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abigailspinach · 2 months ago

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But the two men gave remarkably different answers, neither of which seem likely to bring down the cost of child care.

Vance, speaking to a conservative activist at an Arizona church on Wednesday, thinks parents should look to grandparents, aunts and uncles for those who have them, and also suggested cutting down on training and certification requirements for day care workers. That answer, at least, focuses on the issue at hand, but it won’t satisfy any parent or potential parents who don’t live near their extended family or whose extended family can’t afford to work for free.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care. That – it’s going to take care – we’re going to have – I – I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.

Egan has written about the widely held fear among economists that Trump’s proposal to place a new 60% tariff tax on goods from China and a 10% across-the-board tariff on goods from other countries would mostly just be passed along to consumers and not replace income tax for the government. Trump’s not listening to those warnings.

Because I have to say with child care – I want to stay with child care – but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just – that I just told you about.

Hear that, parents? The cost of child care is small change compared with all the money the US is going to be bringing in from Trump’s tariffs. What you’re not hearing is a concrete proposal for a tax credit or a program to transform those tariff dollars Trump is sure the US government will be swimming in into help for affording child care.

We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.

Repeat: Child care – actually not very expensive, per Trump.

The child care question was put to Trump by Reshma Saujani, founder of Moms First and Girls Who Code. Spoiler alert: Saujani was not satisfied with what Trump had to say.

“I don’t even think he’s actually thought about this, and parents are suffering,” she later said on TikTok, arguing families are being crushed by the cost of child care.

While she might not have been expecting much from Trump’s answer, the question as she posed it on stage was detailed and not at all partisan. Here’s what she said:

President Trump, you – you talked about how the increase in the price of food, gas and rent is hurting families, but the real cost that’s breaking families’ backs and preventing women from participating in the workforce is child care. Child care is now more expensive than rent for working families and is costing the economy more than $122 billion a year, making it one of the most urgent economic issues that is facing our country. In fact, the cost of child care is outpacing the cost of inflation, with the majority of American families of young children spending more than 20% of their income on child care. One thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common is that both parties talk a lot about what they’re going to do to address the child care crisis, but neither party has delivered meaningful change. If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable? And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

-- Reshma Saujani

Saujani is mostly right on her facts. That $122 billion figure comes from a 2023 study by the nonpartisan nonprofit group Council for a Strong America. Luhby reported in May about another report that found in 11 states and Washington, DC, parents with two kids in a child care center could expect to pay at least twice as much for child care as for typical rent. CNN’s Matt Egan has also reported on the child care crisis.

So, this is not a new issue. But here’s what Trump had to say:

Well, I would do that. And we’re sitting down – you know, I was somebody – we had – Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter Ivanka were so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

Trump’s off to a good start here. When she worked in the White House, his daughter Ivanka did help add provisions to Trump’s tax cut law that doubled the child tax credit to $2,000 per child for millions of Americans, according to a CNN fact check.

However, those increases were not granted to the millions of children whose parents don’t make enough to pay income tax. Democrats would later further expand the child tax credit by up to an additional $1,600 and also gave the credit as cash even to families who don’t pay income taxes. That additional bump and expanding it to all parents was credited with cutting the child poverty rate nearly in half in 2021. But Democrats failed to get the votes for a longer-term expansion of that experiment.

Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to try to permanently extend and expand that credit, and Vance, not the Trump campaign, has also suggested he supports an expansion, but details are sketchy.

Even Trump’s doubling of the credit to $2,000 is set to expire next year, so this will be a key issue for whoever wins the White House. Luhby has written extensively about the child tax credit.

This is where Trump stops making much sense:

But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that – because, look, child care is child care. It’s – couldn’t – you know, it’s something – you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

Yes, you do have to have child care. But what are these numbers he’s talking about?

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly – and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

So Trump has moved from the cost of child care to the taxes – tariffs – he plans to impose on imports.

Repeat: Child care – actually not very expensive, per Trump.

We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first, it’s about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.

Yep. Very good question.

#Childcare #Childcare costs #US 2024 Election #CNN #tariffs

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newstfionline · 7 months ago

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Wednesday, April 3, 2024

California is gripped by economic problems, with no easy fix (Economist) Home to many of America’s most progressive policies, from criminal justice to vehicle emissions, California serves a unique role as a punchbag for right-wing politicians. Every few years it becomes fashionable to declare that it is a failed state, or that the California dream is turning into a nightmare. This rhetoric is often overblown: in terms of pure economic heft California remains the most powerful American state. But for all its continuing prowess in innovation (not least in artificial intelligence), California again appears to be entering one of its periodic rough patches. The state faces three overlapping challenges: rising unemployment, growing fiscal strains and population outflows. All of these should abate over time, but for now they mark out California as a pocket of relative weakness in an otherwise robust American economy.

State Department Defends Arms Transfers to Israel (Washington Post) State Department spokesman Matthew Miller defended the Biden administration’s recent decision to authorize the transfer of billions of dollars’ worth of warplanes and bombs to Israel, saying Israel needed to defend itself. Miller then came under pointed questioning about whether the 2,000-pound MK84 bombs authorized to be transferred should be described as “self-defense,” as the bombs have been linked to mass-casualty events in Gaza. Miller responded that Israel needed to defend itself “against a very well-armed adversary, like I said Iran, Hezbollah,” and that Washington expects Israel to use any weapons responsibly.

US oil exports (Bloomberg) Who is a major beneficiary of sanctions on Russian and Venezuelan oil? US suppliers who have muscled their way into markets once dominated by OPEC and its allies. US oil exports have set five new monthly records since Western nations began imposing sanctions on Russia, after the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And with trade restrictions on Venezuela set to renew in April, American barrels are beginning to displace sanctioned oil in India, one of the bigger markets for illicit crude.

Panic in Haiti's capital as wild shooting fills streets (Reuters) Panic set in around downtown Port-au-Prince on Monday as wild shooting filled the streets of Haiti's capital, with heavy gunfire near the national palace. The latest violence to rock the Caribbean island nation comes as the outgoing prime minister signaled that a broad transitional council is nearly finalized and seen as key to ending the current social and political crisis and paving the way for new elections.

Peru’s president accused of amassing $500K in jewelry on $50K salary (Washington Post) Even given the low expectations Peruvians have for their leaders, Dina Boluarte was unpopular. For nearly all of her 16-month presidency, her approval ratings have languished in the single digits. She’s widely blamed for the deaths of nearly 50 people killed by security forces while they were protesting her predecessor’s ouster, and accused of standing by while lawmakers dismantle Peru’s democracy. Still, Boluarte, 61, a mid-level civil servant who became Peru’s first female president, had managed to avoid accusations of being personally corrupt. Until now. Her government has been rocked by reporting that in the past year she has amassed a personal jewelry collection worth $500,000 on a monthly presidential salary of around $4,200. Highlights allegedly include a $50,000 Cartier bracelet and a $19,000 Rolex watch. That prompted prosecutors to launch an investigation for “illicit enrichment.” The accusations extend Peru’s streak of presidents to come under serious criminal investigation to eight. Every leader of this Andean nation since 1985 (with the exception of two briefly serving, unelected interims) has been the target of at least one criminal probe.

Norway follows its neighbor Denmark in planning an increase in conscripted soldiers (AP) Norway is to increase the number of conscripted soldiers from the present 9,000 to 13,500, the Norwegian government said Tuesday. “We must have enough people with the right skills at the right time,” Defense Minister Bjørn Arild Gram said. “We will need more people with professional military expertise going forward.” The move by the Scandinavian NATO member comes after neighboring Denmark last month said it wants to increase the number of young people doing military service by extending conscription to women and increasing the time of service from four months to 11 months.

Scottish Hate Crime Law Takes Effect as Critics Warn It Will Stifle Speech (NYT) A sweeping law targeting hate speech went into effect in Scotland on Monday, promising protection against threats and abuse but drawing criticism that it could have a chilling effect on free speech. The law, which was passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2021, expands protections for marginalized groups and creates a new charge of “stirring up hatred,” which makes it a criminal offense to communicate or behave in a way that “a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting.” A conviction could lead to a fine and a prison sentence of up to seven years. The protected classes as defined in the law include age, disability, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity. Racial hatred was omitted because it is already covered by a law from 1986. The new law also does not include women among the protected groups; a government task force has recommended that misogyny be addressed in separate legislation.

Ukraine uses drones in what appears to be its deepest strike yet inside Russia (AP) Ukrainian drones attacked industrial facilities in the province of Tatarstan, Russian authorities said Tuesday, in what would be Kyiv’s deepest strike inside Russian territory since the war began more than two years ago. Seven people were injured in the attack on facilities near the cities of Yelabuga and Nizhnekamsk, located some 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) east of Ukraine. The strike damaged a hostel for students and workers in a free economic zone where a factory manufacturing Iranian-designed drones is reportedly located.

Turkey’s shock elections (Washington Post) Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan just experienced what analysts deem his worst political setback in more than two decades. His long-ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, lost emphatically in local elections around the country Sunday—a surprising rebuke after Erdogan had consolidated his tight grip on power in general elections last year. The opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, secured victories across the country and in Turkey’s five biggest cities, including Istanbul, where Erdogan had campaigned vigorously for his handpicked AKP candidate. This turn of events is fueled, first and foremost, by voter anger at a frustrating status quo. “It was Erdogan’s handling of the economy that appeared to loom largest in the race, with households battered by runaway inflation and the cratering value of the currency,” my colleagues Beril Eski and Kareem Fahim reported. Inflation has been running at about 70 percent.

Macau Races (Nikkei Asia) Macau is getting out of the horse racing business, with the final race at the Macau Jockey Club happening last Saturday after 44 years of operation. The average attendance last year had dwindled to 492 spectators, but the finale on Saturday drew a crowd of 3,000 to send it off.

Taiwan’s strongest earthquake in nearly 25 years damages buildings, leaving 4 dead (AP) Taiwan’s strongest earthquake in a quarter century rocked the island during the morning rush hour Wednesday, damaging buildings and highways and causing the deaths of four people. Taiwan’s national fire agency said four people died in Hualien County and at least 57 were injured in the quake that struck just before 8 a.m. A five-story building in Hualien appeared heavily damaged, collapsing its first floor and leaving the rest leaning at a 45-degree angle. In the capital Taipei, tiles fell from older buildings and in some newer office complexes, while debris fell from some building sites. Schools evacuated their students to sports fields, equipping them with yellow safety helmets. Some also covered themselves with textbooks to guard against falling objects as aftershocks continued.

Japan is still reeling 100 days after the Noto earthquake (Economist) Fishing boots. Their son’s beloved fishing boots—that is what Hamazuka Hiroyuki and Chiaki most hope to find under the rubble of their garage. The Hamazukas’ place in Suzu, on the northern tip of Japan’s Noto peninsula, is one of nearly 100,000 buildings that were damaged or destroyed when a massive earthquake struck on January 1st. As of late March the disaster had killed 244 people. The Hamazukas and their children survived, but like most of their neighbours, nearly 100 days after the tremor, the family is only beginning to piece its life back together. The peninsula will take years to recover, says Fujino Tatsuo with a sigh, a disaster-relief volunteer helping to clear away the Hamazuka family’s debris with an excavator.

World Central Kitchen Pauses Gaza Operations After 7 Workers Killed (NYT) The disaster relief nonprofit World Central Kitchen paused operations in Gaza and the region on Tuesday after the organization said seven of its workers were killed in an airstrike. José Andrés, the organization’s founder, said on X that “several of our sisters and brothers” were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Monday. The group later said in a statement that the team was leaving a warehouse in central Gaza in two armored cars after unloading humanitarian food aid. The group said the convoy was hit despite having coordinated movements with the Israeli military. The Israeli military said in a statement early Tuesday that, in light of the reports, it was “conducting a thorough review at the highest levels to understand the circumstances of this tragic incident.” The military also said it “makes extensive efforts to enable the safe delivery of humanitarian aid, and has been working closely with W.C.K. in their vital efforts to provide food and humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.” Erin Gore, the nonprofit’s chief executive officer, said that the group’s employees were killed in “a targeted attack” by the Israeli military.

Israeli government says it will block Al Jazeera from broadcasting (BBC) The Israeli parliament has approved a law giving the government the power to ban broadcasts of TV channels including Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned network. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would "act immediately" to close the network's local office. The US expressed concern over the move. With foreign journalists banned from entering Gaza, Al Jazeera staff based in the strip have been some of the only reporters able to cover the war on the ground. For years, Israeli officials have accused the network of anti-Israeli bias. But their criticisms of the broadcaster have intensified since the Hamas attacks of 7 October. Authorities claim it has close links with Hamas, which Al Jazeera vehemently denies. In a statement, Al Jazeera said: "Netanyahu could not find any justifications to offer the world for his ongoing attacks on Al Jazeera and press freedom except to present new lies and inflammatory slanders against the Network and the rights of its employees.

Israel is determined to invade Rafah (Washington Post) Israel is telling the world that the last battle of the Gaza war will take place in a sand-blown city on the Egyptian border. The Americans are wary. The Palestinians are terrified. Rafah, in southern Gaza, is now home to 1.4 million people—a last refuge for those displaced from other parts of the enclave. Families are living in tents, surviving on limited aid. Among them, and in tunnels beneath them, according to the Israel Defense Forces, are the last intact Hamas battalions and more than 100 Israeli hostages. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned Washington that the war against Hamas cannot be won without taking Rafah. The Biden administration is deeply concerned about Israel’s planned assault—warning of a “disaster” scenario—but appears keen to avoid a public showdown. The Biden administration has urged Israel to consider more targeted “precision” or “surgical” strikes on Rafah, U.S. officials say. Yet those terms are relative. Two weeks of heavy fighting at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, described by the IDF as a “precise” operation, left the medical compound in ruins.

#headlines #news

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zipmartini · 1 year ago

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Not to single out, um, deathfucker here, but this is an example from the comments that perfectly illustrates the point.

Let's say you're really mad that the emergency increase made to SNAP during COVID lockdown ended in March. You don't care that lockdown effectively ended for most Americans at least 18 months prior. It was a good excuse to expand the program, and that expansion reduced poverty by 10% in the last quarter of 2021, and child poverty specifically by 14%, bringing 4.2 million Americans above the poverty line... so any excuse is a good excuse. And so, you ask, this is the same guy you want me to vote for?

Let's assume that's true. But before get into that exercise, let's have an aside where we state unequivocally that it is not, in fact, the same guy.

This SNAP extension ended in only 32 of the United States of America. What happened in the other 18? Well, their state governments had already ended them earlier on their own. Those states have one color in common; I'll let you guess which color, the first two guesses don't count, and the correct answer is not "blue." Democrats were the ones who were advocating for that COVID extension to become permanent. Republicans have a hard-on for ending SNAP. It comes up every five years, when the new farm bill goes before Congress. And, yes, it's worth saying: normally, SNAP is negotiated by the legislature, not the executive, and it doesn't matter who the President is.

But in this case, the end of the extension was part of the overall debt ceiling negotiation between President Biden (D) and House Speaker McCarthy (R). That debt ceiling had to go up. You think SNAP getting slashed is bad? It ain't zero. Defaulting on the national debt would mean no Social Security checks go out. No veteran benefits. Millions out of work. It would be a true global catastrophe, the likes of which even economists can't imagine.

So, yes, part of that deal was that SNAP benefits would go back to where they were before COVID. That actually sounds... kind of reasonable. It's the kind of thing a Chief Executive can affect, since it's a COVID emergency thing, and you can just hope Congress will increase it again later when the farm bill comes up (not likely in this Congress, but hey). In exchange, Sleepy Joe Biden successfully fought for an expiration date on McCarthy's increase to the age ceiling for work requirements. He got exemptions for the unhoused, for veterans, for young people aging out of foster case. McCarthy wanted to put Medicare recipients on work requirements... Biden blocked him, so they both ended up kicking it to the states, which isn't great, but isn't a total loss. There was a bit about calculating how many people on TANF can avoid work requirements: the previous reference year was 2005, McCarthy wanted 2022, they settled on 2015. Now, all this might not sound like a fight to you, but trust me, these two duked it out.

Funny thing is, House Republicans fucking hated this bill. They wanted McCarthy's head for this. So on one side, McCarthy's own party is mad because he rolled over for Biden. And on the other side, programs like SNAP are quite popular with voters, and they're upset with McCarthy and his party for settling the debt ceiling issue by going after hungry kids. This is often known as giving someone enough rope to hang themselves with.

And this is putting aside the fact that the debt ceiling negotiation was all part of a larger fourth-dimensional chess game that a President has to play with the overall economy, things like the Fed simultaneously raising interest rates to combat inflation and spur job growth, things like that. That game, right now, is in a very clear victory state. Everyone thought a recession was coming: last October, Bloomberg predicted a recession would come this year with 100% confidence, and the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia put the odds of a recession at at 60-year high. And yet, a recession did not happen. Unemployment is currently at a 60-year low, and the jobless rate for black Americans recently hit a historical low. GDP growth is strong, and the US has the fastest growth rate and the lowest annual inflation rate of the G7 nations. The labor market is a little tight, and wages could be growing faster to outpace inflation, but they are growing. And this is all even with the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine... you'd expect, as these economists did, that the price of oil would skyrocket, but in fact they're lower than pre-COVID levels. Inequality is falling. Compare that to the economy under Obama, where the unemployment rate hovered around 9%. Economists have issued wide-ranging mea culpas and are trying to figure out how they got it so wrong.

