The Wages of Progressive Elitist Political Sins in California

Progressive elitist political sins have very real consequences.  It is often said that California leads the nation in trends such as progressive elitism.  It is certainly the intent of many of the major Internet media companies based in California, such as Google and Facebook, to lead America into a socialist future.  The California Budget and Policy Center has compiled the data on low wage, mid wage, and high wage workers in California for the last 40 years.  The eye-opening inflation-adjusted, real wages are plotted below:

Apparently, progressive elitist policies only work for elitists and only hurt those the elitists claim they are trying to help.  Over 40 years, low wage workers in California were mostly worse off than they were in 1979 and only the recent expansion of the economy has managed to bring them to a very slight improvement over 1979 of 4%.  Mid wage earners have been very nearly flat in earnings per hour over this entire 40 year period.  The upper 10% of wage earners have done comparatively OK under California progressivism with a 43% real increase, though even this is only a 1.075% increase per year.

In comparison, the national real median personal income is:

Nationwide, real median personal income went up by 39% from 1979 to 2016 and it went up further in 2017.  This median national real income is not on a per hour basis, as is the data above on California workers.  However, in 1980 the average worker worked 38.1 hours a week and now the average worker works 34.4 hours/week, so one could multiply the gains in the national median income by about 1.1 for a comparison with the CA data above, though I am not doing that in the subsequent numbers I discuss.  If the national median personal income data excluded the population of California, whose population is about 12% that of the entire U.S., the increase would have been greater.  In fact, with some simple algebra one calculates that the median non-California worker's real income increased by about 44%, which means that outside of California, median income workers did as well as the top 10% of California workers did over the 40 years since 1979.  And that despite the fact that real incomes in many other states have also been held hostage to the sins of progressive elitist politics.

The wages of California progressive political sins are even worse than is suggested by this data.  The inflation adjustment on California worker wages is a national inflation rate, not a California cost of living adjustment.  California progressive politics has caused housing costs to soar.  Their regulatory state has caused costs on many businesses to soar as well and these costs have to be passed on to the people living in California.  State taxes are high.  The cost of living in California is about 13.4% above the national average, or about 15.2% above the national cost of living excluding California.

The California practice of suppressing individual rights has bad consequences for more than one's economic well-being, but the economics of it are bad enough.  Once again, I will remind my readers that economic growth rates are like interest rates, as they go up they have a most remarkable compounding effect on the size of the economy.  A rapidly growing economy makes a very much bigger pie to benefit everyone over a 40 year period, which is the time that most Americans have to look forward to before they die.  Many of us have even longer time-horizons for our concerns, since we have children and grandchildren we love and want to see flourish in freedom, prosperity, and security.

My youngest granddaughter just celebrated her first birthday.  If the national economy grows at a rate of 3% a year for the next 90 years, it will be 14.3 times as big as it is today.  Such growth rates are very achievable, if our governments do not excessively interfere with the private sector.  A 2% growth rate for 90 years yields an economy only 5.9 times its present size.  I expect the 14.3 times larger economy will have much more to offer my granddaughter as her life comes to a close than will an economy 5.9 times larger.  It might even offer her many more years of enjoyable life.  Of course, a real Progressive Elitist government outcome could be a negative growth rate or a 1% growth rate, where the latter economy in 90 years would be only 2.4 times the size of the present economy.

The Economist Provides the Solution to Clean Energy's Dirty Secret

The 25 February - 3 March 2017 issue of the Economist has a cover story entitled "Clean energy's dirty secret."  There is a lead off editorial to the issue that states that "the renewables revolution is wrecking the world's electricity markets."  This is because clean energy generation by wind and solar is erratic and requires expensive standby generation capacity from fossil fuels.

The solution, at least in large part, that the Economist suggests is to use meter technology, batteries, and frequent updates on the rapidly fluctuating cost of energy as wind and solar output fluctuates from near zero to some part of their maximum electric power output to force the demand for electricity to fluctuate as rapidly as does its generation by erratic and unreliable wind and solar power generators.

So the rich can ignore the hourly changes in the cost of their electricity, while those less well-off watch the meter informing them of the rapid changes in the cost of electricity to figure out whether they can afford to cook dinner, watch television, use their computer, use a power tool, vacuum, or use their air conditioner.  So, not only are most people to pay more for their energy use due to the phantom of hysterical catastrophic man-made global warming, but many are to be forced to watch the electricity cost meter extremely diligently and to tailor their lives to its whimsical machinations.

