Tidbits Political Quotations
To Accompany the April 27, 2017 edition of Tidbits
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2017/tidbits042717.htm          
Bob Jensen at
Trinity University




USA Debt Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/ ubl

How Your Federal Tax Dollars are Spent ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c4eab53ef01b7c8ee6392970b-popup

To Whom Does the USA Federal Government Owe Money (the booked obligation of $19+ trillion) ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations/2016/05/25/spring-2016-to-whom-does-the-us-government-owe-money-n2168161?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
The US Debt Clock in Real Time --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 
Remember the Jane Fonda Movie called "Rollover" --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(film)
One worry is that nations holding trillions of dollars invested in USA debt are dependent upon sales of oil and gas to sustain those investments.

To Whom Does the USA Federal Government Owe Money (the unbooked obligation of $100 trillion and unknown more in contracted entitlements) ---
http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/15/news/economy/entitlement-benefits/
The biggest worry of the entitlements obligations is enormous obligation for the future under the Medicare and Medicaid programs that are now deemed totally unsustainable ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm

 

Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side because it's been fertilized with more bullshit.
Anonomous

 

Shoot for the space in between, because that's where the real mystery lies.
Vera Rubin
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/12/28/remebering-vera-rubin/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=f053a9c4e2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-f053a9c4e2-234390133

 

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S. Eliot

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.
Margaret Wheatley
Even conversations that are not politically correct.

Why, we grow rusty and you catch us at the very point of decadence --- by this time tomorrow we may have forgotten everything we ever knew. That's a thought isn't it? We'd be back to where we started --- improvising.
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Act I)

It's hard to beat a person who never gives up.

Babe Ruth, Historic Home Run Hitter
What's sad is to witness what Syria has become because nobody will give up.

And "because they're nonstate actors, it's hard for us to get the satisfaction of [Gen.] MacArthur and the [Japanese] Emperor [Hirohito] meeting and the war officially being over," Obama observed, referencing the end of World War II. 
President Barack Obama when asked if the USA of the future will be perpetually engaged in war.
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-on-americans-being-resigned-to-live-in-a-perpetual-war-2016-7

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. 
Joseph Campbell

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking. 
George S. Patton

If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there.
Yogi Berra

Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
Henry David Thoreau

But there were worries expressed in papers and conversations that p.c.-ness has become a rigid concept, a new orthodoxy that does not allow for sufficient complexity in scholarship or even much clarity in thinking. One speaker, Michel Chaouli, a graduate student in comparative literature at Berkeley, said that "politically correct discourse is a kind of fundamentalism," one that gives rise to "pre-fab opinions." Among its features, he said, are "tenacity, sanctimoniousness, huffiness, a stubborn lack of a sense of humor." ---
Michel Chaouli in "The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct," 1990
http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_6308.pdf

66 Trump Executive Actions to Date ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-executive-orders-memorandum-proclamations-presidential-action-guide-2017-1

Trump's 'Buy American. Hire American' Policy Is Dangerous Nonsense ---
http://reason.com/archives/2017/04/21/trumps-buy-american-hire-american-policy

Not Lawless in Seattle:  A judge stops the city’s bid to unionize Uber and Lyft drivers ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/not-lawless-in-seattle-1492379305?mod=djemMER

How the Left Dominates USA Law Schools (much like our universities in general)
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/04/byu-and-pepperdine-are-the-most-ideologically-balanced-faculties-among-the-top-50-law-schools-2013.html

Berkeley Cancels Speech by Ann Coulter, Citing Possibility of Rioting ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/berkeley-cancels-speech-by-ann-coulter-citing-possibility-of-rioting/117859?elqTrackId=822ae8d8445149ae9eb1f9a89909ae8e&elq=a2487983b7a8488786606b7ed06b314c&elqaid=13589&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5638
Soon thereafter the decision to ban her from campus was reversed ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/berkeley-reverses-decision-to-cancel-ann-coulter-speech/117882?elqTrackId=40733bf59dd34f38b3cd967a9178c5b2&elq=41c25a2273744c52969f669495d418a4&elqaid=13609&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5645

To me, it’s (the banning or disruption of conservative speakers at UC Berkeley)  a sign of intellectual weakness,” he said. “If you can’t ask Ann Coulter in a polite way questions which expose the weakness of her arguments, if all you can do is boo, or shut her down, or prevent her from coming, what does that tell the world?
Bernie Sanders
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2017/04/23/sanders-slams-uc-berkeleys-antifree-speech-zealots-its-a-sign-of-intellectual-weakness-n2317054?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

Breaking down the nationwide average shows significant variation between states, likely driven by localized economic and political conditions. Support for public higher education declined in 17 states in 2016, including Illinois (an outlier). Support rose in 33 states. Oregon posted the largest increase in a state, of 14.6 percent. Oklahoma posted the largest decrease outside of Illinois, 12.6 percent.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/04/20/state-support-higher-education-increased-2016-not-counting-illinois?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=67e05f1a3b-DNU20170420&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-67e05f1a3b-197565045&mc_cid=67e05f1a3b&mc_eid=1e78f7c952

