1. Chart of the Day (above). The Census Bureau’s monthly report on retail sales this week showed that Americans spent more dining out in November (about $53 billion) than they spent on food at grocery stores (about $51 billion). That marks the tenth straight month starting in February that restaurant spending was greater than grocery store sales, and except for October at $1.98 billion, November’s difference in favor of restaurants was the largest to date ($1.97 billion).
2. More Obamacare Fallout: An Investor’s Business Daily analysis by Jed Graham finds that ObamaCare will raise the marginal tax rate for some families as high as 70%. For example, a family of four that earns an extra $11,800 income will have to give back about $8,200 in higher taxes.
3. Quotation of the Day, is from Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who was the president of Yale University in 1991 when he wrote this (from the WSJ’s Notable and Quotable section this week):
The most serious problems of freedom of expression in the U.S. today exist on our campuses. Freedom of thought is in danger from well-intentioned but misguided efforts to give values of community and harmony a higher place than freedom. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce “correct” opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.
4. Creative Destruction. Streaming video now accounts for 70% of broadband usage from services that didn’t even exist (or barely existed) a decade ago: Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Facebook, Amazon video, etc.
5. Gender Pay Gaps in Pro Sports. Female players in the WNBA earn an average salary of about $75,000 compared to the average NBA salary of $4.5 million. That means that a WNBA player earns about 1.5 cents on average for every $1 earned by an NBA player, for doing basically exactly the same work. Likewise, female professional soccer players in the US earn about 1.4 cents for every $1 earned by male soccer players, according to this Vox article. I see two possibilities here: a) investigations by the Department of Justice for a “disparate impact” violation or some other violation of the Equal Pay Act, or b) women should try to switch leagues and play on the men’s teams.
6. Who-d a-Thunk It? Academic finance and economics professors aren’t very good investors and can’t beat the market? No real surprise here, but Noah Smith offers some insights in Bloomberg in an article titled “The World’s Smartest Bad Investors.”
7. A Lack of Economic Growth, Not Income Inequality, is the Real Problem. That’s what we learn from J.T. Young writing in Real Clear Markets, here’s a slice:
Liberals are unlikely to be persuaded by the obvious observation: income inequality is rather simply, if also miserably, cured. This is what the late and unlamented communist regimes succeeded so mightily in – an equality of poverty for all but their ruling political class. Likewise, liberals are unlikely to be persuaded by evidence that a slowing economy produces the income inequality they bemoan.
Liberals have seized on income inequality as their version of the current economy’s flaw because it both shifts the focus of blame from their policies, and seemingly justifies a greater pursuit of those policies – higher spending, higher taxes, and more regulation – in the cause of redistribution.
In doing so, they have not just reversed effect and cause, but cure and culprit. Far from ameliorating the effects of income inequality, the left’s policies have created the slow growth that most exacerbates it. This is where we now stand, and have stood for almost a decade. We risk a nadir of stagnation worthy of Atlas Shrugged, in which we are all equally impoverished.
8. Video of the Day (below). A Christmas classic from 2011, the Carlson School of Management Flash Mob featuring “Deck the Halls” (2.6 million views on YouTube). Would a university dare do even this today in the new anti-Christmas environment on college campuses today? A lot has changes in just four years…..
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1Y7o6tl
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