The Republican Thread

[southsider2k5]

They weren't randomly chosen. They were chosen because, yeah, they make Krugman's point that you don't need a business environment like Texas in order to have comparable unemployment rates; that can be achieved in liberal tax-crazy bastions like NY and MA. His argument isn't that every blue state is better than Texas.

 

Unless this author's goal was to chose three different civil levels (county, city, neighborhood) in a satirical attack on Krugman choosing these states and wasn't actually trying to make the argument laid out in the article about "McJobs," then it makes no sense at all. It's not misleading or incorrect for Krugman not to analyze city-by-county-by-neighborhood each civil level in each state in a discussion on state-level policies and economics.

 

You cannot claim that "McJobs" is a myth by comparing Houston, Brooklyn and Boston current average wages and COL. It just doesn't make any sense.

 

Satirical attack?

 

The argument is very well laid out. Krugman purposefully took only the numbers that made his argument. If anyone is guilty of a satirical attack it is Krugman. The response just gets and breaks down his "numbers" further and show why they are garbage. Sure the numbers look great for Paul if you focus just on exactly what he wants you to focus us, which is exactly what you are doing here.

 

It also has you ignoring the majority of the article where the comparison is on Paul's personally picked states.

 

So out of curiosity, with his search for liberal states, why didn't he pick California and Illinois? Trust me, he picks weren't random liberal states.

[StrangeSox]

I never said they were random blue states. They were chosen as states with comparable statistics to Texas. Again, the point here is to examine Texas's economic policies, whether they result in the "miracle" of job growth, what sort of jobs are being grown and if those economic policies are a necessary condition to obtain similar unemployment rates. Showing that some municipalities* in Texas have comparable wages and lower COL to some municipalities* in NY state and Massachusetts doesn't address that.

 

The argument isn't well laid-out because, again, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. You cannot conclude that the claim that most of Texas's job growth is low-wage is a "myth" by looking at the average wages in Harris County and comparing them to part of NY, NY and to Boston. That information simply cannot tell you what the wages of the jobs Texas is adding are. You need to compare wage trends for that.

 

Picking a small subset of data set and comparing it to another small subset of another data set doesn't tell you anything about the validity of comparing the two complete data sets and if one if "garbage" or not. What you've said here is that "sure, the numbers look great for PK if you focus on the comparison he's actually making (state v state), but if you look at an arbitrarily chosen subset of that data, well!" Also, he doesn't exactly refute PK's claim that Texas has an usually high uninsured rate--instead, he points out that Texas has a large Mexican immigrant population, many of them illegal and most working low-wage, low-benefit jobs. Which, uh, was sort of PK's point: yeah, Texas is adding jobs, but those jobs suck. At the end of the article, the author even says "well even if Krugman is right and all these jobs really are s***ty, low-wage jobs with little or no benefits, hey it's better than not working at all!" That seems to me at least, to be a partial admission that Texas is adding a lot of crappy jobs but that its better than adding no jobs.

 

I'm focusing on the parts of the article that are blindly, glaringly nonsensical: completely illogical arguments and comparisons. This is an interesting quibble here because it seems that's essentially what Williamson is doing: making off-base comparisons with minor parts of Krugman's article.

 

 

 

*what's a good catch-all category for the category of counties, cities, and neighborhoods? does such a category even exist?

Edited August 16, 2011 by StrangeSox

[southsider2k5]

I never said they were random blue states. They were chosen as states with comparable statistics to Texas. Again, the point here is to examine Texas's economic policies, whether they result in the "miracle" of job growth, what sort of jobs are being grown and if those economic policies are a necessary condition to obtain similar unemployment rates. Showing that some municipalities* in Texas have comparable wages and lower COL to some municipalities* in NY state and Massachusetts doesn't address that.

 

The argument isn't well laid-out because, again, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. You cannot conclude that the claim that most of Texas's job growth is low-wage is a "myth" by looking at the average wages in Harris County and comparing them to part of NY, NY and to Boston. That information simply cannot tell you what the wages of the jobs Texas is adding are. You need to compare wage trends for that.

 

Picking a small subset of data set and comparing it to another small subset of another data set doesn't tell you anything about the validity of comparing the two complete data sets and if one if "garbage" or not. What you've said here is that "sure, the numbers look great for PK if you focus on the comparison he's actually making (state v state), but if you look at an arbitrarily chosen subset of that data, well!" Also, he doesn't exactly refute PK's claim that Texas has an usually high uninsured rate--instead, he points out that Texas has a large Mexican immigrant population, many of them illegal and most working low-wage, low-benefit jobs. Which, uh, was sort of PK's point: yeah, Texas is adding jobs, but those jobs suck. At the end of the article, the author even says "well even if Krugman is right and all these jobs really are s***ty, low-wage jobs with little or no benefits, hey it's better than not working at all!" That seems to me at least, to be a partial admission that Texas is adding a lot of crappy jobs but that its better than adding no jobs.

