Skip to main content

Policies Do Have Consequences

 As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the unemployment rate in April nationwide was 6.1%, but this obscures giant variations in the states. 

With some exceptions, those run by Democrats such as California (8.3%) and New York (8.2%) continued to suffer significantly higher unemployment than those led by Republicans such as South Dakota (2.8%) and Montana (3.7%). 

It’s rare to see differences that are so stark based on party control in states. But the current partisan differences reflect different policy choices over the length and severity of pandemic lockdowns and now government benefits such as jobless insurance. Nine of the 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates are led by Republicans. The exception is Wisconsin whose Supreme Court last May invalidated Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s lockdown...

Most states in the Midwest, South and Mountain West aren’t far off their pre-pandemic employment peaks. One obstacle to a faster recovery may be the $300 federal unemployment bonus, which many GOP governors are rejecting. Meantime, states with Democratic governments continue to reward workers for sitting on the couch. The longer that workers stay unemployed, the harder it will be to get them to return to work.

Subsidized unemployment indicates economic illiteracy. 

One of the worst parts of Biden's waste-filled stimulus plan is that it gave a big bailout for states, based on a formula that actually rewarded them for having bad numbers.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

California: A Model for the Rest of the Country, Part 2

Part 1 here . On Leaving the Golden State Guest Post by NicklethroweR . Posted on the Burning Platform. The fabled Ventura Highway is all that separates my artist loft from the beach where surfing first came to the United States. Both my balcony and front patio face the freeway at about eye level and I could easily smack a tennis ball right on to the ever busy 101. Access to the beach and boardwalk is very important to a Tourist Town such as mine and I can see one underpass from my balcony and another underpass from the patio. Further up the street are two pedestrian bridges. Both have been recently remodeled so that people can not use it to kill themselves by leaping down into traffic. The traffic, just like the spice, must flow and the elites that live here do not like to be inconvenienced as they dart about between Malibu and Santa Barbara. Another feature of living where I live would have to be the homeless, the insane and the drug addicts that wander this particular...

Factfulness: Ignorance about global trends. The world is actually getting better.

This newsletter was powered by  Thinkr , a smart reading app for the busy-but-curious. For full access to hundreds of titles — including audio — go premium and download the app today. From the layman to the elite, there is widespread ignorance about global trends. Author and international health professor, Hans Rosling, calls Factfulness  “his very last battle in [his] lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance.” After years of trying to convince the world that all development indicators point to vast improvements on a global scale, Rosling digs deeper to explore why people systematically have a negative view of where humanity is heading. He identifies a number of deeply human tendencies that predispose us to believe the worst. For every instinct that he names, he offers some rules of thumb for replacing this overdramatic worldview with a “factful” one. In 2017, 20,000 people across fourteen countries were given a multiple-choice quiz to assess basic global literac...

Top Five Consumer Cyber Security FAQs

Business, technology, environmental and economic changes are a part of life, and they are coming faster all the time. All of these changes and advancements can be distracting and make us more vulnerable to cyber scams. That's why protecting your credit is a critical part of protecting yourself from cyber security threats. Security researchers have reported that hackers and scammers are using any opportunity or vulnerability to target both individuals and companies. You may have already seen these attempts in the form of fake emails or calls. Here are the top five questions Equifax ®  has received about how individuals can protect themselves from cyber security threats and help to improve your credit protection. 1. How can I better protect my credit? Check your credit reports frequently. You can get free credit reports from the nationwide credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian ®  and TransUnion ® ) at annualcreditreport.com. Check your credit reports frequently to closely...