Yes! Economist Joel Waldfogel wrote an article in the Globe yesterday saying exactly what I’ve been saying for years: the custom of exchanging gifts decreases people’s utility.
“When you spend $50 on me, you’re operating at significant disadvantage. You don’t know what I like. I might not have been willing to pay anything for the item you purchase for me with $50. While $50 in spending normally produces at least $50 worth of satisfaction, there’s no guarantee that $50 in gift spending will produce nearly as much satisfaction for the recipient. And if you buy me something worth nothing to me, you have destroyed at least $50 worth of value.”
Check it out!
If you live in the Boston area, you’ve probably heard that the New York Times Co. is threatening to close the Boston Globe if unions don’t accept $20 million in cuts. The paper has been losing money lately because of falling advertising revenues, a problem that has only been aggravated by the recession. Although the Globe has a reputation for liberal bias, which I have noticed in many of its stories on local and national politics and on its editorial page, I think that losing the Globe would be a terrible thing.
Boston has three daily papers:
- The Boston Globe – the “liberal” paper. My parents subscribe to this paper, so I have been reading it for a long time. Although I don’t agree with most of its editorials and I have noticed bias in some of its news articles, I really appreciate that its coverage of crimes and trials is almost always factual and unbiased.
- The Boston Herald – the “conservative” paper. I read it online and occasionally buy it if there’s a big news story or if I’m bored. I agree with its politics more than the Globe’s, but its crime stories are usually anti-defense, sensationalized, biased, and sometimes defamatory, which really annoys me.
- The Metro – the free paper, which I read most days. This is actually my favorite of the three papers. Its articles, although less in depth than the other papers, are unbiased, and its editorial page has a wide range of opinions.
If the Globe closed, we’d be left with the Herald as our major paper, which would be kind of scary. I don’t like it that public opinion in Massachusetts tends to be dominated by liberal thought, but it would be sad not to have the Globe. The more newspapers there are, the greater variety of opinions, and varied opinions are always a good thing. On a side note, does anyone remember Boston Now? That was a short-lived free paper that existed a couple of years ago, and I was really sad when it closed. I love newspapers, and while I love the Internet too, there is no way that it can compare to opening up an actual paper, reading it at breakfast or at Dunkin’ Donuts, and cutting out and saving articles of important events. I am a big opponent of the trend toward websites instead of newspapers, Kindle instead of books, iTunes instead of CDs, and Hulu instead of the TV. Don’t get me wrong: the Internet is one of my favorite things in the world, but society would be much worse if it replaced books, CDs, TVs, and newspapers. We should try as hard as we can to reverse these trends and save the Globe.
I am not as outraged over the AIG bonus scandal as most people seem to be. Generally I’m opposed to government bailouts, so I don’t think it was a good idea for the government to give AIG bailout money to begin with. However, I’m also opposed to the government telling companies what to do. AIG is a private company, so doesn’t it have the right to decide how much to pay its employees? I mean, maybe giving large bonuses to executives who messed up (if that’s what they did, I don’t know the details) isn’t the best business decision, but the compensation decisions of a company are really none of the public’s or the government’s business.
The way I see it, giving companies taxpayer money is kind of socialist, and government regulation of companies is kind of socialist. Isn’t it better for the government to do only one socialist thing instead of two?
And then there’s the Democrats’ idea to tax the bonuses at 90%. In addition to being mean-spirited, this would also be unconstitutional, since the Constitution forbids taxes that target a specific group of people.
In conclusion, there are far better things to be outraged about than the AIG bonuses, including the fact that the government spent so much money on the bailouts and the stimulus in the first place.
Overall, there was nothing too surprising about Obama’s address to Congress. Early on he said that he doesn’t support big government, but then he went on to list all the things he wants the government to spend money on. He says he doesn’t want to create a huge national debt, but he just pushed through a nearly $1 trillion stimulus package and is now planning to place the burden of reducing the budget deficit solely on financially successful people. Here are two of the main things in the speech that I took issue with:
1. Obama’s comment that “a surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy.” I really disagree with this statement because it presumes that money fundamentally belongs to the government, which (supposedly) has the right to distribute the money to people however it sees fit. I think money belongs to the people who earn it. Stealing less money from the rich (as Bush did) is NOT the same thing as transferring money to them. Ever since the 16th Amendment was passed, the government has been transferring money from the rich to the poor, not the other way around.
