Political Roundtable - Part VI

[sfam]

Here's and interesting abstract from Psychological Science:

Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding
 
People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate (Experiments 1 and 2). Although these effects occurred when people were asked to generate a mechanistic explanation, they did not occur when people were instead asked to enumerate reasons for their policy preferences (Experiment 2). Finally, generating mechanistic explanations reduced donations to relevant political advocacy groups (Experiment 3). The evidence suggests that people’s mistaken sense that they understand the causal processes underlying policies contributes to political polarization.

[Zonkerbl]

Zonk -- Wasn't able to respond to your post/provocation on economics earlier but I doubt I could have added anything of value. I'm a layman dependent upon common sense for economic judgement and I confess there's probably some gaping holes in my analysis. It does appear to me though that when Apple borrows $18 Billion for 20 or 30 year bonds instead of repatriating its overseas cash hoard something is askew. I also don't understand why GM doesn't have to pay income taxes for 20 years while Ford does. Another thing that bugs me is the fact that corporations aren't required to disclose their net tax payments each year.

On politics - I believe our country is in deep trouble and not only because of debt and deficits ......... the electorate seems uninterested or unwilling to read up on or care much about important issues ......... the MSM seems to value grand parties with celebrities and political luminaries more than they do truth. justice and journalism that holds those in power accountable to the people ........... we've also come to a point in our history where much of the electorate is ok with lying as an accepted form of political debate. It's all quite depressing IMO but my wife insists that I remain cheerful in spite of it. It's a struggle not to transfer my jaded outlook on things to my kids and thus counteract, the natural, youthful optimism that they and other youngsters possess.

Popper, i enjoy discussing things with you but it's hard to have a discussion if you don't read my posts. You come in here and drop prepackaged fox news soundbites, and I routinely knock them out of the park, and I get no response. Makes me wonder if you're even interested in discussing these topics or are you just trying to spread fox propaganda?

I do read your post. Pretty much every one. I think the post you're referring to delves deep into the weeds of economic theory. My Econ 101-103 classes taken in 1975 don't prepare me very well to engage in any sort of detailed discussion on the issue so why waste the board's time. However I will comment on your statement that "neocon philosophy states that markets are good and that we should always trust them no matter what..." I believe this is a false premise. I'm not a neocon but my observations and discussions with those that are don't support your statement.

One last thing - for those of you on the board who cite Fox News as the source for every argument that goes against your beliefs I would say you'd be better served by just responding to the substance of a position rather than trying to pigeon hole it in a demeaning way. How would you like it if I assign to progressives on this site the Huffington Post or MSNBC as the source for all of your arguments. It's unfair and tends to prejudice the opposing view.

Popper, I'm not buying that "oh I'm too dumb to respond to that" argument from you anymore. Everybody on this board knows that's not true.

If you can be so kind as to point out which part of my posts went over your head I would be more than happy to try to rephrase it -- that's one of the benefits I get from this thread is translating things from econimicsese into English. So I get irritated when you say "oh, I'm too dumb and I'm not going to respond," because that means I'm missing an opportunity to hone my communications skills.

That and your posts push my buttons sometimes. Like the one about "why can't we just trust the market?" That is a neocon argument and is one of the main reasons liberals don't trust economists. Working in an aid context as I am, surrounded by liberals, constantly having to beat back their preconceived notions about economics, I get hot under the collar sometimes when I hear someone repeating it.

[popper]

Zonk - Very well. I didn't say I was too dumb to understand your post on economics but rather that I'm ignorant of some of the theorems you mention. If I'm not mistaken you are an economist that has spent years studying and thinking about the building blocks and application of various components of economic theory. On the other hand, my understanding comes from 30 years in business, minimal and basic econ. coursework, the Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, etc.

I went back and reread your post (copied below) and thought about it some more. I don't have any disagreement with it - it makes sense. BTW - thanks for the shout-out to one of my heroes, Hayek. Also, Is it true that most undergraduate economic departments don't even teach the Austrian school of thought?

