Tag: "unemployment"

The Cost of At-Home Caregiving

The MetLife report said that for the typical woman, the lost wages due to dropping out of the labor force because of adult caregiving responsibilities averages nearly $143,000. That figure reflects the wages lost while not working — typically for about five years — as well as lower wages after returning to the workforce with rusty skills. When foregone pension and Social Security benefits are counted, the out-of-pocket losses roughly double.

Full article by Marilyn Geewax on nursing homes quality service in the NPR.

May 10, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Jobs Matter

There’s plenty of reason to worry about the long-term unemployed. Plenty of evidence suggests that when a person stays unemployed for seven months or more, it becomes harder and harder for him or her to ever return to the workforce.

This is Brad Plumer at Ezra Klein’s blog. Full post is interesting.

May 07, 2012 | 4 comments | by

For the bottom 1%: Prison Release or Factories Behind Bars

David Henderson’s post:

In our prisons today are 2,200,000 people… and their wages are typically about 23 cents an hour. They are, essentially, the bottom 1%. Many of them are there for violent crimes, theft, fraud, and other such things. But hundreds of thousands of them are there for buying, selling, or producing illegal drugs. The drug war has put them there. And we taxpayers are paying $30,000 a year and more to keep them there….

We hear the occupy people advocate taxing the top 1% more. I’ve got a better idea: let’s tax the top 1% less – they’re already paying a disproportionately high share of taxes – and let a few hundred thousand of the bottom 1% percent out of prison and out of their grinding poverty in prison.

And my comment:

And for those who are kept in prison, let’s allow factories behind bars, so that they earn more than 23 cents an hour. Here is the principle: just because a person is imprisoned does not mean he should lose his right to work. In fact, prisoners should be able to work for any employer at any task, consistent with the prison’s need for order and security.

Apr 30, 2012 | 7 comments | by

Obama Labor Department: Hiring Quotas for the Disabled

The Obama administration is on the verge of compelling most of the largest corporations and universities, as well as many smaller businesses, to adopt a 7% hiring quota for disabled job applicants—lest they be debarred from doing business with the federal government. This radical personnel policy could raise costs and slash the productivity of almost 200,000 companies with U.S. government contracts.

James Bovard article in the WSJ.

Apr 25, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Lottery Winners: Rags to Riches to Rags Again

The central finding is this: people who win large amounts are just as likely to end up bankrupt as people who win small amounts. People who win a large amount, $50,000 to $150,000, have a lower bankruptcy rate immediately after winning but a higher bankruptcy rate a few years later so the 5-year bankruptcy rate for the big winners is no lower than for the small winners. Amazingly, by the time the big winners do go bankrupt their assets and debts are not significantly different from those of the small winners.

More from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution

Feb 10, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Who Gets Welfare?

Source: Census Bureau

The chart shows the percent of households receiving a benefit in each of the education categories. For example:

Over a third of households with heads whose formal education was limited to a high school diploma — the most common type of household — received at least one of these types of assistance in 2010. A majority of households with heads who stopped their schooling before graduating from high school received government assistance in 2010.

Total assistance was about $600 billion in 2010 and it went to almost one half the population.

Source: University of Chicago professor Casey Mulligan at The New York Times’ Economix blog.

Feb 03, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Paying People Not To Work

  1. The statistical evidence on [Unemployment Insurance] is overwhelming significant. When the UI benefits maxed out at 26 weeks, there was a spike in the number re-employed right after the benefits ran out… it’s hard to dispute the fact that UI insurance does have some effect on labor supply. And that means some effect on employment, as studies show that the effects on unemployment duration even occur in areas with double digit unemployment.
  2. Many Western European countries such as France saw their natural rates of unemployment rise from around 2% in the 1960s to about 10% in the 1980s. We don’t know all the reasons, but the most plausible explanations have to do with various labor market policies….
  3. Denmark recently found that their four year maximum on UI benefits was distorting the labor market, and cut the maximum duration to 2 years. Denmark is arguably the most progressive, most civic-minded country on Earth. Were they just imagining this problem?

More from Scott Sumner.

Dec 16, 2011 | 2 comments | by

ObamaCare is Killing Jobs

When CKE’s health care advisers, citing Obamacare’s complexities, opacities and uncertainties, said it would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million health care costs in 2010, [Carl] Puzder said: I need a number I can plan with. They guessed $18 million — twice what CKE spent last year building new restaurants. Obamacare means fewer restaurants. And therefore fewer jobs… Rising health care costs are, he says, just one uncertainty inhibiting expansion. Others are government policies raising fuel costs, which infect everything from air conditioning to the cost (including deliveries) of supplies, and the threat that the National Labor Relations Board will use regulations to impose something like “card check” in place of secret-ballot unionization elections.

Full op-ed by George Will here. 

Dec 07, 2011 | 2 comments | by

Are We Paying People not to Work?

See Casey B. Milligan New York Times editorial.

Nov 03, 2011 | 3 comments | by

Ugly Forecast: We Are Headed Toward a Double Dip

[Its current forecast is] chilling: as bad as the economy has been, it’s about to get worse. … ‘If the United States isn’t already in a recession now it’s about to enter one,’ says Lakshman Achuthan, … chief operations officer … ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if [the unemployment rate] goes back up into double digits’ … Achuthan … says … gross domestic product rate is likely to go negative by the first quarter of 2012.”

New York Times story here.

 

Oct 10, 2011 | 4 comments | by
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