Hispanic Pundit

Links for 2010-09-01 [del.icio.us]

2010-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

Robert Barro: The Folly of Subsidizing Unemployment - WSJ.com
"My calculations suggest the jobless rate could be as low as 6.8%, instead of 9.5%, if jobless benefits hadn't been extended to 99 weeks."

Links for 2010-08-30 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-31T00:00:00-07:00

Help the World’s Poor: Buy Some New Clothes
"When workers voluntarily take a job they demonstrate that they believe the job is the best alternative available to them – even when that job is unsafe and the pay is very low compared to wages in the United States. That’s why economists with political views as divergent as Paul Krugman and Walter Williams have both written in defense of sweatshops.

Sweatshop jobs are often far better than the vast majority of jobs in the countries where they are located. David Skarbek and I researched sweatshops that were documented in U.S. news sources (or see here for my shorter, more general defense of sweatshops). We found that sweatshop worker earnings equaled or exceeded the average national income in 9 out of 11 countries we studied. Working in a sweatshop paid more than double the national average in four of the countries."
I Wuz Wrong - Personal - The Atlantic
McArdle on her mistakes in the Iraq war and the financial crisis.

Links for 2010-08-29 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

Second-Home Owner Asks: Can I Deduct Mortgage Interest? - WSJ.com
On the tax implications of a second home.
My Syllabus of Errors, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
Caplan lists his mistakes.

Links for 2010-08-28 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

Ideas: Why Don't Universities Sell Admissions?
"All of these explain why schools give some weight to measures of student quality in deciding whom to admit. But none of them explain why they give no weight at all to willingness to pay. A student is worth more to the school the more able he is, but not infinitely more. Even if student quality is the only thing schools care about, additional money could be used to offer more generous scholarships to able students who would otherwise go elsewhere, raising average quality. So one would expect schools to be willing to trade off, at some rate, money against SAT scores, agreeing to admit somewhat less qualified applicants at somewhat higher prices."

Links for 2010-08-27 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-28T00:00:00-07:00

8 DIY Projects To Add Value To Your Home By Labor Day - Yahoo! Real Estate
If you are looking to sell.
Tired of Water? Read This!
Orange Juice, Chocoate milk and others.
Bloggingheads.tv - Clash of the Civilized
Hitchens and Robert Wright on the threat of Iran, the necessity of Iraq war and international law. Overall a good listen, though not much new.

Links for 2010-08-24 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

GOP Losing Vietnamese American Voters | FrumForum
"The AALDEF report mentioned above found that among Vietnamese Americans born in the United States, Barack Obama won 69% of the vote and Barack Obama won 60% of the vote of Vietnamese Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. While these two cohorts are minorities within the broader Vietnamese American community (15% and 25%, respectively), obviously these groups are the demographic future of the Vietnamese American community, unless there is another wave of large-scale immigration from Vietnam. This trend has been noted in Vietnamese American strongholds like Orange County, California and Houston, Texas. In the latter case, a Vietnamese American Democratic businessman named Hubert Vo defeated a longtime incumbent Republican state representative in 2004 to become the first Vietnamese American in the Texas State Legislature."
The Volokh Conspiracy » The Cato Institute’s Supposed “Purge” of the Liberaltarians
"Second, it is strange to claim that Cato got rid of Lindsey for promoting a political alliance with the left at the very time when Lindsey himself recently disavowed that very idea, stating that “it’s clear enough that for now and the foreseeable future, the left is no more viable a home for libertarians than is the right.” If Cato objected to Lindsey’s advocacy of an alliance with the left, one would think they would have purged him back when he was actually advocating it, not after he has repudiated it. Wilkinson does still favor liberaltarianism, but apparently only as a philosophical dialogue. He holds out little if any prospect of an actual political coalition between the two groups."

