Tag Archives: #Economics

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Heather Long gets a promotion

Heather Long first came to my attention when she was an economics reporter for CNN. She wrote, on September 16, 2016:

Problem: Most Americans don’t believe the unemployment rate is 5%

by Heather Long | September 6, 2016 | 3:18 PM EDT

Heather Long

Americans think the economy is in far worse shape than it is.The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has tapped into this confusion. He has repeatedly called the official unemployment rate a “joke” and a even “hoax.”

There’s more at the original.

I noted, at the time — in a post that is locked up, with so many others, in a file that’s stuck in my server somewhere when I got this site ‘fixed’ from some real technical problems — that what Americans believed, that unemployment was “actually at 9%, or higher,” was correct, if you looked at U-6 rather than the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate.

    • U-1: Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force
    • U-2: Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force
    • U-3: U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)
    • U-4: Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers
    • U-5: Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force
    • U-6: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.

NOTE: Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.

The August, 2016 U-6 rate was 9.6%, which I said was right in line with American’s perception of it. Interestingly enough, with the current ‘official” unemployment rate of 4.8%, U-6 currently stands at 8.5%, while we have employers going begging for workers.

As it happened, Miss Long followed me on Twitter not due to any of my brilliant economic articles, but because I responded to one of her sunset over Manhattan Twitter photos with one of sunset between the olive trees in Tuscany. Hey, I’ll take that.

Search and rescue volunteer, Nate Lair, drives a boat through downtown Beattyville after heavy rains led to the Kentucky River flooding the town and breaking records last set in 1957. March 1, 2021
Alton Strupp / Louisville Courier-Journal

In February of 2017, while still with CNN, Miss Long wrote a series about Beattyville, Kentucky, a place called the “poorest white town in America” from 2008 to 2012. While I don’t live in Beattyville, I do live in the next county over, and my nephew, Nate Lair, lives outside the town and is a volunteer fireman and rescue worker there.

I did get some photos of the Beattyville Wooly Worm Festival last Saturday!

My younger daughter wanted me to get the baby goat. I didn’t.

But I digress.

One of the things I really liked about Miss Long was that, in reading her articles, I couldn’t tell what her political positions were. From a few of her tweets concerning the Defiant Girl statue, facing down the bull on Wall Street, I could tell that she was a strong supporter of more women moving into the financial and technical fields, but whether she is a Democrat or Republican (or independent), liberal or moderate or conservative, I really do not know. To me, that’s the mark of a good journalist, as opposed to journolist.[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading

That’s about to change:

    Heather Long to join Washington Post Opinions as editorial writer and columnist

    By WashPostPR | Monday, October 25, 2021 | 12:10 PM EDT

    Announcement from Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, Deputy Editorial Page Editors Karen Tumulty and Ruth Marcus, and Manager of Editorial Talent and Logistics Nana Efua Mumford:

    We are delighted to announce that Heather Long will be joining the Opinions section as an editorial writer and columnist, focusing on economic policy, the future of work and other topics. This is something of a homecoming for Heather, who was deputy editorial page editor of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., when the paper won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize for writing about the Penn State/Sandusky child abuse scandal.

    Since joining The Post in 2017, Heather has reported and written brilliantly on how economic trends and policies — and more recently, a pandemic — affect real people across the country. In 2020, she helped coin the “K-Shaped Recovery,” and in 2021, she recognized the “Great Reassessment of Work” taking place as the deep psychological impact of the pandemic caused people to quit jobs, retire early and seek something very different in their careers. She has won two SABEW “Best in Business” awards and twice been a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for breaking news.

    As a member of the Post editorial board, Heather will become the lead writer on economics, business, inequality, labor and related issues, taking the place of Charles Lane, who assumed chief foreign-policy duties when Jackson Diehl retired in August. On our op-ed page, she will join Catherine Rampell (recent winner of first prize in commentary in the Online News Association awards), Megan McArdle and Helaine Olen to comprise one of the liveliest economic teams anywhere. In time we hope to take full advantage of Heather’s proven broadcasting skills as well.

    Heather grew up in Virginia and Pennsylvania, graduated summa cum laude in Economics and English from Wellesley College, earned two Master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and worked at an investment firm for a couple of years before joining the Patriot-News from 2009 to 2012. She was an opinion editor and columnist for The Guardian in 2013-2014 and senior reporter and editor for CNN from 2014-2017.

    Heather is finishing some reporting projects and hopes to join us Dec. 1.

