Why I'd like to see this, and health insurance, return to individual or at least non-employment group purchasing. You can get something similar on most credit cards right now- but they only cover minimum payments. We need something like Aflac available for the self-employed, but covering unemployment as well as medical.
I think if you study the shorter time periods for when the growth occured during the 1930s, you can see a more accurate depiction of why the growth occurred.
When the New Deal was deemed unconstitutional and their programs ended, this is when you had a spurt in growth between 1935-37.
More importantly, you miss the aspect of private investment which didn't return to it's 1929 levels until 1952. This was because of the uncertainty created over who would retain the rights to private property.
While you have your total numbers for the 8 year periods correct, you miss the 2 year period between 1935-37 when the economy recovered because the NRA was reduced to a minor bureau.
...ask yourself how much help this sort of thing is to independent contractors and the self-employed.
As per usual the gummint is way behind the curve on significant changes in society and the workforce.
There is no wondering to be done on why the Corporate Slave State luvs them some 'independent contractors...' and the Republicrat cartel love to bloviate about 'American small business...', that's me, the self-employed but there is no safety net for me.
Obama and his folks seem no more knowledgeable in this area.
Or am I missing something in the 'stimulus package' which would help me?
If a better form of "unemployment/underemployment" insurance is needed. Something that the individual, rather than the employer, purchases/pays into in good times, which makes up for lost wages in bad times.
South Florida had a similar problem with the cocaine trade, coming in from Columbia. Crime stats went through the roof.
Same is true during prohibition and the bootleggers.
So, drug cartels and I think even DHS, FBI or some groups said Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries on Earth and the Drug cartels might bring down the entire Mexican government. So, clearly the U.S. is ignoring a major problem.
I personally think they should legalize Marijuana, it's a huge cash crop, grows everywhere and in my view if alcohol and cigarettes are legal....this vice and it's consequences are more with that level.
Another absurdity is Hemp. It's still illegal to grow hemp, even though it is hugely useful for industry, gives no "buzz" whatsoever and grows in soils, lands where other crops will not. It's so absurd. It's like banning corn.
If Marijuana was legalized, it would wipe out the drug cartels who are dealing with just Marijuana just like ending prohibition helped enormously with criminals smuggling/distributing alcohol. Legalization ruins the criminal enterprise.
There would still be meth, heroin, cocaine but at least the focus could move on those drugs, which are so addictive, destructive, pot doesn't even rank with those....
and the start would be to take a huge bit of money out of the drug cartels by marijuana legalization.
They could also give Mexico a cash crop to legitimately trade. It's already a large economic enterprise something like $8 billion dollars, so just legalizing it, creating a cash crop instead of a criminal underground activity doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
Another thing that generally is the best crime fighter and that is reduce poverty. Poverty completely correlates to higher crime statistics.
is there are probably a large section of illegal immigrants who are not a drain on the financial system. Then the self-fulfilling wage repression cycle. Corporations love illegal labor because they can pay under the table or pay less than even minimum wage, no worker rights, workman's comp. etc. and that is why they lobby for increasing the labor supply continually through whatever manipulation of immigration policy they can muster. The major of illegal immigrants are really coming to work because they live in poverty and border hopping is seen as simply a way to earn wages. But like any large demographic, it's not going to be "all" people who are in this country unauthorized and so forth and focusing in on the illegal versus the system itself, even trade, or the overall wage repression in the U.S. probably isn't going to give a real solution to this mess.
I learned a great deal and your last paragraph above reminds me of what my grandparents told me:keeping wages stable during the Depression is better than cutting wages which can contribute to the uncertainty and delayed demand excerbating the problem
But one can quickly get some estimates and I am also assuming from the specificity of each component, say $10 billion for transit, they have to be talking to the people who potentially would receive the money. So they could quickly say $10 billion, just as an example will allow us to employ 2000 workers.
Everything I have read from various analysis, plus Keynesian and then the New Deal implies you are right on the food stamps, extension of unemployment benefits etc. Anything that would be actually spent and if money is given directly into the hands of the bottom rungs of the economic ladder will be spent will boost from a consumer point of view.
So, maybe I am not clarifying, it's not exact, more one can just almost a paper napkin calculation but from each project and then go ahead and use the other more macro economic estimates for things like food stamps.
I also think getting a better estimate would put the focus on U.S. workers. There are a lot of offshore outsourcing firms that use guest workers in IT...so if they want to claim 1 million jobs in I.T. ....they need to specify U.S. workers, otherwise we will be funding India's offshore outsourcing business, not the U.S. economy.
But something like $335 for STD education, come on, we know not only is that not going to generate jobs, probably more importantly that is an absurd amount of money for the task at hand.
