Tidbits Political Quotations
To Accompany the October 31, 2018 edition of Tidbits
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2018/Tidbits103118.htm          
Bob Jensen at
Trinity University




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

In September 2017 the USA National Debt exceeded $20 trillion for the first time ---
http://www.statedatalab.org/news/detail/national-debt-surpasses-20-trillion-for-the-first-time-in-us-history

Human Population Over Time on Earth ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE 


State Income Taxes Ranked From Highest to Lowest
http://www.businessinsider.com/state-income-tax-rate-rankings-by-state-2018-2


The Federal budget for 2017 ---
http://ritholtz.com/2018/04/federal-budget-2017/

Jensen Comment
Note that even before the 2018 corporate tax cuts the corporate income tax has been a shrinking part of the Federal budget of the most recent decades. I've long been an advocate of replacing it with a VAT tax but liberals and conservatives alike hate that idea.

Medicare and Medicaid are the least sustainable entitlements predicted for the future.

Interest on government debt is a huge worry since foreign interests (think China and the oil-rich nations of the Middle East) own so much of it with the threat that one day these large investors will stop rolling over their investments in USA debt.

To Whom Does the USA Federal Government Owe Money (the booked obligation of $20+ 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/ 
In 2018 Foreigners (think Asia and the Middle East) May Be Losing Interest in USA Treasuries ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-12/lackluster-u-s-bond-auctions-add-to-worries-of-foreign-pullback
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

How Americans Get Health Insurance ---
http://ritholtz.com/2017/08/americans-get-health-insurance/

This is an interesting 2017 graph of the USA's trading partner performances ---
http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/trade.png
It's easy to get distracted my big amounts, but look at the imbalances of trade with nations like Japan, Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Switzerland. Add to this what we spend helping to defend nations like Japan, Canada, Germany, and Italy?


The enemy is fear
We think it's hate
But, it's fear

Gandhi

 

13 of the (alleged) most famous last words in history ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/famous-last-words-in-history-2017-10

 

Here are the Ten Best Pieces of Advice from 2018 Commencement Speakers ---
Click Here

 

The Best Advice from 2018's Celebrity Commencement Speakers ---
https://moneyish.com/heart/the-best-advice-from-2018s-celebrity-commencement-speakers/

 

Countries With the Highest Household Wealth on Average ---
http://ritholtz.com/2018/07/countries-highest-household-wealth/

 

Tech billionaires Marc Benioff and Jack Dorsey are clashing over a key law that could seriously impact the San Francisco homelessness crisis ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-benioff-and-jack-dorsey-clash-over-san-francisco-homeless-measure-prop-c-2018-10
Jensen Comment
This is not popular among what I think is a majority of wealthy taxpayers. Exhibit A is what happened when Seattle tried the same thing. Jeff Bezos and others made sufficient threats to make Seattle's socialist mayor back down on a soak-the-rich tax. Even worse is when the wealthy won't move their businesses into soak-the-rich cities, and startups choose to start up someplace else.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/amazon-flexes-its-muscles-and-seattle-backs-down-on-a-business-tax.html
And if you're landlocked like San Francisco (think the SF Bay) with the highest priced real estate in the USA perhaps you should think about rewarding the homeless to leave rather than move to San Francisco. The same tactic is being used on undocumented immigrants in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany where immigrants are paid to leave.

 

California Evidence:  What Happens When States Decide to Really, Really Soak the Rich With Taxes ---
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2018/07/06/millionaires-flee-california-after-tax-hike/#34aa8f514189
Jensen Comment
This overlooks other tactics taken by the rich. For example, portfolios of very people are heavy into tax exempt bonds which may have to be municipal bonds issued in the state of residence in order to be exempt from state income taxes. More commonly, rich people invest for capital gains that are not taxed until realized (think common stocks and art work). Really rich people use off shore tax havens that reduce both federal and state taxes. In other words it's very difficult to soak the rich with taxes if they are astute enough to defer or avoid those taxes. And sometimes they move to more tax-friendly states like the nine states states that have no general state income tax ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_income_tax
However, it appears that only a small proportion of really rich folks in California headed for Nevada, Texas, Florida, or some other state having no income tax. In part this is due to the many magnets that hold people to their long-time homes such as nearness to family and close friends and jobs. More important is the impact of high taxes that prevent many wealthy people from moving/retiring into California. California also has another barrier to inflows --- the astronomical price of real estate. You have to be really, really, really rich to consider buying even a modest home in San Francisco or other parts of the Silicon Valley. When high real estate prices combine with high upper tax rates you really don't need to build a physical wall at the border to keep rich people from moving into a state like California.  And some rich folks don't like the fact that la la land politicians control all branches of government in cities, counties, and the entire la la state of California.

