Largely by stepping toward an economy in which workers bear the burden of distributing healthcare and housing with little regard to ability or willingness to pay, the Build Back Better bill (BBB) would implement the single largest permanent increase in work disincentives since the income tax came into its own during World War II.
…
The implicit employment and income taxes in BBB would increase marginal tax rates on work by about 7 percentage points. I expect that such a change in the disincentive would reduce full-time equivalent employment by about 4.5%, or about 7 million jobs.
The only daycare that wouldn’t muzzle our children like animals was a private christian school. All of the government provided or subsidized daycares in our area required all day masking of children, even outside. Free daycare would thus have a value to $0 to me as a parent, and perhaps even be of negative value if government financing reduced the supply of caregivers in the free market.
Your current bet for the VA gubernatorial race? What say you?
50/50
The only outcome I don’t expect is a Terry blowout. He leads in the polls, but any surprise will be for Youngkin. There is a big enthusiasm gap, but a ton of ground to cover.
In Maryland the republican governor did nothing to stop the state health board from overturning school boards on mask mandates.
I consider school mask mandates supervillain tier evil, so anyone who doesn’t stop them I have no respect for. If Youngkin can end the mask mandate in my county, he’s worth electing. If not I offer only tepid support. I’m not convinced he’s a fighter, but parents who do want to fight are going to vote for him. I hope he wins but I’m not excited until I see concrete results.
P.S. The career bureaucrats in your schools do seem to be throwing up a stink about your exercising your democracy and all. No matter what policies you pass, the ones implanting them are your enemies.
Thanks. I was slightly more optimistic than you, but trust your local knowledge over my far away knowledge. Adjusting my expectations accordingly. Thank you.
P.S. I attribute the most recent controversies here in Southlake, TX to bureaucratic incompetence over some woke conspiracy (the James Lindsay assumption). The TX anti-CRT bill is only a few pages and is in plain English, but the school administrators seem completely lost on the implementation. There is nothing in that bill that remotely implies that both sides of the holocaust need to be taught. Face palm. Someone is vastly overpaid and under qualified over here…and needs to go.
Terry is trying everything he can to lose, it wouldn’t surprise me if he could manage. What comes next is a bigger question.
They are searching for some embarrassing reductio ad absurdum to discredit common sense. So if you don’t want your 4th graders reading about sucking an old mans dick, you need caution tape over the entire library.
BTW, this would probably fly over most peoples heads but I’m not entirely sure what the objection is here. Is the “other side” of the Holocaust really some kind of intellectual danger to kids. If I was given one way to make sure kids didn’t grow up to be Nazi’s, making them slog through Mein Kampf cover to cover would probably be the greatest turn off you could manage.
Yeah, the average person seems unable to make the following distinction:
Does the holocaust exist as a historical fact?
Vs.
What were the justifications for the holocaust?
In terms of the former, there is nothing controversial there on the historical facts and anyone that suggests otherwise is a complete kook. Or maybe I need to brush up on the writings of Louis Farrakhan?
In terms of the latter, I have no problem in allowing our daughter to read Mein Kampf when it’s age appropriate. Readily available on Amazon and probably free elsewhere. Hitler was an intellectual lightweight and his policies were actually *dysgenic* vs eugenic. In order to understand good, you need to understand evil.
How does copyright law work for an evil villain? Should it apply differently to anyone else?
Back during the campaign, one of Biden’s boasts was that Build Back Better would exclude whites and dolls out mo money to Blacks and “Browns.”. The campaign web site trumpeted promises that it would::
-Make a Historic Commitment to Equalizing Federal Procurement
-Ensure His Housing Plan Makes Bold Investments in Homeownership and Access to Affordable Housing for Black, Brown, and Native Families
-Achieve Equity in Management, Training, and Higher Education Opportunities Connected to the Jobs of the Future
-Boost Retirement Security and Financial Wealth for Black, Brown, and Native Families
-Ensure Workers of Color Are Compensated Fairly and Treated With Dignity
-Ensure Equity in Biden’s Bold Infrastructure and Clean Energy Investments
-Strengthen the Federal Reserve’s Focus on Racial Economic Gaps, abd
-Promote Diversity and Accountability in Leadership Across Key Positions in All Federal Agencies.
All the better people of course cheered the ascension of open apartheid. No one is talking about it now so perhaps one should assume that poor and working class whites have indeed been cut off from the largesse.
And the other big Mouch-reminiscent “anti-dog-eat -dog Rule” features are the trillions in payouts to the Boyles, Taggarts, and Larkins selling junk energy generation in wind and solar clothed in Thunbergite religious robes. Every Dem faction gets its payout: even third world dictators would cringe at the transparent corruption.
Get with the program Kling. Don’t you know Build Back Better is a free lunch? Ever since Card won the Nobel Prize for proving minimum wage increases and mass migration and open borders are free lunches, the mainstream orthodoxy amongst US economists is that all Joe Biden policy initiatives are a free lunch. In fact, we should just call orthodox US economics “The Free Lunch School.”
https://i2.wp.com/caesoose.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2014-06-29_00017.jpg
I don’t get it. The US has record low birthrates–but somehow we need to increase the availability of childcare.