The only place the economy sucks right now is, ironically, in perception. Consumer confidence is low. In October, three-quarters of all Americans thought we were already in a recession. One thing that Democrats are historically bad at are taking credit for the good things they do. I don't know if they think it's gauche crowing, the kind of low-road stuff worthy of Republicans, or maybe it's because they didn't especially want credit for a recovery that came on the back of the calculation that more jobs at the cost of a SNAP reduction was a net gain... whatever the reason, most people are unaware that the economy right now is doing great, and is in very large part to Bidenomics. Biden has just very recently woken up to the fact that maybe he should start campaigning on all of the good stuff he's done. What seems to be the biggest economic mystery of fiscal 2023 is not just how we avoided a recession, but why most people think the opposite, and blame Joe Biden for it, when it's in fact the opposite.

Okay, let's end the Biden Apologist portion of this screed and go with your assumption: Joe Biden is secretly out to hurt poor people and deport brown people and his very, very, very, very, very long political career was a long con to get into the White House and now, moo hoo ha ha, it's time to slash some social safety nets, and that's just who Joe Biden is, and there are so many other leftists who would do a much better job championing the poor and the weak and the defenseless.

Halley's Comet has flown away, and isn't coming back for a long time.

Take a trip in a time machine with me, back to Ye Olden Dayes before COVID, to late summer of 2016. The American combination of a two-party system plus first-past-the-post voting that almost always results in the parties nominating the absolute worst candidate bit the Republicans especially hard, and they nominated an utter moron, a buffoon, a cartoon, a fucking New Yorker... a scandal magnet, twice-divorced, racist, caught bragging about sexual assault, and, worst of all, someone who said some very bad things about popular members of his own party, like ridiculing John McCain's time as a prisoner of war.

The conventional wisdom at the time was that the 2016 election was a gimmie for the Democrats. There was actual public discourse about the Democrats squandering their Get Into The White House Free card on a centrist like Hillary Clinton. It was said that a moldy ham sandwich with no mustard could beat Donald Trump, and so the Democrats should have seized on the opportunity and nominated a pink-haired Marxist Muslim lesbian person of color with an accent and a wheelchair. And, y'know, Hillary Clinton was unpopular herself. It's not just the e-mail server stuff, which resurrected her "shady" reputation vis a vis Whitewater and Vince Foster, et al. And it wasn't just the media, which realized that "in the bag" doesn't get people to tune in every night so they had to make a real horse race out of it. A lot of it was this prevailing idea that the DNC cut a deal with Clinton back in 2008: that if she would kindly call off her increasingly vicious and damaging primary challenge to Barack Obama and allow them to nominate the person who could be the nation's first black president, then she would get a cabinet seat, have time to burnish her resume, and in 2016, the big chair would be hers. This is the kind of crooked, backroom, labor-union, corrupt shenanigans that is the Democrat reputation, and it was hard to dismiss as mere conspiracy in the face of how the DNC treated Bernie Sanders in the run-up to the 2016 nomination.

Now, all the way back to my original post. That moment I was talking about, when it would be time for the Left to break off and make a statement and let its voice be heard? Many, many people thought that this was the moment. That the Left could use this gimmie of an election to make everyone know that they were not happy being silenced by the Centrist wing, not happy with the DNC, not happy with the Clintons, not happy about the Iraq War, not happy with how little they believed the Obama administration accomplished, not happy with the two-party system, not happy about spinning up your own Thunderbird server, whatever. They chose that moment, and voted for Jill Stein, or didn't vote at all, hoping that the high turnout for Stein or the low turnout for Clinton would send a message and lay the groundwork for more power in the party for the Left... safe and cozy in the knowledge that, no matter how much damage they did, there was absolutely no possible way Donald J. Trump would actually get anywhere near the Oval Office.

This is where I confess to you, Gentle Reader, that I was one of those people.

I, like many others, was dissatisfied with the two given choices, and the two-party system that presented these two finalists, and FTPT voting, and just in general doing whatever the hell everyone else does. I certainly wouldn't have the cred to criticize the Clinton 45 Administration if I'd voted for her. It wouldn't be a very interesting dinner party anecdote. It wouldn't be anything to go on Tumblr and brag about in 2023 as her administration was winding down and the whole victory lap thing was happening in the press. And prior to this, I already had some libertarian leanings that you could have gone back and read about had Tumblr not deleted my original blog during The Purge for the crime of taking artistic photographs of naked ladies... leanings like "pro-choice is a libertarian concept," bullshit like that. So I threw my lot in with the "biggest" third-party effort this country has, and I voted for Gary Johnson.

I assure you, I did so very safe in the knowledge that Hillary Clinton was going to win. In fact, I stayed up on Election Night with my daughter so she could witness history firsthand.

And I remember, as they called Pennsylvania for Trump, I laughed out loud. I laughed! Donald J. Trump! WWE guest-star, Home Alone suck-up, spray-tanned bonehead! A walking brand name from the 80's, the subject of a bad Monopoly rip-off! HILARIOUS. Comedy that was going to blow W barfing all of the Prime Minister of Japan out of the water. I mean, chances are this walking toupee made out of spaghetti wasn't going to have to be in charge of any kind of a real national emergency... in the event of something like, I dunno, a deadly viral pandemic, there were still grown-ups at the CDC. What real damage could he do?

Don't I feel fucking stupid.

I repeat: don't I feel fucking stupid.

Please don't get me wrong: internal dissent is a good thing. Internal criticism is a good thing. Just look at the Republican Party, where even the smallest internal dissent is anathema. Where Mike "God, Jesus, and Sex With The Lights Out With Mother" Pence utterly destroyed his political career for the crime of not willingly tipping the domino that would have enabled a conspiracy to overthrow the American federal government for the boss that sent a mob to intimidate him with threats of his own assassination if he did not. And I understand if you reflexively roll your eyes because the DNC has made quite the meal out of donations squeezed from the threat that the Blond-Haired Baba Yaga will get back into office if not for your twenty dollars. And yes, it sucks that that threat allowed Joe Biden to sweep into a 2020 Democrat primary race at the last minute with only "brand recognition among the Trump-weary undecideds" as the solitary virtue, as if anything scarier than melted vanilla ice cream would result in red tanks with MAGA written on the side rolling down 5th Avenue. But we can blame a lot of things on the black swan that was the 2016 election, and that's one of them. And, also, we can blame the 2016 election on a lot of things, too. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

That's the Trolley Problem of American politics. [Joker voice]: Tonight, you're all gonna be part of the American experiment. Tell me to break this old lady's legs, and I'll break this old lady's legs. Do nothing, and I'll shoot her in the head. Scream about how rotten it all is as I load the chamber. Stand resolute that your hands are clean as I cock the hammer.

God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

lol.

In economics we divide the population into income quintiles -- top 20%, bottom 20%, etc

The Biden Economy has been very, very good to the bottom 20% -- I know because I am in that quintile and under the Biden Presidency I have seen multiple SNAP increases, the best COLA adjustments for Social Security in four decades, Medicare now pays my utilities, and because I'm part of the Affordable Connectivity Program, they can now never turn off my internet even if I can't afford to pay the bill.

The problem with the poorest people being the one who benefits the most? Is that it doesn't resonate as a media story. The media is not catering to that bottom quintile -- we don't have the expendable income their advertisers are seeking.

But if you want to elect a POTUS who is honestly helping the people who need it the most, you should be an enthusiastic Biden supporter. It won't make splashy news headlines, you're not even going to find MSNBC going GUESS WHAT THE POORS ARE DOING BETTER all the time because it's really not a sexy story. But it's a real story. A true story.

I'm just really sick of the pseudo-leftist takes that characterize Biden and the Democrats as 'conservative' or assertions that they don't have policy platforms except 'we're not the Republicans.' Such commentary sounds intelligent but only in the way Libertarian commentary sounds intelligent: you have to not think critically at all to some to such absurd conclusions. Democrats are working within a broken system and doing the best they can. You wanna fix the system? Great, I'm onboard, but smearing the only people trying to help is not going to get you anywhere.

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khan-ae · 3 years ago

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The Utilitarian Case for Abortion Rights

The history of abortion rights in the United States is long with lots of ups and downs. This year, Texas, a major US state, banned abortions as early as six weeks and opened the door for almost any private citizen to sue abortion providers and others.

The debate surrounding abortion generally revolves around arguments from human rights i.e. the woman's right to make her life's choices versus the fetus' right to live. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with such arguments (except maybe that the existence of human rights itself cannot be proved using first principles of philosophy), but there's another important dimension to the problem that is often overlooked.

Utilitarianism is a branch of ethical philosophy that says that the distinction between right and wrong is determined by the consequences of the action alone. So murder, for example, is 'wrong' not because it is inherently wrong to kill another human being but because say, a society with high homicide rate is very likely to be poor and backward.

With that being clear, let's talk about something seemingly irrelevant.

The Unfulfilled Bloodbath Prophecy

In the late twentieth century, the crime rates in the United States spiked. It was attributed mainly to liberal criminal punishment laws and the crack-cocaine boom. Several economists, criminologists and politicians made apocalyptic predictions about how the ever-increasing crime rates are going to destroy the US society and economy. James Alan Fox, the most widely quoted crime expert in the popular press at that time, warned of a coming “bloodbath” of youth violence.

But, Fox and all other experts turned out to be wrong. The bloodbath didn't materialise. Infact, the crime/homicide rate began to fall sharply in the early 1990s. Experts then flocked to explain the decline in terms of the internet boom, the crack bubble burst, better policing strategies etc.

“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.”

~ Laurence Peter

But, as Steven Levitt argues in his bestseller Freakonomics, all of those reasonings are false or at the very least, irrelevant. The single most important reason why crime rates unexpectedly decreased in the 1990s was because the US Supreme Court 20 years ago, had ruled in favour of a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey and legalised abortion throughout the country.

As an interesting side-note, Norma later renounced her allegiance to legalised abortion and became a pro-life activist. Well...

The Romanian and Scandinavian Experience

It is tempting to argue that this weird relationship between abortions and crime rates is merely a correlation in the US experience, but the story repeats itself in Romania, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and any other place one has tried to find a pattern.

In 1966, one year after Nicolae Ceauşescu became the Communist dictator of Romania, he made abortion illegal. “The fetus is the property of the entire society,” he proclaimed. “Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.” He and other experts of the time believed that a large young population would be an invaluable asset to the society and economy.

Extreme steps were taken to ensure that young women were having children. Government agents sardonically known as the Menstrual Police regularly rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests. If a woman repeatedly failed to conceive, she was forced to pay a steep “celibacy tax.”

But Ceauşescu and other experts of the time turned out to be wrong, "terribly" wrong. Compared to Romanian children born just a year earlier, the cohort of children born after the abortion ban would do worse in every measurable way: they would test lower in school, they would have less success in the labor market, and they would also prove much more likely to become criminals.

The abortion ban remained in place until Ceauşescu's regime was overthrown by thousands of protestors marching on the streets in 1989. What is even more interesting is that a majority of those protestors were teenagers, many of whom might not have been born had abortion remained legal two decades ago.

Studies in other parts of Eastern Europe and in Scandinavia from the 1930s through the 1960s reveal a similar trend. In most of these cases, abortion was not forbidden outright, but a woman had to receive permission from a judge in order to obtain one. Researchers found that in the instances where the woman was denied an abortion, she often resented her baby and failed to provide it with a good home. Even when controlling for the income, age, education, and health of the mother, the researchers found that these children too were more likely to become criminals.

Link between Abortion and Crime Rates

The conclusion is simple: when a woman does not want to have a child, she usually has a good reason. She may be unmarried or in a bad marriage. She may consider herself too poor to raise a child. She may think her life is too unstable or unhappy, or she may think that her drinking or drug use will damage the baby’s health. She may believe that she is too young or hasn’t yet received enough education. She may want a child badly but in a few years, not now. For any of a hundred reasons, she may feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.

One study has shown that the typical child who went unborn in the earliest years of legalized abortion would have been 50 percent more likely than average to live in poverty; he would have also been 60 percent more likely to grow up with just one parent. These two factors—childhood poverty and a single-parent household—are among the strongest predictors that a child will have a criminal future.

References: Freakonomics by Steven Levitt

#abortion #texas #us #usa #legality #crime #philosophy #case #rights

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 years ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 29, 2020

Heather Cox Richardson

One story jumped out at me today. The Hill reported that as soon as a Democrat is back in the White House, Republicans intend to retrench and be careful about how the country spends money, although during Trump’s term, even before the pandemic, they spent huge sums without worrying about it.

This is a pattern. Since President Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, Republicans have insisted that tax cuts will pay for themselves by stimulating economic growth, thus increasing tax revenues as everyone gets richer. At the same time, they have dramatically increased military spending without ever suggesting a way to pay for it. Then they complain about the debt, and insist that the only way to get our finances back into whack is to cut domestic spending.

There are two important metrics involved in figuring out our national expenses. One is the deficit, which is the difference between the money the government spends every year and the money it takes in. The other is the debt, which is the total amount the government owes.

Until the late twentieth century, the government took on large debt during the Civil War, WWI, WWII and during the Great Depression, when Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated a new kind of government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. But leaders of both parties believed that deficits should reflect emergencies and that debt should be held at a low percentage of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, used to estimate the growth of the economy. It was to pay down the national debt that the Republican Party created national taxation, including the income tax, during the Civil War, and that Republican Dwight Eisenhower kept the top income tax bracket at 91% during his administration. Eisenhower was the last Republican president to balance a budget.

After the Great Depression, taxes and the social welfare programs they funded created what economists call the “great compression” when economic inequality in America shrank.

But the stagflation of the 1970s drove white families into higher tax brackets without giving them more buying power at the same time that politicians eager to end business regulation and social welfare programs told them that their tax dollars were going to the civil rights protesters that featured so prominently on the evening news. In 1980, they voted for a president who promised to cut the taxes that he insisted were going to “welfare queens” and to put money back in their pockets.

Ronald Reagan promised that cutting taxes would actually produce more revenue. As business leaders—the supply side—had more money, they would invest in businesses which would hire more workers, at better wages. Rather than focusing on the demand side of the equation—the workers—as governments had done since FDR fought the Depression with the New Deal, Reagan said he could jump-start the economy by putting money into the supply side. The man who would become his own vice president, George H.W. Bush, called this idea “voodoo economics,” but who would complain about a plan that enabled Americans to have the government programs they had come to depend on, without having to pay for them?

Unfortunately, it actually was voodoo economics. In 1981, Congress cut $35 billion from the next year’s budget and cut the top income tax rates from 70% to 50%, as well as cutting capital gains and estate taxes. At Reagan’s urging, it also added $17 billion in new defense spending. In the next five years, it would increase defense spending by 40%. As that money (and more, from the deregulation of savings and loan banks, and from lower interest rates) boosted the economy, it seemed that supply-side economics worked.

An up-and-coming Republican spokesman named Grover Norquist insisted that voters did not want to be taxed to pay down deficits, and it was clear they didn’t have to be. When Democrats called for higher taxes and defense cuts to balance the deficit, Republicans accused them of being anti-business and soft on communism.

But the booming economy was paid for by extensive borrowing. During Reagan’s years in office, the federal debt tripled from $994 billion to $2.8 trillion, and America went from being a creditor nation to a debtor nation. Republican leaders insisted that the Democrats were responsible for the rising debt because they would not make sufficient cuts in domestic spending, but in fact increased defense spending meant the administration itself never submitted a balanced budget.

When he took office, George H.W. Bush tried to take on the national debt, which was costing Americans $200 billion a year in interest payments. In 1990, facing a $171 billion deficit for the next year, Bush agreed to raise taxes if Democrats agreed to steep spending cuts. Republicans led by Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich signed onto the deal in private, but in public began to force those willing to raise taxes, people they called RINOs—Republicans In Name Only—out of their party. The belief that economic growth depended on cutting taxes had become the test of Republican purity.

In 1993, to deal with budget deficits, President Bill Clinton convinced Congress to raise tax rates on incomes over $250,000—affecting about 1% of Americans—to 39.6%, increase the highest corporate tax rate by 1%, and increase the gas tax. Not a single Republican voted for the measure, but under it, the economy boomed and the annual deficits began to shrink. In 1997, Clinton expanded domestic programs and cut the capital gains tax rate, but even still, in 1998, the government was producing a budget surplus.

Even before he took office, President George W. Bush prepared a $1.6 trillion tax cut to wipe that surplus out. Norquist explained to a reporter that so long as there was money to spend, it would go to social welfare legislation, and the Republicans were determined to starve the government, not feed it. Bush did not get the full cut he wanted, but in June 2001 Congress passed a bill cutting $1.3 trillion over ten years.