And thus I will be able to discern whether Miss Long is a liberal or conservative, and how close to the ends of that spectrum she is. But even if it turns out that her political views are rather far from mine, knowing that she actually understands business and economics, will have me continuing to pay attention to what she writes. My congratulations to her.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
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President Biden wants to ‘legalize’ 11 million illegal immigrants, when 17½ million Americans can’t find the jobs they need If you voted for Joe Biden because he was a nicer guy than Donald Trump, then you also voted for this

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,659,000 Americans with jobs in January of 2020, but only 150,031,000 in January of 2021. That’s a loss of 8,628,000 jobs. Despite the “civilian noninstitutionalized adult population” increasing from 259,502,000 to 260,851,000, or 1,349,000 souls, the labor force, meaning people who are either working or looking for work, decreased by 4,295,000, meaning that over four million people got too discouraged to look for work. The “not in labor force” adult population increased by 5,643,000 people, from 95,047,00 to 100,690,000.

The total number of unemployed, even by the BLS U-3 measure, leapt from 5,796,000 to 10,130,000, or 4,334,000.

The “official” unemployment rate was reported to be 6.3%, which doesn’t sound too bad I suppose, but, quite frankly, I see U-3 as a way to under-report to the American people just how bad the economy is. Former Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnunchin thought that U-5, “Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force,” was the better number to use.[1]Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work … Continue reading I prefer U-6 as the best number, which includes everyone in U-5, plus those who are employed part-time, but want full-time work and cannot get it.

U-5 currently stands at 7.4%, while U-6 is a whopping 11.1%.

Doing the math, U-5 reports 1,768,000 people who want jobs, but have been too discouraged to look hard, while U-6 tells us that there are roughly 5,950,000 people who are working part-time only because they can’t find full-time work.

And that’s why this story from The Philadelphia Inquirer pisses me off so much:

Biden, Democrats unveil bill that would overhaul path to citizenship for millions

by Alexandra Jaffe, Associated Press | February 18, 2021 | 3:48 PM EST

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats proposed a major immigration overhaul Thursday that would offer an eight-year pathway to citizenship to the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally.

The legislation reflects the broad priorities for immigration changes that Biden laid out on his first day in office, including an increase in visas, more money to process asylum applications and new technology at the southern border.

It would be a sharp reversal of Trump administration policies, and parts are likely to face opposition from a number of Republicans. Biden has acknowledged he might accept a more-piecemeal approach if separate major elements could be approved.

“We have an economic and moral imperative to pass big, bold and inclusive immigration reform,” said New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, one of the lead sponsors of the bill, in unveiling it Thursday.

There’s more at the original, but the obvious question is: if we have roughly 17,850,000 Americans who want full time jobs but either can’t find anything but part-time, or can’t find work at all, why would we ‘legalize’ 11,000,000 illegal immigrants to compete with them?

Is there any way that isn’t utter madness?

President Donald Trump probably never saw the economic collapse over the COVID-19 restrictions coming, but he had what he called an “America First” policy. He would never have agreed to make it easier for non-Americans to compete with actual American citizens for jobs, but that’s what his successor is doing. Under President Biden, we will have more Mexicans and Guatemalans and Venezuelans getting jobs that would otherwise have gone to people born in this country, to people who are real American citizens.

And if you voted for Joe Biden, because Donald Trump was an [insert slang term for the rectum here], and Mr Biden was such a nice guy, then you also voted for this!

References

References
↑1 Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.
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President Biden acts like he cares about working Americans, but that’s all it is: an act.

This is the kind of thing that pisses me off about Joe Biden being President. Looking at the January unemployment numbers, he said:

The unemployment numbers are from data collected in the middle of the month, normally before the 20th, meaning before he signed the executive order that threw 11,000 people out of work on the Keystone XL Pipeline!

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The Biden Administration has no idea what poverty is like Warning: a nasty story is included

The Washington Post and Fox Business both had stories about the confirmation hearings of former mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-South Bend) to become Secretary of Transportation. Fox Business noted that Mr Buttigieg acknowledges Keystone Pipeline workers, thrown out of jobs due to President Biden’s cancellation of the border crossing permit into Canada, may need to get ‘different’ union jobs, while the Post omitted that part.

Republican Sens. Dan Sullivan (Ala.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) challenged Buttigieg over an order Biden signed Wednesday halting construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The project’s supporters say the order will cost thousands of jobs.

Buttigieg said the administration’s climate agenda ultimately will create jobs and stressed the importance of curbing the use of fossil fuels.

Note what Mr Buttigieg said, that the administration’s climate agenda ultimately will create jobs. Meaning, in a time of high unemployment, those to be created jobs don’t exist yet! Perhaps some of those Keystone XL Pipeline workers will get some of those newly created jobs, but what do they do between today and then?

Oops! For the left, that doesn’t really matter, does it? Mr Buttigieg never got his manicured hands dirty trying to weld two sections of pipeline together, or excavating material in the pipeline’s path. The sheltered son of University of Notre Dame professors, he never had to worry whether there’d be food on the table or a roof over his head.

This is the problem for the left elites: they claim to be all for the poor and the working class, but they have no concept about how the poor and the working class actually live. It’s nothing for Democratic Governors to issue shutdown orders that throw millions of people out of work, because they have no idea what missing even one paycheck can mean for people.

