One Fifth Of Young Adults Are Neither Working Nor Studying

One Fifth Of Young Adults Are Neither Working Nor Studying

If one defines a failed state as one where the most productive segment of society does nothing, then America is 20% of the way there.

According to a new report from the Center for Economic Policy and Research, 18.3% or almost one in five young adults in the U.S., were neither working nor studying in the first quarter as Black and Hispanic youth remained idle at disproportionate rates.

Specifically, some 3.8 million Americans aged 20 to 24 were not in employment, education or training (known as the NEET rate) in the first three months of the year. That’s up a whopping 24%, or 740,000, from a year earlier, before many lost their jobs or opted to defer college enrollment as campuses shut down at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bloomberg notes that while the NEET rate has eased from its April 2020 peak, progress on reducing racial disparities hasn’t been as even. Almost a quarter of Black young adults were inactive last quarter, up from 20.9% in the same period of 2020. The rate for Hispanics in that age group was just under 20% and about 16% for White Americans. As usual, Asian somehow always find ways to be the busiest of all despite such widespread excuses for failure as “systematic racism” and “white rage.”

Last quarter’s surge was driven by joblessness, while school attendance rose moderately as campuses started to reopen, according to the CEPR study. Young adults are still experiencing double-digit unemployment rates.

“Current and ongoing recovery efforts need to do more to ensure that young adults in today’s diverse working class can improve their long-term prospects in the labor market and prosper in the years ahead,” said CEPR’s Simran Kalkat, an author of the report.

Needless to say, inactive youth is a worrying sign for the future of the economy, as they don’t gain critical job skills to help realize their future earnings potential. High NEET rates also foster environments that are fertile for social unrest, although since no politician will ever recognize the mindblowing Chicago gun violence, we may as well just ignore this.

Separately, for the first time in history, the jobless rate for teenagers in May was lower than the rate for workers age 20 to 24. However, the unemployment rate for those in their early 20s has improved over the last six months to 10.1% from 10.7%.

As Bloomberg concludes, this week’s jobs report will provide some insight as to whether states ending pandemic unemployment benefits will encourage young adults to return to work (spoiler alert: yes). It will also show if there are more opportunities in lower-paid service jobs as the economy continues to reopen, which teens are likely to apply for.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 16:40

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Broadway Hit Hamilton Could Get Up to $50 Million Federal Bailout


sudan-ouyang-UQuka_ruWxQ-unsplash

When it comes to wasteful COVID-19 spending, it might seem like there aren’t many things the federal government hasn’t done.

But just you wait.

Broadway mega-hit Hamilton will receive at least $30 million and possibly as much as $50 million in federal bailout funds, The New York Times reported Wednesday, despite its status as one of the most successful and profitable musicals in American history. The funds are being delivered through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) program, a $15 billion portion of the $900 billion COVID relief bill passed by Congress last December. Each production affected by the pandemic is allowed to apply for up to $10 million from the program, but Hamilton will get several times that total because the Broadway production and each of four touring shows are separately eligible, according to the Times.

Indeed, it must be nice to have Washington on your side.

Jeffrey Seller, Hamilton’s lead producer, tells the Times that none of the bailout money is going to the show’s producers or investors and that it won’t be paid out in royalties to artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda. Instead, the money will be used to “remount those shuttered productions” and pay off bills that accumulated during the show’s pandemic-induced hiatus.

Don’t buy this argument. Money is fungible and every dollar that taxpayers contribute to “remount those shuttered productions” is a dollar that the show’s investors and producers won’t have to spend or borrow to do the same. Let’s be very clear about this: Hamilton was absolutely going to return to the stage whether the federal government kicked in $50 million or nothing at all.

Worse, every dollar spent bailing out mega-hit Broadway shows is a dollar that can’t be spent to help get smaller productions and theaters that don’t have access to private credit and investments on the scale that Hamilton surely does. If there is any role for the government to play in helping entertainment businesses get back on their feet after the financial impact of the pandemic, that’s where the focus should be. How many community theaters could be saved with that same $50 million being showered on Hamilton?

That’s the problem with almost all government bail-out schemes. You gotta be in the room where it happens—metaphorically, at least. Successful businesses will always have an advantage over those who lack the lobbyists, name recognition, or culture cachet required to cash in.

