Month: May 2021

A new grading policy, put forth by the Baltimore City School Board, Tuesday, will allow students who are struggling and failing classes to move up to the next grade level due to the virus pandemic, according to local news Fox 45. 

Instead of holding back students, Baltimore City Public School System’s (BCPSS) new grading policy will push up struggling students who failed classes during the pandemic and have their educational status tested during the fall semester to determine what skills they missed during virtual learning classes. 

Chief Academic Officer Joan Dabrowski said the new policy is intended to “avoid the punitive approach of failing students.” 

“This is not about a failure, but it is about unfinished learning and giving multiple opportunities, multiple onramps for young people to complete that … learning,” BCPSS CEO Sonja Santelises said.

High school students will have their failing grades swapped out for a “No Credit,” and for lower schools, a “Fail” will be replaced with “Not Completed.” 

About 78,000 students are enrolled across the metro area. More than 65% of students in secondary schools and 50% of Elementary Schools failed at least one class.

Fox 45’s investigative arm, “Project Baltimore,” has spent several years investigating BCPSS corrupt school system. Grade-rigging has been well known before the pandemic, but now it’s out in the open. At least now, school officials can deflect their failures on the pandemic. 

Earlier this year, we pointed out how a high school student who almost graduated near the top half of his class failed almost every class. There have been attendance issues, such as attendance at high schools dropping to a 13-year low. More than a dozen schools have zero students proficient in math. 

BCPSS officials no longer have to be covert about grade rigging as they can openly blame the pandemic. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Last year, we discussed the controversy over the acting Northwestern Law Dean declaring publicly to “I am James Speta and I am a racist.”

He was followed by Emily Mullin, executive director of major gifts, who announced, “I am a racist and a gatekeeper of white supremacy. I will work to be better.” 

The public confessions reflect the view that all white people are racist due to their race and privilege — a view contested by some as itself a form of racial intolerance or bias.

Now one of Brandeis’ Assistant Deans, Kate Slater, has triggered a similar controversy after declaring “all white people are racists.”

Slater is the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Slater defines herself as an “anti-racism scholar” who is seeks to “facilitate an understanding of race and racism through honest and frank conversations.”  In her discussion of “critical race theory,” she does not exclude herself from being a racist and insists that she does not hate white people, just “whiteness.” Such statements rankle many. It is doubtful that Brandeis would tolerate an academic saying that she does not hate black people, just “blackness.” 

Slater defines her role as helping “White people conceptualize what sustained anti-racism can look like with the ultimate goal in mind: liberation from oppression for Black people and people of color.” Ironically, this is an effort to get “white folx” not to fear critical race theory which clearly did not work with a number of conservative sites:

I have a different take on this controversy from some who have denounced Slater as engaging in simply another form of “race baiting.” I agree with Slater that we should be debating this issue. This is a view among many academics and should be respected as a good-faith understanding of the source of racism.

The problem is that critical race theorists and advocates often insist that we must have a dialogue on race but it tends to be more of a diatribe. For an academic to voice opposing views on such issues is to risk investigation, re-training, or even termination, as we have discussed in past cases. The only dialogue allowed in these sessions tends to be the willingness to accept the underlying premises rather than alternative viewpoints.  Indeed, most sessions are treated as “trainings” to address “whiteness:” and “white privilege” rather than debating if this view is itself racially intolerant.  The same is true at corporations like Lockheed where top executives were sent into mandatory training to address “white male culture” and “white male privilege.”

Slater says that she seeks “an understanding of race and racism through honest and frank conversations” but it is clearly a discussion premised on the assumption of all white people being racist and “whiteness” being hateful. It is designed to be more therapeutic and transformative for white people than a real debate of the assumptions and stereotypes underlying this aspect of critical race theory.

It is a loss in my view and inhibits true evolution of viewpoints and assumptions. I accept that I many be blind or insensitive to racial bias or privilege, but I have serious concerns over the bias shown in some of these lectures and supporting material.

Colleges and universities were once places where controversial subjects could be debated in a passionate but civil exchange.  Assumptions were challenged and data reviewed. That is not happening on many of the issues that face us today. Certain subjects are treated as off-limits. We have been discussing the targeting of professors who voice dissenting opinions about the Black Lives Matter movement, police shootings, or aspects of the protests around the country from the University of Chicago to Cornell to Harvard to other schools. Students have also been sanctioned for criticism BLM and anti-police views at various colleges. Even a high school principal was fired for stating that “all lives matter.”

