Category: Demographics

More Immigration Disinformation

The Daily Escape:

Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, ME – December 2023 drone photo by Rick Berk Photography

There are plenty of newsworthy items as we end another week. You can read about them all over the internet. Wrongo wants to highlight just one: The Dow Jones index is up 29% since bottoming on Sept. 30, 2022, climbing to a new all-time high.

This is mostly due to the announcement by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday that in all likelihood, there will be no more increases in interest rates, and that there may be as many as three interest rate reductions in 2024.

Professional investors aren’t following the Dow, but it remains a mental benchmark that many Americans use to gauge the health of the stock market and the economy. So accept good news when it shows up.

Today we return to the topic of illegal immigration. As Wrongo writes this, there is still no deal on immigration, which is thought to be the hold-up on funding for Ukraine and Israel. From Semaphore:

“GOP negotiators said they believed they were making progress in securing a border policy package that’s tilted toward conservative priorities….They also welcomed the…Democratic attacks on the negotiations…..’There are several Democrats that have spoken against it,’ GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, (R-NC) told Semafor. ‘That means we’re hitting the right sort of tone.’”

Wrongo mentioned that it is very difficult to find facts from either side in the immigration debate. One constant refrain from the Right is that terrorists are slipping over the southern border, posing an existential threat to America, and it’s all Biden’s fault. From CBS:

“Republican lawmakers, GOP White House hopefuls and conservative media figures have argued that the Biden administration’s border policies have given terrorists an easier way to enter the US and harm Americans. On Monday…Trump claimed that the “same people” who killed or abducted more than 1,000 civilians in Israel are coming across the southern border separating the US and Mexico…”

And Media Matters added:

“Since the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent bombing campaign in Gaza, Fox News has seized on the chaos in the Middle East to revive its relentless fearmongering campaign suggesting that migrants crossing into the US at the southern border are terrorists, this time from the Middle East. Fox’s toxic rhetoric follows “a spike in hate incidents” against Muslims in the US.”

There has been an increase in Border Patrol apprehensions of individuals who are on the US terror watchlist over the past two years. But they represent a tiny fraction of all migrants processed along the southern border. From the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“From October last year to this September, officials at the southern border arrested 169 people whose names matched those on the watch list, compared with 98 during the previous fiscal year and 15 in 2021, according to government data. But that is a minuscule fraction of the total number of migrants who were apprehended at the border over the past year, more than two million.”

That fraction is less than 0.01% for those of us without calculators. Finding illegals who are on the terror watch list is far more common along the US-Canada border, despite much lower levels of unauthorized migration there. Here’s a US Customs and Border Protection chart:

Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 430 watchlist hits along the northern border in fiscal year 2023, the vast majority of them at official ports of entry.

Still, there are concerns. In its homeland threat assessment for 2024, the intelligence branch of DHS said:

“…record encounters of migrants arriving from a growing number of countries have complicated border and immigration security…”

The assessment also said a recent increase in apprehensions of migrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, while still significantly lower than those from the Western Hemisphere, has “exacerbated border security challenges” because those individuals require more vetting and processing and because it’s more difficult to deport them.

There’s also the question of migrants who aren’t apprehended. The Border Patrol estimates more than 1 million individuals have entered the country surreptitiously over the past two years.

Republicans in Congress now talk about the southern border primarily as a national security issue rather than largely as a collective fear of the “great replacement”. If hundreds of thousands of migrants are evading apprehension, these national security fears have merit. But since terror watch list apprehensions are tiny and a lot higher along our northern border, that border most likely poses an equal threat to national security, if not more, since the security along the northern border is lax. We don’t really have any idea how many evade apprehension by crossing it.

Despite the constant hammering by Fox and the Right, since 1975 no one has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the US that involved someone who came across the border illegally. Whenever Congress gets around to dealing with illegal immigration, the solution will require more manpower both for the border patrol and immigration services.

Immigrants will keep on coming. Migration is a part of human nature. Europeans came to North America before America was a country. The peoples of the UK are not the peoples that were there 5,000 years ago. The vast majority of UK citizens have little DNA from the original peoples of those islands. That is also true in the US.

History shows that trying to stop immigration all together is a fool’s errand.

Regardless of how successful we are at controlling immigration, the US demographics of the past 250 years will look VERY different from the US demographics of 100 years from now. That doesn’t mean we should give up on controlling the process as much as possible. Part of that is to increase the costs of crossing the border, which we are doing today with instant expulsion and denial of asylum claims.

And once people are here, we must do all we can to get them integrated into US society.

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Why People Say The Economy Is Terrible

The Daily Escape:

First snow, Doubling Point Lighthouse, Kennebec River, ME – December 2023 photo by Rick Berk Photography

Wrongo may have stumbled upon the reason why people say the economy is bad when so many economists say it isn’t. From a LendingClub report from last May: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“For some Americans, earning a six-figure income doesn’t guarantee a comfortable lifestyle….many Americans are struggling to make ends meet — with 61% of those surveyed saying they feel stretched too thin, and 49% of those earning $100,000 or more saying they’re living paycheck to paycheck.”