Quote Of The Day

2010-08-23T09:30:32-07:00

“If you want to know why teachers are being laid off in California (even if teaching has remained one of the most secure jobs nationwide) you might want to check out this new $578 million high school in LA Unified School District. As we’ve written before on JPGB, buildings don’t teach kids, people do. Given the way school districts squander their resources, maybe they’ll soon need another $26 billion in Edujobs from Congress (read: taxpayers).” — Jay P. Greene, Professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas

Links for 2010-08-22 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-23T00:00:00-07:00

The 10 most tattooed cities in America - TODAY Fashion & Beauty - TODAYshow.com
A list.
How ethnic profiling explains Dani Rodrik’s fondness for industrial policy
"Unfortunately, Dani is also REVERSING CONDITIONAL PROBABILITIES. Dani’s evidence is based on what he believes is the high probability that IF you have had steady growth for six decades, THEN you had industrial policy. This is interesting, but this is not the right probability in deciding whether to choose industrial policy, which is “IF you have industrial policy, THEN what is your chance of steady growth for six decades?”"
Matthew Yglesias » Maine Fact of the Day
"Maine is the whitest state in the union, edging out long-time rival Vermont. In fact, the state is so white that white people even cook the Mexican food."...what do you expect? Being the farthest state from Mexico! :-)

Quote Of The Day

2010-08-17T14:42:27-07:00

“Meanwhile, hiding behind rhetoric about the sanctity of religious expression when the Left has been trying for years to scrub the public square of religious expression is ludicrously hypocritical. Hiding behind the sanctity of private property rights when the Left normally offers, at best, one grudging cheer for private property is even worse. When local communities fend off Wal-Marts, the Left cheers. When campus goons throw pies or shout down speakers, liberals yawn. But when nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose building a mosque at Ground Zero, it’s nothing more than nativism and bigotry run amok? How does that work? The Left is constantly lecturing America about sensitivity to this, that, and the other thing. Well, how about sensitivity to many Americans who think this idea is offensive? Why must opponents be cast as either bigots or ignoramuses?” –Jonah Goldberg

Quote Of The Day

2010-08-09T22:44:15-07:00

“Despite criticisms from Republican politicians about the White House’s overly lenient immigration policies, this administration is actually deporting more immigrants than the Bush administration.” — Catherine Rampell, writing in the New York Times economix section

Ezra Klein Understand Politicians

2010-08-06T00:40:37-07:00

He writes:

Reihan Salam’s effort to explain how you can know congressional Republicans believe something they don’t mention publicly or support legislatively gets at the heart of one of D.C.’s most pernicious illusions: The idea that we should worry about what congresspeople believe in their heart of hearts, as opposed to what they’re willing to vote for at this time….

…if you created a model based on “what position would a person take if they wanted to help their party win the next election,” you’d find your model almost perfectly accurate. And when you take that model in which policy barely matters and partisan incentives govern behavior and add the filibuster into it, you understand why the Senate is so dangerously broken.

The Republican Party does not currently exist as an institution interested in working with Democrats to shape policy, just as the Democratic Party in 2005 did not exist as an institution interested in working with Republicans to shape policy. Pundits and commentators like to ignore this fact as we like to write pieces about how if Congress followed our policy preferences somewhat more closely, it would surely be more successful. That’s what Salam was doing in his original post, in which he said there was a conservative consensus that included a large number of lawmakers behind a conditional version of state and local aid. But there isn’t. There’s a Republican consensus in favor of winning the next election and a Republican consensus that winning the next election means obstructing Democratic accomplishments and that, and not policy disagreement, is the central operating reality in the United States Congress.

Any model you have about politicians must include the fact that the primary concern of all politicians, regardless of party, is power - keeping the power they have and working towards increasing it.

On Overturning Prop 8

2010-08-05T12:23:30-07:00

The judge — who is gay and should have recused himself — justified his ruling in part by noting that no “demonstrated harm as a result” of same-sex marriage could be shown, which could have made blocking it justified. This is undoubtedly true but also astonishingly irrelevant. The law could conceivably require that everyone wear a wizard’s hat every Saturday at 6 PM; the point is not that it is “good” or can be demonstrated to be “harmful,” but whether it violates any existing protections.

The more serious argument, then, is that Proposition 8 violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment — which has been abused to justify everything from affirmative action to tax increases. The judge wrote that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage” and that it is not a component of it that can be taken into account when defining it under the law. I happen to agree with him, but that’s something to tell to a legislature or the citizenry, not to a judge, who is there only to decide whether everything is being enacted according to an enumerated process. Californians are entitled to decide for themselves what’s essential to marriage.