On the other hand, the federal government’s firehose of COVID relief spending—$5.9 trillion and counting—means it is easier than ever to get bailed out. So far, the government has responded to the pandemic by sending money to people who earn six-figure paychecks, paying fully vaccinated people not to work even though there are millions of available jobs, bailing out state governments that are running huge surpluses, and using the pandemic as cover for a massive bailout of union-run pension funds, among other things.

Like with Hamilton, there doesn’t seem to be any consideration of when or how much government aid is necessary. We’ve pumped so much money into the system—nearly all of it borrowed and added to the country’s long-term debt problems—and it has to go somewhere.

Did a bunch of fake celebrities whose only claim to fame is being former contestants on The Bachelor need the federal government to dump as much as $20,000 apiece into their bank accounts? Nope, but they got the cash anyway, according to data gathered by ProPublica and reported in a variety of media outlets.

The likelihood that those funds are critical to preserving the American economy from the scourge of COVID-19 is less than the chance of someone finding true love on a trashy reality television show—or the odds that the curtain would come down on Hamilton without millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded aid.

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San Jose Wants to Force Gun Owners to Carry Insurance and Pay Fees


reason-sanjose2

On Tuesday, the San Jose City Council unanimously advanced a number of novel gun control proposals, including requirements that gun owners carry liability insurance and that they pay a fee to cover the public costs of gun violence.

“While the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms, it does not require taxpayers to subsidize gun ownership,” said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo in a Tuesday press release. “We won’t magically end gun violence, but we will stop paying for it.”

These proposals come a month after a workplace shooting at a light rail facility in San Jose left 10 people dead, including the shooter.

The mayor describes San Jose’s insurance mandate as a “first-of-its-kind” policy, although the idea has been floating around for a while. Following the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, a flurry of state lawmakers from Connecticut to California introduced bills mandating gun owners carry insurance. None of those proposals become law.

A House bill introduced this year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D–Texas) would create a federal insurance mandate in addition to requirements that gun owners get a license, pay an $800 licensing fee, and register their individual firearms.

Most of the details of San Jose’s proposed gun laws have yet to be fleshed out, including the fee structure for gun ownership and how much insurance gun owners might be required to purchase.

The city is asking the Pacific Institute for Research Evaluation (PIRE), a nonprofit research group, to prepare a report on the costs to San Jose taxpayers of gun violence, which will then be used to calculate appropriate fees.

A preliminary report prepared by PIRE ahead of Tuesday’s vote put the annual costs to federal, state, and local governments from gun violence in San Jose at $39.7 million. That figure includes all the costs stemming from murders and assaults as well as suicides and unintentional shootings.

Fee revenue would be split with Santa Clara County, which contains San Jose, to cover things like emergency room treatment, victim assistance, jail, criminal prosecution, and mental health services.

Because the city of San Jose doesn’t have a register of firearm owners, it’d be up to individuals to proactively pay any required fees and get insurance coverage. Those who didn’t would be at risk of fines or having their guns confiscated.

Anthony Mata, chief of the San Jose Police Department, said that officers wouldn’t go door to door to enforce the coverage mandate, but would ask for proof of insurance should they find a gun during the course of other police work.

“Where there’s an interaction, a lawful car stop or consensual search, that’s the opportunity where the officer finds a gun, he can ask the question,” Mata said at Tuesday’s meeting.

San Jose’s proposal is already attracting controversy from gun rights activists. The Sacramento-based Firearms Policy Coalition, a gun rights group, and Gun Owners of California have both said they intend to sue the city. “The mayor will have his rear end handed to him in a basket by the courts,” said Sam Paderes, executive director of the Gun Owners of California, to the Guardian last week.

Liccardo himself was quite cavalier about the possibility that the city would end up in court, saying Tuesday that “when it comes to sensible gun control, no good deed goes unlitigated.” The mayor also said that the city had consulted with a number of outside groups, including the Giffords Law Center, a gun control group, on the legality of its proposals.

George Mocsary, a law professor at the University of Wyoming, says that San Jose’s proposed gun control policies raise a number of constitutional issues.

It’s highly questionable, he says, if insurers will actually write the kinds of policies that San Jose would require gun owners to purchase. If they don’t, then they would be unable to comply with the city’s mandate, and thus effectively would be prohibited from owning firearms.

“You can’t intentionally ban something indirectly if you can’t ban it directly,” he says, adding that if gun owners were required to pay exorbitant fees or to purchase more insurance than what would be considered “actuarially fair,” that would likely also be unconstitutional.