I obviously follow a robust view of free speech that is out of vogue today. I have no problem with extreme views being voiced on campus so long as schools allow countervailing views also to be voiced. For that reason, I have defended faculty who have made similarly disturbing comments “detonating white people,” denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer,  strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters and other outrageous statements. We previously wrote about academic freedom issues at University of Rhode Island due to its Director of Graduate Studies of History Erik Loomis, who has defended the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence.

We cannot make true progress unless we are able to speak openly and freely on such subjects. Many disagree with the views of academics like Slater but few faculty members are willing to raise such disagreements openly on campus. To do so is to risk being labeled as an example of reactionary white privilege and hostility. Without such freedom to challenge underlying assumptions or viewpoints, these sessions will be viewed as indoctrinations rather than real discussions of race in society. That will serve to silence many but convince few.

According to JPMorgan’s Daniel Silver, as of this moment some 23 – all republican – states have announced at least some form of early reduction in pandemic-related unemployment insurance benefits ahead of the September expiration at the federal level. These programs, he suggests, are likely limiting labor supply, generating a potential economic argument for ending these programs early.

A glance at the following chart – which shows the number of US job opening vs the number of Americans who remain on some form of Pandemic unemployment benefit, would suggest that Silver is right.

So, while the left are desperately gaslighting that this is a skills or geographic mismatch, the chart above makes it clear that paying people to stay home is not good for growth (or social stability).

Which is why 23 (Republican) states have listened to their business owners and started to cut those benefits. In fact, as Mike Shedlock notes, that means around 3.5 million Americans will come off Pandemic emergency benefits in the next few weeks.

And since Democrats will likely not end UI benefits any time soon – or ever, if they could –  this sets up the US economy to become an epic real-time economic experiment, one where everyone can keep track of the unemployment across in Red states (most of which have ended their UI benefits), and blue states where claims will keep potential workers at home, pressuring unemployment rates.

As noted above, all of the 23 states announcing early-UI benefit terminations have Republican governors and as is clear from the charts below, many of these states have tighter labor markets and stronger earnings growth (naturally, not all).

So the trade off appears to be one of political pandering vs practical economics – lower unemployment rates in Red states even as the hoped for tradeoff – higher wage growth – is largely missing, with average hourly earnings in red states also slightly higher on average.

By way of early confirmation of our thesis that government handouts are repressing the recovery by encouraging people not to work, according to an analysis published this week by job site Indeed, job searches jumped by 5% the day each state announced its intent to pull out of the federal programs.

In May, job search activity on Indeed increased, relative to the national trend, in states that announced they would end federal UI benefits prematurely.

We will be closely watching the unemployment rates of the red and blue states going forward as a real-time test of whether paying people to stay home (something not even the USSR did) is indeed the best way forward for Americans… or if it will create an idiocracy.

Authored by Bryce Coward via Knowledge Leaders Capital blog,

The US dollar is on the verge of breaking down to the lowest level since 2014.

This is not all that surprising. After all, the US money supply continues to grow at a rapid pace relative to other countries and quantitative easing is likely to continue at full pace through the end of 2021. Meanwhile, other countries like the UK, Canada and others are already telegraphing rate hikes. Not only that, but the US budget deficit as a percent of GDP – which has a tight correlation with the level of the US dollar index – is set to explode through 2022 and beyond. The ballooning budget deficit suggests a level of 70 or 80 on the US dollar index over the coming years would not be out of the realm of possibilities. That would equate to a further decline of 11% to 22% from here.

If the US dollar drops below the 90 “line in the sand” and starts on a path toward 80 in the back half of 2021, that would have fairly large ramifications for stocks.

In this post we’ll briefly highlight one.

For the last 15 years or so one of the most persistent trends in the equity market was the relative outperformance of US technology companies vs basic materials companies. The red line in the chart below shows the relative performance of materials vs tech. Since 2005 the red line has gone nowhere but down – meaning tech was outperforming materials – until recently. The blue line in the chart is the US dollar index, inverted. As tech was outperforming materials, the US dollar index was going up most of the time…until recently. The tight correlation between the US dollar index and tech/materials relative performance suggests further weakness in the US dollar will be accompanies by a rather large and important rotation out of tech and into materials. For passive investors this is tricky and risky because the tech+ sector accounts for more than 40% of the S&P 500.

There’s also a fundamental case to be made for such a rotation. The relative valuation level of materials companies vs tech companies is well below average. The next two charts display the price/earnings ratio and price/book value ratio, respectively, for materials vs tech companies. The green line shows the average relative valuation since 2006.

Valuations must always be put in the context of earnings growth. Tech stocks are supposed to be the high growth engines of the market, so they should, in theory, receive a higher valuation than other lower growth companies. However, the relative growth between materials and tech companies is normalizing and is currently above the historic average. This doesn’t mean that materials companies will grow faster than tech companies (even though that could certainly happen), just that growth rate difference between the two groups is shrinking.