This ties together with other information, some of which comes from the issue, who reported this from the Aspen Institute: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Though routinely positive cash flow is the starting point for financial stability, it remains largely out of reach for many Americans. Even before the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half (46.5%) of households reported that their income did not exceed their spending over the course of a year. For households with annual income of less than $30,000, this number increases to three in five (61.5%).”

Now there may be many reasons why people spend beyond their means. Some seem to be unable to defer gratification until there’s money in the bank, so they buy on credit. There was a $48.5 billion jump in spending from September to October 2023. For others who make less than a living wage, the problem isn’t one of choice, it’s existential.

The searing takeaway from the above is that negative personal cashflow was a problem even before the post-Covid inflation drove prices through the roof in America. The Aspen Institute provides this handy chart showing how individuals build financial security:

Financial security starts with having a routinely positive cashflow. But, nearly 50% of Americans today aren’t cash flow positive (see quote above), while 49% of people earning more than $100k are living paycheck to paycheck.

This dovetails with Wrongo’s Monday column which showed that “Nearly 3 in 10 Americans say they have had to forgo seeing a doctor in the past year due to costs.” If you’re one of the 7.5% of uninsured Americans, and have money in your checking account that isn’t going to necessities, you can definitely go to the doctor.

Aspen has another chart that shows the breakdown of who lives paycheck to paycheck by income levels:

Seventy-four percent of those making less than $50k are living paycheck to paycheck, and while the percentage gets smaller as annual income rises, it’s still 48.7% for people making more than $100k, in an economy where the median income is around $54K!  FYI, the percentage of Americans who make $50k or less is 37.8%.

More from LendingClub: (brackets and emphasis by Wrongo)

“The share of consumers in the US earning over $100,000 per year who live paycheck to paycheck increased 7 percentage points in April year over year. High-income consumers are particularly likely to live in urban areas, at 36%, and these tendencies toward higher incomes…[don’t] prevent almost 70% of urban dwellers from saying they live paycheck to paycheck.”

It’s hard not to conclude that the majority of Americans are currently experiencing dire financial conditions, including many who live with negative cashflow. When your cashflow is negative, you either cut back, borrow or sell assets. For most people selling assets isn’t a real choice. So while some cut back, the majority borrow to make ends meet. According to the issue, the:

“…highest risk, and most expensive forms of debt are now growing fastest. Payday loans, online insta-loans, and so forth. That means that people are exhausting the more mundane forms of debt—credit cards, bank loans, government loans, etcetera.”

This squares with a report by Achieve, a personal debt management firm, that shows:

“In the first nine months of 2023, the average monthly participation in debt resolution programs increased by 119% compared to 2020, even though the average earnings rose by approximately 37% during the same period.”

It gets worse:

“In 2023, the typical household income of individuals enrolled in debt resolution programs was $59,900, which is a notable increase from $43,598 three years prior.”

Americans are earning 37% more but are still struggling with debt. Not a pretty picture to take before the voters.

Meanwhile, Democrats still are touting how “strong” the economy is. The aggregate numbers hide terrible personal experiences that are happening out of sight of our politicians and surprisingly, our economists. However, it’s clear from the polls that few Americans are buying that message apart from the true believers, the media and pundits.

The disconnect between economic data and the lived experience of average people needs to be addressed by Biden and the Democrats. If nothing is done to at least acknowledge the actual problems of many Americans specifically, their negative personal cashflow, these angry folks will certainly tilt toward giving Trump another chance.

Let’s give the issue the last word:

“What is this? What do we call it when the majority of people can’t make ends meet, as in, they’re literally spending more than they make, because they don’t make enough to live a stable or secure life?

Today the averages are hiding a truth: that a near-majority of American citizens are financially underwater. These are big numbers. The Census Bureau says as of now, 258.3 million Americans are adults. And the Aspen Institute says that 46.5% of them can’t make ends meet. That’s 120 million of us that are going deeper in debt every month.

That can only happen when those at the very top are skimming off more than 100% of the growth in the economy. This suggests that Biden et al need to run on policy that will help the majority of voters, not simply the moneyed people who finance political campaigns.

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Suicides Hit A Record

The Daily Escape:

San Juan river cuts through monocline ridge, UT – November 2023 drone photo by Hilary Bralove. It is believed by many that the Navajo people based their rug and basket weaving patterns on what they saw in these geologic formations.

The temporary truce in the Israel/Hamas war is over. Reprobate Congresscritter George Santos (R-NY) was ousted from the House, and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor died. She was the swing vote in the Bush v. Gore case that stopped the Florida recount and handed the 2000 presidential election to GW Bush. This was the first time that Republicans realized that if they controlled the Court, they could fix elections.

