I wrote yesterday that I expect higher than average voter turnout in the U.S. elections that take place on Tuesday. There are also forces working against voter turnout, particularly that of time pressure.
Traditionally, college students are under the most intense time pressure, but that pattern is changing as people take on more and more interest and activities in their personal lives. The most common pattern is that people accumulate more things to do over time, but this then reaches a peak around the age of 60, after which people start to take on a degree of self-restraint when it comes to their schedules. Of course, part-time workers and retirees may have much less time pressure than full-time workers.
This profile of time pressure corresponds in a very rough way to demographic voting patterns. College-age voters vote in notoriously small numbers, while retirees are the most reliable voters.
If there is a long-term trend in time pressure affecting voter turnout, though, I am unable to find it in the data. It may be that election day comes infrequently enough to be exempt from time pressure calculations in people’s minds.
In this year’s election, the large number of unemployed and underemployed workers — about 15 percent of eligible voters — could correspond to an increase in voter participation, if time pressure is a factor. If employed workers turn out less than unemployed workers, this could indicate a time pressure effect. I would be surprised, though, if this effect is large enough to measure.
Voter turnout is likely to be higher than usual in this year’s U.S. elections, which take place Tuesday, November 2, not just because of the high interest in the political issues at stake, but also because fewer voters are moving.
It’s true that home foreclosures are the highest they have ever been in U.S. history, and foreclosure usually means it’s time to move (though foreclosures also occur on houses where the owners have already moved out). What is even more extraordinary, though, is the way that foreclosures have become one of the main reasons people are moving from one residence to another. Roughly half of homeowners are stuck with their homes, unable to move because the amount they owe on their mortgages is at least as much as the homes could be sold for. They may want to move, but it will have to wait.
Another reason people are not moving as much as usual is the low turnover in the job market. People move mainly to go to new jobs. With few job openings, there aren’t so many reasons to move.
People are less likely to vote while they are in the middle of moving, or for several months afterward. They are more likely to vote if they are staying put. With more people than usual staying where they are, voter turnout is likely to be higher for that reason alone.
I don’t always have time on a Friday night to explain the events and problems of the banking industry in the detail that they call for. If you don’t have years of history inside banking and haven’t been following the story all along, it can get confusing. Accordingly, I am grateful to Peter White at Truthout for putting together a report that explains, more clearly than I ever could, the connection between foreclosure error and the financial condition of banks. For a quick background on this, please read:
No longer able to lean on stock market gains, the giant banks are having to look farther afield to report profits. In some cases they are slashing their loan loss provisions. This results in a profit on paper but is not the same as making a profit from operations. If the bank executives can smile and say, “We don’t think there are more loan losses ahead,” Wall Street might buy it for this quarter, but what will the banks do for the fourth quarter? The reduced loan loss provisions, just at the time when the largest commercial real estate loan losses are about to come tumbling in, is a desperate move from banks that don’t know which way to turn. Surely some investor-class lawsuits will follow from the date of the third-quarter earnings report for bank stocks that tumble from their current levels, though the chance of these lawsuits recovering any money from a bank in a downward spiral are slim. (I have not looked at specifics and do not mean this as a comment on any specific bank holding company).
AIG pulled off a miracle in its stock offering for AIA, which was its oldest and largest operating company. It raised $18 billion, a higher amount than AIA is worth in total, while selling only 58 percent of the company and holding on to a 42 percent stake for itself. This was the largest Hong Kong initial public offering ever. AIA stock began trading today (as 1299.HK). The cash from the stock offering should allow the remnants of AIG to hang on well into next year.
There were no early bank failures reported tonight. It may be that regulators are holding off in order to avoid putting bank failures into the political spotlight on the busiest campaign weekend of the year. If you are a U.S. registered voter, please vote on Tuesday, November 2.
The flurry of activity that surrounds a major election is something economists have been observing and writing about for many years. The election spending, particularly in the three weeks leading up to election day, tends to give the economy a small boost. The boost this time, though, could be larger because of the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that allows unlimited and anonymous corporate election spending.
Political spending on this election is considerably more than we have ever seen in the past. The total spending officially will surely be less than $10 billion, a lot for an election but a drop in the bucket in the U.S. economy. When the unreported spending is included, though, the total could be comparable to the size of the stimulus package of 2008.
