Maybe 90 percent of all sentenced felons today are out of confinement and living more or less among us.
…rough arithmetic suggests that about 17 million men in our general population have a felony conviction somewhere in their CV. That works out to one of every eight adult males in America today.
Read the entire essay, which paints a very dark picture of conditions in this country. It strikes me as the most important magazine piece that I have seen so far this year.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Eberstadt_Figure2.png
“The U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), for example, suggests that the “potential growth” rate for the U.S. economy at full employment of factors of production has now dropped below 1.7 percent a year, implying a sustainable long-term annual ”
sounds like moving the goal posts…growth is growth, and the USA has the highest real GDP growth (at 3%) than almost all developed countries . Anyone can create any arbitrary metric and than say the US economy is ‘failing’ by not meeting it.
The other key aspect is the population growth is slowing down a lot the last 15 years.
It’s all good, the leisure class is growing – millions of people freed from the curse of Adam. It’s just not the leisure class you wanted or expected.
Anybody have a citation for this? Because I might not believe this unless 1 million people show up at my front door with a valid Ohio driver’s license an a notarized affidavit attesting to having received a prescription for opiates during this short time window.
Quinones has an op-ed in the NYT recently, Why Trump’s Wall Won’t Keep Out Heroin that presented some disappointingly weak arguments. They were so lame that I’ve started to question his credibility.
In that article, he seems to make a call for perfection instead of pursuing a cost-benefit analysis. “Won’t stop” is vague. Does he mean reduce, or eliminate. If eliminate, that’s unreasonable and irrational. If reduce, that’s a strong claim that flies in the face of common sense and experience. So it needs strong evidence, and he doesn’t provide any.
He then says that the wall could ruin law-enforcement cooperation with Mexico. First, how does he know that? Answer: he doesn’t.
Second, what interests of the Mexican government would be harmed so much that building a wall would cause such harm to relations? The interest in allowing their subject to illegally cross into the US? Not very compelling, and anyway, if a wall wouldn’t stop that, why should they care? Wouldn’t they just laugh at the foolish futility of it, in the “50 foot wall, 51 foot ladder” style? Is the wall effective at stopping unregulated human flows, or isn’t it? Does stopping unregulated human flows really have zero effect on contraband smuggling? Come on Quinones.
And finally, the fact we have an Mexican heroin problem of such epidemic proportions that it’s worth him writing about means that the cooperation we’ve had isn’t worth nearly enough. Ironically, if one actually looks into the full history of his given example – El Chapo’s involvement with the criminal justice system – one will see it hardly constitutes a great case study of the fruits of this cooperation.
Yes, there was a highpoint of the US from 1997 – 2000.
1) The reality is after 2000, US companies accelerated outsourcing which led to huge changes to China and India. And it did effect the WWC in the US.
2) We can’t grow like that era and I remember all the layoffs occurring in 2001- 2003 all moved to housing.
3) The rebound from the Great Recession is a hell of a lot better than the Great Depression.
4) Crime and divorce rates are still below 2000. So it is not all bad here.
5) If rich conservatives care so much about the WWC why are not investing in these towns. Local conservative institution, churches especially, need assistance.
I cannot speak to the 11% in Ohio number, but a little easy googling seems to support the claims that:
1. Opioid overdose deaths (47,000 in 2014) exceed murders (14,300 in 2014) or traffic deaths (about 32,000.) Baring some really large misfactualization, opioid overdoses now kill more people than all traffic deaths and all murders combined.
2. Apparently 2,106 of those 47,000 overdose deaths in 2014 where in Ohio.
4.4% or so. Ohio has roughly 3.3% of the US population.
Also, given how many people have surgery in a given year, and how many of them legitimately use opioids to control post surgical pain, that 11% number may not be interesting. (My personal experience was that they are very useful but I cannot imagine becoming addicted to them. Apparently this is common. Obviously lots of people do become addicted. This all suggests that the perscription rate may not tell us much. Hard to argue to with the deaths….)
And as I like to remind, they all sat beside us in public school.
People on the left have been talking about inequality and social immobility for years. Now it gets discovered by the right and by libertarians, so it is a big deal. Welcome aboard. Also, have to agree with collin that i am surprised that they did not account for population growth.
Steve
WHAT evidence is there that “inequality” or “immobility” are the root of these disasters? It is reported that inequality is increasing everywhere, including the social welfare states of Europe.
Indeed, while it was alcoholism rather than heroin, socialist and still statist Russia was and is plagued with addictions and premature deaths.
The useful complaint to libertarians goes like this: I at least believed people should be free to ingest what they want, and fighting an oppressive war on drugs was both wrong and counterproductive. But in the news I find more and more epsiodes where person A ingests some drug and then behaves in ways that kill innocent bystanders. Not what I had in mind.
So the real charge here is that The State does indeed need to control distribution and ingestion of these substances.
And the real question is How? Perhaps The State is in all ways incompetent to deal with this?