Quick and Easy summary of the Moral Monday protests here in North Carolina:
As far as I can tell, “Moral Monday” is Rocky Horror Picture Show for Progressives. They dress up, they recite lines, they shriek at all their favorite parts of the show.
Beautiful.
Posted in Idiots on Parade, Politics: North Carolina
Tagged Mike Munger, Moral Monday
Last week, The Post revealed how New Yorkers on welfare are buying food with their benefit cards and shipping it in blue barrels to poor relatives in the Caribbean.
But not everyone is giving the taxpayer-funded fare to starving children abroad. The Post last week found two people hawking barrels of American products for a profit on the streets of Santiago.
“It’s a really easy way to make money, and it doesn’t cost me anything,” a seller named Maria-Teresa said Friday.
…
Maria-Teresa said she uses some of the products but vends the rest out of her Santiago home, providing markdowns of $1 to $2 compared to what her buyers would pay in local shops.
“I don’t know how much of a business it is, but I know a lot of people are doing it,” she said.
…
The black-market maven even takes her customers’ requests for hot-ticket items. Her best-sellers include a 19-ounce box of Frosted Flakes, which goes for $6.50 at Dominican supermarkets. She sells it for $2 less — after her sister buys it on sale for $2.99.
But because the sister uses her Electronic Benefit Transfer card, she actually pays nothing — taxpayers foot the $2.99.
Maria-Teresa also offers a 24-ounce Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box for $2, compared to the $4 Dominican counterpart. The Kellogg’s variety costs $2.99 on sale at Western Beef.
A 23-ounce container of powdered Enfamil baby formula goes for $25 in the United States and $19 in Santiago but Maria-Teresa sells it for $15. “People want the best quality for the price, so they buy the formula made in the US,” she said.
The average monthly wage in Dominican Republic is about 7,000 pesos, or just $167, and that’s why the black market has become so profitable, Maria-Teresa said.
So, lesson #1:
The inefficiencies of the government programs are everywhere.
And the 2nd lesson:
Markets in everything.
But, why even bother buying, packing, shipping and then selling fraudulent goods?
And the food-stamp fraud doesn’t stop there. She said her sister has Bronx grocers ring up bogus $250 transactions with her EBT card.
In exchange, the stores hand her $200 cash and pocket the rest. No goods are exchanged. Instead, Maria-Teresa’s sister sends the money to Santiago — when she’s not spending it on liquor or other nonfood items.
“We do it all the time, and a lot of people do this,” Maria-Teresa said. “It’s a way of laundering money, but it’s easier because it’s free.”
It’s easier, she says, because it’s free.
Indeed.
Posted in Crime, Economics, Government, Idiots on Parade, Politics: National
Tagged EBT, Food Stamps, Fraud
Health Care.
It’s all the rage these days. How are we going to implement it? Will the republicans defund it? Can Obama legally just change the law as he sees fit?
Fascinating stuff.
But underneath it all is the assumptions that go into it. For example, take Ezra Klein over at Bloomberg:
Health care and education pose the same basic threat to the economy: How do you keep costs down for a product that consumers must purchase?
Saying “no,” after all, is how consumers typically restrain costs. If Best Buy Co. wants to charge you too much for a television, you can walk out. You might want a television, but you don’t actually need one. That gives you the upper hand. When push comes to shove, producers need to meet the demands of consumers.
But you can’t walk out on medical care for your spouse or education for your child. In the case of medical care, your spouse might die. In the case of college, you’re just throwing away your kid’s future (or so goes the conventional wisdom). Consequently, medical care and higher education are the two purchases that families will mortgage everything to make. They need to find a way to say “yes.” In these markets, when push comes to shove, consumers meet the demands of producers.
So, first off, education is nothing like health care. You may or may not purchase it. Sure, purchasing some of it is a great idea, more of it may be a good idea and too much can be a bad thing – look at all the freakin’ Fine Arts and English Literature students out there. Sheesh.
Second, Ezra misses a critical parallel – food. After all, even more basic a need than health care is food. And we aren’t facing a food cost crisis. Nor is there a food shortage. In fact, hunger is defeated here in America and on the ropes globally.
So what gives on medical care?
One answer, beloved on the right, is that government is the problem and less government is the solution. Both medical costs and education costs are highly subsidized. Those subsidies, some contend, are the cause of rising prices. If people were paying full freight, they’d be acting more like typical consumers and demanding a better deal.
That gets causality backward. The subsidies exist because consumers — also known as “voters” — are desperate to get medical care when they need it and secure quality educations for their kids. As prices rise, they appeal to the government for help. They find a way to say “yes.”