 

Eight Science Quotations from Commencement Speeches
https://todayinsci.com/QuotationsCategories/C_Cat/Commencement-Quotations.htm

 

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

 

The Lucretius Problem is a mental defect where we assume the worst case event that has happened is the worst case event that can happen ---
https://www.fs.blog/2015/04/lucretius-problem/

 

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Aristotle

 

The Economic Ignorance of Bernie Sanders ---
http://reason.com/archives/2018/08/09/the-economic-ignorance-of-bernie-sanders

 

How many times have we heard ‘free tuition,’ ‘free health care,’ and free you-name-it? If a particular good or service is truly free, we can have as much of it as we want without the sacrifice of other goods or services. Take a ‘free’ library; is it really free? The answer is no. Had the library not been built, that $50 million could have purchased something else. That something else sacrificed is the cost of the library. While users of the library might pay a zero price, zero price and free are not one and the same. So when politicians talk about providing something free, ask them to identify the beneficent Santa Claus or tooth fairy.
Walter Williams

 

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
Eric Hoffer.

 

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston Churchill

 

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

In honor of his centennial, the Top 10 Feynman quotations ---
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/top-10-richard-feynman-quotations

Thomas Sowell (controversial conservative black economist) --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell
The 30 Best Thomas Sowell Quotes ---
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/the-30-best-thomas-sowell-quotes/

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

That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
Thomas Jefferson

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 gave up earlier.

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

And many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation: for a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good.
Niccolo Machiavelli

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

You can get a lot farther with a smile and a gun than you can with just a smile.
Al Capone

 

Top 3% of U.S. Taxpayers Paid Majority of Income Tax in 2016 ---
https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/top-3-of-u-s-taxpayers-paid-majority-of-income-taxes-in-2016#gs.A2jQfFU
Yeah I know! Other taxes like sales taxes are more regressive. Property taxes are not as regressive and pay for education in most states. But Individual income taxes, unlike corporate income taxes, are the largest source of federal revenues ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

President Trump Gets Blasted by Washington Post 'Fact Checkers' - But Who Checks Their Facts?
Click Here

NYT:  Chelsea Clinton Condemns Louis Farrakhan's Latest Anti-Semitic Remarks ---
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2018/10/17/chelsea-clinton-condemns-louis-farrakhan-n2529359?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=&bcid=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f&recip=17935167
Jensen Comment
I wonder if Keith Ellison will also condemn the remarks of his hero.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent --- Another Lifetime Scarlet Letter Over Consent Dispute
Kobe Bryant says he's 'disappointed' to be removed from animated-film festival panel over 2003 sexual-assault allegations ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/kobe-bryant-disappointed-to-be-removed-from-festival-jury-2018-10

Elizabeth Warren's Terrible Policy Views Are More Disqualifying Than Her Dubious Ancestry Claims ---
http://reason.com/blog/2018/10/15/elizabeth-warren-dna-test-native-america

Proud Boys, Antifa Clash Again on Portland Streets:  The city is looking less like Portlandia and more like Little Beirut ---
http://reason.com/blog/2018/10/15/right-and-left-wing-street-mobs-clash-ag

Pew Map Shows One Reason a National $15 Minimum Wage Won't Work ---
http://reason.com/blog/2018/10/12/pew-map-shows-why-national-15-minimum-w

Casey’s Case: Doug Casey On Brett Kavanaugh ---
https://finance.townhall.com/columnists/dougcasey/2018/10/18/caseys-case-doug-casey-on-brett-kavanaugh-n2529380?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&bcid=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f

The migrant caravan that’s spurring Trump’s latest temper tantrum, explained ---
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/17/17983362/caravan-honduras-trump-border-illegal
Jensen Comment
If Democrats give a green light to caravans as a path to USA citizenship this could give a boost to the GOP in the midterm elections.

NY Times: Trump’s Tax Cut Isn’t Paying For Itself (At Least Not Yet) ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/10/ny-times-trumps-tax-cut-isnt-paying-for-itself-at-least-not-yet.html
Jensen Comment
Revenues are up, and that's a good sign. The Reagan tax cuts demonstrated that there is a lag between tax cuts and eventual returns from those tax cuts.