Harvard:  Women Dominate College Majors That Lead to Lower-Paying Work ---
https://hbr.org/2017/04/women-dominate-college-majors-that-lead-to-lower-paying-work?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date&spMailingID=17048645&spUserID=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&spJobID=1001676407&spReportId=MTAwMTY3NjQwNwS2

Say What?  Socialist Moslem Keith Ellison Blames Obama For Democratic Failures ---
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2017/04/20/keith-ellison-blames-obama-for-democratic-failures-n2315794?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

Bob Dylan's Nobel Speech ---
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-speech.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twitter_tweet

The number of Afghan refugees allowed to stay in Germany has dramatically dropped ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-germany-approving-far-fewer-afghan-asylum-seekers-newspaper-2017-4

As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.
Bob Dylan

They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings.
Steal a little and they throw you in jail,
Steal a lot and they make you king.
There's only one step down from here, baby,
It's called the land of permanent bliss. 
What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?

Bob Dylan

Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame
Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain
Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks
Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain
False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin
Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in

Bob Dylan

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son
And what did you see, my darling young one
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin'
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin'
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Bob Dylan

Patti Smith Sings Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rains Gonna Fall” at Nobel Prize Ceremony & Gets a Case of the Nerves ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/12/patti-smith-sings-bob-dylans-a-hard-rains-gonna-fall-at-nobel-prize-ceremony-gets-a-case-of-the-nerves.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

USA Debt Clock --- http://www.usdebtclock.org/ ubl




NY Times:  Student Loan Forgiveness Program Approval Letters May Be Invalid ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/04/ny-timesstudent-loan-forgiveness-program-approval-letters-may-be-invalid.html


From the CFO Journal's Morning Ledger on April 24, 2017

Trump administration rejects sanctions waiver for Exxon
President Donald Trump has rejected Exxon Mobil Corp.’s bid to sidestep U.S. sanctions against Moscow and resume an oil venture with a politically powerful Russian energy firm. Mr. Trump’s family and political aides have previously faced scrutiny over their possible ties to Russia. Competitor Chevron Corp. said Monday it would sell its Bangladeshi subsidiary to Chinese investors, Reuters reports.


Harvard:  Minimum Wage Increases Make Restaurants More Likely to Fail ---
http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/20/study-minimum-wage-increase-make

Every $1 increase in minimum wage makes mid-level restaurants 14 percent more likely to fail, Harvard economists say. Workers, business owners, consumers lose.

Jensen Comment
It's important to heed the standard deviation in studies like this, because local markets are much more price sensitive than other markets for fast food. Seattle in not Baltimore (that just rejected a minium wage increase to prevent a spike in unemployment).

It's also important to note differences in industries with respect to minimum wages. I suspect that restaurants are more price sensitive than landscaping, This, in large measure, is due to the fact that using a restaurant is almost a daily phenomenon where as landscaping is more like an infrequent capital investment with fewer alternative options in terms of companies and technology.


San Diego's Experiment With Higher Minimum Wage: 4,000 Fewer Restaurant Jobs ---
http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/11/san-diegos-experiment-with-higher-minimu

Jensen Comment
This conflicts with studies in some cities like Seattle that found less negative correlation between minimum wage increases and job losses. It would be interesting to see if the impacts are also suspected in other industries like landscaping where there are a high proportion of minimum wage workers. Several things complicate these studies. San Diego is close to the border with Mexico. That alone means a greater likelihood of undocumented workers working at low wages in the underground economy where wages earned are not reported to the government or to researchers doing wage studies.

In the case of San Diego it's possible that jobs are not being totally lost due to minimum wage increases. Some of those jobs may only appear lost due to their movement into the underground economy.

What I find interesting is that our liberal media tends to cherry pick reporting of these wage studies. The Seattle studies are widely reported. The San Diego studies are more likely to get passed over by the liberal media.

I did not do any research to report the total number of restaurant jobs in San Diego. Hence I don't know if 4,000 jobs is an insignificant number of such jobs.

Also jobs are increasingly being lost in the restaurant industry due to technology. It's more difficult these days to attribute lob losses to higher wages.


Interesting Tax Facts and Tips ---
http://reason.com/reasontv/2017/04/17/23-tip-and-facts-about-taxes


"Women Dominate College Majors That Lead to Lower-Paying Work," by Sarah Green Carmichael, Harvard Business Review, April 19, 2017 ---
https://hbr.org/2017/04/women-dominate-college-majors-that-lead-to-lower-paying-work?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date&spMailingID=17048645&spUserID=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&spJobID=1001676407&spReportId=MTAwMTY3NjQwNwS2

The pay gap between men and women in the U.S. — the 80-ish cents on the dollar that the average woman earns for every dollar the average man does — has narrowed at such a slow pace that it would be unfair to glaciers to call it glacial.

