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The Weather Channel aired its doom-mongering special: “2020: Race to Save the Planet” on November 7 giving each Democratic presidential candidate the opportunity to virtue-signal their most terrifying vision for what will happen (in just a few years) if we do nothing… and what their ‘solutions’ are.

The intro is terrifying… “…because without ‘it’, the world could look like this…”

Here’s how some of the candidates responded (via OneGreenPlanet.org)…

Bernie Sanders said climate change will hit low income communities the hardest:

”I have seven grandchildren and I don’t want to be in a position 20 years from now or have anybody in that position, to have our grandchildren say to us ‘you knew what was going on, the scientists told you, and you did nothing. and you allowed all of this to happen.”

Pete Buttigieg talked about how climate change seems far away from us, stressing the need for increased infrastructure:

“I think our imagination around climate change is confined to the North and the South Pole. But I see it happening right here in the middle of America.” When asked “What keeps you up at night?” Buttigieg said, “that we will sleep through the critical moments on dealing with this issue.”

Elizabeth Warren talked about manufacturing and how climate is “intertwined around the world,” and our infrastructure needed to be “more resilient.”

“As people lose access to water, they will become climate refugees… and it’s true all around the world.” Warren is “worried that we’re running out of time, every time the scientists re-analyze the data it’s worse than they thought.” And on economic justice, ” 40% of this money needs to go to communities that are hardest hit.”

Cory Booker said we need to stop giving subsidies to oil companies, paid for by taxpayers.

“incentivizing what is right, not only renewable energy, but incentivizing farmers to do cover crops and things that pull carbon from the air.” He talked about the health challenges that cost “millions of dollars,” related to climate change.

Kamala Harris said climate change will, “affect all of us equally.”

“The UN has told us that in 12 years if we do nothing it will be irreversible, the chance of the harm, so we cannot afford the cost of doing nothing.” Harris said that instead of “studying” communities that are impacted, she would “have them at the table creating the plan.”

Be afraid, be very afraid

All of which fits perfectly with a recent essay by Cynthia Chung, via The Strategic Culture Foundation, who questions the so-called “Greta Effect” and asks, rhetorically, “are we really this time, for certain certain, heading for the end times?”

In a little less than a year and a half, Ms. Thunberg has garnered a great deal of media attention for her passionate pleas that the world finally take heed to the very real crisis of climate change affirming that if we fail to meet the requirements laid out for us by the IPCC we will most assuredly have no planet to live on 11 years from now. Ms. Thunberg has confidently and frequently stated this in almost every interview or speech she has made since her media blitz began.

This is of course very disturbing news indeed.

What is just as disturbing is that it is seemingly all up to the children around the world to take matters into their own hands, since all adults have apparently become the equivalent to the walking dead, with children being the supposed organisers behind these immense marches across Europe, Canada and the US, to save the planet from total annihilation. This regard for the adults in the west and their seeming encouragement of this regard of themselves is very disappointing, but hardly surprising when you realise that many of them are from the ‘Make Love Not War’ live in the moment movements from the 60s that used as one of their main slogans “Never trust anybody over 30”. Interestingly, these are the parents of the dejected youth of today, who seem to have all taught their children the same lesson: don’t trust adults. Apparently something really terrible happens to you once you turn 31 and either you have to accept the fact that you are now analogous to a sack of potatoes or maintain a 20 something year old mental state for your entire life in order to stay “relevant”.

‘Forever young’ justice warriors such as Jane Fonda are a model for us all on how to never mentally develop past the age of 30. At the age of 81, Jane has made the vow to get arrested once a week for 14 weeks until she has to film her tv show ‘Grace and Frankie’, where at that point she will have fulfilled her part in making the world a better and safer place and will have earned her entrance into sainthood. As Jane stated in an interview with Washington Post, “Greta said we have to behave like it’s a crisis…We have to behave like our houses are on fire”. Jane apparently has a strange understanding of what she would do if her house was on fire since she continues to fly frequently and supports the eating of meat, the two top “no-no’s” from Greta. Regardless, Jane is on a mission to send a message to everybody else that even though she does not follow what Greta asks, if others also do not, we will all die horrible deaths in 11 years. After all, Jane will be 92 at that point…but with the mind of a forever young 20 year old.

As Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, put it, “If we don’t work together, we are going to die together”. Bone-chilling words to be sure. The way things are going we might end up seeing baby boomer NATO Defense Ministers holding hands singing “We Are the World”, wait…that already happened in 2015.

However, it is no longer good enough to distrust anybody over 30, and those now leading the charge are just entering their teens since people in their 20s are becoming part of ‘the problem’ and are just not willing to do enough to save the planet. In a world that up until recently was obsessed with whether someone had a PhD title before they could make any public statement on the climate change subject, now could care less about academic titles and don’t even require a high school diploma to dictate world policy. Why? Well, because “all the science is already in” on climate change and now it is just about getting action done and since adults have been the problem that has got us to where we are today, it is only fitting that the children take matters into their own hands…right?

Before we dare to answer that question I thought I would share some interesting periods in history that may help provide a new perspective about the current situation we find ourselves in. Bare with me, I am past 30 years in age.

The Art of Prophesising

On January 23, 2019 Greta made the prediction: “The date is January 23, 2031. The world has just ended. No humans are left on the planet once known as ‘Earth’ ”.

Have we really come to a point where we are at the brink of the end times? I have spoken with a great many people who believe this to be the case. Whether they believe it will be in 11 years or 50 years, the consensus among the many is that we are certainly approaching the end of the world, something that used to be associated to the crazy guy who pulled out all his teeth so they could no longer hear his thoughts, holding up the sign “The End is Nigh” and babbling apocalyptic lines from the Book of Revelations…now the majority of us would look at that guy and say “You know, I think he has a point.”

But in all seriousness, are we truly living in the darkest period of humanity’s existence?

I will come back to that question because I truly do not take it lightly, but it should be known that there is not only a long list of false prophecies for the end of the world that had massive followings throughout history, but there are a lot of parallels to those periods and to that of our present day.

In 1345 the biggest financial collapse of history hit Europe. Food became increasingly hard to come by and water sanitation could not be maintained. It was not long after that the plague, carried by ships travelling from Asia, consumed a vulnerable Europe. During this time, many cities suffered up to a 50-70% mortality rate, killing much of the very young and old.

Many thought this to be the end of the world. There was no seeming solution to the problem and many believed that they were either being punished or had been abandoned by God, and since their condemnation seemed certain, took the path of living in the most hedonistic lifestyles imaginable as death and despair surrounded them. Others tried to buy their entrance into Purgatory with “indulgences” issued by the Church (somewhat reminiscent of today’s purchasers of carbon offsets). The basic idea was that one could reduce the amount of punishment one would undergo for committing a sin in exchange for money. This gave individuals, who could afford it, a way to partake in this end of world orgy-fest while avoiding their soul’s eternal damnation, or at least so they were told.

Others took matters a little more into their own hands to make it right with God. They set out onto the streets whipping themselves profusely. It was thought that if they punished themselves God would spare them from the plague, while others who had already contracted it thought it would move God to take the sickness back. These were known as the Flagellants, and they had a very large following. Later on they would blame the Jewish people for God’s wrath and resorted to the slaughter and burning alive of these groups of people in the hope that God would finally relent.

Another interesting period to take note of was during the Roman Republic. One of the most illustrious positions that one could hope for, outside of being Consul, was to be an Augur. This was an incredibly prestigious position within the Roman government that was usually assigned for life. An Augur was basically the interpreter of ominous and fortuitous signs, which included interpreting animal entrails (considered an exact science at the time), behaviour of birds and so forth to dictate future policy of the Republic.

There was also the period between the 4th and 5th Crusade known for its ‘Child Crusaders’. According to George Zabriskie Gray’s research on this subject, in 1212 a twelve year old boy named Stephen, from the village Cloyes in France claimed he had been selected by God to lead a Crusade of Children to rescue the Holy Land. He would recruit 30, 000 children to join him. Around the same time, a 10 year old boy named Nicholas, from Cologne, would also begin to preach and recruit children for the same mission. He too claimed that he had been selected by God and recruited a following of at least 20, 000 children. What little is known of the fate of these children is that the majority of them died of either starvation, were murdered or sold into slavery. Of the few thousand that actually set sail for Palestine, it is not known what happened to them, but only that they never arrived to the Holy Land.

