Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State

[Jason McCullough]

So there's a couple of statistics/political science professors. They wrote a book (http://redbluerichpoor.com/). And it explains everything.

I'm too drunk to transform the bullet points I made into sentences, so you get bullet points. And you'll like it.

Shorter version of the book: why Sarah Palin is a culture warrior - she's filthy rich (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/tag/gelman).


The basic image here, also seen in Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, is of low-income people hoodwinked into backing the GOP by culture war rhetoric. But Andrew Gelman and his coauthors in the excellent Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State mount a huge pile of data to suggest that this isn’t the case. Overall, low income back strongly and consistently back Democratic candidates. Where you see culture war voting is among rich people. They explain this, plausibly, in terms of the fact that privileged people are able to do more to express their cultural preferences — both in terms of lifestyle and in terms of who they vote for. Poor people need to spend their money on stuff they need and cast their votes for practical reasons. But the well-off can afford to indulge their preferences about where to live, how to vacation, and what recreational pursuits to follow and divergent tastes in these matters continues into the voting booth.

Our current crop of candidates offers up some pretty good examples of this. The McCain family is really stinkin’ rich (inheriting multi-million dollar fortunes and owning a dozen houses) but the other three couples on national tickets are well-off on a much more banal scale. The Palin family, the Obama family, and the Biden family all have incomes running into the six figures which is much more than your average American family has. But the Palins choose to spend their money in very different ways. They’re raising five kids, getting into competitive snowmobiling, going on moose hunting expeditions, etc. This isn’t stuff that your typical coastal elites care to do with their time and money, but none of it’s cheap, either. Rather, these are the leisure pursuits of Red America’s economic elite while prosperous people in Blue America are instead raising fewer children in smaller houses that are much more expensive per square foot and spending money on cheese plates rather than moooseburgers. The Myth

Example 1: Tucker Carlson, 2007 - Ok, but here's the fact that nobody ever, ever mentions - Democrats win rich people. Over $100,000 in income, you are like more than not to vote for Democrats. People never point that out. Rich people vote liberal. I don't know what that's all about.
Example 2: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2002/03/22/i-hate-your-politics/
Example 3:: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/03/the-trustfunder.html (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/%7Ecook/movabletype/archives/2005/03/the-trustfunder.html)
Interesting, because it sounds like it's right if you glance at what state voted for who


Reality

Strong correlation between income and voting in red states (strong in Texas for both counties and voters)
Weak correlation between income and voting in blue states (virtually nothing in Maryland)
Rich states vote for Democrats, Rich voters vote for Republican
Poor states vote for Republicans, poor voters vote for Democrats (Bush 62% 200k+, 36% 15k-)


Details

State trend has appeared in last thirty years; didn't exist in 1976
Rich/poor voter divide has increased in last thirty years
David Brooks vs. Thomas Frank

Both socially liberal
Disagree on economics
Both live in Washington DC area
Very easy to find a county that votes for the GOP and is poorer than Democratic-voting county in Maryland
Journalists live in rich states, availability bias




Why?
Demographic vote shifts

Last 30 years have seen white-collar and professionals go Democratic
Last 30 years have seen owners and both skilled and non-skilled workers go Republican

Minority misidentification

People who aren't black think blacks are 24% of the population, not the correct 12% of the population
Majority of whites think blacks are doing as well or better than everyone else economically; actually have 60% less average earnings
Similar conclusions about immigrants and minorities seen in Europe
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/07/overestimates-o.html (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/%7Ecook/movabletype/archives/2005/07/overestimates-o.html)
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/06/misperception-o.html (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/%7Ecook/movabletype/archives/2005/06/misperception-o.html)

Rich voter culture war

Evangelical protestants have moved to the GOP
Catholics and Mainline protestants have moved to the center
Changes mostly concentrated in voting behavior of the rich in poor states
Religion correlates with income in poor states, reverse in rich states
Top 10% of income = 15% of votes

Partisan gap

Voters issue opinions still mixed (85% of GOP is not conservative or does have official opinion on an issue; roughly same for Democrats)
Southern conservative democrats go to the GOP
Killer Bartels graph - the rich make out like bandits under the GOP while everyone else is screwed, under Democrats everyone does pretty well instead

http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/03/american-politi.html
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/04/larry-bartels-o.html (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/%7Ecook/movabletype/archives/2006/04/larry-bartels-o.html)
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/04/more-on-larry-b.html (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/%7Ecook/movabletype/archives/2006/04/more-on-larry-b.html)


Geographical industry difference on donations
Regressions that Democrats can't do much better by moving left economically, which I don't buy
Public vs. elite
Enormous public margins for taxes on the superrich

Conclusions

Explains an awful lot, doesn't it?


