Happy Tax Day…

This is the one more apropos to Saint Patrick's Day:

Enjoy the day…

Previously:
–In Honor of St. Patrick's Day
–On My New-Found Appreciation for Irish Dirt

So, at the tender young age of 7 1/2, she is finally undergoing crate training:

Okay, that idea didn't work too well, since the crate entrance is blocked and it's too high for her to jump out of. So it's back to the old fashioned way:

Next step is to attach the door, and then to keep it closed briefly. Stay tuned…

Best dog in the world.

(Carnivalized at Modulator's Friday Ark.)

Little or no substantive blogging until Saturday at the earlier. Maybe a Kip Clip or CuteTuber™ or two in the meantime.

Enjoy the rest of your week.

(Comments are closed for this post.)

…for $1:

[A bureaucrat] says if the state's food stamp recipients receive just $1 for energy bill assistance, that qualifies them for extra federal assistance. That means someone [on welfare] could receive about $30 more per month in food stamps.

Sending out $1 checks cost the state $250,000. DSHS says that could bring the state and additional $43 million in federal funding.

Call it red tape or a hoop to jump through. Either way, the state says it makes sense.

But as I noted back in January 2008, what can you expect, given that government is human beings?

(Via To the People.)

—

Lewis Black on tax rebates (contains naughty language):

Of course, there ain't no such thing as a free book, so I might ask that you PayPal me a few bucks to cover postage. (Unless you're local and would like to just pick them up.)

In no particular order:

–Antitrust Policy; Armentano
–Losing Ground; Murray
–Extraordinary Popular Delusions (unabridged); Mackay
–The Power of Gold; Bernstein
–Against the Gods; Bernstein
–The Politics of Freedom; Boaz
–Epistemological Problems of Economics; von Mises
–Socialism; von Mises
–Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero; Rothbard
–The Market as an Economic Process; Lachmann
–The Dirty Dozen; Levy & Mellor
–Restoring the Lost Constitution; Barnett
–The Economics of Time and Ignorance; O'Driscoll & Rizzo
–Go Directly to Jail; Healy

Email me directly at kipesquire@kipesquire.net if you're interested in any titles.

Happy S.A.D.

CuteTuber™ FAQ

That's me…

See you Friday.

The concept of a "natural unemployment rate" follows from looking at unemployment as a search process. According to this theory, people search for a new job so long as the expected benefits of additional search exceed the expected costs of additional search. Once the expected costs of additional job search exceed the expected benefits, people stop searching and take the best offer they have found (and that is still available) to that point.
…
In Canada, one reason the natural unemployment rate seems to have declined from its peak in the 1980s is that EI ("employment insurance", the current euphemism for unemployment benefits) has become less lucrative and other policies have also been altered with the result of somewhat lowering the height of the social safety net. One result has been that people search less and for shorter periods of time when they are unemployed, thus lowering the unemployment rate.

You mean that (socialized-medicine) Canada is, in at least one respect, less welfare-statist than the U.S.? Go figure.

Now comes word, meanwhile, that President-Elect Obama hopes to significantly expand unemployment benefits.

One of the mitigating joys of Career 2.0 is receiving 39 weekly direct deposits of $405 from the New York State government. That's a puny fraction of the well over $100,000 in state income taxes I've paid over the years (not to mention New York City income taxes, state sales taxes, etc.), so suffice it to say that I, qua libertarian, am hardly ethically conflicted about it. And while I do faithfully perform all the required job-seeking activities that attach to receiving unemployment insurance, let's just say I'm not in any rush. "Expected benefits" versus "expected costs" indeed.

Meanwhile, as I commented over at EclectEcon:

Note that the debates in the U.S. over extending benefits are increasingly focused, not on the "automatic stabilizer" paleo-Keynesian argument, but instead on neo-liberal notions of "humaneness."

If you subsidize something, you get more of it. So yes I too think the natural rate of unemployment in the U.S. will undoubtedly rise.

And I am Exhibit A.