Mocsary also raises some practical concerns with requiring gun owners to carry insurance, arguing that it could increase the potential for more firearm injuries.

“The best way to incentivize more of an activity is to take away the financial consequences of that activity,” he tells Reason. “If you are taking away from individuals the financial consequences of people being hurt by their guns because their insurance will pay for it, the natural behavior will be for people to take less care.”

The memorandum that the San Jose City Council approved yesterday laid out only the broad strokes of its insurance mandate and gun ownership fees. It directs the city attorney to draft more detailed ordinances by September. Once complete, those ordinances will then go before the city council for another vote.

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Forget Goldilocks: El-Erian Doubts “Transitory” Narrative, Fears “Increasing Risk Of Instability”

Forget Goldilocks: El-Erian Doubts “Transitory” Narrative, Fears “Increasing Risk Of Instability”

Authored by Mohamed El-Erian, op-ed via The Financial Times,

Too much confidence is placed in the view that inflation rises will be transitory…

It is not often that I take a very strong view that runs directly counter to the market consensus. On the rare occasions in the past that I have done so, it has been an uncomfortable feeling at first.

The question is whether my current scepticism over the consensus view of a “Goldilocks-like” scenario for markets of not-too-hot, not-too-cold conditions, moves from being an outlier to a baseline for economists and policymakers. The good thing on this one is that I will not mind if I end up being wrong as it would also mean a much lower risk of unnecessary economic and financial disruption.

As highlighted by a recent Bank of America survey, markets are currently dominated by a consensus based on three core hypotheses: durable high global growth; transitory inflation; and ever-friendly central banks.

By embracing this trifecta, investors have pushed equity and corporate bonds ever higher, anchored government bond markets, and sidelined short sellers who bet on falling prices.

Notwithstanding some qualifications, I have no serious quarrel with the view that growth will be robust in the biggest economic regions in the world — China, the EU and the US.

Indeed, I am more optimistic about European growth prospects than I have been for a very long time. I also agree that the systemically important central banks will maintain ultra-loose monetary policies for quite a while. Whether warranted (in the case of the European Central Bank) or not (in the case of the US Federal Reserve), they have too much of their reputation and thinking invested in uber-stimulus to risk a premature easing of the monetary accelerator.

I do worry a great deal, however, about the widespread conviction that the current rise in inflation will be transitory. This is not because I deny the two influences on the current data will be reversed — comparisons with a low base last year and some temporary supply-demand mismatches.

Rather, it is because of all the on-the-ground evidence of structural changes in supply at a time when aggregate demand will remain robust.

This is notable in the functioning of the labour market with uncertainty over skill mismatches pushing up wages. Labour supply might also be affected by a different propensity to work coming out of the pandemic. In addition, there are ongoing changes in supply chains, inventory management and transportation.

Then there are the typical lags. Not having lived through an inflation period for quite a while, there might be too little appreciation by some investors of two historical dynamics.

First, seemingly one-off increases in prices can cascade through the system. Second, a rise in inflation can be persistent, starting with commodities and prices at the factory gate only to end up in consumer prices and wages.

To be clear, I do not expect a return to the inflation of the 1970s. But we have to respect the possibility of a shock to a financial system that has been conditioned and wired for the persistence of lower and more stable inflation.

All of which leads to another complication. Should such worries be borne out over the next few quarters — and it will take time as central banks are likely to extend the time period that defines “transitory” — that would raise doubts about the other two elements of the market consensus on high growth and friendly central banks.

With the Fed having switched its approach on monetary policy to being dependent on outcomes in economic data rather than the traditional forecast-based approach, it is likely to be very late in adjusting strategy should its transitory inflation call not materialise.

A late slamming of the brakes, rather than an earlier easing off the accelerator, would significantly increase the risk of an unnecessary economic recession.

Indeed, that is the strong cautionary message that emerges from even the most cursory reading of the history of modern central banking policy mistakes. It also risks unsettling financial stability, undermining growth further. And that is if market accidents do not precede the policy mistake.

Central banks’ often repeated assertion that inflation will be “transitory” is sidelining much needed exploration of what is happening to both price dynamics and the functioning of the labour market. The result is a comforting equilibrium with underpinnings that become increasingly unstable.