Andrew Gelman Links

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/02/rich-and-poor-still-vote-differently-in.html
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/ (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/%7Egelman/blog/)

[Bill Dungsroman]

Some people post while high and out comes gibberish.

McCullough posts while high and writes...an outline.

[Jason McCullough]

I wrote up the outline earlier while sober, I'm just too lazy to pretend to turn it into a book review.

It's a seriously amazing book for how they tease the correlations from the data.

[Chris Nahr]

I don't know about American voter distribution but I've sure seen a lot of movies, so...




Minority misidentification

People who aren't black think blacks are 24% of the population, not the correct 12% of the population
Majority of whites think blacks are doing as well or better than everyone else economically; actually have 60% less average earnings


They may get their ideas about blacks from movies which routinely overrepresent both the population share and the income level of blacks, in the interest of promoting racial equality. Blacks are the principal media stereotypes for "other"/"victim"/"look how tolerant we are", due to the history of slavery and racism and probably also due to simply looking the most different from their white target audience. To correctly reflect America's contemporary ethnic composition, movies should feature a shitload more Asians and Hispanics and a good deal fewer Africans, and only the Asians would typically appear in high-income jobs.

[SteveS]

FiveThirtyEight.com (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/how-went-2008-election-looking-only-at.html) did a piece yesterday with three nice maps that summarizes the state vote by income group. If only low income voters were counted, Obama would have damn near wiped McCain.

[Anders Hallin]

To correctly reflect America's contemporary ethnic composition, movies should feature a shitload more Asians and Hispanics and a good deal fewer Africans, and only the Asians would typically appear in high-income jobs.
I really don't think African-Americans make up 12% of the movie population (until the mid-80s, 2% of major movie stars had been African-American), and if they do, it's likely not as full, "normal" characters. So I think it'd rather be a reduction of whites and more ethnic diversity.

Though I'm pretty sure the miscalculation of black wealth has more to do with thinking that black people get some magical welfare checks that they can live the high life on, instead of the miserable existence they actually provide.

[Chris Nahr]

I really don't think African-Americans make up 12% of the movie population (until the mid-80s, 2% of major movie stars had been African-American), and if they do, it's likely not as full, "normal" characters.

African-Americans tend to make up a very small part of both the total cast and of the big stars whose names sell movies, but starting around the 1980s you got a virtually mandatory black co-star or two whose characters represent an equal or higher professional position relative to the white star(s) of the movie. Naturally, the audience doesn't count how many black extras are standing around in the background; but if there's one black boss (as co-star with a good deal of screentime) of three white professionals then you've got your impression of 25% blacks with high income, contrary to the real situation where such situations are much rarer.


Though I'm pretty sure the miscalculation of black wealth has more to do with thinking that black people get some magical welfare checks that they can live the high life on, instead of the miserable existence they actually provide.

Overestimation of welfare likely also plays a part, sure.

[Jason McCullough]

To correctly reflect America's contemporary ethnic composition, movies should feature a shitload more Asians and Hispanics and a good deal fewer Africans, and only the Asians would typically appear in high-income jobs.

I can see movies for population percentage, but it doesn't explain the income thing. The income misinterpretation goes back a ways, and I'd say the only blacks in movies until about the mid-1990s were poor criminals.

Family incomes by race here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States). I strongly suspect that the 10% higher median income for asian-headed families is due to more workers and hours per-family, rather than a wage differential. Poking around the web gets a bit of debate; this (http://www.iaas.umb.edu/publications/occasional/MarleneKim.pdf) argues that the common "wages are the same or higher" is due to methodoligcal errors, and finds asian men have 13-20% lower wages due to their race. Which is a slightly different question, but there you go.