In sum, we have poor trends in the US dollar that are being driven by fundamental factors of money supply growth and budget deficits. These factors could push the US dollar down to 70 or 80 in the coming years, which would have substantial effects on financial markets. One of those effects could be to see a continued rotation out of tech and into materials, which is a trend supported not only by a weak US dollar but also changing valuation and fundamental trends between the two sectors. That kind of rotation is likely to be more difficult for passive investors than active ones given the rather large weighting of tech and tech-like companies in the major indexes.

Authored by Robert Wright via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Misinformation, i.e., wrong claims innocently made, and disinformation, i.e., wrong claims willfully made, have long consorted to create propaganda, a distorted worldview designed to achieve some political goal.

The lines between those lies have so blurred that only a neologistic portmanteau, dismisinfoganda, fully captures recent reality.

Like an old hip-hip song, let’s break it down:

• dis = intentionally wrong claims (lies)

• mis = unintentionally wrong claims (error)

• dismis(s) = denying a claim without empirically engaging it

• info = a claim about the real world

• (propa)ganda = that which is propagare, i.e., propagated or spread

Ergo, dismisinfoganda is the politicized spreading or squelching of claims without, or counter to, adequate empirical evidence. 

Dismisinfoganda remains agnostic about motivation, which is often opaque even to the claim’s originator. Moreover, what matters most is not the creation of the claim but its propagation. People tend to believe, and pass along, claims that they believe substantiate their ideological views or further their material interests. The selective process (spread or ignore) occurs regardless of the claim originator’s intent.

A 1975 book by Tom Burnam updated in 1986 called The Dictionary of Misinformation (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell) now looks rather quaint. Most of its 302 undocumented pages the author used to explain proper usage of words like zeppelin, which, in addition to being in the name of one of the greatest rock-n-roll bands ever, was the only lighter-than-air airship that was both steerable and rigid. Some simply corrected common elisions of history, where phrases like the “Emancipation Proclamation” come to stand in for the Thirteenth Amendment, or misattribution of origins, like Charles Darwin being the first person to elucidate biological evolution. Important stuff for copy editors and fact checkers but harmless for the most part.

Mission-critical matters simply fail if they are erroneous. If an engineer denies that two plus two equals four and tries to launch a rocket into space, s/he isn’t even going to be able to build the rocket, much less provide others with the schadenfreude of watching the thing explode on the launch pad.

Specious commercial claims also tend to go down in flames, although only metaphorically and sometimes too slowly. Competitors and consumers have strong incentives to expose the truth that such-and-such company’s product claims are false or misleading and nobody else much cares, which keeps noise to a minimum. Of course companies may also try to spread disinformation about competitors but they have to do so surreptitiously or consumers would immediately discount it. The current mix of customer feedback (Yelp! and such), expert opinion (via Consumer Reports and the like), costly quality signaling (like UL and others), and product databases/aggregators (like CPID), remains imperfect but in normal times (which these are not), it works well enough. One hopes that any private attempt to “cancel” any such bona fide commercial information assessor or disseminator, the way that social media site Parler was shut down earlier this year, the departments of justice and commerce would meet with swift and sure retribution.

Parler, of course, was not a major source of commercial information but rather a forum for the sharing of political opinion and policy information, which one would think would be protected by the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall pass no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” While it is true that Congress did not directly shut down Parler, a panoply of laws and administrative policies made it lawfully possible for private parties to do so and some, including myself, have argued that regulations and taxes are so high that traditional public-private distinctions have broken down. If the government can essentially outsource its dirty business to corporations, the Bill of Rights becomes a dead letter.

Florida recently retaliated against what its governor terms “Big Tech Censorship” by passing a Transparency and Technology Act that tries to force social media companies to inform Floridians of their banning/blocking policies and to apply them to all users consistently. The legality of the measure has been questioned although many states, including ironically enough the one where Silicon Valley is located, regularly regulate out-of-state companies doing business within them.

At least the subject is being debated, probably because Big Tech Censorship of a law regarding Big Tech Censorship would be more than a little ironic. A much more important issue is dismisinfogandizing by federal officials, especially Anthony Fauci. AIER and others have repeatedly exposed his lies, half-truths, and flip-flops (and floppy pitching arm) and yet somehow this superannuated individual retains his job, power, and prestige.

The most recent revelation, however, may finally drive him from the policy scene. In case you haven’t heard, a consensus is now emerging that the hypothesis that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 came out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology needs further study. That doesn’t mean that the CCP deliberately unleashed the virus on the world or even covered it up, just that for some reason earlier indications that lab workers experienced Covid-like sickness in November 2019 did not fully register until recently.