With that comes an increasing risk of instability down the road, exposing us all to significant economic and financial damage — damage that, fortunately, can still be avoided if both central banks and markets widen their perspective.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 16:20

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San Jose Wants to Force Gun Owners to Carry Insurance and Pay Fees


reason-sanjose2

On Tuesday, the San Jose City Council unanimously advanced a number of novel gun control proposals, including requirements that gun owners carry liability insurance and that they pay a fee to cover the public costs of gun violence.

“While the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms, it does not require taxpayers to subsidize gun ownership,” said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo in a Tuesday press release. “We won’t magically end gun violence, but we will stop paying for it.”

These proposals come a month after a workplace shooting at a light rail facility in San Jose left 10 people dead, including the shooter.

The mayor describes San Jose’s insurance mandate as a “first-of-its-kind” policy, although the idea has been floating around for a while. Following the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, a flurry of state lawmakers from Connecticut to California introduced bills mandating gun owners carry insurance. None of those proposals become law.

A House bill introduced this year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D–Texas) would create a federal insurance mandate in addition to requirements that gun owners get a license, pay an $800 licensing fee, and register their individual firearms.

Most of the details of San Jose’s proposed gun laws have yet to be fleshed out, including the fee structure for gun ownership and how much insurance gun owners might be required to purchase.

The city is asking the Pacific Institute for Research Evaluation (PIRE), a nonprofit research group, to prepare a report on the costs to San Jose taxpayers of gun violence, which will then be used to calculate appropriate fees.

A preliminary report prepared by PIRE ahead of Tuesday’s vote put the annual costs to federal, state, and local governments from gun violence in San Jose at $39.7 million. That figure includes all the costs stemming from murders and assaults as well as suicides and unintentional shootings.

Fee revenue would be split with Santa Clara County, which contains San Jose, to cover things like emergency room treatment, victim assistance, jail, criminal prosecution, and mental health services.

Because the city of San Jose doesn’t have a register of firearm owners, it’d be up to individuals to proactively pay any required fees and get insurance coverage. Those who didn’t would be at risk of fines or having their guns confiscated.

Anthony Mata, chief of the San Jose Police Department, said that officers wouldn’t go door to door to enforce the coverage mandate, but would ask for proof of insurance should they find a gun during the course of other police work.

“Where there’s an interaction, a lawful car stop or consensual search, that’s the opportunity where the officer finds a gun, he can ask the question,” Mata said at Tuesday’s meeting.

San Jose’s proposal is already attracting controversy from gun rights activists. The Sacramento-based Firearms Policy Coalition, a gun rights group, and Gun Owners of California have both said they intend to sue the city. “The mayor will have his rear end handed to him in a basket by the courts,” said Sam Paderes, executive director of the Gun Owners of California, to the Guardian last week.

Liccardo himself was quite cavalier about the possibility that the city would end up in court, saying Tuesday that “when it comes to sensible gun control, no good deed goes unlitigated.” The mayor also said that the city had consulted with a number of outside groups, including the Giffords Law Center, a gun control group, on the legality of its proposals.

George Mocsary, a law professor at the University of Wyoming, says that San Jose’s proposed gun control policies raise a number of constitutional issues.

It’s highly questionable, he says, if insurers will actually write the kinds of policies that San Jose would require gun owners to purchase. If they don’t, then they would be unable to comply with the city’s mandate, and thus effectively would be prohibited from owning firearms.

“You can’t intentionally ban something indirectly if you can’t ban it directly,” he says, adding that if gun owners were required to pay exorbitant fees or to purchase more insurance than what would be considered “actuarially fair,” that would likely also be unconstitutional.

Mocsary also raises some practical concerns with requiring gun owners to carry insurance, arguing that it could increase the potential for more firearm injuries.

“The best way to incentivize more of an activity is to take away the financial consequences of that activity,” he tells Reason. “If you are taking away from individuals the financial consequences of people being hurt by their guns because their insurance will pay for it, the natural behavior will be for people to take less care.”

The memorandum that the San Jose City Council approved yesterday laid out only the broad strokes of its insurance mandate and gun ownership fees. It directs the city attorney to draft more detailed ordinances by September. Once complete, those ordinances will then go before the city council for another vote.