And the list of examples goes on…

In Praise of Folly

So what is the point of all this? I think it is useful for us to have a memory of our past folly. And I think we are in the greatest danger of committing folly when we forget the foolish whims and beliefs of the past that were not just based on religious misconceptions but also on misconceptions of what passed for ‘science’. I think it is very dangerous when a population cannot even remember its recent ecstasies in folly in end of world prophecies such as the Y2K scare only 20 years ago, with a massive following of believers who were prepared for end times. This was a subject that was constantly being talked about on mainstream media and even by the governments of countries, President Clinton being no exception.

I think it is also very dangerous when there are absolute statements made such as “all the science is in” on a subject. Climate science is a relatively new science, and an extremely complicated one with many unknown variables. It is interesting that a group of scientists in this field have claimed that they know everything there needs to be known on this subject, when I don’t think we can say that for any other subject in the sciences to this date. Either climate science is far more simple than we thought or we are skipping steps.

What is also concerning is that although this grouping of climate scientists speak with such certainty about what the climate will be 10 years from now and what is influencing it, they are still unable to accurately predict the weather 2 weeks from now (let alone when a cold or hot front will be entering a region months or years from now). Meteorologists admit that their forecasts are at best an “educated guess” from measurements they take in change of atmospheric pressures. This does not even take into account the role of the Sun, which is an obvious contributor to global climate cycles, nor other factors within our galaxy such as supernova emissions of radiation and cosmic rays. Yet despite this lack of understanding we can be certain that climate scientists can with confidence predict the climate trend of the WORLD 10 or even 50 years from now!

We are told that the climate is completely chaotic now and unpredictable but moving towards a measurable point in the future. This confident prediction is being calculated by super computers. Computers that are ultimately limited to their programs’ parameters and variables. It is claimed that these computers can ‘learn’, can ‘problem solve’, but it still is operating within a human-made program and is thus limited to the assumptions of that program. A computer cannot decide to start taking into account the Sun’s role in climate change for instance. It does not even have a concept of what the Sun is. There seems to be an almost mystical faith being put into these super computers, likened to a shaman who shakes a bag of bones and dumps its contents out to form some random pattern that somehow will reveal our fate.

How can a computer have all the answers when we don’t even know all the variables let alone how they interact in order for it to calculate the outcome years from now? Well the answer is we obviously can’t. It is not an accurate prediction. Just like the Y2K scare.

I would further add that when a movement forms vehemently asserting that the end of the world is nigh, that is a reflection of the breakdown of that society. It is a reflection that the people of such a society no longer have faith in that society’s fitness for survival. I think it is no coincidence that the leading nations supporting the prophecy of Greta are largely first world western countries, countries that at one time enjoyed the highest standards of living but now are experiencing decay and economic collapse.

There are already answers to the clean energy crisis. Namely nuclear power, with fission power (and soon fusion) not only being the cleanest forms of energy but by far the most efficient and most powerful source of energy human civilization has ever had access to, making actions once impossible turn into the possible, such as long-distance space travel. The technology of the plasma torch has the capability to break down matter into its ionic components, this means that landfills could be cost-effectively broken down into their elemental forms which would thus turn them into resource mines. It is a wonder that those who seem to care so much about solving these problems never seem to bring up these very evident solutions.

So how did European civilization ultimately survive the mayhem of the Black Death? Fortunately there were those who did not believe that this was the end of the world and sought to not only rebuild but improve upon the conditions of the past. They did not believe that people needed to resort to some form of supplication to avoid the end of the world (somewhat reminiscent of today’s concept of all humans being innately polluters who must repent and minimise the negative effects of their mere existence). Rather those that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages believed that the avoidance of the end of the world could only come about through human intervention, which had the highest capacity for the good and depended on scientific discoveries that could only be brought about through the creative imaginings of an optimistic human mind.

Shocking video has surfaced of a ‘Smart Summoned’ Tesla driving down the wrong side of the road while trying to find its owner, like a lost infant wandering aimlessly, trying to find its mother, at a shopping mall. 

