is a great book that explains why the free market works and socialism doesn’t.