"President Biden is proposing to expand federal intervention in many areas that are the responsibility of state and local governments and the private sector. His $2.3 trillion jobs plan would subsidize broadband, automobiles, the electric grid, manufacturing, highways, transit, water systems, and much else. His $1.8 trillion families plan would subsidize pre‐school, child care, colleges, paid leave, health care, food programs, and many other things. Every dollar spent on Biden’s plans would be extracted from elsewhere in the economy through higher taxes now or in the future.
Biden’s plans would impose large budget costs, but perhaps a larger problem is that the federal government is the worst institution to tackle the issues the president is focused on. Decades of experience with federal spending programs show that the government suffers from severe political, bureaucratic, and knowledge shortcomings that often make its actions inefficient, harmful, and sometimes disastrous. While federal programs help some people, they usually create costs and negative side effects that outweigh the benefits.
After being in Washington for decades, Biden should know this but he appears to be seized by the urge to exercise power. Younger members of his team are likely ignorant of past federal failures and entertain lofty visions of remaking society. But they should put their dreams aside and study how federal programs actually work. They should read Why Government Fails So Often by Peter Schuck of Yale Law School. He examined federal programs in detail and found that performance has been “dismal” and failure “endemic.” He concluded that,
many, perhaps most, governmental failures are structural. That is, they grow out of a deeply entrenched policy process, a political culture, a perverse official incentive system, individual and collective irrationality, inadequate information, rigidity and inertia, lack of credibility, mismanagement, market dynamics, the inherent limits of law, implementation problems, and a weak bureaucratic system.
I examined the structural reasons why federal programs usually do not add net value to society in this study on aid to the states and this study on government failure. The latter study identified five basic sources of federal failure and the types of failures they generated, as summarized in this table.
Here are brief descriptions of the five sources of federal failure.
First, federal policies rely on top‐down coercion, which creates winners and losers, and which displace mutually beneficial market relations. A related problem is that by excluding markets and the price mechanism, federal actions rely on guesswork, which results in resource misallocations and failures. Then in turn, government failures don’t get weeded out as they would in markets because they are funded by coerced taxes not voluntary transactions.
Second, the federal government lacks knowledge about our complex society. That ignorance is behind many unintended and harmful side effects of federal policies. While markets gather knowledge from the bottom up and are rooted in individual choices, the government’s blunt and coercive actions destroy that knowledge and squelch diverse preferences in society.
Third, legislators often act counter to the broad public interest. While America is a democracy, logrolling in Congress allows frequent enactment of programs that do not have majority support in the legislature or in the nation. Once programs become law, they get entrenched and difficult to reform or repeal.
Fourth, civil servants act within a bureaucratic system that rewards inertia, not the creation of value for the public. The lack of firing and performance pay, and the excess of red tape and bureaucratic layering, are some of the problems in the federal bureaucracy. Reforms over the years have tried to bring business efficiencies to the bureaucracy, but there are fundamental reasons why federal agencies will always be inefficient.
Fifth, as the federal government grows larger, its performance deteriorates. Legislators are overloaded by the demands of fundraising, speeches, and constituent service, let alone trying to understand the armada of 2,300 federal programs they have created. Even before the pandemic, the federal budget was 100 times larger than the average state budget, which is far too large for legislators to adequately oversee or control. Furthermore, each new spending program likely produces less value than the last, while the tax costs of funding each new program increases rapidly at the margin.
Biden’s programs would face these and other problems. New programs and related regulations would generate negative and unforeseen side effects, and they would destroy beneficial diversity in state policies and society. Program execution would be poor, and failed programs would not be repealed or reformed. Policymakers would be even more overloaded and have less time for proper oversight. Government performance would decline further.
Rather than unifying the nation, Biden’s proposals would increase anger and division as the federal government forced on the nation more one‐size‐fits‐all mandates on education, health care, child care, automobiles, and many other things. The federal government is far too large already. Americans should reject Biden’s proposals.
Federal government failure is discussed in detail here."
Friday, April 30, 2021
Biden’s Programs Would Fail for Many Reasons
Joe Biden Doesn’t Think On The Margin
"In his address to the joint session of Congress, Joe Biden claimed:
“When this nation made 12 years of public education universal in the last century, it made us the best‐educated and best‐prepared nation in the world. But the world is catching up. They are not waiting. 12 years is no longer enough today to compete in the 21st Century. That’s why the American Families Plan guarantees four additional years of public education for every person in America – starting as early as we can.”