The Federal Reserve noted, in May of 2019 — before the economic dislocations caused by COVID-19 — that 61% of Americans could cover an unexpected, $400 emergency through cash, savings or a credit card that they could pay off at the next billing date. And that means that 39% could not cover such an expense.

And how would that 39% take care of that bill? Borrowing, selling something, or putting off paying something else. But Mr Buttigieg apparently thinks nothing of throwing those unionized workers out of a job; they’ll just have to get ‘different’ union jobs.

If they exist, that is.

I grew up poor, and while not quite as badly off as some other folks in eastern Kentucky, things were tight.

I’m going to tell you a story, a kind of nasty story, but a true one nevertheless. Sometime when I was in high school, the water pipe in the basement froze, and burst. My mother — my father was long gone — did not have the money to afford a plumber to repair it. In high school at the time, I was able to figure out how to shut the water off in the basement where it came out of the foundation wall, but repairing the burst pipe was beyond my knowledge.

We went without running water for at least two months! My mother worked hard, every day, my long-gone father hadn’t contributed a dime in years, and she just didn’t have the money to get it repaired. Our house was in town, so there was no outhouse. I don’t know how my mother and sisters took care of things — as a teenaged boy, I really didn’t want to know — but with no working toilet, when I had to urinate, I pissed out the attic window.

It wasn’t too bad: my bedroom was in the (barely heated) attic, and there were no houses across the street, because there was a ravine there, so I was able to just open the dormer window and let fly. The roof extended under that dormer window, and the urine went into the gutter.

Of course, urine isn’t the only bodily waste. “Number two”? That was at school, or anyplace else I could find on the weekends.

Bathing? Showers in the school gym locker room.

Yeah, that’s a nasty story, but that was my mother’s unexpected $400 expense, backdated fifty years. But that’s an experience which taught me what it was really like to be poor, and we weren’t the poorest people around.

Joe Biden knows nothing about this, Pete Buttigieg knows nothing about this, nobody in the whole damned Biden Administration has any flaming idea what poor people go through, and they are willing to keep adding on and keep adding on and keep adding on more ‘little’ expenses and more ‘sacrifices’ for the good of all.

We’re not poor now, thanks to a lifetime of hard work, but even at my advanced age, my memory is still good, and clear. Mao Zedong once sent the urban elites in China out into the fields, so learn how the peasants lived, and while I would never advocate that kind of totalitarian action, but at least those elites learned — if they survived it — how the other 90% lived. It would be nice if someone in the Biden Administration had some experience, some concept of what the President’s policies will do to people in this country.

Right now, it doesn’t seem as though they give a damn.

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Bidenomics will depress, not increase, American workers’ wages

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove notes some of the stuff that’s coming with the [shudder!] Biden Administration:

Biden Priorities: Amnesty, $15 Minimum Wage, Boys In Girl’s Bathrooms

By William Teach | January 17, 2021 | 7:51 AM EST

Hey, #NeverTrumper, you voted for this with your Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is what you agitated for by telling everyone to vote for not just Joe Biden, but Senators and Representatives. No crying. No whining. No complaining. Own it.

Big Business: Joe Biden’s Amnesty for Illegal Aliens Is a Legislative Priority

by John Binder | January 16, 2021

The big business lobby is cheerleading President-elect Joe Biden’s massive amnesty plan for the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the United States, calling the initiative one of their many “priorities.”

Biden floated the amnesty plan with a number of open borders and business lobbying groups during a meeting this week. Some executives with the groups are calling the amnesty “the most aggressive” plan they have seen while working on Capitol Hill, suggesting it includes not only legislation, but executive orders to legalize most of the illegal alien population. (snip)

Today, 18 million Americans are jobless, and another 6.2 million are underemployed, all of whom want full-time jobs with competitive wages and good benefits. Their chances of securing higher wages and more job opportunities are crushed by the mass inflow of illegal and legal immigration.

There’s more at the original.

The Democrats were big on touting “good, well-paying union jobs” throughout their campaigns. But the obvious question is: why are union jobs well-paying? It’s simple: unionization uses the economic law of supply and demand, by restricting the supply of workers vis a vis demand for workers. If a company is forced to hire only unionized workers, then the supply of those workers is restricted by the number who are in the union.

It’s not just unions: any jobs which require professional licenses or certifications — doctors, nurses, teachers, commercial drivers — are inherently limited in the supply of available workers. Other skilled trades offer such certifications — electricians, plumbers — but their jobs don’t always require people to hold such paperwork.

But the vast majority of American workers do not hold such licenses or certifications, and the computerization of manufacturing has reduced the need for highly trained welders and the like. Most American jobs now require only a minimum of on-the-job training.

However, we have another restriction on supply when it comes to the supply of workers: citizenship or permanent residency status. To be in compliance with employment laws, employers must have copies of the documents which show that a prospective employee can legally work in the United States: a birth certificate, naturalization form or ‘green card.’ This keeps some illegal immigrants from getting jobs, at least with businesses which obey immigration laws.