NY Times:  ‘Don’t Get Too Excited’ About Medicare for All ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/opinion/sunday/medicare-single-payer-health-care.html?fb=1&recb=published-assets-bq.thompson_sampling&recid=1Bq8s0acvT5uUy8yUSJ8MCz16wy&mi_u=10527319

Vancouver was the first place to experience the tidal wave of Chinese cash. Now the city is leading efforts to stop it ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-20/vancouver-is-drowning-in-chinese-money
Jensen Comment
In 2014 Canada made it more difficult to buy citizenship, but not all provinces are alike in this respect ---
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/08/04/canada-residency-immigrant-investor_n_11325000.html

NY Times:  Trump Claims ‘Criminals and Unknown Middle Easterners’ Are in Caravan of Migrants:  And He's Correct ---
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-claims-‘criminals-and-unknown-middle-easterners’-are-in-caravan-of-migrants/ar-BBOIRjd?ocid=spartanntp

CNN Retracts Fake News Story of Pipe Bomb Sent to White House ---
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/10/24/report-pipe-bomb-addressed-to-white-house-intercepted/
Anything to detract from the two caravans headed north for the USA border

We simply cannot allow people to pour into the U.S., undetected, undocumented, unchecked and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, lawfully to become immigrants in this country ---
Barack Obama
https://twitter.com/ForAmerica/status/1054741206998155264?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1054741206998155264&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftownhall.com%2Ftipsheet%2Fkatiepavlich%2F2018%2F10%2F25%2Fobama-we-simply-cannot-allow-people-to-pour-into-the-united-states-n2531185

 




Externalities and How the Sears Catalog Changed America
My father's Uncle Martin owned a 200+ acre farm near Fenton, Iowa in the early 1900s. He ordered a large two-story ornate home from a Sears Catalog. The prefabricated pieces of this home were carried on a horse-drawn buckboard from the train depot to Uncle Martin's farm. My point here is that in hundreds (maybe thousands?) of farms and towns the Sears Catalog help to provide relatively high-quality homes to a developing America.

How the Sears Catalog Disrupted the Jim Crow South and Helped Give Birth to the Delta Blues & Rock and Roll ---
http://www.openculture.com/2018/10/sears-catalog-disrupted-jim-crow-south-helped-give-birth-delta-blues-rock-roll.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

Sears Catalog:  Black shoppers, Hyman writes, "could order directly from the catalog and avoid getting gouged at the local stores, both in terms of price and in terms of condescending service."
From a Chronicle of Higher Education newsletter on October 17, 2018

You may have read that the once-mighty Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week. But before it began its long decline, the retailer helped undermine white supremacy in the rural South through its thriving mail-order business. Louis Hyman, an associate professor of labor relations, law, and history at Cornell University, makes his arguments in a series of Twitter threads.  Black shoppers, Hyman writes, "could order directly from the catalog and avoid getting gouged at the local stores, both in terms of price and in terms of condescending service."


How to Mislead With Statistics
The terrifying uncertainty at the heart of FiveThirtyEight’s election forecasts ---
https://www.vox.com/2018/10/24/18009356/fivethirtyeight-nate-silver-election-2018-forecast-analysis

Jensen Comment
One thing about political polls is that they can change so suddenly as election day grows closer and closer. Nate Silver learned a hard lesson in 2010 when Scott Brown won the election to fill Ted Kennedy's senate seat. Nate Silver predicted that Scott Brown would lose and  was embarrassed professionally the day after the election. The very late changes in voter preferences were totally unexpected.

One thing the liberal media does not like to focus on much at the moment is the timing of the 7,000+ migrant caravan headed this way on foot through Mexico in October 2018. This particular caravan appears to be bad for Democratic candidates who are largely avoiding making comments about the tide (more than just the biggest mass headed this way in one caravan) headed this way just before 2018 election --- 
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnandandyschlafly/2018/10/24/dems-tonguetied-on-caravan-issue-n2531281?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=&bcid=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f&recip=17935167 

The GOP is capitalizing on fears knowing that an overwhelming majority of USA voters are frightened by these caravans and probably future tides of people headed for the southern border of the USA even though there is great sympathy about marchers' bleak futures in their gang-infested home nations, especially in Latin America.

The Canadian Army was sent to the Quebec border not long ago to stem the tide of Haitians trying to enter Canada.
NY Times --- https://www.google.com/search?as_q=Canada+Army+Quebec+Border&as_epq=Haitian&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=&as_occt=any&safe=images&as_filetype=&as_rights=

Something similar happens statistically with temporal data in capital markets research conducted by economics, finance, and accounting professors.
Market data is volatile and impacted greatly by transitory (daily) happenings in the world.