[Brandon Clements]

•State trend has appeared in last thirty years; didn't exist in 1976
Because of gathering techniques (I.E. 'we've just started to collect this data)?

[Brandon Clements]

I can see movies for population percentage, but it doesn't explain the income thing. The income misinterpretation goes back a ways, and I'd say the only blacks in movies until about the mid-1990s were poor criminals.

Counterpoint: Action Jackson. Released in 1988, and that's only one example. Now, trending may have some other data, but there were several high-profile black actors playing good guys by that time.

[mystery]

Though I'm pretty sure the miscalculation of black wealth has more to do with thinking that black people get some magical welfare checks that they can live the high life on, instead of the miserable existence they actually provide.

I think the miscalculation comes less from movies and more from TV. I call it "The Cosby Effect".

[Tim James]

The rich culture warrior angle is interesting. I had always considered that the environmentalist camp, for example, was able to act that way or impose their will due to having the excess income to spend on the latest green craze while poor countries and people just want to eat, but never considered that the right does the same thing. I would provide an example about a principle that they can stand on given the luxury that they are rich, but they don't really stand for any principles any more, so that's kind of useless.

[Jason McCullough]

Because of gathering techniques (I.E. 'we've just started to collect this data)?

They do mention this, the income data is available back to the 1930s in various formats. Really all you need is state income distributions and vote outcomes.


I had always considered that the environmentalist camp, for example, was able to act that way or impose their will due to having the excess income to spend on the latest green craze while poor countries and people just want to eat, but never considered that the right does the same thing.

Yeah, me too. Apparently it's the new post-materialist politics (http://www.google.com/search?q=postmaterialist+politics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a).

On the misperception of black numbers and income, apparently that shows up consistently for minorities across a wide range of cultures, so I think blaming it on media is a bit much. That first link (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/07/overestimates-o.html) shows Hungary wildly overestimates the number of immigrants, which I'm pretty sure is not due to immigrant overportrayal on until-recently-state-communist television. It's interesting data though, I can't find really in-depth discussions on why.

[Jason McCullough]

A couple more interesting bits:

Restricting to only white voters (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/01/rich-state-poor-1.html) removes half of the rich-poor voting gap.

Jamie Galbraith makes the interesting case that all the income inequality jump is incredibly concentrated (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/02/betweensector-e.html) in just a few counties (http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/03/jamie_galbraith.html).


County data confirm this: The big income winners in the late 1990s were concentrated in just four counties--Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo in California (all in the environs of Silicon Valley), and King County in Washington (Microsoft) as well as in Manhattan, the home of the bankers who made it happen. Take the big tech counties out, and the rise in inequality between counties in the late 1990s disappears.

[Aeon221]

A couple more interesting bits:

Restricting to only white voters (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/01/rich-state-poor-1.html) removes half of the rich-poor voting gap.

Jamie Galbraith makes the interesting case that all the income inequality jump is incredibly concentrated (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/02/betweensector-e.html) in just a few counties (http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/03/jamie_galbraith.html).

Well, yes, if you get rid of all the rich people, inequality does indeed disappear. I bet you could remove Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit and Oakland and halve the number of black people in this thingie.

[Jason McCullough]

Well, I'm more than a little surprised there's that much of a voting gap in rich asians, blacks, and hispanics.

[Chris Nahr]

On the misperception of black numbers and income, apparently that shows up consistently for minorities across a wide range of cultures, so I think blaming it on media is a bit much. That first link (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/07/overestimates-o.html) shows Hungary wildly overestimates the number of immigrants, which I'm pretty sure is not due to immigrant overportrayal on until-recently-state-communist television.

Why are you so sure? I don't know the Hungarian media but it's certainly conceivable that they run a lot of scare stories about immigrant crime etc. Overrepresentation in the negative rather than positive sense.

[Jason McCullough]

I'm just guessing like you are. :)

[Sarkus]

I wrote up the outline earlier while sober, I'm just too lazy to pretend to turn it into a book review.


You write outlines before posting on the internet?

I seriously don't understand how you have the time for all of this. Are you on meth or something?

