Blog Post

AEIdeas

1. Cartoon of the Day above (with a h/t to Jon Murphy).

2. Markets in Everything: a) Truman Capote’s ashes will be auctioned off in September, b) “GuestReady” provides Airbnb hosts with the services to professionalize their rentals and c) the first “Pizza ATM” in North America has arrived at Xavier University.

3. Taxachusetts’ Big Taxi Welfare Fund. When the Massachusetts governor signed a law earlier this month regulating ride-hailing services Uber, Lyft and Fasten, it included a new tax. For every trip, the ride-sharing services will be forced to “contribute” a nickel tax to a new fund to support modernization, training, and improvement of Big Taxi? Will that be enough to help the legacy taxi business endure or improve the taxi experience for passengers? It’s “too little, too late,” remarked one observer, who is gifted for the obvious. Source. Here’s more from Reason (h/t Morganovich).

4. Think Your Obamacare Plan Will Be Like Employer Coverage? Think Again, says a NY Times article about Obama’s Unaffordable Care Act, here’s the opening:

When Obamacare was developed, one goal was to allow middle-class Americans to use the new marketplaces to buy the same kind of health insurance they had at their jobs. People could retire early, or quit a corporate job and become a freelancer, and still have the great care and financial protection that come with high-end plans. But six years into the health law, the reality is that a typical Obamacare plan looks more like Medicaid, only with a high deductible. The typical marketplace plan covers a small number of low-cost doctors and hospitals, and offers fewer frills than employer plans. The recent high-profile exits of many of the national insurers from markets around the country will only heighten the shift.

MP: So that promise that we can keep our doctors was really just a big 4-Pinoccio lie wasn’t it?

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5. Obamacare’s Tan Tax. From FoxNews:

The tanning salon industry is feeling burned by “Obamacare.” Business owners around the country say the little-noticed 10% tax on tanning in President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul has crippled the industry, forcing the closing of nearly 10,000 of the more than 81,000 tanning salons in the U.S.

Update: See Venn diagram above. Thanks to a comment below the post by Seattle Sam for the inspiration.

6. Mexico’s Manufacturing Boom is Lifting US Workers, because it’s fueled by American goods and services, according to the LA Times:

The bottom line, say economists and company executives, is that what’s good for Mexico’s factory workers is good for some U.S. workers too. That’s because the chain of goods that supplies Mexico’s factories is very different from the one for China. Simply put, Mexico needs to consume a chunk of U.S. goods in order to make its own. Around 40 cents of every dollar that the United States imports from Mexico comes from the U.S., compared with just 4 cents of every dollar in Chinese imports. The influx of auto factories in Mexico might sustain hundreds of supplier jobs in Deforest, Wis., or Calhoun, Ga. “Instead of thinking of Mexico as a separate part of production, it’s now part of our manufacturing process,” said Raymond Robertson, an economist at Texas A&M University. “Mexican companies aren’t just producing products that rival ours, they are producing parts of our products.”

MP: There’s a good remedial economics lesson here about how international trade works for Mr. Trump, who continues to refer to NAFTA as “the worst trade deal in history.”

7. Bernie Madoff’s Financial Advice to a Fellow Inmate About to Be Released from Prison: “Invest in funds that track the S&P 500 index of stocks.”

8. Desperate for Food in Socialist Venezuela. Hungry gang butchers thoroughbred horse after breaking into Caracas zoo in search of food.

9. Politically Correct? I’m not making this up, it’s not from The Onion. But it’s now “politically incorrect” to use the term “politically correct” according to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Inclusive Excellence Center‘s new “Just Words?” guidelines. Reason? “Over time, PC has become a way to deflect, say that people are being too ‘sensitive‘ and police language.” Does that include the way these campus “language police” are being too sensitive and trying to… well… “police language”? Read more here.

10. Video of the Day below, featuring Heather Mac Donald discussing “Are the Police Racist?”