Category Archives: Economics

Capitalism

Posted on November 22, 2011 | 5 comments

Did you know that there are losers in addition to winners?

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Posted in Economics, Pino's Law

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Wealth And Distribution: II

Posted on November 21, 2011 | 7 comments

A week and a half ago I posted about the distribution of wealth in a controlled population of people that were EXACTLY like one another.  Exactly.  They contributed to 401ks the same, they saved for houses the same, they worked at the same wages and got raises the same.  The result, after just 15 years of life?

…the poorest third of people control less than 20% of the net wealth while the richest 14% control more than 20% of the net wealth.

6/15th’s of the poorest control less money than the top 2/15ths.

I have expanded my model to include home ownership.  Again, this is done with the assumption that ALL people do the EXACT same thing in the same way.  They buy a house at the same time, in the same housing market and the home they buy is worth the same.

Here’s what we get:

Again, the money shot:

Total
Worth
$20,150.00
$41,065.00
$62,768.00
$85,282.81
$108,633.07
$132,996.30
$155,049.73
$178,141.44
$202,303.53
$227,569.27
$253,973.07
$281,551.59
$310,340.71
$340,378.62
$371,702.83
$414,013.44
$455,546.94
$498,681.75
$543,467.99
$589,958.54
$638,156.14
$687,997.39
$739,532.90
$792,816.28
$847,903.24
$904,848.64
$963,712.56
$1,024,553.38
$1,087,433.82
$1,152,418.08

The control of wealth explodes after year 15.  That’s when my peeps buy a house.  What was a net worth growing by about 30k a year now grows much quicker; near 40 or 50k a year.  And this is just by buying a home.

So, after 30 years, where is the wealth?

The total wealth is $14,112,947 with a quintile at $2,822,589.

The lowest quintile.  That group of people that control the bottom 20% of the wealth in this equal society, defined equal society, compromises fully HALF the people in that society.  The bottom HALF of our population controls just 20% of the wealth.    The top 3/30, or 1/10th or 10% control 20% of the wealth as well.  In fact, the top 3% controls as much wealth as the bottom 33%.

And we’re just 30 years into the life of the exactly average 18 year old.  We’re just at 48 years of age.  We haven’t even begun to take into account poor choices or good choices.  This model is assuming that all kids make the exact same choices with their money, career and finances.

And we STILL have “wealth distribution” issues.

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Posted in Economics, GINI, Middle Class, Politics: National

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Cost of Separation

Posted on November 19, 2011 | Leave a comment

Consider eating out.  Going to a restaurant and having dinner–lunch would work, breakfast too.  The way it works today is that a small short term “contract” is enacted.  You sit down and order, the joint brings you food and you have to pay for it.  This is understood to be a contract because if the place doesn’t bring you what they said they would, you have legal recourse.  Ina similar manner, should you choose not to pay, they have recourse as well; it’s illegal to d”dine -n dash”.

And this works well.  Based on this arrangement, I’m willing to try new places as often as I’m moved.  If something opens near me, I almost always try it.  Further, in a quest to find more and better restaurants in a specific genre of food, I’ll expand my radius and drive further to experiment.  However, what if it didn’t work this way.  What if the arrangement was different.

Suppose that if you wanted to try a new eatery you had to commit to eating there once a week for a year.  In short, by agreeing to eat there just once, you were legally bound to eat there 51 more times.

Do you think you would try more or fewer new restaurants?

It’s obvious.  We would all eat at fewer new restaurants.  Not only that, but we might find that as a result of such a restriction, fewer new restaurants would be opened in the first place.  In other words, the general overall “eating out” experience would be diminished.

The exact same is true of jobs.

As it becomes harder and harder for me separate from my labor, I’ll buy less and less of it.  It’s pure and simple.  It’s as true of labor as it is of restaurants as it is of cars.  And it’s being demonstrated around the world:

(Reuters) – Employers burned by the cost of laying off workers in the last crisis are uneasy about taking on permanent staff amid faltering economic growth putting pressure on the current workforce, a staffing industry executive said on Thursday.

Demand for temporary workers often acts as a leading indicator for overall economic growth, as firms hire flexible workers at the start of a recovery and cut staff ahead of a downturn.