Let’s leave aside whether the President’s reading of the historical returns to public education is correct (a lot of evidence highly doubts it). Let us also park the idea that national economies “compete.”
Even if Biden was correct on these claims, using past evidence of the effects of expanding years of public education as justification for further expansions would be misguided.
That the first interstate highway system may have produced significant increases in economic activity does not mean that building another interstate highway system would be a cost‐effective use of public funds. Which is only to say that good economics happens on the margin: what matters is the weighing up of the marginal costs and marginal benefits of each additional year of publicly provided education, not the average costs and benefits from the past.
We all understand this in our private lives. Half an hour of exercise per day may bring benefits to us that exceed the costs of that which we miss as a result. Maybe an additional half‐hour still has net benefits again. But at some point, the marginal costs—the economic costs of an additional unit of time working out—clearly exceed the benefits.
The realistic alternative to someone spending an extra two years in government‐financed college is, for many, a couple of years spent acquiring on‐the‐job skills or going to college privately. The opportunity cost of kids spending time in subsidized universal preschool is, for many kids, spending two years with their parents or a family member, or in a daycare setting.
To make a more convincing case for this additional public spending, then, Biden would have to explain why the marginal benefits of the extra public education exceeded the additional costs. Little of the evidence presented in the accompanying “Factsheet” to the American Families Plan convincingly attempts that.
In fact, when pushing for universal preschool education provision or significant childcare subsidies, the administration tends to use past evidence from targeted programs at very disadvantaged kids (for whom it is more plausible a government program might provide something the child otherwise wouldn’t receive) as supporting the case for universal provision.
That, again, shows a failure to think on the margin: that a program might bring benefits exceeding costs for some disadvantaged kids doesn’t mean extending it to all will bring similar net benefits."
Thursday, April 29, 2021
The Disastrous J&J Pause
"We were told that the J&J pause was necessary to prevent vaccine hesitancy. I never understood the certainty people expressed on this point, even people who were relatively good on other issues. In anycase, as the excellent Daniel Bier argues, the best explanation for the data right now is that the J&J pause increased vaccine hesitancy.
Could the plunge timing have been a coincidence? Perhaps the eager had already gotten their vaccinations, leaving only the less eager and more hesitant. Maybe. But note that younger people were getting vaccinated rapidly before the pause and at increasing rates in line with the rates of the older people who had been vaccinated before them. But then the vaccination rates of the young plummeted, just as for the old. In other words, the plunge started in all age groups at the same time but at very different levels of vaccination. The similar timing across age groups is easy to explain if it was the J&J pause (everyone saw the pause at the same time) but it requires multiple coincidences to explain why every age group would reach their hesitancy point at different levels of vaccination but at the same time.
My view is that neither the CDC nor the FDA should be playing psychological games with the public. Just give it to us straight. In this case, since there was never much doubt that the J&J vaccine was much safer than COVID, a bulletin to physicians would have been appropriate to the circumstances. We don’t know for certain what have happened under that counterfactual (although the data from Britain v. Europe on the AZ pause suggest a bulletin would not have generated the same hesitancy) but it would have been the right decision on the evidence.
See Bier’s tweet thread for further breakdown of the data."
Men have been increasingly underrepresented and “marginalized” in higher education for 40 years going back to the early 1980s & and young women are more likely than their male counterparts to be working after earning a college degree
See Chart of the day: For every 100 young women in October 2020… by Mark J. Perry.
"Yesterday the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual report on “College Enrollment and Work Activity of Recent High School and College Graduates – 2020” based on data as of October 2020. Here’s a description of the BLS data used for the report:
Information on school enrollment and employment status is collected monthly in the Current Population Survey (CPS), a nationwide survey of about 60,000 households that provides information on employment and unemployment. Each October, a supplement to the CPS gathers more detailed information about recent degree recipients and school enrollment. In addition to data on recent high school graduates ages 16 to 24, this release presents information on recent degree recipients ages 20 to 29.