From Two Former Presidents of the AAA
"Some Methodological Deficiencies in Empirical Research Articles in Accounting." by Thomas R. Dyckman and Stephen A. Zeff , Accounting Horizons: September 2014, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 695-712 ---
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/acch-50818   (not free)

This paper uses a sample of the regression and behavioral papers published in The Accounting Review and the Journal of Accounting Research from September 2012 through May 2013. We argue first that the current research results reported in empirical regression papers fail adequately to justify the time period adopted for the study. Second, we maintain that the statistical analyses used in these papers as well as in the behavioral papers have produced flawed results. We further maintain that their tests of statistical significance are not appropriate and, more importantly, that these studies do not�and cannot�properly address the economic significance of the work. In other words, significance tests are not tests of the economic meaningfulness of the results. We suggest ways to avoid some but not all of these problems. We also argue that replication studies, which have been essentially abandoned by accounting researchers, can contribute to our search for truth, but few will be forthcoming unless the academic reward system is modified.

The free SSRN version of this paper is at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2324266

This Dyckman and Zeff paper is indirectly related to the following technical econometrics research:
"The Econometrics of Temporal Aggregation - IV - Cointegration," by David Giles, Econometrics Blog, September 13, 2014 ---
http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-econometrics-of-temporal.html 


2018 International Tax Competitiveness Index:  This is probably one of those great examples where the popular media chooses not to report to voters. ---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2018/10/2018-international-tax-competitiveness-index.html

Jensen Comment
In spite of the beating the GOP's recent tax cuts are taking, the USA is still not very competitive among world nations, falling way below such nations as New Zealand, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, Finland, Norway, Germany, Canada, Denmark, etc.

 It helps explain why USA businesses are reluctant to bring back profits earned in other parts of the world.

This is probably one of those great examples where the popular media chooses not to report to voters.

 

Table 1: 2018 International Tax Competitiveness Index Rankings

Country

Overall Rank

Overall Score

Corporate Tax Rank

Individual Taxes Rank

Consumption Taxes Rank

Property Taxes Rank

International Tax Rules Rank

Estonia

1

100.0

1

1

9

1

6

Latvia

2

86.0

2

2

27

6

5

New Zealand

3

83.0

18

3

6

3

15

Luxembourg

4

80.5

21

17

2

18

1

Netherlands

5

77.5

19

8

12

10

3

Switzerland

6

77.0

6

9

1

34

8

Sweden

7

75.0

7

20

16

7

7

Australia

8

72.2

27

19

7

4

17

Czech Republic

9

69.6

8

4

33

13

9

Austria

10

69.6

15

21

10

9

13

Slovak Republic

11

69.4

10

6

32

2

27

Turkey

12

68.8

17

5

24

17

10

Hungary

13

68.4

3

15

34

26

2

Finland

14

67.7

5

27

14

11

18

Norway

15

66.2

13

11

18

24

14

Germany

16

65.3

24

28

11

14

11

Korea

17

64.4

28

10

5

25

31

Canada

18

64.0

22

23

8

20

22

Belgium

19

63.8

23

7

25

23

12

Ireland

20

63.7

4

33

23

12

21

Denmark

21

63.7

14

30

17

8

23

Slovenia

22

63.6

12

12

28

21

16

United Kingdom

23

63.1

16

24

22

30

4

United States

24

61.5

20

26

4

28

32

Iceland

25

60.2

11

31

19

22

20

Japan

26

59.5

35

25

3

29

25

Spain

27

57.4

26

18

15

31

19

Mexico

28

57.2

31

13

26

5

34

Greece

29

51.9

25

14

30

27

29

Israel

30

51.7

29

35

13

15

33

Chile

31

48.3

30

22

29

16

35

Portugal

32

48.2

33

29

31

19

28

Poland

33

47.7

9

16

35

32

30

Italy

34

46.9

32

32

20

33

26

France

35

41.4

34

34

21

35

24

 


How to Mislead With Statistics
Has Connecticut found a solution to underfunded public pensions?
https://www.statedatalab.org/news/detail/has-connecticut-found-a-solution-to-underfunded-public-pensions

“As pension solutions go, those are all pretty standard stuff. But the other approach Connecticut is considering is truly fresh. The state’s inventory of real assets on its books, such as office buildings, parking lots, raw land or highway right-of-ways, identifies nearly 7,000 properties. An initial estimate is that these assets could have an overall value in the billions. If the state were to include certain state enterprises, such as toll-roads, that number could reach even higher. A question arose: In lieu of cash, can the state donate any of these real assets as an in-kind contribution to its pension funds?”