Community colleges may have worked yesterday, but they’ve long been trumped by online certificates and short-courses. The major expense for students of a community college is the time commitment and opportunity cost.
So please tell me: Why do we need more childcare for nonexistent children, and more community college funding for nonexistent students?
That’s just not true. Do you have sources? Links? Studies?
I’d like to hear Kling and this crowd comment on Community colleges. Community college has totally different programs:
“Remedial education”: For students who didn’t learn the basics, but have aged out of high school.
“Transfer Education”: Serious, rigorous academics that is designed to replicate the first two years of a serious university program and let you transfer into university on completion. Students who didn’t get admission into selective universities can often prove their ability via getting good grades in a community college program.
“Trade School”.
One argument is to make it easier for people to have more children. Secondly, lots of people have lots of children today, even if overall stats are down. I would like less big government that runs absolutely everything, but you are making a weak argument against this.
Well, the American Association of Community Colleges reports on the community college enrollment crisis, writing:
“Executive Summary
Community college enrollments mostly grew during the first decade of the 21st century, accelerating rapidly at the end of that decade as the Great Recession hit. Since a peak enrollment in 2010, the total community college enrollment has decreased each fall, declining by more than 1 million students nationally (14.4% ) between 2010 and 2017.
Over the course of the 17 years studied in this paper, there were important differences in the enrollment trends for different segments of community college populations. A few key trends include:
• Full-time student enrollment declined at a faster pace than did the part-time student enrollment between 2010 and 2017.
• All age groups showed declines in enrollment between 2010 and 2017 with the exception of students under the age of 18. This is largely due to the rapid increase of high school students enrolling in community college classes.
• While always a majority, women have decreased their share of the community enrollment since their highest representation in 2004.
• White students were no longer the majority of students enrolled nationally in community colleges in the fall of 2014. • While White student enrollment has steadily declined since 2010, non-White student enrollment has remained relatively
steady since 2012—largely driven by increases in Hispanic students.
• Analysis of state data suggests that enrollments have regional variations. Two states with College Promise programs
showed enrollment increases corresponding with implementation of their state-wide free-tuition programs
• While enrollment in community colleges has seen decreases since 2010, 4-year public colleges, and to a lesser extent
4-year independent colleges, have not seen decreases.
• Finally, the paper highlights a few other trends that are related to community college enrollment, suggesting that the
number of high school graduates and college continuation rates of those students may have impacts on community colleges.”
And employers are adopting e-learning because it is superior:
“For example, organizations have realized that using the best elearning software tools can increase productivity by 30%. Not just that, elearning boosts employee engagement by 18%, and it typically requires up to 60% less employee time (SHIFT eLearning). Most importantly, elearning has better knowledge retention rates (up to 60%) compared with face-to-face training. These and other benefits have been too enticing to ignore. It’s hardly surprising, for example, that 77% of US organizations utilized elearning systems in 2017 (StrategyR, 2021).”
https://financesonline.com/elearning-trends/
As a result, people are wisely turning their backs on the failed higher education industry:
“According to a 2020 Strada Education Network survey of more than 25,000 responses, only 17 percent of adult learners believe additional education will be worth the cost, compared to 37 percent in 2019. In the same survey, just 24 percent believed additional education will make them an attractive job candidate to potential employers and help get them a good job, down from 56 percent the year before. Since the pandemic began, adult learners are opting for quicker, less expensive nondegree credentials (39 percent) and skills training (24 percent) over the traditional bachelor’s degree (11 percent).”
https://www.insidetrack.org/resources/12-higher-ed-trends-to-watch-in-2021/
Do you happen to have information on how the decrease in community college enrollment matches up with changes in university enrollment? I wonder if the decrease in community college attendance is due to those students getting accepted to regular universities. I know at least one school that was working really hard to get “under served populations”, which in practice seemed to mean “kids who would normally go to community college and really struggle in a university class”. I am curious to see if the bigger schools were poaching the community college kids, I guess.
Figure 1 of an American Community College Association report at: https://www.aacc.nche.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Final_CC-Enrollment-2020_730_1.pdf
shows a long steady increase in public 4 year college enrollment and a long steady decrease in public 2 year CC enrollment. Figure 2 shows a relatively large increase in the 3 year completion rate at community colleges which would suggest any poaching didn’t lower the quality of CC enrollees. And by the same measure, according to IPED data, from 2004 to 2016.completion rates at public four-year universities increased 12 percent, from 54.5 percent to 61.3 percent. So poaching may not have necessarily lowered 4 year enrollee quality. So, anyway, I have no idea but it is a good question.
Casey Mulligan makes sense. I trust him.
The Jonah Goldberg and George Will types on the surface they advocate for cuts to entitlement programs, small government, fiscal responsibility, but at election time they support the Democratic Party who is moving in the complete opposite direction, which suggests they never really cared about fiscal responsibility and entitlement cuts very much to begin with. Then they want to deploy Jedi Mind tricks to say that everything is the fault of Trump and Trump supporters.