The data in the BLS report are presented in three tables that correspond to the three sections in the chart above:
- Table 1. Labor force status of 2020 high school graduates and 2019-2020 high school dropouts 16 to 24 years old by school enrollment, educational attainment, sex, and rate in October 2020
- Table 2. Labor force status of persons 16 to 24 years old by school enrollment, educational attainment, sex, and race in October 2020
- Table 3. Labor force status of 2020 associate degree recipients and college graduates 20 to 29 years old by selected characteristics in October 2020
Although the BLS report highlighted several gender differences in educational and labor force outcomes between young men and young women, most of the 26 gender differences displayed in the chart above were not mentioned in the text of the BLS report. Specifically, the data in the chart above show that:
- Compared to young women, young men were less likely to graduate from high school, more likely to drop out of high school, less likely to enroll in college after high school and more likely to be unemployed. For example, for every 100 females who graduated from high school last year and enrolled in college in the fall of 2020, there were only 70 young men. For every 100 young women who were recently dropped out of high school, there were 134 young men.
- Compared to women ages 16 to 24, men in that age group were less likely to be enrolled in college, far less likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, and far less likely to be employed with a college degree. Compared to young women in that age group, young men were far more likely to have less than a high school diploma, much less likely to attend college after high school and more likely to be unemployed with or without a high school diploma. For example, for every 100 young women ages 16-22 who were enrolled in college and working last fall, there were only 66 young men.
- Compared to females ages 20-29 years old who recently earned an associate’s degree or hold a bachelor’s or advanced degree (master’s, professional or doctoral), their male counterparts were far less likely to have recently earned an associate’s degree, less likely to hold a bachelor’s or advanced (master’s, professional or doctoral) college degree and far less likely to have a college degree (bachelor’s degree or higher) and be employed. Young men ages 20-29 who were recent associate degree recipients, recent college graduates with a bachelor’s degree or higher, and those who with a bachelor’s or advanced degree were far more likely to have those degrees and be unemployed than their female counterparts. For example, for every 100 women who were recent associate degree recipients, there were only 56 men. For every 100 women with an advanced degree who were unemployed, there were 175 men.
The significant gender differences favoring young women for a variety of educational outcomes detailed above provide additional empirical evidence that it is men who are increasingly struggling to finish high school and attend and graduate from college. Actually, men have been increasingly underrepresented and “marginalized” in higher education for 40 years going back to the early 1980s. And young women are more likely than their male counterparts to be working after earning a college degree. College-educated young men with any degree (associate’s, bachelors, or advanced) are more likely than female college graduates to be either unemployed or not in the labor force.
It is young men, more than young women, who are at-risk and facing serious educational and work-related challenges, which show up later in large gender disparities for a variety of measures of (a) behavioral and mental health outcomes, (b) alcoholism, drug addiction, and drug overdoses, (c) suicide, murder, violent crimes, and incarceration, and (d) homelessness.
See my December 2019 post “Chart of the day: For every 100 girls/women…..” where I suggested that despite the fact that boys and men are at so much greater risk than girls and women on so many different measures, those significant gender disparities that disproportionately and adversely affect men get almost no attention. In fact, it’s girls and women who continue to get a disproportionate amount of attention, resources, and financial support. From the time girls are in elementary school, they are favored with a significant number of educational resources that aren’t available to boys including (a) thousands of after-school and summer girl-only programs for computer coding (“Girls Who Code”), (b) hundreds of girl-only summer STEM camps sponsored by both universities and private organizations, (c) numerous female-only scholarships, fellowships, and awards at the college level for both students and faculty, (d) many hundreds of women’s centers and women’s commissions, (e) female-only political campaign programs and (f) female-only health and medical science programs.
It’s because of the many risks facing young men and boys and the overwhelming favoritism for women in all levels of education that motivated me to file Title IX complaints with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against more than 300 community colleges, 4-year colleges, and universities, and public school districts for violating the civil rights of boys and men. Based on those complaints, the OCR has now opened more than 150 federal civil rights investigations for violations of Title IX’s clear legal prohibition of sex discrimination. Almost 50 of those investigations have been resolved by colleges and universities agreeing to either (a) terminate their discriminatory programs, (b) convert discriminatory, single-sex, female-only programs into legitimate coeducational programs that are open to all gender identities, or (c) introduce single-sex, male-only programs that are equivalent to the female-only programs.
As I’ve pointed out many times before Title IX clearly says that “No person [female or male] in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, …. be subjected to discrimination under any education program….” In the past, universities routinely violated Title IX with impunity because they were never challenged when they engaged in illegal discrimination against men, but that’s now changing. I’m hopeful that we’re entering a new era of civil rights enforcement that ends the long-standing selective enforcement of Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination. Based on my experience, momentum is building towards a new world of “Title IX for all” and not “Title IX for some.”"
