The Links:
A house is not a credit card. Reinflating the bubble one bad loan at a time. This part is also important to remember:
One of the most abjectly false narratives about the financial crisis is that risky mortgages proliferated so that people who couldn’t afford homes could nonetheless buy them. Modern subprime lending was not about homeownership. Instead, the 1990s crop of subprime mortgage makers allowed people with bad credit to borrow against the equity in their existing homes. According to a joint HUD-Treasury report published in 2000, by 1999, a staggering 82 percent of subprime mortgages were refinancings, and in nearly 60 percent of those cases, the borrower pulled out cash, adding to his debt burden. The report noted that “relatively few subprime mortgages are used to purchase a house.”Which is good because the Robo-Signers are back! Remember kids, when you create a moral hazard you incentivize the kinds of behavior you ought to be preventing.
So, not only is SCOTUS going to blow up Obama care, but now there's a huge perception problem due to Jonathan Gruber, "architect" or the plan. Tyler Cowen adds "It’s a healthy world where academics can speak their minds at conferences and the like without their words becoming political weapons in a bigger fight." Arnold Kling comments here.
Interesting policy proposals for Social Security which don't involve cutting benefits, raising the eligibility age, or privatizing the system.
A closer look at employment and social insurance.
The paper has two main findings. First, the insurance value of Medicaid is substantial, and decreasing the size of the program would entail large welfare costs in excess of one dollar for every dollar of reduced spending. Second, expanding the size of the program would offer significant insurance value only to wealthy households. The authors conclude that in terms of managing the risks of the elderly, the current scope of Medicaid seems appropriate.How can those Scandinavians tax so much? They mush hate freedom and happiness. Okay in all seriousness I though this was the important piece:
these countries also spend relatively large amounts on the public provision and subsidization of goods that are complementary to working, including child care, elderly care, and transportation. Such policies represent subsidies to the costs of market work, which encourage labor supply and make taxes less distortionary…Furthermore, Scandinavian countries spend heavily on education, which is complementary to long-run labor supply and potentially offsets some of the distortionary effects of taxationMeanwhile in the real threat to freedom land, DC police plan on revenue from Civil Asset Forfeiture years in advance. They even put it into their budget forecasts. Wonderful! Evidence that there's basically a quota and cops seize assets purely to fund their departments. Roving brigands!
Uber doesn't need lobbyists, they just get politicians and their staffs to use the service. Crony capitalism for all!
There is privilege and there is privilege and then there's this from George W. Bush:
No, I think you have to earn your way into politics. I don’t think that anything is ever given to you.You know who makes the 1% look poor? The 0.01%.
The coup at UNC. Many colleges were using funds form their general tuition to increase the amount of financial aid given to low income students (and athletes who don't attend classes). UNC has now put a 15% cap on that amount. The article goes on to discuss the idea of middle class buy-in as essential for progressive agendas to succeed.
Post-mortem on Corinthian Colleges.
We haven't focused much research on the "non-cognitive" skills gaps in low income homes.
While researchers have documented an income-based divergence in the amount of time parents spend with their child, they did not measure the quality of how that time was spent. We do know that economically advantaged parents are able to offer different home environments compared to their lower-income counterparts by committing more quality time and resources to their child’s development. As Kalil explains in her project description, these differences may “play a role in producing growing gaps in cognitive and non-cognitive skills, producing a feedback cycle that leads to low socioeconomic mobility and further growing inequality.”How we tried to prevent incidents at hacker camp and failed.
Over the last summer, I volunteered with the safer spaces team of a European hacker camp, trying to prevent and deal with any incidents that could arise from putting approximately 1000 mostly white, mostly men in a field.Life imitates Wag the Dog.
1 in 5 Americans are a grammar nazi.
"LaShamanda has a heterozygous big bootie, the dominant trait. Her man Fontavius has a small bootie which is recessive. They get married and have a baby named LaPrincess," the biology assignment prompts students.
Dr. Oz's twitter train wreck. There's no place like the internet.
Smartphone use is causing parents to pay less attention to their children which is in turn causing more injuries among children. Another spurious correlation nominee?
The Onion and A.V. Club may be preparing to go up for sale. Well, it's been a great ride.
Umbrellas are boring, what if you used a laser to vaporize incoming rain droplets?
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