Donald Trump?!

He did it. He finally announced a presidential bid. Here is an excerpt from a FOX news article:

New York real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump on Tuesday declared himself a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, launching his against-the-odds campaign after teasing one for years. ... And he could be an aggressive -- and interesting -- player on the primary debate stage, should he stay among the top-10 candidates in the polls. ... “This is going to be an election, in my opinion, based on competence,” Trump said. “The American Dream is dead. And if elected president, I will make it bigger and stronger than ever.”

My god. I hope he does not won. There is no way he can beat Hillary. Not only that, he is crazy. Even for people who don't like Rick Santorum (like I do), no one can deny that he is intelligent. Trump is smart, but not only does he hold beliefs similar to candidates like Rick... He acts crazy, too. I hope he does not win. I think the best candidates to beat Hillary are Walker, Kaisich, and Rubio. We will see who ends up taking a front-runner position in the next few months.  

Why I oppose border fences

I may eventually write a full post on this, but here is something I have already written. The other side conceded.
http://www.debate.org/debates/Border-Fence/17/

I argued three things.
(1) Fences harm the environment
(2) Fences cost a lot
(3) Many immigrants do not even cross the border

He argued this:
(1) Fences work
(2) Fences reduce crime
(3) Immigration is bad

I refuted all of his points and my points were not really debunked. 

Sorry, gun control advocates: gun control does not work

Whenever a pro gun control study comes out, the media is quick to pick up the story. Even FOX news, claimed to be a conservative beacon, picked up on the story. The Washington Post also published a much longer, in depth story on the study. 

The study, published by scholars from The Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, concluded that gun licensing laws reduced homicides by 40% in ten years. According to the study, permit to purchase (PTP) laws "may reduce firearm-specific homicides." Unfortunately for the left, the study is bogus. 

According to Economist John Lott: 

As the authors of the study note, from 1995 to 2005 the firearm homicide rate in Connecticut indeed fell from 3.13 to 1.88 per 100,000 people, representing a 40% drop over a ten-year period (“We estimate that the law was associated with a 40% reduction in Connecticut’s firearm homicide rates during the first 10 years that the law was in place“). However, unexplained is that the firearms homicide rate was falling even faster immediately prior to the licensing law. From 1993 to 1995, the Connecticut firearms homicide rate fell from 4.5 to 3.13 per 100,000 residents, which means more than a 30% drop in just two years. This represented a greater decline than the 17% national decline over those two years. Of course, Rudolph and his co-authors do not address this inconvenient fact (though if one looks at their Figure 1 on page 3 this preceding drop is clearly visible). ... Their results are also extremely sensitive to the last year that they pick. ... The longer samples show a relative increase in Connecticut’s firearm homicide rate whether Rudolph et al. had looked at one additional year or five additional years. ... The Webster study also cherry-picks what crime rates to look at. For over all violent crimes as well as robbery and aggravated assault, Connecticut’s crime rate was falling relative to the rest of the US in the years prior to the licensing law and rising afterwards. For murder, there is basically not change in trends before and after the licensing law.

More criticisms of the study are in the link above. 

Sorry, liberals, but the research you use is bogus again. Gun control does not work. And there is one point Lott made not in the quote above: the study looks at one state. But that makes no sense when 10 other states have similar laws. When Lott did his concealed carry research, he looked at *every single* county, state, and city. Increasing the sample makes a better study with more accurate results. Choosing one state is the definition of cherry picking; gun laws don't work. But law abiding citizens with firearms do work.  

Hilary Clinton's rich bashing is not convincing

At least Bernie Sanders believes in the crap he says. Hillary has sprinted to the left because she needs to appeal to her base. She must bash the rich or she cannot be elected. But it would be more convincing if she did not charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for each speech. She claims to hate the rich, even saying that when she and Bill left the White House at the turn of the century that they were bankrupt. Now she is charging $300,000 for speeches.

Yep. $300,000. 300k. 3 + 00000. Three with five zeros. Bankrupt?

Democrats need workers to win. The reason Romney lost was because he was seen as out of touch. Hillary Clinton makes Mitt look like he is a union factory worker in Detroit. It really pisses me off when politicians, like Hillary, claim that the game is rigged, that the rich are too rich, and that we need to tax our economy to hell in the name of equality. But the reality is that she is part of the problem she is complaining about! Ironically, she charged $225,000 on a speech about high tuition at a University!