The point here is that a politicized claim with major policy implications that Fauci adamantly dismissed as absurd in May 2020 he now says a year later needs investigation as he is “not convinced” that the virus emerged naturally. Far from a one-off mistake, Fauci’s outright dismissal of claims with empirical backing forms part of a pattern of behavior displayed across the federal and some state governments regarding election reforms and results, police brutality, urban rioting, fiscal and monetary policy, and other important policy areas.

While that pattern of dismisinfoganda hardly proves a Deep State or Blue State conspiracy, it should deeply trouble all Americans that high profile and highly paid members of its government cannot seem to reason correctly. A real scientist working in the public interest would have said a year ago what Fauci is now saying regarding the origins of the novel coronavirus: “Here is what we know, and here is what we still need to learn.” Instead, he leveraged his (undeserved) popularity and traditional journalist deference for authority, especially of the white lab coat variety, to stave off a line of inquiry that could have saved lives by speeding therapeutic and vaccine development.

Alas, I see no way of significantly reducing dismisinfoganda other than ideas that I have previously espoused:

1. Improving the educational system so more Americans can reason correctly, ask the right questions, find disinterested sources of data, and more generally think for themselves. But it will take about two decades to slow the spread and flatten the curve of dismisinfoganda even if we magically improved education overnight, which is unlikely.

2. Holding public officials much more accountable for their affirmative decisions and pronouncements, thus encouraging them to proceed more cautiously on the policy front and to speak more judiciously when acting in a policy or spokesperson capacity. Police officers are not the only public servants whose qualified immunity needs to be reconsidered, but such a fundamental reform also seems unlikely at present.

3. Increasing transparency through floods of FOIA requests or, better yet, continuous automatic release of all but the most secret national security information. Police officers are not the only public servants who should be wearing body cams but, again, such a fundamental reform seems unlikely so long as the rulers get to make and enforce their own rules.

4. Encouraging the formation of bonded news outlets that credibly commit to making payments to aggrieved parties if they refuse to retract mistakes as prominently as the original articles.

A glimmer of hope lies in the fact that some drastic people and institutions still have the incentive and wherewithal to expose dismisinfoganda, and they were the ones responsible for bringing the Wuhan lab story back into view with compelling new details. But the fact that a highly educated dear friend of mine recently refused to see me in person because I wouldn’t consent to wear an N95 mask for hours even though he was vaccinated and I have something at least as good, natural immunity, is telling. 

The New York Times claims that natural immunity is no better than the mRNA “vaccines,” and NPR argues that Covid survivors should still get vaccinated, but who can believe them, or Fauci, on such matters anymore, especially when important policies with profound civil liberties implications, like vaccine passports, remain under consideration? Therein lies the true cost of runaway dismisinfoganda. Many Americans once believed government officials unless/until they had good reason to doubt them but increasingly they disbelieve officials unless/until they have reason to believe them. Maybe that is a good thing as it will eventually induce Americans to ask why they continue to pay the salaries of people they cannot implicitly trust to do their respective jobs. 

Democrat lawmakers in particular have long pushed for massively increased federal aid for public housing across the country following a decades-long decline amid a perpetual funding crisis that’s left large mid-20th century urban housing complexes derelict and crumbling.

Nowhere has the crisis been felt more than (as expected) New York City, where most of the some 325 housing projects owned by New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) are dilapidated to the point of becoming uninhabitable, for years if not decades facing interminable problems like mold and rats, water leaks and damaged roots, as well as no heat, elevators going out, and lead paint hazards. 

NYCHA’s problems managing the housing relied upon by some 400,000 or more residents has long been documented, but new fears that there’s no funding solution on the horizon – meaning urgent repairs are likely to be pushed off (drastically raising the cost of the fixes to an estimated annual increase of $1 billion a year), could soon lead to residents becoming homeless as buildings constructed between 1945-1970 are becoming uninhabitable while sitting largely unfixed.

Bloomberg in a new reports chronicles what it calls the “$40 Billion Housing Headache Facing New York’s Next Mayor” which begins with the following couple of anecdotes…

“At the Twin Parks complex for seniors in the Bronx, residents say they had little to no heat this winter.”

And in the case of Stuyvesant Gardens in Brooklyn, “rats have taken over a playground and are coming inside the building” – which is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of array of issues facing many of the housing complexes.

Among the most pressing problems which are on the brink of creating full-blown health crises for low-income residents remain mold and pest issues, heating issues, and badly needed lead-based paint abatement. 

