Americans Still Leaning Against Healthcare Legislation

According to a new Gallup survey, “Americans currently tilt against Congress’ passing healthcare legislation.”

49% of respondents said they would advise their congressman to vote against a health care bill and 44% said they would support their congressman if he or she would vote for the bill.

What would Milton Friedman Say?

In his new book How Barack Obama is Bankrupting the U.S. Economy, Stephen Moore, senior economics writer at the Wall Street Journal, speculates how Milton Friedman would respond to the current economic crisis:

At times like this, I become more nostalgic for the indispensable missing voice in this debate: Milton Friedman’s. No one could slice and dice the sophistry of the left’s government-market interventions better than Friedman. Imagine what he would have to say about the arrogance of the U.S. government of owning and operating the car companies or managing the $2 trillion health-care industry. “Why not?” I can almost hear him ask. “After all, they’ve done such a wonderful job of delivering the mail…”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about one of my last conversations with Friedman, when he warned that “even though socialism is a discredited economic model and capitalism is raising standards to new heights, the left intellectuals continue to push for bigger government everywhere I look.” He predicted that people would be seduced by collectivist ideas again. He was right.

HT: Helen Smith

Regulations may frighten banks out of Switzerland

From Reuters:

Swiss bank UBS  is threatening to move its headquarters out of Switzerland if the authorities impose too many new regulations in the wake of the global financial crisis, Swiss weekly paper Sonntag CH said.

Oswald Gruebel, chief executive of Switzerland’s biggest bank by assets, made the threat in a speech to businessmen last week, citing the possibility that the authorities would force major banks to reorganize as holding companies, the paper said on Sunday.

Armed customer saves the day

When two armed robbers entered a Tennessee liquor store and demanded money, an armed customer initiated a gun fight. One robber fled while another collapsed outside the store.

No bystanders were injured and the customer was not charged with any crime.

Quote of the Day

“Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.”

~ President Calvin Coolidge

How drug enforcement laws help al Qaeda

From the Guardian:

From west African coastal states such as Guinea-Bissau the drugs pass through Mauritania, Mali and Niger before ending up in Libya or Egypt. From there, law enforcement officials suspect the drugs are hidden in containers on board cargo ships, which are less likely to be searched than those from Latin America.

Intelligence agencies are studying claims that the airstrip in Mali is under the control of one of al-Qaida’s most powerful franchises, raising concerns that Africa’s burgeoning role in the cocaine trade is now funding terrorism.

It is not only al-Qaida that may be involved. A briefing prepared for the US Congress speculated that west Africa’s substantial Lebanese trading community – strong supporters of Hezbollah – have been buying the drug from the paramilitary group Farc, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Low-Skilled Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Magnus Lofstrom of the Public Policy Institute of California has an interesting new paper on low-skilled immigrant entrepreneurship

More than half of the foreign born workforce in the U.S. have no schooling beyond high school and about 20 percent of the low-skilled workforce are immigrants. More than 10 percent of these low-skilled immigrants are self-employed. Utilizing longitudinal data from the 1996, 2001 and 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation panels, this paper analyzes the returns to self-employment among low-skilled immigrants. We compare annual earnings and earnings growth of immigrant entrepreneurs to immigrants in wage/salary employment as well as native born business owners. We find that the returns to low-skilled self-employment among immigrants is higher than it is among natives but also that wage/salary employment is a more financially rewarding option for most low-skilled immigrants. An exception is immigrant men, who are found to have higher earnings growth than immigrants in wage/salary employment and are predicted to reach earnings parity after approximately 10 years in business. We also find that most of the 20 percent male native immigrant earnings gap among low-skilled business owners can be explained primarily by differences in the ethnic composition. Low-skilled female foreign born entrepreneurs are found to have earnings roughly equal to those of self-employed native born women.

The chart below shows low-skilled self employment rates by gender and nativity in the United States.

 

Does the Welfare State Make Older Workers Unemployable?

Gilles Saint-Paul has a new working paper that looks into if the welfare state makes older workers unemployable:

One characteristic of European labor markets (as opposed to “Anglo- Saxon” ones) is that they are heavily regulated. Historically, most of these regulations arose to protect some archetypal “insider” workers, with little concern for how they would aect the market for “outsiders”. Older workers were not highly represented among the “insiders”, which means that the im- pact of regulations on their employability had little weight in the design of those regulations. Furthermore, the problem was aggravated by ill-conceived attempts to “make room” for younger workers by inducing older workers to retire earlier, which were due to collide with the increased labor participation of the latter required by the aging problem. As a result of those developments, a culture has arisen where the older workers are assumed to be unemployable. Accordingly, some specif…c provisions that made it harder to …re them have been implemented in some countries, like the French “De- lalande” contribution discussed below.

The figure below shows employment of older workers across countries. It shows a positive relationship between the age of retirement and the employment rate of old workers.

American Samoa fattest nation on earth

The world is getting fatter, from the Pacific island to Eastern Europe. In the Global Post, Laurie Cunningham ranks the ten fattest countries on earth:

1.) American Samoa, 93.5 percent (of population that’s overweight)

2.) Kiribati, 81.5 percent

3.) USA, 66.7 percent

4.) Germany, 66.5 percent

5.) Egypt, 66 percent

6.) Bosnia-Herzegovina, 62.9 percent

7.) New Zealand, 62.7 percent

8.) Israel, 61.9 percent

9.) Croatia, 61.4 percent

10.) United Kingdom, 61 percent

Quote of the Day

“Bush and Paulson and Greenspan and their clique are “free marketeers” in the same way (to borrow from A. J. Jacobs) that Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.  They adopt the language, and some of the form, of market advocacy without any of the content.”

~ Peter Klein