[Don’t worry, I’ll keep working on the “USA Retirement Fund” bill summary and commentary later!] I hesitate to gripe about taxes too much, because I know it’s a problem that most people would like to have. I’m also afraid to do the math on the marginal rate we’re paying right now on my income, when you factor in the AMT as well as the FICA tax, state taxes, etc. (though the numbers were much more unpleasant in the days when... Read more

So for those who are keeping score — well, the Illinois Republican Party is still just as pathetic as before.  To recap: One candidate who’s trying to buy the election, spending gobs of his own money on TV ads that have no content except to say that he’ll be careful with taxpayers’ money and stick it to the unions.  So far as I can tell, his previous involvement in politics has all been of the “what’s in it for me?” sort.  An anti-Rauner... Read more

That’s the quote that the Chicago Tribune offers in its story today on the two-day faculty strike at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a strike aimed at securing substantial increases in professors’ and instructors’ pay.  Now, what characterizes this sort of strike, in contrast to others, is that the students have already paid their tuition, and the university has committed to providing them with 15 weeks of instruction.  I see no indication that the school year is being extended... Read more

So I’m not going to be able to fix the problem of high college costs. I don’t know how to force administrators to care about keeping tuition under control, or even lowering it. I don’t know how to interest employers in some alternative to hiring college graduates, regardless of the value of the course of study, just because of the credential itself. But here’s what I would do with respect to remedial education. The numbers show up periodically — shockingly... Read more

(Tuesday morning update:  revised since originally posted with additional material.) Conventional wisdom offers two explanations for the rise in illegitimacy/single parents, especially among blacks. Conservatives will tell you that this is because “Uncle Sugar” provides enough in the way of welfare benefits that men have become dispensible. Liberals will tell you that this is because of the loss of well-paying jobs that, in the past, men, and in particular black men, were able to find with no futher education than... Read more

So I’ve been reading about “The Great Black Migration” (The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America by Nicholas Lemann), about which I’ll write more in a later post, but only a few pages in I realized that I had to retract my prior statements that “We’re not accustomed to servants in 21st century America. In fact, it’s been a long time since anyone but the wealthy has had servants.” Well, strictly speaking, maybe what I... Read more

More fun with the BLS.gov data — in this case, looking at the pay changes by decile and quartile, for men and women.  Unfortunately, the data publicly available on the site was limited to the years 2000 – 2013 for the top and bottom decile and the 1st and 3rd quartile — presumably the deeper historical data is available offline if I were an economist by profession rather than an armchair economist.  But it’s still instructive to look at the... Read more

Have you ever been an expat in East Asia? Well, neither have I, actually.  But before leaving for our expat adventure in Germany, a friend lent me a book with advice on being an expat and living abroad, which was general enough not just to cover Europe but what to expect globally.  And it discussed the fact that in East Asia — for instance, Singapore or Malaysia or the like — it is absolutely the norm to have a live-in... Read more

Here, for your Thursday morning contemplation, are three graphs from the bls.gov site. The first of these, median weekly earnings, in constant (1982-1984) dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), for full-time workers, both hourly and salaried. Not great — wages dropped precipitously at the end of the Carter administration, recovered during Reagan’s term, dropped again with the early 90s recession and climbed with the dot-com boom, finally reaching their earlier levels only to drop again with the current recession. But... Read more

Can Barack Obama, or his successor, be trusted to fully implement and successfully enforce border controls and internal restrictions on working without valid authorization, and to keep new guest worker and H1-B visa programs at levels appropriate for labor shortages, rather than to surpress wages? According to The Economist, he is absolutely trustworthy because of his splendid track record at deportation and because he is willing to deport people even when it creates hardship, just to establish his bona fides.... Read more