State GDP And Personal Income Maps: Percent Change 1st Quarter 2023

From Bureau of Economic Analysis, "Gross Domestic Product by State and Personal Income by State, 1st Quarter 2023"

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the first quarter of 2023, with the percent change ranging from 12.4 percent in North Dakota to 0.1 percent in Rhode Island and Alabama, according to statistics released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).***Personal income, in current dollars, increased in 48 states and the District of Columbia in the first quarter of 2023, with the percent change ranging from 11.4 percent in Maine to –1.0 percent in Indiana.

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

  *** Personal income In the first quarter of 2023, as current-dollar personal income for the nation grew at an annual rate of 5.1 percent, state personal income increased in 48 states and the District of Columbia.
 

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Did State Colleges Exacerbate The High Cost Of College? Reprint With Addendum

Reprint of my 12-year-old blog post, "Why College Is Expensive" about the price of college.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Why College Is Expensive

Posted By Milton Recht

A comment I posted on "Why does college cost so much?" by Tyler Cowen:

Colleges and universities do lower their costs of teaching. They use low cost adjuncts, grad students and post docs. They increase class sizes, use large lecture halls and eliminate courses with low enrollments. Schools look for ways to save on heating, cooling and other and energy costs. There is no shortage of competition for students at US colleges as at each beginning term there are many unfilled seats at many of the colleges and universities in the US. A greater part of tuition has gone to non-teaching parts of universities, e.g. administrative, fund raising, sports, buildings, dorms, stadiums, and other physical structures, etc.

Obviously many schools have pricing power and can and have raised their prices without seeing ill effects in applications.

It has been like this for decades.

A more logical reason for pricing power at private universities is the existence of state schools.

State colleges took away from private colleges, the most price sensitive element of college students and parents, lower income and middle class students. Private universities became a luxury good and a sign of affordability for the rich. While private colleges these days do provide financial aid, most colleges do so for only about half or less of their students for less than half the tuition and room and board costs.

Without state colleges there would have been greater pricing and political pressure on private colleges to make schools affordable for the middle and lower income group. Colleges would have be been more frugal with their spending to keep costs and financial aid low so more middle class and lower incomes students could attend.

Basically, state colleges allowed private colleges to become luxury [and Veblen] goods for price insensitive [and staus seeking] consumers, which allowed private schools to raise prices without much concern.

Addendum to the original blog post.

Private colleges did not have to significantly expand their student enrollment to meet the demand of increased applications for private college admission. As states created state colleges or expanded their enrolled number of college students, the state schools admitted the students who were not accepted at private colleges, or could not afford the expense of private schools.

State colleges eased the political and pricing pressure on private colleges to expand the size of the admitted student body; to lower tuition and other college expenses; to increase financial aid. State schools could raise their tuition as long as they remained more affordable than private college.

Record Renewables Growth In 2022 Did Nothing To Lower Fossil Fuels Dominance At 82% Of Supply

From Reuters, "Renewables growth did not dent fossil fuel dominance in 2022, report says" by Shadia Nasralla; editing by Philippa Fletcher:

Global energy demand rose 1% last year and record renewables growth did nothing to shift the dominance of fossil fuels, which still accounted for 82% of supply, the industry's Statistical Review of World Energy report said on Monday [Weblink added]. *** The stubborn lead of oil, gas and coal products in covering most energy demand cemented itself in 2022 despite the largest ever increase in renewables capacity at a combined 266 gigawatts, with solar leading wind power growth, the report said.

"Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again," said the president of the UK-based global industry body Energy Institute, Juliet Davenport.

Inflation Adjusted 10.5% Drop In 2022 Charitable Giving

From Wall Street Journal, Opinion, Commentary, "A Tax Deduction Won’t Save U.S. Charities: Adjusted for inflation, donations fell 10.5% last year from 2021." By Leslie Lenkowsky:

High inflation is hitting America’s charities. Donations last year dropped by 3.4% from 2021 levels, or 10.5% after adjusting for inflation, according to the Giving USA report released this week. Never in its more than 60-year history has this annual report recorded so steep a single-year decline in real dollars.***According to Giving USA’s inflation-adjusted estimates, all three main sources of philanthropy—corporations, individuals and foundations—cut back last year. At 6.4%, the decline in individual giving measured in nominal dollars approached that of the Great Recession, when philanthropy plummeted. Factoring in 2022’s inflation more than doubled the drop.

