At Brookings Martha Ross sounds what has become a monotonously recurrent theme with the same persistent conclusion. Millennials are finding it hard to get jobs especially jobs that pay enough for them to pay off their educational loans and the solution to that is more education:

Helping young people prepare to engage in work and life as productive adults is a central task for any society. But after the great K-12 conveyer belt of education ends in the United States, young people out of high school face a landscape of college and training options that can be confusing, difficult to navigate, and financially out of reach—and they also face a labor market that favors those with college degrees.

It’s a small wonder then, that some young people are struggling. In a new analysis, my colleague Natalie Holmes and I found that 17 percent of all 18 to 24 year-olds, or 2.3 million people, in the nation’s largest cities and counties are out of work. Nationally, there are 5 million such young people.

On the whole, their circumstances suggest a difficult transition to adulthood. Only 36 percent worked in the past year, compared to 69 percent of all young adults. Twenty percent left high school before completion, and another forty-three percent report that a high school diploma is their highest level of educational attainment. Only 17 percent are in school, compared to 53 percent of all young adults. (Since so many young adults are in school, and school enrollment affects labor market behavior and prospects, we did not include all students in the analysis.

I’m finding it hard to reconcile the various competing claims. Isn’t that just a more polite, more politically correct way of saying “We’re full”? The American workforce does not need more people with little or no command of English and limited skills. We shouldn’t be importing them and doing so pushes down the wages of other workers with whom they compete for jobs.

How in the world do we plan to to train people who won’t stay in high school long enough to graduate? Saying that such people need more education is facile.

To add insult to injury, I’m now seeing people with master degrees being hired to fill very ordinary positions that a couple of generations ago would have been done by people with high school only. The additional years of education don’t qualify them better for their jobs but it does differentiate them from people with less formal education and add a significant amount of educational debt.

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner calls for removing President Trump from office on grounds of mental unfitness under the 25h Amendment:

This is sad and dangerous. It’s why the 25th Amendment provides procedures for ousting a President who’s demonstrably not up to the job. Instead of embarrassing themselves in public praising him, his top advisors need to seriously consider pulling the plug.

Just for the record and for the umpteenth time, I did not vote for Trump, I think his demeanor is awful, I think some of his policies are wrong, but I think that some of them are right.

I hope that James recognizes the risks in what he’s proposing. If Trump is removed Mike Pence will become president. The ball will be in the Democrats’ court then. If President Pence encounters the same level of resistance that Trump has, Trump’s supporters will, rightly, see the entire Resistance as an attempted coup. There are already serious, sober people who aren’t died in the wool Trump supporters who see the Trump-Russia collusion story as an attempted coup.

There would be a genuine risk of an actual, shooting civil war and IMO no good would come of that.

I agree with Kai Weiss’s thesis in this piece at CapX:

A one-size-fits-all approach from the Commission, along with the need to reach unanimity among member states is, after all, still the preferred path for action at a European level. However, with 28 different voices round the table, reaching unanimity has understandably become more and more difficult.

The refugee crisis of recent years is a case in point. Heads of state and EU officials have been talking about a “European solution” for many years, with very little real progress. Securing the bloc’s external borders and finding a fair but humane way to deal with a complex situation has proven out of the organisation’s reach.

Foreign policy is another example. Of course, there is a big debate over how far Brussels should supersede national governments in this area – thankfully that has meant the more swivel-eyed federalists’ plans for a European army have been swiftly rebutted by a chorus of opposing member states.

At the same time, it’s striking how member states have been unable to agree on even the smallest matters, like when the EU wanted to issue a joint statement to support Juan Guaidó as the rightful president of Venezuela – in the end Brussels decided it had no opinion on the matter, although individual governments have made their views clear.

The Commission’s one-size-fits-all solutions have alienated many countries. As Brussels, together with the infamous Franco-German engine, has pushed for ever more integration over the decades, other countries that are more sceptical about giving up their sovereignty have felt pressured towards accepting “ever closer union”.