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Federal Law Enforcement Is Running Roughshod Over Facial Recognition Privacy, Says GAO


facialrecogdreamstime

Out of the 86 federal agencies that employ full-time law enforcement officers, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed 42 of them about whether they either owned and/or used facial recognition technologies from outside suppliers. At the request of members of Congress, the GAO looked at how many agencies used the technology; why they used it; and how carefully the agencies tracked their employees’ use of the technology.

In the GAO report released yesterday, 20 agencies acknowledged that they did use facial recognition technology. Three owned internal systems, 12 used outside suppliers, and 5 both owned internal systems and used outside suppliers. The report found that 10 agencies used Clearview AI and 5 used its competitor, Vigilant Systems. Most of the agencies that acknowledged using facial recognition technology admitted to exercising little oversight of employee use of the technology and having no systems in place to protect privacy.

The report notes that the agencies generally used facial recognition for verification (matching a photo of an individual to another photo of the same person) and identification (comparing an unknown individual’s photo against a set of others to determine a potential match). For instance, the Federal Bureau of Prisons uses facial recognition to verify which of its 8,000 employees could access secure network operations centers at certain facilities. In addition, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) uses the technology to verify the identity of certain travelers entering and exiting the country. The GAO observes that the CBP has still not implemented its earlier recommendations for assuring the accuracy of that agency’s systems and establishing privacy protections for travelers’ data.

On the other hand, six agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the U.S. Capitol Police, reported using facial recognition technology from May through August 2020 to support criminal investigations related to civil unrest, riots, and protests following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In addition, three agencies used facial recognition technologies seeking to identify suspects in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

The only reported real-time surveillance use of the technology was a now-discontinued experiment by the Secret Service that tracked volunteers as they went about their jobs in the White House complex.

One of the chief findings of the GAO report is that 13 of the surveyed agencies actually have no real idea how their employees are using outside systems in their investigative activities. In addition, most of the agencies have never formally assessed the privacy and accuracy-related risks of using non-federal facial recognition systems.

“Facial recognition is out of control, and it’s only getting worse,” said Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn in a statement. “It’s alarming that six federal agencies targeted facial recognition at BLM protesters. In a democracy, police should not be allowed to use surveillance to punish dissent. While the GAO’s findings are alarming, their recommendations don’t go far enough. We don’t need facial recognition regulations, we need a full ban. We can’t wait for Congress to act, so we are calling on President Biden to issue a moratorium on federal facial recognition.”

Similarly, the Electronic Privacy Information Center observes that the “GAO finds widespread use of facial recognition without adequate privacy protections.” EPIC adds that earlier this month it had “joined over 40 other organizations to detail the issues with law enforcement’s use of facial recognition and call for a law enforcement ban on the technology’s use.”

Civil liberties advocates are right to worry that expanding police use of facial recognition technologies has already placed essentially all Americans in a perpetual lineup. The longer-term concern, however, is that the ongoing normalization of cyber-surveillance will anesthetize the public and eventually enable law enforcement to begin using the technology for pervasive real-time surveillance. Deploying such tech would essentially turn our faces into ID cards on permanent display to the police.

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Supreme Court Won’t Hear Case Challenging Massachusetts’ Income Tax on Telecommuters Who Don’t Live or Work in Massachusetts


westendrf648864

The Supreme Court won’t take up New Hampshire’s lawsuit against Massachusetts over teleworker taxes. Massachusetts has a policy of taxing out-of-state teleworkers working for Bay State companies.

The Court justifiably deemed the lawsuit out of its jurisdiction. But the decision to pass on the case frustrates many who were hoping to get nationwide clarity on how states can tax the income of out-of-state workers, particularly teleworkers. 

Income tax for those living in one state and working in another has always been a tangled mess, with rules and differing from state to state. The confusion has been compounded during the pandemic, with the rise of teleworkers who live and work out of state.

States have the ability to tax income that was earned by working in the state and income that was earned by residents of the state. This means that if someone works in New York and lives in Vermont, then New York can tax it because it was earned by working in New York, and Vermont can tax it because it was earned by a resident of Vermont. Fortunately, like most states, Vermont offers a refund of the amount one pays in New York income tax, so the income would not be taxed twice. 

But these refund schemes vary from state to state, creating a complicated web that can make filing as an out-of-state worker a headache. 

For remote workers, the confusion only grows. Take the case of a person who lives in New Hampshire but, under typical circumstances, commutes to work in Massachusetts. As of 2017, more than 103,000 people—that’s more than 15 percent of all New Hampshire workers—were in this position.