When people talk about the pay gap, what this phrase typically means is that a woman is being paid less than a man for doing the same work. A well-known example is Lilly Ledbetter, who had worked in a tire factory for almost 20 years when a colleague left her an anonymous note revealing she’d been earning thousands of dollars less than men in the same position.

But these kinds of pay gaps — same role, same experience, same firm — account for only a portion of the 20% pay gap between men and women, a gap that’s much worse for women of color. Large chunks of the gap can be accounted for by differences like industry and role. And at the root of these differences, according to a new research report by Glassdoor, could be college majors.

Examining 46,934 resumes shared on Glassdoor by people who graduated between 2010 and 2017, the researchers looked at each person’s college major and their post-college jobs in the five years after graduation. They then estimated the median pay for each of those jobs (also using Glassdoor data) for employees with five years of experience or less. Their key finding: “Many college majors that lead to high-paying roles in tech and engineering are male dominated, while majors that lead to lower-paying roles in social sciences and liberal arts tend to be female dominated, placing men in higher-paying career pathways, on average.”

 

When I spoke with Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s chief economist, he explained that one of his hopes with this research was to give all college students more insight into which majors pay the most, so that they can make informed decisions about which major they choose. He’s also hoping that “by showing young women the facts about what they could potentially earn, more of them might choose a physics or engineering major,” and that more of them will persist in those majors even if they’re the only woman in some of their courses. 

That is a noble goal, but it’s one that I was skeptical would work. In our society, maleness and prestige often go together.

Jobs that are unconsciously coded male have more prestige and pay than jobs that are coded female. This is why a custodian or a janitor (usually a man) gets paid more than a maid or a “cleaning lady” (categorically female — have you ever heard of a “cleaning gentleman”?). And it’s one of many reasons that male factory workers who get laid off don’t rush into “pink-collar” jobs — not only do these jobs pay less, but they also are inescapably lower prestige. Corporate America is not immune to these trends: HR, once considered the most glamorous department to work in, has since become highly feminized, and must now fight for respect at the C-suite table.

A series of studies have shown just how tightly gender, prestige, and pay are tangled. Researchers have found that the pay gap is not as simple as women being pushed into lower-paying jobs. In effect, it is the other way around: Certain jobs pay less because women take them. Wages in biology and design were higher when the fields were predominantly male; as more women became biologists and designers, pay dropped. The opposite happened in computing, where early programmers were female. Today, that field is one of the most predominantly male — and one of the highest paying. The wage gap remains the widest at the top of the income ladder, where jobs tend to be male dominated.

I suspect that our assumptions about what type of work is skilled or specialized is also subtly gendered, although I’m not aware of any research examining this specific question. But why do we assume that STEM subjects are “harder” than subjects that are more person- or language-oriented? Aren’t human beings just as complex as code? When I posed my hypothesis to Chamberlain, he was skeptical. He pointed out that if you write bad code, the program probably just won’t work. Human beings are less rigid, or just have lower standards. When it comes to writing, for example, “many people are willing to accept mediocre work.” (Sigh.) There’s also the pesky issue of market forces and the skills that society values. Music may be a highly technical field, but it’s a low-paying one.

Nonetheless, the Glassdoor data does show that even when women and men study the same subject, women sort into lower-paying jobs when they get out of school. For example, among female biology majors, the top post-college jobs are lab technician, pharmacy technician, and sales associate. Among the male graduates, the most common jobs are lab tech, data analyst, and manager. Since the latter jobs are higher paying, the pay gap persists even among people who majored in biology. The data shows similar gaps for mathematics majors: Among both genders, data analyst and generic analyst roles were popular. But men were much more likely to be found in sexy data scientist roles, and so the average male math major earns $60,000 a year in his first five years out of school, while the average female math major earns only $49,182. Other research has shown that more of the gender wage gap comes from within-industry gaps than between-industry gaps.

When I asked Chamberlain why women aren’t getting those higher-paying industry jobs, despite their qualifications, he said his data didn’t indicate a reason. It could be driven by the behavior of the job seeker. Perhaps men feel pressured to find and take the highest-paying job they can get, while women think holistically about work-life balance and flexibility. Perhaps companies are fast-tracking men into prestigious, higher-paying roles. Or perhaps companies are being too narrow in what they’re looking for. For instance, if you’re trying to hire a data scientist and you tell your recruiter to look only at statistics majors, you’ve immediately narrowed your pool of applicants to mostly men. If companies looked at skills rather than credentials, they might find that there are women trained in sociology, biology, or anthropology who are just as handy with a spreadsheet.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on the history of women in the occupational professions ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Women


Preventing the Next Madoff Norm:  Champ stepped into his role at the SEC invigorated by the spirit of reform. What he found was passivity and petty dysfunction ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/preventing-the-next-madoff-1492366357?mod=djemMER

Norm Champ stepped into his role at the SEC invigorated by the spirit of reform. What he found was passivity and petty dysfunction.

