“Last week, I briefly discussed the geographic distribution of Recovery Act funds. The figure shows the relationship between per capita Recovery Act grants awarded and unemployment across states, which shows that stimulus aid was not particularly well matched with need…On average, for every extra percentage point of the labor force that is unemployed, a […]
Author Archive for HispanicPundit
Mar8th2010
Universal Kindergarten
Published by in Education, Hispanics (Minority Issues) and ModernPolitics. 1 CommentBefore we embark on universal preschool, we should look at the results from universal kindergarten. According to Elizabeth U. Cascio, assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College, the gains were far short of expectations:
My results indicate that state funding of universal kindergarten had no discernible impact on many of the long-term outcomes desired by policymakers, […]
Mar5th2010
“The news is now out that Government Motors is recalling 1.3 million compact cars in the US, Canada and Mexico to fix power steering motors that can fail. Does this sound familiar? Well the big difference with Toyota is that GM has not made the media headlines anywhere, and certainly is not attracting the attention […]
Mar4th2010
“I spent the morning writing about the Bush administration’s failure to anticipate the long-term costs of the Iraq occupation, which have reached $1 trillion and counting over the last eight years. With health care reform, there are no such illusions: We have good-faith estimates, sometimes downplayed but never hidden or dismissed, of how much this […]
Mar3rd2010
The Effort To Keep Ethnic Studies Professors Employed
Published by in DayToDay, General and Personal. 1 CommentAs someone who both grew up in Compton and attends UCSD, I feel compelled to comment on the recent race relation issues UCSD is having. As most of you have probably already heard, the whole thing started when UCSD students, outside the campus, had a “Compton Cookout”, where participants were to wear “chains, rapper-style urban […]
Mar2nd2010
The strongest argument against universal and single-payer healthcare, IMO, is the argument that they inevitably lead to price controls. And as any student of economics knows, price controls are detrimental to many things we like about healthcare. Things like technological innovation, pharmaceutical innovation, and quick access are all harmed when price controls are implemented.
Advocates of […]
Feb24th2010
The Economist lists the Union payoff:
Mr Obama has revoked some Bush-era executive orders that unions hate and issued a few they adore. He has appointed union insiders to top jobs, allowed Congress to add “buy American” provisions to the stimulus bill, risked a trade war with China to please tyre-workers, let other trade deals wither […]
Feb23rd2010
When Obama proposed his credit card regulations, economic theory predicted what would happen: harm those with less than perfect credit scores (primarily the poor). Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University, explained it best when he wrote:
” When you make lending to high-risk people less attractive, the result is not worse terms for […]
Feb22nd2010
“Scientists now think that King Tut may have died of malaria….this is a good excuse to meditate on just how rich we are. King Tut was probably the wealthiest man in the world during his time. He died of something that wouldn’t kill the most abjectly immiserated welfare mother in the United States today, because […]
Feb19th2010
I remember reading that Malcolm X, being the radical that he was, increased the support for Martin Luther King Jr. In a world without a Malcolm X, MLK would have been the radical one. But with Malcolm X in the picture, it pushes people to compromise on a more ‘moderate’ person - and MLK fit […]
Feb18th2010
Fiscal Stimulus And Hypocrisy
Published by in Economics, Fiscal Stimulus and ModernPolitics. 1 CommentMany Democrats, including Obama, have criticized Republicans for both opposing the Stimulus bill and helping to direct some of that stimulus money to their districts. They claim its hypocrisy. Greg Mankiw argues otherwise:
It seems perfectly reasonable to believe (1) that increasing government spending is not the best way to promote economic growth in a depressed […]
Feb17th2010
“If you did a simple cost-benefit comparison, the Obama plan vs. a simple extension of Medicaid, more R&D through the NIH, and some targeted public health expenditures, I believe the latter would win hands down. And the latter seems more politically feasible too. It avoids the mandate, the unworkable and ridiculously low penalties for those who don’t […]
Feb16th2010
Megan McArdle gives the loss breakdown:
It’s looking increasingly like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are going to cost the US government much more than AIG. In its latest long-term budget outlook released in late January, the CBO projected that the AIG bailout would ultimately cost the Treasury $9 billion dollars. Indeed, the entire private financial […]
Feb12th2010
Affirmative Action - Not Win-Win
Published by in Hispanics (Minority Issues) and affirmative action. 0 CommentsDuke University professors Peter Arcidiacono and Jacob Vigdor have a forthcoming paper in Economic Inquiry “Does the River Spill Over? Estimating the Economic Returns to Attending a Racially Diverse College”, Mark Perry provides a summary:
“Do white and Asian students at elite schools benefit from the presence of Under- Represented Minority students on campus or […]
Feb11th2010
Economist Arnold Kling gives what should be the Republican healthcare points in their upcoming healthcare summit with Obama:
1. All Medicare savings must be used to shore up Medicare. None of those savings can be used to fund new insurance subsidies or entitlements. Medicare is unsustainable, and it is going to need every dollar that we […]
Feb10th2010
I admit it, I get uneasy feelings when people congratulate Obama for increasing Pell Grants. I don’t see it as the universal positive that many others do. For three reasons.
First, Pell grants are politically cheap. Increasing funding for Pell grants takes little courage and comes with no political cost. Who disagrees with more funding for […]