Staffing firms Randstad, USG People and Manpower have warned of slowing jobs growth in Europe as the region’s debt crisis hammers consumer and business confidence.

“What has happened in this recession is that the psychology of hiring has completely changed,” said David Arkless, president of global corporate and government affairs at Manpower Group.

In the past firms hired temporary workers at the start of a recovery and gradually took on more permanent staff. But now, even in sectors and companies that are growing, employers are mindful of the huge costs of downsizing in the last recession and reluctant to take on permanent staff, he said.

“Employers are saying this could kill my company if I do the wrong kind of hiring now and it turns into a double dip recession,” said Arkless. “They are stretching the human element of their company to breaking point because they are so scared of hiring any more people right now.”

We all wanna make sure that our workers have it good.  However, when we mandate too much good, they get nothing.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Politics: International

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California Facing Revenue Shortfall

Posted on November 19, 2011 | 3 comments

It’s an old adage but I think it’s important to point out how often people tend to overlook it:

If you tax it, you’ll get less of it.

Politicians forget this all the time.

A case can be made that raising income tax rates at the state level won’t force people, en mass, to move.  Or, that if you reduce state income tax rates, people will move in.  I agree with this; people fundamentally chase jobs, not tax rates.  This is for people however, not corporations.

When you tax corporations at a rate that is so high that businesses begin to move to avoid those taxes, people will move too.  Further, the higher the “income” chain you go, the more able that individual is free to move.

Own your own internet widget company and live in CA.  Pay too much in taxes?  Move to Nevada, or Texas.  Are ya a gazzilionaire and just live off dividends?  Pay too much taxes?  Move to Florida.

The point is, the higher the income stream, the greater the desire to tax it.  And the greater the ability to avoid it.  These people did not amass great wealth because they are careless or foolish.  And they certainly didn’t amass that wealth in order to have it stolen from them.

They’ll move.  And when they do, the revenue expected from them will be less:

LOS ANGELES — California’s budget problems show no signs of abating.

A report released by state budget analysts on Wednesday forecasts a sharp decline in revenue for this fiscal year, which could set off more than $2 billion in new cuts in state spending in January, including a seven-day reduction in the school year for public school students.

The report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office projected that the state would fall $3.7 billion short of the $88.5 billion in revenues and transfers that was anticipated in the 2011-12 state budget approved in June. Under the terms of that budget, automatic reductions — known as trigger cuts, and specified in some detail in the budget — go into effect if revenues fall $1 billion or more short of projections.

California is a state blessed by weather and geography.  And people are fleeing the place.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Politics: National, States Behaving Badly

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Wealth and Distribution

Posted on November 11, 2011 | 3 comments

Occupy Wall Street is having an impact.  There’s little doubt that they have generated much conversation and debate.  Some think that the impact they’ve had is positive; others negative.  For me, it’s focused the debate on income distribution, income mobility and wealth distribution.

We’ve talked about the GINI.  That’s the tool, in general, that measures distribution.  It could be World Series Titles or brown hair.  It could be the letter “W” in license plates or it could be income.  And I’ve come to the conclusion that the GINI, as reported by the major players, isn’t reporting anything useful.  The GINI measures income per family.  And all families aren’t created equal.

So, next up is wealth.  This time I built a thought experiment.  A simple and crude one to be sure, but, based on feedback, could be refined.  In fact, it’s my goal to refine it as I go.  The idea is to create a world that is as equal as possible.  I’ve built a population that is the same in every regard.  They make the same, save the same and spend the same.  And they advance the same.  Given such a world, what does income and wealth distribution look like?

Let’s look at wealth.

I assume a number of things.  All in the name of equality:

  1. 1000 people per year
  2. A starting salary of $30,000
  3. A raise of 3% a year.
  4. Progressive living: roommate-own apartment-saving for home
  5. Progressive retirement savings – none to 401k
  6. Rent and food don’t increase in real terms
  7. People only have living and food expenses.  And save ALL other money.