But if the incoming Biden Administration passes some form of blanket amnesty, then multiple millions of currently illegal immigrants become legal immigrants, eligible to work in the United States, and rapidly increasing the supply of available legal workers.

So what happens? The economic pressures for employers to pay higher wages decreases dramatically. Economics has been called the dismal science because it is, well, dismal, because it is a science that describes people but is based on statistics, and numbers don’t care about people.

Along with this are the proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour, $7.75 an hour above the current federal minimum wage. If that’s done, what will happen?

If a worker earning $7.25 an hour gets raised to $15.00 an hour, that will be a 106.9% raise! Pretty good, huh? But let’s say a worker is already making $12.00. To get a 106.9% raise, he would need to get a raise to $24.83. Why would an employer give a raise to $24.83 to a worker who had been producing at a rate which justified $12.00 per hour? He would have to give that worker a 25% raise, to $15.00 per hour, which I suppose the worker would appreciate, but that previously $12.00 an hour worker would now be a minimum wage employee. Why would an employer give an employee a greater raise than necessary?

Would a worker already making $25.00 an hour, a concrete mixer driver, for example, get a raise? It wouldn’t be required, but now a guy doing a hard, dirty job in all kinds of weather would now be much closer to the minimum wage.

This is the economic effect that Bidenomics would create: downward pressures on wages due to a rapid increase in the supply of available legal workers, along with a pushing of non-minimum wage jobs closer to the minimum. When you have ‘social justice’ driving your economic thinking — and I use the term ‘thinking’ very loosely here — you wind up with policies which result in more, rather than less, poverty and income disparity.

Eventually, a minimum wage increase of that magnitude will trigger price inflation, as employers have to pay more money to the lest productive workers in our economy. The economy will rebalance itself, because that is simply how things work. Inflation will eat away at the wage increase, until the increase is meaningless in real terms, but with more workers pushed closer to the minimum, hourly workers will wind up poorer overall.

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Oh, life on the farm is kind of laid back Ain't much an old country boy like me can't hack

When I was graduated from high school, in 1971, I just couldn’t wait to get out of small town Mt Sterling, Kentucky, and move to what passed for a big city, Lexington. After stops in Hampton, Virginia and the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware, it was 2002 before I finally realized how good I had things in a small town, and we bought a house in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, population 4,659.

In 2014, we bought our retirement home, a small farm in rural Estill County, Kentucky.

OK, OK, maybe our place isn’t quite like Green Acres, but we have 7.92 acres, 500 feet of frontage on the Kentucky River, and we bought it for the ridiculously low price of $75,000. The house is a bit of a fixer-upper, but yes, it is being fixed up! We have one neighboring family, who mostly keep to themselves.

Life is good.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Want to Move to the Countryside?

The pandemic offers a unique opportunity to fix the housing crisis plaguing rural America.

By Kerry Thomson | December 25, 2020 | 2:58 PM EST

With the Covid-19 pandemic has come the rise of remote work, and rural America is having a moment. Searches on RedFin and Zillow show upticks in interest in rural areas, as more Americans determine to flee the cities for greener pastures.

Finding a house in rural America, however, may be easier said than done. Consider Orange County, Ind.—population 19,840 in 2010—which is in many ways a model for rural America. It has a thriving arts community, a local food co-op and a farmers’ market, interesting ecological and natural features such as the Rise at Orangeville natural spring and Hoosier National Forest, and a rich history, with a name deriving from the Dutch Protestant House of Orange.

And it has wide open spaces—too wide open. There simply isn’t enough housing for the people who want to live there. This counterintuitive housing shortage is having a devastating effect on rural America’s economy.

At first glance, Orange County’s housing shortage doesn’t make sense. One would think building in rural America would be easy. There is plenty of cheap land; zoning rules are generally less restrictive; and employers are struggling to fill job openings. Yet the housing crunch is an enormous struggle. In 2017 there were a mere 79,000 single-family home starts in all of “nonmetropolitan” America, compared with 223,800 in 2005.

One explanation is the unwillingness of banks to extend loans to contractors or developers looking to build housing where there are no comparison properties nearby. And given the relatively small, sometimes stagnant housing markets in rural areas, there are often few such “comps.” Without them, there can be no loans. Without loans, there can be no building.

It isn’t often that we see a huge error in economic thinking in the Journal, but this is one of those times.

The second issue is a lack of investors who see adequate potential return on investment in rural areas. The average home value in Orange County is a little over $100,000. In Bloomington, 50 miles away, the average price is more than twice that. It isn’t hard for contractors to figure out where they can earn a bigger return.

Finally, there is a lack of skilled labor. In the fallout of the 2007-09 financial crisis, which crippled the construction industry, 2.2 million construction workers out of roughly 5.3 million left the industry and never returned. This is a national problem, but given the higher potential return on investment for construction in urban areas, rural areas are lower on the list of destinations for contractors.