All kinds of charities saw giving slide. Inflation-adjusted declines for education and “public-society benefit” organizations (such as political advocacy, community development and policy research groups) exceeded the national drop, while giving to the arts, environment and human services almost matched it. Donors kept supporting religion and healthcare at close to 2021 levels.

US States (+DC) Homelessness Rates Per 10,000 People

From USA Facts, "Which states have the highest and lowest rates of homelessness? California, Vermont, and Oregon have the highest rates of homelessness across the 50 states." Published on Thu, March 16, 2023 5:00AM PDT | Updated Tue, May 16, 2023 4:53PM PDT:

Source: USA Facts

US Needs To Evaluate The Effectiveness OF Legislation

Reprint of my December 2, 2014, blog post, "Replace The Congressional Budget Office With A Legislation Effectiveness Office" that will evaluate the effectiveness of existing legislation.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Replace The Congressional Budget Office With A Legislation Effectiveness Office

Posted By Milton Recht

My published comment to The Wall Street Journal Opinion, "How to Score in Congress: The GOP needs reformers to run CBO and the Joint Tax Committee:"

In the private sector, costs and revenue are associated with the same service or product. In the public sector, costs are incurred for a benefit, but the revenue is from unrelated taxes and fees.

Evaluate government programs by their effectiveness in achieving their purpose and not by the amount of taxes and fees that Congress includes in the same bill. Congress can enact the taxes and fees associated with many bills without the passage of the original program bill. The new funds could be used to lower our debt or balance our budget.

Instead of a Congressional Budget Office, the US needs an Effectiveness Office to analyze the likelihood that a proposed law or program will achieve its purposes; to study the effectiveness of previously enacted legislation in achieving stated goals.

Having ineffective programs and laws removed would do more good, then balancing the books of new programs and laws with more fees and taxes. Reorganize the CBO as a Program Effectiveness Office.

Former FBI Director James Comey's 2016 Press Statement on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Use of a Personal E-Mail System

Former FBI Director James B. Comey's July 5, 2016, press statement on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Use of a Personal E-Mail System:

Washington, D.C.

July 5, 2016

Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Use of a Personal E-Mail System

Remarks prepared for delivery at press briefing.

Good morning. I’m here to give you an update on the FBI’s investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail system during her time as Secretary of State.

After a tremendous amount of work over the last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and referring the case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision. What I would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.

This will be an unusual statement in at least a couple ways. First, I am going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would, because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of intense public interest. Second, I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.

I want to start by thanking the FBI employees who did remarkable work in this case. Once you have a better sense of how much we have done, you will understand why I am so grateful and proud of their efforts.

So, first, what we have done:

The investigation began as a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General in connection with Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server during her time as Secretary of State. The referral focused on whether classified information was transmitted on that personal system.

Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.

Consistent with our counterintelligence responsibilities, we have also investigated to determine whether there is evidence of computer intrusion in connection with the personal e-mail server by any foreign power, or other hostile actors.

I have so far used the singular term, “e-mail server,” in describing the referral that began our investigation. It turns out to have been more complicated than that. Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. As new servers and equipment were employed, older servers were taken out of service, stored, and decommissioned in various ways. Piecing all of that back together—to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work—has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.

For example, when one of Secretary Clinton’s original personal servers was decommissioned in 2013, the e-mail software was removed. Doing that didn’t remove the e-mail content, but it was like removing the frame from a huge finished jigsaw puzzle and dumping the pieces on the floor. The effect was that millions of e-mail fragments end up unsorted in the server’s unused—or “slack”—space. We searched through all of it to see what was there, and what parts of the puzzle could be put back together.