. . .

Yet “nothing was what I expected,” he writes in “Going Public,” his firsthand look into the SEC and the challenges of working for the federal government. “I soon learned that the SEC wasn’t a typically dysfunctional bureaucracy that needed to fix what had been broken. Rather, there were parts of it that had never been built.”

The agency’s failure to cultivate examiner expertise and encourage follow-through, for instance, was blamed for allowing Madoff and Stanford to continue their schemes. Walls dividing the examination and enforcement groups, and turf wars among work teams, meant that there was no system to share detailed tips about suspected frauds. Some SEC supervisors had been there for decades and recruited employees without private-sector backgrounds, meaning that the agency was out of touch with the more recent financial products and practices they were being asked to regulate.

Mr. Champ discovered that “the combination of civil service protection and public employee union contracts . . . had wired the wrong incentives” into the agency, which risked privileging employee perks—job security, work-life balance, protection from termination—over the good of the financial markets. This created a culture, according to Mr. Champ, that rewarded passivity and fostered petty dysfunction.

He learned his first day on the job, for example, that office supplies were hoarded because they might run out. Underperforming government employees could not easily be fired, including one who apparently did not show up to work for years. Mr. Champ seems especially astonished that the SEC asked an investment firm to extend its daily opening hours—so that an examiner could preserve his 10-hour Monday-Thursday work schedule and keep his Fridays off.

From his first days at the SEC, Mr. Champ sought to leave the agency better than he found it—to develop clear information-sharing procedures and performance standards and to recognize examiners for initiative and good work. What he ran into, however, was a bunker mentality among some of the permanent staff that thwarted real change. They waited out reform-minded managers with the refrain “this too shall pass.” When Mr. Champ became head of the important Division of Investment Management—the group tasked with overseeing investment companies, mutual funds, hedge-fund advisers and exchange-traded funds—he discovered that the division was referred to inside the SEC as the “Wax Museum” because of its resistance to reform.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
The SEC's failure to greatly limit the massive Madoff Ponzi Fraud was at best severely negligent and in reality probably insider fraud ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRottenPart2.htm#Ponzi


The Economist Magazine:  A lack of competition explains the flaws in American aviation ---
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721201-americans-are-treated-abysmally-their-airlines-they-should-look-europe-lessons-lack?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/20170420n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/na/25018/n

Americans are treated abysmally by their airlines. They should look to Europe for lessons

DECADES ago travelling by air in America was a glamorous affair. Today it signals delays, discomfort, extra charges and the threat of violence. A video of a passenger being forcibly dragged from a United Airlines flight on April 9th, after too few people volunteered to give up their seats, has sparked an outpouring of complaints about flying in America. Passengers are right to moan. America’s airlines really do compare badly with foreign ones. European carriers are the best point of reference.

Air fares are higher per seat mile in America than in Europe. When costs fall, consumers in America fail to enjoy the benefits. The global price of jet fuel—one of the biggest costs for airlines—has fallen by half since 2014. That triggered a fare war between European carriers, but in America ticket prices have hardly budged. Airlines in North America posted a profit of $22.40 per passenger last year; in Europe the figure was $7.84.

 

Standards of service are also worse. Only one operator based in America can be found in the world’s 30 best carriers, as rated by Skytrax, an aviation website, compared with nine from Europe. When Ryanair, currently Europe’s largest and cheapest airline, cut service to the bone, it began to lose customers and money. That prompted it to perform a U-turn and be “nicer” to customers, in order to protect its market share from rivals like easyJet, Wizz Air and Norwegian.

This happy combination of low fares and reasonable service has a simple explanation: competition. American policymakers have presided over a wave of mergers in the past few years. The biggest four carriers in America between them now control 80% of the market, compared with just 48% a decade ago. Warren Buffett, a man who knows an oligopoly when he sees one, bought nearly $10bn-worth of airline stock in 2016. In Europe, where the top four carriers have around 45% of the market, policymakers have got three things right.

First, European regulators have tried harder to preserve competition between existing carriers. The EU has been willing to block mergers, such as a proposed tie-up between Ryanair and Aer Lingus, and to prevent airlines from building monopoly positions at airports. Not so in America: at 40 of its 100 biggest hubs, a single carrier now accounts for more than half of capacity. That pushes up prices. The merger of American and US Airways in 2013 increased American’s market share at Philadelphia’s airport to 77%. Fares rose from 4% below the national average in 2013 to 11% above after the merger.

Second, Europe has made it easier for foreigners to boost competition by entering new markets. There are no ownership limits at all between European countries; and the EU lets airlines with a non-EU owner that has a stake of up to 49% fly anywhere within the bloc. America caps foreign ownership at 25%. Foreign joint ventures, such as Virgin America (which was acquired by Alaska Air Group last year) struggle to take off.