The backlash to this over-federalisation of Europe has, of course, been most keenly felt in the UK, which has now decided to forge its own path (if its government ever actually gets round to leaving).

but I don’t think he really appreciates the problem. The EU isn’t pursuing a “one size fits all” strategy. It’s pursuing a “one size fits Germany” strategy. That is evident from the demonstrations, some violent, that continue to occur every weekend in France and have been doing so for six months. It is evident from the surge of the Brexit Party in the United Kingdom.

Germany for its part continues to pursue its nearly two century project of Germanizing Europe. Don’t believe it? Let the EU adopt Hungarian as its common language and watch the squawking from the Germans. The idea isn’t as nuts as it sounds. Jakob Grimm who, in addition to collecting fairy tales was also a founder of modern linguistics, proposed that Hungarian should be the international language on the grounds that its grammar was simple and regular and it didn’t have any difficult to pronounce sounds.A one-size-fits-all approach from the Commission, along with the need to reach unanimity among member states is, after all, still the preferred path for action at a European level. However, with 28 different voices round the table, reaching unanimity has understandably become more and more difficult.

The refugee crisis of recent years is a case in point. Heads of state and EU officials have been talking about a “European solution” for many years, with very little real progress. Securing the bloc’s external borders and finding a fair but humane way to deal with a complex situation has proven out of the organisation’s reach.

Foreign policy is another example. Of course, there is a big debate over how far Brussels should supersede national governments in this area – thankfully that has meant the more swivel-eyed federalists’ plans for a European army have been swiftly rebutted by a chorus of opposing member states.

At the same time, it’s striking how member states have been unable to agree on even the smallest matters, like when the EU wanted to issue a joint statement to support Juan Guaidó as the rightful president of Venezuela – in the end Brussels decided it had no opinion on the matter, although individual governments have made their views clear.

The Commission’s one-size-fits-all solutions have alienated many countries. As Brussels, together with the infamous Franco-German engine, has pushed for ever more integration over the decades, other countries that are more sceptical about giving up their sovereignty have felt pressured towards accepting “ever closer union”.

The backlash to this over-federalisation of Europe has, of course, been most keenly felt in the UK, which has now decided to forge its own path (if its government ever actually gets round to leaving).r

At no time has this been more evident than in the treatment of Greece. That Greece, with an economy still in the thralls of a post-colonial lack of capital investment, was utterly unsuited to adopt the euro was obvious from the start. The only way that could work is if the Greeks consumed German goods while the Germans poured money into Greece. The Greeks held up their part of the deal while the Germans declined to live up to theirs, preferring instead to complain about Greek profligacy and sloth (by comparison with German thrift and industry). That the entire policy with respect to Greece was targeted at propping up insolvent German banks does not seem to have occurred to the Germans.

I want to commend a piece at The New Republic by Win McCormack to your attention. Here’s its opening paragraph:

In her illuminating essay “The Revolutionary Tradition and its Lost Treasure”—itself a lost treasure, as so few people who consider themselves within the Western revolutionary tradition ever read or even know about it—Hannah Arendt explains a political concept Thomas Jefferson advanced toward the end of his life, involving the creation of what he called “wards” or “elementary republics.” Jefferson proposed that counties throughout the United States be subdivided into units small enough to permit citizens to conduct their politics on a face-to-face basis. Jefferson was vexed that the U.S. Constitution had, in theory, granted fundamental power to the people, without however giving them any tangible way to actually participate in the process of governing. The elementary ward republics he advocated would, he hoped, provide a means for citizens to exercise political power directly, rather than solely through their elected representatives.

The piece never really addresses the question it purports to be answering: why has European-style socialism never caught on in the United States? I think it’s because more Americans want to be rich than to be equal.

Something that people need to keep in mind as they turn to state socialism to promote their pursuit of stuff is that personal freedom and the freedom to create small, self-organizing groups, a quality so much a part of American society, is that state socialism is inevitably inimical to both. Soviets could not survive the Soviet Union. Such organizations cannot survive state socialism, state capitalism, or crony capitalism all of which inherently seek the consolidation of power within the state. The only way they can thrive is within a liberal democracy and capitalist economy in which the consolidation of power itself is considered an evil that must be fought every single day.