Most of the political spending comes from corporations that are otherwise mostly holding on to their cash. Some of the spending, to be sure, is coming out of the public relations or advertising budget. But much of it is money that would not otherwise be spent. An action that converts saving to spending is a more pure form of stimulus than one in which spending is converted from one form to another.
Despite the consistent denials of the political operatives involved, it seems a safe guess that a lot of this year’s political spending is coming from outside the country. Imagine, billions of dollars pouring into the United States from other countries. This is, in some ways, the best form of stimulus — there is nothing to be paid back later. In other ways, of course, it is the worst form of stimulus — stopping to think of the implication that the country is for sale.
Political spending goes largely to broadcasters, newspapers, and the post office — sectors currently in desperate need of funds. In all three areas, this fall, it is safe to say that the influx of political money will prevent or defer layoffs that otherwise would happen immediately.
So the stimulus that comes from all this extra election spending will be good for the U.S. economy, right? Well, yes and no. Any stimulus is good for the economy if it’s your job that’s saved, but the political spending stimulus has the drawbacks that come with political policy being engineered for the benefit of international corporations rather than the people of the country. And beyond this, it has the same drawbacks that any stimulus would have in the current recession: it diverts resources from the growth areas of the economy to the declining sectors. This eases some of the short-term economic pain, as the businesses that benefit can postpone their decline for a short time, but is basically no help at all in terms of what the economy will look like five or ten years from now.
You think you know, but like so many other things in agriculture, the reality doesn’t live up to the story you usually hear. Dogs are, for the most part, born into unbelievable poverty and squalor, are killed by the millions at an early age if they have the wrong stripes or get minor illnesses, and if they live long enough to get into the stores, they are at risk of catching illnesses and dying there.
Dog breeding, it turns out, is a cut-throat business, literally, where killing second-rate puppies is an everyday task, but where even that degree of ruthlessness doesn’t guarantee a profit.
One of the saving graces of the recession is that puppy sales have plummeted, and with a smaller market to sell into, breeders are breeding and killing far fewer puppies.
But it is not just that people are buying fewer dogs. The popular support for dog breeding is starting to fade. Evidence of this is a ballot measure, expected to pass in Missouri next week, that would limit dog breeders to 50 breeding (adult) dogs. This comes close to shutting down the state’s breeding industry, as a typical dog breeding operation may have more than a thousand dogs and still barely get by financially. With a limit of 50 dogs, dog breeding effectively becomes a part-time job.
Meanwhile, the city council in Richmond, British Columbia, is considering a measure to ban the sale of puppies in pet stores. The bylaw is expected to pass unanimously when it comes up for a final vote. The city of 175,000 is struggling with the cost of about 500 dogs a year abandoned by city residents, and thinks the puppy ban will reduce its stray-dog costs. At the same time, council members believe instituting the ban means it’s doing its part to address the dog breeding problem. At a recent meeting, one pet store owner showed up to speak against the proposal. But another pet store in town has already stopped selling puppies, as demand for them evaporated in the economic slowdown.
Opponents of measures such as these like to talk about the difference between “legitimate breeders” and “puppy mills,” but people in the dog business have assured me there really is no such distinction. Every breeder will tell you that they are legitimate and it’s the other breeders who are operating puppy mills. Some breeding operations may be cleaner than others, but no for-profit breeder could possibly provide a pet-quality lifestyle for its dogs, and national breeding organizations virtually require breeders, “legitimate” or not, to kill non-conforming puppies.
Ultimately, pet stores don’t actually need the dog breeders. That’s because more than enough puppies are born into dog-owning households to provide a dog for everyone who wants to have one. These household puppies get better care and tend to be healthier and better adjusted than the puppies from breeders. A small number of pet shops have stopped buying dogs from breeders and instead are offering dogs that come from animal shelters in the local community. This is the story, for example, of Pet Rush, a Los Angeles-area pet store that made the switch in June. The store owner says that obtaining dogs from local shelters has made things simpler not just for himself, but also for his customers.
It costs animal shelters a fortune to take care of stray and unwanted dogs. The new OK Go video, “White Knuckles,” which is serving as a fundraiser for ASPCA animal shelters, could also work as an advertisement for rescue dogs. The dogs are actually the more lively performers in the video, and as the band notes, “Most of the dogs in the White Knuckles video are rescues.”
