Aging boomer trends

Tim Kowal 2 Comments

Here are a couple of interesting (and troubling) posts about what aging boomers are up to.  First, the LA Times reports that, as predicted, the nation’s 77 million boomers are beginning to dump their stocks as they prepare for long retirements.  Just as the economy rose during the boomers’ productive years, experts are predicting a long slump as they begin to cash out:

The report’s basic premise is that stock prices “have been closely related to demographic trends in the past half century" — in other words, that baby boomers pushed up stock prices in earlier years as they hit their prime earning and saving years.

. . . .

Indeed, aside from being a longer-term depressant, selling by baby boomers -– the post-War contingent born between 1946 and 1964 –- could forestall any current-day recovery in the market from the global financial crisis.

And cashing out they are, according to this article from a Fox affiliate, reporting that many retiring boomers are also retiring the idea of leaving an inheritance:

"My goal is when they carry me away in that box that my bank account is going to say zero," Willison said. "I’m going to spoil myself now."
Upending the conventional notion of parents carefully tending their financial estates to be passed down at the reading of their wills, many baby boomers say they instead plan to spend the money on themselves while they’re alive.

In a survey of millionaire boomers by investment firm U.S. Trust, only 49% said it was important to leave money to their children when they die. The low rate was a big surprise for a company that for decades has advised wealthy people how to leave money to their heirs.

The article reports that many boomers feel they have pre-paid their children’s inheritance by helping them pay for college or a house.  Says one boomer:  "I’ve helped launch them with their education and their careers. If they can’t make it on their own now, they can never make it. I’ve done my job. Now I’m going to enjoy life." 

I can’t help wonder, though, how much the boomer generation—particularly, the leaders they helped elect—contributed to the high entry costs that make it so expensive for their children today to begin new careers, or contributed to the land use regulations that make it so expensive for their children to afford the kind of housing their parents had 30 or 40 years ago. 

I wish those boomers well who have earned and saved enough to enjoy a comfortable retirement.  Those they leave behind have no claim on them, and the boomers have every right to enjoy their rewards.  We might have liked, however, to have enjoyed more of the economic freedoms they had so that we might have a better chance at our own. 

[Cross-posted at the main page]

Prop 13 Is for Lovers…of Property Taxes!

Tim Kowal 127 Comments

Last week’s “OC Watchdog” piece by Teri Sforza in the OC Register pokes the Prop 13 bear, suggesting it is time Californians withdraw their opposition to higher property taxes, by focusing on the familiar scenario of the new homeowner paying scads more in property taxes than his long-time homeowner neighbor.  For those unfamiliar with this watershed issue of California tax and public finance policy, Prop 13 is the wildly popular constitutional amendment passed in 1978 by a margin of nearly two-to-one, cutting rates on all property taxes to a maximum of 1% of 1975 property values.  Cal. Const. art. XIII A, §§ 1-2.  Prop 13 allows assessments to rise by no more than 2% per year, and revaluation may occur only when property is sold.  After its passage, Prop 13 cut statewide property tax revenues by a staggering 57%.  It is commonly blamed by politicians and the media as one of the chief causes of the decline in the funding and, more debatably, the quality, of California’s sub-par school system.

Like many Prop 13 opponents, Ms. Sforza points to Prop 13’s loopholes, such as 1031 like-kind exchanges available to commercial and investment property owners, suggesting homeowners are getting the short end of an already wrongheaded deal.  Similarly, LA Mayor Villaraigosa attacks Prop 13 as “a corporate tax give-away.”  Says Villaraigosa, “[w]e all know the history” of Prop 13:

With the state experiencing rapid growth and high inflation, we had people literally forced out of their homes by skyrocketing assessments. And we all know what’s happened since. Not only have we suffered the long‐term consequences of disinvestment in public education and public infrastructure ‐‐ Prop 13 has had the unintended effect of favoring commercial property owners at the expense of homeowners.”

However, a closer study shows Villaraigosa’s “history” is not only incomplete, it is wrong.  In fact, just six years prior to decisively enacting Prop 13, Californians even more decisively (65.9% voting against) to defeat Prop 14 (a/k/a the “Watson II” initiative), a similar proposed constitutional amendment to limit property taxes.  Four years before that, Californians rejected still more resoundingly (68% voting against) the same idea in Prop 9 (a/k/a the “Watson I” initiative).  Moreover, state law at the time placed ceilings on the tax rate that school districts could assess without the approval of a “tax override” by a majority of district residents.  As of 1971, nearly every district had approved such an override. Continue Reading →

California’s Nanny State Nanny Law

Tim Kowal 34 Comments

The California Assembly, faced with such difficult tasks as prison overcrowding, the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation, one of the worst business climates in the nation, and a broken education financing policy (article forthcoming), apparently has prioritized the issue of overworked babysitters, courtesy of a bill introduced by Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco).  From the OC Register:

A bill pending in the state Senate would require breaks for that babysitter. These include a 10-minute break for every two hours worked and a 30-minute meal break after five hours on the job.