But on a pretty Saturday in southern New England, let’s turn our attention to a news article that hasn’t gotten much interest. From the issue, we learn that:

“More people died from suicide in the United States last year than any other year on record, dating to at least 1941, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

They quote the Kaiser Family Foundation who measure the suicide deaths per 100,000 of population: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Suicide deaths are increasing fastest among people of color, younger individuals, and people who live in rural areas. Between 2011 and 2021, suicide death rates increased substantially among people of color, with the highest increase among AIAN people [American Indian and Alaska Native people]  (70% increase, from 16.5 to 28.1 per 100,000), followed by Black (58% increase, from 5.5 to 8.7 per 100,000), and Hispanic (39% increase, 5.7 to 7.9 per 100,000) people….The suicide death rate also increased in adolescents (48% increase, from 4.4 to 6.5 per 100,000) and young adults (39% increase, from 13.0 to 18.1 per 100,000) between 2011 and 2021….”

Suicide rates are up by nearly 50% in adolescents over the last decade, while suicides among Black people are up by almost 60%. These aren’t trends, they’re explosive changes. What we’re seeing in the data is our world in chaos.

Wrongo often says that American life has fallen apart over the past 30 years. People struggle to pay their bills; many do that by accumulating debt. For some, that struggle turns them to embrace demagogues, people who scapegoat innocents, or promise to take their rights away, robbing them of  their personhood.

When we see suicide rising particularly among groups who struggle the most for their existence, it says that something has gone terribly wrong with the American model. And in the suicide statistics, there is confirmation that our nearly Darwinian model is what’s wrong. Adolescents and minorities aren’t committing suicide at these rates because they can’t get therapy, but because they feel as if there’s little or no future for them. Sadly, they are told by many pundits and politicians that everything’s fine.

Perhaps this partially explains why Biden seems to be doing so badly in polls of young voters.

As one of the commenters at the issue says:

“It shouldn’t be ‘The pursuit of happiness’ it should be ‘The amelioration of misery’. Being free to pursue happiness when there isn’t enough…left to go around doesn’t do ‘We the people’ any good.”

So, it’s time to forget about Santos, Kissinger and Hamas for a few minutes. Tune in to your Saturday Soother, where we try to get distance from the news for long enough to be able to handle whatever’s coming next.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, we’ve completed our fall clean-up and now it’s on to putting up the deer fencing that protects the bushes around the Mansion. The tree is up and illuminated, and the first members of our family are coming to see it today.

While it’s a beautiful day in the northeast, it makes sense for you to stay indoors for now. Start by brewing up a mug of “The Antidote” coffee ($19.50/12oz.) from Apocalypse Coffee in Melbourne, FL. Now grab a comfy chair by a south facing window and watch and listen to Schubert’s “Serenade”. Written two years before his death, it’s a perfect example of the melancholic music Schubert was so well known for:

 

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Biden’s Birthday

The Daily Escape:

Eastern Bluebird, Cape Cod, MA – November 2023 photo by Ken Grille Photography

“Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.” – Yogi Berra

Biden celebrated his 81st birthday on Monday. Although this isn’t breaking news, as if on cue there were plenty of: “Is Biden Too Old?” faux concern expressed by journalists and pundits across the media landscape. As Wrongo has said before, Biden is visibly old. He looks like many older men who have remained physically fit: They seem thinner with voices that become more gravely with time.

From Paul Campos:

“When Biden was born in 1942, the…life expectancy for American males at birth was 62.6 years. 81 years later, it’s possible to estimate within an extremely high degree of accuracy how long American men born in 1942 will end up living, on average. The answer is 71.1 years, i.e., 14% longer than their…life expectancy at birth.”

Wow! Biden is old! Campos describes the two alternative definitions of life expectancy. First, period life expectancy, which is “life expectancy at birth,” a statistical construct. Period life expectancy isn’t a prediction: it’s a statement of a statistical fact. That fact is, if age adjusted mortality rates were to remain constant over the course of a cohort’s lifetime, it would indicate the average age at which people in that cohort died.

The second is called cohort life expectancy. This is a look back at how long people actually lived. When Biden was born in 1942, the period life expectancy for American males at birth was 62.6 years. This alternative definition of life expectancy how long people actually live, is called cohort life expectancy. That is 71.4 years in Biden’s case.

The gap between period life expectancy and cohort life expectancy was at one point nearly 20%. It turns out that people born in the US in 1900 lived to be on average 56 rather than the expected 47 years. With the massive improvements in medicine and public health over the last 120 years, the difference between period and cohort life expectancy are diminishing.

Period life expectancy isn’t a prediction, and it’s very inaccurate. Nevertheless it is almost always interpreted by the media as a prediction.

If Wrongo had one request for Biden’s handlers it would be to teach him to add more color, more inflection, to his voice. Everyone knows that he will occasionally trip over a word or two when speaking. That problem is as old as the man himself. From the NYT: (brackets by Wrongo)

“While Mr. Biden shuffles when he walks, talks in a low tone that can be hard to hear and sometimes confuses names and details in public…[his staff]…note that he maintains a crushing schedule that would tire a younger president.”