All in all, the presence of illegal aliens in the U.S. is estimated to cost the country in excess of $100 billion dollars annually.
Keep in mind that the costs cited above includes only expenditures for education, emergency medical care and incarceration. The costs would be significantly higher if expenditures on other programs such as special English instruction, law enforcement/courts, translators, assistance for public housing, food stamps, welfare payments, etc. were included. Other factors not considered in the reports are job losses by citizens to illegal aliens and the depression of wages in the construction, landscaping, assembly, food processing and service sectors that most illegal aliens are employed in.
A study released on October 1, 2008 by the Center for Immigration Studies deals with gang activity..."Taking Back the Streets: ICE and Local Law Enforcement Target Immigrant Gangs" is the Center for Immigration Studies report that offers these highlights http://www.cis.org/ImmigrantGangs :
# Transnational immigrant gangs have been spreading rapidly and sprouting in suburban and rural areas where communities are not always equipped to deal with them.
# A very large share of immigrant gang members are illegal aliens and removable aliens. Federal sources estimate that 60 to 90 percent of the members of MS-13, the most notorious immigrant gang, are illegal aliens. In one jurisdiction studied, Northern Virginia, 30 to 40 percent of the gang task force case load were removable aliens.
# MS-13 activity was found in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
# The immigrant gangsters arrested were a significant menace to the public. About 80 percent had committed serious crimes in addition to their immigration violations and 40 percent were violent criminals.
# While immigration law enforcement is a federal responsibility, ICE cannot do the job effectively without assistance from state and local law enforcement, particularly when it comes to immigrant gangs.
# Failure to adequately control the U.S.-Mexico border and to deter illegal settlement in general undermines the progress ICE and local law enforcement agencies have made in disrupting criminal immigrant street gangs.
Good post, Mr. Oak. Sadly, it is true that we have an incredible crime burden placed on our society and prison system by illegal aliens. That 20% figure is likely a conservative one.
I'm sure the ACLU, La Raza, MEChA, LULAC and all the usual suspects will consider the following statistics racist and Sheriff Joe Arpaio extremely racist for enforcing immigration laws by utilizing the 287(g) program:
---------------------------------------------------------------
Maricopa County, Arizona is the best area in the country for reliable illegal alien crime statistics. The county sheriff, Joe Arpaio, has aggressively decided to combat illegal alien crime in his county. He has partnered with federal ICE through the 287 (g) program which trains local law enforcement personnel in determining and dealing with illegal aliens. He has a well staffed Triple I Unit (Illegal Immigrant Interdiction Unit).
The MCAO report (October, 2008) from County Attorney Andrew Thomas features these startling numbers for prosecuted felony cases in Maricopa County, Arizona:
In 2007, illegal immigrants accounted for:
10% of sex crimes convictions
11% of murders convictions
13% of stolen cars convictions
13% of aggravated assaults convictions
17% of those sentenced for violent crimes
19% of those sentenced for property crimes
20% of those sentenced for felony DUI.
21% of crimes committed with weapons
34% of those sentenced for the manufacture, sale or transport of drugs
36% of those sentenced for kidnapping
44% of forgeries
50% of those sentenced for crimes related to "chop shops"
85% of false ID convictions
96% of smuggling convictions
Illegal immigrants make up 19 percent of those convicted of crimes in Maricopa County and 21 percent of those in county jails.
Illegal immigrants only make up an estimated 9 percent of the county’s population.
It is estimated that each violent crime cost citizens $20,000, and each property crime cost citizens $4363 per offense.
Stock markets in general are a way for businesses to get startup capital, and in return agree to eternal taxation of their profits by anybody who "owns" the stock.
In other words, it's much like how organized crime works- go to the Don for the startup capital for your enterprise, and pay protection money forever afterwards.
We got the capital, so they get the protection money. Should it be legal? Probably NOT, but that's the way the system is currently wired.
... the projects that we can specify in that way, we lose a big portion of the stimulus. And if we take the time to specify the stimulus spending down to that project level, the spending pattern of the second half of the 2009 fiscal year drops down to 0, since it would still be in process by labor day.
And of course, a majority of the employment from the project to install broadband in 500 rural locations will not be the project staffing, it will be the employment at supplier firms and the employment resulting from second round multiplier impacts of the spending out of the initial primary and secondary employment of the project.
Indeed, one of the strongest (and one of the quickest) stimulus spending options available is to raise the food stamps entitlement thresholds ... both amount provided and the bar compared to the poverty level where eligibility phases out. That has a very high multiplier effect, but almost no project level employment.