:-)

[Jason McCullough]

Once I was done reading it took maybe a half hour to flip through and write all that down.

[Jason McCullough]

One really interesting bit I forgot to mention - in an side (http://books.google.com/books?id=YerA7ZQLYr0C&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=the+end+of+inequality+james+snyder+republican&source=bl&ots=XpU251pUqf&sig=ScG3TPR5IkjPf4nY13UvKbz9gpc&hl=en&ei=KI6wSYPUBYnKtQPCo9mUAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result), they reference this book (http://www.amazon.com/End-Inequality-Transformation-American-Democracy/dp/039393103X), which covers how before the 1960s one-man, one-vote reforms, the population ratios between equal size congressional districts could be 20 to 1 (http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/elj.2009.8102), as politicians were not redistricting to keep up with the massive increase in urban/suburban population.

The overrepresentation for rural interests was tremendous. In the South at least, rural areas were more racist but also more less conservative economically than suburban or urban areas. So part of the 1960s-and-beyond shift in power away from the Democrats (and also towards less terrible racial politics) was due to the Supreme Court cleaning up violations of proportional representation.

[wildpokerman]

"Rich state" is all up in the air now.

California is getting their ass handed to them with an onerous business unfriendly tax burden, a drop off of the import economy making their ports a bit less profitable, and a strangling real estate collapse.

The Tri-state area, Delaware and Rhode Island are feeling the gigantic sucking sound of the collapse of the brokerage and banking industries.

I'd say that every area and demographic is in play again for either party. Over the next few years it's going to be about whoever can put people to work.

[Jason McCullough]

Well that's certainly a well-supported statistical prediction.

[Greatatlantic]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/correlation.png

Seemed appropriate, since I wanted to say something along the lines of correlation not proving causation. Also, "lies, damned lies, and statistics." I have not read the book and I just checked my library and its already checked out, so I'm not claiming the authors draw bad conclusions at any point, because I have neither access to their data nor conclusions.

However....

1) Does anyone doubt that race triumphs class in American politics? Namely, blacks vote 95% for democrats. Any discussion on voting patterns accross income needs to filter this demographic out first as best as possible. Furthermore, there is an argument out there that racial politics have played a very important implicit role in Republican success in the South.

2) "Income" does not imply class. For example, some manual labor jobs pay much better than typical white collar entry level jobs. Also, "artisinal" workers (basically working class people who own their own business) are going to have very different economic values than either most working class individuals or college educated professionals.

Etc., Etc. Still, sounds like an interesting read.

[wahoo]

GA=Famous Harvard Econ professor. I had no idea! I've read your textbooks man.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/03/identification-problem.html

[Greatatlantic]

GA=Famous Harvard Econ professor. I had no idea! I've read your textbooks man.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/03/identification-problem.html

Uh... no, I am not Greg Mankiw. Though apparently we both read XKCD.

[Jason McCullough]

Couple of good questions, GA.

Race
1. I'm not sure what you mean about filtering out blacks on the questions of class-based of voting; blacks are highly over-represented in the lower income classes. If you want to do so, however, note that the bookend to the black population voting 95% for Obama (and matching vote totals in mostly-black cities and places like DC) is whites in places like Mississippi voting 88% for McCain. I shit you not, go here (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#MSP00p1). Mississippi is the most extreme I can find, but Alabama is also 88%, Georgia 76%, Louisiana 84%. The border states are in the 65% range.
2. Related to that, there's an interesting effect where the black population of an area correlates with a vote for Obama, until it hits a certain tipping point and starts going the other direction, and then finally once the area goes is almost entirely black it reverses direction here. Check out the graph here (http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3597/the_clinton_firewall/) - if an area is all white or all black Obama's race is no big deal, but areas with non-majority but still significant black population show big polarization.
3. If you look at the counties were Obama actually ran behind Kerry's 2004 vote, it's sadly what you'd expect if race was a big deal in of itself - the appalachia belt. Go here (http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html) and click on voting shifts.
4. As mentioned below, Bartels found about 50% of the rich state/poor state effect disappears when you adjust for race. This begs a lot of questions, but it's still interesting.

