60,000 War on Drugs Deaths in Mexico from 2006 to 2012

According to CNN:

The Mexican government has been fighting a war with drug traffickers since December 2006. At the same time, drug cartels have fought each other for control of territory. More than 60,000 people have been killed from 2006 to 2012

Wow! Some things just cannot be done by Government.  Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, neighbors and churches need to convince people to not use recreational drugs. Gov. is a very blunt and ineffective tool, it needs to stop its war on drugs and leave suppression on drug use to you and me.

And BTW the circumstances surrounding the death of Eric Garner show that the cigarette taxes are too high (I am looking at you democrats).

Let's Get Politicians to Commit to Some Percent of School Spending Going to Teachers

Here in Florida both of our candidates for governor are promising to increase school spending. Seeing that administration spending has risen 700% since 1970 and is huge shouldn't we get them to also commit to spending some percent in the classroom?

Years ago I heard an economist on a local radio who compared the Alachua county school system with the comparably sized catholic school system for Tampa St Petersburg. He said that in the catholic school system 90% of total spending was in the classroom where in the Alachua county school system only 50% of spending was in the classroom. (In the classroom would be the teacher compensation plus cost of physical plant plus costs of things like paper and books.)

So let's not get politicians to commit to more school spending but to more in classroom spending. We can be for lower school spending and more compensation for teachers. 

Florida spends about $10,000 student per year. So a class of 20 students would be about $200,000. I rent office space so I know we rent enough space for about 3 class rooms for about $900/month (and that includes about 1/4th of that goes to taxes and schools do not pay property taxes) so building costs should not be major expense. Total teacher compensation must be about $65,000/year. Now you do need to spend more for special education but that would be in class spending and that would not be enough to explain where the money goes.

So I think that citizens should ask for less total spending more in classroom spending. 



BTW here is an except from that tells you be careful of the numbers that you get from your local school board: They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools

Real spending per pupil ranges from a low of nearly $12,000 in the Phoenix area schools to a high of nearly $27,000 in the New York metro area. The gap between real and reported per-pupil spending ranges from a low of 23 percent in the Chicago area to a high of 90 percent in the Los Angeles metro region.

On Healthcare Spending Consuming most of the Increase in Income for Lower Income Earners

From the comments of a post by David Henderson about healthcare spending consuming most of the increase in the lower income earners income. 

Tom Nagle writes:
I think it is pretty obvious why poor people are more harmed by the increase in health care costs than higher income people are. Much of the increase is a result of increases in mandated coverage for things like psychological counselling, birth control products, in-vitro fertilization, "lifestyle drugs", and very high cost treatments that merely delay death from a terminal illness. These are all things that a high income person might likely purchase (outright or via insurance) without a government mandate, but that a lower income person might be more likely to forego in order to have more income to spend on other things. The widespread satisfaction with health care among people in the UK and even Canada, despite the things not covered in the public healthcare system, is one indicator that the majority of people in developed countries would prefer to pay for less health care than government requires people to buy in this country. If it were legal in America to sell coverage equal to the Canadian system's coverage at the Canadian system's cost, I suspect it would quickly win the largest market share.
Posted November 1, 2014 6:02 PM

David R. Henderson writes:
Well said, Tom. In a speech I gave on health care once, I said, “I don’t want to mandate Canadian style health care for the United States; I want to allow it."

You could go further and say lower income people would mostly prefer to take more risk with say less educated providers and so the system of licencing in the USA states is excessive.

I am also almost certain that Government in the USA could provide taxpayer funded medical care for all citizens for less than it spends now in medicare and medicaid, if it only funded evidenced based medicine. That is if it refused to pay for treatments that do not have evidence that of net positive outcomes. This would not be death panels but refuse to pay panels, people could pay for any additional treatments.

The expensive medical care treatments generally yield very low returns to health.

Perhaps My Favorite Econ blog Post Ever

From Scott Sumner here

Here is an excerpt:

If I ask my students whether they find RE to be plausible, they almost all answer "no."But suppose I ask them a different set of questions:
1. Do you expect to get back all the Social Security that you have been promised?
Almost all say they expect less than what has been promised.
2. Then I ask whether that perception affects their willingness to save money for retirement, outside of Social Security.
Almost all say they are more likely to save for their retirement because of the perception that Social Security is on the road to bankruptcy.

It is often surprising how we fool ourselves about our behavior and the behavior of others.  We often think that people ignore incentives when they incentives have ways of working out.

Moral hazard can work out very subtilly. Often it does not require everyone to respond just on the margins. One example that I like is that you let banks fail the most conservative people would end up with more money and power relative to the risk takers and they would end up with more control of the economy.

Another example is crime deterrence, people look at crime doubt the power of deterrence but no one walks up to heavily armed guy without a weapon tries to extort money from him.