. . . .

The bill, called the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Act, would require that people who hire domestic workers not only pay them minimum wage (currently $8 an hour), but also pay overtime and provide workers’ compensation. Employers would also have to keep time records and issue paychecks.

At one point there was a provision for paid vacation time for full-time employees, but that has been scrapped.

AB 889, dubbed the Babysitter’s Bill, is supposed to close loopholes in the state’s current labor laws. Under existing law, people hiring domestic workers are exempted from the requirement to provide workers’ compensation if their employees do not work full-time. This new law would remove the exemption.

The Assembly already passed the bill and is expected to easily win approval in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Senator Doug LaMalfa reacts, and Adam Summers at Reason Foundation rounds out some of the remaining common sense objections.  Here are some of the most vexing concerns after reading the text of the bill:  Continue Reading →

NPR: Some Things Considered

Tom Van Dyke 84 Comments

Some on the right say National Public Radio has been on fair-and-balanced behavior since the GOP made its semi-annual kabuki run at NPR’s funding.

Funding still intact, of course. It’s a Republican ritual. The threat, not the cut.

As for NPR’s leftish bias, I’ll leave that up to the ether, where all such arguments begin and end, to the satisfaction of nobody.

Is too. Is not!

Two bookended stories on today’s All Things Considered show just how hard it is to quantify such bias.

The first was on an eco-sit-in [remember sit-ins? These folks sure do—or they learned about them in class]

neo-hippie sit-in

outside the White House against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry “dirty” tar sands petroleum products from Canada to refineries on the US’ Gulf Coast.

We learned [or rather, NPR told us] that the pipeline really won’t amount to much in curing our dependence on foreign oil.

OK, got it.

The next story considered was the GOP’s strategy for the fall: to highlight, cancel, and/or stall impending new government regulations on business and industry that might curtail the creation of more jobs. [There is a bit of an unemployment crisis currently in the US.]

We learned [that is, NPR told us] that curtailing these regulations probably won’t amount to much in job creation.

OK, roger, got that too.

Now without disputing the truth of what we learned [or were told], what we have here is that the house wins all ties, “the house” being NPR, and what we have here is a tie, a push. Minimize the effect of the pipeline or the forestalling of new regulations to near-zero effect, and it’s a wash, a non-issue, and protecting the environment—a self-evident good—wins by default.

And this is how it’s done rhetorically, without lying. In Blackjack, the house has a minimal advantage of a half-percent. If you change the rules so the house wins every push on 17, its advantage rises to almost 2 percent, and all of sudden it’s the death of 1000 cuts.

Did NPR ask anybody if the new regulations would amount to much? Did NPR interview anybody about the jobs that would be created by constructing the pipeline, during and after?

You already know the answer to those. That would be comparing apples to apples, oranges to oranges. That would have been all things considered, hence the rueful joke from the right about what “All” really means to NPR’s signature news show.

Next—hitting the trifecta here—ATC ran a story about the green jobs debacle at Solyndra, which is both apple and orange, and which appears to be a flushing of over a half-billion government dollars down the eco-wishing well.

By the time the story was over, you were left with the impression it was just one of those things. Could have been bad management, bad technology, whatever—other alternative energy companies are successful, afterall. No barometer of anything, really. Could have happened to anyone.

So how do I quantify–digitalize–all this mummery, and present clear stats to my empiricist friends on the left as evidence of NPR bias?

The answer is, I can’t. You had to be there. There was no Big Lie; there was no lying atall. Leftpersons probably heard the same thing I did, and detected only an even-handed review of the issues.

It’s not what you put in, it’s what you leave out. Not what you ask, but what you don’t ask. And in the case of honest people, what never occurs to you to ask in the first place. So it goes, and what’s at the genuine heart of our epistemological crisis.

____

LATE ADD: President Obama nixed the new environmental rules.