And while it is easy to see that Biden remains in command of situations that would cause younger men to freeze, better projection of his words and ideas would go a long way to blunting the finger-wagging ageists who jump on his every appearance on the world stage.

That said, Wrongo thinks that Americans can hold two competing thoughts at the same time: Biden is older than Trump but is competent and accomplished. While Trump is younger and a menace to America. To Wrongo, it seems that the press is more concerned about Biden having a birthday than about Trump becoming Hitler.

The media who are pushing Biden’s age choose to ignore Trump’s age. He’s 77 and will be 78 if elected, and 82 at the end of his term. He’s not aging well. In his recent campaign appearances, he’s mistaken Biden for Obama 7 times, claimed that Biden will start World War II and said that Jeb Bush started the Iraq War.

These are just the highlights, and there are many more alarming gaffes. Think about what a second Trump term would bring: a dictator-adjacent felon who wants to weaponize the DOJ to take revenge on his former political appointments.

Despite Biden’s many achievements, during one of the toughest periods in our recent history, the media has planted and nurtured the idea that Biden is unfit to be president. Why? Well, because of nothing beyond how Biden seems in videos. After thousands of articles saying Biden’s too old, many in America are willing to dump the president that ended Trump’s reign of error.

Let’s get real: Biden has rung up a fine record as president. CLEARLY, his age and experience have given him the ability to make decisions that less experienced politicians probably would not make. Biden has ably handled foreign crises and had the most productive first three years of any president since LBJ.

All the while, his opponent is rapidly decompensating. This from a man who has proven his inability to put the country first in his thinking. The contrast is stunning, and more obvious than the media seems capable of being honest about.

The sad truth is that neither Party is willing to take the risk of nominating a younger candidate who might underperform what Biden and Trump did in the 2020 presidential election.

In the meantime, happy birthday Joe Biden, who statisticians predict will be approximately one year older than he is today on election day 2024!

It probably won’t be long before we see a headline saying, “If Biden really cared about the environment he wouldn’t put so many candles on his birthday cake.”

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More Chaos

The Daily Escape:

Lenticular clouds over Mt. Adams, WA – October 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

The news is awful and the time to cover it is short. So here’s a few thoughts on the fly:

First, about Lewiston. This is another American tragedy caused by the AR-15. The effort to paint the problem as another mentally-ill person who unfortunately happened to snap has already begun.

And on average, more than one gun per capita is owned by Americans. The Framers couldn’t have conceived of such violence from one gun. Wrongo is fully aware that it is highly unlikely that guns will ever be brought under better control, unless we happen to become the autocracy that many on the Right want us to be.

The Supreme Court’s ideas about originalism and what was meant by a “well-regulated militia” back in the 1770s, made Wrongo take a look at the demographics of the era. In 1790, the US population was around 3.9 million people, excluding Indians and slaves (as they did back then).

And if you try to determine what a rifle owned by one of America’s well-regulated militia cost in the 1770s, you uncover an almost insoluble problem. There was no national currency, each state had its own. Most were expressed in pounds, but each varied in value in relation to the English pound that they were based on.

Despite all of the problems of comparisons, in 1775, a week’s wages for a Massachusetts agricultural laborer were about 3.75 MA pounds. Across the colonies, a long rifle of medium quality cost between 4-7 pounds, so an average worker could acquire a rifle for less than two week’s wages.

That probably meant that like today, there were at least as many guns as men in colonial America.

The well-regulated militia as a deterrent to tyranny made sense until the time of muzzle loaders came to an end. From roughly 1500 – 1850, militias could fight on relatively equal ground with professional soldiers. But once artillery got good enough to chew up massed formations with only a few cannons, the rifle and other small arms became of secondary value in the fight against tyranny because citizen militias could no longer stand up to formal militaries.

Today, small arms play a different role in combat than when the Constitution was written. If the Second Amendment people were serious about wanting to be able to fight off their government they should be arguing to legalize artillery and explosives. They should conduct anti-armored drone drills, weekend artillery practice, and crowd-fund air defense systems.

Think of it as: Today, guns are worthless for fighting tyranny, but they’re perfect for imposing it.

Now, onward to the House of Representatives, and the new Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, (R-LA). We now have an insurrectionist religious fundamentalist conspiracy theorist who’s second in line for the presidency should something happen to Biden. The House GOP caucus just unanimously elected a traitor.

This needs to be on billboards nationwide.

The election of Johnson represents the surrender by the remaining non-MAGA Republicans to the minority MAGA fringe of their Party. It is a debacle for what the GOP used to stand for in America. And given that funding for the government runs out in a few weeks, a fight between what is now a fully-controlled MAGA House and the House Democrats is inevitable.

To say you’re a Republican in America in 2023 but don’t support Trump makes about as much sense as saying you’re a Communist Party member in the USSR in 1950 but don’t support Stalin.

We should expect a very long shutdown.

House Democrats have to make their fights with House Republicans as loud as possible. They need to make public remarks every day, regardless of their impact on private negotiations. Dems need to make sure everyone knows what the demands by Johnson and the MAGA extremists he leads mean to citizens.

