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Politics and Economics
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is carried out by the US Census Bureau on behalf of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). This annual survey collects data on violent, property, and hate crime victimizations, both reported and not reported to the police…According to the just released BJS report Hate Crime Victimization, 2005-2019, violent hate crime victimizations accounted for 1.0% of all nonfatal crime victimizations in 2019.
I live in Alameda County California, across the Bay from San Francisco. Alameda County has the fifth largest homeless population in the US and the fourth highest percentage of homeless individuals who are unsheltered. …Clearly, Alameda County is doing something wrong – but what?
In a search for answers, I Googled “US cities where homelessness is declining” and came up with Houston, where the homeless population has more than halved since 2011.
In 2016, the American Dialect Society (ADS) recognized the word "gaslight" as the "Most Useful" new word of the year. Sure, the word had become near-ubiquitous by then, but that just made it widespread. Why did so many people find it so useful?
Don’t make promises on the assumption it will all work out…Don’t make promises based on speculative theories that haven’t been tested…Don’t make promises on the assumption you can retract the promise later without serious repercussions…
…But these figures are averages across all respondents and they obscure large partisan differences. For instance, 76% of Republicans/Republican Leaners indicated they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police, compared to just 31% of their Democratic counterparts. Here’s more:
So what is it about good governance that leads to greater happiness and life satisfaction? For starters, good governance creates conditions conducive to economic growth and higher living standards, which enables increases in well being, especially in less developed countries. More directly, good governance enhances social trust…
In this post, I’m proposing that offenders be allowed to accrue $300 a month of their ASBI benefit when participating in education and training programs while incarcerated, with the correction facility receiving the balance of $700/month for program expenses. The offender would then receive their accrued ASBI after they’ve been released and have met with a probation or parole officer. The ASBI payout could be substantial, as follows…
Equally important, the formerly incarcerated often lack the financial resources to support themselves while they look for work or upgrade their job skills through further education and training. And when you don’t have enough money for reliable transportation, stable housing, or even something decent to wear at a job interview, the barriers to success can seem insurmountable. At least crime pays, if only for a while.
Too many Americans are plagued by chronic poverty, income volatility, job instability, and lack of social mobility. In previous posts (here, here, here, and here), I proposed an Adult Student Basic Income (ASBI) that would effectively address these societal ills without diminishing labor market participation or labor productivity. …The beauty of an ASBI is that it’s affordable: it would be funded partly by the elimination of some government programs, but mostly by declining demand for other programs. Here’s a possible funding breakdown…
How many Adult Student Basic Income (ASBI) recipients would not have pursued further education or training without getting paid for it? I’m guessing millions of US adults who are struggling financially but have limited job prospects. These include many of the over 40 million adults in the US with low literacy, as well as a good number of low-income individuals with okay literacy but limited education and skills, such as the 48 million adults with no formal education past high school. Then there are the 19 million immigrant workers who lack proficiency in English. Yes, some of these groups overlap, but it still adds up to a lot of people.
Those who dismiss the concept of scarcity often embrace an attitude of “if there’s a will, there’s a way”. Americans are steeped in this way of thinking: You can do it! Don’t let the doubters hold you back!
In Part I of this series (What is Affordable Childcare and Whose Childcare Should Be Subsidized?), I concluded the federal government should fully subsidize childcare for low-income families and partly subsidize the childcare of middle-income families…The cost of my proposal? Just four billion a year (or thereabouts). Here are the numbers…
Note that my hypothetical family with a take-home income of $5,000 a month can barely save anything for emergencies, retirement or the kids’ education after high school. Their budget would still be tight if they paid just 7% of their income on childcare, but at least they wouldn’t be teetering on the brink. Now consider parents with net incomes of just $2000 a month….
No surprise here: the smaller the metro and nonmetro population group, the more likely offenses will be cleared by arrest, especially for property crimes, although once again the countryside doesn’t quite follow the pattern.
Republicans often assert that cities run by Democrats are more crime-ridden than those run by Republicans. Democrats often counter there’s no evidence of that. Neither side presents evidence one way or another, other than the anecdotal sort. So I decided to look into the matter myself, using cities with Republican mayors as a proxy for cities that are not dominated by Democrats or progressives. My sample included all the cities with Republican mayors on Wikipedia’s list of mayors of the 50 largest cities in the US, of which there were ten with Republican mayors. I also chose ten cities with Democratic mayors from Wikipedia’s list and then looked up the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) 2019-2020 figures for homicide and aggravated assault crime rates, et voila!. Here is what I found…
I suspect more crimes will have gone unreported in 2020 (a year of strong anti-police sentiment), but those numbers aren’t in yet. As for why victims don’t report crimes, the most common one is that they dealt with the matter another way. Other reasons include: didn’t consider it important enough to report; police wouldn’t or couldn’t help anyway; fear of reprisal; and not wanting to get the offender in trouble. Here’s how the relative importance of those reasons breaks down by urban, suburban, and rural place of residence…
US crime rates appear to have dropped back to levels last seen in the 60s and 70s. But that doesn’t mean crime is no longer a serious problem in this country. Crime was too high fifty years ago and it remains too high now. As the above charts show, the decades-long surge in violence and property crimes began in the 1960s. And Americans were mad as hell about it. By the end of that decade, “law and order" had become a hot-button political theme and effective campaign slogan.
Of course, the sticker tax rate may not be the effective rate - what the taxpayer actually pays. Either way, the tax burden of the middle-class is rather large in the Top Ten “most progressive” countries, mostly due to their high income and consumption taxes. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I’m more interested in the nuts and bolts of governing than in expressions of political sentiment. I don’t care if someone has the right values or cares about the right things. Give me specific goals and policy proposals. Want to eliminate poverty, hunger, homelessness, etc? Great! What’s the plan? And how are you going to pay for it?
I’m not sure that paying more than 30% of one’s income on housing necessarily means one is suffering financial hardship. That 30% threshold came from the early 1960s when Americans spent almost a quarter of their monthly expenditures on food. Today we spend half as much on food, so shouldn’t we be able to spend more on housing? Spending no more than 30% of one’s income on housing may still be ideal for most low-income households but many better-off households could afford to pay more, especially households in the upper-half of the income distribution.