Jensen Comment
There may be some assets of value that can be held by pension funds, but to say that most of these assets have "overall value in the billions to pension funds." is misleading. For example, raw land might have value if it can be quickly sold with low transactions cost. However, selling some of this raw land may not be such a hot idea such as selling flood plains or parks. Selling parking lots may have some drawbacks if the parking lots will be developed in a way to leave lots of people without parking. What about selling office buildings that house state workers? Would the state have to start paying rent to owners? Could the owners evict the state workers?

All told it seems to me that this is a very fuzzy idea with enormous transactions costs as well as enormous long-term losses to the state.


How to Mislead With Statistics
Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline ---
https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation?elqTrackId=f06df2359e6340a6a4812a071e9b430e&elq=348c473b7310444cae0eee9348850b4b&elqaid=21012&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9959
Scroll down to the table below the graph

Jensen Comment
I don't deny that there's racial inequality in schools. However, in terms of discipline differences it struck me that the schools shown with the highest disparity in in nonwhite student high discipline are also the schools with the greatest likelihood of nonwhite teachers and administrators doling out the discipline. The worst school districts are often the districts with the highest proportion of single-parent homes where discipline at home is often more difficult, especially in districts with a stronger influence of youth gangs.

My point is that the data reflect deeper societal problems that go beyond racial bias of teachers and administrators. If there was a magic bullet to eliminate racial bias in the classroom the data might not dramatically change for the worst performing school districts. The magic bullet has to be found outside the schools.

Of course some of the school districts with white majorities have disgraceful racial prejudices in the schools that are reflected in this data.


Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren accuse Amazon of 'potentially illegal' activity in new attack against the company's labor practices ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-send-amazon-letter-over-union-video-2018-10
Jensen Comment
This move is largely political to persuade more blue collar workers to vote for Democratic candidates. Open borders and sanctuary city advocacy by left-wing extremists has hurt the Democratic Party.

NYT:  Unions That Like Donald Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/opinion/sunday/the-unions-that-like-trump.html
Jensen Comment
Many unions also like the tariffs recently imposed by President Trump


Everything You Know about Cross-Country Convergence Is (Now) Wrong ---
https://piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/everything-you-know-about-cross-country-convergence-now-wrong

Jensen Comment
What the article should stress more is that convergence among so many nations over the past three decades or more has been stymied largely by drug turf wars among rival "gangs" beginning to Afghanistan, Latin America, and most nations of Africa fighting over drug manufacture and export. And there's the huge problem of the AK 47s that weaponized revolutions and stifled fragile democracies and business development. The situation is worse. In the 1950s it was relatively safe to visit African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern nations as long as you took minimal precautions. These days with rampant kidnappings and armed gangs most developing nations are far more dangerous just to visit as a tourist or as a business promoter. Former religious tolerance is on the decline within so many nations like Egypt and China.

Even those that were relatively safe due to the iron-fisted control of a dictator (think Saddam or Gaddafi) no longer have iron-fisted safety amidst vicious rival gangs.

Kidnap Risk Map ---
https://www.agcs.allianz.com/assets/PDFs/Crisis Management/Global-Kidnapping-Risk-Map_Red24.pdf


Brookings:  What does (new) economic evidence tell us about the effects of rent control?
https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/

Jensen Comment
We have friends whose son is a San Francisco chef. Their son lives in a tiny, tiny and poorly maintained rent-controlled apartment with his wife. The apartment is very convenient for walking to their jobs. The claim is that they decided that they would rather keep their apartment rather than have children in a studio apartment or commute from outlying areas. If true, this illustrates an externality of rent control.

The article above concluded with the following paragraph:

Rent control appears to help affordability in the short run for current tenants, but in the long-run decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood. These results highlight that forcing landlords to provide insurance to tenants against rent increases can ultimately be counterproductive. If society desires to provide social insurance against rent increases, it may be less distortionary to offer this subsidy in the form of a government subsidy or tax credit. This would remove landlords’ incentives to decrease the housing supply and could provide households with the insurance they desire. A point of future research would be to design an optimal social insurance program to insure renters against large rent increases.

Note that having private insurance to mitigate rent increases would have to be taxpayer-funded insurance since it makes no economic sense to have it be tenant-funded. Insurance covers unlikely happenings. Rent increases are pretty much likely happenings in urban areas much like the fact that the only owners needing flood insurance are those owners likely to be flooded. Hence, the government has to fund flood insurance. Similarly the government would have to fund rent increase insurance.

