GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino puts the recent UAW victory in Tennessee into perspective. A slice:
The reason the election is such a big deal is that this same facility in Tennessee voted against UAW representation in 2014 and 2019. Tennessee is a right-to-work state, and without the aid of government coercion to make workers join, the vast majority of Americans don’t want to be part of a union.
Despite wall-to-wall positive coverage of labor unions in the past two years, and constant press about the union “renaissance” and “resurgence,” the union membership rate in the U.S. declined to a record low of just 10 percent in 2023. It’s only 6 percent in the private sector.
Under Mr. Biden’s SAVE plans, a typical borrower will pay only $6,121 for every $10,000 borrowed. Hence, the plans covert loans into a 39% “grant” without an appropriation from Congress. “Indeed, the Federal Government bragged in March that the clear majority of individuals on this new plan—57%—are paying nothing,” one state lawsuit notes.
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As for legal authority, the department refers to a section of the Higher Education Act that supposedly lets Mr. Cardona “craft ‘an alternate repayment plan,’ under certain circumstances.” But it omits that the law specifies that this authority is to be exercised “on a case by case basis” to “accommodate the borrower’s exceptional circumstances.”
The Administration is making millions of borrowers eligible for forgiveness and zero payments no matter the circumstances. Even the Obama Administration in a 2015 rule-making disclaimed the authority to relax repayment terms as Mr. Biden has done because “such a change would require congressional action.”
Andrew Stuttaford decries the Tories’ illiberal effort to ban tobacco in Britain.
In America hourly pay growth among 16- to 24-year-olds recently hit 13% year on year, compared with 6% for workers aged 25 to 54. This was the highest “young person premium” since reliable data began (see chart 3). In Britain, where youth pay is measured differently, last year people aged 18 to 21 saw average hourly pay rise by an astonishing 15%, outstripping pay rises among other ages by an unusually wide margin. In New Zealand the average hourly pay of people aged 20 to 24 increased by 10%, compared with an average of 6%.
Emma Camp reports on the Biden administration’s latest battering of liberal values.
Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Matteo Crosignani, Lina Han, Marco Macchiavelli, and André Silva: (HT Tyler Cowen)
Amid the current U.S.-China technological race, the U.S. has imposed export controls to deny China access to strategic technologies. We document that these measures prompted a broad-based decoupling of U.S. and Chinese supply chains. Once their Chinese customers are subject to export controls, U.S. suppliers are more likely to terminate relations with Chinese customers, including those not targeted by export controls. However, we find no evidence of reshoring or friend-shoring. As a result of these disruptions, affected suppliers have negative abnormal stock returns, wiping out $130 billion in market capitalization, and experience a drop in bank lending, profitability, and employment.