Edit - Also, what's wrong with the Laffer Curve and why do liberals hate it. Is it flawed?

Zonk's Post ---- It is based on one of the theorems that are only true in extremely restricted circumstances, namely, long run perfect competition. Perfect competition assumes all actors are small, all actors in the economy have instantaneous and costless access to all production technologies, all actions of all actors are instantly observable to all other actors, all transactions are costless, there is no such thing as private knowledge (because everything everyone knows is instantaneously available to everyone else), all property rights are clearly defined and enforcement of property rights is costless, and the consumption of all goods is excludable (you can prevent people from consuming them) and rival (one person's consumption of a good makes less available to others). In the long run, when entry and exit of firms has guaranteed that all firms are operating on the minimum of the average cost curve, then you can say that the resulting allocation of resources is Pareto optimal -- a Socialist central planner cannot reallocate resources in a way that would make anyone better off. In other words, when these conditions hold, you can trust markets.

These conditions NEVER hold. That opens up opportunities for government interventions that can improve on the allocative result of markets. Doesn't, however, necessarily mean that the government has the information necessary to know how to carry out the proper reallocation (that was Hayek's contribution). So the field of microeconomics is largely an exercise in studying what happens when you relax one or more of these assumptions, and whether there's a way for government intervention to improve on the market outcome.

If you relax the assumption of "small actors" you get monopolies.

If you relax the assumption of instantaneous and costless access to all production technologies, you get the lack of unconditional convergence (persistence of the income gap between rich and poor countries) and other things.

If you relax the assumption of costless transactions, you get situations where the original allocation of resources has inertia, which can result in suboptimal outcomes. This is related to the "costless enforcement of property rights" assumption. When it holds, you get the Coase theorem -- no matter what the original pattern of resource endowments, markets will ensure that all welfare improving transactions take place, so you don't have to worry about the original allocation of wealth. When transaction costs are high, or property rights are not well defined or costly to enforce, inheritors of wealth have lower costs of income enhancing investments. Poorly defined property rights are also the root cause of externalities, like pollution and traffic congestion.

If you relax the perfect information assumptions, you get moral hazard and adverse selection, adverse selection being the market failure extant in the health industry.

Goods that are non-exclusive and non-rival are public goods that the private sector has no incentive to produce. The biggest example is national defense. My consumption of national defense does not make national defense less available to you, and there is no way to defend some people but not others.

[Induveca]

Funny thing about economists, they dabble in a profession amongst dozens of opposing theoretical schools of thought. Thusly, advocacy or opposition of a certain branch of economic theory doesn't lend itself well to decisive debate victories.

I think politicians and economists would do the world a great favor if they ceased attempting to pigeonhole every argument as "neocon" "liberal" "republican" "democrat" etc. It's a lazy, cookie-cutter approach to thought.

[dobrojim]

but we do have empirical evidence say for example what GOPers
predicted about what would happen following the passage of the
Clinton economic package and what actually happened.

similarly, we have empirical evidence about the Laffer curve.

[Zonkerbl]

Zonk - Very well. I didn't say I was too dumb to understand your post on economics but rather that I'm ignorant of some of the theorems you mention. If I'm not mistaken you are an economist that has spent years studying and thinking about the building blocks and application of various components of economic theory. On the other hand, my understanding comes from 30 years in business, minimal and basic econ. coursework, the Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, etc.

I went back and reread your post (copied below) and thought about it some more. I don't have any disagreement with it - it makes sense. BTW - thanks for the shout-out to one of my heroes, Hayek. Also, Is it true that most undergraduate economic departments don't even teach the Austrian school of thought?

Edit - Also, what's wrong with the Laffer Curve and why do liberals hate it. Is it flawed?

You don't understand -- as a professional economist in the government, it is my job to explain complex economic ideas to political appointees, who are typically smart people who are CEOs with 30 years of business and etc. and etc. but not much formal economics training. I.e. people like you.