2. His statement that “Tonight I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training…Every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.” This deeply offended me for three reasons:
- Although these comments were just Obama’s opinion and do not have the force of law, what a paternalistic, un-American thing to say! How dare Obama tell Americans what decisions to make in their own lives? Dropping out of high school is just as good a choice as going to college. The choices that individual people make are not the business of the country as a whole – that would be socialism. What makes America beautiful is that people have the liberty to make their own decisions without being judged by others.
- Additionally, to expect everyone to get a college education is collectively self-defeating. The purpose of a college degree is to gain an advantage in the job market. If everyone gets a college degree, no one will have an advantage. The situation will be exactly the same as if no one went to college, except everyone will have spent 4 years of their life working hard with no financial compensation. Sounds pretty stupid to me.
- Third, society needs all kinds of people. That includes plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, cooks, cashiers, and people who work in Dunkin’ Donuts. Blue-collar jobs that require no college education, and maybe not even a high-school education, are in many ways more useful to society than doctors, consultants, and even lawyers. The world wouldn’t be a very good place if all the Dunkin’s shut down because there was no one to make coffee and get donuts for people. Contrary to what Obama seems to think, in America, it’s okay to have people with a variety of jobs and education levels.
Various people have been making a ruckus over the New York Post’s cartoon that allegedly compares Barack Obama to a chimpanzee. The cartoon shows police officers killing a chimpanzee and saying “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” Numerous people have been calling the cartoon racist, and now Al Sharpton is trying to organize a boycott of the paper.
I disagree with the claim that this cartoon is racist. First of all, the chimpanzee could just as easily be representing Congress as Obama, since Congress actually created and passed the stimulus bill. Additionally, even if the chimpanzee represents Obama, that does not make the cartoon racist. Maybe the cartoon is meant to call Obama stupid, or compare his out-of-control spending to the Travis the chimpanzee’s rampage (a pretty good comparison, by the way). Under none of these interpretations is the cartoon criticizing Obama for his race, so I don’t see how the cartoon could be interpreted as racist.
People in America are becoming oversensitive about racial issues. Just because Obama is black doesn’t mean that anyone who doesn’t like him is racist. Believe it or not, there are many things that a non-racist person could find to criticize about Obama, such as his support of a more progressive tax system and excessive government spending. Al Sharpton actually said that the Post “thought we (African-Americans) were chimpanzees.” Since when does criticizing the stimulus package amount to calling all black people chimpanzees?
The only thing about the cartoon that I find offensive is that it is making fun of a tragedy that resulted in a woman being mauled by a chimpanzee and the chimpanzee being killed. I love animals, and I find it icky that the paper is making fun of a chimpanzee dying. For the most part, however, the cartoon is just criticizing the stimulus bill, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The economic stimulus package is nearing $900 billion, about a third of the most recent federal budget. Although it is scary that the government is adding almost a trillion dollars to the $10 trillion national debt, some parts of the bill are more objectionable than others.
- The worst part was billions of dollars to expand Medicaid coverage of contraceptives. If you want condoms, you should have to pay for them yourself! Thankfully, Obama said he was willing to drop this.
- Obama also says he will agree to getting rid of the alternative minimum tax for tens of millions of people, one of the few good parts of the stimulus bill.
- $180 billion will go toward increased Medicaid funding and unemployment benefits. This is unfair to people who work and/or have too much money to qualify for Medicaid.
- There will be a $500 payroll tax holiday for all workers. Tax breaks are always better than increased spending, I guess.
- $365.6 billion will go toward roads, highways, bridges, and other brick-and-mortar projects. This is better than giving people money for nothing, a la Medicaid and Welfare, but it doesn’t seem like America really needs all those new roads…
It’s good that Obama is at least trying to compromise with Republicans, but if I was in Congress, I still probably wouldn’t vote for it. It’s just a mind-boggling amount of money, and with the national debt at such a ridiculous level, we can’t add to it any more.
Why can’t the government stop spending money? Despite the first stimulus package and all the bailouts, our economy is still stinking, which kinda makes it seem like these things didn’t exactly work. There’s a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that goes, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
So, I don’t really like the idea of the new, $550 billion economic recovery package. Most of the money will go toward health care, education, food stamps, and unemployment benefits, instead of tax cuts. The tax cuts that are included in the package will discriminatorily help the poor, many of whom don’t even pay any taxes. More financially successful taxpayers who are unfairly slapped with the alternative minimum tax won’t get any assistance at all.
Cutting taxes for everyone would be a much better way of stimulating the economy. The government needs to shrink its budget and decrease the gargantuan national debt. Spending billions of dollars to give people free stuff at the expense of more successful people is just wrong.