In his Wall Street Journal column today Joseph Sternberg asks the question I have been asking for over a decade. Of the factors that produce growth the factor that is lagging is business investment. Where’s the business investment?

Net private fixed investment (expenditures on equipment, machinery or property minus depreciation) averaged around 8% of gross domestic product between 1947 and 1990, with significant spikes during booms—it hit 10% of GDP under Ronald Reagan. It has lagged since then, however. As of late 2018, amid another burst of GDP growth, net investment was barely half the Reagan level.

The low net-investment baseline Mr. Trump inherited (from Republican and Democratic predecessors alike) doesn’t fully explain today’s shortfall. Despite faster growth, investment has not accelerated under Mr. Trump as much as during past periods of economic strength. Net investment grew by 8% in 2006, 10.9% in 1998 and 16.7% in 1984—the peaks of those business cycles. Mr. Trump managed investment growth of only 6.9% in 2018 and the rate is drifting downward again, not least thanks to Mr. Trump’s antitrade policies.

There is a direct causal connection between low business investment and low productivity gains. Labor productivity increases when businesses invest. I had hoped that the reduction in corporate income taxes would have spurred an increase investment and for a while there that’s just what happened. But my hopes were dashed in the last quarter of 2018 and since. Once again business investment has not risen as it should.

I think the lesson is pretty clear. Executive compensation needs to be tied to earnings not to stock values and that’s especially true when we have a Federal Reserve that’s determined to subsidize the stock market. Over the last couple of decades stock prices have become unmoored from corporate earnings and we need to undo the Clinton Administration’s regulations on executive compensation. We shouldn’t care how high executive compensation increases as long as it’s based on things we care about, i.e. earnings not stock prices. If we want to regulate something it should be to limit the percentage of earnings that can be devoted to executive compensation rather than discouraging investment.

I mean if your compensation is rising anyway, why take the risk of investing?

There is another possibility and that is that we have lost the ability to measure business investment. If that’s the case we are also unable to measure gross domestic product. I don’t think that’s the case and if we had heretofore unmeasured Reagan era levels of business investment I think it would feel more like a business boom than it does but at least it should be mentioned.

It’s a little early, the first Democratic presidential candidate debates being a month away, but I thought I’d put down a marker. The following candidates will not get a majority of the primary votes in their home states:

• Michael Bennet
• Steve Bullock
• Pete Buttigieg
• Julián Castro
• Bill de Blasio
• John Delaney
• Tulsi Gabbard
• Mike Gravel
• Kamala Harris
• Jay Inslee
• Wayne Messam
• Seth Moulton
• Beto O’Rourke
• Tim Ryan
• Marianne Williamson
• Andrew Yang

Of the candidates not in the list above, some (e.g. Biden, Sanders, Warren) will probably win some states and some (e.g. Booker, Hickenlooper) I just can’t assess whether they have enough support to win their home states.

As to those in the list above, is it possible they could win states other than their home states? It’s possible but I wouldn’t count on it.

Today must be the day for comparing apples and oranges. In his latest Washington Post column Robert Samuelson wonders why wage growth is so weak despite the number of people getting jobs, something that must surely be obvious to anyone who isn’t writing from an office in Washington, DC or a house in Alexandria, VA:

After correcting for inflation, wage gains remain sluggish. In April, average weekly earnings for nonsupervisory workers were up 3 percent from a year earlier, to $785.55. Meanwhile, prices as measured by the consumer price index were up 2 percent. Considering that the economy has been expanding for nearly a full decade — a record if it continues through June — this is perplexing, even allowing that wages are growing faster at the top than in the middle.

Theories abound to explain wage behavior. Average workers (it’s said) still recall the ferocity of the 2007-09 recession and are more reluctant to chase higher wages by leaving their present jobs. For similar reasons, employers resist large wage gains. They want to remain competitive in another recession. Both are willing to trade stronger job security for slightly lower pay.

Other theories blame sluggish wage growth on changes in the labor market. The decline of unions — a phenomenon that stretches back to the 1960s — has weakened workers’ bargaining power. Globalization has had the same effect, because in many industries production can be moved abroad where wages are lower. China is an obvious example.

