Important headlines for January 25th
Bottom Line: These are stories you don't want to miss and my hot takes on them...
Hot Take: Make it happen! There are a lot of dumb, artificial, things politicians have done over the course of time but deciding that rather than every day being 24 hours as is fact of nature...We have one 23-hour day per year and one 25 day per year and stick with it for months at a time before we switch again. This might sound odd but I don't know if there's anything else being considered in the state session that I'd rather see happen than this. For intellectual consistency if nothing else.
Economic Growth Is the Cure for Inequality Amity Shlaes, City Journal
Excerpt: In a discipline that once showcased the power of markets, an axiom is taking hold: equal incomes lead to general prosperity and point toward utopia. Teachers, book review editors, and especially professors withhold any evidence to the contrary. Universities lead the shift, and the population follows. Today, millennials, those born between 1981 and 2000, outnumber baby boomers by the millions, and polls suggest that they support redistribution specifically, and government action generally, more than their predecessors do. A 2014 Reason/Rupe poll found 48 percent of millennials agreeing that government should “do more” to solve problems, whereas 37 percent said that government was doing “too many things.” A full 58 percent of the youngest of millennials, those 18–24 when surveyed, held a “positive” view of socialism, in dramatic contrast with their parents: only 23 percent of those aged 55 to 64 viewed socialism positively.
Hot Take:
The education establishment and leftist are dead wrong (I'm mean like literally - Socialism has killed more people than any other form of government)
They're in the process of being proven once again how dead wrong they really are
I'm not naive and don't expect a generation of indoctrination by the education establishment to be replaced with the immediate connecting of the dots now that the economy is kicking it but that's where it begins. The oldest Millennials are 36 and the youngest are 19. Think about their frame of reference. The oldest Millennial was 26 years old when the Great Recession hit in November of 2007. The youngest was nine! So, here's a generation of people who'd been fed a bill of goods in school and came of age and grew up in the worst sustained ten-year window of economic activity in US history. For those thinking the 30's were worse you're way off. The Great Depression was worse at its peak, but it lasted for only four years and by 1934 the US economy posted 10.8% growth and never looked back. We'd never gone more than four years without growth of at least 3% until the era of Obamanomics. Enter a quasi-socialist President and it happened. For the eight years of Obama's administration standing in the way of prosperity through massive regulation and tax increases on businesses and individuals and the US economy averaged only 1.8% economic growth. For that younger generation it was a bit of an affirmation of what they'd been conditioned for. Only the rich get richer, you can't get ahead, etc. They'd never known differently at a time of economic impact for them as a generation until now.
Inside of a year we've gone from a 1% growth economy into the best in 11 years, then 12 years and most recently 21 years. The lowest unemployment rate in 17 years. The lowest minority unemployment rate ever! The best raises in 11 years. The best increase in take home pay in 32 years! This from the evil barbarian named Trump from the evil rich guys called Republicans. So, who was really telling the truth? Perhaps the less ideological Millennial generation will at least question the BS of the education establishment and realize that Obama was a truly awful President. I'm bullish on them just as I am with the US economy when it's given a chance to do what it was designed to do.
Until tomorrow...