Immediately after 9-11, Congress appropriated $358 billion for security before Bush dramatically increased military spending—by $48 billion—while slashing domestic spending. When the administration launched more tax cuts the following year, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, worried about a fiscal crisis. Vice President Dick Cheney disagreed: “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” Bush took the country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq but, for the first time in U.S. history, did not raise taxes to pay for the military actions. Instead, Congress cut taxes again. By 2009, the Congressional Research Service estimated the cost of those wars at $1 trillion.

President Barack Obama took office in early 2009 with the Great Recession in full swing. Deficit spending to restart the economy put the deficit at more than $1.4 trillion that year. As the economy recovered, deficits dropped to $585 billion.

Under Trump, though, they rose dramatically again despite the fact he inherited a growing economy. In 2017, he pushed through a tax cut which increased the 2019 deficit to $984 billion. It was projected to be $1.02 trillion in 2020—a 74% increase in four years of a strong economy—when the coronavirus hit. This meant that interest payments on the federal debt—before coronavirus—were estimated to cost $382 billion, 8.2% of total government spending.

The pandemic, of course, required a huge relief package. The CARES bill appropriated $2.2 trillion, making this year’s deficit projected to be at least $3.7 trillion.

Measured against GDP, our accumulated debt is now higher than at any time except in 1946, during World War II. In June 2020, it was $20.3 trillion.

Economists are of two minds (at least!) about the economic effects of deficits and the federal debt, but there is one very clear political meaning to them. This pattern of government spending and taxation since 1981 has moved wealth upward dramatically. In 1979, the top 1% of Americans held 20.5% of the nation’s wealth. In 1989 the top 1% held 35.7%. By 2017, the top 1% owned 40% of the country’s wealth, more than the bottom 90% combined. The top 20% in 2017 owned 90% of the wealth, leaving just 10% for the remaining 80%. The bottom 20% of Americans have no wealth; they are in debt.

When Republicans today say they are going to turn their attention back to the deficits and the debt, what they are saying is that they intend to continue to cut taxes. Then they will blame the Democrats for being fiscally irresponsible when they call for the infrastructure and social welfare spending that used to keep the American economic playing field somewhat level.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #political #election 2020 #corrupt GOP #wealth #debt #quotes

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theculturedmarxist · 4 years ago

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Yves here. One of the big sources of the lack of democratic influence on policy is the way so many elements of fiscal decisions are hostage to economists’ beliefs, many of which are at best outdated, just plain wrong, or shamelessly abused (one example of abuse comes below). The presumption that economists know better shuts off many key decisions from debate.

Nathan Tankus below explains the role of fiscal multipliers, which in lay-speak is “how many dollars of GDP growth does a dollar of fiscal spending generate?” Austerians bizarrely believe in “fiscal consolidation” as in that budget-cutting will improve debt to GDP ratios. The problem with that view is that reducing expenditures results in economic contraction that is even larger than the cut in spending, making debt to GDP ratios worse. Greece was the poster child of this phenomenon. The IMF had nevertheless made this approach the centerpiece of its “programs” which had the appearance of working, because they would usually be imposed on countries in the midst of a currency crisis. Dropping foreign exchange rates in conjunction with imposing the austerity hair shirt would (sometimes but not always) provide enough of a trade boost to offset the fiscal downdraft.

Needless to say, the blind application of “fiscal consolidation” didn’t work in the Eurozone, where member states were all on the Euro and thus could not lower their exchange rates. The IMF admitted as much, when its then chief economist Olivier Blanchard announced that the IMF had determined that at least in weak economies, “fiscal multipliers are greater than one”. Even though that was tantamount to saying its playbook was wrong, the organization continues to dole out the same bad medicine.

By Nathan Tankus. Originally published at Notes on the Crises

Since the CARES act passed in late March, there have not been any more major fiscal packages passed through congress until this week. I’ll be writing about this second fiscal package in more detail later this week.

Since no substantial policy changes have been in the works until quite recently, the more abstract questions about fiscal policy — how effective it is, how you decide how big fiscal packages should be — has been pushed into the background for most of the 2020 crisis.

Meanwhile, because of promising vaccine news (as well as a deep desire to avoid the present), financial market journalists, participants and scholars are jumping ahead to an optimistically predicted “boom” in the summer of 2021. I think these discussions are very premature.

In short, it’s become clear from a number of different angles that the notion that fiscal support to the U.S. economy remains wildly inadequate will become more controversial in 2021. As this package starts impacting the economy and the prospects of a true reopening driven by a vaccine starts to seem like more of a reality (even if it ends up being a mirage), the discourse about austerity and worries about inflation will become louder. No one doubted how deep the crisis was in December 2008 but passing a large fiscal package became much more controversial in 2009. Political and intellectual winds can shift fast. In this context I want to step back a bit, and cover some more basic and abstract points. In this “lameduck” period before the next inauguration, we have some time to make fiscal policy somewhat more understandable. But we need to watch out for missteps in the fiscal policy conversation that happen in Biden’s critical first 100 days.

https://twitter.com/BharatRamamurti/status/1306713487306035202

The most critical concept that gets utilized in modern public policy conversations about fiscal policy is the “fiscal multiplier”. In the video above, you can see Bharat Ramamurti of the CARES Act Congressional Oversight Commission embarrass a right wing witness over his misrepresentation of other people’s research. In the clip, what they are essentially fighting over is how “large” or “small” fiscal multipliers are — for both state and local government relief. And yet, what the fiscal multiplier fundamentally is does not get explained. Nor is the importance of “large” and “small” multipliers spelled out. Why should we care what the size of this “multiplier” is.

The fiscal multiplier is one of the most famous ideas that appeared in John Maynard Keynes seminal book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money — perhaps the most famous single idea to make it to modern thinking. The modern form of a fiscal multiplier as used in public policy is defined by the Congressional Budget Office. In their formulation, there are two important fiscal multipliers. One they call the “demand multiplier” and the other they call the “output multiplier”. The demand multiplier is multiplied by the “direct effects” on demand to tell us how much total income across the economy (The “gross domestic product”) responds to additional spending. So, for example, if the government paid to build a hospital then the “direct effects” would be the total amount of money spent on the wages, inputs and other currently produced goods and services needed to build the hospital.

The “demand multiplier” is thus all the secondary increases in spending (and thus income) that emerge because of that “direct” increase in demand. This can be hard for people to wrap their heads around but it may be easier to grasp when you realize that everyone’s spending is someone else’s income. When your boss pays you, he’s making an expenditure. When you pay someone else, you’re making an expenditure. To that person, what you are paying them is their income. This web of payment relationsmean that when spending increases- either because a company builds a factory or a government pays for vaccine distribution, incomes increase. Meanwhile people with higher incomes generally spend more, even if they don’t spend their whole increase in income. This is fundamentally where this secondary or “multiplier” effect comes from. We will of course return to this concept multiple times later in the series.

[image missing due to .webp shit]

If one knows the direct effect of a particular spending project on demand plus the demand multiplier then you can calculate how much total income will increase. Yet the equation above combines the “direct effects on demand” and the “demand multiplier” into what it calls the “output multiplier”. Why does it do that? In order to multiply this “output multiplier” by the “budgetary cost of a change in fiscal policy”. This is important for policymakers who want to increase overall demand for as few dollars as possible. If you think that the limits on fiscal policy are some metrics for how much you can safely “borrow” rather than spending’s effect on employment, inflation or the trade deficit, then it is important that you don’t “waste” your budget on things that don’t increase demand by substantial amounts for each dollar appropriated. Thus if the output multiplier is small a policy will not be worth it to the budget conscious even if the demand multiplier is large- or predictable. This is why it’s so important to Bharat Ramamurti in the above clip to establish that fiscal multipliers for state and local government aid in this crisis are larger than the witness was claiming. The smaller the multiplier, the more unappealing it seems to policymakers. This is a point that we will return to later in the series.This inclusion of what the CBO calls a “budgetary cost of a change in fiscal policy” leads to significant issues in public policy analysis because it is ambiguous what the relevant “change in fiscal policy” is. For example, if congress appropriates 10 billion dollars for the construction of additional public schools should that total amount be considered the “budgetary cost” even if it is not expected that that 10 billion dollars will be doled out by the department of education in that single year? There is a danger of making policies look worse than they actually are by comparing what is effectively a multi-year budget to a yearly effect on demand. In a future part of this series we will examine this critical point when it comes to thinking about the government’s role as creditor and policies- such as student debt cancellation- where output multipliers can vary by extremes depending on what methodology you choose.

I know that that was a lot to absorb from one piece and don’t feel dismayed if you feel that you are missing important elements of what’s been discussed. We will be going over important points multiple times. Part Two in this series will be coming next week since there’s a number of things about the current Covid Relief package that I will need to cover in the next few days… including apparently Trump’s potential veto??

Try to enjoy your holidays with everything going on and please stay safe.

#economics #economy #economic theory #austrian economics #nathan tankus #bharat ramamurti #economic policy

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bambamramfan · 5 years ago

Text

Cognitive Hazards of Existential Risk

Amid the world-changing catastrophe and lockdown we are all experiencing now, people are wasting no time arguing about “who saw this coming and who took it seriously first.” Just today I read TUOC’s back and forth https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/614319297954709504/shlevy-theunitofcaring-slatestarscratchpad and Scott’s post about existential risk more broadly https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/ and those are among people I respect.

We could get lost in the weeds on the object level. My impression is that everyone “took this seriously” before some people they know/read, and after other people they know/read, and so your own impression of your success there is more about which group of people you choose to focus on. Myself, I was arguing to my boss that our office needs to act on this faster on March 3rd, which is well after some people, and well before many government officials. I don’t think it says much about me. Rationalist blogs took it seriously before Vox took it seriously before CNN took it seriously before the President, and every group’s villains take the opportunity to dunk on those later in the chain while their heroes lament.

So let’s talk about the meta level instead. Or why I think all the slamming on people for not seeing this coming is pointless and won’t benefit us in the long run anyway.

Rationalism, and many of its adjacent groups, prize very highly the trait of “taking ideas seriously.” This means talking about principles or threats not just in some “this may happen some day to other people” sense and a symbol to chatter about, but changing their own life based on the conclusions these ideas lead to. And in some ways, especially regarding your core ethical principles, I think this is very useful.

But there seems very little discussion of the very good reason that most people don’t do this. Picture yourself as a politician, a leader of the country or at least your community. In the past few years you have been told by highly intelligent people that you respect about the following major problems that will explode any moment: global warming, AI expansion, EU breakdown and financial interdependence, terrorist attacks with nuclear or biological weapons, resource crisis, white nationalism, ebola, the breakdown of the middle class and/or nuclear family, social unrest and police brutality, and the end of late stage capitalism. All of these are very serious problems that very serious people tell you you need to act on NOW or society will end, and as far as you can tell, are equally convincing.

You could expend all your credibility on the first one to cross your desk, and be forgotten in a week. And actually, many politicians do. We forget them. (Or they are like Marco Rubio, chasing forever after the latest big thing https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1244683450742947842 )

Successful politicians, ones who stick around, offer a Very Serious and Wide-Ranging Plan Addressing the Roots of this Crisis and Calling for Urgent Action, which often involves expert task forces and grants to some organizations, and then forget about it because nothing will happen on their plan and they know it. (In fact you can credit Joe Biden for doing this exact thing on January 27 https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/27/coronavirus-donald-trump-made-us-less-prepared-joe-biden-column/4581710002/ ). This is the opposite of “taking ideas seriously.” This is showing attention to a problem for the sake of others’ judgment, without having to change your life or direct action much at all.

Economists have a pithy version of this attitude, as applied to people who try to short a company that they just KNOW is over-valued: “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” (And indeed, many investors who saw the 2008 financial crisis coming and tried to bet against it… bet in 2006 and 2007 and lost all their money first.)

You can’t just take every world-changing threat seriously at face-value and adjust your portfolio likewise. You will lose all your money, all your credibility, and have a broken shell of a life.

And most people, on a “meta-rational level”, actually know this? That you have to have some dissonance between your stated beliefs and how you guide your day to day existence, and that letting every change in the former affect your latter will throw you wildly off course. So they nod soberly at the new articles, maybe post online about it and use it as a reason to contribute $100 to their already favorite politician, maybe spend an equivalent amount on some consumer good that makes them feel prepared (gold against a financial crisis, prepping supplies, etc) and move on with their lives. And in most cases *this is very good for them.*

The problem being of course, that most cases are not all cases, and the one risk that proves out destroys all your hard work too.

The sort of competition-as-a-virtue ideology that the leading edge of our culture has now (from Wall St. to Silicon Valley) actually makes this worse. Even if you have an entirely accurate picture of future risk, if you have a competitor that just *ignores* or undervalues future risk, and doesn’t budget and plan for it, they can just beat you by price (or whatever.) Only entities that don’t have to worry about the short term can really prepare for future existential risk, and until now, our cultural ethos was very much against those sorts of entities, deriding them as traditional, monopolistic, and unaccountable (which they often were.)

The answer isn’t to just “ignore all future risks.” But it’s also really not to take a prideful stance of insisting *all* long-tail risks need to be treated with immediate seriousness. If you do this, you will find yourself very disappointed: as all your followers either ignore you, or lose all their money and sanity on the many other claims on their attention.

Unfortunately we actually need to analyze upcoming risks honestly. Most will never affect us. Some actually will. This is, well, incredibly hard. In particular a sense of proportion is very valuable here. (Rationalists like the linked SSC post will go on about the vital difference between .00001 and .01 chance, but frankly I think most people don’t react differently to .5 and .1 chance currently.)

So let’s be honest about how people are actually coming to take this crisis seriously: it’s not because an expert presented them with a scary chart. People, especially top decision makers, are used to seeing scary charts. It is when the Real of the experience actually starts to hit them in the face. Almost every state put off any action until sick people were already in their state and multiplying by (if small) quickly increasing numbers.

You can’t even decide “well I will trust the experts in the field or this one particular expert I respect”, since well, the most common failure mode of experts is to vastly overstate the importance of their field.

There is an interesting side-tangent here of the difference between people who are “very online” and those not. For the past year the political internet had pondered this distinction, as twitter/etc discourse failed to resemble American voting outcomes so starkly, even among the Democratic primary voters. The implication was that by being “too online” we were stewing in so much self-referential memetic influences that we had lost touch with what “real people” thought, and so being very online was bad for your mental hygiene. In the past couple months, the lines of these categories persisted, but now it was the “very online” who were dramatically right about something relative to people just listening to talk radio and reading local papers.

(*Yes, this post uses the term “existential risk” for things that will just kill dozens of millions of people and raise unemployment to 20%, and not the technical meaning which would require the obliteration of all human life. Existential risk more commonly refers to “that would coerce drastic changes on you”, such as a neighboring army that can topple your government, without needing the whole complete extermination of humanity thing.)

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notebooknebula · 4 years ago

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Chris Prefontaine - Scale and Automate Real Estate Investing

https://www.jayconner.com/chris-prefontaine-scale-and-automate-real-estate-investing/

After many years of coaching and constantly doing deals himself independently, Chris Prefontaine founded Smart Real Estate Coach in 2014, bringing in his son Nick, daughter Kayla, and son-in-law Zachary as the company began to grow.

The family team coaches investors on how to properly scale and automate their businesses throughout North America — all without using their own cash, credit, or taking out bank loans to buy property. His team buys and sells homes in his own market every month.

Join our new Private Money Academy with a free 30 day trial,

https://www.jayconner.com/trial

—————————————————————————————————

Jay Conner (00:01): Well, hello there! And welcome to another episode of Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner. I’m Jay Conner, The Private Money Authority and your host. And let me give you a special welcome, particularly if this is your first time to tuning in. Here on the show at Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner, we talk about all things that relate to real estate investing from single family houses to commercial deals, to self storage, to land, to anything that you can imagine. Even note investing. Anything that you can imagine that relates to real estate investing. This show is for you, whether you are a seasoned real estate investor, or a brand new real estate investor.

Jay Conner (00:51): Here’s why. First of all, we talk about private money a lot on this show. How to get funding for your deals, regardless of your experience or your credit or your verification of income. You know, whether you’re seasoned or you’re brand new, everybody is always looking for new funding for your deals. As a matter of fact, on today’s show, my special guest, we will be talking about creative ways to get funding for your deals regardless as to whether you have private money lined up or not. In addition to that, people are always looking for ways to find really, really hot deals. We talk about that on the show here, we talk about how to automate your business, how to sell properties very quickly in order to reduce your carrying costs.

Jay Conner (01:36): But before I introduce to you my guest today, I want to give a special gift to you. You see, I mentioned a moment ago, I’m known as the private money authority. So if you are seasoned or brand new and you want more funding for your deals, I’ve got a free gift for you. And that is, I just recently launched my brand new membership, which is titled The Private Money Academy. It’s a monthly membership where I am live at least two times a month for the entire Academy where we do a hot seat. We analyze your business, help put a plan together to expand your business and scale it and grow it very quickly. I answer Q and A every time live twice a month for Academy members. We’ve got a closed Facebook group where you can ask questions at any time. It’s a very, very expensive and live forum. And we also have brand new training content for the Academy members every month. Well, I’ve got a brand new offer here. Brand new, and it’s free. You can have free access to the Academy for four weeks, and I’m going to give you the URL right now. To where you can go take advantage of this free gift after we finished the show and that’s www.JayConner.com/Trial That’s JayConner.com/Trial

Jay Conner (03:05): So you may be tuning in on YouTube, or you may be on Facebook, or you may be listening to iTunes or Google play or one of our platforms. And so no matter where you’re tuning in from, we need your help. Please subscribe, rate and review. If you’re watching on YouTube, be sure and subscribe and hit that little bell. So you can be notified every time that we go live with a new guest and new training. And speaking of guest and training today is no exception to the past where I’ve got a fantastic expert guests to join me. And so I’m so excited to have him on before I bring him out of the green room and bring him on here, live on the show. Let me tell you just a little bit about my friend.