FBI investigators have also read all of the approximately 30,000 e-mails provided by Secretary Clinton to the State Department in December 2014. Where an e-mail was assessed as possibly containing classified information, the FBI referred the e-mail to any U.S. government agency that was a likely “owner” of information in the e-mail, so that agency could make a determination as to whether the e-mail contained classified information at the time it was sent or received, or whether there was reason to classify the e-mail now, even if its content was not classified at the time it was sent (that is the process sometimes referred to as “up-classifying”).

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.

With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”

I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.

It could also be that some of the additional work-related e-mails we recovered were among those deleted as “personal” by Secretary Clinton’s lawyers when they reviewed and sorted her e-mails for production in 2014.

The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server.

It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.

We have conducted interviews and done technical examination to attempt to understand how that sorting was done by her attorneys. Although we do not have complete visibility because we are not able to fully reconstruct the electronic record of that sorting, we believe our investigation has been sufficient to give us reasonable confidence there was no intentional misconduct in connection with that sorting effort.

And, of course, in addition to our technical work, we interviewed many people, from those involved in setting up and maintaining the various iterations of Secretary Clinton’s personal server, to staff members with whom she corresponded on e-mail, to those involved in the e-mail production to State, and finally, Secretary Clinton herself.

Last, we have done extensive work to understand what indications there might be of compromise by hostile actors in connection with the personal e-mail operation.

That’s what we have done. Now let me tell you what we found:

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).

None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system, but their presence is especially concerning because all of these e-mails were housed on unclassified personal servers not even supported by full-time security staff, like those found at Departments and Agencies of the U.S. Government—or even with a commercial service like Gmail.

Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

While not the focus of our investigation, we also developed evidence that the security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified e-mail systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.

With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial e-mail accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account. We also assess that Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal e-mail extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related e-mails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

So that’s what we found. Finally, with respect to our recommendation to the Department of Justice:

In our system, the prosecutors make the decisions about whether charges are appropriate based on evidence the FBI has helped collect. Although we don’t normally make public our recommendations to the prosecutors, we frequently make recommendations and engage in productive conversations with prosecutors about what resolution may be appropriate, given the evidence. In this case, given the importance of the matter, I think unusual transparency is in order.

Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. Responsible decisions also consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.

In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.

As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.

I know there will be intense public debate in the wake of this recommendation, as there was throughout this investigation. What I can assure the American people is that this investigation was done competently, honestly, and independently. No outside influence of any kind was brought to bear.

I know there were many opinions expressed by people who were not part of the investigation—including people in government—but none of that mattered to us. Opinions are irrelevant, and they were all uninformed by insight into our investigation, because we did the investigation the right way. Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way. I couldn’t be prouder to be part of this organization.

Excess Unfilled Job Openings Are Not A Sign That The US Needs Additional Workers: Reprint

Reprint of my 4 year old blog post, May 11, 2019, "Job Opening Excess Does Not Mean The US Needs Additional Labor."

Saturday, May 11, 2019

Job Opening Excess Does Not Mean The US Needs Additional Labor

Posted By Milton Recht

My published comment to The Wall Street Journal, Opinion, "Help Wanted in the U.S.A.: More guest workers would ease the growing labor shortage." by The Editorial Board:

The existence of [excess] job openings does not equate to a need for additional labor. There will always be marginal businesses that do not have the funds to invest in equipment, that are profitable and exist only if labor is very cheap. Keeping labor costs low by importing more labor leads to a misallocation of resources into unsustainable businesses that are unneeded, inefficient and have artificially low product prices. When the WWII Bracero guest migrant agricultural worker program, which existed from 1942 to 1964, ended in 1964, farming equipment replaced the lost workers without a loss of output. Additionally, as workers gain experience, they move into higher productivity jobs at higher wages at the same or different firms. An unfillable opening at the lower wage previous job is a signal to the employer that its products and processes are inefficient and lack needed added consumer value to allow the payment of a competitive wage. Importing cheap labor distorts capital investment [and decreases productivity].