If you don't understand what I'm saying, chances are if I try to explain that topic the same way to my political masters they won't understand me either, and it'll be MY FAULT. For not speaking plainly.

Currently my goal in life is to get people out of the habit of saying "markets are good and we should trust them," which was fine during the Cold War, but now we have to embrace the more nuanced "the role of government intervention is to create an environment so that markets can do the good things we know they can do."

Liberals hate the Laffer curve mostly because it is part of supply side economics and the "trickle down" theory. "Trickle down" theory is used to justify adopting policies that favor the rich, so it's a sore point. The Laffer curve is this no-brainer idea that once the income tax rate gets high enough, as you raise it, revenue goes down (no point in working anymore, since you keep so little of it). "Neocons" use the Laffer curve to justify lowering tax rates on the wealthy. But most economists believe that that point is much higher than the current tax rate on rich people, and anyway discussing income taxes rates is a red herring. Income taxes create distortions in the economy (they create an incentive to consume leisure, i.e. work less, because income generating activity is taxed and leisure-generating activity is not). That's why everybody else has a VAT.

Super-wealthy people like Mitt Romney earn most of their income through investments and get taxed at the 15% investment tax rate. Is it fair to tax corporations at the corporate income tax rate, and then tax Mitt Romney on profits he makes investing in those corporations again? That's the real issue -- double taxation on investment in the U.S. puts us at a competitive disadvantage vis a vis other countries that have a VAT. Replace the corporate income tax with a VAT and the problem goes away.

See, you're my audience, Popper... Well, you and Nate, but Nate won't argue with me anymore.

[Zonkerbl]

Funny thing about economists, they dabble in a profession amongst dozens of opposing theoretical schools of thought. Thusly, advocacy or opposition of a certain branch of economic theory doesn't lend itself well to decisive debate victories.

I think politicians and economists would do the world a great favor if they ceased attempting to pigeonhole every argument as "neocon" "liberal" "republican" "democrat" etc. It's a lazy, cookie-cutter approach to thought.

See, that's my problem.

People confusing "neocon wanna be armchair economists" with real economists.

Anyone who's tried to get an anonymously peer-reviewed journal article in economics published knows that there is very much such a thing as a decisive debate victory. Your econometric tests better produce statistically significant results. Your model had better be based on a rigorously generated mathematical theory. If one Western trained economist gets in an argument with another, there's a winner and a loser. Because the rules of the game are very clearly defined. It's science. People who pooh-pooh the idea of economics being a science have NO IDEA what real economics is about.

To me there's a very clear distinction between an "economist" and a talking head on tv claiming to be an economist. That's a neocon. Well, until Krugman came along -- he was the first non-neocon economist to go "on the lecture circuit," as they say.

[Zonkerbl]

Popper, define what you mean by the "Austrian School of Thought."

As far as I know, it is the basis of introductory microeconomics as taught from Varian's textbook in graduate school.

edit: well, according to wikipedia the school is thought to be a fringe group because of its rejection of econometrics and aggregate macroeconomic analysis, and a rejection of the use of math.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School

Nevertheless, the general idea of marginal utility is fundamental to modern economics.

[dobrojim]

Funny thing about economists, they dabble in a profession amongst dozens of opposing theoretical schools of thought. Thusly, advocacy or opposition of a certain branch of economic theory doesn't lend itself well to decisive debate victories.

I think politicians and economists would do the world a great favor if they ceased attempting to pigeonhole every argument as "neocon" "liberal" "republican" "democrat" etc. It's a lazy, cookie-cutter approach to thought.

See, that's my problem.

People confusing "neocon wanna be armchair economists" with real economists.