 

I'm focusing on the parts of the article that are blindly, glaringly nonsensical: completely illogical arguments and comparisons. This is an interesting quibble here because it seems that's essentially what Williamson is doing: making off-base comparisons with minor parts of Krugman's article.

 

 

 

*what's a good catch-all category for the category of counties, cities, and neighborhoods? does such a category even exist?

 

They were chosen because they compare favorably to Texas.

 

The authors point is that if you get inside the data and get past the inherent biases and misleads, there is more to the numbers than meets the eye.

[StrangeSox]

Comparing an arbitrary selection of differing municipalities (?) in said states is not getting inside the data or getting past bias or misleading statements. If anything, it's even more egregious cherry-picking, but the worst part is that the cherry-picked data doesn't actually support his conclusion at all. It doesn't dispute it, it is simply irrelevant.

 

You cannot conclude that the claim that most of Texas's job growth is low-wage is a "myth" by looking at the average wages in Harris County and comparing them to part of NY, NY and to Boston.

[farmteam]

Completely random sidenote: You guys seem more civil today, and actually analyzing eachothers' posts. This heartens me.

[southsider2k5]

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/A...Staffing-Up.htm

 

 

If the federal government's regulatory operation were a business, it would be one of the 50 biggest in the country in terms of revenues, and the third largest in terms of employees, with more people working for it than McDonald's, Ford, Disney and Boeing combined.

 

Under President Obama, while the economy is struggling to grow and create jobs, the federal regulatory business is booming.

 

Regulatory agencies have seen their combined budgets grow a healthy 16% since 2008, topping $54 billion, according to the annual "Regulator's Budget," compiled by George Washington University and Washington University in St. Louis.

 

That's at a time when the overall economy grew a paltry 5%.

 

Meanwhile, employment at these agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office to more than 281,000, while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6%.

 

Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, found that between March 2010 and March 2011 federal regulatory jobs climbed faster than either private jobs or overall government jobs. (See chart.)

 

Regulatory production is way up, too, if you measure that by the number of rules federal agencies churn out.

 

The Obama administration imposed 75 new major rules in its first 26 months, costing the private sector more than $40 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation study. "No other president has imposed as high a number or cost in a comparable time period," noted the study's author, James Gattuso.

 

The number of pages in the Federal Register — where all new rules must be published and which serves as proxy of regulatory activity — jumped 18% in 2010.

 

This July, regulators imposed a total of 379 new rules that will cost more than $9.5 billion, according to an analysis by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo.

 

And much more is on the way. The Federal Register notes that more than 4,200 regulations are in the pipeline. That doesn't count impending clean air rules from the EPA, new derivative rules, or the FCC's net neutrality rule. Nor does that include recently announced fuel economy mandates or eventual ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank regulations.

 

But what's good for regulators isn't necessarily good for the private sector, as compliance burdens impose ever-increasing costs on businesses.

 

"Our economy is continuing to sink," Sen. Barrasso said, "and it's being weighed down by regulations coming out of this administration."

 

By 2008, the cost of complying with federal rules and regulations already exceeded $1.75 trillion a year, according to a 2010 study issued by the Small Business Administration.

[Balta1701]

Congrats to all the unions that wasted 25-30 million of your members dues up in Wisconsin. how did that work for ya? You won two seats that will be re-districted right back to the R's next year. And you will likely lose one of the two Democratic recalls next week. keep up the good work.

Both Democrats held their seats by double-digits.

[southsider2k5]

Now I understand how to fix the Social Security system, just declare everyone dead! Problem solved.

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/bre...0,3267092.story

 

Social Security wrongly declares 14,000 people dead each year

 

Social Security wrongly declares 14,000 people dead each year

CNNMoney

 

6:34 a.m. CDT, August 17, 2011

More Americans are being erroneously killed off by the Social Security Administration every day.

 

Of the approximately 2.8 million death reports the Social Security Administration receives per year, about 14,000 -- or one in every 200 deaths -- are incorrectly entered into its Death Master File, which contains the Social Security numbers, names, birth dates, death dates, zip codes and last-known residences of more than 87 million deceased Americans. That averages out to 38 life-altering mistakes a day.

 

While these errors occur online, in the depths of the administration's database, they have a very real impact on the people who have effectively been declared dead.