We have to expect that Beltway pundits and the editorial boards of the WaPo and the NYT will attempt to push Biden and Democrats to work with the new Speaker. But, that is a lost cause. House Democrats should work in a bipartisan manner with the (slightly) more reasonable Senate and then turn the fight back to the GOP House in a big public event.

Here’s a tweet by Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

Martin sees this as giving a political advantage to Democrats, but the problem he ignores is the chaos. Is it possible that any order can come out of the MAGA chaos? Johnson is still vulnerable to the rule that a single disgruntled Republican House member can initiate the process to oust him, just as Matt Gaetz (R-FL) did with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

If four of the other 220 House Republicans agree, he will lose his job. So a reasonable view is to expect more Republican chaos.

Buckle up, it’s going to be a roller coaster ride from here to next November.

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Sunday Soother – October 22, 2023

The demise of Sunday Cartoon Blogging was greeted without crying by the Wrongologist faithful, but maybe we need a laugh today. Herewith is the best cartoon of the week:

Jordan blew it:

And here is the best photo of art this week: West Bank wall – via Street Art by Banksy:

(This was executed in 2005 by Banksy on the West Bank barrier wall in Abu Dis.)

There’s only a small chance that we’ll get totally soothed after a most tumultuous week. John Dick, CEO of CivicScience reports that: (emphasis and brackets by Wrongo)

“People are glued to the Israel-Hamas war. In our 3 Things to Know this week, we found that 81% of US adults are paying close attention to the crisis in Israel – although [for] younger people, much less so. This high level of attention carries across age and political affiliations, but older adults and Republicans are much more likely to follow it very closely.”

Having both a war in Congress and the war in Gaza so dominate the news makes it hard for people to get sufficient distance to see these events in any real context. But, on this rainy Sunday in Connecticut, let’s give Soothing the old college try.

We had the local arborist come by to get a quote for tree work on the Fields of Wrong. When the cold weather comes, shaping and pruning trees and felling them is easier. We need all three. We’re delaying our fall clean-up for a few more weeks, since we still have many trees with green leaves. It looks like the clean-up will begin during the first week of November, or maybe when Congress is likely to select a new Speaker.

So here at the start of another week that will certainly be filled with momentous news, let’s try deep breathing and some robust coffee to start us off for the week. Let’s brew up a mug of Opus Dark Roast ($19.99/12oz.) from San Jose CA’s Chromatic Coffee. It is said to have notes of dark chocolate and burnt sugar. Yummy!

Now grab a seat by a south-facing window and watch and listen to two different pieces, both of which gesture towards finding peace among combatants. First, from JS Bach’s “B minor Mass, here is “Dona Nobis Pacem” (Latin for “Grant us peace”). It is performed by the English Baroque Soloists & Monteverdi Choir and conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner:

Now for a change of pace, listen to Alicia Keys perform her 2014 song “We Are Here”. It describes Keys’ frustration with both national and international issues, including the conflict at the time between Israel and Gaza. Following the song’s release, Keys launched a movement, called the “We Are Here Movement” calling for a more equal and just world:

Sample lyric:

Let’s talk about Gaza
Let’s talk about, let’s talk about Israel
Cause right now it is real
Let’s talk about, let’s talk Nigeria
And the mass hysteria, yeah
Our souls are brought together
So that we can love each other, brother

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Remembering 9/11

The Daily Escape:

This mass includes parts of five floors of the North Tower of NYC’s World Trade Center that compacted on 9/11/2001 during the building’s collapse. iPhone photo by Wrongo taken at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, September 2016.

The above is among Wrongo’s favorite pieces at the 9/11 Memorial Museum. It is a charred and pitted lump of fused concrete, melted steel, carbonized furniture and other, less recognizable elements. It weighs between 12 and 15 tons and is four feet high. If you ever thought that humans who were in the Twin Towers when they collapsed might have survived, consider this pancake.

The 9/11 Memorial’s email today asked this question:

“Did you know that over 100 million Americans have been born since September 11, 2001?”

Although Wrongo has a grandson who was born later that week and who’s now turning 22, Wrongo had no idea that roughly 30% of Americans have no memory of this event that profoundly shaped America in the past 22 years.

What do those of us who do remember 9/11 want to tell those who can’t remember it? Maybe that there’s too much fear in America, and all of that fear is grinding us down. The visible scars of 9/11 are gone, but more than ever, America lives in persistent fear.

We distrust Russia. We worry about inflation. We worry that our budget deficit will bankrupt us. We fear for our kids’ safety while they’re in school. We worry that if we lose our job we won’t find another one. Some of us worry that we’ll never find the job we’re looking for. Some of us think the rest of us are Communists. The Lefties think the Righties are fascists, and we’re still afraid that ISIS will attack us on our streets. We fear the mob outside our gates trying to get in. We fear the immigrants already inside the gates.We think most of the news we see is fake. Many of us distrust our public school teachers.

Hell, we don’t trust our government!