Why might the government fund rent increase insurance that transfers taxpayer dollars to renters and landlords?
There's probably not a good argument for a couple in San Francisco earning nearly $250,000 per year. But there may be reasons for helping teachers, firefighters, police, and other civil servants making less than $150,000 per year. But I would argue that this type of subsidy to such renters is unfair, because it helps only those willing to live in small apartments and penalizes their colleagues who must pay commuting expenses in order to have larger and safer homes and better schools for families. It's better, in my opinion, to subsidize the wages lower-income folks providing necessary services rather than subsidize only those who choose to rent closer residences to their jobs.


Why Forests Give You Awe ---
http://nautil.us/blog/-why-forests-give-you-awe

Jensen Comment
Forests give you awe because of the many living things in them from the towering trees to the tiny mushrooms and animals. Mountains give you awe because of their light and panorama. Enormous fields of corn and wheat give you awe for some of the same reasons looking out over bodies of water give you awe. Nature has so many awesome things. Sometimes I wish I knew more about where to look for the tiny things that require more work to find.


Jim Borden:  Books are the Great Equilizer
https://www.jborden.com/books-the-great-equalizer/

Jensen Comment
I might add that times have changed to where books at home may be less important than networking access and computing power. By the way, hundreds of millions of books are now free online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Paul Allen --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen

The following appears in an October 17, 2017 Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter

It was the last straw at the University of Washington. Paul Allen and his buddies had been sneaking into the university’s computer-science lab. The high-school kids used all the terminals at once, and they borrowed a device without permission. So, in 1971, the lab’s director wrote him a letter.

“Turn in your keys,” he wrote, and terminate your activities “immediately.”

Allen has attributed that free time spent on the university’s computers to his subsequent creation, along with Bill Gates, of the dominant personal-computing company Microsoft. The innovator died of cancer Monday at age 65. Washington’s computer-science department last year was renamed the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. And at a naming event last year, he expressed optimism for the field’s future.

“I envy today’s young computer-science and engineering students, I really do,” he said then. “The amount of computing power available for their projects and the facility of the programming tools they can use far exceed anything we had.”


How to Mislead With Statistics
Yahoo Finance MAP: The most and least tax-friendly states ---
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/map-least-tax-friendly-states-144250362.html

Jensen Comment
It's somewhat misleading compare states by aggregating their taxes. The main problem is all the variations in tax breaks and exclusions. Sales taxes are not equal in terms of products that have exemptions and states that have sales tax holidays. California has the infamous Proposition 13 on property taxes, but other states have somewhat similar, albeit more limited, exclusions.  For example, Bexar County (think San Antonio) gives seniors a limited property tax break on school district taxes. New Hampshire has no general income tax but has a sneaky tax on cash dividends and interest (that are not not part of retirement plans) after a $5,000 exemption. New York has a 10-year income tax exemption for executives whose companies  partner with universities in research.


Education Week:  How History Class Divides Us ---
https://www.edweek.org/ew/projects/how-history-class-divides-us.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news1&M=58649777&U=2290378&UUID=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f

Americans are increasingly polarized and public distrust in government is at record levels. What if the inability of Americans to agree on our shared history—and the right way to teach it—is a cause of our current polarization rather than a symptom?

I n September in a room where someone had conspicuously placed a Confederate flag for at least part of the proceedings, the Texas board of education sat through two days of public hearings on a “streamlining” of its 2010 social studies standards.

Panels of teachers had proposed hundreds of changes, but the most controversial was to delete a line of the standard on the Alamo referencing “all the heroic defenders who gave their lives there.” Swift condemnation from politicians and the public followed, forcing the panels to restore some of that language even before the hearings concluded.

Much has been written about the Alamo’s relative historic importance in the story of the United States, but that wasn’t even the point of this debate. What was truly at stake were the underlying values proponents felt it signaled: What defines American thought and action? What can students take pride in?

It’s easy to lose sight of the connection between what students learn in history and the civic ideals and values those topics communicate, especially since they tend to be treated as different disciplines in K-12 education.

But the Texas debate reminds us that history and civic values are deeply intertwined, and gives rise to this interesting question: What if the inability of Americans to agree on our shared history—and on the right way to teach it—is a cause of our current polarization and political dysfunction, rather than a symptom? It’s a question that gets right to the issues of what constitutes facts, how to interpret them, and how they inform contemporary debates, all of which are key themes as America experiences a kind of civic crisis.

Public trust in the government is near its historic low. And in 2017, Americans were far more politically polarized on topics like immigration and healthcare than in the early 2000s, according to Gallup. Journalists are now routinely assailed by politicians. The bruising confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court led The Washington Post to speculate that even “our least damaged institution” might now be viewed with increasing levels of skepticism.