Jay Conner (03:50): First of all, he is a three time best selling author. One of his books, Real Estate On Your Terms, we’ll be talking about that. Secondly, the new rules of real estate investing and also he is co-author with Moneeka Sawyer’s, Real Estate Investing For Women. He’s also the founder and CEO of SmartRealEstateCoach.com. And he’s the host of the Smart Real Estate Coach Podcast. In addition to that, he’s been in real estate for almost 30 years now. His experience ranges from constructing new homes back in the 1990s and owning a Realty executive franchise to running his own investments, commercial and residential. Well today he runs his own buying and selling businesses where this family thing, which purchases about two to five properties every month. So this guy is still in the trenches today and knows exactly what’s going on. He’s an expert in the realm of terms, he’s also an expert on how to take your business from part time to full time. And he has this very, very special strategy and formula that he employs and also educates his students on which is called, The Three Pay Days. With that, I’m excited to have on and introduce to you my special guest today, Mr. Chris Prefontaine. Chris, welcome to the show!

Chris Prefontaine (05:16): Hey Jay! Good to be back, buddy. Good to see you as always.

Jay Conner (05:19): Good to see you too. And I’ll tell you folks, one special reason I love having Chris here on the show is because Chris and I have got the same exact core values and ethics when it comes to doing business. It’s all about putting the other person first. Whether you’re talking to a buyer or you’re talking to a seller, or you’re talking to a private lender, Chris believes exactly the same thing that I do. And that is, put other people first and you don’t have to worry about yourself. Just sort of like Zig Ziglar said. So Chris, I had you on the show. I guess it’s been coming up on a year ago. I lost track of time, but since that time we’ve had this crazy thing called COVID-19 come along. Corona virus. So first of all, if you would Chris share with the audience how have you been dealing with the Corona COVID-19. How’s it affected your business? And what have you done to adapt? And as your business increased, decreased or stayed the same?

Chris Prefontaine (06:25): Yeah. Thanks, Jay! It’s interesting because when this happened, so I’m going to go back to March when it started to happen. I said to my son, Nick and my son, Zach, I said, okay, I’m hoping what we built post-crash was built to what our expectations were, which was to weather all storms. It really was built to do that. And so our business has tripled and the amount of properties we’re doing as has all the students, so super happy with it, super pleased with it. It’s still, as you know, nobody knows the answer, right? The billionaires don’t know the economists don’t know. So the jury is still out, but so far, we’re just, we’re not getting by with driving. And I love to see that for the students, cause it’s almost like they had an, it’s not even, not official. It’s just a massive pump up in business.

Chris Prefontaine (07:07): I think a lot of that’s because the banks are making it very difficult for your conventional buyers, which makes it difficult for the sellers. I see that, especially in the higher end, you know, the jumbo loans over and over and over again. So I love, and I think you do too, dealing with those buyers that are truly great buyers. They just need a little bit of time. So that’s the kind of path we took since April. What do we change? Only thing we change as a team is virtual meetings every morning, cause we’re virtual, except for one day a week now. And then the, from the, from the standpoint of sellers, we started about a year and a half, probably about the time I was on your show or early, we started pivoting to virtual. Anyway, it just, now that’s overwhelmingly accepted by the sellers, whereas before it was a bit of a sell to let them know how we’re going to do things virtually. So I I’ll end that question or that answer with my son-in-law said to me the other night, we’re at dinner privately. The family. And he said, I gotta tell you, I think COVID coincidentally is one of the best things that ever happened to our company in our portfolio. So probably a little bit different answer than most people give. But that’s been, it’s been a disguised blessing for us so far.

Jay Conner (08:17): Well, when you say your son said, dad, coincidentally, I think this is a, been a blessing for us. You may or may not have heard of my definition of coincidence, but my definition of coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.

Chris Prefontaine (08:35): I love it!

Jay Conner (08:36): Well, your story, Chris, and your results and your experience since COVID-19 is exactly the same as mine. My business has tripled both my coaching business and my buying and selling house business. Year to date since January, of course, you know, COVID came in strong in March. I have bought and sold more houses this year than any year since I went full time back in 2003. My coaching business has skyrocketed. And I think another reason for that is because what you just said, virtual. And I really cannot tell you, I wish I could tell you. Well, I can give you part of the reason, part of the reason our real estate investing business at sky rocket is because I was, and you were prepared for the increase in business.

Jay Conner (09:34): For the all cash deals, we have plenty of private money on the shelf ready to take advantage of serving all those people and et cetera. But the, but the demand itself, I must say, I can’t, I cannot give you a definitive answer, but I’m thankful for it on both the buying and selling side. And we were prepared to take care of it. Now, your popular business model that you talk about, your strategy is a strategy that’s called the three pay day strategy. And we talked about it. Last time you were on the show, but we got a whole lot more additional new viewers and audience members since then. So from scratch, how about explaining your three day strategy or three payday strategy and what that means?

Chris Prefontaine (10:22): Yeah, so the three payday is this is on the exit. So we buy them on lease purchase or owner financing sometimes subject to, but all of our exits, almost all of our exits are going to be rent to own. And when we do that, we create the three paydays. That I know you’re familiar with, but the first payday is a nonrefundable down payment. And the second pay day is the difference between what I’m paying the underlying mortgage on that’s in the seller’s name or the seller directly, if it’s owner financing and what I’m collecting from my buyer, my buyer who needs time to get financing. That’s payday two. Payday three is the, is pretty cool because not only the cash out the mark-up and the price that we were able to achieve, but it’s also all of the principal pay down. When you start looking at principal, pay down on some of these deals, of course, the longer the term, the better, right? But when you’re talking about on financing deals, Jay, we only do on a financing deals when we buy, when they’re free and clear property. So we’re doing always principal only pay downs. And so over the course of three, four, five, seven, 10, my building 20 years, you got some massive principal pay down. So I love the three paydays. I also love the longer terms, especially during Covid.

Jay Conner (11:29): So let’s just make sure our audience understood what you just said. So you said the majority of these deals that you’re doing, the three payday strategy and those three paydays again are on the selling side when you’re selling the home they are, you’re getting the nonrefundable option fee or down payment. You’re getting positive cash flow between what you got coming in, what you got going out per month. And the third one, what’d you say the third one was?

Chris Prefontaine (12:02): Principal Pay down. And if there’s any mark-up from what we purchased to what we’re selling.

Jay Conner (12:07): Yeah. It’s just so that principal pay down means you, and then this is what I want everybody to not miss. You’re buying homes from sellers and the way you’re funding those deals, the way this third pay they have is you’re buying those houses with the seller, being your lender. The seller is your bank. The seller is taking a note back and selling to you as seller financing, or you bought it subject to the existing note. Is that right?

Chris Prefontaine (12:39): That’s correct. When they’re free and clear the seller financing, we prefer so that we can structure whatever we want for principal pay down. And the third way buying them would be lease purchase. So more of a sandwich, sandwich lease.

Jay Conner (12:51): Gotcha. So, what are the reasons, what are the benefits, why have you decided to exit with the rent to own strategy versus putting it in the MLS and cashing out?

Chris Prefontaine (13:06): Yeah, mainly it’s the three paydays Jay, but I’ll tell you a pre COVID, but certainly more so now to our earlier comments, both of us. The amount of buyers, the buyer pool for people that can’t walk in a bank today and get financing. And then especially when you get to jumbo and above is crazy. We had a guy, give you a direct example. I think it’s always easier to understand. $1.3 million house. One of our students had a buyer saw that same home had an under agreement. COVID hit, he has a 760 credit, but he didn’t have enough down at the bank. Wanted to see some ungodly amount, like two and a half year reserves, 25% down. He had like 10% down. So he, he thought he lost that house. My student picked it up. We did together. We partnered on it and this guy came out again for the same house and did a rent to own on it because we’re going to give him the two year ramp. He needs to save more money than satisfy the bank. Well, those are everywhere right now. Like the buyer pool is enormous. Prior to COVID I use the percentage of like 60% to 80% of the buyers couldn’t get financing. If you took a snapshot in time, I don’t know what the number is today, but it’s bigger. And so they need our help. And that’s the cool thing about a very healthy relationship. So to what you said earlier, if we put their interests for us, it’s a win-win. Big win-win right now, helping these people.

Jay Conner (14:24): So I’m going to ask you a question that you could actually take three days live seminar to answer. We don’t have three days. So let me just ask you to let your consciousness just flow and just answer it the best that you can from the 30,000 foot view. Here’s the question. When you and your students are talking to a potential seller, of course, all these sellers were talking about where you buy creatively on terms are off market. Clearly you’re not buying these properties in the multiple listing service they’re off market. When you are beginning a conversation and establishing rapport and getting information on the property, we know that the seller of that property in most cases, either has not considered or even thought about the possibility of selling their property on terms. They are thinking somebody just going to buy this house. So my three day seminar question is, what is your talk off? How do you convince someone to agree to sell their house on terms? Before you answer this question, Chris, I want you to explain to everybody and unpack what does it actually mean. The sell on terms. Let’s get that clear you, after you clear up black and white, easy peasy, really, what does it mean to sell on terms? How do you convince somebody to do that when they never consider doing that? And when the conversation started with them, they’re anticipating, you know, getting a check and getting all their money.

Chris Prefontaine (16:22): Yeah, absolutely. So terms to us, cause it does mean different things to different people, as you and I said off air. Terms to us is simply lease purchase, owner financing and or subject to because we combined some of these strategies. That’s what terms is to us. Those are the three areas we live in. The conversation, this, the question you asked with the convincing is by far the biggest thing we get in live trainings. So it’s not convincing. So just to clarify that, so it’s like the same reason you would go to an autobody or an attorney or an accountant because you have something you’re trying to either fix, improve or accomplish, because not always negative, especially with debt free properties, it’s not negative. They just wanted the most. So that’s, so first and foremost, I have a simple question at the beginning of the conversation. Jay, if you were to get your price, I haven’t seen your home yet, but if you were to get your price, are you open to doing that on a lease purchase or owner financing?

Chris Prefontaine (17:15): Now most say, well, I just want to sell it out. Right? And my answer is I get it. 99% of the sales I deal will say that. Of course I would want to sell tomorrow of a full price cash, and have no issues. Right. But the reality is this. Mr. Seller, you have a significant part of the buyer pool right now that can’t do that. They can’t, they can’t do, they can’t buy your home because of financing. Now that has made, it’s made even easier for me to explain with Covid. It’s even, it’s even worse for them. So that’s the conversation. And then back to the convincing, there is no convincing if they can, A. Wait for their cash, if they have any in the house, any equity left. And B. I can solve whatever issue they have. Give you some off the top of my head.

Chris Prefontaine (17:57): I’m moving to Texas. My family is already there. I want to be there for the holiday. I have two homes. I can’t keep them both during COVID. I owe about what it’s worth. I can’t afford a realtor. If there’s any motivation for selling, that makes sense for me to solve. I can solve it. As long as one of two things are in the mix. One, I need my cash right away. Two. I’m a year behind and has no equity in my house. Like those are the two things that I just can’t do anything with typically. But every other scenario, if they can wait, we can solve it with a lease purchase or owner financing or subject to. So is that, was that a condensed enough or too condensed?

Jay Conner (18:34): Yeah. Yeah. You took three days and put it in three minutes. Which is what I wanted you to do. So what would you say is a realistic percentage of people that you’re talking to. And this is putting aside those that you can’t help. Like, you know, those scenarios, you just, I mean, you know, they’re a year behind and they have no equity. You know, those do have equity. Those that, you know, the math would work if they get it and they can wait, what percentage of those people that you talk to actually end up being, you know, agreeable to selling on terms in some kind of structure?

Chris Prefontaine (19:17): Yeah. About a third. But let me clarify where the third came from. The third have already been weeded out by virtual assistants who spoke to them and they said, yeah, I’m somewhat open. Have someone call me. You know, they weren’t shutting it down totally. They could wait for their equity. So out of those that we get about a third are open to terms. Now I can’t tell you in accurate metric from April 1 to now segregated. I can just tell you ongoing. We’re about a third. So it’s a significant amount. Look, here’s a stat. This is a cool thing. I, some of us, our company and some of our students are niching down just to do owner financing, just at target free and clear properties. Well, if you look at this different stats, but if you look at the stats about a third of the property, the United States are debt free or close to it.

Chris Prefontaine (20:02): That’s a lot of properties! You don’t need to talk to many of those. These street paydays, those free and clear properties. If you get four year terms, you’re talking about six figure deals right across the board. If you get a house that’s 200 grand or higher and you get four years of more, and the principal payments, you’re talking six figures, three paydays, you don’t need to do, you know, 50 of those a year. You can go out and try and do that, but you don’t need to do that for most people. So super, super, super lucrative for both parties. If, if that’s the criteria. So probably a longer answer to your good question.

Jay Conner (20:36): That’s good. Would you say most of these sellers, you’re able to negotiate, that you do negotiate terms, they are willing to take payments or whatever. Would you say most of those are principal only payments or do some people you have to pay interest?

Chris Prefontaine (20:55): Okay, good question. So in the mix of what we do about 20% of the properties we take on our contract offering clear, and yes, we do those with principal only payments. Now there’s been a hybrid or two. I’ll give you two real examples. We did our office building and the owner is very sophisticated investor owns probably not the largest landowner, but one of the largest on Island here where we live. And so he sold me the building and he said, I want five and a half percent interest. This is a year and a half, two years ago. I said, well, you should pay principal. So here’s what we did. We both loved it from when I closed on it in November of 18, all my payments. And there were teared up payments were principal all the way until about September of 19. So as long as the shorter that is, I took that principle five 50 and had it paid down to four 90 without a penny of interest, then he advertised it at 5%. And he got his way. And I got my way. There was no way I would’ve got a 60 grand pay down in principal by doing a conventional mortgage. He knew that. And I knew that. So we both got our way. That’s one example.

Chris Prefontaine (22:01): The other way we do things is let’s say I’m three years into a four year on a financing term. This was an exact deal. And every holiday season, I send them a note or an email. And I say, look, I know you got three years left or two years left, as we click along. If I was to prepay 6,000 was in this case, it was 6,200 prepay. So take it for another day, like prepay some principal when you extend it a year. So I get another year principal pay down that’s of course, if my buyer’s not ready to cash out, it works even better. We did that two years in a row at a particular property. The third year, last Christmas, they called us and said, will you do that thing again? And I said, well, instead of that, why don’t we do this? If you guys don’t need the cash, why don’t we change your note? That’s going to be coming up next year. Why don’t we change that to an interest rate of 4.2? And why don’t we put that out 15 years for balloon? So a four year deal on a financing principal only became a five, then became a six, then became a 21 year deal. So that’s why I said earlier, you can mix and match some of these strategies depending on what the motivation is of the seller. In this case, they didn’t need the money and their account and loved it, that they were going to stack it in some interest. So we do sometimes that was another long answer, but I hope that helps.

Jay Conner (23:12): Oh, it did help because what you just explained was a real life example of the deal after the deal, after deal, after the deal.

Chris Prefontaine (23:21): Exactly.

Jay Conner (23:23): So that’s a great example of, I mean, you know, when I first heard years ago that sellers of homes of houses, of single family houses, would be willing to take a note out 15 years, I thought to myself who in the world would wait 15 years? I mean, they might be dead by then, who would wait 15 years to get their money? And I, and the light bulb finally came on to me years ago. Well, the same answer is to the site to a different question. Who in the world would be willing to sell their property and agree to leave the mortgage in their name and trust me to make the payments? The answer is the same. And the answer is, I can’t make a decision and have the same motivation as somebody else for the seller. They do things for their own reasons. I do things for my reasons and I need, and we need to let them make their choice. Right? One of the biggest mistakes I made when I started in real estate investing was making decisions for other people or deciding in my mind what I thought they would do, or they would not do. And I don’t have a clue what somebody else is going to do until I give them the choice. So my lands! Give them the choice! Right?

Chris Prefontaine (24:44): Yeah. To your last point there about making the decisions pre COVID too many of our students and us, when we first started, we’d say, if they asked us how long a term we may have come out with a term back then, like four years. Now, simply by changing how we answer that we’re getting five, seven, 10, and 20, just as easy as we were getting three to five in the simple question, when they say, how long is, if you got your number, I don’t know if you’ve got your number, what’s the longest you could see yourself going in terms? And I am pleasantly surprised. I won’t say shocked at how many sellers are programmed to say things like, well, I wouldn’t go up 30, like a regular mortgage, but I might go up 20 or might go upto 10, like automatically they do. And so it took us four or five years to figure that one out, but all the students, new students now. So you think we would have had to pick it out first. New students, as soon as we told them that technique thought that was normal. And they’re getting those longterm,

Jay Conner (25:38): Chris, you’re the expert on terms. I’m the expert on private money. But I got a question for you and your students to play with, and I want to hear how it goes. So the question that you just said was, well, what’s the longest you could go? I would love to play with this question. And that question would be, well when they say, well, you know, how long have I got to go? I might ask them, well, how many years would you like to continue receiving monthly income?