During the pandemic, many of these people were forced to work from home. This would seem to mean that because they earned the income while working at home in New Hampshire and are residents of New Hampshire, that income could only be taxed in New Hampshire. And since New Hampshire has no income tax, that means they would owe nothing on that money. 

This is where the controversial Massachusetts rule comes in. Effective March 10, 2020, Massachusetts instituted a temporary rule that gave the state the power to tax the income of remote workers who typically work in Massachusetts. For those in income tax-free states like New Hampshire, that means being subject to income taxes that people who work non-remote jobs in the state don’t have to pay.

The rule states: “All compensation received for services performed by a non-resident who, immediately prior to the Massachusetts COVID-19 state of emergency was an employee engaged in performing such services in Massachusetts, and who is performing services from a location outside Massachusetts due to a Pandemic-Related Circumstance will continue to be treated as Massachusetts source income subject to personal income tax.” 

New Hampshire officials sued Massachusetts over this policy, considering it an affront to their sovereignty to decide how workers in their state are taxed. 

“In the middle of a global pandemic, Massachusetts has taken deliberate aim at the New Hampshire Advantage by purporting to impose Massachusetts income tax on New Hampshire residents for income earned while working within New Hampshire,” reads New Hampshire’s complaint. “Upending decades of consistent practice, Massachusetts now taxes income earned entirely outside its borders. Through its unprecedented action, Massachusetts has unilaterally imposed an income tax within New Hampshire that New Hampshire, in its sovereign discretion, has deliberately chosen not to impose.” 

In its brief, the Supreme Court said that it passed on the case because—as established by the precedent set by Mississippi v. Louisiana and other similar cases in order to protect the rights of states—the court will not take state-on-state suits “unless the threatened invasion of rights is of serious magnitude and established by clear and convincing evidence.” 

Legal scholars note that, in general terms, this means the court will not take on state-on-state suits unless there is a clear reason why this suit is being brought by a state and not by a private citizen affected by the issue. 

“New Hampshire does not invoke the types of interests that would warrant such an exercise,” reads the Supreme Court brief, “and the issues New Hampshire seeks to present can adequately be raised and litigated by New Hampshire residents who are subject to the Massachusetts income tax.”

While this may be the right decision, the Court passing on the case leaves open the question of whether states have the ability to tax out-of-state remote workers. The Massachusetts rule, although temporary, could set a precedent that remote workers in another state have strong enough economic ties and impact to the state where their company is located to merit being taxed out of state. 

This could cause further problems, especially for those who live and work remotely in states that do have an income tax, unlike New Hampshire. As of now, state rules regarding refunds for those who work out of state do not usually include remote workers. This means that if teleworkers were taxed in the state where their company is, they could be taxed twice on the same income. 

In our increasingly remote-work world, people now have the opportunity to choose where they want to live, and, independently from that, where they want to work. This gives them the opportunity to live in lower-tax states like New Hampshire and work for companies based in urban centers in states like Massachusetts, New York, and California.

Remote employees of Massachusetts companies living in New Hampshire aren’t using the roads in Massachusetts or creating trash that Massachusetts must dispose of. Their employers are already paying corporate taxes in Massachusetts. Out-of-state employees are not consuming in-state public goods, and should not be required to pay for them.

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Stocks & Bonds Soar In ‘Stagflationary’ Q2, June Gloom Crushes Crypto

Stocks & Bonds Soar In ‘Stagflationary’ Q2, June Gloom Crushes Crypto

An ugly year for “hard data”, especially relative to expectations, but that didn’t stop oil prices, big-tech stocks from soaring (as the yield curve flattened dramatically with the long-end well bid)

Source: Bloomberg

And Q2 saw ominous stagflationary signals…

Source: Bloomberg

As Bubble Markets followed The Fed’s balance sheet flow…

Source: Bloomberg

This seemed to sum things up…

In Q2, the long-bond outperformed The Dow as the dollar sank…

Source: Bloomberg

June saw bonds surged and bullion purged…

Source: Bloomberg

The S&P 500 just had its best first half of the year since 1998. Trannies outperformed in H1 but were rapidly losing gains and Nasdaq underperformed (but was rapidly rallying back)…

Source: Bloomberg

S&P are up 5 straight months (and 5 straight quarters)

