Category Archives: News commentary

Large numbers of Americans migrated away from heavily urbanized states last year, but the nation’s overall population grew by only 0.1 percent, according to data released by the Census Bureau early this week. Not only was this was the lowest rate of population growth in the nation’s history, “17 states and the District of Columbia lost population,” said the bureau.

Some of those population losses were quite large. According to this Census Bureau table, between July 1, 2020 and July 1, 2021, New York lost more than 319,000 people, or 1.6 percent of its residents. California lost nearly 262,000 people, or 0.7 percent of its residents. DC’s population dropped by 2.9 percent; Illinois’ by 0.9 percent; and Hawaii’s by 0.7 percent. Other states that lost population included Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

The fastest-growing states were Idaho (2.9%), Utah (1.7%), Montana (1.7%), Arizona (1.4%), and South Carolina (1.2%). Numerically, the fastest-growing states were Texas (+310,000 residents), Florida (211,000), Arizona (98,000), North Carolina (94,000), and Georgia (74,000). (All these numbers are rounded off as they are only estimates.) Continue reading →

The Department of Transportation’s twitter page recently posted a tweet showing a hypothetical zoomer promoting the Build Back Better Act. “The new infrastructure law is going to make getting from place to place so much better over the next decade and when combined with the Build Back Better Act it will create millions of new jobs,” says the zoomer.

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— TransportationGov (@USDOT) November 26, 2021

I’m not sure if there is a federal law forbidding an agency from lobbying the public in favor of a non-partisan bill, but it is generally frowned on. Legal or not, many if not most of the responses from people in the twitter universe were negative. Continue reading →

“Inflation is good for you!” proclaims a headline from the Intecept. “Inflation is bad for the 1 percent but helps out almost everyone else,” the article claims.

Inflation in Germany in the early 1920s led to this basket of groceries costing a million marks. Before World War I, one dollar would buy 4 to 5 marks, but by the end of 1923, a dollar was worth more than 5 billion marks.

Inflation “may be a good sign,” agrees New York Times business writer Jeanna Smialek. “Don’t panic” about inflation, says economist Paul Krugman. Continue reading →

Since I share my home with a couple of dogs, I tend to wear out a pair of shoes each year. I usually notice I need new shoes in the rainy season (which is most of the year in Oregon) when I come home with wet feet. But, according to Allison Schrager of the Manhattan Institute, I should just suck it up and learn to live with less.

Apparently, it’s a bad thing that Americans can buy “whatever they want whenever they want.” Schrager finds it alarming that 40 percent of American households have three or more televisions, “including 30 percent of households earning less than $40,000 a year!” Similarly worrisome, to her, is that 30 percent of Americans have 2 or more refrigerators. Just think of how horrifying it must have been for her to discover that some low-income people probably have both three televisions and two refrigerators!

The Manhattan Institute claims to be a “free-market think tank” that supports “greater economic choice.” But you wouldn’t know it to read Schrager’s article, which states that we need to live more like Europeans, meaning consuming less and living with lower economic growth. This is because, she claims, “An economy based on consumption is not sustainable.” Continue reading →

More than 18 percent of office space in New York City is vacant, the highest rate in more than 30 years, according to a report just released by the state comptroller. Rents are down 4 percent and total employment in the city has dropped by 11 percent, almost four times as much as after the 2008 financial crisis.

More than 10 percent of all office space in the nation is shown in this photo, and much of it may remain vacant after the pandemic ends. Photo by Harold Hoyer.

One indicator of the reduction in office use, the report notes, is swipe rates: the number of times that employees access buildings. According to Kastle Systems, a company that manages access systems in many New York City office buildings, swipe rates declined by more than 95 percent in April 2020. Since then, they have recovered to less than 30 percent of pre-pandemic rates. This suggests that a lot of office space that is still under lease may be vacated when leases expire. Continue reading →

It cannot have escaped everyone’s notice that 17 Republican senators had agreed to support the infrastructure bill that the senate passed yesterday — enough to prevent a filibuster. A former senate staffer once told me that the fix was always in for senate votes: the leadership would decide what to do and then twist enough arms to make it happen.

So what was in it for the Republican leadership to support this bill? The bill included billions of dollars for projects we don’t need, like rural broadband, urban transit, and new Amtrak trains. Some Republicans may benefit from the pork, but I wonder if the leadership thought that going along with this bill will help them to fend off the $3.5 trillion bill the Democrats want to pass next.

That bill includes money for clean energy, preschool, and affordable housing, among other things. As with the infrastructure bill, these things are arguably not necessary or, to the extent they are, the top-down approach taken by the bill will do more harm than good. For example, we know the reason housing is unaffordable in many states is because state and local land-use rules of restricted the supply of land for new housing, but the bill will do nothing about those rules. Continue reading →