The video shows the vehicle nervously stopping and starting (sometimes in the middle of the road), as it seeks to make its way back to its owner by navigating a parking lot. Nearby onlookers seem baffled by the car’s “ham-fisted driving”, as only the Brits over at the Daily Mail could accurately describe it. 

The video starts with the car already out of its parking space and moving through the lot. The video begins with the car on the complete opposite side of the road, before the Tesla decides to stop and park, straddling where both traffic lanes would be. The film was taken at a shopping mall in Richmond, BC, Canada. 

Recall, we noted recently that Consumer Reports had issued (another) warning about the company’s Smart Summon feature last month. 

Consumer Reports commented that the Summon feature only works “intermittently” and “depending on the car’s reading of the surroundings”. It said the car sometimes seemed “confused” about where it was, adding that one vehicle shut itself down in a parking lot after incorrectly assessing that it was on a public road. 

That certainly seemed to be the case in the most recent example. 

We also detailed Consumer Reports’ first look into Smart Summon, when they called the feature “glitchy” and a “science experiment”. Smart Summon “doesn’t match the marketing hype,” they said at the time. 

The NHTSA is also currently investigating the feature. 

We also documented at length what an unmitigated disaster the original release of Summon was, showcasing videos and testimonials from social media of the feature running amok. Early customer videos and reports of the “feature” made it look extremely dangerous and nothing short of a complete disaster. 

And continued evidence has done nothing to change that sentiment…

Submitted by Market Crumbs

Welcome to 2019. This isn’t your grandparents’ beverage market anymore. Soda is being replaced by seltzer water. Beer is being replaced by spiked seltzer. A whiskey glass is being replaced by a whiskey pod.

Soda consumption in the U.S. fell to a 31-year low in 2016. Last year bottled sparkling water volume grew by 26% versus just 4.2% for bottled still water. Those statistics were enough for Coca-Cola to introduce its first new beverage line in more than a decade yesterday. The company is introducing AHA, a new brand of sparkling water, which will launch in March.

This isn’t their first attempt at sparkling water. With the introduction of AHA, they’ll be pulling their Dasani brand of sparkling water. They also attempted to make a Smartwater version that never took off. Consumers want healthier alternatives, which was echoed by Coke’s head of North American still beverages unit, who said “We’re fairly focused with this on extending our new brand and creating a new brand, as well as extending in other categories of our core equities.”

Just like soda companies need to find healthier alternatives, beer makers are increasingly offering spiked seltzer drinks for calorie-conscious customers. Also yesterday, Anheuser-Busch announced its tripling down on hard seltzer drinks. In addition to its Natty Light and Bon & Viv offerings, they’ll now offer Bud Light seltz in 2020.

White Claw, which brought attention to the category, is now in the top 25 brands among malt beverages and beers with sales surpassing all craft beer brands, except for Blue Moon Belgian White. Spiked seltzer is on pace to see another year of triple, yes triple, digit percentage growth to $1 billion in sales. They’ve become so popular the Brewers Association even changed its definition of a craft brewer to include drinks such as seltzers and THC beverages after a poll of association members found the majority intend to produce drinks other than beer in the next 3-5 years.

With consumers’ beverage tastes rapidly evolving, the largest beverage companies appear to be at the point of doing whatever it takes to have products that are currently popular. With so many smaller beverage companies constantly coming out with new drinks, their only option may be to continue to acquire that month’s hot beverage maker.

Since 1986, laws have prevented emergency rooms from turning away patients that are unable to pay, regardless if they are uninsured, indigent, addicted to drugs, or mentally ill.

We have no such similar laws to protect the half a million homeless in the U.S. who have no place to sleep, and one doctor is now trying to change that, according to Bloomberg. 

Jeffrey Brenner is a doctor who, for 25 years, has worked with the poor and the homeless. He recently became an executive at UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurer, and he is planning on using his position to give people places to live. 

Brenner is using a pair of apartment complexes in Phoenix as research and development for his proposed initiative. He’s using UnitedHealth’s money to pay for housing and support services for about 60 formerly homeless recipients of Medicaid. UnitedHealth’s 6 million Medicaid members generated $43 billion in 2018, almost 20% of the insurer’s total revenue. 