Succumbing to so much fear has enabled the growth of internal threats that could end our democracy:

  • We’re so angry that we’ve lost much of our social cohesion
  • We aren’t willing to deal with income inequality
  • We’re seeing overt racism grow before our eyes
  • We see clear threats to the right to vote, or whether our votes will even count if we cast them

So today’s wakeup call is for America, particularly for those Americans born after 9/11. Don’t forget the heroes and the victims of 9/11, but please, learn to stop letting fear drive you as much as it drives those of us who are old enough to remember 9/11.

Here’s a 9/11 tune: The October 20, 2001 “Concert for New York” can’t be beat. It was a highly visible and early part of NYC’s healing process.

One of the many highlights of that 4+ hour show was Billy Joel’s medley of “Miami 2017 (seen the lights go out on Broadway)” and his “New York State of Mind”. Joel wrote “Miami 2017” in 1975, at the height of the NYC fiscal crisis. It describes an apocalyptic fantasy of a ruined NY that got a new, emotional second life after 9/11, when he performed it during the Concert for New York: 

Check out the audience reaction to Joel’s songs. That doesn’t look like fear. That’s where we all need to be today in 2023. It isn’t hyperbole to say that the city began its psychological recovery that night in Madison Square Garden. Please visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum if you haven’t been there yet.

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The Economic Value Of College Is Collapsing

The Daily Escape:

Thor’s Hammer, Queen’s Garden Trail, Zion NP, UT – September 2023 photo by Michelle Strong

We all believe that college graduates make, on average, a lot more money than high school graduates. Economists call the gap that exists between the incomes of college graduates and high school graduates the college wage premium.

But, Paul Campos points out that in recent decades the growth in the college wage premium has been largely caused by declining wages for high school graduates, because wages for college graduates have been almost completely stagnant. For example, here is the Congressional Research Service’s (CRS) median hourly wage in 1979 and 2019, (40 years apart) for someone with a Bachelors degree (in 2019 dollars):

1979: $26.42

2019: $28.85

But it’s worse than that: Over the last 20 years of that 40 year period, the median hourly compensation of people with four-year college degrees increased by a total of $0.31, or 31 cents, just over a penny per year.

From Campos:

“The flip side of all this is that wages have declined for people who have gone to college but either not gotten a degree, or not gotten more than a two-year associate’s degree, falling from $22.86 in 1979 to $20.00 in 2019. And the decline has been even sharper for those with high school diplomas or less — thus driving up the “degree premium” for several decades’ worth of college graduates whose own compensation has not actually gone up, even as the cost of their degrees has gone through the roof.”

Here’s a chart from the CRS:

For both high school and no high school diploma categories, wages have fallen in absolute terms. So as college costs have risen, the college wage premium has stayed about the same because wages for the less educated have fallen dramatically.

As the NYT explains, the college wage premium has one important limitation:

“…It can tell you how much college graduates earn, but it doesn’t take into account how much they owe — or how much they spent on college in the first place.”

The NYT explains how a group of economists devised another way to look at the relative value of a college education: The college wealth premium. The wealth premium is the measure of how much more wealth college graduates can expect to accumulate as opposed to those with no more than a high school degree: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Then the researchers looked at the wealth premium, and a different picture emerged. Older white college graduates, those born before 1980, were, as you might expect, a lot wealthier than their white peers who had only a high school degree. On average, they had accumulated two or three times as much wealth as high school grads of the same race and generation. But younger white college graduates — those born in the 1980s — had only a bit more wealth than white high school graduates born in the same decade, and that small advantage was projected to remain small throughout their lives.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“When the researchers looked at young Americans who had gone on to get a postgraduate degree, the situation was even more dire. ‘Among families whose head is of any race or ethnicity born in the 1980s and holding a postgraduate degree, the wealth premium is … indistinguishable from zero,’ the authors concluded. ‘Our results suggest that college and postgraduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment.’”

This means that Millennials with college degrees are earning a good bit more than those without, but they aren’t accumulating any more wealth. We all know why:

“The likely culprit…was cost: the rising expense of college and the student debt that often goes along with it. Carrying debt obviously diminishes your net worth through simple subtraction, but it can also prevent you from taking important wealth-generating steps as a young adult, like buying a house or starting a small business.”

Since 1992, the sticker price has almost doubled for four-year private colleges and more than doubled for four-year public colleges, even after adjusting for inflation. Over the last 15 years, more young Americans have borrowed to cover those rising costs. From the NYT:

“In 2007, total student debt stood at $500 billion. Today it is $1.6 trillion….Among student borrowers who opened their loans between 2010 and 2019, more than half now owe more than what they originally borrowed.”

When you factor debt into the equation, the financial benefit of a college education begins to look very different. The NYT reports on Douglas Webber of the Federal Reserve, who found that the premium now varies much more than it used to:

“The “downside risk” to enrolling in college, he argues, has become “nontrivial.”