Third, Europe has also encouraged competition between different airports and their main operators. Breaking up the ownership of London’s biggest three airports has saved passengers £420m ($628m) in fares since 2009, according to ICF International, a consultancy. In contrast, most American cities have only one airport, many of them publicly owned.

Dogfighters

Some of Europe’s advantages are hard to replicate. Distances between big cities are shorter, making road and rail transport serious rivals. Yet that is all the more reason for America to promote competition in the sky. America’s regulators should loosen the cap on foreign ownership, take away slots from incumbents and promote the use of secondary airports to give new entrants a leg-up. If that doesn’t yield dividends, regulators should consider breaking up the big airlines. Allowing competition to wither was a huge mistake. It should be rectified

Continued in article


FDA rule to take effect May 5 requires chain restaurants to post calorie counts on menus: The pepperoni calorie-count rule ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fdas-pizza-minders-1492379447?mod=djemMER

The Food and Drug Administration can’t possibly fulfill all of the responsibilities it claims to have, and here’s one way the Trump Administration can set better priorities: Direct the agency to end its effort to inform Americans that pizza contains calories.

An FDA rule to take effect May 5 requires chain restaurants to post calorie counts on menus. The regulation also covers movie theaters, grocery stores, breweries and other establishments with more than 20 locations. The rule, required by the Affordable Care Act, has been revised and twice delayed in six years, mostly due to objections from a trade coalition called the American Pizza Community. (Regrettably, it does not issue membership cards.)

The more than 100-page rule, perhaps the longest meditation on fast food ever published, says that pizza purveyors must display per slice calorie ranges. Dominos offers 34 million potential combinations, and the number of pepperonis on a pizza can vary based on whether a customer also tosses on green peppers or something else. FDA suggests displaying verbiage like “pepperoni—200 added calories for a one-topping pizza” for every topping. Better have a calculator when ordering.

The regulation also defines menu to include advertisements or flyers that list a phone number or website for ordering—in other words, marketing material. The restaurant must certify that the store made “reasonable” efforts to ensure that calorie estimates are accurate, though the minds behind this rule don’t sound like reliable arbiters of reasonableness. The penalty for noncompliance is fines, jail or, this being America, class-action lawsuits.

The micromanaging extends to menu font and colors, which must be “the same color or in a color at least as conspicuous” as other types, according to FDA guidance. By the way, none of this will help consumers eat less pizza: Most customers place orders online or over the phone, not from a menu board. Dominos offers an online Cal-O-Meter to help customers know what they’re eating. Restaurants are already required to make this information available in stores and the web for those who wish to know.

The rule has also riled grocers who must label tuna sandwiches or other fresh foods where preparation isn’t standardized. A supermarket trade association, the Food Marketing Institute, says compliance will cost at least $1 billion and some grocers may decide to stop selling prepared foods.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Do people really concerned with calories eat pizza? If so they probably just assume a wide slice of pizza has calories approaching infinity.

In high school my daughter Lisl would not eat fish or meat. But she turned salad bar meals into 5,000 calorie love affairs.

How do you report calorie counts of a 25-item salad bar? A leaf of lettuce smothered with blue cheese dressing can be an inch wide or a six inches wide.


The Economist Magazine:  A lack of competition explains the flaws in American aviation ---
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721201-americans-are-treated-abysmally-their-airlines-they-should-look-europe-lessons-lack?cid1=cust/ednew/n/bl/n/20170420n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/na/25018/n

Americans are treated abysmally by their airlines. They should look to Europe for lessons

DECADES ago travelling by air in America was a glamorous affair. Today it signals delays, discomfort, extra charges and the threat of violence. A video of a passenger being forcibly dragged from a United Airlines flight on April 9th, after too few people volunteered to give up their seats, has sparked an outpouring of complaints about flying in America. Passengers are right to moan. America’s airlines really do compare badly with foreign ones. European carriers are the best point of reference.

Air fares are higher per seat mile in America than in Europe. When costs fall, consumers in America fail to enjoy the benefits. The global price of jet fuel—one of the biggest costs for airlines—has fallen by half since 2014. That triggered a fare war between European carriers, but in America ticket prices have hardly budged. Airlines in North America posted a profit of $22.40 per passenger last year; in Europe the figure was $7.84.

Standards of service are also worse. Only one operator based in America can be found in the world’s 30 best carriers, as rated by Skytrax, an aviation website, compared with nine from Europe. When Ryanair, currently Europe’s largest and cheapest airline, cut service to the bone, it began to lose customers and money. That prompted it to perform a U-turn and be “nicer” to customers, in order to protect its market share from rivals like easyJet, Wizz Air and Norwegian.

This happy combination of low fares and reasonable service has a simple explanation: competition. American policymakers have presided over a wave of mergers in the past few years. The biggest four carriers in America between them now control 80% of the market, compared with just 48% a decade ago. Warren Buffett, a man who knows an oligopoly when he sees one, bought nearly $10bn-worth of airline stock in 2016. In Europe, where the top four carriers have around 45% of the market, policymakers have got three things right.

