Walter E. Williams asks Who benefits from Democratic Control?

Prof. Walter E. Williams asks in his column entitled Who Benefits from Democratic Control? whether blacks are being well-served by the Democrats who are given more than 90% of their votes in most elections.

He notes that of the 20 major U.S. cities with the highest homicide rates in terns of homicides per 100,000 people, that 19 of the 20 highest murder rate cities are controlled by Democrats, many of them for decades.  The only exception of the 20 major cities is Tulsa, Oklahoma where much of my family lives.  The worst cities in murder rate are in order: St. Louis, Baltimore (nearby for me), Detroit, New Orleans, Kansas City (a sister lives nearby), Cleveland (my wife's home city), Memphis, and Newark, NJ, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC (nearby for me).

Prof. Williams also notes that many cities are losing their populations.  Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh are among those whose present populations are less than half what they were in 1950.  The populations of Washington, DC, Baltimore, Camden, NJ, and many others are much reduced due to safety issues, poor schools, and unpleasant environments.

So Walter E. Williams asks blacks what do they have to lose by trying politicians who are not Democrats.

Employment Growth or Contraction By State Since December 2007

It is very interesting that if one plots the number of jobs created in Texas since 2008 against the change in the number of jobs in all other states combined, one gets an astounding story of job creation in one state that does little to prevent the creation of jobs:

There is no contest.  Texas added jobs without ever dropping below the number of jobs in December 2007 despite the Great Recession.  It has now added 1.44 million jobs, while the remainder of the nation has yet to recover all the jobs lost since December 2007!

[The oil and gas industry in Texas, which Obama has fought and tried to suppress, is responsible for a large part of the Texas jobs creation success.]  

But some of those other states did add jobs and some lost a particularly large fraction of the jobs they had in December 2007.  Let us see which states are relative winners and which are relative losers.  I will use BLS seasonally adjusted Establishment Data on non-farm payrolls which excludes public administration.  I am going to break the states into three groups.  The first group is the one that created more jobs over the 7 year period than would be needed to keep up with the average population growth of the country over the 10-year period of the last census.  That population growth rate was about 0.9%, so 7 x 0.9% = 6.3%.  The next group of states managed some kind of job growth, though as we will see that job growth was most commonly pathetic.  The final group of states are those which still have fewer jobs now than they had in December 2007.  I have simply taken the non-farm non-public administration jobs in December 2014 and divided by the number of such jobs in December 2007.  Thus, North Dakota had 32.24% more such jobs in 2014 than in 2007.

The heroic states with more created jobs than average population growth from Dec 2007 to Dec 2014:

North Dakota, Texas, and Oklahoma certainly benefited from both business-friendly state governments and the shale oil boom.  Alaska benefited from high oil prices.  Obama did nothing but hurt the jobs creation in these states.  The District of Columbia benefited from the inexorable growth of the federal government and the many well-paid lobbyists located there.  Gov. Rick Parry of Texas has some real bragging rights in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination due to the record of Texas during his long term as governor.  Of the five states and DC which created jobs in excess of population growth, only those jobs in DC were created by Obama and his socialist cronies.

The states that could not keep up with population growth, but at least did not actually lose jobs:

Massachusetts, New York, and California on this list certainly benefited from the huge out-pouring of Federal Reserve money propping up the largest financial institutions largely located in these states.  Note that the bottom 12 states in this group did not even manage a 1% growth of jobs in 7 years!  Both Virginia and Maryland, despite being benefited by the growth of the federal government by their proximity to DC, managed virtually zero private job growth at 0.6% and 0.15%, respectively.  Six of the bottom 9 states in this group voted for Obama twice, so they deserved no better.  Scott Walker, Republican governor of Wisconsin has little to brag about in terms of job creation in his state in his presidential bid.  Democrat Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland has still less to brag about.

Finally, we have the states that actually lost such jobs in the 7-year period of the Great Recession and its supposed recovery:

Of these 17 job losing states, 11 of them voted for Obama twice.  That is certainly a fair indicator of an anti-business mentality in those states.  Only Idaho, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada on this list appear in many lists of business-friendly states.  Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has only a 3.06% job loss in seven years to talk about.

