Category Archives: News commentary

“Limited government” is one of the key goals of the Cato Institute and libertarians in general. Research shows that “small governments . . . report better economic performance than big governments.” But it is one thing to compare two governments side by side. It is quite another thing to actually reduce the size of government.

Recent events suggest that shrinking government may be impossible. A slight majority of voters in Britain agreed to leave the European Union motivated, at least in part, by the idea that big-government bureaucrats in Brussels shouldn’t dictate policy to people in the United Kingdom. Yet actually carrying out an exit is proving to be far more difficult than imagined.

Similarly, Donald Trump campaigned for president on a promise that he would “drain the swamp,” which the Antiplanner interprets to mean reduce the size of the federal government. Many Republican members of Congress also claim to support smaller government. Yet, under a Republican Congress, deficits and debt are increasing. Meanwhile, Trump’s solution to many problems is to throw money at them. Continue reading →

As most Antiplanner readers probably know, Congress last week decided to test whether the nation with the world’s dominant currency can borrow another trillion dollars or so without risking its economy. Before passage of the bill, the national debt was $21 trillion, and the bill will add at least $800 billion to that and probably more.

The good news is that the 2018 spending bill contains very few earmarks. The bad news is that it calls for so much spending that it didn’t really need any. For example, although it never names the Gateway project — Northeast Corridor improvements including new tunnels under the Hudson River which the Trump administration doesn’t want to fund — the bill includes more than $500 million that will probably go for that project.

Specifically, the bill spends $650 million on the Northeast Corridor, which is $292 million more than was authorized by previous Congressional law. Amtrak itself received $50 million more than was authorized. This includes $35.5 million to start service on new routes, such as New Orleans-Jacksonville, a route that stopped running when Hurricane Katrina hit much of its infrastructure. Continue reading →

Business Insider is stunned by the notion that Silicon Valley residents who earn $400,000 a year consider themselves middle class. Yet they are; the only reason Business Insider doesn’t think so is that neither it nor Palo Alto Online — the source of Business Insider‘s data — understands the difference between class and income.

According to the Pew Research Center, “middle class” includes families of four that earn $48,000 and $144,000. But that’s not middle class; that’s middle income. While classes and incomes can be correlated, they are not the same. Social classes include upper, middle, and lower, but most of lower being working class.

The working class includes people who earn incomes through manual labor and who generally do not have college degrees. But some of them may earn a lot of money, such as the Long Island Railroad conductor who earned $239,000 in 2009. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner was surfing the web on Saturday and happened to learn that Tom Rapp died last week of cancer. That may not mean anything to you and he didn’t have anything to do with the Antiplanner’s usual issues, but his music had a big influence on me.

“If you cannot be universal,” Rapp said about this thought-provoking song, “you should at least be ambiguous,” a statement that applies to a lot of his work.

Growing up in Portland, I often listened to a radio station called KVAN, which from 1967 to 1979 focused on “progressive rock.” Its owner was Catholic and the station also played a mass every evening, but she apparently didn’t care what its disk jockeys did the rest of the day. So they often played full albums of then-unknown artists such as Pink Floyd (I first heard A Saucerful of Secrets on KVAN), Jethro Tull, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. In 1969, I was fortunate to be listening when they played the full album of These Things Too by Pearls Before Swine. Most of the songs on the album were written by the group’s lead singer, Tom Rapp. Continue reading →

Five years ago, on the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, the Antiplanner noted that blacks had made a lot of political progress since then, but hadn’t made much economic progress. For example, black per capita incomes as a percent of white incomes had grown from 55 percent in 1963 to 58 percent in 2011, the last year for which data were available at the time I was writing. (According to tables B19301B and B19301H of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the actual percentage in 2011 was 56 percent.)

There have been some improvements in the last five years, but they are small. Black per capita incomes in 2016 — the last year for which numbers are available now and five years after the 2011 data I cited in 2013 — are 2 percent greater, as a share of of non-Hispanic white incomes (58 percent in 2016), than they were in 2011. According to tables B19013B and B19013H, black household incomes have grown from 60 percent to 61 percent of non-Hispanic white incomes. (The ratio is a little higher because black households have more people.)

Black wealth took a big hit in the Great Recession. Unlike incomes, this doesn’t appear to have improved since 2011. Continue reading →

This week, Oregon voters are receiving their mail-in ballots for a special election whose purpose is to see just how stupid Oregon voters really are. The election is on a ballot measure whose supposed goal is to make health insurance more affordable. To reach this goal, the measure calls for taxing health insurance.

This is right in line with the policy, popular in Portland, of making housing more affordable by taxing housing. Let’s see how well that’s working. Oh, my; it doesn’t seem to be working at all.
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I don’t want to influence any voters here with my use of the word “stupid.” Maybe you want to make health insurance more expensive by taxing it. But if you want to make it more affordable, Oregon’s ballot measure is the wrong way to go.