Class
1. Bartels and Frank went back and forth quite a bit a couple years ago on what class really means (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?p=353813) (go to the end of the thread). Income? Educational level? A set of specific cultural attitudes? Picking different definitions gives somewhat different results.
2. The genius of Gelman's work in my opinion is that it kind of bypasses that whole debate - cross-state inequality didn't use to matter, now it does, no matter what variables you adjust for, which strongly implies cross-state inequality is the source of the change. Combine that with "the seen different is limited to differences in rich people cross-state" and that's the game.
2. The phrase ("Artisinal" workers (basically working class people who own their own business)) is "small business owners," and yes, they vote differently than professionals; he has an interesting series of graphs on this. Small business owners have gone just as much for the GOP (they didn't used to) as professionals now go for the Democrats (they didn't used to). Part of that is that lots of small business owners are rich (http://www.sba.gov/advo/press/06-15.html), so it's somewhat a rephrasing of Gelman's observations.


The study finds that in 2001 small business-owning households were more than twice as likely as non-owning households (57.1 percent to 25.5 percent) to be high income, and over eight times more likely (21.2 percent to 2.5 percent) to be high wealth households. However, from 1992 to 2001, the chance of being in the high income category for non-owning households increased 42.5 percent, and their chance of being high wealth increased 92 percent, whereas the chances for small business-owning households increased 24.7 and 61.8 percent, respectively.

[Jason McCullough]

So it turns out that "Appalachia was the only area to vote less for Obama than Kerry" map is misleading (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/its-not-about-appalachia.html).


From a quick look at this graph, it appears there's something special going on with these white people in Appalachia who didn't want to vote for Obama.

The actual picture for white people, as I estimate it, is slightly different. The complicating factor is that, at the same time that whites in some areas were moving toward McCain, blacks everywhere were moving toward Obama. Maps of the total vote show the sum of the two patterns.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/ben2b.png

The Appalachian counties don't stand out in this map. McCain did extremely well among whites in a much broader area in the southeast, with the Applachian counties standing out in the earlier map only because they had very few black votes to cancel out the swing among the whites. Actually it looks like McCain did even better in some of the counties just south of that Appalachian belt.

[Anaxagoras]

If I'm reading that graph correctly, it looks like there wasn't much of a racial component to the election at all; the election merely highlighted Conservative Southerners being Conservative.

Interesting.

[Jason McCullough]

TPMCafe (http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/tpmcafe-book-club/?ref=csubf) is having an interesting book club discussion this week. Check out Steve Sailer elaborating on his theory about the voting gap between CA and TX (http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/22/the_electoral_college_superpowers_california_versu/) coming down to geography.


Having lived in both states, I have developed a much more boring theory (http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/feb/11/00016/)based on geography: California ran out of its best real estate, while Texas still has plenty of its typically mediocre land. So, housing prices in California got extremely expensive (even before the Housing Bubble of 2004-2007), while they stayed affordable in Texas. And that has had far-reaching social, cultural, and political consequences.

[Lux]

This theory suggests that, in order to encourage marriage and children among voters, Republicans should pursue policies that raise wages, lower demand for houses, and keep the public schools from eroding further.

So they should act like Democrats?

[Aeon221]

I'm not going to get into the whole minimum wage thing (I'm against it, as is all reputable economic research, but I swear I will not respond to any post about it because it is a goddamn quagmire), but I'm pretty sure I don't buy this theory about home prices having such a major impact on political affiliation. Or at least I don't buy that it is universally applicable, however well (or otherwise) it explains both California and Texas.

For instance, consider Michigan, the Dakotas, and Chicago. All of these areas are cold, terrible places. No sane person wants to live in them-- remember Fargo? Michigan and the Dakotas have both been gripped by regular recession for years. Both Dakotas consistently rank in the bottom twenty for PCI, and Michigan currently has the highest unemployment rate in the nation.

None of these states (protip: Chicago is not a state, I'll come back to them!) experienced a major population boom or housing price increase -- Detroit is well known for being Fallout-esque in its emptiness and slightly dystopian air.

And yet all three are solidly blue. How does that work with the model?