 

“Erroneous death entries can lead to benefit termination, cause severe financial hardship and distress to affected individuals, and result in the publication of living individuals' 1/8 personal identifying information 3/8 in the 1/8 Death Master File 3/8 ,“ the Inspector General said in its most recent evaluation of the database.

 

Laura Brooks, of Spotsylvania, Va., discovered she had been declared dead when she stopped receiving her disability checks, and her rent and student loan payments unexpectedly bounced.

 

She went to her bank and a representative said her account had been closed because she was dead. Brooks, a 52-year old mother of two, was already on permanent disability because of a severe depressive disorder, so hearing this turned her already difficult world completely upside down.

 

“It was one of those surreal things, like seeing a UFO,“ said Brooks. “When you are a person who already thought that maybe you should be dead because life was so bad to you, I thought this could be a premonition.“

 

The bank representative told Brooks she couldn't reopen her account until she could prove she was alive. When she went to the Social Security office in January 2001, she found out she was declared dead on Dec. 6, 2000. To correct this, she had to submit the pay stubs she was receiving from a program that helps people on disability get back to work.

 

It took two months for the Social Security Administration to finally “revive“ her. The administration later explained that a funeral director had mistyped a Social Security number when submitting a death notice to the agency.

 

Because of that misstep, Brooks said she accumulated between $300 and $400 in fees for bounced checks, and she hadn't received the more than $1,000 in disability payments she was owed. Once she was declared alive again, the Social Security Administration only resumed her payments -- it wouldn't reimburse her for missed payments, she said.

 

“Those disability checks were everything I had, and the $300 to $400 I had to pay in fees was more than half of that weekly income,“ she said. “But more than the financial impact of all of this was the psychological shock -- it spiraled me into further depression and really started me on the road to questioning authority.“

 

Making matters worse, Brooks said the Social Security Administration had somehow lost the file containing all of her information, including her disability benefit records and medical history. It took her two years to rebuild it.

 

Eleven years after being declared dead by the Social Security Administration, Brooks claims the agency has yet to apologize to her for the debacle.

 

The Social Security Administration said it cannot comment on specific cases but said it works as quickly as it can to fix these types of mistakes and that two months is too long for an error like this to be resolved.

 

Of course, Brooks isn't the only living person to have been put in the Social Security graveyard. In a recent investigation, the Social Security Office of the Inspector General, which oversees the Social Security Administration, discovered that the Death Master File contained 36,657 death entries between May 2007 and April 2010 for people who were very much alive.

 

In fact, the Social Security Administration admits that erroneous entries slip through the cracks.

 

“It is unfortunate, but some of the death data that we post to our records … proves to be wrong and we correct it as soon as possible,“ said administration spokesman Mark Hinkle. “Usually the error was inadvertently caused because of a human typing error when death information was entered into a computer system.“

 

This inaccurate information is then sold to the public, as well as to banks and credit bureaus.

 

Those who are declared dead not only lose their ability to apply for credit or receive benefits, but they are also at a high risk for identity theft now that all of their personally-identifying information has been made public.

 

In one review, the Inspector General found that months after the Social Security Administration deleted incorrect information from the database, the personally identifiable information of 28% of the individuals was still publicly available on at least one other web site.

 

To avoid the financial hardship or risk of identity theft as a result of being named to the Social Security's death list, the Identity Theft Resource Center recommends that you do the following:

 

First, find out who reported you as dead.

 

Then, get a copy of your death certificate from the county clerk's or recorder's office where the death was reported, and fill out a form to amend the certificate. The death certificate will include the name of whoever reported your death. This person is typically contacted to sign the amendment as well.

 

To remove your name from the database, you need to make an appointment at your local Social Security office. Bring a photo ID and the certified copy of the amended death certificate, the ITRC said.

 

Once you correct the information with Social Security, you may need to contact your bank, credit bureaus and any other entities that are under the impression that you're deceased to let them know you've been born again.

 

Social Security's Hinkle said it's typically easier to fix than this.

 

“It normally involves seeing the person face-to-face and verifying some form of current ID,“ he said, adding that the administration occasionally writes letters that people can present to other entities to prove they are alive.

 

“We take these situations seriously and wish they didn't happen at all, but when we find out it has occurred, we help the person fix it,“ said Hinkle.

[Balta1701]

First, find out who reported you as dead.

Therefore, the problem isn't at the administration of OASDI, it's at the death certificate filing level, because OASDI will only react to a report of a person's death, not generate one itself.

 

Seems like stricter regulation of death certificates, probably at hospitals, might be one answer.