When you look at Webber’s data, higher education is a financial gamble that can still sometimes produce a big windfall, but it can also bring financial disaster:

“If your tuition is free and you can be absolutely certain that you’re going to graduate within six years, then you enter college with a 96% chance that your gamble is going to pay off, meaning that your lifetime earnings will be greater than those of a typical high school graduate.”

But going to college isn’t free. If you’re paying $25,000 a year in tuition and expenses, Webber calculates that your chance of coming out ahead drops to about 66%. At $50,000 a year in college costs, your odds are no better than a coin flip: Maybe you’ll wind up with more than the typical high school grad, but you’re just as likely to wind up with less.

Americans can count, so they are aware that college education has become a financial gamble. They understand that going into high five-figures of debt (that doesn’t go away in bankruptcy) in order to earn a 5-figure salary doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In 2009, 70% of that year’s high school graduates went to college. In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million US undergraduates. It’s been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021. The percentage going straight to college is now 62%.

This tracks polling. In 2019, the percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41% from 74%. About one-third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among Gen Z, 45% say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

But, education is an essential pillar of our democracy. The rejection of higher education by so many should be extremely concerning for the future of our nation. You should read the NYT article. Here are Wrongo’s conclusions:

  • Colleges and universities are pricing themselves out of the market. Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered.
  • Turning higher education into a revenue-maximizing enterprise for the benefit of these institutions is a social disaster.
  • Higher education’s leadership has zero accountability for their role in making a college education so expensive.
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Labor Day Thoughts

The Daily Escape:

Hatch Chili festival, Hatch, NM – September 2023 photo by Eddie Gomez

“If we weren’t all crazy, we’d all…go…insane…” – RIP Jimmy Buffett

Wrongo was sad to learn that singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett died on Labor Day weekend. Wrongo isn’t a Parrothead, yet like most people, he will sing along whenever “Come Monday”, “Margaritaville”, or “Son of a Son of a Sailor” pops up on the car radio.

Labor Day kind of means the end of summer, and back to school for kids and their parents. Having Monday off is great. But what exactly are we celebrating? One answer is that knowledge workers have won the tug-of-war over work from home (WFH).

The NYT’s Sunday Business section has an article “All That Empty Office Space Belongs to Someone”. They ask the question: “What happens if the nearly 100 million square feet of workplace real estate stays empty”? They’re only talking about NYC real estate. The article quotes a real estate executive Eric Gural, whose family company, GFP Real Estate, owns and manages more than 55 properties and 13 million square feet, or about 2% of the city’s office real estate, about what happens next:

“Rents will be lower. Occupancy will be lower. We won’t be as profitable. The worst part about that is that it might affect some of the philanthropy we do.”

That’s kinda tone deaf. Why would a worker want to rush back to the office so Gural’s family can keep up with their philanthropy?

Among Wrongo’s six kids, most spend at least a few days in the office each week. Some are in the office every day. The problem generally isn’t that everyone hates the office. Mostly they hate how office work has changed during the past 20 years: Open floor plans, with people squeezed together into pods.

Then there’s the commute. Few office workers can afford to live in NYC or even a subway ride away. The average one-way commute in New York takes 40.8 minutes. That’s far longer than the US average of 26.4 minutes. That average time means that many, many commuters to NYC are in a car, train or bus for much longer than 41 minutes each way.

This means that people had a major lifestyle change when they started to WFH. No more getting up with the birds to sit on a train for an hour or more, and then stand on a 90° subway platform BEFORE they even get to their desk!

WFH also was family positive since most kids had remote schooling, which the WFH parents could supervise. At the same time, childcare also cratered. So the pinch on parents to be in attendance 24/7 for their young kids was clearly helped by WFH.

Nothing will solve the commute problems for those who live outside of Manhattan, not even giving everyone a private office. Maybe if companies offered to pay for commuting costs and childcare, people would come back. How about it, corporate America?

Another big labor issue is how long it has taken for women to return to the workforce. In the years leading up to the pandemic, women’s labor force participation rates were rising faster than that of men. Several factors were driving it, in particular the female-dominated industries, such as health care and caregiving were among the fastest-growing industries. Also, women’s educational attainment has risen substantially.

That ended during the pandemic. But CNN has reported that the labor force participation rate for women in their prime working age hit an all-time high in June of 77.8%. Prime working age is defined as 25-54. It was the third consecutive month that women between the ages of 25 and 54 have set a record high for labor force participation.

Women are doing much better in the labor market, and clearly, the pandemic’s “she-cession” is over. Yet, barriers remain: Notably, they’re still making far less than men. In 2022, women in the US earned about 82 cents for every dollar a man earned, according to a Pew Research Center report released in March. That’s a big leap from the 65 cents that women earned in 1982. But it’s barely moved from the 80 cents they were earning in 2002, and certainly hasn’t kept up with inflation.

The WFH movement helped women as well: Home-based work allowed for more flexibility in hours, and that helped improve access to childcare with schedules that allowed for easier drop-offs and pick-ups.