And that’s what’s at the bottom of this: justice, properly understood, is a process, not a result. The law is not there to bend and bash until you get what you want from it. In a free and ordered society, we simply have to resign ourselves to the fact that the legislature is sometimes wrong and that the culture is sometimes a bit off. If your interpretation of the Constitution just so happens to align with all of your political views, you’re probably interpreting it wrongly. I want to see same-sex marriage enacted in the United States. But I want it to be done lawfully and orderly, not by judges who think it’s their job to save the world rather than to follow the law.

More here.

Two Arguments In Favor Of Immigration

2010-07-29T00:30:33-07:00

With the Arizona (anti-)immigration laws coming into affect soon, I have seen a lot of arguments in favor of immigration by those opposed to the Arizona laws. Most of them are either weak on economics, or miss the point completely. As a strong supporter of immigration, I thought I’d give two of my favorite arguments in favor of immigration.

My favorite argument in favor of immigration is that immigration is a huge boom to the immigrants themselves. It is, without a doubt, the strongest poverty alleviation tool in the history of man. Nothing else, no social program, no foreign aid, no economic reform, nothing, can so positively improve the lives of people like the freedom of an immigrant to move from an underdeveloped country to a developed country. The only way immigration is even debatable on humanitarian grounds is for one to assign almost zero importance to the welfare of the immigrants themselves. The argument is made stronger when you consider that immigrants also have a (small) net positive affect on the developed country. But even if you disagree, and believe that immigrants are a net loss to the receiving country, that loss would still have to be weighed against the overwhelming positive gain it gives immigrants themselves, almost always of which consist of the poorest members of the world. An impossible hurdle to overcome.

My second favorite argument in support of immigration, and this one specifically appeals to my libertarian and conservative friends, is that immigration is mutually exclusive from social programs. You have to pick: either an economy with abundant immigrants and low levels of social programs, or an economy with abundant social programs and low levels of immigrants. You can’t have both. Counter intuitive you say?

Not really:

Although poor immigrants are likely to support a bigger welfare state than natives do, the presence of poor immigrants makes natives turn against the welfare state. Why would this be? As a rule, people are happy to vote to “take care of their own”; that’s what the welfare state is all about. So when the poor are culturally very similar to the rich, as they are in places like Denmark and Sweden, support for the welfare state tends to be uniformly strong.

As the poor become more culturally distant from the rich, however, support for the welfare state becomes weaker and less uniform. There is good evidence, for example, that support for the welfare state is weaker in the U.S. than in Europe because our poor are disproportionately black. Since white Americans don’t identify with black Americans to the same degree that rich Danes identify with poor Danes, most Americans are comfortable having a relatively small welfare state.

Thus, even though black Americans are unusually supportive of the welfare state, it is entirely possible that the presence of black Americans has on net made our welfare state smaller by eroding white support for it.

Immigration is likely to have an even stronger counter-balancing effect on natives’ policy preferences because, as far as most Americans are concerned, immigrants from Latin American are much more of an “out-group” than American blacks. Faced with the choice to either cut social services or give “a bunch of foreigners” equal access, natives will lean in the direction of cuts. In fact, I can’t think of anything more likely to make natives turn against the welfare state than forcing them to choose between (a) helping no one, and (b) helping everyone regardless of national origin.

This is not something peculiar to one blogger, this is widely recognized on the left and the right. From Paul Krugman and Matthew Yglesias on the left, to Bryan Caplan, Jeffrey Miron and David Friedman (also here) on the right.

Taking the side of immigration over safety nets doesn’t just make sense economically, it also makes sense on humanitarian grounds. As Bryan Caplan explained: “…unlike the welfare state, immigration has and continues to help absolutely poor people, not relatively poor Americans who are already at the 90th percentile of the world income distribution. There’s no reason for libertarians to make apologies to social democrats: Libertarian defenders of immigration are the real humanitarians in the world, and the laissez-faire era of open borders without the welfare state was America’s real humanitarian era.”

Quote Of The Day

2010-07-20T22:42:25-07:00

“When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.” — David Brooks

Its A Spending Problem

2010-07-15T11:31:26-07:00

The WSJ reports:

Even if all Bush tax cuts are extended and the AMT is patched, tax revenues will rebound to 18.2% of GDP by 2020—slightly above the historical average. They will continue growing afterwards…

CBO figures show spending…which has averaged 20.3% of GDP over the past 50 years… surging to a peacetime record 26.5% of GDP by 2020 and also rising steeply thereafter.