The funding crisis and controversial fallout is expected to be a central, possibly campaign-defining issue sifting the candidates in the Democrat and Republican primaries coming up next month. And out of the gate some of the most aggressive funding measures still represent but a drop in the bucket of what’s needed in the NYCHA housing-wide overhaul.

“The eight leading Democratic candidates for New York City mayor have pledged to increase city spending on public housing to at least $1.5 billion annually, a $900 million increase from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposed budget for the fiscal year starting July 1,” Bloomberg writes.

“Rats as big as kittens”… headlines like the below have been running locally for years if not decades…

Rats as big as ‘kittens’ run around near playground on NYCHA complex in the Bronx | WPIX 11 New York#WeCanFixIt https://t.co/bh3rB1ZdsI

— 700 Strong (@strong_700) April 2, 2019

Yet the reality remains that this is “a fraction of the hole the city needs to fill, and many of the candidates leading at the polls are relatively vague on how they will raise extra money” – with the dividing line tending to be the degree to which the federal government is pressed for the bailout vs. various plans to get creative on local funding measures. Though of course plans in the latter arena which offers incentives for builders and contractors to keep repair costs (or building for new housing) down have been met with fierce resistance as it’s seen as a creeping move to privatize public housing.

“People want repairs, not privatization, and we should be able to make repairs without privatizing public housing,” NYC comptroller and current mayoral candidate Scott Stringer said. 

“New York City could get more than $20 billion under Biden’s infrastructure plan” with a hoped-more “more to come,” he pointed out.

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

One of the fringe benefits of Washington’s stimulus program has been inflated stock portfolios.  This has delivered a great boon for certain state governments.  In Connecticut, for example, a state that taxes capital gains as regular income, this year’s budget surplus is projected to be $470 million.

That’s quite an achievement.  Especially when you consider the state’s rainy-day fund will hit an all-time high of $4.5 billion.  Federal coronavirus stimulus is also bringing $6 billion into the state.

Yet for the greedy fellows in the Connecticut state legislature the budget surplus is not nearly enough.  They want to soak the rich for the noble purpose of helping people.  Lawmakers are proposing a “surcharge” on high earners; single filers making more than $500,000 will be subject to a combined capital gains rate of 8.99 percent.

But that’s not all.  The state legislature also wants to create something it calls a “consumption tax.”  People earning more than $500,000 would pay 0.7 percent of their adjusted gross income.  That rate would rise to 1.4 percent for those earning $2 million, then 1.5 percent over $13 million.

The dillweed state planners already have grand plans for these coercive funds.  The money would go into a new Equitable Investment Fund that would be managed by an Equitable Investment Council.  The intent of the fund, in addition to collecting fees, is to reduce income inequality and redistribute wealth to certain disadvantaged groups.

Democratic Governor Ned Lamont recently had the gall to oppose the proposed taxation schemes.  And for that, hundreds of protestors showed up at his house and staged a mass ‘die-in’.  In this novel protest, freeloaders pretended to die in front of Mr. Lamont’s house because they want more free stuff…and he doesn’t want to give it to them.

This behavior, no doubt, has been conditioned in numerous states across the USA…

Prize Money

Here is the ‘land of fruits and nuts’ governor Gavin Newsom wants to send state sponsored stimmy checks of $600 to 11 million Californians.  Newsom, who’s facing a recall election later this year, is shamelessly buying votes.

And why not?  California, another state that taxes capital gains as regular income, is flush with cash.

This time last year Newsom predicted California would face a massive budget deficit of $54 billion.  He begged for a federal bailout.

Now, instead of a deficit, the state has a $76 billion surplus.  What’s more, that’s before the state receives $27 billion in federal stimulus from the American Rescue Plan that Congress passed in March.

California is also using this windfall to hand out $116.5 million in prize money to those who’ve done their civic duty and gotten the COVID-19 vaccine jab.  One lucky vaccine badge of honor holder will score the maximum vaccine prize of $1.5 million.

Here at the Economic Prism we recognize that a million bucks ain’t what it used to be.  But we also know, from experience, that it’s still super hard to build up wealth of $1.5 million.  It takes hard work, discipline, sacrifice, saving, investing, and, still, some luck.

Good for whoever wins the $1.5 million maximum prize.  But if they follow the example of Newsom, they’ll squander it before Christmas.  Then, like Newsom, they’ll have to beg for a bailout.

Of course, the greatest example for wastrel squandering can be found in Washington…

Welcome to Walley World!

Over the last 110 years Washington has become a sort of money sucking vortex.  At the Capitol Building sits a cadre of legislatures and an army of staffers working up new laws to take your money.

New rules, proposed rules, and notices are published daily in the Federal Register.  A quick read of the daily publication – presently about 80,000 pages – will enlighten and alarm you to the vast array of agencies, departments, and commissions and their vast array of daily nonsense.