Chris Prefontaine (26:15): I love it! in to the point!

Jay Conner (26:15): Well, I don’t, whatever. I don’t want to ever stop getting monthly income.

Chris Prefontaine (26:20): No, I love that one. Thank you for the share.

Jay Conner (26:23): So anyway, it just came. It may be a stupid idea, but I don’t know sometimes what I think stupid works and vice versa. So, so the next question. You talk about operating. In the midst of this current chaos, you talk about operating in the perfect triangle. What does that mean? What is the perfect triangle that you talk about?

Chris Prefontaine (26:50): Yeah. I thought of this right when Covid hit and literally I moved home to the home office here. And that was, we’ve got a really cool community, like really a family environment in the office and amongst our community. So I said this, if we can all attach ourselves to one side of triangle, a cause, just a cause. Like a major mission, like right now, because of the chaos, sellers and buyers are some of them afraid, but all of them need a guide. They’re like screaming for help. And in some cases, literally don’t know, should I sell, can I sell? Does this work? So find a cause that can, then the second piece of the triangle actually affect lives, like affect them, generationally affect them. That’s what we’re doing.

Chris Prefontaine (27:32): We’re going to affect generationally. These people that thought they couldn’t buy or sell. And that’s going to forever be in their family. And then third. And in affecting our lives as well. And then third piece of the triangle is to get paid, to do it. So find a cause. Go out and affect lives positively, including your own. And then get paid to do it. I don’t think that triangle has ever been so prevalent because of the chaos right now, because of the need for a guide and someone to like take them by the hand. There was a major survey done, Jay, I’m going to forget the name. One of my mentors told me about it. They do a trust survey every year. It’s not cause of COVID. They happen to do it right around covid. But the number one thing with sellers and buyers was this trust factor. Like they just want a guy that they can trust and that perfect triangle is where we could camp out.

Jay Conner (28:18): So beautiful way to describe win-win-win. Final question, Chris. For this show. And that is given your experience. We’ve had COVID come along both you and I lived through 2008, 2009. I mean, you’ve been doing this real estate investing thing for 30 years, yourself and your family. What’s the best advice you can give today on how to prepare to handle the next recession. When’s the next recession? Well, if we, any of us knew that we could retire today.

Chris Prefontaine (28:56): You wouldn’t be yet.

Jay Conner (28:58): Is there going to be another recession? Of course. Is it going to be another stock market crash? Of course. You know, it’s cycle cycle, cycle cycle. So what do we need to do to prepare?

Chris Prefontaine (29:11): Sure. I mean, I could go a couple different directions here, personal and business, but let’s go business first. I will personally tell you my opinion, never, ever, ever sign personally on a bank piece of paper, pledging your assets. That’s my opinion, except for maybe an exception of your own home. I could see that working, but you could still buy that on terms as my family members have. So that’s number one. Don’t sign personally. Number two. So then you’re not worrying about if,if,if,if,if. That they’re going to come knocking if the market drops. Okay. Number two. Hang out with someone that weather the storms, Jay, you said you and I have gone through ’08. I went through ’08. I went through 9/11, like you did. I went through my son’s accident where he was put in a coma and that was an overnight shot. You know, all these things beat us up, but they also weathered us because unfortunately success without the, those trials and tribulations, their rotten teacher, they really are.

Chris Prefontaine (30:01): So if you’re going to do anything in real estate, just hang out with someone that weathered a few storms, that’s the way to do it. Just don’t deviate. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. And then lastly, on a personal note, pre ’08, I know I would have no problem, no problem whatsoever. Having a personal residence that had there was leverage 70, 80, 90% of it. I would have no problem doing it until you said, Oh, that’s normal. I have good rate. And I’m in real estate. I will tell you if you can live on 50% or less of your income and never have to be in that debt or leveraged position, you will also sleep better. So if you could tell all of these are based on my way, crashing, not needing to sleep at night. When I put my head in the pillow, I want to know that everything’s fine. And so that’s a smidgeling of what I would tell people to do.

Jay Conner (30:48): Awesome advice, Chris. Awesome advice. So Chris, I know that the audience wants to stay connected with you. So how can folks further the conversation and stay connected and get plugged into Chris Prefontaine?

Chris Prefontaine (31:03): Sure. Thanks, Jay! They can go to SmartRealEstateCoach.com There’s if they don’t mind listening to me babble for another 45 or so minutes, there’s a free webinar there. It’s content rich. It’s not going to teach how to make a million dollars. It’s going to expose you to some more information on what is possible for you. And then if you want, we can actually, I’ll probably get a, I’ll get a spanking for this one, but I’ll offer a free strategy call for anyone that wants to talk, especially with Covid here. Just go to SmartRealEstateCoach.com/Action. That’s all. They’ll just ask you if you’ve done deals. If you haven’t done deals, no wrong answer. Allows myself or my son, Zach, to help you out with a free strategy call. No ties, no hooks. We’ll get on 15 minutes. We’ll make it well worth your time.

Jay Conner (31:46): That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Chris and parting comments.

Chris Prefontaine (31:53): I said some of them in the interview, cause you, your questions were just spot on. I don’t care what niche you’re looking at. You and I have both advocates of exposing all niches. We both do that on our podcast. I love that. So, find an issue and get behind. I’m not so naive to think it’s mine. I’m sure Jay feels the same way. Find one you can get behind. Secondly, find someone in there that has weathered a few storms. And third don’t deviate for three years. Like just don’t. Don’t get the shiny object syndrome. You’ll have a great experience with that simple formula.

Jay Conner (32:19): I love it! Chris, thank you so much for joining me on the show!

Chris Prefontaine (32:22): Thanks for having me, buddy. Good to see you.

Jay Conner (32:24): Absolutely. And, thank you! My audience for tuning in to another episode of Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner. And I’m so glad you were here. Be sure to tune in for the next show. Here’s to taking your real estate investing business to the next level. I’m Jay Conner, The Private Money Authority. And we’ll see you then. Bye for now.

#Jay Conner #Private Money Lender #Real Estate Business #Real Estate #Real Estate Investing #Real Estate Investor #Real Estate Profit #The Private Money Authority

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IS THE UNITED STATES AT END OF EMPIRE?

America’s economic primacy is pretty much behind us. And, I don’t believe there is any chance of reversing a trend that began thirty plus years ago. The best-case scenario for the nation is to slow the rate of economic decline – never mind social and cultural decline, which are probably lodged in irreversible decay. As Robert Kaplan says in his book, The Revenge of Geography, we might prolong our position of strength by preparing the world for our own obsolescence and thus ensuring a graceful exit. But even this outcome will require the strength of will that has yet to be demonstrated by leaders in business, education, and government.

Economic primacy might be measured along many fronts – income per capita, rate of growth, productivity, foreign exchange reserves, among others – but if one looks at Gross Domestic Product (GDP), perhaps the coarsest measure of a nation’s economic well-being, then the United States has lost its economic primacy to China when compared on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis.

The PPP approach levels the GDP calculation to each country’s relative price of goods. So, if a television set costs $500 in the United States while the same television costs $250 in China then, theoretically at least, we’re under counting China’s GDP by $250. Using the PPP rationale, China’s GDP was approximately $23.5 trillion in 2019 compared to that of the United States which came in at $21.4 trillion.

Some politicians, economists, lobbyists, and others, like to use a different measure of GDP to suit their own purposes. The nominal GDP, which looks at the total of goods and services produced at current exchange rates yields a substantially different calculation. The nominal GDP of the United States in 2019 came in at $21.4 trillion, a number which is identical to the nation’s GDP on a PPP basis. The reason for this is that the nominal GDP calculation is based on the dollar and so there is no currency conversion rate difference. By comparison, China’s nominal GDP came in at $14.3 trillion. If we only look at nominal GDP, it is clear we are being lulled into a false sense of economic security.

CHINA HAS UNRIVALLED DIPLOMATIC PATIENCE

Diplomatically, China also has an edge on the United States. In the 1980’s, the then leader of the People’s Republic of China, Deng Xiaoping, enunciated his famous maxim of tao guang yang hui. Interpreted variously, the maxim is meant as a foreign policy directive that regardless how muscular the nation might become economically, geopolitically, and militarily it is always best to keep a “low profile diplomatically.” No more beguiling example of Deng Xiaoping’s maxim is in evidence than in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Simply put, China plans to build one “road” from China to Europe and thus control all manner of transcontinental commerce. Already, China controls or has a presence in ports that handle about two-thirds of the world’s container traffic. In Greece, the port of Piraeus, a storied port dating to the Fifth Century B.C., is majority owned by the China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) which makes Greece a strategic entry point for China into the heart of Europe.

In Central Asia, China’s power projection is as undeniable as it is ominous. Through the auspices of the euphemistically named Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), China has, in effect, expanded its borders westward by 1,500 miles to the Caspian Sea. Strategically, the mostly land-based route from Khorgos, Kazakhstan on China’s western border to Piraeus has now achieved super-highway potential from China to Europe.

China established the SCO with original signatories Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan for the expressed purpose of promoting border security along its Xinjiang autonomous-region home to millions of mostly Muslim ethnic Uyghurs. Emblematic of China’s clout in the region, moreover, is that since the formation of the SCO both India and Pakistan have been granted membership in the organization. For the United States, it isn’t clear how much leeway it will now have to operate in Central Asia given the leverage that China has over SCO countries economically, diplomatically, and militarily.

China has also learned to game international organizations. The Paris Climate Accord, biased to begin with in favor of China, looks the other way when the nation burns far more coal than it officially admits. So, while emissions in the United States trend lower, potentially hobbling our fossil fuel energy sector, China’s continue to increase. China’ s shell game also involves the building of coal plants outside its borders to further fuel its economy without having to account for the consequent emissions domestically. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is also in China’s pocket as it refuses to rein in China’s channeling of state subsidies to its manufacturing companies so as to better compete on the world’s stage. The most egregious example, of course, of how China has played international and presumably apolitical agencies lies with the country’s spread of the devastating and deadly Coronavirus and how the World Health Organization’s (WHO) was complicit in the coverup of China’s misdeeds. In December, 2019, when Taiwan warned about the infectiousness of the virus, the WHO refused to share Taiwan’s warnings with the rest of the world. Clearly, the WHO was doing China’s bidding. To this day, Taiwan, at China’s behest, is boycotted from participating as a full-fledged member of the WHO.

IF WE’RE NOT MAKING STUFF WHAT ARE WE TO DO?

Let’s face it, manufacturing was lost to our shores for all intents and purposes several years ago. In 2015, China displaced the United States as the top manufacturing nation in the world. In 2019, China’s value-added output – in essence, the difference between price and the cost to produce – in manufacturing amounted to $3.9 trillion compared to $2.4 trillion for the United States. That gap will doubtless continue to grow.

There are now roughly 15 million workers in the United States engaged in manufacturing down from approximately 18 million in the 1980’s – President Trump, to his credit, was determined to revitalize manufacturing, steel, and coal but despite gains in these areas total employment numbers will continue to slip on a trend-line basis. When one considers that China has approximately 112 million manufacturing workers, the competitive disadvantage for the United States becomes palpably clear.

In 2019 our nation’s goods deficit with China was approximately $345 billion. That gap is not likely to be made up in any of our lifetimes. So, that leaves Services as the new game in town. In 2019, Services accounted for roughly 69% of our nation’s GDP. And, as a nation, we better excel in that new cycle reality. It is true, the United States ran an annual balance of payments surplus in services with China of about $36 billion in 2019 – with U.S. exports amounting to about $56 billion and imports from China totaling $20 billion. But don’t let that fool you as a $20 billion gap will be easy for China to make up especially when one considers that China’s Services sector is growing at an average of 2% per year. And, unless we accelerate the rate of growth of exports – the rate of growth is about even for both imports and exports – we might soon be facing a deficit in this sector of the economy so crucial for the good health of the nation in the twenty-first century.

THE NATION FACES SOME VERY STIFF HEADWINDS

The United States economy has structural defects which will not go away simply by holding rallies and mouthing rhetorical flourishes in the halls of Congress. Decline might be inexorable but we should not stand by as mere spectators. The will and purpose to restore our economic vitality must be marshaled by every American. It must begin, first and foremost, by demanding of our leaders, our institutions, and ourselves to be unafraid to serve in keeping with American priorities. It is the remotest possibility that we can salvage the service economy and consequently our nation unless our standard of performance is nothing less than service excellence in everything we do.

We don’t have a lot going for ourselves: Labor productivity growth is stalled at near zero levels; the rate of household savings is paltry; regulation and taxation still suffocates businesses and individuals despite President Trump’s initiatives; unemployment – not the nominal rate but the U6 rate which measures the unemployed, those that are not looking for work, and those who have had to settle for part-time work – is mired at levels of 7% (during the Obama years the U6 rate never got below 9.2%); and he national debt is now in excess of 120% of GDP. Entitlement spending while currently at a level of approximately 70% of the federal budget is on the threshold of becoming a perfect storm of out-of- control spending. The progressive policies of the Biden Administration will see to that as it attempts to solve every problem by printing greenbacks. The growing number of baby boomers reaching retirement age and the population’s longer life expectancy will further exacerbate the nation’s economic health.

Perhaps the most troubling portent for the nation’s future is its inability to clamber out of a deep and black hole in education. Among the 37 industrialized nations which comprise the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), for example, the United States ranks 31st in mathematics and roughly in the middle on science. Clearly, all of the monetary and fiscal policies in the world will hardly fix this crippling deficiency which has more to do with a cultural indifference to serious and rigorous education.

Prior to Mr. Trump’s coming to office, the federal government was hell-bent on redistributing wealth rather than getting out of the way so that risk capitalists could create wealth. Unfortunately, President Trump’s reforms designed to bring back a full-throated and free market approach to the nation’s financial issues died the moment President Biden came into office.

Meanwhile, in the corporate world, business leaders are fixated on how quarterly earnings affect their pay packages, and when push comes to shove, cutting corners and worse. How else can one explain the utter disregard American companies operating in China have for the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on its people. Abuses such as forced labor (unions are illegal in China), the internment of over a million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, bans on religious freedom and free expression, arbitrary arrests, and the repression of Hong Kong citizens seem not to bother the likes of executives at Caterpillar, General Motors, Ford, AMD, Micron Technologies, Intel, Texas Instruments, Nike, and many others which are doing a land-office business in China. Apple, most notably, has raised to an art form tax, regulatory, and labor dodges which allow it to stash hundreds of billions of dollars overseas while paying little or no income taxes in the United States. The company, apparently, is nonplussed by the fact that its armies of workers in China are employed for wages and benefits that would be in contravention of United States laws. How the CEO’s of these companies can live with themselves knowing full well that they are profiting from someone else’s misery is a testament to their greed and lust for power.

WHERE DOES THE CUSTOMER FIT IN?

From the way we treat our veterans, clients, patients, students, donors, and citizens – customers, all, to my way of thinking we have a lot of work to do before we can claim to excel in service. A survey by consulting giant Accenture in 2007 showed that 41% of respondents described service quality as fair, poor, or terrible – more recent surveys suggest service is worsening. Perform any human endeavor at that level of proficiency and you are an abject failure. In the services sector, however, that is par for the course. In the Far East, cultural determinants do not confuse service with servitude. As a rule, suppliers will go the extra mile to please a consumer. In the West, and particularly in the United States, the most that a service worker can muster when asked to perform a personalized service is to utter something like, “no problem.” That kind of indifferent attitude is ingrained and certain to keep our level of service quality from climbing out of the aforementioned levels of mediocrity.

In the meantime, off-shore locations feast on our indifference to service and do whatever it takes to secure and maintain a customer relationship. The oft-cited explanation for the comparative advantage of off-shore locations, namely, their low cost, is a facile response to a more complicated dynamic. It is true that off-shore locations enjoy all-in cost advantages vis-a-vis the United States. It is also true, that President Trump worked hard to enhance our competitiveness on the world stage by reducing the oppressive web of regulation; reducing our world-leading corporate tax rates; negotiating better trade deals; exiting globalist compacts financed on the backs of American taxpayers; offering a tax holiday for repatriated corporate profits, among other initiatives. Those initiatives, however, have either been rolled back or will soon be under President Biden’s Administration.

My experience is that, particularly in technical disciplines, services delivered by off-shore locations are superior to ours. An apprenticeship initiative, if it were aggressively expanded to include science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations, might make us more competitive in this area. In the rarefied world of supercomputers so critical to pushing the frontiers of science and technology, for example, the United States is out-produced by China on the order of two-to-one. So, until and unless we grow a much larger crop of more competent technical workers we will continue to be outperformed by nations more determined, better educated, more dedicated, and hungrier than we are.

CAN THE UNITED STATES GUARANTEE THE PEACE?