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Obama administration scientist slams claims of climate ‘emergency’: Heat waves are 'no more common than they were in 1900'
By Lawrence Richard of The Washington Examiner.
"Climate alarmists are wrong to call perceived drops in temperature and other climate changes an “emergency,” a scientist who worked for the Obama administration argued.
“Both research literature and government reports state clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years,” Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, wrote in an op-ed on Saturday.
Dr. Koonin clarified: “Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that — to paraphrase the classic movie ‘The Princess Bride’ — I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.”
The former undersecretary then provided three examples to highlight how the environmentalist narrative differs from these reports.
“Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century,” he wrote, adding that “Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago.”
“The global area burned by wildfires has declined more than 25 percent since 2003 and 2020 was one of the lowest years on record,” he said.
Koonin specified that misinformation is not always intentional.
“There are abundant opportunities to get things wrong — both accidentally and on purpose — as the information goes through filter after filter to be packaged for various audiences,” Koonin said, describing how “the public gets their climate information almost exclusively from the media.”
“As a result, most people don’t get the whole story,” he added.
In the op-ed, the environmental scientist explained his background and credentials, and he clarified his reason for sharing the climate assessment data.
He said it started in 2013, when he was asked by the American Physical Society to update the organization’s public stance on the changing climate. Over the next year, Koonin said he initiated a workshop to act as a “stress test” for the climate science community.
“I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed,” he wrote.
He said he discovered that “humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate. The results from many different climate models disagree with, or even contradict, each other and many kinds of observations. In short, the science is insufficient to make useful predictions about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”
Since that discovery seven years ago, Koonin explained that the public narrative about the climate has shifted away from any actual scientific data and is, instead, being driven by alarmist phrases, such as “climate emergency,” “climate crisis,” and “climate disaster.”
The scientist said that President Joe Biden has added to this alarmist language by appointing climate envoy John Kerry and announcing that the administration will spend almost $2 trillion to combat the “existential threat to humanity.”"
Biden Infrastructure Plan: Funding Not Green
"President Biden’s infrastructure plan is a mess of contradictions. It promises to increase America’s competitiveness and “create millions of good jobs,” but it would be funded by a corporate tax increase that would do the opposite. The plan would provide large corporate subsidies, even though leading Democrats often complain about corporate subsidies.
Perhaps the most striking contradiction in Biden’s plan is that it is supposed to combat climate change, but the plan’s $2 trillion in taxpayer funding is not green. The green way to fund infrastructure is through user charges that restrain consumer demand. But Biden’s plan relies on income taxes to pay for infrastructure subsidies, and that approach does not moderate consumption or reduce resource use.
If water systems need upgrades, for example, they should be funded by increases in water charges to limit water use and benefit the environment. In the same way, gas taxes are a good way to fund highways because they restrain automobile use and passenger charges are a good way to fund airports because they restrain airline use. Well‐structured user charges can also reduce congestion.
Biden would subsidize the upgrades to water systems, highways, airports, and other facilities, rather than relying on green and efficient user charges. In his infrastructure plan, the president mentions climate change 20 times and the environment 14 times, but the plan is entirely funded in a non‐green manner.
The table shows some of Biden’s proposed non‐green infrastructure subsidies and the preferred green funding approach.
Other commentary on Biden’s infrastructure plan here, here, here, here, here, here, and here."
Economist: Lockdowns ‘Greatest Peacetime Policy Failure’ in Canada’s History
Canadian economist Douglas Ward Allen recently ran a cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns. The trade-off hardly seems worth it.
"Earlier this month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease official in the United States, struggled to explain why COVID cases and deaths in Texas were continuing to fall even though the Lone Star State had lifted the last of its restrictions against Fauci’s advice a month earlier.
"It can be confusing,” Fauci began. “Ofen you have to wait a few weeks before you see the effect ... I’m not really quite sure. It could be they’re doing things outdoors."
Weeks later, COVID-19 cases and related deaths continue to fall in Texas and other states that lifted restrictions, including Mississippi and Oklahoma. Meanwhile, many states with restrictions have seen a resurgence of the virus, including Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
Costs and Benefits of Lockdowns
Why states without restrictions are currently faring better than states with restrictions is unclear. But a recently published economic study may offer a clue.
Canadian economist Douglas Ward Allen, the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, suggests the ineffectiveness of lockdowns may stem primarily from voluntary changes in behavior.
“Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent noncompliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns,” writes Allen. “The limited effectiveness of lockdowns explains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries.”