“If this polyglot country doesn’t have a set of ideals and a broad narrative, we don’t have much of a hope,” said Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford University, whose recent volume attempts to connect the dots between history education and citizenship. “It is not popular to talk about in an era of identity politics, but history teaching in school has a civic purpose, not only a disciplinary purpose


Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I'm not sure that the debate over history is any more intense that in the Viet Nam war years. In those days there was a debate over whether to leave the module in Texas history textbooks that claimed the USA dropped an atomic bomb in the Korean War.


The Atlantic:  Why It's Cheaper to Ship Goods From Beijing Than New Jersey ---
by Jayme Smaldone, Founder & CEO of Mighty Mug
The Atlantic, October 24, 2018
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/trump-right-leave-universal-postal-union/573709/

Trump’s decision to leave the Universal Postal Union could help small businesses

Last week, President Donald Trump declared his intention to exit a 144-year-old international postal agreement known as the Universal Postal Union. If he follows through, Trump will be helping the American small businesses that so many politicians woo on the campaign trail, only to abandon once in office.

I run a 12-person business in Rahway, New Jersey, called Mighty Mug. We make a patented travel mug that won’t fall over when knocked, which we ship to every state in the country.

Shipping has become almost invisible to the average American consumer; many assume it should be free when making a purchase. But it certainly isn’t invisible to businesses like mine. We pay the U.S. Postal Service $6.30 to deliver one mug, and we provide free shipping for larger orders despite the cost because consumers expect it.

Almost anyone who makes a desirable product faces the threat of knockoffs eating into his or her market. We are no exception, but we were still shocked to see counterfeit Mighty Mugs pop up like weeds two years ago through an array of e-commerce sites. Not only were those counterfeits cheaper; they also came with free shipping—much of it through air mail, which is the most expensive form of transport—all the way from China.

It turns out that Chinese counterfeiters can offer free shipping because they pay only about $1.40 to send a mug 8,000 miles from China to an American home, or five times less than what we pay. Let the absurdity of that situation sink in for just a moment, and then consider that we can’t ship a mug across the street for $1.40. And if I were to ship one Mighty Mug to China, the U.S. Postal Service would charge me $22.00—or $62.50 with tracking. As the weight of the package increases, so does the problem: We pay up to $17.61 to mail a four-pound package, but a shipper in China pays $3.67.

The culprit is the Universal Postal Union, or UPU, which a century and a half ago set the conditions for global mail exchange. The UPU required postal authorities to give equal treatment to foreign and domestic mail, and established a uniform flat rate to mail a letter anywhere in the world. At the time of signing, it was revolutionary: No longer would senders have to calculate postage for each leg of a journey from country to country. The UPU also created a system known as “terminal dues,” which provided discounted rates for shipments of items up to 4.4 pounds, with the largest discounts going to shippers in developing countries.

Despite being the world’s second-largest economy, China is still classified as a developing country, getting the same subsidized rates as countries such as Cuba and Botswana. What this amounts to, in essence, is a massive undue subsidy paid for by U.S. ratepayers in the form of higher shipping costs.

These subsidies were not much of a problem in the past, when consumers generally bought household products from street-level retail establishments. Now they shop online, and mail has become the primary pipeline for products to travel from a business to a home. There is no efficiency that we or any business can implement to overcome the shipping subsidy that the UPU framework creates. This situation has helped fuel an avalanche of knockoffs online.

Because we have a patent on our product, we can request the removal of knockoff listings, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole. As of today, we have removed more than 1,800 knockoffs, most shipping directly from China, with still more to go. We even use a cutting-edge AI-driven system to detect and take down fraudulent listings—the smartest solution to the dumbest problem imaginable.

Beyond losing direct-to-consumer sales, the UPU has also caused us to lose major retail and distribution opportunities. When potential partners do a simple web search and find knockoff items selling at 50 percent to 75 percent of our price, they stay away. Why stock a Mighty Mug in your store if customers are likely to just buy the cheaper version online?

Continued in article


It Was Bound to Happen:  Graduate Student Assistants’ ‘Fight for $15’ ---
Click Here

Jensen Comment
What's the difference between paying a student $3,000 per semester versus $15 per hour for 200 hours? The amount of time a student actually works each semester will probably vary greatly under either compensation contract.

Although I was fortunate to have a tuition plus room&board fellowship in my accountancy Ph.D. studies at Stanford for five years, I also taught (my own choice) an Economics Department undergraduate course on the side for extra cash. It would be very difficult to clock the hours it took to teach that course. I put in a lot of extra hours preparing to teach that class for the first time. But in subsequent semesters it took a whole lot less time to teach that course. Although all business and accounting doctoral students were given shared offices on campus (mine was in the computer center), as an economics instructor I was also given a private office on the Quad above the Economics Department. I had a desk in an entire attic amidst the rafters and  the pigeons.

