The Goat Pen

The NOAA is predicting a low to moderate hurricane season for 2014.

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/o ... cane.shtml
Based on their past predictions, this means we are screwed.

Excerpt from The Redistribution Recession...by Casey Mulligan


Helping people is valuable but not free. The more you help low-income people, the more low-income people you'll have. The more you help unemployed people, the more unemployed people you'll have.

That's a cost. For example, you have people out of work who would be productive if it weren't for the help. So there's a trade-off: more help, less economic efficiency.

I met a recruiter—a man whose job it is to find employees for businesses and put unemployed people into new jobs—and he described the trade-off pretty well. Stacey Reece was his name, and he said that in 2009 his clients again had jobs to fill. But he ran into a hurdle he hadn't seen before. People would apply for jobs not with the intention of accepting it, but to demonstrate to the unemployment office that they were looking for work.

As Mr. Reece described it, the applicants would use technicalities to avoid accepting a position. The applicants would take Mr. Reece through the arithmetic of forgone benefits, taxes, commuting costs and conclude that accepting a job would net them less than $2 per hour, so they'd rather stay home.

People remain unemployed longer, as Mr. Reece saw with his own eyes.

Friedrich Hayek's "Use of Knowledge in Society" explains how economic information is not and cannot be fully known by a single person. That information exists "solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess." Mr. Reece is one of those separate individuals. Most policy makers were not and are not aware of what Mr. Reece was seeing. Most of those who voted Democrats into the Senate, the House and the presidency were not aware.

But as Hayek would tell you, it's not simply a matter of putting Mr. Reece in charge. It's impossible for me or anyone else to tell you all of the things that Mr. Reece doesn't see, but let me name three. First, Mr. Reece doesn't mention many other new and expanded programs with the same economic character, such as food stamps, mortgage assistance or health-insurance subsidies.

Second, Mr. Reece's perspective comes with some judgment; his story makes the unemployed seem a bit lazy or ungrateful. But you could just as well say that this situation arises from the employer's failure to up his bid so that it competes better with unemployment benefits. My point here is not to assign fault but to illustrate that a lot of different actors contribute to market outcomes.

Third, Mr. Reece is in charge of hiring, not firing. If we had more time to look at what businessmen had to say about the government's fiscal stimulus, I would show you statements from those making decisions about layoffs. They explain how the new and expanded programs for the unemployed and poor were subsidizing layoffs—they were making layoffs cheaper.

Unlike state unemployment-insurance benefits that are sometimes a kind of liability for the employer writing the pink slip, the federal unemployment-insurance expansions were paid by taxpayers generally, which means that an employer could lay off as many people as he wanted without adding to his federal tax burden.

Maybe more vivid was the kind of ObamaCare experiment in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that told unemployed people that "if you like the health plan you had on your old job, you can keep it," and the federal government will pay. Before the Recovery Act, many employers used to voluntarily help employees with their insurance after a separation; these were expensive benefit programs for their employees. The employers had to consider that laying somebody off was going to end the value created by the employee but wasn't going to end the health expenses the employee creates. But employers readily explain how the Recovery Act completely changed that calculus. Lay somebody off during the crisis and, for the first time, among other things, the employer wouldn't have to pay for former-employee health insurance.

So public policy intended to make layoffs less painful actually made layoffs cheaper and more common.

It's not just politicians or journalists who do not see the full economic picture. It's the top economists in the world, from the International Monetary Fund to university professors, who promised that there was no trade-off and that, at this supposedly special time in history, redistribution would create jobs and grow the economy. The stimulus advocates rarely note the kind of thing that Mr. Reece talked about, and they never, ever, mention that redistribution is a subsidy to layoffs.