[southsider2k5]

Therefore, the problem isn't at the administration of OASDI, it's at the death certificate filing level, because OASDI will only react to a report of a person's death, not generate one itself.

 

Seems like stricter regulation of death certificates, probably at hospitals, might be one answer.

 

Don't hire this guy...

 

[mr_genius]

http://www.gallup.com/poll/149042/New-Low-...%20-%20Politics

 

uh oh

[StrangeSox]

The authors point is that if you get inside the data and get past the inherent biases and misleads, there is more to the numbers than meets the eye.

 

 

Here's a much better actual look at the numbers instead of the hack job done by the National Review. Texas has actually had the 6th-fastest growing hourly wage rate since the recession hit.

[southsider2k5]

http://illinoispolicy.org/uploads/files/Po...tsILJobLoss.pdf

 

Illinois Loses Most Jobs in the Nation

In a trend that continues to worsen, more Illinoisans found themselves unemployed in the month of

July.

 

Illinois lost more jobs during the month of July than any other state in the nation, according to the most

recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. After losing 7,200 jobs in June, Illinois lost an additional 24,900

non-farm payroll jobs in July.1 The report also said Illinois’s unemployment rate climbed to 9.5 percent.

This marks the third consecutive month of increases in the unemployment rate.

 

Illinois started to create jobs as the national economy began to recover. But just when Illinois’s economy

seemed to be turning around, lawmakers passed record tax increases in January of this year. Since then,

Illinois’s employment numbers have done nothing but decline.

 

Data released today by the bureau confirms this downward trajectory.

 

[Balta1701]

Over the 2 month period June-July, there were 15,600 government job cuts in the State of Illinois.

[southsider2k5]

Over the 2 month period June-July, there were 16,700 government job cuts in the State of Illinois.

 

Perhaps having the most governmental units of any single state in the country has something to do with that being easy to cut?

 

http://www2.census.gov/govs/pubs/state_snapshot/gov07-il.pdf

 

• 1st in overall number of local governments (6,994).

1st in number of municipalities (1,299).

• 3rd in number of townships (1,432).

• 1st in number of special district governments (3,249).

• 3rd in number of independent school districts (912).

 

[Balta1701]

Then you have little reason to complain about the state's post-tax-cut job losses, as you just told us that they're good and necessary.

[southsider2k5]

Then you have little reason to complain about the state's post-tax-cut job losses, as you just told us that they're good and necessary.

 

Except that isn't all of the cuts...

[NorthSideSox72]

Except that isn't all of the cuts...

It is about half. So that's part of the picture, but certainly not all of it.

 

[southsider2k5]

It is about half. So that's part of the picture, but certainly not all of it.

 

Maybe. I haven't been able to find anything detailing those cut numbers exactly. If they aren't related to the state cuts, and instead are cuts at the local levels, it is a different story.

[Balta1701]

Maybe. I haven't been able to find anything detailing those cut numbers exactly. If they aren't related to the state cuts, and instead are cuts at the local levels, it is a different story.

Right now local cuts are typically making up 3/4 of government job cuts nationally, state cuts 1/4, and federal ones are just starting to kick in.

 

Of course, funding for all 3 levels is very intertwined.

[mr_genius]

http://www.gallup.com/poll/149114/Obama-Cl...%20-%20Politics

 

some interesting poll numbers from Gallup

[Balta1701]

On the subject of Illinois, the Philly Fed is out with their state by state "Coincident indices" this month, showing sorta how each state is doing over the last 3 months (basically the time since IL increased its taxes).

The coincident indexes combine four state-level indicators to summarize current economic conditions in a single statistic. The four state-level variables in each coincident index are nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing, the unemployment rate, and wage and salary disbursements deflated by the consumer price index (U.S. city average). The trend for each state’s index is set to the trend of its gross domestic product (GDP), so long-term growth in the state’s index matches long-term growth in its GDP.

 

As you can see, Illinois and Indiana have had similar economic condition changes over the last 3 months, and Michigan has gotten quite a bit weaker.

[southsider2k5]

On the subject of Illinois, the Philly Fed is out with their state by state "Coincident indices" this month, showing sorta how each state is doing over the last 3 months (basically the time since IL increased its taxes).

 

 

As you can see, Illinois and Indiana have had similar economic condition changes over the last 3 months, and Michigan has gotten quite a bit weaker.

 

That chart has to be fake. Just look at Texas.

[StrangeSox]

No one argued that Texas is doing poorly, just that it's not some anomaly thanks to its tax and regulatory environment.

[Balta1701]

That chart has to be fake. Just look at Texas.

Of course. Their government has been expanding employment.