Anyone who's tried to get an anonymously peer-reviewed journal article in economics published knows that there is very much such a thing as a decisive debate victory. Your econometric results better produce statistically significant results. Your model had better be based on a rigorously generated mathematical theory. If one Western trained economist gets in an argument with another, there's a winner and a loser. Because the rules of the game are very clearly defined. It's science. People who pooh-pooh the idea of economics being a science have NO IDEA what real economics is about.

To me there's a very clear distinction between an "economist" and a talking head on tv claiming to be an economist. That's a neocon. Well, until Krugman came along -- he was the first non-neocon economist to go "on the lecture circuit," as they say.

Indu's argument sounds too close for my comfort to the way the MSM covers
almost everything ie that there are 2 (political) sides to an argument or story
so in order to be 'fair', we (the MSM) have to give them equal weight.
It's a copout and lazy way of reporting stories. Having to explain why
one side's argument really is better is dangerous for them as it leaves
them potentially vulnerable to accusations of bias given how hard
it is to dispute such allegations compared to how hard it is to make
the allegations. It also requires more actual work and research into
a story which costs money they would prefer not to spend. So we're left
with people (like certain individuals here) making allegations about State
dept employees and welfare recipients that most people just shrug without
challenging.

[Induveca]

Zonk, understand much more what you're doing here now. Nothing wrong with practicing your trade. Excellent place to do so.....

As a guy who has owned multiple businesses, (mostly tech and medical) I know the challenges of attempting to decipher difficult scientific concepts from employees/consultants.

Funny thing is, a few well crafted real-world analogies get almost any point across quite easily. That's always my request when someone comes in spewing excessive scientific terms to justify my investment in their concept. I'm not interested in speaking their language, but I will pay/invest in them for their expertise if they can communicate/translate into common sense terms/examples.

They then become an asset, and not the guy in meetings who smugly rambles in specialized terms no one has the time/need to understand....while attempting to make a relatively simple point.

[popper]

Zonk - Very well. I didn't say I was too dumb to understand your post on economics but rather that I'm ignorant of some of the theorems you mention. If I'm not mistaken you are an economist that has spent years studying and thinking about the building blocks and application of various components of economic theory. On the other hand, my understanding comes from 30 years in business, minimal and basic econ. coursework, the Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, etc.

I went back and reread your post (copied below) and thought about it some more. I don't have any disagreement with it - it makes sense. BTW - thanks for the shout-out to one of my heroes, Hayek. Also, Is it true that most undergraduate economic departments don't even teach the Austrian school of thought?

Edit - Also, what's wrong with the Laffer Curve and why do liberals hate it. Is it flawed?

You don't understand -- as a professional economist in the government, it is my job to explain complex economic ideas to political appointees, who are typically smart people who are CEOs with 30 years of business and etc. and etc. but not much formal economics training. I.e. people like you.

If you don't understand what I'm saying, chances are if I try to explain that topic the same way to my political masters they won't understand me either, and it'll be MY FAULT. For not speaking plainly.

Currently my goal in life is to get people out of the habit of saying "markets are good and we should trust them," which was fine during the Cold War, but now we have to embrace the more nuanced "the role of government intervention is to create an environment so that markets can do the good things we know they can do."

Liberals hate the Laffer curve mostly because it is part of supply side economics and the "trickle down" theory. "Trickle down" theory is used to justify adopting policies that favor the rich, so it's a sore point. The Laffer curve is this no-brainer idea that once the income tax rate gets high enough, as you raise it, revenue goes down (no point in working anymore, since you keep so little of it). "Neocons" use the Laffer curve to justify lowering tax rates on the wealthy. But most economists believe that that point is much higher than the current tax rate on rich people, and anyway discussing income taxes rates is a red herring. Income taxes create distortions in the economy (they create an incentive to consume leisure, i.e. work less, because income generating activity is taxed and leisure-generating activity is not). That's why everybody else has a VAT.