If we start at year 1 and continue to build our population, it looks like this for the first 15 years:

The graphics are tough to see without clicking through.  Lemme give ya the money shot:

Total
Worth
$20,150.00
$41,065.00
$62,768.00
$85,282.81
$108,633.07
$132,996.30
$155,049.73
$178,141.44
$202,303.53
$227,569.27
$253,973.07
$281,551.59
$310,340.71
$340,378.62
$371,702.83

Using the gross assumptions above, I have identified the “Total Worth” of the individuals year over year.

Each row above represents another cohort advancing and the previous year taking it’s place.  That is, this year’s “Year Ones” becomes next year’s “Year Twos”, And this year’s “Year Twos” become next year’s “Year Threes”.

We like to break down distributions by quintiles.  Let’s do that.  Let’s break it down by quintile.

If you sum all the wealth of the 15 represented years, you get $2,771,905.  If you divide $2,771,905 by 5 you get $554,381.  The first SIX years of cohort classes don’t equal one single quintile.  On the other end of the spectrum, just 2 cohort classes are at $712,081.  Nearly 40% more than the top quintile.  In other words, more than the poorest third of people control less than 20% of the net wealth while the richest 14% control more than 20% of the net wealth.

6/15th’s of the poorest control less money than the top 2/15ths.

And this in a world controlled by exact equality and accounting for no good/bad decisions.

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Posted in Economics, GINI, Middle Class, Politics: National

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Ohio: Unions and Elections

Posted on November 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

Liberals love to scream that corporations influence elections in an unfair manner.  They have tons of money and are able to exert influence that ordinary people can’t.

Strangely they are silent when that exact same influence is wielded by unions:

The nation’s biggest labor unions spent nearly $30 million to repeal the law. That was more than twice the amount spent by Republican-affiliated groups backing the law.

30 million dollars.  30.  Million.  Dollars.

Listen.  The Left complains that abuses take place all the time by “actors” of the right.  Rules are broken and advantages are exploited.  But make no mistake.  The REAL complain isn’t that those rules are really important or that advantages shouldn’t exist.  The REAL complain from the Left is that they aren’t the ones benefiting from ’em.

Once again we have Unions using illegally obtained money to elect officials and pass laws that benefit the Union.

Occupy Ohio people, Occupy Ohio.

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Posted in Economics, Idiots on Parade, Liberty, Lobby/PAC, Politics: National, States Behaving Badly

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Mortgage Refinance Program: Part II

Posted on November 2, 2011 | 3 comments

The current economic condition was brought about by housing.   Housing costs and a housing bubble.  The result is that we find an enormous problem with hundreds of thousands of people facing foreclosure. And until that problem is cured, we may never truly begin to see a real path to recovery.

These people are suffering.  They’re going to bed at night with that pit i their stomach wondering how they’re gonna make the next payment.  How they’re gonna avoid having the phone shut off.  How they’re gonna make winter.  There is fear and apprehension and stress.  I get it.  And I don’t wanna diminish it.   But those feelings are never, ever, really gonna go away until they’re addressed.  Not just contained, but addressed.

I went to school in Marshall, MN, home of Schwanna’s Ice Cream and Red Barron pizza.

I met Mr. Schwann by the way.  He dropped out of school in the eighth grade before founding his company.  I tended bar at the hotel he liked to have his Christmas Parties at.  His favorite thing was to tell me to watch how his executives would “run on the bar” in an effort to drink what he was drinking.  The worst was when he landed on CC and water with a rind of lemon.  I never cut so many lemon rinds in my life!

My major was Mathematics.  Not math, but Mathematics.  In calc I found myself in class with a bunch of non-math majors.  And they were struggling.  Some just wanted to pass and get the req out of the way.  Others were earnestly interested in learning calculus.  I gravitated towards those kids.

We would study forever.  I’ve found that math is learned in a series of ramps and plateaus.  That is, forward progress is made steadily until such a time as a specific concept is hit that prevents further and deeper understanding.  And until that plateau is addressed, not contained, further learning can not occur.  The gifted teachers have a grasp of plateau identification and remediation.  Anyway, the same process holds true in other aspects of life.

And home finances are one of them.  Which is my very long way of saying that just giving someone the answers to the calc exam isn’t going to help them understand calculus.  And neither is forgiving mortgages going to help people address their home finance situation:

WASHINGTON — The federal government’s expansion of a mortgage refinancing program could reduce the monthly payments of up to one million homeowners, but analysts said the modest scope of the plan meant it would probably do little to heal the housing market or help the broader economy.