When one has a project, say install broadband in 500 rural locations, one can easily spec out the task from equipment needs to timeline to staffing required.
The same is true of say Medical record modernization.
Large corporations do this every day and many of the components in the stimulus, targeting x funds to y project imply such estimates.
this is project management and government contracts are required to do this before bidding on contracts in their proposals.
... in over five decades, and the last time we did the economy was massively different.
So the rules of the political game may require the conferring of expert status on some direct estimate of employment impacts, but from a Post Keynesian perspective, any such estimate is bound to be in part bullshit, no matter how estimates it or how, because we are in uncharted terrain, and you cannot predict the behavior of a complex system such as the economy in uncharted terrain by simple projection of its behavior in more accustomed territory.
What we can do is get a clear, if rough, idea of the magnitude of the output gap ... how far we are from potential output ... and a clear, if rough, idea of the magnitude of government spending required to fill a substantial portion of that gap.
Since government spending is the injection that is currently available, we know that spanning a substantial portion of the output gap is going to give us the best employment output in reach from Keynesian stimulus, and reduce the required direct employment by the government as employer of last resort to the smallest available level.
So the prediction of employment impacts is quite dubious, but on the other hand, the idea that the case for the stimulus rests on having a clear idea of the employment impacts is simply the result of the framing adopted in the political campaign of "3 million new jobs". The reality is we are facing a big output gap, and need to fill it, and neither private business investment, residential investment, exports or debt-financed consumption is going to be showing up to fill it.
Why I'd like to see this, and health insurance, return to individual or at least non-employment group purchasing. You can get something similar on most credit cards right now- but they only cover minimum payments. We need something like Aflac available for the self-employed, but covering unemployment as well as medical.
I think if you study the shorter time periods for when the growth occured during the 1930s, you can see a more accurate depiction of why the growth occurred.
When the New Deal was deemed unconstitutional and their programs ended, this is when you had a spurt in growth between 1935-37.
More importantly, you miss the aspect of private investment which didn't return to it's 1929 levels until 1952. This was because of the uncertainty created over who would retain the rights to private property.
While you have your total numbers for the 8 year periods correct, you miss the 2 year period between 1935-37 when the economy recovered because the NRA was reduced to a minor bureau.
...ask yourself how much help this sort of thing is to independent contractors and the self-employed.
As per usual the gummint is way behind the curve on significant changes in society and the workforce.
There is no wondering to be done on why the Corporate Slave State luvs them some 'independent contractors...' and the Republicrat cartel love to bloviate about 'American small business...', that's me, the self-employed but there is no safety net for me.
Obama and his folks seem no more knowledgeable in this area.
Or am I missing something in the 'stimulus package' which would help me?
If a better form of "unemployment/underemployment" insurance is needed. Something that the individual, rather than the employer, purchases/pays into in good times, which makes up for lost wages in bad times.
South Florida had a similar problem with the cocaine trade, coming in from Columbia. Crime stats went through the roof.
Same is true during prohibition and the bootleggers.
So, drug cartels and I think even DHS, FBI or some groups said Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries on Earth and the Drug cartels might bring down the entire Mexican government. So, clearly the U.S. is ignoring a major problem.
I personally think they should legalize Marijuana, it's a huge cash crop, grows everywhere and in my view if alcohol and cigarettes are legal....this vice and it's consequences are more with that level.
Another absurdity is Hemp. It's still illegal to grow hemp, even though it is hugely useful for industry, gives no "buzz" whatsoever and grows in soils, lands where other crops will not. It's so absurd. It's like banning corn.
If Marijuana was legalized, it would wipe out the drug cartels who are dealing with just Marijuana just like ending prohibition helped enormously with criminals smuggling/distributing alcohol. Legalization ruins the criminal enterprise.
There would still be meth, heroin, cocaine but at least the focus could move on those drugs, which are so addictive, destructive, pot doesn't even rank with those....
and the start would be to take a huge bit of money out of the drug cartels by marijuana legalization.
They could also give Mexico a cash crop to legitimately trade. It's already a large economic enterprise something like $8 billion dollars, so just legalizing it, creating a cash crop instead of a criminal underground activity doesn't seem like a bad idea to me.
Another thing that generally is the best crime fighter and that is reduce poverty. Poverty completely correlates to higher crime statistics.
is there are probably a large section of illegal immigrants who are not a drain on the financial system. Then the self-fulfilling wage repression cycle. Corporations love illegal labor because they can pay under the table or pay less than even minimum wage, no worker rights, workman's comp. etc. and that is why they lobby for increasing the labor supply continually through whatever manipulation of immigration policy they can muster. The major of illegal immigrants are really coming to work because they live in poverty and border hopping is seen as simply a way to earn wages. But like any large demographic, it's not going to be "all" people who are in this country unauthorized and so forth and focusing in on the illegal versus the system itself, even trade, or the overall wage repression in the U.S. probably isn't going to give a real solution to this mess.