With all these rules, it has become near impossible to earn an honest living, and set aside a few bucks, without the IRS stopping by uninvited for a fireside chat.  Was overtime pay properly reported?  Were company sponsored parking lot fees disclosed as taxable benefits?

Some of these rules Washington even changes after the fact.  For example, President Biden, in an effort to get his hands on the capital gains windfall, has proposed a budget for the upcoming fiscal year that assumes that a hike in the capital gains tax rate took effect in late April.  Biden plans to retroactively increase the top tax rate on capital gains to 43.4 percent from 23.8 percent for households with income over $1 million.

Yet sticking it to individuals and companies who work and operate within the borders of the United States is not good enough.  Washington also wants to cast its sturdy nets to encompass the entire globe.  Reuters reports:

“U.S. Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo said he expects strong backing from G7 peers for Washington’s proposed 15 percent-plus global minimum corporate tax, which should help solidify support in the U.S. Congress for domestic corporate tax legislation.

“By the time of a G20 finance leaders meeting in Venice in July, there should be a good sense of unity around a global minimum tax structure, Adeyemo said.  He added that there would be many technical details to work out, so a final agreement may have to wait until G20 leaders meet in Rome at the end of October.”

Wally, and his cohorts at the Treasury, want to compel other countries to have a minimum corporate tax of 15 percent so that when the U.S. jacks its corporate tax rate from 21 percent to a proposed 28 percent it doesn’t appear to be so dramatically confiscatory.

Ireland, for example, has a corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent.  This has made the country extraordinarily attractive to businesses looking to set up shop in a tax friendly locale.  Ireland, while not a G7 country, is a member of the OECD and EU, and would have to accept these changes.  Naturally, Ireland is planning to resist.

The point is, here is another instance of Washington’s destructive arrogance.  Wally is working to compel the developed world to operate in conformance with American policies.

Certainly, this is nothing new.  But with the money suck in Washington hitting a fever pitch, and states using their bailout funds to soak the rich and sprinkle around stimmy checks and prize money, a trip to Walley World is the last place anyone should want to go…

…unless you like to pay good money to stand in line all day and get milked like a cow.  Moo!

Biden’s nominee for assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, Christopher Maier, if confirmed is sure to get the attention of Beijing given his words this week to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Taiwan. The man who is also head of the Department of Defense’s Defeat-ISIS Task Force urged Congressional leaders in a Thursday briefing to establish a program for US special forces to train local troops in Taiwan toward deterring a possible “Chinese invasion”.

As the official tapped to oversee all US special forces he’s pushing an irregular warfare Vietnam-style preparedness scenario in Taiwan, which China claims as its own. “I do think that is something that we should be considering strongly as we think about competition across the span of different capabilities we can apply, [special operations forces] being a key contributor to that,” Maier told Senators.

He described that Taiwanese forces must be prepared to defend against an “amphibious landing” by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). 

“I think [we could build] on some of the areas that they may not be thinking of … If there is a Chinese military advance, there could be some opportunities for resistance networks or other capabilities that we would leave behind against a potential enemy amphibious landing,” he said.

According to a summary of his remarks by Military.com, he described further:

Maier said that special operators could help Taiwanese troops hone their skills, and mentioned resistance networks and counteracting potential enemy amphibious landings as examples.

Information operations is a key area where special operators can help conventional forces deter Chinese aggression, he said. Improving how U.S. special forces conduct information operations will be one of his top priorities, he added.

But there’s no doubt that any significant US special forces presence on Taiwan would itself be a severe enough red line to trigger war with China, thus the very action that Maier’s proposal is aimed to deter would likely fast become reality for any such training program could get off the ground. 

Days ago Taiwan’s foreign minister Joseph Wu in a PBS Newshour interview warned that China is “preparing for war” against Taiwan, and further affirmed that the increasing PLA war drills will soon slide into a real conflict situation

“I think Beijing has been preparing for war against Taiwan, and that is what we have been seeing. They are preparing for it,” Wu said. “If you look at the number of sorties, it’s around 2,900 times last year. So, the threat has been increasing. And when we examine in a closer way, the Chinese sometimes even cross the middle line of the Taiwan Strait.”

NASA’s Curiosity rover captured a stunning snapshot of what appears to be a cloudy day in the Arizona desert, but this picture is actually a cloudy day on Mars. 

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) released multiple images documenting cloudy days in the thin, dry atmosphere of the Red Planet. 

“Clouds are typically found at the planet’s equator in the coldest time of year, when Mars is the farthest from the Sun in its oval-shaped orbit. But one full Martian year ago – two Earth years – scientists noticed clouds forming over NASA’s Curiosity rover earlier than expected,” NASA JPL’s press release read. 