It’s a profitable business overall but the patients in the most need, who offer a “complex blend of medical, mental health, and social challenges” go on to cost UnitedHealth far more than what it take in to care for them. 

Brenner said: 

“Can you imagine people living on the street with these disorders? Heart failure, COPD. They’re rolling around with oxygen tanks, crazy stuff. This is just sad. This is just stupid. Why do we let this go on?”

Instead, Brenner has been looking at data of patients for answers. One patient, named Steve, who is 54 with MS, cerebral palsy, heart disease and diabetes was homeless before UnitedHealth got him an apartment. While homeless for the year prior, he went to the ER 81 times and spent 17 days hospitalized and had medical costs of about $13,000 per month. Since a roof was put over his head, his average monthly medical costs have dropped more than 80% to about $2,000 per month. 

Patients like Steve wind up in the ER because they don’t fit into the traditional ways that healthcare is delivered. The system is set up to “route billions of dollars to hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and labs to diagnose and treat patients once they’re sick” and not care for vulnerable and homeless people.

The U.S. spends 18% of its GDP on healthcare, versus 8.6% in the other 35 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The outsized spend on healthcare is converse with the country’s undersized spending on social support, housing, food, cash assistance and care for children. Other nations spend about $2 for social services for every $1 they spend on healthcare. 

Brenner’s program is called MyConnections and, after testing in areas like Phoenix, Milwaukee and Las Vegas, it is now expected to roll out to 30 markets by the year 2020. It comes at a time when Wall Street continues to press UnitedHealth about the performance of its Medicaid business, which was “not at our target margin range of 3% to 5%,” CEO Dave Wichmann said in January 2019. 

He was approached by UnitedHealth in 2017 after he had founded the “Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers” in 2002, an organization that helped find hot spots of medical spending. At first, he had no interest in working with United. “I said no, and said no a couple of times,” he says. In 2017, he says, he was finally convinced that UnitedHealth’s commitment was serious, and he finally agreed. 

He now manages a team of 65 and expects to house 350 homeless Medicaid patients by early next year. As of now, these patients cost more than $17 million in annual healthcare spending. Brenner’s goal is to get them to “graduate” to paying their own rent within a year. 

Brenner studied neuroscience at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, NJ and formerly worked in family medicine, doing his residency in Seattle before moving to Camden NJ in 1998, which was – at the time – the poorest city in the country. There, he started a small practice with three exam rooms and eventually went on to practice solo. Almost all of his patients were on Medicaid. 

“He’d get up in the middle of the night to deliver babies,” the article says. He also treated victims of violent crime and went to Camden’s hospitals to try and get a picture of the city’s spending on healthcare. It was there he realized the “gross imbalance” of the healthcare system: in Camden, just 1% of patients made up 30% of the costs.

 “Like, for 1% of the spending here, we could open up 10 primary-care offices all over the city,” Brenner realized. 

He commented: “The system had become so distorted that it felt like a microcosm of what was going on in America, which is if you don’t take good care of people, they’ll get sick. Then you’ll need more hospital beds and hospitals to take care of them.”

You can read Bloomberg’s full longform piece on Brenner here.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Economists debate whether the decline in productivity is real. It is real, let’s investigate 10 reasons why…

Productivity Measurement

Brookings questions the Productivity Slump. It cites measurement issues.

Much of the recent debate, and related research, on productivity measurement issues has focused on this decline in productivity in the U.S. Predating the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession, and now continuing for more than a decade, the productivity slowdown in the U.S. does not appear to be just cyclical in nature, but rather seems to reflect also deeper, structural phenomena. There are different views on what factors explain the slowdown. But one view challenges the very reality of the slowdown, arguing that the slowdown wholly or largely reflects the failure of the productivity statistics to capture recent productivity gains, particularly those from new and higher-quality ICT goods and services

There are two potentially important sources of underestimation of productivity related to ICT goods and services. First, if prices do not fully capture quality improvements in the new ICT products, price deflators are overestimated and real output (adjusted for improvements in quality, including product variety) is underestimated. Second, many ICT services, in particular internet-based services such as Google searches and Facebook, are largely not reflected in GDP measurement even though they generate substantial utility for consumers, the reason being that their use does not involve monetary cost as they are available free of charge to the users.

