The Obama administration is on the verge of compelling most of the largest corporations and universities, as well as many smaller businesses, to adopt a 7% hiring quota for disabled job applicants—lest they be debarred from doing business with the federal government. This radical personnel policy could raise costs and slash the productivity of almost 200,000 companies with U.S. government contracts.
James Bovard article in the WSJ.
The central finding is this: people who win large amounts are just as likely to end up bankrupt as people who win small amounts. People who win a large amount, $50,000 to $150,000, have a lower bankruptcy rate immediately after winning but a higher bankruptcy rate a few years later so the 5-year bankruptcy rate for the big winners is no lower than for the small winners. Amazingly, by the time the big winners do go bankrupt their assets and debts are not significantly different from those of the small winners.
More from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution
Source: Census Bureau
The chart shows the percent of households receiving a benefit in each of the education categories. For example:
Over a third of households with heads whose formal education was limited to a high school diploma — the most common type of household — received at least one of these types of assistance in 2010. A majority of households with heads who stopped their schooling before graduating from high school received government assistance in 2010.
Total assistance was about $600 billion in 2010 and it went to almost one half the population.
Source: University of Chicago professor Casey Mulligan at The New York Times’ Economix blog.
When CKE’s health care advisers, citing Obamacare’s complexities, opacities and uncertainties, said it would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million health care costs in 2010, [Carl] Puzder said: I need a number I can plan with. They guessed $18 million — twice what CKE spent last year building new restaurants. Obamacare means fewer restaurants. And therefore fewer jobs… Rising health care costs are, he says, just one uncertainty inhibiting expansion. Others are government policies raising fuel costs, which infect everything from air conditioning to the cost (including deliveries) of supplies, and the threat that the National Labor Relations Board will use regulations to impose something like “card check” in place of secret-ballot unionization elections.
[Its current forecast is] chilling: as bad as the economy has been, it’s about to get worse. … ‘If the United States isn’t already in a recession now it’s about to enter one,’ says Lakshman Achuthan, … chief operations officer … ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if [the unemployment rate] goes back up into double digits’ … Achuthan … says … gross domestic product rate is likely to go negative by the first quarter of 2012.”
Back in the 1960s the major form of poverty alleviation was cash welfare… this is included in the incomes of those who are defined as poor. The poverty numbers from the 1960s are therefore the number of people who are still poor after we’ve helped them.
Since then … we’ve had a bipartisan move to stop just giving money to poor people and start giving them what we think they need. We give help with housing vouchers known as Section 8 vouchers… Food Stamps existed before but the program has been greatly extended. Medicaid, that free health care, is not included in household income either.
The EITC is the country’s largest poverty alleviation program and we don’t count its effect in reducing poverty at all.
Because, just as in the 1960s, we count peoples’ market and direct cash grant incomes when we place them below or above the poverty line. But we’ve moved our major methods of poverty alleviation from that direct cash assistance to those goods and services in kind plus aid through the tax system, all things which we don’t count when we place people above or below the poverty line.
A lot of new outlets carried Mark Zandi’s prediction:
“The president’s plan would provide a meaningful boost to the economy and job market in 2012,” Zandi concluded. “I expect the plan to add 2 percentage points to real GDP growth and 1.9 million payroll jobs, and reduce unemployment by a percentage point.”
I entered these numbers into a spreadsheet along with the cost of each program (based on WSJ) of $175b, $70b, and $140b respectively. You can then calculate how much it costs (in lost revenue or greater expenditures) to create a job. The numbers are sobering: $233k per job for the payroll tax cuts and $350k per job for the infrastructure spending. And these jobs would only be around for the duration of the new stimulus package!
HT: Arnold Kling
From Sarah Kliff, writing at Ezra Klein’s blog:
With little notice or fanfare, today marks the end of federal subsidies for COBRA health insurance, the program that allows recently laid off workers to stay on their former employers’ health insurance. Traditionally, workers pay the entire premium, but as part of the stimulus package, Congress created a 65 percent COBRA subsidy, which was then extended repeatedly to stretch through the end of this month. That brings down the average family’s monthly premium from $1,137 to $398, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
So, did the subsidy work?
The results from four studies range from it worked a lot to it worked a decent amount to it worked a little to it didn’t work.