Curiosity has taken about 21 photographs of the strange Martian clouds over Gale Crater. 

This year, they were ready to start documenting these “early” clouds from the moment they first appeared in late January. What resulted are images of wispy puffs filled with ice crystals that scattered light from the setting Sun, some of them shimmering with color. More than just spectacular displays, such images help scientists understand how clouds form on Mars and why these recent ones are different. 

In fact, Curiosity’s team has already made one new discovery: The early-arrival clouds are actually at higher altitudes than is typical. Most Martian clouds hover no more than about 37 miles (60 kilometers) in the sky and are composed of water ice. But the clouds Curiosity has imaged are at a higher altitude, where it’s very cold, indicating that they are likely made of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Scientists look for subtle clues to establish a cloud’s altitude, and it will take more analysis to say for sure which of Curiosity’s recent images show water-ice clouds and which show dry-ice ones. – NASA JPL

This GIF shows clouds floating over Mount Sharp on Mars. The rover took these photos in mid-March. 

In late March, the rover took more photos of clouds just after sunset. 

Another GIF of Martian clouds after sunset about 37 miles in the sky and are primarily composed of water ice and sometimes offer a colorful display. 

“If you see a cloud with a shimmery pastel set of colors in it, that’s because the cloud particles are all nearly identical in size,” said Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “That’s usually happening just after the clouds have formed and have all grown at the same rate.”

“I always marvel at the colors that show up: reds and greens and blues and purples,” Lemmon said. “It’s really cool to see something shining with lots of color on Mars.”

Curiosity landed on the Red Planet in August 2012 and is still operating. The rover was designed to explore the Gale crater as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission. What’s been grabbing all the headlines this year has been NASA’s Perseverance rover and the tiny robotic, coaxial helicopter Ingenuity, which landed on the planet in mid-February. Also, China landed its rover on the plant weeks ago. 

Mars is becoming a highly focused planet because it contains many valuable resources, including rare metals, that have ignited a new rush by global superpowers to conduct future space mining missions. Before Mars is mined, the Moon will likely experience mining operations first. 

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Lifetime real earnings of the median male worker declined by 10% from those who entered the US labor market in 1967 to those in 1983, or roughly a loss of $136,000.

A study on Lifetime Earnings in the United States over Six Decades is worth a close look.

The study shows the United States shows a “wage stagnation of average earnings and a rise in income inequality since the 1970s.” The charts are based on US Social Security Administration (SSA) records over 57 years.

The charts are more than a bit confusing unless one carefully dives into the details.

The lead chart is titled “Median Lifetime Earnings” but shows instead annualized real (inflation adjusted) annual wages, not lifetime or real lifetime earnings.

Lifetime Definition

• Lifetime earnings means earnings between the age of 25 and 55 inclusive.

• Annualized lifetime earnings as depicted in the chart is the sum of real annual labor earnings from ages 25 to 55, divided by 31.

When nominal earnings are deflated by the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) deflator, the annualized value of median lifetime wage/salary earnings for male workers declined by $4,400 per year from the 1967 cohort to the 1983 cohort, or $136,400 over the 31-year working period.

The lifetime earnings of the median male worker declined by 10 percent from the 1967 cohort to the 1983 cohort. Further, more than three-quarters of the distribution of men experienced no rise in their lifetime earnings across these cohorts. 

Cohort Definition 

As used in the article, cohort means all of those who turned 25, 35. 45, etc. in a particular year. 

Key Notes 

A download of the Working Paper PDF provides these insights.

• Median initial earnings fell from $33,300 for the 1967 cohort to $29,000 for the 1983 cohort (PCE adjusted in 2013 dollars). 

• The analogous figures at age 55 were $55,900 for the former cohort and $54,100 for the latter, a decline of $1,800, showing no sign of catch-up over the life cycle.

• Median initial earnings for men was only $24,400 in 2011, virtually the same level as in 1957.

• Cohorts of female workers have seen robust and steady gains, on the order of 22% to 33% for the median female worker. However, because these gains started from a very low level of median lifetime earnings for the 1957 cohort, they were not large enough at the aggregate level to offset the losses by men.

• Using the CPI rather than the PCE to convert nominal earnings to 2013 dollars lowers lifetime earnings growth for both men and women.

Inflation Adjustments 

The two most commonly used price indexes are the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) deflator from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the consumer price index (CPI) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS). The (older) CPI and the (newer) PCE differ in several ways that are by now well understood.