Facebook a Productivity Killer

Google searches are indeed a time-saver. But what the hell is “produced” by them. And where do the searches and Facebook playing take place?

At work perhaps. After discussing the above Brookings did come to this conclusion: “In large part, the productivity slowdown—and the associated productivity paradox—are real.”

It never explained why. Rather Brookings remains puzzled: “While recent research suggests that mismeasurement, although sizable, does not explain most of the observed decline in productivity, it must be noted that there remain unknowns and gaps in data.”

Real or Imagined

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) asks Is the U.S. Productivity Slowdown a Mirage?

Labor productivity in the United States—defined as total output divided by total hours of labor—has been increasing for over a century and continues to increase today. However, its growth rate has fallen. One explanation for this phenomenon focuses on measurement difficulties, in particular the possibility that current tools for measuring economic growth do not fully capture recent advances in the goods and services associated with digital communications technology.

One reason some analysts believe that labor productivity is understated is that price inflation may be overstated for digital goods and services.

As with Brookings, the NBER concludes there is some mismeasurement but fails to figure out why.

As an aside, the NBER group is the official arbiter of recession dates in the US.

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Study

The FRBSF asked the same question: Does Growing Mismeasurement Explain Disappointing Growth?

The FRBSF came to the same conclusion that mismeasurement is a problem but like the others fails to offer credible rationale.

No Hidden Productivity

The problem with the above analysis is the Fed, Brookings, and the NBER all focused on the measurement issue in apparent belief there is some sort of hidden productivity waiting to be discovered.

Mismeasurement Irony

I propose productivity is likely to be overstated, not understated because of mismeasurement.

How so?

• How many overtime hours do supervisory workers at Walmart, Target, etc., actually work while getting paid for 40?

• How many hours do employees work at home and on vacation while not getting paid for them?

Before diving into a 6-point practical explanation as to why productivity losses are real, please ponder a few charts that I put together.

Nonfarm Productivity 1990-Present

In the above and all the following charts, I let Excel plot the trendline. The chart shows declining productivity, but it’s horribly misleading. Let’s investigate other timeframes to understand why.

Nonfarm Productivity 1990-2000

Those are the heydays of the internet revolution. Computers replaced people. Spreadsheets replaced accountants. Robots replaced manufacturing workers at an increased pace.

Nonfarm Productivity 2001-2007

Productivity soared coming out of the dotcom and 911-related recession.

By 2004, economic activity was all about housing and finance.

Nonfarm Productivity 2009-2019

Productivity soared coming out the the Great Recession as is the case coming out of any recession. Since then corporate productivity has been anemic.

Manufacturing Real Output vs Employees

From 1990 until 2008 manufacturing output per employee skyrocketed. Both plunged in the Great Recession and the trends are now positive but output per employee has slowed to a crawl as the number of manufacturing employees has been on the rise.

This indicates decreasing marginal utility of robots, lower worker skill sets, or both.

Obesity Trends

Chart from the National Institute of Health.

Obese workers have more health-related issues and thus need more time off. They also move slower and do not function as well as healthy workers.

Rise of the Zombies

Zombie firms are companies that are unable to cover debt servicing costs from current profits over an extended period. Cheap financing is the primary cause. The result is low productivity.

Please review Rise of the Zombie Corporations: Percentage Keeps Increasing

Collective Bargaining with Militant Unions

On October 31, I asked Chicago ISM Crashes: How Much is GM to Blame?

I do not pretend to have the answer, but GM agreed to a lot of worker protections, guaranteed hours, plant improvements, etc, that will not make any sense if there is an economic slowdown.

Chicago also just settled its teacher strike to which I commented Chicago Headed for Insolvency, Get the Hell Out Now

Chicago Teacher Contract Details

1. 16% raise over five years (not including raises based on longevity)

2. Three-year freeze on health insurance premiums

3. Lower insurance copays

4. Caps on class sizes

5. More than 450 new social workers and nurses.

6. New job protections for substitute teachers who going forward may only be removed after conferring with the union about “performance deficiencies.”