All major equity indices were higher in Q2 with Nasdaq the leader and Dow Industrials and Transports lagging…

Source: Bloomberg

Nasdaq was also June’s best performer, The Dow was unchanged and Trannies tumbled…

Source: Bloomberg

The growth versus value trend regimes have ebbed and flowed but overall both have done sell in 2021 so far…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields were very mixed this quarter with 30Y yields plunging 34bps (biggest yield drop since Q1 2020) as 2Y yields surged almost 11bps (biggest quarterly spike since Q3 2018)…

Source: Bloomberg

With the long end crashing over 20bps in June (biggest yield plunge since March 2020) alone while the short-end yields rose over 10bps (the biggest monthly spike since Sept 2019)…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar ended lower for Q2 after its Q1 surge, but rebounded notably in June…

Source: Bloomberg

Q2 was a bloodbath for Bitcoin (down 40%), suffering its worth quarter since Q4 2018, but Ethereum managed a 20% gain

Source: Bloomberg

ETH remains significantly higher relative to BTC since the start of the year…

Source: Bloomberg

But all majors Cryptos had a really ugly June…

Source: Bloomberg

Commodities were up for the 5th straight quarter in Q2. All the majors were higher but oil soared most (with everything decoupling from crude in June)….

Source: Bloomberg

Commodities had a very mixed June with crude soaring while Dr.Copper was clubbed like a baby seal…

Source: Bloomberg

As dramatic as that outperformance was, Crude relative to copper is still not back to pre-COVID levels…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, banks lodged just under one trillion dollars of excess malarkey with The Fed over the month/quarter-end…

Source: Bloomberg

Probably nothing!

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 16:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3yf18o5 Tyler Durden

Federal Law Enforcement Is Running Roughshod Over Facial Recognition Privacy, Says GAO


facialrecogdreamstime

Out of the 86 federal agencies that employ full-time law enforcement officers, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed 42 of them about whether they either owned and/or used facial recognition technologies from outside suppliers. At the request of members of Congress, the GAO looked at how many agencies used the technology; why they used it; and how carefully the agencies tracked their employees’ use of the technology.

In the GAO report released yesterday, 20 agencies acknowledged that they did use facial recognition technology. Three owned internal systems, 12 used outside suppliers, and 5 both owned internal systems and used outside suppliers. The report found that 10 agencies used Clearview AI and 5 used its competitor, Vigilant Systems. Most of the agencies that acknowledged using facial recognition technology admitted to exercising little oversight of employee use of the technology and having no systems in place to protect privacy.

The report notes that the agencies generally used facial recognition for verification (matching a photo of an individual to another photo of the same person) and identification (comparing an unknown individual’s photo against a set of others to determine a potential match). For instance, the Federal Bureau of Prisons uses facial recognition to verify which of its 8,000 employees could access secure network operations centers at certain facilities. In addition, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) uses the technology to verify the identity of certain travelers entering and exiting the country. The GAO observes that the CBP has still not implemented its earlier recommendations for assuring the accuracy of that agency’s systems and establishing privacy protections for travelers’ data.

On the other hand, six agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the U.S. Capitol Police, reported using facial recognition technology from May through August 2020 to support criminal investigations related to civil unrest, riots, and protests following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In addition, three agencies used facial recognition technologies seeking to identify suspects in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

The only reported real-time surveillance use of the technology was a now-discontinued experiment by the Secret Service that tracked volunteers as they went about their jobs in the White House complex.

One of the chief findings of the GAO report is that 13 of the surveyed agencies actually have no real idea how their employees are using outside systems in their investigative activities. In addition, most of the agencies have never formally assessed the privacy and accuracy-related risks of using non-federal facial recognition systems.

“Facial recognition is out of control, and it’s only getting worse,” said Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn in a statement. “It’s alarming that six federal agencies targeted facial recognition at BLM protesters. In a democracy, police should not be allowed to use surveillance to punish dissent. While the GAO’s findings are alarming, their recommendations don’t go far enough. We don’t need facial recognition regulations, we need a full ban. We can’t wait for Congress to act, so we are calling on President Biden to issue a moratorium on federal facial recognition.”

Similarly, the Electronic Privacy Information Center observes that the “GAO finds widespread use of facial recognition without adequate privacy protections.” EPIC adds that earlier this month it had “joined over 40 other organizations to detail the issues with law enforcement’s use of facial recognition and call for a law enforcement ban on the technology’s use.”