The PCE is generally accepted to be the superior index for measuring the overall price level and its evolution over the business cycle. It is thus the standard choice in aggregate (macro) economic analyses. However, for more micro work, such as the analyses in this paper, the CPI has some advantages. In particular, the CPI aims to capture the price level faced by the typical household for its out-of-pocket expenses and is thus based on a detailed survey of U.S. household expenditures, whereas the PCE is based on business surveys and also includes purchases made by others on behalf of households. Consequently, relative to the PCE, the CPI places a lower weight on health care prices (since a large fraction of total expenditures is paid by Medicare/Medicaid and insurance companies) and a much higher weight on housing and transportation. 

In our empirical analysis, we choose the PCE as our baseline measure for deflating nominal earnings because it implies a lower cumulative inflation over this period than the CPI. We report all values in 2013 dollars. 

Lifetime Earnings for Men and Women

• From the 1957 to the 1983 cohort, annualized mean lifetime earnings for men rose by around $10,000, from $42,200 to $52,200. This rise corresponds to a cumulative increase of 23.7%, or an average increase of 0.82% between two consecutive cohorts.

• However, the bulk of these gains—21.9% of the total 23.7%—accrued to only the first 10 or so cohorts. From the 1967 to the 1983 cohort, mean lifetime earnings increased by only 1.5% cumulatively.

• Median lifetime earnings for men has barely changed from the 1957 cohort to the 1983 cohort, increasing by only about $250—or less than 1%.

• Across almost the entire distribution of males, there have been either trivial, or even negative, gains in lifetime earnings.

• Women, on the other hand, have seen increases in lifetime earnings throughout the entire distribution. Median lifetime earnings increased nearly monotonically from $14,100 for the 1957 cohort to $22,300 for the 1983 cohort. 

• This steady increase in lifetime earnings for women has been broad-based, with all parts of the distribution experiencing consistent lifetime earnings growth across cohorts. 

• Median lifetime earnings for women grew at an average rate of 1.8% per cohort for the 27 cohorts from 1957 to 1983, with almost the exact same annualized growth rates for the 10 cohorts from 1957 to 1967 and the 16 cohorts from 1967 to 1983.

• Looking at the population as a whole, we find that the trends for men and women combine in sometimes offsetting ways.

Closing the Gender Gap

The chart looks severely dated but cohort means the year in which someone turned 25. 

Figure 3 plots the ratio of the mean lifetime earnings of females to that of males

In 1960, median inflation adjusted wages for women aged 25 were less than 40% of males.  But fewer women than men were working and fewer women than men were college educated.

After 1965, the gap started to close quickly (showing an almost linear trend), and by the 1983 cohort (working women who turned 25 in 1983), the lifetime earnings of women reached more than 60% of their male counterparts.

To the extent real median wages have risen in aggregate, it is because of the headway made by women relative to men. 

Decline of Men vs Women

The mean lifetime income for men rose until 1972. The median topped out a bit earlier in 1967 albeit by an arguably meaningless 0.13 percentage points. 

Those who turned 25 in 1983 were 55 in 2014. Thus the study misses the last 7 years. 

Even Worse Than It Looks

The charts and findings are even worse than they look. 

The PCE measure of inflation is understated relative to the CPI.

Both are severely understated since 1999 relative to housing. Housing-adjusted real wages have been hammered in aggregate, and even more so for men.  

For discussion, please see Fed Sponsored Speculation: Real Interest Rates Are -4.1 Percent, Lowest Since 1980.

Placing the Blame

The Fed with tremendous help from Congress seeks to destroy the dollar. They have succeeded. Yet the Fed rails against income inequality. 

The Fed, Congress, and Progressive need to look in the mirror to see who is to blame for falling real wages.

“It costs only a few cents for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce a $100 bill, but other countries had to pony up $100 of actual goods in order to obtain one,” accurately quipped American economist Barry Eichengreen.

Trade Distortions and Wage Distortions

1. Real wages are a function of global wage arbitrage.

2. GWA is a function of Nixon closing the gold window, allowing deficits to explode.

3. Factor in the Fed inflating assets for the benefit of the wealthy

4. Factor in bailouts by Congress

5. Assign Percentages https://t.co/gRXeovQwN3

— Mike “Mish” Shedlock (@MishGEA) May 28, 2021

In addition to trade distortions inaccurately blamed on NAFTA, real wages is another data series that goes back to Nixon closing the gold window in 1971.

For details, please see Nixon Shock, the Reserve Currency Curse, and a Pending Currency Crisis.

Is the Fed Trying to Destroy the Dollar?

A friend asks “Is the Fed Trying to Destroy the US Dollar?”

The answer is yes, to repeatedly bail out the banks at the expense of consumers.

Be my guest at assigning percentage blame.