On January 30th, incoming Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder received a letter from fifty-eight members of Congress asking for a U.S. investigation into a DEA-led counter-narcotics operation in Ahuas, Honduras that went badly w

January 31, 2013

Port-au-Prince - It “shook the house, like this” he says, violently rocking back and forth, acting it out. He yelled to his wife to get out, grabbed the children and went to the street. “Ten minutes later it was,” he said, bringing his hands together, “flat.” With this, Sonny Jean’s post-earthquake story begins; three years later we’re speaking at one of Haiti’s first sewage treatment plants, located in Titanyen.


Sonny Jean, showing off the DINEPA sewage treatment plan in Titanyen; Hundreds of shelters dot the background in Kanaan.

Like many of those who lost their homes, Sonny settled with his family on the Champ de Mars, the public park in downtown Port-au-Prince across from where the national palace once stood, which later became home to at least 20,000 people. Sonny lived there with his family in a small shelter and “it was tough,” he said, adding, “it wasn’t the place I wanted to raise my family.” In December of 2010, a friend tried to convince him to move to a tract of land the government had declared to be of public utility. While at first skeptical of moving so far from downtown Port-au-Prince, he knew he couldn’t stay in the Champ de Mars camp either.

Eventually, he packed up his tent and what belongings had survived the earthquake and went with his wife and children to Kanaan, a vast expanse of land on a hillside about 20 km outside of Port-au-Prince. Like the majority of those who have left the camps, it wasn’t through a rental subsidy or because they were given a temporary shelter or had their home repaired. According to Sonny, he was the first to set up a tent so far west in the area, though he’s now joined by hundreds of others close by, and up to hundreds of thousands in all of Kanaan.

But life there is difficult and was especially in those early days. “I was lonely, man, scared,” he said.  With the wind whipping incessantly and no other families around, there were many restless nights.

Later, across the street from his new home, Sonny noticed some people starting to clear the land. He told his wife he was going to check it out; she was skeptical anything good would come of it. He went across the street, standing alone, just looking on. Eventually he heard someone, who seemed to be in charge, speaking Kreyol but “different than I speak it.” So he responded in English, which he had picked up in the years he had lived in the U.S. on a seaman’s visa. (Though he’d like to return to the U.S. someday, he hasn’t been able to get a new visa.)

The manager, an English speaker from another Caribbean island, was impressed by his English, and after speaking for awhile, offered him a job on the site.

It’s been many months since that chance encounter, and now, some nine months since Haiti’s second sewage treatment plant opened, he was showing the place off; the area where the trucks dump their waste water, the treatment ponds which the water filters in to, the area where they clean the trucks before they exist the plant and also where they hope to have a garden, where they can use the treated water for irrigation.

Last week, the Bureau of Labor statistics released its estimates for union members in the United States in 2012. CEPR published our own analysis of the numbers, including a breakdown of state union membership in the private and public sectors.

Early analysis has emphasized specific measures such as the implementation of so-called “right-to-work” legislation in Indiana or the attacks on public-sector bargaining in Wisconsin. But, a look at changes across the states shows some geographical patterns that cross state lines.

In the three maps below, the states shaded in red hues lost union members between 2011 and 2012; those in hues of blue saw gains. The darker the hue, the greater the gain or loss as measured in percent terms. Louisiana – in dark blue – saw the greatest overall gain with a 39 percent increase in total union members. Arkansas – in bright red – had the greatest decline, losing 21 percent of its union workers.

Click Maps for Larger Version

  

The first map shows the percent change in all union members (that is, combining the public and private sector). The deepest reds – indicating the biggest losses – were concentrated in the center of the country, in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. The biggest concentration of blue shades – where union membership grew most –was in the west (California, Hawaii, and Nevada) and the south (from New Mexico through Texas and Louisiana all the way to Georgia and South Carolina – though the union base in many of these states is, of course, small).

Bloomberg made a serious effort to turn class war into generational war using a column by Evan Soltas that was cleverly titled “Don't Let Class Warfare Turn Into Generational Warfare.” The basic story in the piece is that the baby boomers are skipping into retirement leaving the generations that follow with a huge tab in the form of their Social Security and Medicare benefits. There are a lot of items that are not quite right in the piece which drive this conclusion.

First, the idea that baby boomers have not paid for their retirement is driven entirely by the Medicare side of the equation. Standard calculations of the net tax payments for Social Security show that most baby boomers will pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.

The imbalance on the Medicare side stems from the fact that we pay twice as much per person for our health care as the average for people in other wealthy countries. This is not the result of us getting better care; we don’t generally have better outcomes than people in other countries. It is the result of the fact that we pay more for our care. This means that our doctors get paid much higher salaries (our autoworkers and retail clerks don’t), we pay far more for our drugs, our medical equipment and everything else in our health care system.

This is a story of class war: rich people getting richer from the inefficiency and corruption in the health care system. Soltas and Bloomberg are turning reality on its head in trying to make it a question of generational warfare.

In the same vein, Soltas gives us the generational accounts from Larry Kotlikoff, an economist who has made a career of trying to foment generational warfare. The Congressional Budget Office decided almost 20 years ago that Kotlikoff’s shenanigans were not good enough for government work, a conclusion I reached a few months earlier in my classic, “Robbing the Cradle? A Critical Assessment of Generational Accounting."

Soltas falls for a couple of Kotlikoff’s tricks in warning us that net tax rates for those born in 2026 will rise to 73 percent. First, Kotlikoff uses a 4 percent real discount rate compared to the 2 percent industry standard. This is a bit technical, but making the switch raises his net tax burden figure by close to 50 percent.

January 30, 2013 (GDP Byte)

Image: This satire of El País' publication of a fake photo of President Hugo Chávez on its front page last week captures the quality of much media reporting on Venezuela.  El País is the most influential paper in Spain and has much influence also in Lati

Ha-Joon Chang
The Guardian Unlimited, January 28, 2013

Mark WeisbrotAl Jazeera English, January 29, 2013En Español

January 29, 2013 (Housing Market Monitor)

January 29, 2013