News Story of the Day: Hillary Clinton is scheduled to attend a lunch fundraiser at the home of SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, the cousin of Elon Musk. SolarCity is a solar energy firm that makes solar panels and cells. It’s a billion-dollar company, whose biggest stakeholder is Musk himself. But what’s also interesting about SolarCity is that it reportedly contracts 10 percent of its labor to federal prisons. The federal prisoners are paid 93 cents per hour. This is interesting because Clinton has said she would no longer accept donations from private prisons. Of course, SolarCity has hired big-time lobbyists to go to Washington.
Chart of the Day: Glassdoor is out with a new chart that looks at the gender pay gap in five countries, including the United States. The website found that, yes, at first glance women earn less than men: 24 cents. However, when similar age, years of experience and education are taken into account then that number shrinks to 19 cents. Furthermore, when the same job title, employer and location are added to the equation then that number shrinks even further to five cents. What accounts for that five-cent gap?
However, we are unable to observe many personal characteristics such as race/ethnicity, marital status, the presence of children, or innate worker ability—all of which are known to have a large effect on gender pay differences. Our estimates of the “adjusted” gender pay gap likely suffer from some degree of bias due to these unobserved factors.
Can we please stop parading this myth of the gender pay gap?
Here is the chart:
Illustration of the Day: Have the terrorists won? Considering that more freedoms are taken away by the day and law enforcement agencies have a lot more authority then ever before then it’s safe to say that the terrorists have won, or at the very least are winning. InfoWars has a cartoon out describing this:
Quote of the Day: Legendary economist Walter Williams has a brilliant op-ed out at Town Hall explaining why you shouldn’t actually be so frightened of the multi-billion-dollar trade deficit the United States has with many countries, including Mexico and China. Remember, the trade deficit has zero effect on taxes or taxpayers so nobody should be petrified of this immense number.
Let’s look at the political angst over trade deficits. A trade deficit is when people in one country buy more from another country than the other country’s people buy from them. There cannot be a trade deficit in a true economic sense. Let’s examine this.
I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me. That means I have a trade deficit with my grocer. My grocer buys more from his wholesaler than his wholesaler buys from him. But there is really no trade imbalance, whether my grocer is down the street, in Canada or, God forbid, in China.
Here is what happens: When I purchase $100 worth of groceries, my goods account (groceries) rises, but my capital account (money) falls by $100. For my grocer, it is the opposite. His goods account falls by $100, but his capital account rises by $100. Looking at only the goods account, we would see trade deficits, but if we included the capital accounts, we would see a trade balance. That is true whether we are talking about domestic trade or we are talking about foreign trade.
Video of the Day: Think this year’s potential Republican thug tactics against Donald Trump are anything new? One just has to look to the last election in 2012. The GOP was so threatened by Ron Paul (SEE: Will the ‘Ron Paul Rule’ haunt the Republican Party in its battle against Donald Trump?) that the leadership employed a series of devious maneuvers to prevent Dr. Paul from threatening Mitt Romney’s coronation. Rachel Maddow does an excellent job looking at the 2012 chaos and the sabotage directed at Paul.
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