Just one county, near the border, so it doesn't represent the mean, median.
I learned a great deal and your last paragraph above reminds me of what my grandparents told me:keeping wages stable during the Depression is better than cutting wages which can contribute to the uncertainty and delayed demand excerbating the problem
But one can quickly get some estimates and I am also assuming from the specificity of each component, say $10 billion for transit, they have to be talking to the people who potentially would receive the money. So they could quickly say $10 billion, just as an example will allow us to employ 2000 workers.
Everything I have read from various analysis, plus Keynesian and then the New Deal implies you are right on the food stamps, extension of unemployment benefits etc. Anything that would be actually spent and if money is given directly into the hands of the bottom rungs of the economic ladder will be spent will boost from a consumer point of view.
So, maybe I am not clarifying, it's not exact, more one can just almost a paper napkin calculation but from each project and then go ahead and use the other more macro economic estimates for things like food stamps.
I also think getting a better estimate would put the focus on U.S. workers. There are a lot of offshore outsourcing firms that use guest workers in IT...so if they want to claim 1 million jobs in I.T. ....they need to specify U.S. workers, otherwise we will be funding India's offshore outsourcing business, not the U.S. economy.
But something like $335 for STD education, come on, we know not only is that not going to generate jobs, probably more importantly that is an absurd amount of money for the task at hand.
That I consider corporate, stock-market based capitalism as much of a failed experiment as communism. Time to move on to a new new deal.
How about the cost that illegal aliens here impose on us.
For education-medical-incarceration costs (all state studies by FAIR – Federation for American Immigration Reform):
North Carolina (2009 study): $1.2 billion dollars annually
Georgia (2008 study): $1.6 billion dollars annually
Colorado (2008 study): $1.1 billion dollars annually
Illinois (2007 study): $3.5 billion dollars annually
Tennessee (2007 study): $285 million annually
Iowa (2007 study): $240 million dollars annually
New York (2006 study): $5.1 billion dollars annually
Florida: (2006 study): $4.3 billion dollars annually
New Jersey (2006 study): $2.1 billion dollars annually
Texas (2005 study): $4.7 billion dollars annually
California (2004 study): $10.5 billion dollars annually
Arizona (2004 study): $1.3 billion dollars annually
All in all, the presence of illegal aliens in the U.S. is estimated to cost the country in excess of $100 billion dollars annually.
Keep in mind that the costs cited above includes only expenditures for education, emergency medical care and incarceration. The costs would be significantly higher if expenditures on other programs such as special English instruction, law enforcement/courts, translators, assistance for public housing, food stamps, welfare payments, etc. were included. Other factors not considered in the reports are job losses by citizens to illegal aliens and the depression of wages in the construction, landscaping, assembly, food processing and service sectors that most illegal aliens are employed in.
A study released on October 1, 2008 by the Center for Immigration Studies deals with gang activity..."Taking Back the Streets: ICE and Local Law Enforcement Target Immigrant Gangs" is the Center for Immigration Studies report that offers these highlights http://www.cis.org/ImmigrantGangs :
# Transnational immigrant gangs have been spreading rapidly and sprouting in suburban and rural areas where communities are not always equipped to deal with them.
# A very large share of immigrant gang members are illegal aliens and removable aliens. Federal sources estimate that 60 to 90 percent of the members of MS-13, the most notorious immigrant gang, are illegal aliens. In one jurisdiction studied, Northern Virginia, 30 to 40 percent of the gang task force case load were removable aliens.
# MS-13 activity was found in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
# The immigrant gangsters arrested were a significant menace to the public. About 80 percent had committed serious crimes in addition to their immigration violations and 40 percent were violent criminals.
# While immigration law enforcement is a federal responsibility, ICE cannot do the job effectively without assistance from state and local law enforcement, particularly when it comes to immigrant gangs.
# Failure to adequately control the U.S.-Mexico border and to deter illegal settlement in general undermines the progress ICE and local law enforcement agencies have made in disrupting criminal immigrant street gangs.
Good post, Mr. Oak. Sadly, it is true that we have an incredible crime burden placed on our society and prison system by illegal aliens. That 20% figure is likely a conservative one.