On its face, this makes sense, but dig deeper, and you can see the mistakes. Some of those 2.2 million construction workers are still out there, and would be willing to return to work if there was work for them. Twelve years is a long time, and some of those workers have passed retirement age, but a lot of them are still out there.

More, with the huge number of unemployed, there will be many who would happily take a try in the construction industry, if given a chance. Yes, they are mostly unskilled in the construction trades, but the only way to get those skills is to start working, and learn your way up from the bottom. That’s how I did it!

The Journal article simply assumes that there are no construction companies in small towns or rural areas, but that isn’t the case by any means. A lot of the construction companies in small towns and rural areas are small, and not currently very profitable, but given the opportunities to grow, most would certainly take advantage of them.

The housing shortage aggravates many of rural America’s other crises. One is the aging and dwindling population—a trend that could potentially reverse as people find greater flexibility through remote work and the pandemic diminishes the appeal of coastal cities. Who wouldn’t want to live in an affordable community where you know your neighbors and maybe have a national forest as a backyard? But talented young professionals—the type who start businesses that hire people and offer upward earning potential—aren’t going to relocate to rural areas if they can’t find a place to live.

What the Journal article is suggesting is that there is a potential demand for housing in small towns and rural areas. If there is an actual demand, two things will happen: prices will rise, as competition in a reduced supply market pushes prices higher, and those higher prices will spur a greater profitability in construction in those areas.

Kerry Thomson, Executive Director, Center for Rural Engagement, from her LinkedIn profile.

And that will lead to a third thing: other economic development in those areas, as people living in smaller areas and working from home will need more grocery stores and want more restaurants.

Kerry Thomson, the article author and executive director of the Center for Rural Engagement at Indiana University, Bloomington, draws the conclusion that government need to push things, but she has missed the point. If there really is a demand for more small town and rural housing, that demand will push everything that is needed. And if she is incorrect, and that demand really isn’t there, then the government programs she is pushing will be just another pointless government expenditure. She wants the government to push things by “offering a time-limited expansion of rural-specific loan guarantees to banks and lenders. This would provide an incentive to lend to builders in rural areas.”

More, what Miss Thomson wants to do is, in effect, apply large city thinking to small towns and rural counties. She wants to provide those areas with “local government zoning and planning information” and “a tax model to help communities determine the cost and benefit of new homes, among other resources.”  She would add governmental costs to building projects, as planning and zoning commissions require review and approval of construction projects, and add layers of inspections that we normally do not see in small towns and rural areas, things which raise costs, and prices, but do not add value to homes.

New design prototypes could also offer answers. A project to design a prototype for cost-effective, modestly sized homes that appeal to both young professionals and older residents is being piloted in southern Indiana. The homes appeal to both young and old because they are moderately sized and modern, with open floor plans and energy-efficient design features.

One of the great things about small towns is their diversity of housing design. What Miss Thomson has proposed sounds awfully cookie-cutter to me! I spent the better part of a year, through the winter, pouring basements and garage slabs in a subdivision called Quail Hollow, outside of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The whole subdivision was a project by Ryan Homes, and there were five floor plans, each of which could be reversed, from which buyers could choose. A huge, cookie cutter subdivision, and yes, it’s experiences like that which influence me today.

Housing, the author wrote, is one of the most serious issues in rural areas, but she sees it as the “driver” of many of rural America’s problems. In that, she has it all wrong. The primary problem in rural America is the lack of good jobs! What is needed is for manufacturers and entrepreneurs to choose to build their projects in less densely populated areas. That’s not only direct employment, but such creates subsidiary jobs as well. Decent jobs attract decent people, and decent jobs provide the money for people to fix up their existing homes as well as build and buy new ones.

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Well, wahhh!

A few articles in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer caught my eye. In the first, it seems that college professors in the Keystone State are having a tough time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

‘Educators hurt when their students are hurting’: College faculty experience rising rates of stress, burnout due to COVID-19

by Bethany Ao | December 16, 2020 | 5:00 AM EST

Donald Wargo, an associate professor of economics at Temple University, in his home office in Radnor. Photo by Jessica Griffin, Philadelphia Inquirer staff photographer. Click to enlarge.

When Temple University transitioned from in-person classes to virtual in the spring because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Wargo knew immediately that he had to reassess his goals for what he wanted his students to accomplish.

As virtual classes continued into the fall, Wargo, an associate professor of economics, tried to capture the atmosphere of an in-person classroom to the best of his ability — using icebreaker questions at the beginning of the semester to engage freshmen and assigning students to Zoom breakout rooms for small discussions. But it has been difficult to recreate that learning environment, he said.

“It’s our job to get students to learn,” said Wargo, who also serves on the executive board of Temple’s American Association of University Professors chapter. “And when our students are stressed from other things like social isolation or living at home that interfere with their learning, we are stressed.”