The Constitutional Conservatism Newspeak

Tim Kowal 3 Comments

“Liberals are the true conservatives of this generation,” a growingly popular line of argument goes, “because liberals are the guardians of the new American tradition—the New Deal tradition—against the reactionary onslaught of the fake, revanchist ‘conservatives.’ True constitutional conservatism,” the argument continues, “would defend Supreme Court decisions of the past 70 years that approved centralized administrative rule, and would recognize that those cases comprise the operative constitution of the new American order.”  As my friend and former Chapman law professor John Eastman put it in his recent review of UC Irvine law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s book The Conservative Assault on the Constitution, “the Constitution began in the 1930s when the Supreme Court finally acceded to the radical expansion in federal power pushed by President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, and has remained a one-way ratchet ever since.”  According to liberal constitutional conservatism, then, any efforts to pare back the advancements of the centralized administrative state by pointing to limits described in the original Constitution is therefore “not an ‘assault’ on the New Deal but on the Constitution itself.” 

The approach brings to mind a passage from Gulliver’s Travels.  As Jonathan Swift put it,

It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever has been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice, and the general reason of mankind.  These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of directing accordingly.

The “assault” Dean Chemerinsky derides, then, is not on the big-“C”-Constitution but the small-“c”-constitution as judicially amended and legislatively subverted by New Deal and post-New Deal thinking—that is, the constitution that says “The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.” Prof. Eastman describes this “clever” approach taken by Dean Chemerinsky and his liberal colleagues as follows:

[E]ach leftward evolution of the Constitution’s meaning becomes a new fixed baseline of constitutional law, and any move to return to the original meaning amounts to a repudiation not of the wayward interpretation but of the Constitution itself. 

. . . .

According to his methodology, every precedent, however short-lived, that pushes the Constitution’s meaning in the preferred direction, i.e., leftward, becomes the new benchmark for what the Constitution itself says, while any precedent to the contrary is simply an “assault.”

As for the particulars of his argument, Dean Chemerinsky offers little that anyone other than friends of the hard left can agree on.  For example, not even Bill Maher defends the Democrats’ shameful politicization of the “advice and consent” process to freeze Robert Bork’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.  Yet Dean Chemerinsky hales it as a victory that ensured the longevity of liberal judicial amendments to the constitution, abortion being chief among them.  On that topic, Dean Chemerinsky says the key question is “who would decide whether the fetus before viability is a human person: each woman for herself or the state legislature.”  To this, Prof. Eastman responds:

I have never seen the Left’s position on abortion phrased quite so starkly, but it should put to rest the myth that the “progressive” view in support of a “living Constitution” is designed to advance human dignity.  That anyone, individual or legislature, gets to determine the human personhood of another human being is a notion that I had thought we had buried in the ashes of the Civil War.  It bears an uncanny resemblance to the claim made by slave-owners that it was their moral prerogative to determine whether blacks should be treated as property or as human beings.  If “the conservative assault on the Constitution” is an assault on that proposition, then count me among the assaulters in chief.

Moving beyond the abortion issue, nearly every other case analyzed by Chemerinsky involves conservatives chipping away at Progressive decisional law, not U.S. Constitutional law. Supreme Court decisions rolling back affirmative action and arcane forced desegregation programs, permitting crèches and Ten Commandments displays on state or local government property, paring down the admittedly prophylactic exclusionary rule of criminal evidence in aid of good faith law enforcement, and so on.  Thus, as Prof. Eastman puts it:

The ability to manipulate the Constitution’s text to arrive at new and radically different conclusions than originally intended is the hallmark of the “living constitution” enterprise.  Opposition to the enterprise may be an “assault” on the living constitution enterprise, but hardly one on the Constitution, as the author claims.

In other words, it is only the post-1930s “constitution” that concerns Dean Chemerinsky. He calls the pre-1947 interpretation of the Establishment Clause—which, according to the First Amendment’s text, applies only to "Congress" and not state and local governments—a "radical" one; he expresses relief that Clarence Thomas is the only Supreme Court Justice who expresses support for the actual words in the Constitution.  Whatever constitution Dean Chemerinsky thinks conservatives are “assaulting,” then, it’s not the document preserved under glass in Washington.

[Cross-posted at the main page]

“If you seek our monument, look in the hole”

Tim Kowal 1 Comment

I devoured Mark Steyn’s After America: Get Ready for Armageddon within a few days of its release.  If you couldn’t tell, I’m a bit of a declinist, so I tend to nod right along with Steyn’s narrative.  An impressive autodidact though he is, Steyn is not an economist, so no doubt the facts and figures he offers to move his argument along will meet with some criticism.  (On the other hand, that’s true of just about any facts and figures no matter how great the appeal to authority.)  What I find most compelling, however, is his focus on the decline of the American spirit as the result of Americans’ ill-considered experiment in big government.  Here’s a key passage on that point: 

That’s what “fiscal conservatives” often miss: this isn’t a green-eyeshade issue. Increasing dependency, disincentivizing self-reliance, absolving the citizenry from responsibility for their actions: the multitrillion-dollar debt catastrophe is not the problem but merely the symptom. It’s not just about balancing the books, but about balancing the most basic impulses of society. These are structural and, ultimately, moral questions.