It is very clear that the federal government and very many of the state and local governments need very badly to become more business-friendly if Americans are ever going to be able to enjoy plentiful and good jobs again.  This does not mean doing things to favor businesses.  It just means they need to get out of the way and let free Americans in the private sector create jobs and provide great products and services.

Washington D.C. Licenses Tour Guides

Washington D.C. requires tour guides to pass a test and get a license.  Can you imagine why?  It cannot be because if an ill-informed tour guide were to say that the top of the Indian on top of the Capitol is 302 feet above the ground that this would cause great harm to the tourist.  It the tourist goes back to Indiana and tells his neighbor this incorrect fact, his neighbor will tell him, no, from the east side, at the bottom of the steps, to the top of the Indian is 288 feet.  The misinformed tourist would then have no choice but to commit suicide out of embarrassment, right?  Fortunately, in my hypothetical example, the tourist can simply point out that the Capitol was not built on level ground and there probably is a point on the ground above which the Indian does rise to a height of 302 feet.

But what really has me wondering is that there is a tour of sites haunted with ghosts.  Does the D.C. tour guide test check for guide knowledge of the ghosts of D.C.?

There must be tour guides who specialize in the Capitol, the White House, and the three main presidential memorials.  Then there must be some who specialize in the museums.  Do they all take the same tour guide test?

It turns out that the Institute for Justice has just taken the case of the tour company called Segs in the City to protect them from this licensing requirement.  I suppose the Segway tour guides will have to prove they can drive a bus and talk at the same time.  There are also walking tours.  I wonder if the walking guides also have to show they can drive a bus?

It is getting to be the case in many cities that if you want to earn a living doing anything, you must get a license. When the cities finally get all jobs covered, I expect they will begin issuing licenses for the right to breathe out CO2.  You will have to prove that you are worth the pollution you breathe out due to your social value.  If you cannot, then the politicians will be addressing the over-population problem, right?

The Most Naive People in America

The Pew Research Center conducted a poll released on 18 April 2010 based upon four surveys conducted from 11 March to 11 April of about 5,500 adults reached on land and cell phone lines.  22% of the people said they trust Washington almost always or most of the time.  Apparently, the most naive and gullible people in America are this 22% of the adult population!  Only 19% said they are basically content with the federal government.  So, only about one in five Americans are happy with the federal government.

Since the 1950s, there have been only two periods with similar levels of distrust.  From 1992 to 1995, the first term of Bill Clinton and following on the heels of the George H. W. Bush "read my lips" tax increases, those trusting Washington fell to 17%.  From 1978 to 1980, the last years of Jimmy Carter's administration, those retaining trust in Washington fell to a low of 25%.

Today's adults were mostly born between the Census' of 1920 and 1990.  Of course some adults born in that time-frame have died and are not included in the Pew poll.  To keep things simple, we will ignore that for the following calculation.  How many people have been born per minute on average in that time?  The answer is about 3.88 per minute.  If 22% of these people are suckers, then the old saying that a sucker is born every minute is nearly true, but Americans are a wee bit better than that.  Apparently about 0.85 suckers are born every minute.

About half the people said they wanted smaller government, which is fewer than those saying this in other recent surveys.  About 40% want government to provide more services.  The Pew Center does tend to produce results slightly more favorable to the left than many polls over the years, in my opinion.

The Public School Scandal

I have stated over and over that our biggest problem in the fight for the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States of America is the fact that the education of our young is controlled by government.  Government at the local, state, and federal levels always has a conflict of interest in education.  American children need an education in which a cornerstone of their knowledge is knowing that legitimate government, as stated in our Declaration of Independence, is that government which governs with the consent of the governed for the purpose of securing their individual rights.  They need to understand that the purpose of the Constitution was to insure that the federal government had very limited powers dedicated to the purpose of securing individual rights and nothing more.  To understand how important this is, students need a knowledge of the history of great numbers of governments which oppressed the People.  They need a realistic knowledge of the Capitalist system with its free markets for goods, services, and ideas and how that system serves every unique individual by allowing them many, many choices and an easy path to forming many voluntary associations with others for specialized purposes of their own.  They need to understand that socialism cannot accommodate individual rights, cannot recognize the individuality and uniqueness of each of us, and cannot allow us to develop and express ourselves as the individuals we are.  Students need to understand that a Capitalist, free market society offers a richness of life no other system can offer.  Yet, all governments inevitably want to grow and want to feel needed in far more ways than the protection of our individual rights.  And frankly, many politicians hunger for power and learn how to use special interest groups to help them attain it.  Hence, government has a fundamental conflict-of-interest when it is put in charge of running our education system.