Super-wealthy people like Mitt Romney earn most of their income through investments and get taxed at the 15% investment tax rate. Is it fair to tax corporations at the corporate income tax rate, and then tax Mitt Romney on profits he makes investing in those corporations again? That's the real issue -- double taxation on investment in the U.S. puts us at a competitive disadvantage vis a vis other countries that have a VAT. Replace the corporate income tax with a VAT and the problem goes away.

See, you're my audience, Popper... Well, you and Nate, but Nate won't argue with me anymore.

Got it. I'm to be your Guinea Pig. So be it. You mention govt. intervention to improve markets and that makes sense so long as that intervention in constitutional. Let's assume it is. My question then would be; If I'm not mistaken, Fannie and Freddie were established to improve markets. Perhaps they did for a while and then they succumbed to corruptions that enriched politically-connected individuals (mostly D's) and shareholders (greatly aided by book-cooking D executives). Subsequent to that monumental heist, the taxpayer was then required to bail them out. Many people warned of the distortions and corruptions taking place but didn't have ability to overcome the votes against reform within the D party. In this instance it was mostly corrupt D's but I'm sure I could come up with examples of corrupt R's as well That's not the point. The point is is that the fox (corrupt politicians) is guarding the hen house. How do we make these govt. interventions, which in theory make sense, impervious to the inevitable political corruption that follows?

Regarding your point on tax rates, I accept that tax rates are too low on some of the rich (and the middle class for that matter). Some others that don't take advantage of loopholes and other deductions pay 50+ percent in combined federal, state, municipal taxes. Do most liberal economist think that is enough? Also, if you look at it from the perspectives of R's, they believe that D's will raise taxes whenever possible while not cutting spending on anything. Therefore shouldn't the R's hold out until the time is ripe to leverage significant spending cuts in return for higher taxes?

The VAT is something I'd like to learn more about. I hate our current income tax system and it perverts everything we should be doing to grow the economy.

Regarding the Austrian School of Economic thought the following link is a pretty good description IMO.
http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=0689 ... f67385aebc

[Zonkerbl]

Popper, Fanny and Freddie are implicit subsidies because of the understanding that they will be bailed out if they get into financial trouble, and they did.

I don't advocate for subsidies, ever. Your excellent discussion of the moral hazard involved in reforming such institutions is a great example of why you should never create economic rents through subsidies that then become self-perpetuating (the extra profit from the subsidies are used to pay for lobbyists who then ensure it is impossible to ever get rid of the subsidy).

Financial regulation is admittedly somewhat of a mystery to me. I'm not sure what the market failure is that the regulators are trying to address most of the time, and it always takes me days of reading to figure it out.

I understand that bank runs are a kind of market failure that can be prevented with a government guarantee of deposits up to a certain size, that seems to have worked fairly well and I get the economics. After a few days of research I figured out why "redlining" was outlawed.

I think what happened in the housing crash was an information failure combined with a "friction" (or transaction cost) failure. There was a new instrument that appeared in the market, the no-deposit mortgage, and nobody really knew what it was worth because they didn't know what the default rate would be. They made some assumptions about it and then, knowing those assumptions were probably completely wrong, proceeded to bundle the new tool up in ways that it became really difficult to untangle the real worth of those assets once the true default rate of the new instrument was discovered. Markets respond to new information all the time -- but there was such an enormous incentive to hide the consequences of this new information, that I think people must have known about ahead of time or they wouldn't have felt it necessary to hide it in these complicated financial instruments. So instead of pulling off the band aid all at once it took FOREVER for the information to come out, and while that was happening the financial markets basically ground to a halt, not willing to lend to anybody until they knew the full story of what was going on.

So how could government intervention have helped here? Not sure -- pretty sure the financial markets are going to be leery of these complicated instruments from now on, realizing that their main function is to hide the value of an asset. I know for sure that the government could not have "discovered" the true value of the no-deposit mortgage any faster than the market did. And I don't think a "transparency" regulation somehow forcing the unraveling of the new instruments would have helped either -- it's really the market that has to learn not to get taken in again.