While the early days of the pandemic were undoubtedly hard for college faculty members as they dealt with campus closings and uncertainty about the fall semester, research shows that burnout rates and anxiety are still increasing 10 months later due to worsening student mental health and increasing fears of job loss.

There’s more at the original.

I do not know Professor Wargo’s salary, but, according to Glassdoor:

The typical Temple University Professor salary is $156,901. Professor salaries at Temple University can range from $137,463 – $175,610. This estimate is based upon 5 Temple University Professor salary report(s) provided by employees or estimated based upon statistical methods. When factoring in bonuses and additional compensation, a Professor at Temple University can expect to make an average total pay of $156,901.

While I normally don’t include photos from the Inquirer, because I try to minimize content to avoid plagiarism concerns, I did in this article. The photo shows Dr Wargo, in his home office in Radnor, a ‘Mail Line’ suburb of Philadelphia. The photo, taken from the outside, shows Dr Wargo in what appears to be a nice, glassed in sunroom, working remotely from his home. While I don’t know his address, and would not publish it if I did, and do not know what the estimated value of his home is, according to realtor.com, there are currently 160 homes for sale there, with a median listing price of $797,500. Radnor has a recent median average sale price of $916,500.

The area isn’t exactly poor.

Professors aren’t exactly underpaid, and are normally considered among the elites of our society, and, yes, there have been some job losses:

In addition to student mental health issues, a number of colleges and universities around the country have announced staff cuts and layoffs as a result of COVID-19. In October, five universities in Pennsylvania’s state system announced that they would lay off more than 100 full-time faculty. In September, Rutgers University eliminated dozens of adjunct positions, citing “unprecedented pandemic-related economic pressures.”

But, try as I might, my sympathy for the elites is somewhat limited by other news:

Retail sales fell 1.1% in November, biggest drop in seven months

by Joseph Pisani, Associated Press | December 16, 2020 | 11:20 AM EST

NEW YORK — Americans held back on spending during the start of the holiday shopping season, a troubling sign for retailers and the state of the U.S. economy.

U.S. retail sales fell a seasonally adjusted 1.1% in November, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. It was the biggest drop in seven months, and a steeper decline than Wall Street analysts had expected.

The report points to a weak start to the all-important holiday shopping season, which can usually account for a quarter or more of a retailer’s annual sales. It is also another sign that the pandemic is slowing the U.S. economy as retailers face tighter restrictions and people stay away from stores.

The Commerce Department on Wednesday also revised October’s report, saying that retail sales fell 0.1% that month, instead of rising 0.3% as it previously reported. Retailers had tried to get people to shop early, with Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart and others offering holiday deals in October.

There’s more at the original. But, imagine that: with a high unemployment rate, and all of the economic restrictions that governors like Tom Wolf (D-PA) have instituted to fight COVID-19, can anyone really be surprised? People living from paycheck-to-paycheck, in an economy in which government officials can simply order their jobs shut down, might be a little more conservative in their spending habits. And the people who have lost their jobs don’t have money to spend for Christmas, not when they are worried about putting food on the table and keeping the heat on during the winter.

Black Friday was also a bust. Typically one of the busiest shopping days of the season, shoppers mostly stayed home after health officials warned people not to shop in person, and retailers followed suit by putting their best deals online. Half as many people shopped inside stores this Black Friday than last year, according to retail data company Sensormatic Solutions.

I’m shocked, shocked! that people stayed home after the government told them it wasn’t safe to go to stores.

Gov. Wolf’s COVID-19 restrictions will decimate small businesses across the state | Opinion

Jennifer Stefano, For The Inquirer | December 16, 2020 | 9:15 AM EST

At Vecchia Osteria in Newtown, Bucks County, oversized Christmas balls hang from the ceiling and lighted garland frames each entry way. Dozens of tables sit empty, waiting for customers who won’t be coming. The only signs that the business is still open are three large, brown takeout bags under a framed portrait of actress Sophia Loren.

Owners Pasquale and Anna Palino and their young children immigrated from Italy in 1999. After a decade working the kitchens of Italian restaurants around Philadelphia, Pasquale opened Vecchia. Today, all five children, along with their two sons-in-law, work the business seven days a week. Earlier this year, they managed to survive the first round of Gov. Tom Wolf’s COVID-19 lockdowns. But the governor’s latest litany of restrictions — including a three-week indoor dining ban during the industry’s busiest time of year — threatens to destroy the American dream they spent a lifetime building.

“We are losing money every single day,” says Anna, a breast cancer survivor. The eatery, she points out, has lost not only regular, dine-in customers, but also income from holiday parties, catering, and gift cards sales that make the holiday season especially important for restaurants. The Palinos want to stop the virus from spreading, and say they follow every health rule. But they, like many, believe it is individuals taking personal responsibility, not government mandates, that will be required to stop the spread.

Pasquale and Anna have 30 employees who rely on them to earn a living. That’s why their family decided to keep paying all their employees and not to take any income for themselves. But how long can that last, they wonder?

