For Sanctity of Life Day.

For sanctity of life day, a selection of pro-natalist posts by Bryan Caplan.

Childlessness and Regret

Parenthood as the Trump of All Past Regret

Foresee the Empty Nest

Department of Yay: The American Baby Boomlet

Parents' Costs versus Childrens' Benefits - Does the Ratio Matter?

The Julian Simon Club

Nudge and Abortion

Advocate for the PPACA Aaron Carroll Agrees with Me

Aaron Carroll a strong advocate of the PPACA says: 

He and I are in agreement that it’s silly to continue to make it an employer’s responsibility to give health insurance to employees. It’s a quirk of history, and a tax-expenditure inducement that continues that practice. We’d all be better off decoupling insurance from employment.

Our biggest problem in politics today in not ideology but the interface between rationally ignorant voters and corrupt politicians. The employer mandate in the PPACA was created by our corrupt politicians to fool the rationally ignorant voters into thinking that the employer pays for the health insurance rather than it being paid for by the employee through lower wages.  

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.