The effort, built on sweeping voluntary agreements with the mortgage industry to let people refinance even if their homes have declined in value, reflects a new White House emphasis on economic measures that do not require Congress to overcome its bitter partisan divisions.

It also maintains a choice President Obama made in the early days of his administration to focus on reducing monthly payments rather than on the amounts that borrowers owe, the latter being what a growing number of liberal and conservative economists consider necessary to resolve the problem.

I resonate with the plight.  I get the desire to help.  But this isn’t helping.  This is enabling.  And until true and serious lessons are learned, nothing will change:

Treasury has publicly estimated that the redefault rate on HAMP permanent mods will be 40% over five year. Now, just one year into permanent mods, we have already reached a 21% redefault rate. There is no indication that the redefault rate is plateauing, and no reason to think that it will.

In other words, the default rate on refinanced mortgages is very high.  If you are failing to meet the payments of your current mortgage, there is little reason to believe that you will suddenly be able to make the payments on a restructured mortgage.

Not only does this program fail to help the problem it sets out to fix, the secondary impact is that it artificially keeps the home market from clearing.  The price of a home remains artificially high.  And this prevents true recovery.

Let the market work.  Accept the pain and allow these homes that are over leveraged to go into foreclosure and the market will heal.  It always does.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Government, Politics: National

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GINI: Further Clarification on Wage Earners

Posted on October 31, 2011 | 4 comments

This morning I posted on the flaw of using the popular measure of income disparity across nations.  Many organizations use the GINI coefficient to measure this disparity.  However, what these organizations fail to mention is that they are measuring household disparity, not individual disparity.  And when they compare nation to nation, they don’t normalize those numbers so that we’re comparing apples to apples.

For example, in the United States, a massive amount of “households” is comprised of single parents.  That is, the home will find a single eligible wage earner.  And many of those parents opt not to work.  Now, some will say that’s because there is no work to be had.  Others, me included, will say that the incentives are all wrong.  The entitlement programs offer enough aid that the prospect of going to work doesn’t make sense.

So, no income.

Is this sad?  Most certainly.

Does this promote poverty generation to generation?  With out a doubt.

Is this a serious problem that requires serious thought?  Yes.

Does this implicate the job market, compensation structure or some inherent bias towards “the wealthy”?  Under no circumstance.

This morning I showed the “horizontal” version of the data.  Let’s look at the vertical:

Descriptor Lowest Fifth Second Fifth Third Fifth Fourth Fifth Highest Fifth
No Earners 62.4% 29.6% 14.0% 6.3% 3.0%
One Earner 33.0% 52.6% 48.4% 33.1% 22.2%
Two Earners 4.3% 16.0% 32.4% 49.3% 55.9%
Three Earners 0.2% 1.6% 4.4% 8.9% 13.1%
Four Earners 0.0% 0.2% 0.8% 2.4% 5.8%

The data continues to reveal reality.  The quintile that represents the poorest among us, the “Lowest Fifth” has 62.4% of it’s members with ZERO wage earners.  That is, more than half, WAY more than half of the poorest quintile has no one in it making any amount of money.  NONE.  There is no way that this can be counted towards any measure of income disparity.  For that to happen, there must be an income!

I have lived in North Carolina for 12 years [damn!  12 years] and I have never won the North Carolina lottery.  Never mind that we have had a lottery for only 7 years and that I’ve never bought a ticket.  Is it realistic that I be counted among lottery players that haven’t won?

No.

Back to the data.  The “Lowest Fifth” has 62.4% of its members with no income.  62.4%.  Compare this to the “Highest Fifth”.  That quintile has 3% with no wage earners.  Three.  Further, the “Lowest Fifth” has only 4.5% of its membership with 2 or more earners.  Compare that with the “Highest Fifth” who have 5.8% with FOUR wage earners.

It turns out that a predictor of income is, shockingly, the number of wage earners.

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Posted in Economics, GINI, Liberty, Life, Politics: National

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GINI: Income Disparity

Posted on October 31, 2011 | 5 comments

Thursday I posted my thoughts on the GINI rating and how it pertains to income here in America.  In that post, my main thrust was the fact that GINI, as reported when comparing national income disparity rankings, was comparing household incomes.  Not the incomes of individuals, but of households.