Or we could just use our plentiful fossil fuels that also feed our plants with the carbon dioxide they require and make them very much more healthy.  And we can do this with absolutely negligible effects on the temperature on the surface of the Earth.  That sure would give us a better lifestyle and leave us with money and time to create important improvements in human security and happiness. This is much more sensible than having to tell Johnny that he has to stop reading or doing his homework now and turn the lights off because the wind generators cannot move due to too little or too much wind.

Where do these Progressive Elitists get this mindset that it is the height of morality to mess up the lives of others, especially those not very well off, with their many fanciful controls?  How can they be so malevolent?  When they say they are not malevolent but merely concerned about some bad outcome due to carbon dioxide emissions as a precautionary measure, are they not obliged to have carefully and rationally examined the relevant science on that issue before they take actions that surely will hurt many people?  Isn't that rational examination of the science a necessary test of anyone's benevolence and the proper exercise of the precautionary principle?  First do no harm, unless it is absolutely and  irrefutably necessary.

Excellent Article on Effects of Vouchers and Education Choice

James Agresti, a rare Brown University graduate who appears to have thwarted Brown's concerted efforts to mold all of its graduates into Progressive Elitist tribalists, has written an excellent article on the effects of vouchers and education choice.  The article is published on the Foundation for Economic Education website and called DeVos Confirmed: Everything they said about her is false.

Reforming our government-run and controlled education system is one of the most important requirements for developing a civil society with a properly limited government, a broad respect for and protection of individual rights, and the freedom for individuals to choose their own values and to manage their own lives within a richly diverse and cooperative private sector.  These reforms also have the beneficial effect of reducing the political power of the teachers labor unions.  Both government-run schools and teachers labor unions are ham-handed supporters of big, awfully big government, collectivism, and the splintering of the American people into countless tribes at war with one another.

Thoughts on Collectivists and Progressive Elitists from Notes to a Friend

In the reaction to President Trump's efforts to reduce the scope of government, some key characteristics of the collectivists, socialists, and Progressive Elitists are more openly clear than usual.

The socialists are going berserk.  Hysteria is a key component of socialism.  The madness of crowds, the imagined evils of business, the fears for the environment, the dislike for mankind and man's need to control his environment, the dislike for unequal accomplishment and award, fear of uncertainty, and the fear of being independent or of having to think independently.  Hysteria, alarmism, fear -- they all make the socialist want to trust his life and its care to government and to the collective.

Collectivists and Progressive Elitists are known to be less charitable than conservatives are and I am sure than libertarians are as well.  They look into their own souls and they see a lack of benevolence.  They are ashamed. They seek a cheap and easy way to convince themselves that they are benevolent.  By using the force of government, they can choose the causes of "benevolent" action and dilute the cost to themselves in time and money by making everyone contribute to their chosen causes.  Despite putting a gun to the head of others to achieve their goal, they convince themselves to an extent that they are now benevolent, but that conviction is most uncertain and uneasy.  It is difficult to completely evade the fact that they have done harm to some in order to fill the hole in their own souls.  They are cursed with at least the vague notion, that unlike them, the good man finds it easy and natural to view most other men in a benevolent manner because he sees introspectively his own good and noble soul and naturally tends to project that evaluation of what it is to be a man onto others.

Most Okies are Better Off than Most New Yorkers

When discussing the impact of the current New York state minimum wage of $9.00/hour and the law requiring that the minimum wage for fast food workers will rise in stages to $15/hour, I discovered how surprisingly bad off compared to the national household median income most New York residents were.  Because I have family in Oklahoma and it is considered to be backward, poor, and only worth flying over by New York Progressive Elitists, I have decided to do a comparable comparison of Oklahoma to New York.  After all, Oklahoma is the home of many poor Native Americans and a land of people who should have fled the dust bowl in the 1930s in abject poverty, right?  This should be an easy contest for New York.

So once again I will find the cost of living in Oklahoma cities and towns and use that to adjust the median household income of each city or town.  This recognizes that income goes much further when the cost of living is low than when it is very high, as tends to happen in areas with a big government mentality.  Or at least this happens until the costs cause so many business failures that housing values collapse as people flee the area for jobs in areas with more limited government.

Now the total population of the state of Oklahoma is about 0.2 times that of New York state.  So, the size of the cities and towns in this list will be smaller.  I chose all of the bigger cities and towns and a few to represent low population areas of the state.  The results in the table below for Oklahoma should be compared to those for New York in my previous post.