Allen’s thesis would help explain the abundance of data that show lockdowns and other restrictions have been, at best, largely ineffective at reducing the spread of COVID-19.
His study does not stop there, however.
While much of Allen’s paper analyzes the literature to show that studies over-estimated the benefits of COVID-19 lockdowns, he also considers the cost of the lockdowns. In order to do this, he relies on the estimate from George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan regarding the quality of life lost due to lockdowns.
Caplan frames this problem by asking, “Suppose you could either live a year of life in the COVID era, or X months under normal conditions. What’s the value of X?”
Caplan argues 10 months seems like a conservative estimate. Another way to think of this is that people would be willing to sacrifice 2 months of life to avoid a year of lockdowns. This estimate seems reasonable, due to the violence, job loss, business failure, and substance dependencies fostered by lockdowns.
If a year of lockdowns means losing an equivalent of 2 months of life per person, multiplying that 2 months over the entire population of Canada (37.7 million people) gives a cost of 6.3 million years of life lost.
If COVID-19 lockdowns made the death rate 10 percent lower, that would be equivalent to 22,333 years of life saved. Compared to the loss of 6.3 million years, this trade-off hardly seems worth it.
Even if the frightening projections of the Imperial College of London had turned out to be correct—and Allen painstakingly shows they were not—the number of years saved from lockdowns would be 1,735,580, which is still significantly below the 6.3 million years of life lost.
‘Greatest Peacetime Failure in History’
As more countries and states open and do not suffer the consequences lockdown proponents predicted, the empirical data will become increasingly difficult to ignore—especially as the adverse effects of lockdowns become more clear.
For example, FEE’s Brad Polumbo recently reported on new CDC data that show 87,000 people died from drug overdoses from October 2019 to September 2020, a 30 percent increase from the same period the preceding year. There is little doubt these deaths stem from lockdowns.
“While overdose deaths from drugs had begun rising in the months leading to the pandemic,” Axios noted, “the biggest spike in deaths occurred in April and May 2020, when shutdowns were strictest.”
As more data are made available giving a complete picture of the effects of lockdowns, a long-established truth about tradeoffs observed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase is becoming apparent.
“It would clearly be desirable if the only actions performed were those in which what was gained was worth more than what was lost,” wrote Coase. “But in choosing between social arrangements within the context of which individual decisions are made, we have to bear in mind that a change in the existing system which will lead to an improvement in some decisions may well lead to a worsening of others.”
To be sure, Allen’s research will not be the final word on lockdowns. But if his data are correct it will be difficult to disagree with his verdict on how history will judge government lockdowns.
“[It] is possible that lockdowns will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history,” he writes."
‘Very, very few infections happen outdoors,’ doctor says
"With the White House is expected to announce new guidance for outdoor spaces Tuesday, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, tells TODAY that “very, very few [COVID-19] infections happen outdoors,” and then only in settings such as large, packed rallies. “Walking by somebody just isn’t a risk, running by somebody just isn’t a risk.”"
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
Biden ‘Stimulus’ Will Deaden Innovation
Keynesians have it backward: Growth is driven by production, not consumption
By Alexander William Salter. He is an associate professor of economics at Texas Tech University. Excerpts:
"Consumption is downstream from production. Growth is about increasing the supply of goods over time; you can’t spend if the goods haven’t been produced. Production grows as technology and production processes improve. Such improvement requires saving and investing rather than consuming.
The early details on Mr. Biden’s infrastructure plan aren’t promising in terms of incentives for saving and investment. The bill includes significant tax increases on corporations, which would also hurt households and investors. The president and his team deserve credit for attempting to pay for the plan. But raising taxes, especially on businesses, weakens incentives to invest. The result is lost growth.
Mr. Biden’s plan also largely directs resources away from uses that would increase productivity. Improvements in roads and bridges may boost how much companies can produce, and hence growth, by making it easier to move labor and goods across the nation. But that’s a minority of the bill’s spending; other expenditures will have the opposite effect. Take the proposal to invest in expanding clean energy and electric-vehicle charging stations. This is a rather elastic interpretation of infrastructure, and a wealth-wasting one besides.
The government is not good at picking investments. President Obama promised smart green projects. What we got was the Solyndra debacle, which consumed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars while producing little of value. Those dollars are resources that could have been invested elsewhere. What Mr. Biden proposes amounts to a great many Solyndras. That’s an enormous amount of productive capital to squander."
