One of the most troubling long-term trends over the past several decades has been the disappearance of working-age men from the workforce. The chart below shows the downward trend that only accelerated during and after COVID.
Women since the end of World War 2 have nearly doubled their workforce participation. One factor has been that men’s wages have grown much less over the past 50 years than women’s wages. The reward for working has risen for women and fallen for men. We will let readers make of that fact what they wish.
But even the labor force participation rate of women has fallen since COVID. Why?
We attribute at least half of the male labor force decline of late to generous welfare benefits that can nearly replace as much – and in some cases, more – than the loss of wage income from working.
Are men becoming like the lazy male lions who lie around all day and let the lionesses hunt for food?
We think that the decline in the number of men of working age who are not in the labor force is bad for the economy (obviously), but also harmful to their own health and happiness, to family stability. Men not working contributes to other social-culture problems from divorce to crime to drug and alcohol and spousal abuse.
We have to make work pay and eliminate the financial rewards for not working and it should the highest priority of the next Congress.
2) Another Rotten Idea From The 1970s Returns: Rent Control
One of the dumbest economic ideas of modern times is rent control. Few factors have caused the disappearance of affordable housing in major cities more than putting a cap on rents.
Even Assar Lindbeck, a socialist economist from Sweden has concluded: “In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city.”
So naturally, progressives want rent control to make a comeback. Boston’s new mayor won the election by campaigning for it and Santa Ana, California, and St. Paul, Minnesota have recently adopted it.
Next week, voters in the California cities of Richmond, Pasadena, and Santa Monica will vote to cap annual rent increases to about 3 percent. Voters in Orange County, Florida, which includes Orlando, will decide on a rent control measure though the courts may rule it is unconstitutional.
Nothing increases homelessness more than rent control. We hope voters in California and Florida see the folly of these policies.
3) Recycling Is Garbage: Now Even Greens Are Admitting It
Many years ago John Tierney, a muckraking journalist in the finest tradition, wrote an incredibly controversial article for the New York Times called: “Recycling Is Garbage.” His point was that many of the costs of recycling, including the energy consumed, often made recycling an economic and ecological loser. We all want a cleaner environment, and we know that at least half of our readers will shriek when they hear this: but in many cases, recycling doesn’t make much sense and it isn’t going to save the planet.
Now a quarter-century after Tierney wrote his sacrilegious piece on recycling along comes – are you ready for this? – Greenpeace, which agrees with the recycling skeptics. The group’s new report is headlined: “Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street.”
The group offers a wealth of statistics and a succinct diagnosis: “Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.”
In New York City, for example, recycling a ton of plastic costs at least six times more than safely burying it in a landfill.
But don’t think Greenpeace has fully embraced common sense. Now the greens are calling for “phasing out single-use plastics” through taxes or a “Global Plastics Treaty.” But such bans don’t work. The one that many states have adopted on single-use plastic grocery bags has raised prices, forced the use of more energy-intensive paper bags and totes, and even led customers to steal handheld shopping baskets. And what are we supposed to replace plastics with? Glass bottles? Cardboard?
Here's an eye-opening report from our friends at Open The Books: Illinois has 132,188 state or local government employees who make over $100K per year, at an annual cost of $17 billion.
These wages and salaries are typically 30% more than is earned by comparably skilled private sector workers whose taxes pay for these munificent government salaries. This report doesn’t even include the fact that most government employees in the Land of Lincoln have virtual lifetime tenure. They seldom get fired no matter how bad their performance. And it may be set to get worse. The report concludes:
This year, Pritzker is pushing Amendment 1 – which would enshrine long-term employment contracts for government workers, multi-year salary increases, constitutional backed lifetime pensions, the power to strike, and much more.
It would essentially make Illinois “unreformable.”
5) Is China Finally Ending Its Brutish Zero COVID Policy?
We’ve covered this story of the brutal and inhumane lockdowns of tens of millions of Chinese citizens in major cities in China from the start. This Maoist policy has been going on for three years as Beijing communists rule with an iron fist with no regard whatsoever for basic liberties and human rights and with few provable public health benefits. (Yes, we know that could be said of many Democratic governors here in the United States.)
Only time will tell if this leak – that zero COVID policy is ending – is accurate. If true, this is a major stroke for human rights, as the last major nation throws in the towel on shutdowns and militant stay-at-home orders. It also has major policy implications for the global economy as it will help ease supply chain shortages. We suspect that China only stuck with the lockdowns as long as they did because Xi refused to admit error before the Chinese Communist Party Congress confirmed his power.
If there is anything positive that has come from these dictatorial controls exercised by the tyrants in charge in Beijing, it is that the U.S. and the rest of the industrialized world now see that China can no longer be counted on as a reliable participant in the global supply chain – and it’s time to create degrees of separation.