Chicago, on the other hand, is wealthy, educated, liberal to a fault, and corrupt as hell. Despite being in the middle of a frozen nowhere (cut me some slack, I've mostly lived in Hawaii or below the M-D, everywhere is a freezing hell hole), people want to live there -- it experienced a pronounced housing boom, even though it isn't coastal or anything. Again, solidly blue.

On the other hand, I can't really think of any prominent Red cities that I, as a young, single, and rather liberal male, would be willing to move to. Even Atlanta is fairly Blue, despite its position in the midst of a solidly Red state. So perhaps there is something to it after all.

I dunno, Science!

[Mordrak]

What would be the effect of getting rid of minimum wage in your opinion? The only effect I really see is getting rid of it continuing to push wealth inequality even higher. There's already internships, which are mostly for leading into professional jobs. For your average middle class college kid or recent graduate working for nothing, a 1-2 dollar offset because of lack of minimum wage isn't really going to do anything in that area. It'll only push down unskilled labour's wages. Heck, in the long run, if it stays on its current trajectory, it's basically worthless for keeping up with inflation.

[Lizard_King]

The biggest problem with the minimum wage is not economic inefficiency. It's that it serves as a distraction from issues that really would make a difference to low income workers (health care, etc) at worst, and as a safety valve for the status quo at best. It shifts the debate to one where people on the bottom of the labor pyramid are conditioned to accept whatever miserly compromises people who have nothing in common with them broker on their behalf, rather than negotiating on their own terms. Which, for all of its problems, is an idea that has withered far too quickly in the United States.

Conversely, to regulate a true "living wage" would arguably exacerbate that core economic inefficiency to the degree where it does become the central argument against the idea (which, as Aeon is probably suggesting, is what many economists would argue from the beginning).

It's a legislative dead end in the United States.

[Trashcan]

I thought the opposition to minimum wage laws centered around the idea that they forced the costs of a guaranteed standard of living onto the people who were employing the poor. I think the argument usually goes something like this:

1-Minimum wage laws distort the true value of some labor
2-In the cases where the wages are higher than they "should" be, potential jobs are lost as employers can't afford to hire more workers.
3-A lot of the people working minimum wage jobs are the dependents of middle income families.
4- Combine 2 and 3 and we get that businesses are incurring a substantial cost for subsidizing a minimum standard of living for people who don't need it (middle income dependents) while simultaneously employing fewer people (keeping those who need the work from getting it)

The solution that's usually proposed (assuming the person making the argument isn't a libertarian) is, I think, some form of a tax credit. Rather than apply a minimum wage we give a tax refund (of comparable value) to anyone making under a certain amount each year (excluding middle class white kids saving up for a 360.) The thinking being that the costs of a tax credit are shared by the entire [tax paying] population, rather than being shouldered solely by the people employing the working poor. This then frees up resources for those employers to higher more people who need the work.

Is that about right?

[wahoo]

Is that about right?


Absolutely correct. Some experimental tax credits like the EITC have shown good results. They have greatly increased labor force participation rate along the targeted group albeit at the expense of the amt of work among married lower middle class females, who are typically the secondary earner. The other interesting tidbit is that the other losers of the EITC are low-skill workers who don't qualify for the EITC. In short, businesses offer slightly lower wages b/c they know about the EITC and therefore if folks don't get the EITC, then they have slightly lower wages. I think the EITC is pretty soundly structured but at the same time anytime you have a credit like this you have the problem of extremely high marginal rates along the phase-out region. There's no way to avoid that or to extend the EITC too far up the income scale b/c then it gets super expensive.

There's a feeling right now that the minnimum wage is pretty much below the market wage floor for most folks. But once you start getting into living wages and higher min wages then you'll see stronger employment impacts.

[Jason McCullough]

3-A lot of the people working minimum wage jobs are the dependents of middle income families.

1. So?
2. 50% of minimum wage workers are under 25 (http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2008.htm), so there's an upper bound on how high it could possibly be. I can't find data on dependent status or family earnings, though.

[Aeon221]

God damn it, why did I say anything about the minimum wage when I knew this would happen.

[Aeon221]

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=52078

Now you can chat about the minimum wage elsewhere. Not that you will, as I'm pretty sure there isn't anything left to say. I'm more interested in this creepy model relating house prices to political affiliation.