If the nation has ceded its economic primacy, its military primacy is being severely tested. United States’ land-based forces are heavily committed to counterinsurgency operations to fend off non-state actors while conventional warfare strategic planning appears to be dead. In Europe, a likely conventional hotspot, NATO and U.S. forces are outgunned and outmanned by a factor of at least ten to one by Russian forces. In the far East, China’s land-based forces outnumber the United States by a factor of at least two to one.

Our ocean defenses are in no better shape. The nation’s principal bulwark protecting our shores is in steep decline. The United States Navy is but a ghost of its former self. The nation now has fewer vessels than it had before World War I. Most notably, our aircraft carrier fleet which must number sixteen in order to patrol three separate ocean theaters now numbers ten or barely enough to protect two theaters. In the Mediterranean, the U.S. Sixth Fleet is a non-entity the result of which is to have created a vacuum that is now filled by the Russians, Syrians, and Iranians. In the South China Sea, where American Navy vessels seem unable to sail without colliding into tankers and containerships, the United States is being challenged by a territorially aggressive and technologically advanced Chinese Navy. Already, an armada of sophisticated dredging vessels is reclaiming land from the sea for the sole purpose of building military airfields and naval port facilities. More worrisome, Chinese fighter jets and bombers now violate Taiwan’s air space with impunity and regularity.

Former U.S. Undersecretary of the Navy, Seth Cropsey, in his chilling and sobering account, Mayday the Decline of American Naval Supremacy, reminds us that China was the naval hegemon in the fifteenth century. Under the leadership of Admiral Sheng He, Chinese sailors coursed the oceans from their territorial waters to the Strait of Hormuz. Chinese vessels of the time were of a length and tonnage that were not to be seen in the West until centuries later. China’s naval supremacy only came to an end when civil servants forced severe budget cutbacks on the kingdom. Does our own defense budget sequestration of 2013 under President Obama, with its mandate to, in effect, disarm the military, ring a bell? The results of each nation’s budget missteps are eerily similar. China, for its part, will probably not repeat its mistake. In all likelihood, it will take the United States a generation, assuming proper funding and political will, to restore the U.S. Navy so that we can confidently state that the nation can project power and protect seaborne commerce beyond the horizon.

Just as troubling as the rickety state of the nation’s military naval forces is the state of the United States Merchant Marine. The Merchant Marine fleet hauls cargo during peacetime and is attached to the Defense Department during wartime to transport troops and supplies into war zones. The United States should hope it does not get into a major conflagration oceans away as it has experienced a dramatic attrition in its Merchant Marine fleet and manpower inventory. In 1960, the United States had nearly 3,000 vessels in the Merchant Marine fleet. Today, the nation has fewer than 175 vessels or less than one-half of 1% of the total vessel count worldwide. Worse, United States-flagged vessels carry a mere pittance of the total volume of goods and materials that transit through the nation’s ports. The consequence of what is obviously a weak flank in the nation’s defense posture is that in the event of a major outbreak of hostilities the United States would be reliant on foreign-flagged vessels to carry troops, armaments, and supplies with all of the attendant security risks.

One can argue that China’s bellicosity toward the United States is as asymmetrical as it is frontal and direct: China’s theft of roughly $225 billion, at the low end and as much as $600 billion at the high end, annually in counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets from the United States; its monopoly of rare earth metals critical not just for consumer products but for Defense Department applications; its financing of over fifty Confucius Institutes on college campuses and schools designed to spread CCP propaganda; and its unleashing of the Wuhan virus which has cost the lives of more than six-hundred thousand innocent Americans is proof positive that China’s strategy is to envelop the United States on all fronts. And, the United States’ military is playing into China’s hands by its determination to “feminize” its armed forces. Progressive ideologues both in the Biden Administration and the Pentagon are using the military as a social experiment petri dish which is undermining the combat readiness of those in a position to protect our shores in the event of war. All you need to know in this regard comes from the Current Commander in Chief, Joseph Biden: “We’re making good progress designing body armor that fits women properly; tailoring combat uniforms for women; creating maternity flight suits; updating – updating requirements for their hairstyles…”

AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS

In sum, if as the great military historian B.H. Liddell Hart suggests, a nation’s Grand Strategy is a composite of its political, military, economic and diplomatic tools in its “arsenal” which can be brought to bear to advance a state’s national interest then the United States appears to be convulsing in its gradual decay. As I have argued in my essay, The United Kingdom Is Resurgent, the former world economic power, lost its supremacy because it failed to adapt to the winds of change which buffeted its shores long after the economy reached its apex in the early twentieth century.

It is also provocative to think that there might be a “natural” life cycle to nations as there is to human beings that is irreversible. Regardless of one’s view in embracing one or another theory that might explain the demise of nations, there is no reason to remain indolent in resisting such decline even if there is only the remotest possibility of such an outcome. Keep in mind that the demise of Rome was hardly cataclysmic but the result of a long succession of imprudent decisions made by the Empire’s leaders.

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violetsystems · 4 years ago

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President Joe Biden will not call for a wealth tax to help pay for his multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better initiative, according to multiple people familiar with the White House’s thinking. In doing so, he will sidestep a proposal that progressive Democrats, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), say would raise trillions of dollars in revenue and narrow income inequality.

The decision comes amid intense debate in Washington over how to fund the president’s sprawling package, which could top $3 trillion. Democrats are pushing for a variety of tax hikes to fund the legislation, while Republicans are vowing to oppose any package that relies on tax increases to raise revenue.

As a presidential candidate, Biden shied away from a full embrace of the wealth tax, which Warren popularized on the trail and has since introduced in Congress. The policy calls for a 2 percent annual tax on households with a net worth above $50 million, which would rise to 3 percent for those with a net worth above $1 billion.

The Biden White House had not outright rejected the idea — at least not publicly — and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said earlier this month the administration was undecided on whether to pursue it. That fueled optimism among supporters that some form of a wealth tax would ultimately be used to help pay for Democratic priorities like infrastructure, clean energy, expanded broadband, and hospital and school repairs.

Supporters argue that it would be both lucrative — some economists estimate it could raise about $3 trillion over 10 years — and popular, with polls showing nearly 7 in 10 voters somewhat or strongly supporting the proposal. Indeed, the idea helped fuel Warren’s early rise in the 2020 presidential campaign, as she turned it into a populist campaign theme that had crowds chanting “two cents!” at her events.

The White House is expected, instead, to turn to a variety of other pay-fors including a hike in the corporate rate, the ending of federal fossil fuel subsidies and a push to end offshore tax havens for corporations.

While Biden opposed Warren’s structuring of the tax during the campaign, he has latched onto redistributive tax policy as a larger concept. Though their plans to address the problems differ, the president shares Warren's view "that middle class families are paying more than their fair share, and those at the top are not doing their part," a Biden administration official said.

“We have to start rewarding work, not just wealth,” Biden said on the campaign trail.

Inside the White House, the idea that Biden would embrace Warren’s approach after plainly rejecting it during the campaign was difficult to square. Biden aides also don’t see any political risk in casting a wealth tax aside, noting that he supports several tax hikes on the wealthy already, according to several people familiar with his thinking. Taking steps to hike capital gains and estate taxes or raise the top individual income tax rate, for example, would target rich Americans while avoiding a fight over the wealth tax itself.

Biden and Warren also agree on some other measures to increase taxes on the rich, a Warren spokesperson noted, including through eliminating the stepped-up basis loophole that can allow the wealthy to pass fortunes to heirs tax-free. Warren will also continue to push the White House and Treasury Department on her wealth tax proposal, the spokesperson said.

“The bottom line is Democrats seem to no longer be afraid of taxing the rich in a major way, and to be very blatant about the fact that we’re raising taxes on the rich,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "That’s a sea change from where we were just a few years ago.”

While there has been widespread interest in the idea of a wealth tax, there is real concern on Capitol Hill that implementing it as Warren has proposed would prove unconstitutional — and that federal courts stacked with Donald Trump-appointed judges would be unlikely to rule in the Biden administration’s favor on the issue. One Democratic aide said the White House was hesitant to throw its weight behind the idea when it could lean on other pay-fors that the majority of lawmakers are more comfortable with.

There is some skepticism, too, that a wealth tax would raise the $3 trillion that Warren talks about because of how difficult it would be to accurately measure Americans’ wealth each year — and how easy it could be for rich families to hide their assets. One paper from last year, led by Matthew Smith of Treasury, projected a Warren-style wealth tax would have raised $117 billion in 2016, seemingly well short of other estimates.

The revenue proposals Biden has embraced, meanwhile, are still designed to eliminate or reduce “this issue of people accumulating large amounts of wealth over time that is never subject to taxation,” said Sharon Parrott, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“There are lots of different mechanisms to do it,” Parrott said. “The important thing is that we actually do it.”

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things2mustdo · 4 years ago

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Bitcoin is further evidence that the “glass ceiling,” the idea that women are kept from reaching the ranks in corporations and in financial success because of a nebulous “patriarchy,” is nonsense.

Economists have disproved the glass ceiling on more than one occasion in the past, so the more well-read will not be shocked by this. Yet, the existence of the glass ceiling has remained a major talking point for feminists. The silence of feminists during the rise of Bitcoin has been deafening.

Bitcoin is an interesting case study because it is modern and doesn’t have the excuses that you hear when the glass ceiling argument breaks out. There is no Bitcoin establishment or “old boys’ club,” because Bitcoin has no establishment. Bitcoin is hardly established, and there is no one central authority.

Feminists claim that “institutions have always had biases” and “it’s a man’s game,” but Bitcoin didn’t come with any biases. It didn’t come with anything. It was nothing ten years ago, and its meteoric growth is well-known.

Bitcoin was created in 2009, a time where women had established themselves in various industries, most notably tech (see: Meg Whitman, Sheryl Sandberg). Nine years later, only three percent (at most) of Bitcoin use (suggested through Bitcoin community engagement) is by women.

Is this the patriarchy keeping women from investing? No. There is nothing that stops women from investing in Bitcoin. Women don’t even need to go to banks to introduce an intermediary which could discriminate against them.

So why aren’t more women investing in Bitcoin? There are a number of reasons for this.

1. Bitcoin is Boring

There are no emotions involved in cryptocurrency investing. Women are more likely to get involved in areas that stir their emotions, from the social sciences to humanitarian work to political rallies.

Bitcoin is mathematical. It was created with a white paper and some computer programming. Since more women take up studies in the arts or humanities than math, it is more difficult to understand the concept and takes more work.

Also, because women prefer soft subjects to hard ones, women end up in jobs related to the arts and humanities versus the hard sciences. They will be more likely surrounded by men and mostly women that also did not study math and computer science and will not be interested in—or understand—Bitcoin.

In addition, Bitcoin isn’t tangible. You can’t feel it in your hands, so you cannot wave it around to boost or lower your status without hopping on a male-centric Reddit page (HODL!!). This reduces the emotional connection to it because there is no physical thing to attach a feeling to. Where money can be a sign of prosperity or options, the numbers in a bit wallet are less tangible.

2. There Is A Lot Of Risk

Women generally value security and strength, which we have seen in relationship dynamics and the number of careers chosen as opposed to entrepreneurs. Men are more willing to take chances.

One of Bitcoin’s tenets is that it is less risky than fiat dollars because it is not subject to inflation and to crumbling governments, so it should be more stable. However, Bitcoin is still young and has a wildly fluctuating value. It is this perceived value that people see as risky, not the idea. It is these wild fluctuations in value that appeal to men.

Bitcoin is also a long-term investment. Bitcoin believers believe the cryptocurrency will be more durable than fiat and will be a superior currency. Women are much more likely to spend and distribute wealth than to build it through investing.

3. Bitcoin Is Competitive

Men eat what we kill. We evolved to eat the animals we hunted, and we still do that in the modern economy. In a tribal setting, the man that hunted the most for his tribe was rewarded with more power and more women to bang. We evolved to be competitive and to fight for the top spot.

These days, men are more likely to participate in sports and more likely to try new things to get ahead (see here). Bitcoin is competitive with other cryptocurrencies as people (men) race to market and grow their currency of choice. Bitcoin is also competitive as a store of wealth. The more men own, the more men can use our primal brains to associate with power and sex.

These are the reasons why only three percent of Bitcoin users—a completely decentralized, open world without bias—are women. These are the same reasons that men make more money than women in the workplace. It isn’t the patriarchy. It’s the evolutionary and behavioral differences in men and women that decide the numbers.

Men are competitive, find freedom in long-term wealth, and are more excited about new ideas and a new, selfish way to increase wealth. At least, more than women.

Read More: Bitcoin Is Creating A New Class Of Millionaires

Right at this very second, the largest transfer of wealth in the history of humanity is underway. It has been going on since 2009, but it’s really picked up speed in the last 6 months. A couple of days ago, I wrote a detailed post on RVF explaining Bitcoin in layman’s terms. I strongly suggest that every reader of this post spend 10 minutes on that explanation, but if you’re too lazy then here’s the summary:

Bitcoin is the world’s largest cryptocurrency, essentially money for the Internet. It is an open source Internet protocol, like HTTP. It was hypothesized and first developed by an anonymous author or group under the name “Satoshi Nakamoto”.

Bitcoin is pioneering the idea of a deflationary currency, something which has never been possible before in humanity’s history. Gold and silver come close, but not all of it has been dug out of the ground yet. The only two possibilities for Bitcoin are that its value goes to zero, or increases. There is no possibility that the value ever decreases or stabilizes (in the medium term). In the long term, Bitcoin’s value will increase at a decreasing rate, but never stop, as it can be lost but not replaced.

Unlike gold and silver, Bitcoin can be essentially perfectly subdivided, and transmitted anywhere on the planet for almost nothing between any two parties with an Internet connection.

Bitcoin is decentralized like the Tor network, so it cannot be regulated or controlled by any government or authority body.

One Bitcoin has climbed from less than $200 to peaks over $1000 in the last month. Every currency and medium of exchange on the planet is down against the Bitcoin over the last year, including gold and oil.

Innovation Means Winners And Losers

There is a hard limit of just under 21 million Bitcoins. That means less than 1 in 300 people could own a full one, even if evenly distributed, which they are not (there’s already a number of investors that own hundreds or thousands or more).

One Bitcoin can be subdivided down into 100 million Satoshis (the smallest unit). Even if the world’s money supply was entirely Bitcoin, one Satoshi would be worth just a couple of cents in today’s USD, allowing for small transactions. If this were to happen, many many people would be reduced to poverty, living their entire lives on a few Millibits (thousandths of a Bitcoin) or Satoshis.

The new 1% is anyone that currently owns at least one Bitcoin, the world just doesn’t know it yet. Like this, but on a world scale. For the most part, this includes white, technically-minded, middle-aged American men but increasingly comprises Chinese technophiles and a cross section of society in economically unstable countries like Cyprus and Argentina.

The US government is starting to clue in and realises it needs to know what’s going on, but all they need to understand is that they can benefit from supporting it, or be trampled as they attempt to regulate something beyond their control.

I can’t say it any better than one of the commentators on the linked article (although I disagree about the inevitability of war and death), so here’s “Dumbhandle”:

US Government: Pay attention. You have almost destroyed the future of our country by retarding bitcoin usage in the US with the ham fisted application and mismanagement of various regs. Wealth is fleeing already to China and accelerating. You have a very short time to deregulate in order to attract bitcoin wealth to the US before the bitcoin black hole inevitably sucks in all world fiat currencies and the flow of XBT wealth to China and other counties accelerates.

Against all odds, your Chinese colleagues have realized this and are working as a team to effectuate capital accumulation over there. They are winning, because they understand fiats and the petro are finished. You need to immediately pull in some experts from the bitcoin community to explain this to you so you can take proper emergency evasive action to reverse the flow back to the US. Here is your goal: deregulate to reverse the capital flight. Then watch the global conversion of fiat to bitcoin. Watch bitcoin accumulate in the most innovative place in the world, the US. Sit back and watch a golden age bloom here and it spreads globally. Any other course will result in wars and death on a massive scale. Now we will watch you screw it up.

Bitcoin Doesn’t Care

Just like hypergamy and evolution, Bitcoin doesn’t care.

It doesn’t care if you didn’t know

It doesn’t care if you don’t understand

It doesn’t care if you don’t believe

The critics will cry that “Bitcoin is just a bubble” (alternatively: pyramid scheme), and they’d be right. It’s a bubble in exactly the same way as the US dollar, which also gets its value entirely from community consensus (the paper it’s printed with cannot be eaten, used as construction material and is pretty poor fire fuel). I am more prepared to trust a democratic, distributed, deflationary technology than the self-serving government printing press, and I suspect a lot of others might too. I’m not alarmed by Bitcoin’s incredible growth, it’s just following the same S curve that tech giants like Facebook and Twitter tend to.

Absent any flaw being found in the source code (which has been publicly available and reviewed for years), or more likely one being introduced by the core development team (still a vanishingly unlikely proposition), I believe 1 Bitcoin will be worth at least US$ 100 000 by 31st December 2016. The Winklevoss twins think even higher. Max Keiser thinks even higher. Even Peter Thiel (Paypal co-founder) agrees the revolution has begun. Although ultimately, we’re all pure speculators on a very untested new technology.