Yet, in America, as in most countries, government is in charge of the education of our young.  We know that the quality of government-run education in many other fields than history and civics is also very disappointing.  The governments that run the welfare system, the DMVs, job licensing, metro transportation systems, regulate health insurance and electricity rates, and much else equally poorly, do not do much better with education.  In many cases, they also spend far more money on education than they tell us they spend on it as I reported in this post on Washington, D.C. public schools.  According to a study released on 10 March 2010 by Adam Schaeffer with the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom entitled They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools, this problem of under-reporting the real cost of public school educational expenses is very widespread.  He examines the reported spending and the real spending per pupil for six metropolitan regions, including the five largest for K-12 public schools.  He also compares the cost of the K-12 public schools to an estimate of the cost for private schools in that metropolitan area.  The results are very enlightening and offer a sound reason for hope that we can convince the People that government-run education is a very bad deal indeed.

The Cato Institute report compiled public school K-12 costs for the central city school district, for the highest income adjacent school district and for the lowest income adjacent school district.  I have complied a table to condense the most important of the results found by Adam Schaeffer in the following table:

The public school districts under-reported the true cost of public education per pupil anywhere from 3% to 151%.  Only the low-income North Chicago school district did a faithful job of reporting their real expenditures, though the low-income district in the Phoenix area of Deer Valley at 13% and the low-income district in the Washington, D.C. area of Prince George's County at 17% were much more accurate than most in their reporting.  Los Angeles city school district was the worst: they spent more than 2.5 times as much as they claimed to spend per pupil!  The other districts spent between 22 and 85% more than they reported spending.  It turns out that many voters when told about the difference in real spending from what they thought was being spent per student were very upset.  They indicated that they were not willing be taxed so much as they were for the purpose of spending so much.

Equally interesting as the great deception of the People about the amount spent on public education, is the fact that the public education is clearly no bargain compared to private education.  The public school districts spent between 21% and 201% more than the local private schools!  In 8 out of the 18 public school districts examined, the public schools spent more than 100% more than (twice as much) did the local private schools per pupil.  Only the Houston school districts and the low-income school districts of Phoenix, Los  Angeles, and Washington, D.C., were less than 50% more expensive than the local private schools and all but one of them was one-third or more higher in costs.

Now, I am pretty sure that these private schools are generally offering as good or better educations than the public schools.  I am very sure that if they spent as much as the public schools do per pupil, most private schools would offer a substantially better education.  It would seem very clear that the taxpayers in many of these examined school systems could be convinced that a voucher system that allowed them to send their children to a private school instead of the public school money-eater would be preferable both for providing their children a better education and to save the local tax district a huge amount of money, as they shut down more and more of their schools.  Indeed, even the taxpayers with no children to educate would clearly be better off.

Some will argue that many of the private schools are associated with religious groups.  Indeed, in a country in which the taxpayer has to pay for these very expensive public schools and then has to shell out a substantial amount of money for a private school, there is likely to be another motivation of the effort and commitment, such as a strong belief of some kind.  But, if public policy allows a healthy voucher system, the market for private schools will expand greatly.  Many secular schools will be established, as will be schools with strong arts programs or strong science programs.  The competition to provide good educations at reasonable prices will produce many more good schools that people can afford more readily than the bloated socialist holding cells we call schools today.

So, when the topic of public education comes up in your school district, do not feel bashful about informing your conversant that public schools are ridiculously expensive and provide a poor education compared to what a private school can and will provide.  Let's get the People to demand a shift from government-run schools to private schools, where the parents will once again have a say in the education of their children and the taxpayers will have some relief.  The public schools are just one more case of the gullible being taken for a ride by government.