Putting this together, the budget deficit, historically 2.3% of GDP, is projected to leap to 8.3% of GDP by 2020 under current policies. This will result from Washington taxing at 0.2% of GDP above the historical average but spending 6.2% above its historical average.

Link via Goodman.

Greenwald vs Frum

2010-07-13T19:25:16-07:00

I am admittedly weak on foreign policy and as of late I have been trying to catch up. I just finished Noam Chomsky’s book, Failed States and have tried to get my hands on as many debates as possible. So you can imagine my excitement when I found out that two of my favorite bloggers, David Frum and Glenn Greenwald, were doing a bloggingheads together. Both represent intelligently opposite sides of the political spectrum.

On my bicycle ride home today I was able to listen to the full discussion. Though it wasn’t as disagreeable as I expected, the ending of it does touch on important civil-liberty issues and gets to alot of the heart of the disagreement.

The full discussion is worth your time but if you could only listen to one section, I recommend the last ten minutes which I have cut below.

The Threat Of Iran

2010-07-09T15:54:57-07:00

Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu lays it out:

I think to fully translate understanding into actions, we must address the question of whether the world can live with a nuclear Iran. For a lot of influential people, and I suppose for some of the people here today, a nuclear-armed Iran would certainly be a danger, but perhaps I think it wouldn’t be a new danger. After all, the Soviets had nuclear weapons. They were contained. So, too, it is argued, a nuclear-armed Iran could be also contained.

But the Soviet Union is far different and was far different from what we see today in Iran. The Soviets certainly had global, ideological ambitions, but in international affairs, they acted with supreme rationality. Every time the Soviets were faced with a choice between their ideology and their survival, they chose survival: in Berlin, in Cuba and elsewhere. And to the best of my knowledge, there were not many Soviet suicide bombers.

The Iranian regime is different. They’re driven by a militant ideology that is based on an entirely different set of values, a value system that may seem entirely irrational to us but is pervasive, very powerful, among those competing for leadership among the Islamic militants.

Look at what happened nearly a decade ago in another part of this militant world. The Taliban allowed al Qaeda, operating on its soil, to dispatch terrorists to bomb New York, this city, and to bomb Washington. Now, what were they thinking? Did they think that the greatest power in the world would simply ignore mass destruction in its cities? Did they think that the United States of America would ignore an attack on its financial center, on its military headquarters, on its capital city? Were they that stupid? Or were they instead driven not by cool reason but by a fiery fanaticism that overcomes normal logics?

Iran sends children into mine fields. Iran denies the Holocaust. Iran openly calls for Israel’s destruction. Iran empowers Hezbollah with rockets and has overtaken half of Lebanon. Iran empowers Hamas with rockets, has overtaken Gaza and half of the Palestinian polity. Iran has sent saboteurs and terrorist squads into Egypt. Iran sends tentacles into the Yemen and threatens directly Saudi Arabia. Iran sends weapons into South America. This is what they do today when they don’t have nuclear weapons. Think of what they will do tomorrow when they do have them.

It is very hard for modern men and women to come to terms with the role of irrationality in human affairs. We tend to think that people and states are driven solely by interests, by a sober calculation of cost and benefit. We must recognize that those who glorify death and those who dispatch hordes of suicide bombers are not driven by grievances which can be addressed or by a despair which can be alleviated.

We must recognize that there are wide-eyed true believers, even mad believers in the world. There are fanatics who subscribe to a twisted creed and they are willing to pay any price of its realization. And they are driven by a fervent hope that they will succeed at any price.

Shakespeare advises to see the method in the madness. But facing today’s militants in the Greater Middle East, we should be well-advised to see the madness in the method — to recognize that not everyone is constrained by the calculus of cost and benefit that has been associated with nuclear weapons; to recognize that some people, organizations and regimes might act in ways that no one has acted since the advent of the era of nuclear peace that has followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We must not allow the world’s most dangerous regimes to possess the world’s most dangerous weapons. This is the single greatest challenge of our time, and we must not fail to address it.

Full interview here.