Indeed. Let people pay full freight. And this should be accomplished in two ways:
In the first, it’s a perverse system that takes away an individual’s insurance when they loose their job. In the second, shopping for services reduces costs and can even reduce services that are duplicates or are not needed.
But what of subjecting medical care to the market, how are we to explain emergency care? Easy, there isn’t much of it:
Health care is a big business in the United States, representing more than 16 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Yet there are misconceptions about the costs and efficiencies of emergency rooms and “unnecessary” care. According to U.S. government statistics, emergency care represents less than 2 percent (1.9 percent)1 of the $2.4 trillion spent on health care.
Two percent on emergency care. The rest, fully 98% of the health care spend…that money is spent on procedures and items that, while certainly not discretionary, are able to be planned and most importantly, shopped.
No one feels that food is discretionary – that we can choose to go without food for long. But when opened up to a freer market, food has become ubiquitous.
Two simple changes to the way we deliver health care would dramatically reduce prices – okay 3, I just thought of another:
Problem solved.
While I have long ago given up my gaming habits, I like to see geeks ruling the world:
From the stack.
The societal impact of the Martin-Zimmerman trial:
People are using Trayvon Martin’s death as an excuse to project their own deep-seated issues with racism and will not be capable of intelligent, empathetic debate until they’ve cooled down and afforded themselves an education.
Addressing Trayvon without first addressing the absence of critical thinking in our schools, the lack of introspection, the reasons for our low tolerance and our country’s skewed value system does nothing more than create a sounding board for the ignorant. So rather than facilitate more racism outcry, I’d like to address young black people specifically.
I believe we lost that trial for Trayvon long before he was killed. Trayvon was doomed the moment ignorance became synonymous with young black America . We lost that case by using media outlets (music, movies, social media, etc.) as vehicles to perpetuate the same negative images and social issues that destroyed the black community in the first place. When we went on record glorifying violent crime and when we voted for a president we never thought to hold accountable. When we signed on to do reality shows that fed into the media’s stereotypes of black men, we ingrained an image of Trayvon Martin so overwhelming that who he actually may have been didn’t matter anymore.
Don’t you find it peculiar that the same media outlets who have worked so diligently to galvanize the negative stigmas of black men in America are now airing open debates on improving the image of black males in American media? Do you honestly think CNN is using their competitive time slots for philanthropy?
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” – Rahm Emanuel
People respond to perceptions. And when perceptions are put out there in a specific manner, it should surprise no one that people will react predictably.
Romany’s prescription?
If we really wanted to ensure Trayvon Martin’s killing was not in vain, we’d stop perpetuating negative images that are now synonymous with black men in America. We’d stop rapping about selling drugs and killing niggas. The next time we saw a man beating a woman, we’d call for help or break it up, but one thing we would not do is stand by with our cellphones out — yelling WORLDSTAR! Instead of rewarding kids for memorization, we’d reward them for independent and critical thinking.
We’d spend less time subconsciously repeating lyrics about death and murder and more time understanding why we are so willing to twerk to songs that bemean women and boast of having things we cannot afford. We’d set examples of self-love for our youth by honoring our own hair, skin and eye color. We’d stop spending money on designer gear that we should be spending on our physical and psychological health. We’d seek information outside the corporate owned-media that manipulates us. We’d stop letting television babysit our kids and we’d quit regurgitating pundits we haven’t come up with on our own.
Education, introspection, self-love and excellence are the only ways to overcome the wrath of ignorance. So before going back to popping molly and getting Turnt Up, I urge you to consider the implications of your actions. Your child’s life may depend on it.
Indeed.
I was playing around this weekend reading up on retirement accounts and options available to me when I came across this gem:
How many times have you read financial-advice stories lecturing you to max-out on your IRA, save as much as you can in your 401(k), and even pay taxes now to change your regular IRA into a Roth IRA that will be tax-free until you die?
Well, be careful how much you save.
That’s the message in President Obama’s budget for fiscal 2014, which for the first time proposes to cap the amount Americans can save in these tax-sheltered investment vehicles. The White House explanation is that some people have accumulated “substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.” So Mr. Obama proposes to “limit an individual’s total balance across tax-preferred accounts to an amount sufficient to finance an annuity of not more than $205,000 per year in retirement, or about $3 million for someone retiring in 2013.”
That’s the annoying thing about the Left; they just feel they know all about “fairness”. See, it’s not fair that someone retire with more than a certain amount.
And why?
Because, the Barackness Monster knows best.