I am sorry, but if the average household income is $69,000, and only 25.1% of the households make over $200,000 per year, but you make exactly that much for an hour speech and you make 4 times as much as the average American in one day, you should shut up. You have no right to talk about income inequality or what the average American experiences. Sorry.

Clinton is worth over $15 MILLION dollars. I am sorry, but she cannot be empathetic. She does not have the same rising story that Barrack had. Marco Rubio is actually worth the least at $443,000 dollars.

I see pundits all the time saying the Republican party is not empathetic enough. Having self-made men like Ben Carson, whose father left his mother, lived on welfare, and had an illiterate mother and Marco Rubio, who was raised by immigrants (and was made fun of by the NY Times because he has student loan debt!) actually know what poor Americans feel. Even if you disagree with them, there is no doubting that they have experienced what it is like to be poor in the United States. Hillary has not.

I honestly think that Hillary is not qualified to speak about income inequality and the plight of the American worker. But she will anyway. Hopefully, when she casts a republican nominee (who I hope is Rubio) as unempathetic, voters will see through that load of hooey.  

CBO: workers bear the costs of high corporate taxes

Workers "[bear{ slightly more than 70 percent of the burden of the corporate income tax. The domestic owners of capital bear slightly more than 30 percent of the burden," according to this CBO report.

According to this study by nber, "workers in a fully unionized firm capture roughly 54 percent of the benefits of low tax rates." So, cutting these taxes actually benefits the worker, not the company.
So, I say, lower corporate tax rates--not for the rich, but for the worker!

Have wages stagnated?

The argument often forwarded by liberals in support of minimum wage increases are simple: wages have stagnated, minimum wages, increase wages, therefore we need a wage hike. And the argument has a grain of truth to it: wages rise for those who stay employed. But it fails to take into account the fact that many workers become unemployed by minimum wage hikes, so having people have the wage of zero easily outweighs the beneficial impacts. 
But the rest of it is incorrect. Wages have not actually fallen compared to productivity. This paper by the Heritage Foundation clearly details the problem with that argument. The argument uses wages and not total compensation, which includes benefits. Now, instead of having to pay for your own health insurance, your employer does it for you. Paid maternity leave has become more common, more vacation days, etc. All of this increases the purchasing power of the worker even though wages do not increase. In fact, had all of that gone into wages instead of paying for health benefits, there would have been wage increases. In fact, Walmart has actually lowered wages in order to pay for health benefits. So total compensation, not just wages, must be taken into account. 

The statistics used to prove the point also use different methods to control for inflation and wages, which further muddies the waters. The Heritage Foundation, of course, finds that total compensation has increase 77% over the last few decades. This is a different narrative than what Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, or the Employment Policies Institute announces. But many may counter: isn't the Heritage Foundation a conservative organization? Correct. But economist Martin Feldstein, who works with the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economics, has published a study on the issue as well. He agrees with the Heritage report and says the apparent gap between productivity and pay exists only when improper data is used, and when you correct for that, both wages and productivity change together. Even the liberal, pro-minimum wage think tank the Center for Economic Policy Research found no gap between productivity and pay, as well as coming to the same conclusion as both Feldstein and the Heritage foundation. 

So yes, wages have increased. And even if they didn't, it could be that excessive government regulation, not the evil businessmen, were behind the pay gap. And it is crazy to think that merely raising the wage floor will raise wages when it makes wages zero for thousands of workers. 

Learning wage part two

I already talked about the learning wage, mostly talking about theory. This post will focus on some empirical evidence regarding minimum wages, employment, and long-term effects. 

An important study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER, has a study on the minimum wage increases from 2007, 2008, and 2009. The study convincingly showed that minimum wage increases reduce employment opportunities for low-skilled workers. These opportunities would exist if we had a learning wage--or a minimum wage of $0--and they would be better off in the long term. The employment effects led to reduce income mobility--in other words, it made it harder to move up the income ladder--by reducing skills which would otherwise have been acquired had the minimum wage not priced them out of the job market. The study found a very large effect on employment, concluding by saying "We infer from our employment estimates that minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point between December 2006 and December 2012. As noted above, this accounts for 14 percent of the national decline in the employment-to-population ratio over this period." This is no small effect. And all of the studies showing poverty reduction assume no employment effect; this study erases any doubt of there being an employment effect. 

A 2002 study by economists David Neumark and William Wascher found that minimum wages reduce school enrollment. The study also noted how minimum wages also reduce on the job training, which further reduces the amount of skills teenagers gain in the workforce. 

A 2001 study by economists Duncan D. Chaplin, Mark D. Turner and Andreas D. Pape come to the same conclusions that Neumark and Wascher came to. Their study found that higher minimum wages increased drop out rates. The mechanism for this is because teenagers assume they will be paid more if they drop out and get a job. But as noted, in many cases, they are unemployable because their skills are not worth, say, $7 an hour. This means we not only increase the youth unemployment rate, but also the high school dropout rate. 

A 2006 study by Neumark and Wascher found that those exposed to high minimum wages as a teenager work less and earn less in adulthood. This effect is probably driven from reduced training and schooling during their youth. 

There are hundreds of more research studies, but if you read the literature, one thing is clear: increases in the minimum wage always end up harming those who are supposed to benefit from said wage increases. The evidence for instituting a learning, rather than a living, wage is supported by both economic theory and empirical fact. 

Kansas and supply side economics

Supply side economics, or trickle-down economics, is universally praised on the right but loathed on the left. One of the modern successes, or failures, of supply side economics comes from Kansas. Kansas cut taxes for the wealthy in order to incentivize them to invest more, which leads to economic growth and more jobs. This is where trickle-down comes in, because the wealth (in theory) is supposed to trickle-down to the poor and middle class. Everyone gets richer.

Liberals point to Kansas, where taxes were cut but growth was lackluster. They argue that this proves that cutting taxes does not work. They hope to cause Republicans to back down on the issue—in part because tax cuts are a good conservative talking point—and also in hopes to cause voters doing a quick google search to oppose those initiatives, which are usually at the forefront of the GOP platform. So are liberals correct in saying that the Kansas experiment has disproven supply side economics?

Not really. Economist Scott Sumner notes how the tax changes in Kansas were not that large—and definitely not as large as the GOP presidential candidates would make them. “The past two years Kansas reduced its state income tax rates. As a result, the top rate of income tax faced by Kansas residents (combined state and federal) rose from 41.45% in 2012 to 48.3% in 2013 and then fell a tad to 48.2% in 2014 (if they don't itemize.) That's a pretty tiny drop in the top marginal tax rate in 2014, and a much bigger rise in 2013.” You can see that Federal taxes counterbalanced the tax cuts, and tax decreases were very small; 0.1% decrease in 2014. This is hardly a tax cut. Had the Federal income tax stayed the same, the cut may have had an effect. But the increase in taxes nearly offset all of the growth effects. A 0.1% decreases in taxes is not nearly large enough to impact incentives and cause a trickle-down effect. So, no, the Kansas tax cuts don’t disprove supply side economic theory—it only says that if you raise taxes nearly 7% and then decrease them by 0.1%, you aren’t going to get growth. That is not really devastating to the GOP or supply sider economists.

It should also be noted that even the 0.1% tax cut even had some positive effects. Kansas has always been in the lower half of the nation for job growth. Kansas went from 27^th in the nation for job growth to 21^st, now in the top half. Wages also increased by 3.5%, faster than the national average of 1.9%. But unemployment reduction is still slower than the national average (though, that could be skewed by a few outliers like the Dakotas and Texas, which have reduced unemployment a lot). On the other hand, labor force participation has not changed; labor force participation fell for the nation as a whole. So the Kansas tax cuts—even though they are small—have done some good, despite how small the tax cuts were.

There are a few things to take from this:

First, the tax burden didn’t change much. So lackluster effects are to be expected. This does not mean  a 1, 2, or 10% tax cut would have no effect.

Second, it has only been a few years. Tax cuts usually take time to cause growth because the benefits from new companies emerging and investment sometimes take years to come to fruition.

And finally, even over this short time period and the minimal tax cut, the evidence seems to show that a small amount of good can be done.

Supply side economics is not disproven by Kansas and, in the long term, it may end up proving it. 

America needs a learning wage

America needs a learning wage. Yes, a learning wage.

What is a learning wage? As opposed to a living wage, which is typically seen as $15 per hour, a learning wage is when you make the minimum wage $0 per hour. So why would we want this?