Steyn offers the metaphor of the hole still left almost 10 years later at the site of the 9/11 attacks.  The decline of the get-it-done mentality that used to be a trademark of Americanism has been buried under a mountain of multi-jurisdictional red tape, litigiousness, and creeping apathy and self-loathing.  As Steyn puts it,

a great power can survive a lot of things, but not “a mediocrity of spirit.” A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for so long. “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice” reads the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s Cathedral: If you seek my monument, look around. After two-thirds of the City of London was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, Wren designed and rebuilt the capital’s tallest building (St. Paul’s), another fifty churches, and a new skyline for a devastated metropolis. Three centuries later, if you seek our monument, look in the hole.

I think that’s exactly right, though it brings no satisfaction to say so.  We’ve lost much of what makes a robust, resilient, and energetic people by putting our economy under a clumsy and unwieldy set of ever expanding and ever changing rules.  Sometimes these rules lead to obviously absurd results, like shutting down kids’ lemonade stands.  Most of the time, however, we just put up with it on the assumption that somehow all those rules are protecting us.  So what if the remaining generation of Americans have nothing to show for their tenure on earth but a hole in the ground, so long as that tenure is long and comfortable courtesy of free health care and generous pensions?

True, whether that (somewhat exaggerated) trade-off is worth it is, at base, a moral question.  Is “mediocrity of spirit” a problem?  Do government entitlements contribute to it?  These are questions that do not readily lend themselves to empirical analysis.  But one’s answers to such questions will tell you most everything you need to know about his politics.

[Cross-posted at the main page]

Long Beach politics

Tim Kowal 7 Comments

The city of Long Beach, California, my hometown, is divided into nine council districts.  The house where I grew up, and where my dad still lives, is in the eighth district.  After participating in neighborhood activist groups and being very involved in city politics for many years, my dad finally decided he’d run for councilman of his district, now that the well-liked current councilwoman is termed out. 

However, in the past several years the Democratic political machine has visited itself upon Long Beach.  The city’s mayor, Bob Foster, is a former Sacramento lobbyist, and he’s used his clout to bring young, lockstep Democrats onto the council.  One of those is James Johnson, new councilman for the adjacent seventh district.  If you want proof that a motivated political machine can take over your local politics, observe how Councilman Johnson enjoyed a nearly quarter-million dollar warchest for what is one of the poorer areas of Long Beach.  Yet, only 4% of the $228,000 in contributions he received came from his constituents.  The vast majority—73%—came from out of the city altogether. 

Moreover, the seventh district sits on the 710 freeway and is plagued by pollution in connection with the busy Port of Long Beach.  Johnson campaigned on reducing Port pollution, but recently joined a law firm whose clients are key advocates of Port expansion.  There’s more good info about James Johnson here.

Now, my dad’s a Democrat, but his independent streak makes him unpopular with career politician types.  That he was the first and only candidate to announce candidacy for the eighth district, then, posed a problem for the Foster camp. 

Anyway, here’s the really scandalous part.  A July 5 council meeting was set to decide redistricting in the city due to population shifts in the 2010 census.  Although discussions and proposals had been circulated and discussed several weeks beforehand, Johnson presented a last-minute new proposal, on a “substitute-substitute motion,” that swept my dad’s home into his district, thus barring him from running for the eighth district.  Despite clamorous boos from a packed audience, the Foster pack rammed it through on a 7-2 vote.  Two days after ousting my dad from his district, a new candidate announced for the eighth district—with Foster’s endorsement. 

Crooked, divisive stuff.

Because of all this, my dad’s been getting some local attention that’s been fun to watch, despite how depressing the politics.  There’s a saying somewhere about the mischief in government being inversely proportional to its size. 

Feeling “badly”

Tim Kowal 5 Comments

Jay Nordlinger points out our Education Secretary don’t speak English real good:

Arne Duncan, our illustrious education secretary, is all weepy over the young’uns in Texas. They don’t get no education, what with that mean Rick Perry in charge. Duncan said, “I feel very, very badly for the children there.”

He feels badly, does he? Something wrong with his sense of touch? He can’t tell wood from water from sand? Does he feel sadly and terribly and angrily too?

More on this at Language Log.