North Carolina now ranks # 46 nationally in the amount of money we pay our teachers:
RALEIGH — North Carolina public school teachers saw their pay drop to among the lowest in the country as state budget-balancing during the Great Recession included a multiyear pay freeze, according to a report Wednesday to the State Board of Education.
Pay for the teachers who educate the state’s roughly 1.5 million public school students ranks 46th in the country, above only Mississippi and West Virginia among 12 Southeastern states, the report said. Five years ago, North Carolina teachers’ salaries were in the middle of the state rankings.
That’s pretty bad. I guess. At first blush anyway. I’m not sure that ranking 4th from the top would be any better than 4th from the bottom. After all, I don’t wanna be in the position of overpaying teachers to perform at a level more consistent with the median salary range.
For example, the highest paying state is New York at $72,708 a year. However, New York SAT test scores are 43rd in the nation. North Carolina ranks 40th, a full 3 spots higher than New York.
The second highest spender on teachers? Massachusetts. At a spending rank of #2 they purchase the #27 spot in SAT scores. How about the worst SAT scoring state in the nation – Delaware. How much do THEY spend? They come in #13. So, for all that money Delaware spends, they come in dead last in SAT scores. But, you can argue that at a 100% test taking clip, they are at a disadvantage. So let’s go to the 2nd worst performing state – Washington DC. Their spend? #6 on the list.
Truly pathetic.
Anyway, it got me to thinking. Who controls the spending in these various states? In Minnesota, for example, teacher salaries are negotiated and funded at the local district level. But here in North Carolina, a vast amount of the spending falls on the state. Perhaps if local citizens felt that their teachers needed to be better compensated, they could organize at the local level and pay the teachers as much as they like.
Just a thought.
A conversation on my Facebook feed brought me here today:
In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.
Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year).
Three things. Simple things. Not hard to do things.
Go to school and finish it.
Get a job. Any job.
Wait to have children.
Posted in Economics, Education, Life, Middle Class, Politics: National
Tagged Brookings Institute, Children, Education, Job
The United States is experiencing job growth, to be sure. But look at the kinds of jobs being created:
(Reuters) – U.S. businesses are hiring at a robust rate. The only problem is that three out of four of the nearly 1 million hires this year are part-time and many of the jobs are low-paid.
…
Executives at several staffing firms told Reuters that the law, which requires employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide healthcare coverage or incur penalties, was a frequently cited factor in requests for part-time workers. A decision to delay the mandate until 2015 has not made much of a difference in hiring decisions, they added.
“Us and other people are hiring part-time because we don’t know what the costs are going to be to hire full-time,” said Steven Raz, founder of Cornerstone Search Group, a staffing firm in Parsippany, New Jersey. “We are being cautious.”
Raz said his company started seeing a rise in part-time positions in late 2012 and the trend gathered steam early this year. He estimates his firm has seen an increase of between 10 percent and 15 percent compared with last year.
Other staffing firms have also noted a shift.
“They have put some of the full-time positions on hold and are hiring part-time employees so they won’t have to pay out the benefits,” said Client Staffing Solutions’ Darin Hovendick. “There is so much uncertainty. It’s really tough to design a budget when you don’t know the final cost involved.”
Watch the word from the Left as they mention “anecdotal”
Posted in Economics, Economy, Health Care, Politics: National
Tagged Barack Obama, Full Time, Obamacare, Part Time, Unintended Consequences
I firmly believe that the term “racism” has reached the point where it is essentially meaningless, at least in a formal “words have meaning” sense.
In essence, people know that being racist is bad and that it involves something between one race and another. In attempt to establish the high road, they label their opponents as that bad thing, never understanding what the term means.
The most recent example is North Carolina’s voter ID laws. These laws, so say the opponents, are examples of racism. The data shows that minorities and the poor are most likely to be burdened by voter ID requirements. And therefore, laws demanding ID are “racist”.
Hardly.
I suggest something different. I suggest that the very thing that leads to poverty is the thing that leads to an individual not having an ID.
When turned 16, the VERY day I turned 16, I took my driver’s test and passed. I obtained a license. When the plastic came in the mail, my father sat me down and explained what a driver’s license meant. He taught me that I needed to never leave home without it, ever. That it needed to be correct and up to date. When I moved, it needed to reflect that move.
Further, when I turned 18, he did the same thing with my social security card and birth certificate. He taught me where they were kept, where I should jeep them and how I could obtain replacements in the event they were lost.
In short, a picture ID, a social security card and a birth certificate are mandatory elements to a fully functioning citizen in the United States. To not have one of these things was seen as unacceptable and delinquent.
So I ask you, what is more racist?
Given that minorities and the poor suffer more from lack of ID, is the ideal solution to: