The number one single today in 1955 was banned by ABC Radio stations because it was allegedly in bad taste:
The number one album today in 1961 wasn’t a music album — Bob Newhart’s “The Button Down Mind Strikes Back!”
The number one album today in 1965 was “Beatles ’65”:
Frank Zappa once said that “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.”
That certainly describes Rolling Stone magazine when it wanders off music into areas where it completely lacks what the lawyers call “standing.”
Instead of wasting your time reading Jesse Myerson‘s рубец, read Seth Davis‘ demolition of Myerson’s навоз:
Over the weekend, Jesse Myerson, a twenty-something former Occupy organizer, finally stumbled upon a foolproof recipe for success for today’s struggling Millennials. The recipe? Communism, naturally.
Myerson, whose Twitter bio includes the hashtag #FULLCOMMUNISM (for when fractional communism just can’t murder people quickly enough), listed five economic reforms that he thinks every Millennial should demand: Guaranteed jobs, guaranteed income, no more private real estate, no more private assets at all, and a public bank in every state (a great place to store all those financial assets you no longer own). If that sounds eerily similar to a Yoko Ono-infused brainstorming session by John Lennon, it’s because it is eerily similar to a Yoko Ono-infused brainstorming session by John Lennon. …
Look, lots of people think everybody else’s stuff should be their stuff. Unfortunately for Myerson, most of those people drink juice out of a box and think Cookie Monster and Dora the Explorer are real people. There’s a time and a place to brag that you’ve finally figured out how to make communism work, and it’s your college dorm room at 3:00 a.m. If you publish a serious call for the reconstruction of several core pillars of communism barely two decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (this is the point at which Myerson would almost certainly interject that the USSR wasn’t practicing real communism, maaan), you’re pretty much begging to be mocked.
But what makes Myerson’s article so precious is that either he’s too dumb to know what the Soviet Union stood for (or too lazy to have done a quick Google search prior to clicking “Publish”), or he thinks his readers are too dumb to discern that he’s actually pushing for a return to Soviet-style communism. In his defense, he published his Marxist mash note at Rolling Stone — a site run by a seemingly drug-addled 23-year-old nepot — so maybe he has a point about the collective IQ of his readers. …
As Andrew McCoy noted shortly after Myerson’s piece was published, Myerson’s ideas aren’t just similar to Soviet ideas. They are Soviet ideas, which should come as no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Soviet Union. According to McCoy’s research, each of Myerson’s five reforms was contained in the USSR’s Constitution. Guaranteed jobs are in Article 40. Social insurance for everybody is in Article 43. Abolition of private real estate is in Article 6. Complete abolition of all other private property is in Articles 4 and 5. And government-owned banks — the only banks allowed in the Soviet Union — were a natural byproduct of a system that says only the government can own things. …
If Myerson wants to see what a government-engineered “climate collapse” (whatever that means) looks like, he need only study the Great Chinese Famine, a three-year period of absolute desolation caused directly by Mao’s communist regime. Between 1958 and 1962 alone, upwards of 45 million Chinese died as a result of the Mao-engineered famine, while another 30 million failed to be born because of the communist-caused carnage. As a percentage of the country’s total population, those 45 million Chinese deaths would be roughly equivalent to the entire populations of New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia being wiped out between now and 2018, all thanks to government fiat. I’m pretty sure my capitalist air-conditioning and SUV haven’t murdered 45 million people since 2009, but your mileage may vary.
For all his faults, though, Myerson really is the perfect 21st century chickenhawk communist. Oh, you live in Manhattan, make close to six figures, and went to a middling NY liberal arts college where the cost of a single credit hour exceeds the GDP per capita of a whole host of African countries? Tell me more about how you’re down with The Struggle™. Nothing says certified prole like black-and-white candids, three-piece suits, and finely manicured beards, amirite?
Between this sort of nonsense and its fawning Boston Bomber coverage, Rolling Stone is clearly trying to cement itself as Slate for the dumb set (but I repeat myself) with a traffic model that all but begs people to mock its stupidity. No longer wanting to be confined to writing terrible music reviews, Rolling Stone is basically becoming the print equivalent of clips of the grape-stomping local TV reporter, minus the shame and embarrassment.
If you believe Democrats (and, you know, I could stop writing right there), the economy is recovering.
But if the economy is recovering, why is Congress passing an extension of unemployment benefits?
Ask U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D–Wisconsin), who congratulated herself in a news release:
A new report released by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee shows that the long-term unemployment rate is twice what it was when Congress last allowed federal unemployment insurance to expire after the recessions of 1990-91 and 2001. Approximately 1.3 million workers, including 23,700 Wisconsinites, lost all unemployment benefits when Congress failed to act before the end of December.
Maybe Baldwin should have a conversation with her president about our great economy. Baldwin also fired shots at Gov. Scott Walker, ignoring the fact that Wisconsin’s unemployment rate is lower than the nation’s, and has been lower than the nation’s throughout Walker’s term as governor.
The obvious explanation of that previous paragraph is that it’s an election year. The other answer is that, well, the economy isn’t recovering in ways non-economists can see, reports John Lott:
It has been over four-and-a-half years since the economic “recovery” began, yet a new CNN poll indicates that almost seven out of every ten Americans considers the economy to be in poor shape.
Democrats want to claim that the economy is improving at the same time that they will be pushing Monday for a continued extension of unemployment benefits. Democrats also refuse to acknowledge that up to two years of unemployment insurance benefits actually creates unemployment.
Indeed, people are so worried about the job market that they are clinging to their current jobs at remarkably high rates.
Quit rates that usually rise after recessions, particularly after long recessions when they have stayed with jobs they might not care for, are still lower over the last three months than they were during the recession.
But how can that possibly be?
The official unemployment rate keeps falling. We are told that the job market is improving. Are Americans just not realizing that things are getting better? Or do they perceive of something that the unemployment numbers are not picking up?
The answer is the latter.
The unemployment numbers do not accurately reflect the state of the labor market
. The reason is that the unemployment rate only considers those who are actively looking for work, failing to include the ones who have become so discouraged that they no longer look for a job.
Even the broader U6 measure of unemployment only includes these discouraged workers in its count for just one year. With the traditional measure of unemployment that keeps being reported on the news, these discouraged individuals are counted as officially having left the labor force.
Imagine if workers had not dropped out and that the labor force participation had remained the same as it was when Obama became president 60 months ago. …
As we can see, the official unemployment rate peaked at 10 percent in October 2009 and slowly fell to 7 percent today. But if we add the drop-outs to the unemployed, the current rate would still be 11 percent, virtually unchanged since it hit 11.1 percent in October 2009.
The Beatles had the number one album, “Rubber Soul” …
… and the number one single today in 1966:
One of the most interesting people I’ve interviewed over the years, Lafayette County’s Penelope Trunk, has bad news:
Here’s the problem men have today: They understand how bad it feels to be raised by a dad who is never around.
There’s a generation of boys who didn’t eat dinner with their dad. Only saw their dad on the weekend. Changed schools five times so their dad could relocate to get the best job, over and over again.
Those boys are grown up now, and they are dads. And they don’t want to be like their dad. They want something different.
We have unrealistic expectations for fathers.
So more men are leaving the workforce than ever before. But when men stay home, they are largely disrespected as incompetent breadwinners. And the men who choose work all the time are largely disrespected as incompetent parents. If they try to do a little of both, they are not particular standouts in either. (I’m struck by the art world’s depiction of this problem. For example, Nathan Sawaya‘s sculpture pictured above, and a comic strip from Zen Pencils that depicts the problem.)
Men were raised to be standouts. But no one told them that most good jobs require long hours and high risk which are choices most people don’t want to take.
The other challenge to being a standout breadwinner is that you almost always need a big city. Most people imagine themselves raising their kids in a metropolitan area. But the truth is that it costs a lot of money.
NYC, SF and LA require $150K/year in order to raise two kids in a middle-class life. Some people will disagree with me, but none of those disagreeing will have two kids over the age of six in one of those cities. This is true in the suburbs of places like Boston or Chicago as well. Sure, there are cheap suburbs, but there are not good schools in cheap suburbs.
Most men will not make enough money to afford living in the right kind of metropolitan area. The number of men who will make $150K after the age of 35 is tiny. First of all, if you want to be making $150K after 40 you need to be making it at age 35. Which means you need to be clearing $100K at age 30. (And places like Singapore, Tokyo, and Bermuda don’t count. Because you won’t be able to make that much back in the US. Your market is artificially inflated.) …
We have unrealistic expectations for husbands.
So let’s say you are 35 and you’re ready to get married. You have a three choices:
1. You earn enough to support a family in a metropolitan area. (You need to reliably earn $150K for the next 15 years – unlikely.)
2. You split household labor because you are splitting breadwinner duties. (This typically goes very poorly because women are never happy with the division. Really. )
3. You move to a small town where your career is limited but the cost of living is low. (Negotiate this before you get married.)
The problem is that men don’t like to hear that these are their choices. So men pretend that their salary will continue to rise in their 30s at the same pace it rose in their 20s.
But that approach fails because most women want to stay home with kids.
But let’s say that’s not true for you.
Let’s say you want two high-powered careers. You’ll need tons of childcare. Which means you’ll need to spend almost all your money on childcare. And your wife will struggle to maintain her pre-baby salary because she can’t stop thinking about kids when she’s at work. So you will be very stretched for cash. And stressed, and that’s not great because having a baby kills a marriage anyway, even without the added stress from neither spouse focusing on the baby. (This is why only 9% of mothers even attempt having a high-powered career.)
Now let’s say you have two scaled-back careers. Here’s the problem with that: It’s nearly impossible for people over 40 maintain employment with scaled-back careers. You can’t compete with someone in their early 30s who is going full throttle. They have the same experience as you but more ambition.
Here’s the biggest minefield: Men don’t like when their wives earn more than they do, and women don’t like outearning their husbands either. You can say you and your spouse are different, but the odds would be stacked against you. Because even if one of you is different, it would be really unlikely that both of you are different.
There is not a contemporary template that works for most men.
I fortunately did not have the experience of being “raised by a dad who is never around.” (My parents celebrate their 53rd wedding anniversary today.) The number of children with absent fathers isn’t shrinking, however. It’s one thing for parents to get married, have children, and then divorce; it’s another when the first step is skipped entirely and children never, or rarely, see their fathers. Everyone needs role models, and more than one per gender.
Two reader comments stand out, the first of which is this blog’s headline:
I think we are all screwed. I don’t think the pressure of unrealistic expectation is unique to men and fathers. These exact same thoughts and discussions are ones that I’ve had as a 30 year old woman and mom. What is it about humans today that there is the expectation of perfection in all aspects of your life. Get a good job, push push push up the ladder, don’t slack the young guns are at your heels, make a marriage work, raise amazing kids, don’t age, and try to look happy doing it. Seriously, it’s exhausting. I know I’m tired.
To which came this response:
I think what’s changed is feminism, frankly. Much as I admire intelligent women with real jobs, it messes up the whole family dynamic. The woman now feels she has to hold down the high-powered job or she’s betraying all that women have worked for. The guy feels he should be doing more at home with the kids even if he doesn’t want to. They are both worried about how their jobs compare to one another.
They are also both worried about falling out of the “educated power couple” group. They absolutely don’t want to be in the “middle class, boring job, low ambition” group. That’s seen as low class, and doomed. The feeling is that between automation and globalization, all those “flyover country blue collar” types are going to suffer terribly. Don’t be in that group!
To which came this response:
What’s happening: the middle income group and middle income jobs are really, really shrinking, so more and more people have to work crazy hours to try to get to the top just to make a living wage, since lower paid jobs are part time and poverty level. One middle income job no longer pays enough to raise a family in an expensive area (but even those jobs are more concentrated in expensive areas). And job security isn’t what it once was, so you can’t plan on a long career with one company, you have to remain competitive and be prepared to move on. We have to live *in* this system as individuals, and figure out how to raise families in a time of insecurity and wage stagnation, but it’s not just a cultural phenomenon and it’s not just the result of individual choices.
Another comment suggests avoiding the corporate world entirely and …
I often advise people with enough talent and experience to start their own business. While risky, it is perhaps less risky than staying in the corporate world nowadays. And, there is more potential to create a “portable” business that does not have to stay in an expensive metro area.
To which Trunk said …
Yes, I agree. Starting your own company is one of the best solutions to the problem. But it definitely falls into the high risk category that most people aren’t willing to do. Most people just don’t have the stomach for that sort of risk.
On top of that, I coach so many people who want to start their own company, but they don’t have an idea. For most people coming up with a viable idea for a company is nearly impossible.
(Or, alternatively, they can come up with the idea, but can’t handle the business basics, such as day-to-day accounting.)
Read this, and you wonder how anyone can be optimistic about our future. Of course, things can get worse.
Stanford University Prof. John B. Taylor:
When it became clear that the recovery from recession—which officially ended in mid-2009—was unprecedentedly weak, policy makers found an excuse in the depth of the financial crisis. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner argued in August 2010 that “recoveries that follow financial crises are typically a hard climb. That is reality.” This argument is put forth frequently by government officials, and it’s loosely based on a popular 2009 book by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, “This Time Is Different.”
A careful look at American history by Michael Bordo of Rutgers and Joseph Haubrich of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank has blown holes in the argument. Recoveries from deep recessions with financial crises have been stronger, not weaker, than recoveries following shallower recessions. These strong recoveries average about 6% real GDP growth per year, compared to only 2% per year in this recovery. The current recovery should have been much stronger. …
Yet the overall economy has failed to rebound strongly as it did so often in the past. At 52 months and counting, the recovery is already longer than the 33-month average of all U.S. recoveries. Yet the gap between real GDP and its potential based on population and productivity trends has yet to close appreciably. The fraction of the population employed is still below what it was at its start.
And now comes a new excuse, emerging like a vampire from the crypt. Though it has been quietly gestating for some time, a new-old idea, “secular stagnation,” has received a great deal of attention since former Treasury secretary and White House adviserLawrence Summers made the case at a Brookings-Hoover conference in October, and then again at an International Monetary Fund conference in November. A similar hypothesis was famously espoused by Alvin Hansen, “the American Keynes, ” in the late 1930s to explain America’s poor economic performance.
Hansen claimed, rather ludicrously in retrospect, that technological innovation and population growth had played out, depressing investment—and that only government deficit spending could keep employment up. According to the modern version, secular stagnation began 10 years ago when the rate of return on capital—or what Mr. Summers called in his IMF speech the “real interest rate that was consistent with full employment”—fell well below normal levels experienced since the end of World War II. The decline, say to “-2 or -3%,” continues today and will likely continue into the future, he said. The low rate of return is due to a supposed glut of saving and dearth of investment opportunities. …
There are many problems with this neo-secular stagnation hypothesis. First, it implies that there should have been slack economic conditions and high unemployment in the five years before the crisis, even with the very low interest rates—especially in 2003-05—and the lax regulatory policy.
But it was just the opposite. There were boom-like conditions, especially in residential investment, as demand for homes skyrocketed and housing price inflation jumped from around 7% per year from 2002-03 to near 14% in 2004-05 before busting in 2006-07. The unemployment rate got as low as 4.4%—well below the normal rate and not a sign of slack. Inflation was rising, not falling. During the years 2003-05, when the Fed’s interest rate was too low, the annual inflation rate for the GDP price index doubled to 3.4% from 1.7%.
Moreover, there is little direct evidence for a saving glut. During this recovery, the personal saving rate is well below what it was during the 1980s rapid recovery from a deep recession; 5.5% now versus 9.2% then. In my 2009 book on the crisis, Getting Off Track, I examined the claim that there was a global savings glut and found evidence to the contrary: In the past decade global savings rates fell below what they were in the 1980s and 1990s. The U.S. has been running a current account deficit, which means national saving is below investment.
In the current era, business firms have continued to be reluctant to invest and hire, and the ratio of investment to GDP is still below normal. That is most likely explained by policy uncertainty, increased regulation, including through the Dodd Frank and Affordable Care Act, about which there is plenty of evidence, especially in comparison with the secular stagnation hypothesis.