Weak productivity gains amplify the effect. In the long run, strong productivity improvements are the source of higher wages and salaries. From 2010 to 2017, annual productivity increases averaged only 0.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This compared with a post-World War II average of 2 percent. Slower productivity advances mean smaller increases in labor compensation for most workers.

We now have a new theory from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the McKinsey consulting company. It has long been known that the labor share of national income (GDP, for gross domestic product) has been shrinking. In 1947, the labor share was 65.4 percent of GDP; in 2016, it was 56.7 percent of GDP. These figures combined all forms of labor compensation: wages, salaries, fringe benefits.

Meanwhile, the capital share of income — income accruing to shareholders, business owners and other investors — rose roughly from 34.6 percent to 43.3 percent. Worryingly, three quarters of this shift has occurred since 2000. Again, these trends had been known. But McKinsey went a step further. It estimated how much of the slowdown in wages could be attributed to the rise in capital income’s share.

The answer is: about a quarter. That’s the impact of the shift from labor to capital income. The rest of the wage slowdown reflects poor productivity growth (general efficiency) and the tendency of high-income wages and salaries to grow faster than middle-income wages. If the distribution between labor and capital income had remained unchanged since 1998, the average American worker would have a whopping $4,000 in extra annual pay, according to McKinsey’s calculations.

Let me propose some explanations from the ground rather than 50,000 feet. There are several reasons. The first is fear. People are afraid to ask for a raise for fear of being replaced by someone from a temp firm or placement company who’ll work for lower pay and no benefits. Additionally, people find it hard to leave their present jobs to find better-paying ones. There are multiple reasons for that. Multiple-job households are one reason. I could also go into a diatribe on how resume-screening software provides an advantage to people who look good on paper but in practice are incapable of doing the job.

In a slight digression I heard recently from an excellent source that the IT operations of a major financial services company were shut down for a week due to malware, resulting in the loss of at least a week’s work. That would never have happened, say, twenty years ago. Their present operations are being run by temps and placements. There’s a different ethos at work.

Another prospective explanation is that the job reports aren’t telling the whole story. The jobs that are being created don’t pay better than the ones that are being lost. The jobs being created in health care aren’t jobs for physicians or the highest-paid technicians. They’re jobs for bedpan emptiers that pay minimum wage. People earning $25 an hour are still getting fired and the best jobs they can find pay $15 an hour. That depresses the wage figures.

I found this article by Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg, “Millennials Really Are Suffering”, frustrating. Here’s its kernel:

So it’s refreshing to read a book by a right-of-center author who takes the side of the generation born from 1981 through 1996. The millennials aren’t whiners, Wall Street Journal editorialist Joseph Sternberg writes in “The Theft of a Decade”: They have legitimate complaints about economic trends that have hit them particularly hard.

People in the middle of that generation reached adulthood just as the economy fell into the most severe recession since the Great Depression. That recession was followed by a disappointingly slow recovery. Sternberg notes that the effects of entering the labor force in a weak economy are not transitory: Lifetime earnings are measurably lower.

I think that Mr. Sternberg is trying to draw conclusions that can’t be supported by the available data and the problem resides in the assumptions that are being made.

In 1970 measuring a young person’s income relative to those of their parents’ at their age by averaging the incomes of the young person and those in their age cohort, averaging the income of the parents and their age cohort, and comparing them was fairly reasonable. But circumstances have changed in such a way that is no longer reasonable. In 1970 4% of Baby Boomers were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Now it’s four times as many or even more. Comparing today’s Millennials with previous generations is comparing apples and oranges.

Let me say it another way. What policies would have made a difference for the Millennials? That’s a serious question. I don’t think that any policies other than immigration and trade policies would have made much difference.

The other disagreement I had is with Mr. Sternberg’s inclination to blame the Baby Boomers. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, James Clyburn, and Mitch McConnell are all members of the Silent Generation not Baby Boomers. The Silent Generation has been running the country for 30 years and are extremely reluctant to let go. The Baby Boomers are just holding their coats.

In 2012 emissions of CFC-11, thought to be responsible for destroying the ozone layer and which had been declining or flat for years, began to increase again.

Without looking where has the source of the increased emissions been pinpointed?

Answer here.