7. Chicago Public Schools will become a “sanctuary district,” meaning school officials won’t be allowed to cooperate with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a court order.

8. Employees will be allowed 10 unpaid days for personal immigration matters.

9. Under the new contract, a joint union-school board committee will be convened to “mitigate or eliminate any disproportionate impacts of observations or student growth measures” on teacher evaluations.

10. Instead of student performance, teachers will probably be rated on more subjective measures, perhaps congeniality in the lunchroom.

11. The new union contract caps the number of charter-school seats, so no new schools will be able to open without others closing.

Points four through 11 are all productivity killers.

Soaring Fiscal Deficits

Government does not spend money wisely to say the least. It collects money via taxes then wastes in on counterproductive military operations and other nonsense.

When it spends on infrastructure, it overpays because of prevailing wage laws and collective bargaining.

For further discussion of the debt vs deficits, please see Budget Deficit Lies: What’s the Real Deficit?

It’s the Debt Stupid

It takes $103 in public debt for a $100 increase in GDP.

Build up public debt, expect lower productivity.

Interest on the National Debt

According to Treasury Direct, Interest on the National Debt is $574 billion.

There is nothing remotely productive about paying interest to banks.

Corporate Buybacks

Trump’s tax cuts did not spur investment as claimed. Corporations took the cuts and another repatriation holiday for dividend and buybacks.

In addition to using profits to buy back shares, some companies went further into debt to buy back shares.

If you skimp on investment, don’t expect productivity miracles.

Real Productivity Decline, 10 Simple Explanations

1. The internet boom and the rising productivity associated with it were very real. The rate of change in internet-related improvements has fallen since 2000.

2. Decreasing marginal utility of robots.

3. The Fed’s easy money policies sponsored numerous corporate zombies. Those zombies survive only because of ultra-easy financing. Zombie companies are unproductive, by definition. Things are even worse in the EU because of negative rates.

4. The Fed’s easy money policies also sponsored a “store on every corner”. There are far more retail stores, restaurants, fast food establishments, and outlet malls than needed.

5. Marginal stores have to be manned by somebody and they are, by increasingly marginal employees as the unemployment rate declines.

6. Demographics. As skilled workers retire, those workers are replaced by workers with lower skills.

7. Health issues in general. Obesity and drug-related issues are on the rise as are time off for those reasons.

8. Militant unions demand and receiving unwarranted pay, time off, and control over workplace conditions.

9. Corporate buybacks mainly benefit CEOs and executives who cash out their shares and options. It takes careful investment, not reckless expansion, not buybacks to have productivity gains.

10. It’s the debt, stupid. Fiscal deficits are totally out of control. Interest on the national debt by itself is $574 billion. What are we getting for it?

Looking in the Wrong Place

The San Francisco Fed, Brookings, and the National Bureau of Economic Research all struggle to explain falling productivity.

They can’t come up with the answer because they all have a spotlight on mismeasurement (and in the wrong direction at that, failing to count supervisory overtime and hours worked at home).

But there’s the answer, in ten easy to understand points, supported by data, logical analysis, and graphs.

By the way, this enormous buildup of debt at every level is hugely deflationary. Bubbles do burst eventually.

Days before his anticipated appointment to the House’s leading  impeachment panel, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has been hit with a new allegation that he ignored a 1994 complaint claiming that an Ohio State University sports doctor jerked off in a shower in front of a referee, according to NBC News.

The curiously timed allegation is contained in a lawsuit filed Thursday by 43 accusers who claim Ohio State’s “ingrained culture of institutional indifference” enabled their sexual abuse. The doctor, Richard Strauss, is accused of “drugging and raping athletes” as he preyed on underage athletes. He died in 2005 and was later found to have sexually abused 177 male students over two decades.

According to the lawsuit, Jordan and then-head coach Russ Hellickson replied: “Yeah, that’s Strauss,” in what was essentially a shrug.

The referee, known in the lawsuit as John Doe 42, is the second person to say he told Jordan about being approached or molested by Strauss.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported that House Republican leaders are considering adding Jordan to the House Intelligence Committee days before public hearings are set to begin.

Jordan would compliment ranking minority member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), and has been an outspoken critic of the impeachment process.