City or Town	Cost of Living % Compared to National Average	Median Household Income (National = $53,046)	Effective Median Household Income	% National Effective Median Household Income
Broken Arrow	93	$64,411	$69,259	131
Edmond	109	$71,216	$65,336	123
Woodward	82	$51,811	$63,184	119
Bartlesville	80	$48,036	$60,045	113
Guymon	81	$47,775	$58,981	111
Norman	88	$48,248	$54,827	103
Clinton	79	$43,216	$54,704	103
Ponca City	78	$40,434	$51,838	98
Oklahoma City	80	$45,704	$51,353	97
Altus	80	$40,429	$50,536	95
Ardmore	77	$38,383	$49,848	94
Enid	84	$41,515	$49,422	93
Lawton	89	$43,953	$49,385	93
McAlester	81	$39,291	$48,507	91
Tulsa	85	$40,781	$47,978	90
Durant	80	$36,863	$46,079	87
Cushing	78	$35,553	$45,581	86
Muskogee	79	$32,621	$41,292	78
Vinita	78	$32,109	$41,165	78
Okmulgee	79	$32,022	$40,534	76
Sallisaw	82	$29,524	$36,005	68
Stillwater	91	$31,243	$34,333	65
Hugo	76	$21,639	$28,472	54

Whereas, the residents of New York City had effective median household incomes of only 80% of the national average and those of Buffalo had such incomes of only 78% of the national average, most of the residents of Oklahoma have higher incomes.  Most of the population in Oklahoma enjoys median effective household incomes which are 90% or more of the national average.  For most Oklahomans, the cost of living is below 90% of the national average.

Only three towns were found with effective median household incomes below 76% of the national average.  One of these, Hugo, has a population of only 5,325 and is in the table only to represent the low population southeast area of the state.  Its effective median household income is better than that of larger Ithaca, NY, population 30,016 and home of Cornell University.  Another, Sallisaw, has only 8,779 residents, of whom most are Native Americans.  Stillwater, home of Oklahoma State University, has a population of 45,584.  None of the other towns are worse off than Buffalo.

The biggest city in the state, Oklahoma City, has an effective median household income of 97% of the national median.  The other colossus in the state is Tulsa with an effective median household income of 90% of the national median.  The third largest city, Norman, home of the University of Oklahoma, has an effective median household income of 103% the national value.  Broken Arrow, number 4 in size, is at 131%, #5 Lawton is 93%, and #6 Edmond is at 123% of the national median household income.  There is no contest between Oklahoma and New York.

The Progressive Elitists of New York are famous for telling the rest of the country how to manage the finances of the country and about how concerned they are about income inequality.  They assure us that the big government model is best for reducing income inequality and will generally make most people better off.  Now, there are many very wealthy and high income people in New York.  But the median household income tells us that income point at which half the households make more and half make less.  Thus there can be a minority of people who are have very high incomes who do little to shift the median income level up when most households are making far less than they are.  New York state is famous for its income inequality in fact.  Not withstanding the preaching of its controlling Progressive Elitists.

The minimum wage in Oklahoma is the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour.  According to the advice now being given to us by many Progressive Elitists, it should be $15/hour.  They claim this would give so many more purchasing power that they would spend their local economies to a condition in which everyone would have higher incomes.  But, the people of Oklahoma have managed to do far better than New Yorkers for the most part by ignoring this advice.  They have also ignored advice on the advantages of big government to a considerable degree.  It appears that the experiment has been done here.  The people who inherited the land of the dust bowl and a large Native American population are better off economically than New Yorkers, who have the national financial and business center of the nation.

There is far less income inequality in Oklahoma than in New York.   Most households have higher effective median incomes.  Wow!  The people of fly-over country are beating the pants off of those New Yorkers guided by the all-knowing Progressive Elitists.  Now who would have thought that Okies could win this contest so handily?

So, hi Mom, Betsy, Scott, Peggy, and my nieces and nephews in Oklahoma.  Congratulations on beating those New Yorkers economically and for not following their advice on matters of politics.  It is a very good idea to keep the cost of living low and the cost of doing business low by keeping government smaller.  Keep on trucking!  Keep electing those smaller government Republicans and leave those Big Government Democrats to the New Yorkers, who are killing themselves.

Asthma and Coal-Fired Power Plants -- Is there a connection?