Let's first talk about why we wouldn't want a minimum wage at all. Everyone needs skills to succeed in life, and the best way to acquire skills is through work. Gaining work experience is as valuable, if not more so, than a college degree. And the more skills/better skills you have, the more you get paid. Skills act as a ladder. The higher up you climb, the more you get paid. How do minimum wages--including $15 minimum wages like the one in LA--relate to the ladder? Employers only hire people who are productive. Say being a cashier is worth $10 per hour to a small business. The business cannot pay $10; that would mean no profit for the owner. The business cannot pay $15; that would mean hiring that person causes a net loss. But they could pay $7.25, pay the worker, and make profit at the same time. But if we had a living wage you would be pricing someone out of the market. You saw off the rungs of the ladder, and those not tall enough (or, in this case, productive enough) have no chance of climbing that ladder.

That is why we want a learning wage and also why we *don't* want a living wage. Living wages make it impossible for unskilled teenagers or impoverished minorities to get a job and acquire skills. A learning wage is the opposite: everyone, no matter their skill set, can get skills and learn their trade. The more they learn, the more they earn. A living wage makes them unemployable and, sadly, that makes their lives much more difficult. They are destined to live a life of dependency; living on government assistance. That is not how we reduce poverty. A learning wage would allow those people to get jobs and earn more money than they started out with. The wage they start with may be low, but it would increase overtime.

Liberals will respond: how do you know they will get higher wages? Evil capitalists! Well, here is how we know: it is already happening. For those who do get hired, despite the minimum wage being above zero, people usually do get paid more within 12 months of employment. According to one study, two thirds of those who are paid minimum wage receive a wage increase after working for 12 months. Further, according to the BLS, only 4.7% of the workforce above 16 years of age earned at or below the Federal minimum wage of $7.25. Why is this important? When I discuss lowering--or even abolishing--the minimum wage to create a learning wage, it is *always* argued that employers will pay as little as possible, maybe even nothing, if we abolished a minimum wage. But the BLS statistics and the previous study refute that. If only 4.7% of the workforce earn minimum wage, that means 95.3% of the population earns *above* $7.25 per hour--so businesses already voluntarily pay MORE than the minimum amount required. If businesses arbitrarily paid as little as possible, then there should (1) be no wage increases after one year--there usually are, and (2) everyone would be paid minimum wage! But the fact that the vast majority of people make above the minimum tells us that businesses don't always pay as little as possible. If a worker is valuable, they want to keep that worker (or, in many cases, hire them). Other businesses compete with higher wages and, if one business cannot pay enough, the worker will leave to the job which he or she thinks best compensates their productivity. So, no, employers wouldn't pay slave wages with a learning wage; all it would do is make it easier for the poor, who are now (or will be, if the minimum wage is raised) priced out of the labor force.

America needs a learning wage. Allowing teenagers and the impoverished to learn their trades, which mean higher wages and better lives, is the best way to truly help the poor. 

Why are health care costs so high? The government

Now, there are a lot of reasons health care costs are so high. But a big one liberals always miss is the government. 

According to the CATO institute, regulations cost the health care industry $169 billion each year. Those costs fall solely on the consumer. Profits work like this: revenue - costs = profit. Easy. If you increase the costs, and the revenue stays the same, profits decline. And in many cases, profits aren't large. So the business has two ways to cope: decrease costs or increase revenue. They can decrease costs by paying workers less or replacing them with machines. They can increase revenue by increasing costs. Both of these scenarios impact and harm the health care industry, driving up costs that you and I pay for our yearly checkup. 

And, of course, the solution needn't be more government. Even if we assume the current system is broken--and it is--the argument that a singlepayer nationalized system is the best response is, well, doubtful. Health savings accounts could easily reduce the financial burden of healthcare, without reducing consumer satisfaction. Health savings accounts decrease costs with no adverse effects on health outcomes according to many studies. 

Obamacare and other liberal solutions, like the ones Hillary championed in the 1990s, are not the way to fix our broken system. We need to allow the market to work, not continue to bog it down in regulation like we do today. 

Republican and Democrat views on their candidates

In 2007, Democrats were excited about their primaries. With Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other candidates, 65% of Democrats had an excellent or good impression of the candidates that were running. Republicans were less enthusiastic, with only 50% having a good or excellent impression of their field. In 2011 Republicans were at 44%. Democrats had no polling because Obama was clearly going to win. In 2015, this year, Republicans are at 57%--higher than all of the other years. Democrats are at 54%. Neither side seems to be as rilled up as the Democrats in 2007, but Republicans seem to be more excited than the democrats. But the polling is within the margin of error.

This is based on a Pew Research poll.