The number one single in Britain …
… and over here on my parents’ wedding day in 1961:
The number one single today in 1977:
Tom Still turns on the wayback machine (which takes time to warm up in this should-be-illegal cold):
Guess the source of the following tax-reform plan for Wisconsin. The plan, paired with about $611 million in spending cuts, called for:
■ Cutting individual income tax rates enough to save $2.4 billion.
■ Increasing the state sales tax to 6% from 5% and expanding items subject to the tax, raising $3.2 billion.
■ Hiking the cigarette tax by 50 cents a pack, producing $330 million in new revenue.
■ Raising the state gasoline tax by 2 cents a gallon ($79 million) and auto registration fees by roughly $20, depending on the age and weight of the car ($126 million).
The correct answer has nothing to do with the tea party, Blue Dog Democrats or even the Trilateral Commission. It was the product of a blue-ribbon panel of Republicans, Democrats, business executives and think-tank leaders and delivered Oct. 15, 2002, during the third Wisconsin Economic Summit in Milwaukee.
Although largely dismissed by the two major-party candidates for governor at the time, Republican Scott McCallum and Democrat Jim Doyle, the plan remains an example of bold thinking about taxes, spending and economic growth. It was Camelot for policy wonks, even if the politics were wrong for the times.
I can see one immediate good reason it was “largely dismissed.” Those bullet points above total a tax increase of about $1.335 billion. Of course, at the time the state was looking at a $2 billion deficit heading into the 2003–05 budget cycle. Now …
Roll ahead 11-plus years and another governor, Republican Scott Walker, has charged his state revenue secretary and lieutenant governor to embark on a top-to-bottom review of Wisconsin’s tax code with the help of people invited to private “listening sessions.” Ideas could include eliminating Wisconsin’s individual income tax and raising the 5% sales tax, plus eliminating many items now untouched by the sales tax.
“Any discussion about this clearly should involve an outright elimination (of state income taxes),” Walker told WisPolitics.com.
Because individual income taxes account for roughly half of the state’s general-fund budget in any given year — about $8.4 billion — making up the difference would likely require a doubling of the sales tax, if not more. But this exercise isn’t about pesky details — at least, not yet. It’s about rekindling a dialogue about what is the right taxation mix for Wisconsin in a competitive 21st century economy.
That’s precisely what the 2002 Economic Summit report set out to do, as well. A commission that included former state Administration Secretary Mark Bugher, former state Auditor Dale Cattanach, former state Revenue Secretary Mike Ley and retired Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance President Jim Morgan knew the state was facing a $2.8 billion budget deficit.
They and others took on the task of writing a bipartisan plan that spread the pain of spending cuts across state and local government, local schools and higher education, and which devised a revenue system to rely more on user fees and consumption taxes. Consider these passages from the 2012 report:
■ “We advocate revenue reforms designed to raise new revenues, redesign the revenue system to reflect significant underlying changes in the state economy, such as the shift from manufacturing goods to providing services.”
■ “Reduced income taxes may encourage business expansion and create more high-wage jobs, stem the ‘brain drain’ by creating a more attractive environment for professional and technical workers, (and) attract new industries by having a greater supply of highly trained professional and technical workers.” …
What’s lacking as 2013 yields to the 2014 election year is the fiscal urgency that confronted Wisconsin in late 2002, when a combination of economic factors and overspending in some areas combined to produce the deficit. The state budget is largely in balance today, which is a competitive advantage many states cannot claim.
What’s more glaring today is the sense of economic urgency. Wisconsin in 2002 was still a manufacturing dominated state. In fact, the peak month for manufacturing employment in Wisconsin was March 2002, when there were about 600,000 manufacturing jobs. Today, the number is more like 460,000.
The steady loss of such jobs, which has taken place over Democratic and Republican administrations alike, means Wisconsin must once again think boldly about how to position the state to compete for jobs and growth while fairly taxing its own citizens and businesses.
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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 39,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 14 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
First: The songs of the day:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”:
The number one single today in 1973 included a person rumored to be the subject of the song on backing vocals:
The number one British single today in 1979 was this group’s only number one:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 