Civil liberties advocates are right to worry that expanding police use of facial recognition technologies has already placed essentially all Americans in a perpetual lineup. The longer-term concern, however, is that the ongoing normalization of cyber-surveillance will anesthetize the public and eventually enable law enforcement to begin using the technology for pervasive real-time surveillance. Deploying such tech would essentially turn our faces into ID cards on permanent display to the police.

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As California Begins To Burn, Biden Meets With Western Governors

As California Begins To Burn, Biden Meets With Western Governors

Update: President Biden met with governors from Western states Wednesday to discuss new measures to contain wildfires as this year’s fire season could be one for the record books amid the latest historic heat wave and megadrought. 

“We know this is becoming a regular cycle and we know it’s getting worse,” Biden said at the meeting. “The truth is, we’re playing catch-up. This is an area that’s been under-resourced, but that’s going to change if we have anything to do with it.”

“Wildfires are not a partisan phenomenon,” Biden added. “We need a coordinated, comprehensive response… an we want to know what you, the states and localities and tribal governments, those on the frontlines, are facing in this danger, and what you think would help the most.”

Biden said the government has “to act fast” in containing and preventing wildfires, adding that, “We’re late in the game here.” 

The president addressed the wage issue among federal firefighters by increasing their minimum wage from $13 per hour to $15. As we noted below, Biden last week called $13 “ridiculously low.”

He said more federal firefighter positions would become permanent rather than seasonal “so that when fires aren’t burning, we have a workforce of experienced hands enhancing our forest management, reducing the risks of future fire seasons.”

For the fiscal year 2022, the Biden administration is requesting $30 billion for wildfire management and relief and a 62% rise in hazardous fuels treatment funding. 

* * * 

President Biden is expected to meet with governors of Western states as a megadrought, fallow lands, water shortages, and the latest heat dome has created perfect conditions for another devastating wildfire season.

Biden will meet with governors, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, to potentially boost federal funding to fight fires, according to Los Angeles Times

At the moment, a 13,000-acre wildfire has erupted in Northern California and continues to expand. Preliminary reports suggest the Lava Fire, burning west of Mount Shasta, is only 20% contained. 

Western governors are expecting more funding from the federal government after former President Trump frequently criticized them for mismanaging their forests by neglecting to remove brush. 

The meeting comes as the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are experiencing labor shortages due to low pay. Many state and local fire departments are exhausted from last year’s record-breaking fire season in California. 

Last week, the National Interagency Fire Center, based in Boise, Idaho, increased national preparedness to level 4 on a 1 to 5 scale, saying this is the second earliest it had reached that point.

Jim Whittington, an expert in wildland fire response, expects labor shortages to overwhelm fire crews this year as this season could be dangerous.

“We’re at a point where we’re simply going to be overwhelmed year after year going forward given the current systems we have in place.

“We really need to look at the way we staff and work wildland fires, the way we fund them, and the way we take care of our people. We need a full reset,” Whittington said.

The meeting with Biden and governors could result in better wages and benefits for firefighters. The president last week was outraged when he was told firefighters earn so little. 

“That’s a ridiculously low salary,” the president said in the Roosevelt Room in the White House during a meeting with top officials. 

Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a group that advocates for better pay and working conditions for federal firefighters, said people risk their lives for public safety and deserve better pay. 

Ahead of fire season, in early May, Robert Baird, chief for the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region, warned of “millions of dying trees and all of those pose hazards across California for all of us.”

In response, CALFIRE has already prepared for what could be a fiery year. The agency ramped up personnel and equipment to expand its reach across the state. 

PG&E’s chief risk officer Sumeet Singh is also preparing for what could be a dangerous year. He recently told WSJ that customers could experience increased rolling blackouts this summer as parts of the grid would have to be shut off to prevent fires. 

June is typically the month the wildfire season begins in California. The state, along with the Western half of the US, has been plagued with a megadrought that has produced an ample amount of fuels, such as brush and dead trees. 

Meanwhile, an unprecedented heat wave has battered the Pacific Northwest for the last week, shattering records as parts of Oregon and Washington record triple-digit temperatures

So what it looks like is that Biden will speak with governors from Western states today and could result in additional federal funding, personnel, and or equipment to combat future fires. 

Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/30/2021 – 15:45

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