We should remember what else Labor Day is about. If you enjoy not having to work weekends, or having a 40-hour work week, or having sick days and paid time off, you can thank labor leaders. Thousands of Americans have marched, protested and participated in strikes in order to create fairer, more equitable labor laws and workplaces — and many are still doing that today.

So have a cookout. Go to the big box stores and spend because it helps the economy.

Here’s your Monday Wake Up Call, America! The challenge during the next year is whether the currently hot jobs market will cool off sooner than inflation. It seems likely that the Fed will be able to cool inflation without plunging the economy into a recession. If so, the jobs market will continue to offer average Americans a shot at a better life.

To help you wake up, let’s celebrate Jimmy Buffett’s life. From the Rolling Stone in 2018:

“WHILE PRESIDENT TRUMP took shots at Democrats in conservative Pensacola, Florida on Saturday, Jimmy Buffett hurled musical insults at Republicans in West Palm Beach during a Democratic campaign rally for US Sen. Bill Nelson and gubernatorial candidate and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum.

While singing his hit ‘Come Monday’ at the ‘Get Out the Vote’ rally, Buffett tweaked its lyrics to make a dig at Trump changing ‘Come Monday’ to ‘Come Tuesday, things will change. Come Tuesday, we’re making a change. It’s been two insane years and it’s time to switch gears.’”

Buffett long supported Democrats. So have a margarita, and toast ol’ Jimmy. Here’s his laid-back cover of CSN&Y’s “Southern Cross”, performed live at the Newport Folk Festival in 2018:

Note the Parrothead regalia in the audience. Anyone else think he looks like Biden?

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The Coming $73 Trillion Wealth Transfer

The Daily Escape:

We’ve been on Cape Cod for a few days visiting daughter Kelly. Here’s a sunset photo taken this week at Campground beach, Cape Cod, MA – August 2023 iPhone photo by Wrongo. Smoke from Canadian wildfires made the sunset colors more vibrant.

Welcome to our Saturday Soother! But first, let’s talk about the coming generational transfer of wealth that’s underway as the wealthiest generation (the boomers) retire. According to Ben Carlson, 10,000 baby boomers will be retiring every day between now and the end of this decade.

The first boomers were born in 1946, meaning they’re 77 and on the fast track to 80 years old. Fortune Magazine pegs the wealth transfer from boomers to their kids at $73 trillion (with another $12 trillion going to charity). That means the boomers have $85 trillion in personal wealth!

That sounds great, since so many in our younger generations really could use a little help right now. But fewer people than you might expect will actually receive a sizable inheritance. This is due to the fact that the top 10% of America’s wealthy own something like 90% of the stock market. The concentration of today’s wealth will lead to fewer people benefiting from the generational handoff.

Here’s a chart from the NYT:

According to the NYT, ultra-high net worth households — people with $5 million to $20 million in liquid net worth — make up 1.5% of the population but will constitute 42% of the money that gets passed down in the years ahead. Many of them are boomers. From the NYT:

“A key reason there are such large soon-to-be-inherited sums is the uneven way boomers superbly benefited from price growth in the financial and housing markets. The average price of a US house has risen about 500% since 1983, when most baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s, prime years for household formation.

As US corporations have grown into global behemoths, those deeply invested in the stock market have found even bigger returns: The stock market, as measured by the benchmark S&P 500 index, is up by more than 2,800% since the beginning of 1983…”

Those rates of growth in financial and real estate assets will probably never be seen again. We’re passing a slow growth economy on to the next generations, while their own salaries and savings are having trouble keeping up with inflation.

Some worry that retiring baby boomers will crash the stock market by spending down their portfolios in retirement, leaving nothing to inherit. While it could happen, it’s unlikely that it will. The inequality of stock ownership means few people in the top 10% will never come close to spending all of their wealth in retirement.

So the wealth transfer will be more of a stream than a tsunami. Given the longevity of the wealthy, the money is going to be passed down slowly over time. A married couple that is retiring today has a 50% chance of at least one spouse living into their 90s.

Wrongo sees more and more people in the younger generations talking about how much they need help from their parents right now rather than decades down the road. The challenge is that parents need to be sure that if they make early transfers of wealth, that they keep enough on hand to maintain themselves securely in their advancing old age.

This can only be done by families having honest discussions around very awkward subjects. Talking about it can be helpful. It may be possible to work something out where some of the inheritance is parsed out slowly so the parents can enjoy seeing the kids (or grandkids) use some of the money while they’re still here.

Enough! It’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we ignore the also-ran candidate show that the Republicans put on in Wisconsin, and where we also ignore the perp walk in Atlanta. Instead, let’s focus on clearing our heads for next week’s outrages.

To help clear your head, grab a comfy chair by a window, and pour a mug of cold brew over ice. Now, watch and listen to Beethoven’s “Septet, op. 20”. It had its first performance in 1800 and was one of Beethoven’s most popular works during his lifetime, much to the composer’s dismay! He ultimately wished he had never written the piece.

Today we listen to the first movement, “Adagio – Allegro con brio” played in 2014 by the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne, Germany. The WDR is a German radio orchestra:

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