The Unemployable Subsidizing the Uninsurable
My latest op-ed at Investor's Business Daily explains the terrible misunderstanding of what insurance actually is that must be plaguing Washington, DC. Here's a snippet:
This leaves the burden of propping up the president's health spending law to the young and healthy, because it will be crucial for more young people relative to sickness-prone people to sign up to lower the premiums for everyone.
One way to solve this is to mandate that everyone have coverage. However, this mandate will work only if the people have taxable income. According to latest data available from the BLS, people aged 18-34 (the very people Obama needs to make his plan viable) have an unemployment rate of 8.2%, while people 35 and older have a mere 3.6%.
Thus, the president is calling on young people to give up more dollars they don't have (during a time of record-level student loans, no less) to pay for insurance plans that are too expensive.
The rest of the article can be found here.
A Career in Economics... It's Much More Than You Think!
The American Economic Association has recently put out a fantastic video detailing the careers you can pursue with a degree in economics, which you can check out by here:
They also keep track of data related to earnings and specific career placements. That information can be found here.
As you can see, economics is so much more than just applied finance, but is instead fundamentally about people. As you leave an economics class, you should be laughing, smiling, and saying that this is the most fun you've had in any class, period. We can use it to analyze absolutely absurd and comical things, like how come some sumo wrestlers sometimes lose on purpose, why people for over 250 years put insects and rodents on trial in actual court rooms with lawyers for destruction of property, and how pirates were able to overcome their innate nature of being thieves and scalawags to work together peacefully. These things are unbelievably fun and incredibly enlightening to read and think about.
But we can also talk about deeply serious topics that ultimately have implications for life and death, as the fate of entire civilizations crucially depends on getting their economic policies right. How have we done at exporting democracy and freedom to the rest of the world? Why are some states failed and weak and what can we do to help them? How have we done at steering international development efforts and quelling oppressive dictators? The answers to these questions matter not just as mere intellectual curiosities; understanding them is of vital importance to actual, living human beings.
It is this duality of purposes (highly fun and entertaining and deeply serious analysis) that makes economics the greatest subject on the planet. In one breath an economist can make you laugh by explaining the rationale behind some previously nonsensical historical phenomenon. In the next, we can provide a sobering analysis of current policy efforts to help the oppressed and least-well-off members of society and the world.
The point of all this is simple: if you want to have a high-paying job that's fun, interesting, and matters, there is no better subject to study than economics. It provides you with a framework which you can use to analyze the world around you, the analytic tools to figure out emerging trends in consumer data, and the ability to understand the trade-offs necessary when making difficult decisions. It is, bar none, the single greatest subject and intellectual adventure you can ever embark on.
Kickstarter Saved Neil Armstrong's Suit
My latest article at The Freeman, which challenges the idea that we must use tax dollars to pay for public goods, is online here.
A brief snippet:
What this Kickstarter campaign effectively says is that the American people have had enough with a Washington bureaucracy that systematically fails to provide the things we care about. We don’t care about politics, grandstanding, or budget tricks. We care about getting things done. Today, we have yet another shining example of how unnecessary government is for getting what we want.
Little Assistance for Victims of Moving Companies
My good friend, Dr. Abby Hall, recently moved from Fairfax, VA to Tampa, FL with her fiancé and encountered nothing but problems along the way. Not one to take this lying down, Abby used the Economic Way of Thinking to find out just how a moving company could get away with failing so miserably.
In a recent 900-mile move, my fiancé and I experienced all of the above. Employees refused to give us the names of their supervisors or connect us to management after the price jumped $1,000 over our price quote and the movers arrived eight hours late. Time and again, the company declined to tell us where our belongings were or when they would arrive. Three weeks later, they appeared — with over $1,000 in damage. This all happened despite our checking the legitimacy of the company, reading reviews and calling the company to ask questions.
The rest of the piece can be found here.