First, European regulators have tried harder to preserve competition between existing carriers. The EU has been willing to block mergers, such as a proposed tie-up between Ryanair and Aer Lingus, and to prevent airlines from building monopoly positions at airports. Not so in America: at 40 of its 100 biggest hubs, a single carrier now accounts for more than half of capacity. That pushes up prices. The merger of American and US Airways in 2013 increased American’s market share at Philadelphia’s airport to 77%. Fares rose from 4% below the national average in 2013 to 11% above after the merger.

Second, Europe has made it easier for foreigners to boost competition by entering new markets. There are no ownership limits at all between European countries; and the EU lets airlines with a non-EU owner that has a stake of up to 49% fly anywhere within the bloc. America caps foreign ownership at 25%. Foreign joint ventures, such as Virgin America (which was acquired by Alaska Air Group last year) struggle to take off.

Third, Europe has also encouraged competition between different airports and their main operators. Breaking up the ownership of London’s biggest three airports has saved passengers £420m ($628m) in fares since 2009, according to ICF International, a consultancy. In contrast, most American cities have only one airport, many of them publicly owned.

Dogfighters

Some of Europe’s advantages are hard to replicate. Distances between big cities are shorter, making road and rail transport serious rivals. Yet that is all the more reason for America to promote competition in the sky. America’s regulators should loosen the cap on foreign ownership, take away slots from incumbents and promote the use of secondary airports to give new entrants a leg-up. If that doesn’t yield dividends, regulators should consider breaking up the big airlines. Allowing competition to wither was a huge mistake. It should be rectified

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
There are so many examples of where breaking up oligopolies and monopolies lead to greater efficiency, service, and innovation. Exhibit A is AT&T that made us rent their heavy clunky telephones and did not have an innovative idea since the days of Alexander Bell. Think of the world of telephone communications that evolved with the split up of AT&T.

At the same time I recall the good times when small towns like Ft. Dodge, Iowa and Bangor, Maine were had airline service with big airliners. Regulations required that these losing markets be subsidized with higher ticket prices in the bigger cities like Kansas City and Boston. With removal of regulations so did great airline service in many small towns. Competition has its drawbacks. Service to losing markets is dropped in favor of cheaper ticket pricing in lucrative, albeit competitive airports.

At the moment in airline service we seem to have to worst of all worlds in the 21st Century. Mergers of our largest airlines destroyed what little competition we once enjoyed. At the same time deregulation allowed the merged airlines to drop services in marginal or losing small town airports. I think deregulation of the airline industry coupled with deregulation has been a disaster in the USA. My consolation is that my wife's health gives me an excuse to not fly. I'm not shedding any tears due to what The Economist Magazine now calls "abysmal" airline service.


Thomas Piketty --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

"Contradictions of Capital Taking on Thomas Piketty," by Diane Coyle, The Chronicle of Education's Chronicle Review, April 23, 2017 ---
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Contradictions-of-Capital/239829?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=0795d9d8e2d14c21952da3ea098798b4&elq=cbcc060eb5994809b10d9e3c4d53ec4a&elqaid=13625&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5654

. . .

Piketty’s empirical observation is that inequality in the Western economies declined through the middle of the 20th century, but that from around 1980 it started to increase again, to return to the levels of the Gilded Age. His theoretical argument is that there is an inherent dynamic in economic growth that tends to increase inequality, a dynamic halted and reversed in the 20th century by the two world wars, the postwar welfare state and social-market economies (especially in Europe), and rapid postwar growth.

The key point he makes is that when the growth rate slows, the rate of return on capital falls more slowly, increasing the ratio of capital to income and further widening the gap. This is the r>g formula that was fashionably adorning some T-shirts for a while.

For economists, there is nothing inexorable about this. As Paul Krugman points out in his essay in After Piketty, the theoretical argument depends on (among other things) it being easy enough to substitute machines for workers, and there is no definitive empirical evidence that this is so. Devesh Raval points out a number of other problems. Among them, Piketty uses the term "capital" as an abstraction, but the empirical claim that r>g conflates physical capital used in production, housing capital, and the human capital resulting in high earnings for some people. Indeed, the share of top incomes coming from earnings (rather than rents and dividends) is a great contrast with the inequality of the early 20th century. Suresh Naidu underlines this point, calling Piketty’s argument "institution and politics free": "When wealth is understood as police-backed paper claims over resources, rather than the resources themselves, the undemocratic nature of wealth inequality becomes much clearer." A number of other essays in the volume round out the economists’ (sympathetic) critique of Piketty’s book.