The only other potential issue is advances in quantum computing that smashes apart current encryption standards, but that would cause far larger problems with all online privacy. If anyone would come out on top it’s the forward-thinking and technically-minded Bitcoin community.

Adapt or live with regret among the masses. You have been warned. At the very least, do some reading and make an informed decision.

Bitcoin daily closing prices on MtGox for the last 4 years (to Nov 29), from sub-5 dollars to over $1000. The closing of illegal, anonymous online marketplace Silk Road knocked the price off for a while, but it freed Bitcoin from any accusations of being useful only for drug deals. The road up is going to be rocky, but there is no stopping the train now.

NB: In the time taken for this post to go through the ROK submission and editing process, closing prices have doubled. The original version of this article had the graph below finishing at $450.

https://www.returnofkings.com/10595/there-is-no-hedge-against-inflation

#bitcoin

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theliberaltony · 4 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll(s) of the week

When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, one of the storylines we’ve been following is the growing gap between how Democrats and Republicans view the crisis.

The most obvious divide until this point has been largely political: that is, how Democrats and Republicans view President Trump’s handling of the pandemic. As FiveThirtyEight’s tracker on coronavirus polls1 shows, 82.2 percent of Republicans approve of the president’s response compared with just 12.5 percent of Democrats. But since Trump is arguably the most polarizing president in modern times, it’s not exactly stunning that his approval rating on handling the crisis — 42.7 percent — is more or less identical to his overall job approval rating.2

By comparison, attitudes toward state governors and their handling of the pandemic don’t seem especially partisan — at least at this point. A new poll from SurveyMonkey found that every governor’s approval rating was higher than Trump’s — except for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s, whose rating was on par with the president’s. And 42 governors had an approval rating of 60 percent or higher regardless of their states’ political lean. This includes some Republican governors in blue states — such as Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker — and some Democratic governors in red states — like Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.

Still, we are starting to see more pronounced splits between Democrats and Republicans on their attitudes toward the coronavirus crisis. The Axios/Ipsos tracking poll found, for instance, that 78 percent of Democrats felt there was a moderate to large risk in attending in-person gatherings compared with 51 percent of Republicans, a 27-percentage-point gap that has doubled since mid-April. As for when to end social distancing and reopen businesses, a new poll from The Economist/YouGov found that 34 percent of Republicans said it was already “safe right now” compared with only 6 percent of Democrats. And when it comes to attending large political rallies, Republicans were nearly twice as likely as Democrats (38 percent to 22 percent) to say they’d be comfortable attending one sometime in the next six months (or sooner) based on what they know about COVID-19, according to a new poll from Morning Consult.

However, Americans overall continue to be very worried about the U.S. economy in the face of the health crisis: In FiveThirtyEight’s tracker, 87.3 percent said they were very or somewhat concerned — right in line with where the numbers have hovered since March.

As a result, there is still fairly strong support for government intervention to aid different parts of the economy. Data For Progress’s latest tracking poll found that 58 percent of Americans supported more government spending to fight the pandemic, even if this increased the national debt and deficit, compared with 42 percent who said the government had spent either enough or too much already. There was a partisan split on this question, though, with 70 percent of Democrats supporting more government spending compared with 42 percent of Republicans. Specific policy ideas such as giving grants to businesses, direct cash transfers to individuals, and universal paid leave were supported by 60 percent or more of Americans (including majorities of Democrats and Republicans).

However, there is some evidence that Democrats and Republicans are split over how and when the economy should reopen. A new HuffPost/YouGov survey found that 46 percent of Americans overall backed reopening some parts of the economy while maintaining partial restrictions on nonessential activities; 30 percent preferred to keep all nonessential businesses and activities shut down or restricted. About half of Democrats favored keeping nonessential businesses shut down and nonessential activities restricted, while only 16 percent of Republicans agreed. By contrast, Republicans were more likely to support reopening some parts of the economy: 57 percent of Republicans said they wanted reopening with some restrictions compared with 38 percent of Democrats. And 22 percent of Republicans said there shouldn’t be any restrictions on reopening businesses or resuming activities versus just 3 percent of Democrats.

The HuffPost/YouGov survey also found that 47 percent of Americans felt that policies in their area were “about right,” while 24 percent felt there weren’t enough restrictions. Only 21 percent felt that their area had too many restrictions. But, again, there was a partisan split on this question: 37 percent of Republicans said there were too many restrictions compared with 7 percent of Democrats. Still, similar shares of Republicans (52 percent) and Democrats (49 percent) thought local actions were on the mark.

There are also signs that the debate over privacy and public health could turn even more partisan. For the moment, Americans seem willing to sacrifice some privacy to combat the novel coronavirus. When they are forced to choose between protecting people’s medical privacy and preventing the spread of COVID-19, a new Gallup survey found that 61 percent of Americans would choose limiting the spread of the disease — even if doing so meant revealing people’s sensitive medical information. But here, too, there were some partisan differences: 57 percent of Republicans prioritized protecting medical privacy compared with 42 of independents and just 23 percent of Democrats. This could be an increasingly controversial topic in the coming weeks, though — tellingly, members of Congress from both parties have already proposed legislation aimed at protecting patient privacy and security.

Other polling bites

Morning Consult found that voters increasingly viewed Trump instead of former President Barack Obama as responsible for the state of the economy. Overall, 63 percent of respondents said Trump was responsible for current economic conditions, while 16 percent said Obama was responsible. This amounts to a small but notable change from August 2019, when 55 percent said Trump and 27 percent said Obama. Democrats appear to be driving this shift, too. In 2019, just 49 percent of Democrats said Trump was responsible for the then-strong economy, but in the latest survey, 70 percent said Trump was responsible.

Gallup found that 31 percent of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing, the highest its approval rating has been since September 2009 and the second straight month it has risen. The approval bump comes in the wake of four coronavirus-related bills that Congress has passed, including a $2.2 trillion aid package in March that nearly 8 in 10 Americans support.

New polling from Morning Consult found that 48 percent of Americans felt China was mostly responsible for the current state of the pandemic because it originated there, while 38 percent felt the U.S. was mostly at fault because of its response to the virus. But the responses broke by party line, representing another area of partisan disagreement over the coronavirus. While 79 percent of Republicans blamed China, compared with 10 percent who blamed the U.S., just 26 percent of Democrats blamed China, compared with 61 percent who blamed the U.S.

Left-leaning firm Civiqs offered some hopeful electoral news for Democrats in Georgia. The firm found former Vice President Joe Biden in a close race with Trump, leading 48 percent to 47 percent. In the state’s regularly scheduled Senate race, the pollster also found Republican Sen. David Perdue only narrowly ahead — or slightly behind — the three main Democratic contenders. Meanwhile, in the special election Senate race, the pollster found appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler well behind the principal Democratic contenders in a hypothetical runoff, while GOP Rep. Doug Collins ran neck and neck with the Democrats.

Alabama Republicans will choose their nominee for the state’s U.S. Senate race in a July 14 primary runoff, and a new survey from GOP pollster Cygnal found former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville up 55 percent to 32 percent over former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions held this Senate seat before joining Trump’s cabinet in 2017.

The winner of Utah’s GOP gubernatorial primary on June 30 will likely become the state’s next governor, and a new poll of the Republican contest from UtahPolicy.com/KUTV 2 News found Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox ahead 39 percent to 32 percent over former Gov. Jon Huntsman. Former state House Speaker Greg Hughes received 23 percent, while former Utah Republican Party chairman Thomas Wright had 6 percent.

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 42.8 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 53.5 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -10.7 points). At this time last week, 43.6 percent approved and 52.0 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -8.4 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 43.7 percent and a disapproval rating of 52.1 percent, for a net approval rating of -8.4 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead by 7.9 percentage points (48.2 percent to 40.3 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 7.7 points (48.9 percent to 41.2 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 8.0 points (48.4 percent to 40.4 percent).

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Geoffrey Skelley

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Tuesday, November 24, 2020

OED Word of the Year expanded for ‘unprecedented’ 2020 (BBC) This year has seen so many seismic events that Oxford Dictionaries has expanded its word of the year to encompass several “Words of an Unprecedented Year”. Its words are chosen to reflect 2020’s “ethos, mood, or preoccupations”. They include bushfires, Covid-19, WFH, lockdown, circuit-breaker, support bubbles, keyworkers, furlough, Black Lives Matter and moonshot. Use of the word pandemic has increased by more than 57,000% this year. Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Dictionaries, said: “I’ve never witnessed a year in language like the one we’ve just had. The Oxford team was identifying hundreds of significant new words and usages as the year unfolded, dozens of which would have been a slam dunk for Word of the Year at any other time. “It’s both unprecedented and a little ironic—in a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other.”

Jury duty? No thanks, say many, forcing trials to be delayed (AP) Jury duty notices have set Nicholas Philbrook’s home on edge with worries about him contracting the coronavirus and passing it on to his father-in-law, a cancer survivor with diabetes in his mid-70s who is at higher risk of developing serious complications from COVID-19. People across the country have similar concerns amid resurgences of the coronavirus, a fact that has derailed plans to resume jury trials in many courthouses for the first time since the pandemic started. Within the past month, courts in Hartford, Connecticut, San Diego and Norfolk, Virginia, have had to delay jury selection for trials because too few people responded to jury duty summonses. The non-response rates are much higher now than they were before the pandemic, court officials say. Judges in New York City, Indiana, Colorado and Missouri declared mistrials recently because people connected to the trials either tested positive for the virus or had symptoms. “What the real question boils down to are people willing to show up to that court and sit in a jury trial? said Bill Raftery, a senior analyst with the National Center for State Courts. “Many courts have been responsive to jurors who have said that they’re not comfortable with coming to court and doing jury duty and therefore offering deferrals simply because of concerns over COVID.”

The next few months could be rough for the U.S. economy (NYT) The next few months have the potential to be very unpleasant for the American economy. Many states are reimposing coronavirus restrictions, which will likely lead to new reductions in consumer spending and worker layoffs. As Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, recently said, “We’ve got new cases at a record level, we’ve seen a number of states begin to reimpose limited activity restrictions, and people may lose confidence that it is safe to go out.” Adding to the economic risks, several of the government’s biggest virus rescue programs are scheduled to expire next month. It isn’t clear whether Congress will renew them, because congressional Democrats and Republicans disagree on how to do so. A lack of government support, Powell has said, may lead to “tragic” results with “unnecessary hardship.” The longer-term picture is more encouraging, though. There is reason to hope that the next economic recovery, whenever it comes, will be stronger than the frustratingly weak recovery after the 2007-2009 financial crisis. “It’s a good guess that we’ll get this pandemic under control at some point next year,” writes Paul Krugman, the Times columnist (and Nobel Prize-winning economist). “It’s also a good bet that when we do, the economy will come roaring back.”

Student loan repayments (WSJ) The U.S. government stands to lose more than $400 billion from the federal student loan program, an internal analysis shows, approaching the size of losses incurred by banks during the subprime-mortgage crisis. The Education Department, with the help of two private consultants, looked at $1.37 trillion in student loans held by the government at the start of the year. Their conclusion: Borrowers will pay back $935 billion in principal and interest. That would leave taxpayers on the hook for $435 billion, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The analysis was based on government accounting standards and didn’t include roughly $150 billion in loans originated by private lenders and backed by the government.

Brazil’s local elections (Worldcrunch) Brazilian local elections can be fun to watch. Candidates come from every walk of life, and are notably allowed to use nicknames on the campaign trail—and there have been some true gems over the years: a loud man with thick sideburns and bushy hair campaigned as “Geraldo Wolverine”; an elderly man in army uniform and full beard was “Bin Laden for Governor”; and we’ve also seen a tropical, chubby Spiderman, an old Robin, and Jesuses in various shapes and sizes. Earlier this month, as Brazilians headed to the polls to elect local leaders in the country’s major states and cities—including Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—there were exactly 78 candidates who chose to run as some form of “Bolsonaro,” and even one as “Donald Trump Bolsonaro.” Results are in and 77 of them failed to get elected, including the president’s ex-wife, who campaigned as Rogéria Bolsonaro. The Brazilian leader personally chimed in on his social media accounts to endorse the 59 candidates (with and without familiar nicknames) he favored—only nine of whom got elected, according to Estadão de S. Paulo daily. Centrist and moderate parties made gains in the local contests, which also came at the expense of the other massive political force in the country, the leftist Workers’ Party.

Reporter Gatecrashes EU Defence Chiefs’ Video Call After Login Details Posted on Twitter (Vice) A Dutch journalist managed to join a video call for EU defence ministers, much to his and everybody else’s surprise. Video posted on Twitter shows Daniël Verlaan, a technology reporter for broadcaster RTL Nieuws, in disbelief as he realises he’s actually managed to jump on the call. RTL said that Verlaan was only able to do so because of information tweeted by Dutch defence minister Ank Bijleveld, including a photo (since deleted) showing five digits of a six-digit PIN needed to join the call. Defence ministers representing EU members and foreign policy chief Josep Borrell were on the call. When Verlaan joins, Borrell asks, “Who are you?” After exchanging pleasantries, and as laughter is heard in the background, Borrell asks the reporter if he knew he was “jumping into a secret conference.” “Yes, I’m sorry, I’m a journalist from the Netherlands,” Verlaan says. “I’m sorry for interrupting your conference, I’ll be leaving here.” A spokesperson for the Dutch ministry of defence told RTL a staff member had accidentally tweeted the picture containing information that allowed Verlaan to join the call. “This shows once again that ministers need to realise how careful you have to be with Twitter,” said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

France’s Dragnet for Extremists Sweeps Up Some Schoolchildren, Too (NYT) Armed with assault rifles and wearing balaclavas, dozens of police officers raided four apartments recently in a sprawling complex in Albertville, a city in the French Alps. They confiscated computers and cellphones, searched under mattresses and inside drawers, and took photos of books and wall ornaments with Quranic verses. Before the stunned families, the officers escorted away four suspects for “defending terrorism.” “That’s impossible,” Aysegul Polat recalled telling an officer who left with her son. “This child is 10 years old.” Her son—along with two other boys and one girl, all 10 years old—was accused of defending terrorism in a classroom discussion on the freedom of expression at a local public school. Officers held the children in custody for about 10 hours at police stations while interrogating their parents about the families’ religious practices and the recent republication of the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the magazine Charlie Hebdo. The fifth-grade classmates are among at least 14 children and teenagers investigated by the police in recent weeks on accusations of making inappropriate comments during a commemoration for a teacher who was beheaded last month after showing the cartoons in a class on freedom of expression. As France grapples with a wave of Islamist attacks following the republication of the Charlie Hebdo caricatures, the case in Albertville and similar ones elsewhere have again raised questions about the nature of the government’s response.

France’s Sarkozy goes on trial for corruption (Reuters) Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy goes on trial on Monday accused of trying to bribe a judge and of influence-peddling, one of several criminal investigations that threaten to cast an ignominious pall over his decades-long political career. Prosecutors allege Sarkozy offered to secure a plum job in Monaco for judge Gilbert Azibert in return for confidential information about an inquiry into claims that Sarkozy had accepted illegal payments from L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for his 2007 presidential campaign. Sarkozy, who led France from 2007-2012 and has remained influential among conservatives, has denied any wrongdoing in all the investigations against him and fought vigorously to have the cases dismissed. Next March, Sarkozy is due in court on accusations of violating campaign financing rules during his failed 2012 re-election bid. Next March, Sarkozy is due in court on accusations of violating campaign financing rules during his failed 2012 re-election bid.

Merkel, Germany’s ‘eternal’ chancellor, marks 15 years in power (AFP) In power so long she has been dubbed Germany’s “eternal chancellor”, Angela Merkel marks 15 years at the helm of Europe’s top economic power Sunday with her popularity and public trust scaling new heights as her remaining time in office ticks down. With the coronavirus raging around the world, the pandemic has played to her strengths as a crisis manager with a head for science-based solutions. Merkel, 66, has said she will step down as chancellor when her current mandate runs out in 2021, and leave politics altogether. Assuming she finishes out her fourth term, she will tie Helmut Kohl’s longevity record for a post-war leader, with an entire generation of young Germans never knowing another person at the top. The brainy, pragmatic and unflappable Merkel has served for many in recent years as a welcome counter-balance to the big, brash men of global politics, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin, as liberals have looked to her as the “leader of the free world”. A Pew Research Center poll last month showed large majorities in most Western countries having “confidence in Merkel to do the right thing regarding world affairs”.

China tests millions after coronavirus flare-ups in 3 cities (AP) Chinese authorities are testing millions of people, imposing lockdowns and shutting down schools after multiple locally transmitted coronavirus cases were discovered in three cities across the country last week. As temperatures drop, large-scale measures are being enacted in the cities of Tianjin, Shanghai and Manzhouli, despite the low number of new cases compared to the United States and other countries that are seeing new waves of infections. On Monday, the National Health Commission reported two new locally transmitted cases in Shanghai over the last 24 hours, bringing the total to seven since Friday. China has recorded 86,442 total cases and 4,634 deaths since the virus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.