And I think that’s important.  As I demonstrated in that post, taking these two families:

  • Family A making $60,000 a year
  • Family B making $70,000 a year

Looks to be fairly equitable.  But now let’s consider that family A and family B get divorced, created 4 households out of two.  Then the breakdown looks like this:

  • Family A making $0 a year
  • Family B making $28,000 a year
  • Family C making $32,000 a year
  • Family D making $70,000 a year

THIS looks to be dramatically different.  However, the same four families in the second picture are the individual household represented in the first picture.  Remarkable, yes?

So, how do things look in real life?  Let’s take a look at the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey for 2010:

Descriptor Lowest Fifth Second Fifth Third Fifth Fourth Fifth Highest Fifth
Family Households 9,411 13,969 16,162 18,543 20,528
% 12 17.8 20.6 23.6 26.1
Married Couples 4,037 8,521 11,587 15,270 18,621
% 7 14.7 20 26.3 32.1
No Earners 14,805 7,037 3,327 1,496 722
% 54.1 25.7 12.1 5.5 2.6
One Earner 7,845 12,474 11,488 7,853 5,263
% 17.5 27.8 25.6 17.5 11.7
Two Earners 1,020 3,790 7,702 11,700 13,258
% 2.7 10.1 20.6 31.2 35.4
Three Earners 55 379 1,040 2,112 3,119
% 0.8 5.6 15.5 31.5 46.5
Four Earners 5 58 180 577 1,377
% 0.2 2.6 8.2 26.2 62.7
Aggregate Earners 10,240 21,940 31,595 41,125 48,338

The data is remarkable.  Let’s go through it bit by bit.

First, the “Fifths” listed at the top is earnings by quintile.  That is, the poorest 20% is the “Lowest Fifth” while the richest 20% is the “Highest Fifth”.

Now then, the data:

Households that are “families” is a massive indicator of income.As the percentage of families in each fifth increases, so does the wealth.  The same goes for married couples.  The top fifth has nearly 5x the number of married couples as the bottom fifth.  Seems that family is important in wealth creation.

Family aside, the powerful statistic that I took away was the number of earners in a household.  And what I found matches exactly with the phenomenon I described in my earlier post.

Of the households in the bottom fifth, more than HALF don’t have a single wage earner in the household.  More than half.  While the top 20% has only 2.6% of households that don’t qualify as a wage earner.

Further, if you look at the “Lowest Fifth” as a column and march down, you’ll see that fewer and fewer of those households have the described number of earners.  Starting at the top, this segment of the population has 54% of households with 0 wage earners.  While at the bottom, it has but .2% of the households with 4 wage earners.  The exact opposite is true of the “Highest Fifth”.

In short, it would seem that as a household has more wage earners, that household moves from one of the fifths to another.  And to the extent that this is true, look at the last line; aggregate earners.

The “Lowest Fifth” has 10,240 members.  The fifth that earns twice as much money as the lowest fifth has twice as many wage earners.  The fifth that makes three times as much as the lowest fifth has three times as many wage earners.  The fourth has four times as many wage earners.  And the highest has five times the number of wage earners.

This is true almost to the exact number.

The data presented above tells me that we don’t have an income disparity issue.  We have a family structure issue.  If you take a single wage earner in a household and compare that household to one with 4 wage earners, it should be no surprise which of the two households makes more money.

And lest there be any doubt.  The “Highest Fifth”?  They are some working sums -o- beetches.  Fully 62.7% of those households have FOUR wage earners.  This is not the lazy rich that the OWS and the ((% make them out to be.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, GINI, Liberty, Life, Politics: National, Rocket Surgery

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OWS and Corporations

Posted on October 28, 2011 | 9 comments

I’m guessing that the OWS crowd doesn’t like the fact that corporations are viewed as people.  With free speech rights and the ability to donate to campaigns or to purchase advertising.

I wonder if they think those same rules should apply to OWS or not?

I’m guessing they think that the rules they want applied to corporations are not the rules that want applied to themselves.

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Posted in Economics, Liberty, Lobby/PAC

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