As the concern of Americans about claims of catastrophic man-made global warming has diminished, the Progressive Elitists and their EPA have ramped up a campaign against coal-fired power plants based on those plants causing asthma.  The ads put particular emphasis on them causing asthma in children.  Obama even recently claimed that one of his daughters has asthma because of coal-fired power plants and other use of fossil fuels.  Does this viewpoint have an anchor in science and known data?  Let us examine this issue, because surely none of us want children to suffer because coal-fired power plants provide us with inexpensive and reliable electric power.  It may well make sense to use more expensive power, whether natural gas or better scrubbed coal-fired power plants if the coal-fired power plants are truly implicated as the cause of asthma.

In examining this, I am going to use information from a slide presentation on the prevalence of asthma in the US by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  It is found at the bottom of the page here.

Now, it might be that emissions from coal-fired power plants are the exception and this is a known cause.  Let us see if that would be consistent with other data of the CDC.

This graph shows increasing asthma from 1980 to 1996 and then increasing asthma from 2001 to 2010.  The gap in data is because the method for making the determination of asthma prevalence changed in the years between these two sets of data, so it is difficult to be sure that we are comparing apples to apples.  The apparent increase in asthma is very large in this time.  The odd thing is that the fraction of electric power generation by coal fell in this time and of that falling fraction, more and more effort was made to produce the power from coal more cleanly.  If asthma increased from 3% of the population to 8% during this time, there must be factors causing asthma which are far more important than the contribution that might be made by coal.

It is interesting that the increase in asthma since 2011 is primarily due to an increase in asthma among Black Americans.  Now it might be that coal-fired power plants are much more likely to be upwind of Black neighborhoods, the white Progressive Elitists being so efficient at Not in My Back Yard special interest tactics.  But let us remember this difference as we look at the following data and remember that people of different ethnic backgrounds do often have different susceptibilities to different diseases.

Now this is fascinating data.  Note how dramatically asthma prevalence changes by gender and age.  Surely exposure to the emissions of pollutants does not change so dramatically by age or gender as this.  It might be possible that the susceptibility to pollutants does change this dramatically, but that sure would seem to be a stretch.  Boys to 14 years old are much more likely to have asthma than girls, but girls have a steadily increasing probability of becoming asthmatic through age 17 and then have a slight general decrease in asthma after that, while remaining much more likely than males to have asthma at all ages 18 and beyond.  But males after 14 have a substantial lowering of probability to about age 44, before their probability starts to rise again.  This happens despite the fact that men are more likely than women to spend more time outside in their adult years, where they are supposedly being more directly assaulted by the emissions of coal-fired power plants.  These age and gender behaviors sure seem more likely to suggest a primarily internal biochemical cause as the primary cause of asthma.

Now here it is interesting to note that ethnic Asians are much less likely to have asthma.  I doubt that ethnic Asians are much less likely to live downwind from coal-fired power generators than is the average American.  In fact, a disproportionate fraction of them live in California, which despite its history of smog, has few coal-fired power plants.  Also, while Native Americans have high rates of asthma, most of them live in the American West where coal-fired power plant density is low compared to that in the East.  For some reason, people of multiple race have much higher rates of asthma than any other racial group, except those of Puerto Rican descent, who are about twice as likely as White Americans to suffer asthma.  Once again, this would all seem more likely to point to asthma causes with more of a basis in human biochemistry than in exposure to coal-fired power plant emissions.  Apparently, it is also very bad to have a low income.

By area of the country, it is slightly worse to be from the Northeast and Midwest than from the South and West.  It is worse to be from outside a metropolitan area than from inside one, though the difference is small.  In general, this makes one suspicious of the idea that pollution is an important cause of asthma.  To be sure, one might question whether the use of insecticides by farmers might be the reason for higher rates outside of cities, but one would think if this were true that this would be well-documented.  Besides, insecticides are actually used heavily in cities to fumigate dense housing from cockroaches and other insect inhabitants and mice and rats.  Metro areas are hardly free of similar insecticides as are found in the country.  The slightly greater non-metropolitan asthma percentage is more likely due to natural allergens such as pollen then it is to man-made chemicals.  Many people with asthma have a very rough time when pollen levels are high.  Again, this is a suggestion that the main causes of asthma are not environmental, but genetic or internal human biochemistry combined with natural irritants.  This is so much the case that there is a small advantage in living in a metropolitan area where overall human emissions pollutant concentrations are much higher than in the non-metropolitan areas.