I'm sure the ACLU, La Raza, MEChA, LULAC and all the usual suspects will consider the following statistics racist and Sheriff Joe Arpaio extremely racist for enforcing immigration laws by utilizing the 287(g) program:
---------------------------------------------------------------
Maricopa County, Arizona is the best area in the country for reliable illegal alien crime statistics. The county sheriff, Joe Arpaio, has aggressively decided to combat illegal alien crime in his county. He has partnered with federal ICE through the 287 (g) program which trains local law enforcement personnel in determining and dealing with illegal aliens. He has a well staffed Triple I Unit (Illegal Immigrant Interdiction Unit).
The MCAO report (October, 2008) from County Attorney Andrew Thomas features these startling numbers for prosecuted felony cases in Maricopa County, Arizona:
In 2007, illegal immigrants accounted for:
10% of sex crimes convictions
11% of murders convictions
13% of stolen cars convictions
13% of aggravated assaults convictions
17% of those sentenced for violent crimes
19% of those sentenced for property crimes
20% of those sentenced for felony DUI.
21% of crimes committed with weapons
34% of those sentenced for the manufacture, sale or transport of drugs
36% of those sentenced for kidnapping
44% of forgeries
50% of those sentenced for crimes related to "chop shops"
85% of false ID convictions
96% of smuggling convictions
Illegal immigrants make up 19 percent of those convicted of crimes in Maricopa County and 21 percent of those in county jails.
Illegal immigrants only make up an estimated 9 percent of the county’s population.
It is estimated that each violent crime cost citizens $20,000, and each property crime cost citizens $4363 per offense.
Stock markets in general are a way for businesses to get startup capital, and in return agree to eternal taxation of their profits by anybody who "owns" the stock.
In other words, it's much like how organized crime works- go to the Don for the startup capital for your enterprise, and pay protection money forever afterwards.
We got the capital, so they get the protection money. Should it be legal? Probably NOT, but that's the way the system is currently wired.
... the projects that we can specify in that way, we lose a big portion of the stimulus. And if we take the time to specify the stimulus spending down to that project level, the spending pattern of the second half of the 2009 fiscal year drops down to 0, since it would still be in process by labor day.
And of course, a majority of the employment from the project to install broadband in 500 rural locations will not be the project staffing, it will be the employment at supplier firms and the employment resulting from second round multiplier impacts of the spending out of the initial primary and secondary employment of the project.
Indeed, one of the strongest (and one of the quickest) stimulus spending options available is to raise the food stamps entitlement thresholds ... both amount provided and the bar compared to the poverty level where eligibility phases out. That has a very high multiplier effect, but almost no project level employment.
When one has a project, say install broadband in 500 rural locations, one can easily spec out the task from equipment needs to timeline to staffing required.
The same is true of say Medical record modernization.
Large corporations do this every day and many of the components in the stimulus, targeting x funds to y project imply such estimates.
this is project management and government contracts are required to do this before bidding on contracts in their proposals.
... in over five decades, and the last time we did the economy was massively different.
So the rules of the political game may require the conferring of expert status on some direct estimate of employment impacts, but from a Post Keynesian perspective, any such estimate is bound to be in part bullshit, no matter how estimates it or how, because we are in uncharted terrain, and you cannot predict the behavior of a complex system such as the economy in uncharted terrain by simple projection of its behavior in more accustomed territory.
What we can do is get a clear, if rough, idea of the magnitude of the output gap ... how far we are from potential output ... and a clear, if rough, idea of the magnitude of government spending required to fill a substantial portion of that gap.
Since government spending is the injection that is currently available, we know that spanning a substantial portion of the output gap is going to give us the best employment output in reach from Keynesian stimulus, and reduce the required direct employment by the government as employer of last resort to the smallest available level.
So the prediction of employment impacts is quite dubious, but on the other hand, the idea that the case for the stimulus rests on having a clear idea of the employment impacts is simply the result of the framing adopted in the political campaign of "3 million new jobs". The reality is we are facing a big output gap, and need to fill it, and neither private business investment, residential investment, exports or debt-financed consumption is going to be showing up to fill it.
I'll have to do this for the next poll but I think people want D.C. to do things....that will actually work, are worth the money and make sense.
Rome burns and these cats fiddle.
...my point is that it will bear watching if the House Republicans stand firm on their second chance at voting for the 'package'.
The buzz is that more than a few will vote 'yes'.
No matter what the bill looks like.
Boehner can bloviate all he wants....
....he's not up for re-election just now. Some of his posse of fellow House Republicans are.
They are scared...
...the usual mental state of all politicians.
Conferees are "hand picked" by "senate and house leadership" ....
so it's just a couple from each Chamber who "do the bill" after the bill.
or it can be, depending.
Then, it's pretty clear the Senate is going to change things considerably.
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