The two subsequent sections cover extensions of Piketty. His collaborator Emmanuel Saez argues for continuing and extending the data-collection effort. This is a significant point: Phenomena for which the data are not readily available are invisible in political and policy discourse. In many ways Capital in the 21st Century was published much too late. The political consequences of great inequality were already playing out in the anger and division so visible now in politics in the United States and across Europe. Saez makes the point that although there has been substantial data collection since the 1960s and ’70s on individual incomes, largely through surveys, this statistical approach severs the connection between income distribution and macroeconomic outcomes. Economists in the late 20th century thinking about the economy in the aggregate largely stopped noticing the macro-level inequality trends. There is little reliable data on wealth (as opposed to incomes) at all, and research into wealth distribution and its evolution is correspondingly sparse (as Mariacristina De Nardi and her co-authors point out in their essay).

Filling some of the other research and policy gaps will be crucial for anyone who considers the extent of modern inequality to be problematic. One made visible by the British E.U. referendum and the U.S. presidential election is the spatial dimension. Economies have a geography, something that economists have until recently been prone to overlook; financial capital is highly mobile geographically and — as Gareth Jones points out here — has also created "extra-legal" zones in tax havens where it can safely land. (In a fascinating book, Capital Without Borders [Harvard, 2016], the sociologist Brooke Harrington documents wealthy individuals’ ardent belief that they have a moral responsibility to safeguard their wealth from government expropriation, or what many of us would call "tax.") Heather Boushey explores in After Piketty the implications for women’s economic and political autonomy of "patrimonial capitalism," particularly given the gender bias of inheritance.

The book ends with some reflections from Piketty himself. He is disarmingly open to critiques of his work: "I would like to see Capital in the 21st Century as a work-in-progress of social science rather than a treatise about history or economics," he writes, arguing that all social-science disciplines are needed for a complete picture. However, the critiques matter, at least to the extent that one thinks the current degree of inequality is unsustainable.

Two other recent books point to contrasting possible futures. In The Great Leveler (Princeton University Press, 2017), Walter Scheidel paints a picture not unlike Piketty’s of an inexorable internal dynamic whereby societies become progressively more unequal, until this provokes a reset through war or revolution. In contrast, Tony Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Harvard, 2015) presents a pragmatic 15-point list of policy measures to limit and reduce inequality. When these are taken together, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that if you do not adopt the Atkinson approach, you get the Scheidel outcome. This was exactly the realization that led to the creation of the postwar social contract in the late 1940s.

The editors’ introduction in After Piketty zeros in on this contradiction at the heart of Piketty’s work and its reception: Are there fundamental, intractable laws of capitalist dynamics, making garden-variety policy analysis of inequality ultimately futile? Or, rather, are there "historically contingent and institutionally prescribed processes that shape growth and distribution?" Capital in the 21st Century does not resolve this; neither do the essays in After Piketty. Perhaps it is a purely academic question, but to the extent that any of us are troubled by the new Gilded Age, we have to act as if the second possibility is true regardless.

"Is Piketty's 'Second Law of Capitalism' Really a Law?" by Peter Coy, Bloomberg Businessweek June 6, 2014 ---
 http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-06/is-pikettys-second-law-of-capitalism-really-a-law


Don't count on that government pension," by Terry Savage, The Chicago Tribune, April 17, 2017 ---
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-201704171833--tms--savagectnts-a20170417-20170417-column,amp.html

. . .

This newly collected data should be frightening to those counting on a state or municipal pension. The latest numbers are available at http://www.statedatalab.org/pensiondatabase. There you can search by state to find both state and local pension statistics. The report for each city and state includes the amount of pension plan assets, the amount of plan promises, and the dollar amount and percentage of pension underfunding. Every plan also receives a letter grade, from A to F.

Of the 237 cities studied, 29 received an "F" grade, reflecting a funding ratio of less than 35 percent. Those plans cover many thousands of workers who cannot possibly be paid their full promised pensions, absent a huge tax increase (which would also come out of their pockets as workers).

Based on the size of its unfunded pension liabilities, Chicago is in the worst shape, with more than $62 billion worth of unfunded pension promises. Chicago has less than 33 cents set aside for every dollar promised.

The Chicago Municipal Employees plan is estimated to run out of assets in seven years, since it is only 20.3 percent funded. The police fund (funded at 25.4 percent) and the firefighter's fund (funded at 21.7 percent) will not be far behind. The Public School Teachers' Pension and Retirement Fund is in slightly better shape with 51.6 percent funding.

New York City is in second worst shape in terms of total dollars needed, with an unfunded pension liability of more than $61 billion, but at least it is 71 percent funded.

At another extreme, Portland, Ore., has set aside less than 1 percent of what it needs to pay its $2.9 billion of pension promises.

What's Going On?

How have these cities gotten away with underfunding their pension promises? Until last year, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board required state and local governments to report only a small fraction of their pension liabilities. And there have been no sanctions, other than public outrage, to force employers to top up their pension funds.

Many states, including Illinois, have constitutional provisions making it difficult to change pension formulas, such as cost-of-living increases. These laws have restricted attempts to substitute more appropriate defined-contribution plans, such as the 401(k) plans, used in most businesses.

