Year: 2013

Millennials are getting behind the wheel much less:

Between 2001 and 2009, the average yearly number of miles driven by 16- to 34-year-olds dropped a staggering 23 percent. The Frontier Group has the most comprehensive look yet of why younger Americans are opting out of driving. Public transportation use is up 40 percent per capita in this age group since 2001. Bicycling is up 24 percent overall in that time period. And this is true even for young Americans who are financially well off.

Derek Thompson finds that young people “have swapped student loans for mortgage and auto loans”:

They’ve traded cars for college and homes for homework. And that’s okay! Compared to cars and houses, higher education is a much safer investment. For all the media criticism about college losing its luster, you could make a good argument that it’s never been more important. While the returns to college have flattened recently, wage growth has been even weaker (or negative) among non-college grads. As a result, the “bonus” that young workers get from going to college, which economists call, the “college premium,” has tripled in the last 30 years. Today, the share of the 18-24-year-old population enrolled in school is at an all-time high 45 percent today.

Gary Becker thinks so:

Elsewhere (see my monograph, “The Challenge of Immigration: A Radical Solution”, 2011) I use as an illustration a price of $50,000. I show that such a price would attract young, skilled, and ambitious men and women since they would gain the most from coming here. Many illegal residents would be willing to pay that price too in order to legalize their status since there are huge economic and other advantages of becoming a legal resident. A loan program analogous to the student loan program would lend money to poorer but ambitious immigrants, so that they are not kept out by the cost of entry.

Richard Posner seconds him:

Depending on the price, the option will more or less automatically open a quick path to citizenship for precisely those foreigners whose skills, matching U.S. business needs, will give them reasonable assurance of earning enough money in this country to make the exercise of the option cost-justified to them—and to us as beneficiaries of the labor of high-skilled workers.

Of course “selling” U.S. citizenship, like selling kidneys and other organs, is just the kind of sensible economic proposal that shocks people who lack an understanding of economics—and that’s almost everybody.

Barro hopes that the West, Texas tragedy won’t overshadow the improvements the US has made in workplace safety. He points out that “4,700 Americans died in workplace-related incidents in 2010,” which is “down from 6,200 in 1992, even though the number of employed Americans rose from 109 million to 130 million over that period”:

As Matt Yglesias notes, this isn’t an artifact of sectoral shifts away from manufacturing toward services. Manufacturing work is safer than average, and its on-the-job death rate has fallen almost by half since 1994. Construction, a relatively dangerous sector, has also gotten much safer. Sectors where safety hasn’t improved include agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (which includes some of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S., logging and fishing), and transportation and warehousing.

The bulk of deaths are not due to “industrial accident” events of the type seen in West. In 2010, 40 percent of on-the-job deaths were due to transportation accidents, and an additional 18 percent were due to violence. America’s main workplace safety problems aren’t directly related to the workplace at all: They’re subsets of our general problems with road safety and violent crime.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Come join me, for a while, in an alternative universe. In this universe, Obama is clearly a worse president than George W. Bush. Now how do we get there? Here’s a start:

Many of [Bush’s] supposed failures are mild compared to the current president (e.g. spending, debt).

But by far the biggest factor in today’s debt are the unfunded wars Bush launched and lost, the massive tax cuts which took us from surplus to deficit, a spending spree on Medicare, and a collapse of the economy which occurred on Bush’s watch after eight years of negligent regulation of Wall Street. This sentence is therefore almost perversely deceptive.

Unlike Obama’s tenure, there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11.

Does 9/11 not count? The biggest national security failure since Pearl Harbor – resulting in more than 3,000 deaths? After the president was explicitly warned about its likelihood a month before it happened? Can you imagine what Rubin would be saying if a Democrat had presided over that?

People do remember the big stuff — rallying the country after the Twin Towers attack, 7 1/2 years of job growth and prosperity, millions of people saved from AIDS in Africa, a good faith try for immigration reform, education reform and a clear moral compass.

Credit where it’s due: Bush’s speech to Congress after 9/11 was extraordinary. The original reaction? Not so much. He didn’t return to Washington in that crisis. He panicked. And Cheney went bonkers. Yes, his record on AIDS in Africa remains a great legacy. But the economic growth under Bush was relatively anemic, despite the huge increase in demand caused by the tax cuts. He failed on immigration reform and on social security reform. His education reform has not survived. And the first American president to authorize and defend torture is not a man I would regard as in possession of a “clear moral compass.” Then this:

To the left’s horror, it turns out that most of his anti-terror fighting techniques (e.g. the Patriot Act, enhanced military commissions, Guantanamo) were effective and remain in place. Even the dreaded enhanced interrogation, according to two CIA agents and the former attorney general, contributed to our locating and assassinating Osama bin Laden.

Seriously?

As Emily Bazelon noted, the rigged military commissions have managed to prosecute 7 terror suspects successfully. The civilian courts – which Bush disdained – have convicted almost 500 in comparison. 84 prisoners at Gitmo are on hunger strike; and it has become a rallying cry for Jihad across the globe. Prisoners there were subjected to brutal torture, their meetings with lawyers are bugged and secretly recorded, and the reputation of the United States as a civilized country has been for ever tainted. Maybe soft power doesn’t exist in the mind of Rubin. But Bush did more to destroy America’s soft and hard power by trashing one and over-using the other – and failing to achieve anything of value in return.

Then torture. Note the lack of any discussion about its morality. Note the absence of any mention of the Constitution Project’s report that definitively found that Rubin’s term “enhanced interrogation” meant without question torture. Note the refusal to acknowledge that those with the most information, the Senate Intelligence Committee, have emphatically denied that torture helped get bin Laden. Note also no mention of the fact that Bush had eight years to find and capture or kill bin Laden and failed. Obama found and killed him in three years. We get two CIA agents and an attorney general arguing that their own torture worked. And they have no vested interest in believing or saying that, do they?

As for the surge? It failed dismally on its own terms, but succeeded in getting us out of there. Its own terms were a solid non-sectarian representative government in place to leave behind. Instead, we have a return to brutal sectarianism – only this time with the Shiites in charge. 33 Sunnis were murdered today by government forces – and elections in Anbar and Nineveh, Sunni areas, did not take place.

The country Bush broke is still broken. And the cost in terms of human life and tax-payers’ dollars still looms over us all. And yet some like Rubin still do not see the failure staring at them in the face. Because they cannot. Late-era neoconservatives can never admit error. They do not have the intellect for it.

(Above screenshot from Rubin’s “Ask Anything” series – all five videos are here.)