Political Corruption

John Hasnas writes:

When retiring as Senate majority leader in 1994, George Mitchell, who left the Senate with the highest reputation for integrity, gave an exit interview to National Public Radio. To explain what made the long hours and aggravating work worthwhile, he recounted how, because of his position as majority leader, he was able to get the Clinton administration to reverse an order requiring the federal government to purchase recycled paper—presumably, a measure that would serve the common good—in order to protect the jobs of workers in paper mills in his home state of Maine. He then related how, a few weeks later, a mill worker came up to him “shaking with emotion” to tell him how much saving his job meant to him and how that moment was “indelibly imprinted on [his] mind” and was what “makes all the aggravation worthwhile.” 
All Things Considered: An Exit Interview with George Mitchell (NPRradio broadcast, October 17, 1994).

I doubt that the use of all recycled paper would really be i the public good but Mitchell did not claim that it was not in the public good. He implied that he did what he did in order to save the jobs of his constituents and though this might sound good at first glance once one thinks about it one should realize that it is imoral and corrupt. Is it not corruption to take from all to give to those who can vote for him with no other reason but they can vote for him?

What about those congressmen who have military bases built in their districts? Even if it matters little for efficiency where the installations are built wouldn't it be more moral to put them where the most need is?

In fact the most tender mercies of our politicians are corruption and rather than hide it they are outspoken about it.

The Pizza Belt

Gawker has an article with the title: The Pizza Belt: the Most Important Pizza Theory You'll Read

The author writes:

Indeed: Beyond the Greater Pizza Belt Area is a wasteland. In most parts of California, for example, the chance that a randomly-chosen pizzeria will produce adequate-to-good slices of pizza is close to one in eight; in Los Angeles it is lower than one in ten. Here, there is bad pizza—in the vast wilderness, in الربع الخالي‎. We do not speak of it.[3][4]

I could not agree more.

To me it seems that USAers not of Italian decent think that adding more cheese always makes a better pizza. To me that ends up as a mess. My favorite Pizza from back in Providence RI (I hear they also have it in parts of NY state) is the Italian bakery pizza which has no mozzarella cheese and just maybe a little parmesan cheese. 

My friends here in Florida like the pizza belt pizza better when they get a chance to try it, so it seems that it is not just what you got accustomed to in your youth which is very interesting. Maybe good food is less subjective than we think.

I will say though that pizza and food in general is getting better in parts of the USA outside of pizza belt. My theory is that the better pizza it is due to all the culinary school grads and better other food in due to that and immigrants making into all corners of the USA. Last year I got good past in Moab UT, of all places. 20 years ago that would not have happened.

Voters Concerned About AGW Should Insist on a CO2 Tax or Nothing Else They Get Scammed

Anything more complicated than a straight forward as a carbon tax it is impossible for voters to know what reduces CO2 going into the air (let alone the costs for the reduction) and what is politicians scamming voters for fun and profit.

Below is Matt Ridley (the new Julian Simon? ...maybe) on his Rational Optimist blog:

A year ago I wrote in these pages that it made no sense for the consumer to subsidize the burning of American wood in place of coal, since wood produces more carbon dioxide for each kilowatt-hour of electricity. The forests being harvested would take four to ten decades to regrow, and this is the precise period over which we are supposed to expect dangerous global warming to emerge. It makes no sense to steal beetles’ lunch, transport it halfway round the world, burning diesel as you do so, and charge hard-pressed consumers double the price for the power it generates.""There was a howl of protest on the letters page from the chief executive of Drax power station, which burns a million tonnes of imported North American wood a year and plans to increase that to 7 million tonnes by 2016. But last week, Dr David MacKay’s report vindicated me. If the wood comes from whole trees, as much of it does, then the effect could be to increase carbon dioxide emissions, he finds, even compared with coal. And that’s allowing for the regrowth of forests.

With all such programs it is difficult to tell if the effects are positive let alone the cost per unit of CO2 saved. 

Another example is CAFE which MIT estimates costs 6 to 14 times (see excerpt below) more than a carbon tax per unit of CO2 saved.

For comparison, she defined FES and RFS regulations that would achieve a 20% cumulative reduction in gasoline consumption between 2010 and 2050. She also designed a gasoline tax policy that would elicit the same cumulative reduction. (The tax was implemented as a constant percentage of the gasoline price, starting at $1.00 per gallon in 2010.) Consistent with other studies, her analysis of those three measures indicates that taxing gasoline is 6 to 14 times less costly than the alternative policies in achieving a 20% reduction in the use of that fuel between 2010 and 2050.

People get upset when the see new taxes but the cost of increasing MPGs is hidden in the price of a car and so voters are oblivious to this tax, and it is a tax. Of course the politicians know this but they like their positions.

Environmentally concerned democrats should insist on a carbon tax or nothing. Your politicians are scamming you, not because you are stupid but because they are professionals who work on this stuff all day everyday and you are amateurs, as you should be but you can win on this issue. If they vote for stuff like ethanol or biomass throw the bums out. Even cap and trade is complicated enough that they will eat voters lunch is it is passed.