In corporate America, there are rules requiring disclosure of pension liabilities and forcing increased contributions to underfunded pensions -- costs that are taken out of earnings. That's why most big corporations phased out their defined-benefit pension plans years ago. Instead, they offer 401(k) plans that allow workers to make their own saving and investment decisions, with matching contributions from employers.

If a corporation declares bankruptcy, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation will pick up promised pension payments, up to certain levels. There is no such guarantee for state and municipal pensions.

Obviously, there are a lot of unfunded promises in America. The largest come from the federal government and are related to Social Security and military and federal worker retirement pension plans.

Continued in article

Explore Your State ---
http://www.statedatalab.org


Jagdish put down economics majors (and presumably business majors) with the following message:

. . .

So, now economics is very popular. But economics produces nothing, it only juggles what you have. Hard sciences, medicine, humanities, architecture, music, all contribute far more to civilization, and the mind.

Jensen Comment
I could not disagree more. Economics and business management (along with supporting components like accounting, finance, marketing, data processing, engineering, and markets themselves) perhaps contribute the most essential components of great civilizations --- the marshalling of resources and the leadership essential to bringing those resources to fruition. What great economy in history did as well as the USA without massive slavery and oppression?

 

"Why the U.S. Is Still Richer Than Every Other Large Country," by Martin S. Feldstein, Harvard Business Review, April 20, 2017 ---
https://hbr.org/2017/04/why-the-u-s-is-still-richer-than-every-other-large-country?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date&spMailingID=17055972&spUserID=MTkyODM0MDg0MAS2&spJobID=1001728102&spReportId=MTAwMTcyODEwMgS2

An entrepreneurial culture
Individuals in the U.S. demonstrate a desire to start businesses and grow them, as well as a willingness to take risks. There is less penalty in U.S. culture for failing and starting again. Even students who have gone to college or a business school show this entrepreneurial desire, and it is self-reinforcing: Silicon Valley successes like Facebook inspire further entrepreneurship.

A financial system that supports entrepreneurship
The U.S. has a more developed system of equity finance than the countries of Europe, including angel investors willing to finance startups and a very active venture capital market that helps finance the growth of those firms. We also have a decentralized banking system, including more than 7,000 small banks, that provides loans to entrepreneurs.

World-class research universities
U.S. universities produce much of the basic research that drives high-tech entrepreneurship. Faculty members and doctoral graduates often spend time with nearby startups, and the culture of both the universities and the businesses encourage this overlap. Top research universities attract talented students from around the world, many of whom end up remaining in the United States.

Continued in article

Martin S. Feldstein is the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

 

Added Jensen Comment
In socialist economies where government rather than markets allocate resources of economic production to provide goods and services the government's economists and managers face more daunting tasks equating supply with demand such as when the Soviet economy produced way to many surpluses of some products and dire shortages of others due to failures of the socialist economists and managers supervising a nation of unmotivated workers  --- think of the highly inefficient collective farms that led to food shortages and the fall of the Soviet socialist economy.

Now the Chinese, India, and the other Brics nations are seeking to beat the USA at its own game with even better economists and entrepreneurs. The Brics may well do so once they clean up a lot of lingering corruption and inefficiencies of their old economies. Meanwhile the USA is doomed with political infighting and with $100 trillion in entitlements promises it cannot keep ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS

 




Finding and Using Health Statistics --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/usestats/index.htm

 




 

Bob Jensen's universal health care messaging --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Health.htm

Bob Jensen's Tidbits Archives ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbitsdirectory.htm 

Bob Jensen's Pictures and Stories
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm

Summary of Major Accounting Scandals --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals

Bob Jensen's threads on such scandals:

Bob Jensen's threads on audit firm litigation and negligence ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm

Current and past editions of my newsletter called Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Enron --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm

Rotten to the Core --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

American History of Fraud --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudAmericanHistory.htm

Bob Jensen's fraud conclusions ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on auditor professionalism and independence are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001c.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Governance 

 

Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

·     With a Rejoinder from the 2010 Senior Editor of The Accounting Review (TAR), Steven J. Kachelmeier

·     With Replies in Appendix 4 to Professor Kachemeier by Professors Jagdish Gangolly and Paul Williams

·     With Added Conjectures in Appendix 1 as to Why the Profession of Accountancy Ignores TAR

·     With Suggestions in Appendix 2 for Incorporating Accounting Research into Undergraduate Accounting Courses

Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave  --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
By Bob Jensen

What went wrong in accounting/accountics research?  ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#WhatWentWrong

The Sad State of Accountancy Doctoral Programs That Do Not Appeal to Most Accountants ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVOLUTION OF RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS BY THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW: 1926-2005 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/395wpTAR/Web/TAR395wp.htm#_msocom_1

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm

Systemic problems of accountancy (especially the vegetable nutrition paradox) that probably will never be solved ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm#BadNews

Bob Jensen's economic crisis messaging http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

Bob Jensen's threads --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

Bob Jensen's Home Page --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/