There’s more at the original, but remember: those thirty restaurant employees are, if they are like the vast majority of restaurant employees, making at or near the minimum wage. They aren’t like Professor Wargo, nice and comfortable in his Radnor home, with, one would hope, some decent savings from his six-figure salary.

This is a lesson for the good professor and his colleagues. Yes, some of them are worried about their jobs, though relatively few have lost them. Rather, when colleges go virtual, it’s not the professors who lose their jobs, but the custodians who keep the buildings clean, the maintenance staff not needed because the buildings aren’t being used, the cooks and other service personnel in the cafeterias, where few people are now eating. Those are the people who were making far less than the professors, and those are the nameless ones who are losing their jobs. I have no idea how Dr Wargo, or any other individual professor voted, but what we do know is that college professors donated seven times more to Joe Biden than they did to President Trump. The elites, it would seem, wanted to vote for politicians who would put other people out of work.

For their own good, of course! The displaced workers might wind up out on the streets, homeless and jobless, but hey, they’ll be less likely to catch COVID, right?

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Out of juice What happens when you can't find a working charging station for your plug in electric vehicle?

My good blogging friend, William Teach, has pinch hit for me in the past, and while I haven’t needed his help since I was forced to reconstitute this site, he just published one I have to steal reference:

Who’s Up For A 130 Mile Trip In An Electric Car That Takes 9 Hours?

By William Teach | November 28, 2020 | 3:00 PM EST

The climate cultists at the UK Guardian try to put a rosy face on this, but, ‘taint working

‘Why did it take nine hours to go 130 miles in our new electric Porsche?’

A Kent couple love their new car – but their experience suggests there are problems with the charging network

Miles Brignall | Saturday, 28 November 2020 | 3.30 EST

A couple from Kent have described how it took them more than nine hours to drive 130 miles home from Bournemouth as they struggled to find a working charger capable of producing enough power to their electric car.

Linda Barnes and her husband had to visit six charging stations as one after another they were either out of order, already had a queue or were the slow, older versions that would never be able to provide a fast enough charge in the time.

While the couple seem to have been “incredibly unlucky”, according to the president of the AA, Edmund King, their case highlights some of the problems that need ironing out before electric car owners can rely on the UK’s charging infrastructure.

The couple, who love their new fully electric Porsche Taycan 4S, which has a range of about 250 miles, contacted the Guardian to describe how difficult it is to recharge a car away from home. Their journey would have taken two and a half hours in a conventional car, they say.

In a portion that Mr Teach did not quote, the couple stated that they left Bournemouth on the return trio with 45 miles of charge remaining, so they must have burned through some electrons while in Bournemouth. Perhaps electric car owners need to be a little bit more conservative in planning their travels.[1]As I have pointed out previously, electric cars have far lower ranges when the weather is cold.

Must be nice. That car starts at $185,000. See, these very rich people don’t worry about giving up fossil fuels like the peons

“Electric vehicle consumers want more interoperability, more chargers, greater reliability and a contactless experience. To really help the revolution get to full power before 2030 we need a concerted effort from local authorities to take up the charging point grants – only one in six do, according to AA research, and for those premises providing chargers to ensure they work. Driving an electric vehicle is great fun and can save you money and save emissions. Let’s make sure the future network can help save range anxiety,” he says.

See, we need Government to really build all these charging stations and stuff, so the rich folks aren’t inconvenienced with their expensive toys

The Guardian’s story said that the Taycan Turbo 4S has a range of about 250 miles, but that’s significantly higher than EPA ratings, which state the range to be 192 to 201 miles. The Taycan 4s (not the Turbo 4S), with the upgraded Performance Battery Plus, has a slightly longer listed range of 203 miles, and is actually less expensive, at $103,800 MSRP. Note that The Guardian article wasn’t really very specific about exactly which model the Barneses owned.

A parishioner at my church has a plug in Chevy Dolt Bolt. Given that there are no electric car charging stations in our rural county, he has to have a charging station at his home. If I had a plug in electric, I do have an easy and convenient place in which I could install a 50 amp, 240 volt charging station, something within my skill set, but many, and perhaps most, people do not have a dedicated and secure garage in which they could install such a charger. And, of course, if they don’t have the knowledge and the skills and the tools to install one themselves, they’d have to shell out a couple hundred bucks to a sparktrician to do it for them.

The Guardian article noted that there are more than 11,600 public charging sites in the United Kingdom, but, as the Barneses found out, far too many of them are out-of-service at times, and it can take a long, long time to recharge the vehicle. On Black Friday of 2019, Tesla drivers in the Pyrite State found themselves stuck in hours-long lines trying to recharge.