On a lighter note, AA's dreams may soon come true:

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2014/06/ ... ng-haggis/

I know this place ain't much but I sure don't pay no rent
I get a check the first of every month from this here federal gubmint
Every Wednesday I get commodities
Sometimes four or five sacks
Pick'em up down at the Welfare office
Driving that new Cadillac

"Welfare Cadillac," Guy Drake (1970)

Yessir, the top redistribution song of 1970. A juke box staple for years, alongside "Okie from Muskogee" and "Ballad of the Green Berets." Apparently Nixon's socialist America had become the land of the free cheese (and school lunches, textbooks, and manner of stuff).

Fortune 500 Companies Off-shore Tax Havens 'Beyond Outrageous' http://www.bankrate.com/financing/taxes ... ax-havens/

Sadly, you just can't write a good country song about big corporations fleecing the rest of us to the tune of a couple trillion bucks a year. It just doesn't have the visceral gut-punch of, say, some lay-about drawing 1100.00/mo while enjoying premium cable.

"fleecing the rest of us to the tune of a couple trillion bucks a year."

a couple trillion bucks a year? Do you even read your own link?

Anyhow, why hasn't the President gone after the main culprits of this tax evasion, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and GE'? Why did he raise the small business owner's tax rate, but not the corporate tax rate? Can you answer that tick?

Because he's a socialist!

sardis wrote:
Anyhow, why hasn't the President gone after the main culprits of this tax evasion, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and GE'?

Overseas Corporate Tax Dodge Targeted by U.S. Democrats - Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/ ... N720140520

Dems heard your plea, Sardis, and they are taking action. Good work.

Well, good. I'm sure that the Democratic controlled Senate will pass it through with flying colors...

bluetick wrote:Sadly, you just can't write a good country song about big corporations fleecing the rest of us to the tune of a couple trillion bucks a year.

Here's a good one I always liked:

[youtube]lMx__6Zc3S0[/youtube]

Another good'un:

[youtube]GuwR3MKolGI[/youtube]

Go you hairy 'Baggers!!!!1111


Protestors carrying signs and U.S. flags blocked three buses carrying undocumented children and families to an immigration processing facility in Southern California.

More than 100 undocumented immigrants were stopped from reaching the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's processing facility in Murrieta.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials turned the caravan around and headed southbound, arriving to the U.S. Border Patrol Station Chula Vista in San Diego County.

Wall Street Rises After Jobs Data - Reuters

U.S. stocks were set to rise Wednesday with the Dow industrials ready to pierce 17.000 after the U.
S. private sector created many more jobs than expected last month.

U.S. companies hired 281,000 workers in June, marking the biggest monthly increase since November 2012, well above market expectations for 200,000. The Dow and S&P 500 closed at record highs on Tuesday as manufacturing activity picked up in the United States and Asia and boosted optimism over the health of the global economy.

more mid-term propaganda from the lame-stream media

Speaking of propaganda....


The U.S. economy contracted at a much steeper pace than previously estimated in the first quarter.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annual rate, the economy's worst performance in five years, instead of the 1.0 percent pace it had reported last month.

Toemeesleather wrote:Speaking of propaganda....


The U.S. economy contracted at a much steeper pace than previously estimated in the first quarter.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday gross domestic product fell at a 2.9 percent annual rate, the economy's worst performance in five years, instead of the 1.0 percent pace it had reported last month.

Heh - pretty sure your article refers to it as 'The Polar Vortex quarter' - makes sense to leave that out. Economists already guarantee the second quarter will be "robust" and will make up for that one outlier.

Well, between the Depts of Justice/State/IRS/Obamacare, propaganda is pretty much the soup du jour....hang around awhile and like the weather, it'll change.

'The Polar Vortex quarter' -

Heh, even here, I'm pretty sure you cut'n'pasted the same rosy hiring #s a couple of times.

Oh yea, deja vu.....


Good news! The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the February jobs report on Friday morning and the numbers were the first really good economic news we’ve had in a while. BLS estimates that the economy created 175,000 jobs in February, above the consensus forecast of 149,000. The unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent from 6.6 percent while the labor force participation rate remained unchanged at 63 percent.