I've heard people say that the government should have stepped in and forced banks not to lend more than the standard 33% of gross income (or whatever that threshold is) but they didn't actually have the authority to do that. I think the new regulatory agency does.

We knew already that when new instruments come on the market that are really a scam, there will be an incentive to hide their true value. Don't need govt regulation there, just the application of common sense. Maybe an example of "herd mentality" that my macro econ friends have been writing about.

The Fed's "housing market is looking a little frothy, nudge nudge, wink wink" attitude did not help at all. That's the only thing I know for sure I would change -- "This looks, smells, and tastes like a bubble. When it bursts there will be hell to pay." That kind of statement could have burst the bubble quickly and relatively less painfully.

[Zonkerbl]

Regarding the Austrian School of Economic thought the following link is a pretty good description IMO.
http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=0689 ... f67385aebc

Thanks for this, interesting read.

Yeah, the main purpose of economics in the 20th Century was to argue against Socialism, I guess that's why liberals are so hostile to economists now. When I went to Siberia in 1996 I realized eventually that I had inherited a brainwashed, cold-war approach to economics that really wasn't relevant at all to what post-Communist Russia was going through.

In the post-socialism world, economics can contribute a lot to the liberal side of the conversation. We have a lot of baggage to deal with first.

[popper]

Regarding the Austrian School of Economic thought the following link is a pretty good description IMO.
http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=0689 ... f67385aebc

Thanks for this, interesting read.

Yeah, the main purpose of economics in the 20th Century was to argue against Socialism, I guess that's why liberals are so hostile to economists now. When I went to Siberia in 1996 I realized eventually that I had inherited a brainwashed, cold-war approach to economics that really wasn't relevant at all to what post-Communist Russia was going through.

In the post-socialism world, economics can contribute a lot to the liberal side of the conversation. We have a lot of baggage to deal with first.

Siberia? That's cool (or perhaps cold). What was it like? What special economic challenges did they face then? I don't see how Russia can attract much foreign investment when they lack an independent judiciary. China seems to be able to do it though (I guess the potential for profit is so great it's worth the risk).

[Zonkerbl]

Russia's version of Communism worked because the Communist Party served a number of important institutional functions. First of all, they were the entrepreneurs, breaking the laws of the plan to shift resources from one place to another as needed. This means that corruption is deeply ingrained into the Russian psyche -- breaking the rules is how you get things done. Second, Communists were the commercial court system. They resolved contract disputes and enforced the Commie version of property rights.

We (the economist community) didn't know this at the time, so we blithely advised Russia to free all the prices, keep inflation under control, and everything else would sort itself out. So Russia emerged from Communism in 1992 with no judicial instrument AT ALL in charge of enforcing property rights and resolving contract disputes. So the old Communists who were in charge of it before just kept doing it, except they were called Mafia instead of Communists.

As to your point, there's no inherent conflict between corruption and international investment. If there were, there would be no U.S. FDI to China. Corruption is a price that large companies can pay and small companies can't, so it leads to lower numbers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which in really poor countries can hinder your ability to adopt advances in technology to your country. Russia doesn't have that problem, so corruption and captured judiciaries and all that are just par for the course. As long as oil prices stay high Russia will be fine (they are one of the world's largest exporters of oil).

I started out teaching international economics to "economics" students at a private university in downtown Novosibirsk, only to find out that "economics" and "business" are synonyms in Russia and they thought I was going to teach them how to carry out exchange rate transactions.

So I went over to Novosibirsk State University. They wanted me to teach English. I said fine, I will teach an economics course in English and you can call it English practice, which they said was fine.

After a little bit of time doing that I was approached by the best students in the school, the lawyers, who asked me to teach them an Economics of Law class. I happened to have brought a copy of Posner's textbook with me so I did that.

Fun times.

[popper]

This is very interesting.