Plug in electric vehicles might be OK for tooling around town, but if you are like most Americans and at least occasionally take longer trips in your automobile, you had better have a second, gasoline powered vehicle. The Barneses have learned that the hard way.
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The nanny state prepares to strike again

As William Teach pointed out, it’s rather humorous that the Pyrite State is so worried about sugary drinks, yet legalized marijuana usage. From the Los Angeles Times:

Is gulping soda as bad as smoking? California seems to think so

By The Times Editorial Board | March 4, 2019 | 3:10 AM PST

In California, soda is the new tobacco — at least from a public policy point of view.

Adopting some of the same methods that have been employed to reduce smoking, California legislators have put together an ambitious package of bills aimed at curbing consumption of sodas, energy drinks and other beverages that have added sugar.

The proposals, which are sponsored by the California Medical Assn. and California Dental Assn., include levying a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, mandating warning labels on their bottles and restricting how they are promoted and displayed in stores, as well as limiting the serving size of fountain drinks. The proceeds from the tax (the amount is yet to be determined) would fund programs to prevent obesity, diabetes and other health problems associated with the overconsumption of sugar.

It’s an intriguing approach that has already sparked a backlash from the soda industry and a public discussion about what role the government should play in grocery store purchases. Now the onus is on public health officials to make a clear and compelling case about the dangers — and to explain why sugary drinks deserve as harsh a regulatory response as cigarettes.

There’s much more at the original.

Full disclosure: I love Mountain Dew, and I had been consuming mass quantities of it since I was a teenager in the 1960s. It was nothing for me to drink four bottles or cans of Dew in a day, and on a particularly hot summer day, the count could go higher. When we lived in Pennsylvania, I even had my own, separate Dew refrigerator in the basement, because Mrs Pico continually complained that I had the regular ‘fridge set too cold, and was freezing the produce and eggs.

On July 1, 2017, when we moved back to the Bluegrass State, I gave up soda, cold turkey. I really haven’t missed it.

But, I digress. There is little question that soda isn’t particularly good for you; the Times’ editorial board was simply making the case that it hadn’t been proven bad enough for you for California to attempt to regulate and tax into disuse. I find it interesting that a state which has legalized the recreational use and sale of pot, has passed an assisted suicide law, tried to (but shelved) ban homosexual conversion therapy, and makes millions off of advertisements and product placements for the consumption of alcohol, is so very worried that you might drink a Pepsi.

But one of the proposed measures that could show results is definitely worth exploring: taxes on drinks with added sugar. Last week, a three-year study of the tax on sugar-sweetened beverages imposed by Berkeley in 2014 — the first in the nation — found that people in low-income neighborhoods bought fewer sugary drinks after the tax was imposed, while consumption trends remained the same in neighboring cities that didn’t have such a tax. The study also found that the people who drank fewer sugary beverages consumed more water during the same period.

This finding mitigates the argument that such a regressive levy would hit low-income people the hardest. Poorer people, many of them black and Latino, would still suffer, economically and physically, if they continued to drink copious amounts of sugar-sweetened drinks. But black and Latino Californians have higher rates of obesity than other populations, so if the higher cost encouraged them to switch to healthier (and untaxed) water, it would be a double benefit to them.

Translation: yes, it would have a disparate impact on minorities, but it’s for their own good, so that doesn’t matter!

The obvious question has to be asked: why is it any of the government’s business to “encourage” people to change their choices and habits? The city of Philadelphia imposed a special tax on sugary drinks, and part of the effect was to cut revenue to retailers near the city limits when their customers could, and did, easily drive to stores in neighboring Bucks and Montgomery counties to buy Mountain Dew without paying the ridiculous tax. It seems that customers were willing to spend a little more in gasoline to buy what they chose.

Of course, alcohol consumption is worse, far worse, than that of sugary drinks, and nobody in the Pyrite State is (seriously) trying to ban or reduce that. The editors of the Los Angeles Times even advocated changing state law to allow businesses which serve alcohol to continue serving until 4:00 AM rather than the 2:00 last call specified by state law:

California is still hewing to a 1935 law dictating that alcohol sales stop from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., and that blanket prohibition no longer makes sense for cities with thriving music and nightlife scenes that compete for investment and tourism with the likes of New York City, Las Vegas and other late-night cities.

Heaven forfend! We wouldn’t want the “thriving music and nightlife scenes” to be stifled by not having people drinking during the very wee hours of the morning, would we? At best, I found some California sites which want to help people who drink too much alcohol to moderate their intake, but it seems that nobody wants to curtail it back to zero. The National Institute for Health said:

An estimated 88,0008 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity.

Yet California’s legislature doesn’t seem to care much about that!

The truth is that sugary drinks aren’t good for you, tobacco isn’t good for you, alcohol isn’t good for you, and, let’s be honest here, casual sex isn’t good for you, but you sure won’t find the home state of Hollywood trying to discourage the hook up culture!

Governments should just stay out of people’s personal decisions about what to put in their mouths. Yeah, a lot of things people do put in their mouths aren’t good for them, but those are decisions, intelligent or otherwise, which ought to belong to individuals, not politicians.