Singapore, a City of Skyscrapers and Little Land, Turns to Farming (WSJ) In this skyscraper-studded nation of nearly six million people, all the farmland combined adds up to about 500 acres—an area roughly the size of a single American farm. That explains why more than 90% of the city-state’s food comes from abroad, a feat of globalization that plays out every day as beef is brought from New Zealand, eggs from Poland and vegetables trucked in from Malaysia. But recent developments—from Covid-19-related border closures to international trade fights—have shown that near-total dependence on the outside world may not be the best strategy in a shifting global environment. The Asian financial hub long focused on growing investment is turning to growing food. It can’t be done the traditional way, however. Land is so scarce in Singapore that the government continually reclaims territory from the sea to build new urban infrastructure. Instead, businesses are trying to reinvent agriculture. Industrial buildings are being converted into vertical farms with climate-controlled grow rooms. Rows of lettuce and kale are nourished not by soil, but via automated drips of nutrient-infused water. LED lights substitute for the sun. The government’s goal is to have 30% of the island’s nutritional requirements produced in Singapore by 2030, up from less than 10% today. Earlier this year, it shipped 400,000 seed packets to households to encourage home cultivation of leafy greens, cucumbers and tomatoes. In September, it announced about $40 million in grants to expand high-tech farms.

Reports: Israeli PM flew to Saudi Arabia, met crown prince (AP) Israeli media reported Monday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Saudi Arabia for a clandestine meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which would mark the first known encounter between senior Israeli and Saudi officials. Hebrew-language media cited an unnamed Israeli official as saying that Netanyahu and Yossi Cohen, head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, flew to the Saudi city of Neom on Sunday, where they met with the crown prince. The prince was there for talks with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. A Gulfstream IV private jet took off just after 1740 GMT from Ben-Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv, according to data from website FlightRadar24.com. The flight traveled south along the eastern edge of the Sinai Peninsula before turning toward Neom and landing just after 1830 GMT, according to the data. The flight took off from Neom around 2150 GMT and followed the same route back to Tel Aviv. While Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates have reached deals under the Trump administration to normalize ties with Israel, Saudi Arabia so far has remained out of reach.

Cyclone Gati hits Somalia as country’s strongest storm on record (Washington Post) Tropical Cyclone Gati struck the arid nation of Somalia on Sunday as the equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane with 105 mph winds, making it the strongest storm on record to hit the country. The cyclone made landfall after undergoing an extraordinary period of rapid intensification, which may have set a record for the entire Indian Ocean basin, at one point attaining the strength equivalent to a Category 3 storm, with 115 mph maximum sustained winds. Its landfall was farther south than any major hurricane-equivalent cyclone on record in that part of the world as well. Landfall occurred near Xaafuun, a small community about 900 miles northeast of Mogadishu, where the land juts east near the northern tip of the country. Hordio and Ashira, both desert communities, were also directly affected by the core of the storm. A broad four to eight inches of rainfall accompanied the system through northern Somalia, the driest part of the country, drenching desert regions with a year or two’s worth of rainfall in just a matter of hours to a couple of days. Rains also swept through the Gulf of Aden and brushed up against Yemen.

#headlines #news

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ameeliabrown · 5 years ago

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CoronaVirus Outbreak And Its Potential Impact to The U.S

The coronavirus outbreak has become a decidedly global occurrence, with governments across the globe struggling to plan effective responses while assuring increasingly anxious citizens. As different countries continue to confirm cases of this deadly virus, the United States has already taken its toll on the covid-19. At the time of writing this article, there are 78 cases of the disease in the U.S with one known dead, and most of the patients had recently traveled to Wuhan, China.

What is Coronavirus?

Coronavirus is a large family of virus whose effects range from triggering common cold to causing much more severe diseases, such as SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory).

Effects of Coronavirus on The U.S Economy and Commerce

So far, the effects of coronavirus epidemic on U.S commerce and economy have been very modest. However, the effect is likely to grow if the outbreak keeps spreading, and the factory’s shutdown in China continues. In response, investors both local and international are increasingly waking up to the possible effect of the outbreak that has already claimed thousands of lives. Chinese authorities declared that the number of new cases has reduced, but WHO and other health officials are cautious, noting thousands of infections could go unnoticed. Likewise, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has asked communities and businesses to brace for impact.

Let us consider the effect of this outbreak on some key areas of the United States

U.S Drug Supply

The United States Food and Drug Administration is speeding up its monitoring of the drug supply for possible shortages, including products that may be at risk due to the outbreak that has shut down much of China. Oxford Economists predicted the virus could slow down global growth to its lowest levels and could affect global supply chains. The administration raises concerns about the nation’s convoluted and highly outsourced pharmaceutical supply chain. Most of the drugs used in the United States are manufactured abroad. Likewise, the chemicals and critical ingredients used to make these drugs are overwhelmingly made in China and other countries.

The supply chain’s roots now run deep that it is complicated to anticipate where critical shortages could emerge. However, the FDA claims that no company is currently reporting drug shortages due to the coronavirus. In an effort to get ahead of any problem, the agency, according to her spokesperson has contacted 180 China-based drug manufacturers, asking them to appraise their supply chains and the need to notify the agency of any looming disruptions. Many U.S. drug companies buy Chinese-made pharmaceutical ingredients, in bulk, insulating themselves against a supply disruption for weeks, months or even a year. Overall, the coronavirus is a deadly factor that can trigger retraction in business investment beyond actual disruption of supply chains.

Effect on the U.S markets

On the U.S markets, economic alarms continued to flash due to the increasing spread of covid-19. Just as the outbreak entered a bothersome new phase, the Dow Jones industrial average suffered its worst 5-day slump in four years as investors increasingly absorbed worrisome forecasts. Furthermore, some analysts are further dropping their forecasts for the U.S. economy. The chief economist of Moody Analytics, Mark Zandi, predicts that the covid-19 outbreak will reduce growth in the first three (3) months of 2020 with a value that is more than his earlier forecast of 0.4% to 0.5% a point. He further predicts, “For 2020, the virus will trim growth to about 1.7%. But if the epidemic becomes widespread globally, it almost certainly would lead to a global recession including the U.S”. Likewise, the stoppage of the production of Boeing’s 737 Max Airliner is anticipated to snarl in its first quarter. The virus is likely to reduce stock prices by 5%, trimming business and consumer spending even if the market rebounds by the end of the year, Zandi says.

The Threat to Travel and Tourism

The outbreak of covid-19 is also taking an increasingly severe toll on the U.S. through reduced tourism and travel. In recent years, Chinese tourism has become an important driver of U.S. GDP. About 3 million Chinese visits the USA yearly, spending up to $6,500 per trip, which is 50% more than other foreign visitors in the USA. Many airlines have canceled flights in and out of China, and the U.S. government has imposed restrictions on travels that bar any foreign national who has recently being to China from entering the United States. Consequently, visitations from China will almost certainly reduce by about 30% this year due to the epidemic, resulting in an economic loss of about $5.8 billion, says Moody, a Tourism Economist.

The Threat to the U.S Construction

According to Richard Branch, the chief economist of Dodge Data and Analytics, “the U.S Construction industry is also possible to be affected by the coronavirus. This is because 30% of its products are imported from China, compared to any other country”. Manufacturers will export less to Europe and Asia as their demand slackens. Imports from these regions are anticipated to result in shortages of retail products and spare parts in the U.S including higher prices that restrain consumer spending. “Except the virus is promptly curtailed, supplies will continue to tighten making prices of building and building materials to shoot up including potential cancellation or delays of projects”, He further states.

According to Zandi, “while many Chinese factories are close down and Chinese consumer demand is drooping, the U.S. exports to China will suffer, including plant equipment, computer chips, and aircraft. Even though factories can come up in the second half of the year to make up for the lost production and boost growth, a great part of the restaurant and hotel sales will most likely not be made up, Zandi further states.

The Threat to the U.S. Economic Growth

The coronavirus is also becoming a threat to the U.S economic expansion that is rising. According to the chief economist at Grant Thornton, Diane Swonk, “The Wuhan coronavirus is already causing an economic pandemic. We have a global response that is literally closing down businesses”. Some American manufacturers that use components sourced from China, particularly from infected areas such as Wuhan will either have to shut down production or import parts outside China. If they shut down production, definitely they will need to dismiss workers, who, in response, will lower their spending. The longer this issue goes on, the more the risk of a sadistic cycle”, she further states.

Effect of Coronavirus on Eateries

There is no exception to food and catering industry in the U.S. as restaurants starting to struggle amidst fears of coronavirus outbreak. Most of the restaurants are putting up different measures to ensure their customers are safe. If the virus is not contained quickly and it keeps spreading, I will not be surprised if some restaurants close down.

Coronavirus and U.S interest rates

One of the questions that investors and business owners are asking is if the coronavirus can affect interest rates. While other economists have a more evaluation view, Joe Brusuelas, chief economist of RSM and David Berson, Nationwide Chief economist state the advance of the virus has not influenced them to lower their forecasts. They both estimated that the epidemic would trim the first-quarter growth by a rather modest 0.2% point. Diane Swonk is of the opinion that the Federal Reserve may reduce interest rates at its mid-March meeting due to the intensified outbreak. This is expected to boost stocks, but FED has been playing the waiting game approach since reducing rates three times last year. On a contrary opinion, Zandi does not believe that the Federal Reserve will cut down interest rates again except the outbreak worsens considerably.

WAY FORWARD

What Are Scientists Doing?

Across the U.S and separately in China, New York and Texas, scientists are trying to create a vaccine for the virus, but do not expect it anytime soon. It might take more than a year before a vaccine actually become available.

What You Can Do To Protect Yourself

Maintain social distance with anyone showing signs of Coronavirus, such as sneezing and coughing, the WHO says. Other symptoms of this coronavirus include shortness of breath and fever. Severe cases can result in kidney failure, pneumonia, and even death. Scientists and health officials believe that this coronavirus started in an animal in Wuhan China, and then spread to humans, so it is recommended you cook your eggs and meats thoroughly. Finally, the public should wash their hands regularly with water and soap for at least 20 seconds.

What The Trump Administration is Doing

Once the U.S. health emergency declaration becomes effective, all U.S. citizens who have spent a minimum of two weeks in China’s Hubei province and are returning to the States will be quarantined for about 14 days. The reason is due to the announcement by the State Department urging citizens not to travel to China due to the outbreak.

Final Thought

The coronavirus is gradually becoming a global epidemic whose effects can be severe if not contained in time. With the effects of COVID-19 on the U.S. as predicted, a clearer picture on the epidemic should become visible soon.

References;

Oxford Economics

https://www.cbre.us/research-and-reports/US-Viewpoint—Potential-Impact-of-Coronavirus-Outbreak-February-2020

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/how-a-coronavirus-pandemic-could-impact-the-2020-election-economy.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/world/coronavirus-update.html

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY

Ditto for PayPal. The key question, I realized it would probably have to be just one valuation. The founders all learned to do every job in the company. Instead he can ask What would make the painting more interesting to people? I only thought of when I sat down to write them.1 It does not, for example. With Socrates, Plato, and particularly Aristotle, this tradition turned a corner.

Among them was Frederick's of Hollywood, which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers. Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered.2 It means these ideas are invisible to most people your age, others that will appeal to most people because it only recently became feasible. Economist J.3 2, because that also seems to be to start with good people, to make something customers want. It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. Technical tweaks may also help them to grasp what's special about your technology.

It was impressive even to ask the questions they asked were new to them, or cut them off.4 Will I ever read it?5 There is room for a new search engine, when there were already about 10, and they did it. Popular magazines made the period between the spread of literacy and the arrival of TV the golden age of the essay. It's not for the discovery that most previous philosophy was a waste of time?6 Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts. Meaning everyone within this world was expected to seem more or less the same.

When they appeared it seemed as if search was a mature market, dominated by big players who'd spent millions to build their brands: Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Altavista, Inktomi. Instead of trying to discover them because they're useful.7 Whatever you make will have to be disciplined about not letting your hypotheses harden into anything more. In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite conclusions e. Those whose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resort to euphemisms like significant or important or getting dangerously close realized. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you're going to replace email.8 I answered twenty, I could see at the time, a lot of valuable advice about business, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company. When people sit down to watch a show, they want to live in the suburbs.

If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings.9 Design by committee is a synonym for bad design. Will I ever read it?10 Customers loved us. And they each have.11 That may seem a frivolous reason to choose one language over another. Restaurants with great food seem to prosper no matter what you do. Like most startups, we changed our plan on the fly.

When you're just typing expressions into the toplevel, you want to invest in them.12 Writing was one of the founders we funded asked me why we started Y Combinator is neither selfish nor virtuous. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's likely to be done with levers and cams and gears are now done with loops and trees and closures.13 The only place to look was in the tradition of skateboards or bicycles rather than medical devices. They've applied for a lot of investors hated the idea, but the overall experience is much better than the soul-crushing suburban sprawl. If a nonprofit or government organization had started a project to index the web, Google at year 1 is the limit of what they'd have produced. Among them were Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to found Intel, and Eugene Kleiner, who founded the VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Aristotle's goal was to find one angel to act as the lead investor.

Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to as well.14 So it is with design.15 The real problem is that you look smug. The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand its implications. It would have been better off; not only wouldn't these guys have broken anything, they'd have gotten a lot more done. It would be a curious state of affairs if you could get to the same spot. So if you're developing technology for money, you're probably not going to use TCP/IP just because everyone else does. In the old days, you could create a situation indistinguishable from you being that manufacturer, at least working on problems of minor importance.

That will tend to produce results that annoy people: there's no use in telling people things they already believe, and people answering it often aren't clear in their own mind how much is deliberate.16 Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that customers didn't want the product. At the time it seemed the future.17 There's nothing more valuable than the advice of someone whose judgement you trust. It didn't shake itself free till a couple decades ago, geography was destiny for cities.18 Arguably it's an interesting failed experiment. The American way is to make money by creating wealth, you're always going to be fighting a losing battle against increasing variation in productivity.19 So there could be other ways to attract them, but they were only a little more out of their sales channels. The result was that I wrote it. Not any more.

Notes

I remember are famous flops like the intrusive ads popular on Delicious, but explain that's what they campaign for. But you're not allowed to ask, what you call the market. These two regions were the case. It will seem more interesting than random marks would be very promising, because the proportion of the Web was closely tied to the Pall Mall Gazette.

I'm not saying it's impossible to write your dissertation in the time 1992 the entire West Coast that still requires jackets: The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991, p. As Secretary of Labor Statistics, the big winners are all about hitting outliers, are better college candidates. Bad math is merely an upper bound on a weekend and sit alone and think.

Gary and I don't know of one investor who for some students to get elected with a company. That way most reach the stage where they're sufficiently convincing well before Demo Day. I was not just the local builders built everything in exactly the opposite: when we were quite sore from VCs attempting to probe our nonexistent database orifice.

And it would not know his name. It's conceivable that a skilled vine-dresser was worth about 125 to 150 drachmae.

So 80 years sounds to me like someone adding a few that are only doing angel deals to generate everything else in the next round is high, so it may have been seen mentioning the site was about bands.

This phenomenon may account for a long thread are rarely seen, when we created pets. This point is that the highest returns, it's implicit that this was hard to avoid using it, whether you have to be spread out geographically.

So where do we draw the line that philosophy is nonsense. You also have to resort to raising money. Most of the reasons angels like to invest at a public company CEOs were J.

Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them Google Video is badly designed. I replace the url with that of whatever they copied. Even as late as Newton's time it takes forever.

Digg is notorious for its lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as much as people in any case, because they are to be a quiet contentment.

An investor who invested earlier had been trained that anything hung on a hard technical problem. One sign of a handful of lame investors first, and b not allow them to tell them everything. Algorithms that use it are called naive Bayesian. Xxvii.

You're investing your own morale, you need a higher growth rate to impress are not mutually exclusive. This essay was written before Firefox. Google's site.

Founders also worry that taking time to come up with elaborate rationalizations. Words we use for good and bad technological progress is accelerating, so they made more that year from stock options, of course. The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them.

A more accurate or at least once for that reason. This is one of a handful of consulting firms that rent out big pools of foreign programmers they bring in on H1-B visas.

Confucius claimed proudly that he transformed the field they describe. There is archaeological evidence for large settlements earlier, but one by one they die and their hands.

If you wanted to go to work with founders create a great idea as something you need to be actively curious.

The facts about Apple's early history are from an angel-round board, consisting of two founders and one of the biggest discoveries in any case, because you couldn't do the opposite: when we got to the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://doingbusiness. Acquisitions fall into in the room, and the super-angels hate to match.

Is what we need to go to grad school you always see when restrictive laws are removed. It would be unfortunate.

People were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion.

What they forget is that the web and enables a new Lisp dialect called Arc that is not so much control, and the exercise of stock the VCs I encountered when we were working on what you have to be about 200 to send a million dollars out of the canonical could you build for them, if you get stock as if you'd invested at a 3 million cap, but they seem like a month might to an adult. But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the 1960s, leaving less room for startups that are or feel weak. Sometimes a competitor will deliberately affect more interest than they expected and they hope will be the fact by someone who doesn't understand what you're working on your thesis. Even in Confucius's time it filters down to you.

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