…Don't look for a new Justice Department report about American gun violence to receive any serious media coverage over the coming days, or ever. According to the report from the department's Bureau of Statistics ……

Between the years of 1993 and 2011, as the assault weapons ban expired, more Americans purchased guns, the Supreme Court overturned outright gun bans, and individual states not only loosed gun control restrictions but also issued concealed carry permits to private citizens, incidents of gun violence in America collapsed.

Between 1993 and 2011, nonfatal gun crimes plummeted 69%; from 1.5 million to 467,300. Gun-related murders dropped 40%; from 18,253 to 11,101. Gun-related murders for black Americans plummeted by 51%. …………

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism ... -Narrative

[daSwami]

This is very interesting.


…Don't look for a new Justice Department report about American gun violence to receive any serious media coverage over the coming days, or ever. According to the report from the department's Bureau of Statistics ……

Between the years of 1993 and 2011, as the assault weapons ban expired, more Americans purchased guns, the Supreme Court overturned outright gun bans, and individual states not only loosed gun control restrictions but also issued concealed carry permits to private citizens, incidents of gun violence in America collapsed.

Between 1993 and 2011, nonfatal gun crimes plummeted 69%; from 1.5 million to 467,300. Gun-related murders dropped 40%; from 18,253 to 11,101. Gun-related murders for black Americans plummeted by 51%. …………

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism ... -Narrative

Quite a bit of conjecture in the Breitbart article (consider the source).

[Zonkerbl]

This is very interesting.


…Don't look for a new Justice Department report about American gun violence to receive any serious media coverage over the coming days, or ever. According to the report from the department's Bureau of Statistics ……

Between the years of 1993 and 2011, as the assault weapons ban expired, more Americans purchased guns, the Supreme Court overturned outright gun bans, and individual states not only loosed gun control restrictions but also issued concealed carry permits to private citizens, incidents of gun violence in America collapsed.

Between 1993 and 2011, nonfatal gun crimes plummeted 69%; from 1.5 million to 467,300. Gun-related murders dropped 40%; from 18,253 to 11,101. Gun-related murders for black Americans plummeted by 51%. …………

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism ... -Narrative

The most intriguing (and convincing, to me) explanation I've seen for the decline in violence is the reduction of children's exposure to lead. I also think crack had something to do with it, though I'm not sure what the connection is. Culture change in the african american community to switch from crack and heroin to marijuana? Darwinism -- crack cocaine literally killed all the crack addicts, and thereby killing people prone to violence? Dunno.

I just hate guns. I don't really care how much gun violence there is -- according to the data I've seen, even with the dramatic decline, the U.S. still has much more gun violence than it should, most of it suicides.

$1,000 excise tax per gun.

Popper, you object that I stereotype you as a Fox News brainwashee, and then you post articles from Breitbart? Really?

[popper]

This is very interesting.


…Don't look for a new Justice Department report about American gun violence to receive any serious media coverage over the coming days, or ever. According to the report from the department's Bureau of Statistics ……

Between the years of 1993 and 2011, as the assault weapons ban expired, more Americans purchased guns, the Supreme Court overturned outright gun bans, and individual states not only loosed gun control restrictions but also issued concealed carry permits to private citizens, incidents of gun violence in America collapsed.

Between 1993 and 2011, nonfatal gun crimes plummeted 69%; from 1.5 million to 467,300. Gun-related murders dropped 40%; from 18,253 to 11,101. Gun-related murders for black Americans plummeted by 51%. …………

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism ... -Narrative

Quite a bit of conjecture in the Breitbart article (consider the source).

Here's another source from the LA Times - it seems most Americans were under the impression that gun related crimes/deaths were on the rise when the opposite is true. Massive declines in all categories. Not sure what we are doing right but whatever it is it seems to be working well.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nati ... 2693.story

[Zonkerbl]

We're under the impression that gun related crimes/deaths is much higher in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world except Central America and failed states.

Decline in gun violence is a red herring.