Of those who have asthma, are they more likely now than earlier to have more asthma attacks?  Well no.  The graph above shows a slight drop in the number having attacks in the last 12 months, whether children or adults.  If the causes of asthma were environmental and those environmental factors were getting worse to cause an increase in the number of people reporting that they have asthma, then would it not be likely that the percentage of those with asthma who had attacks in the last 12 months would be increasing?  That it is not seems to suggest a likelihood that asthma is caused by human biological factors and/or more people are becoming aware of what asthma is and are becoming conscious of having the disease.

Now, let us examine the data for those who have actually had an asthma attack in the last 12 months.  Among those who have asthma, the percentage of each group having an asthma attack in the last 12 months varies very little.  The very small differences in the percentage of each ethnic group's asthma population having an asthma attack in the last 12 months inclines one toward the idea there may be an asthma gene which one either has or does not have.  The very similar percentages by region tends to argue that coal-fired power plants are at most a small factor and that environment generally is likely also to be a small factor.

This map of asthma incidence is remarkable.  It is interesting that there are sharp gradients by state.  Texas and Louisiana have low incidences, while New Mexico and Oklahoma have relatively high incidences of asthma in their populations.  Washington and Oregon on the West Coast have high incidences, but California has a low incidence.  All of the Rocky Mountain states have high incidences, despite those states not being noteworthy for pollution.  A narrow band of states across the middle of the Great Plains has relatively high incidences, while states north and south of the band have low incidences.  All of the South has a low incidence and all of the Northeast above the Mason-Dixon line has a high incidence.

The EPA makes the false claim that half the mercury in the atmosphere comes from coal-fired power plants.  I proved this nonsense in my blog post Evaluating the Mercury Emissions Danger from Coal-Fired Power Plants.  In that post, I showed that any mercury output from the coal-fired power plants was overwhelmed by natural sources of mercury in the atmosphere.  I showed that there was a complete lack of correlation between the EPA map showing their claimed power plant mercury emissions and actual measurements of mercury precipitation from the atmosphere.  However, their mercury emissions map may be of use here as a general measure of the pollutant output of coal-fired power plants, such as it is, around the country.  If the plant is supposedly not removing mercury output, then there may be other pollutants it is not removing in proportional measure.  So, here is that map:

Now comparing this map to the asthma prevalence by state in the map above this one, it is seen to be plausible that the high asthma incidences in the states Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky might be due to emissions from coal-fired power plants.  But, there is almost no coal-fired power plant emission in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho to explain their high asthma incidences.  The large concentration of coal-fired power plants in East Texas where most of the state population is coexists with a very low incidence of asthma in Texas and downwind Louisiana.  The high incidence of coal-fired power plants in northern Alabama and Georgia near those states highest population centers coexists with a low rate of asthma in those states.  Oklahoma has a high rate of asthma, but its coal-fired power plants are almost all downwind of its population centers in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Norman, Lawton, and Edmond.  It is also hard to understand how West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina can have low incidences of asthma with so many coal-fired power plants.  In short, there is no correlation between the coal-fired power plant emissions and the incidence of asthma.

This is not too surprising given that the CDC started its slide presentation on asthma by stating that its causes were generally not known.  The CDC has decades of skill in measuring and mapping the regional incidence of diseases and tracing them back to common sources.  If coal-fired power plants were a significant cause of asthma, surely they would have identified this cause long ago.

You would never know about this glaring lack of evidence from the ads being shown of asthma-suffering children on TV lately, which the Progressive Elitist propagandists are shamelessly blaming on coal-fired power plants.  This claim is as false and base as the claim that man's use of fossil fuels will cause catastrophic degradation of the environment and represents a threat to man's continued existence.  There is no rational justification for the claims in either case made by the alarmists who are endeavoring without let-up to further empower the government to eliminate our equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of our own happiness.  It can only be understood as a power grab, allowing Progressive Elitists to dictate our values to us and to micromanage our lives.

Update 21 April 2015:  If man-made global warming is causing asthma attacks as the EPA and Obama claim, why is it that hospital admissions for asthma are lower in the summer than in the winter?  If the claim is that smog and ozone are playing a role, then how is it that asthma prevalence has increased while both smog and ozone have generally decreased each decade since 1970?  What is more, ozone and smog levels caused by man are surely higher in metropolitan areas than outside them, so why is the prevalence of asthma lower in metropolitan areas than in non-metropolitan areas?  The EPA claims that common pollutant emissions are down 62% as of 2013 from levels in 1980!  Smog is down 33% since 1980 according to the EPA.  Is it possible to be more irrational than this Obama EPA is in its asthma claims?