Graduate assistant compensation is a very difficult payment system to implement. Graduate assistants usually don't punch time clocks. It's more like outsourcing where they're given  research assignments (such as searching for and making copies of articles) in duties that they mix in with other activities when they're in the library or on computers. Maybe they're asked to write some code or perform a statistical analysis. Those tasks vary in time, and it would be very difficult for the university to budget open-ended hourly payment systems.

Sometimes graduate student assistants are given opportunities to be co-authors in conducting research and publishing in journals that greatly enhance their careers later on. Even if they're not paid graduate assistants they are sometimes eager to be co-authors on papers with highly reputable professors.

Often their assistantships are fixed stipends per term. The hours they put in are often mixed with learning tasks that are difficult to partition from paid-work tasks. Is the system sometimes abused? Of course it's often abused with overwork or underwork, especially when the students are doing an assignment that could be imposed whether or not they're being paid.

Graduate student assistants who assist in courses have varying types of assignments. Sometimes they grade assignments or help write examinations. Sometimes they teach classes or recitation sections for lecture classes taught by professors. Their teaching roles may be part of a curriculum plan where they would have to teach some classes whether getting paid or not.

My point here is that often, not always, graduate assistant work is professional work that's difficult to meter on a time clock. What constitutes teaching versus learning to teach? What constitutes "preparation" to teach a class.

What constitutes research versus learning to do research?





 

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

How to mislead with statistics
The median cost of a private nursing home room has reached $100,375 per year,---
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/19/this-retirement-expense-has-hit-100000-annually-and-its-continuing-to-rise.html
Actuarial models of long-term care insurance providers greatly underestimated the rapid rise in costs and recently had to more than double the monthly rates for such insurance. The "median cost" of $100,375 is misleading in that this cost has a wide overall variance and a median that differs substantially between the 50 USA  states. In fairness the article touches on this point slightly (such as pointing the high cost of nursing homes in Alaska). There's also extreme variability in terms of quality of care. This, in part, is due to the high worker turnover in nursing homes and the tendency for many to hire unskilled workers at minimum wage. My point is that comparing nursing homes is a lot like comparing sweet cherries with sour lemons.

Sadly, parents that made the most sacrifices for their adult children often are the least-supported in their own times of needs years later.

The good news is that with professional guidance more than five years in advance, heirs can legally confiscate Grandma's estate so that she's eligible later on for Medicaid-provided long-term nursing care. The bad news is that the quality of many nursing homes that accept Medicaid patients is often the worst in the USA. Maybe we should be more like the Germans who sometimes ship their gaga grandmas and grandpas to to relatively good lower-priced nursing homes in Poland.

Nursing Home and Hospital Elderly-Care Fraud
Elderly residents given intensive therapy in the last weeks of life jumped 65 percent, a study shows, raising questions about financial incentives.  ---
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/nursing-homes-are-pushing-the-dying-into-pricey-rehab?cmpid=BBD100918_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=181009&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily

NY Times:  ‘Don’t Get Too Excited’ About Medicare for All ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/opinion/sunday/medicare-single-payer-health-care.html?fb=1&recb=published-assets-bq.thompson_sampling&recid=1Bq8s0acvT5uUy8yUSJ8MCz16wy&mi_u=10527319
Jensen Comment
There are just too many uncertainties about its coverage and cost. People advocating Medicare don't understand it. For example, Medicare claims and services are administered by the private sector, not the public sector. It might take more than a decade and cost over a trillion  to prepare the public sector to take on the administrative chores plus increase the capacity of physicians, hospitals, and support staff. Secondly, there's tremendous uncertainty about coverage. Currently Medicare does not cover the tremendously expensive cost of long-term care either at home or in nursing homes.

All nations that have nationalized health care are much smaller and do not have the millions of undocumented immigrants that we have in the USA. Bringing them on board will be immensely costly and, worse, will be a magnet for virtually all the sick people to enter the USA illegally. Nations that have nationalized health care do a much better job at policing their borders and do not have sanctuary cities to protect undocumented immigrants from being deported.


WHO: Global status report on alcohol and health 2018 ---
www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alcohol_report/gsr_2018/en 


 

On November 22, 2009 CBS Sixty Minutes aired a video featuring how hospitals and nursing homes rip off the government using dying patients ---
"The Cost of Dying," CBS Sixty Minutes Video, November 22, 2009 ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-cost-of-dying-end-of-life-care/

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.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/