Couldn’t Help But Notice (061307)

A Month to Forget (but it doesn’t work that way):

I predicted last week (first item at post) that receipts would be down 5% or more in May 2007 vs. May 2006. Zheesh — try almost 15%. And even though the spending number for May is down slightly from last year, last year’s spending was well above the average for the year.

I wish I would have saved the link, but there was a guy who claimed after April’s blockbuster receipts that Uncle Sam had figured out how to speed up collections from the self-employed and contractors to the tune of something like $20 billion or so vs. previous years. I discounted the argument at the time, but if that person is right, there’s not a lot to be concerned about in terms of the government being on track to getting to a breakeven point next year. Again if that person is right, you would therefore expect June and September, when big estimated payments come in, to be barnburners, and July and August to be especially mediocre like May just was.

We’ll just have to see.

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Republican officeholders would be skewered from here to Cleveland, and all other points in and around Ohio, for allowing an appointment like Frankie Coleman’s in the first place, and for tolerating her misconduct for as long as hers was tolerated, before she finally, and mercifully, resigned. Of course I wish her a speedy and permanent recovery.

As it is, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher will skate, and it will all be chalked up as a big “mistake.” How nice it must be to have a pliant statewide Old Media press corps on your side.

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From the “I’m So Not Surprised” file:

Olympic firms ‘abusing workers’

Some official merchandise for the 2008 Olympics in China has been made using child labour, forced overtime and low wages to boost profits, a report says.

Playfair - an alliance of world trade unions - has condemned “severe workers’ rights violations” in four Chinese factories ahead of the Beijing games.

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Real Estate Rent-Seeking Racket Revisited (NY Times link may require free registration; previous related posts are here and here; HT Techdirt) –

The conclusion, in a study to be released today based on home-sales data from 1998 to 2004 in Madison, Wis., is that people in that city who sold their homes through real estate agents typically did not get a higher sale price than people who sold their homes themselves. When the agent’s commission is factored in, the for-sale-by-owner people came out ahead financially.

….. The findings fly in the face of studies by the National Association of Realtors. The group has said that houses sold via its members’ local multiple listing services get a 16 percent premium over homes sold by their owners.

In the age of Zillow and other services, that 16% figure is no-way-Jose ridiculous.

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Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio is suspending operations (link may require registration) and hopes to reopen in 2012.

Antioch is/was a hotbed of radicalism that is perhaps best known for its zany sexual conduct code:

IN THE EARLY 1990s, in the midst of a national debate about feminism, sexual relationships, and sexual violence, the media discovered an unusual sexual conduct policy at Antioch College, a small liberal arts school in Ohio. The policy, adopted in response to complaints from a group called Womyn of Antioch about not enough being done to stop date rape on campus, mandated explicit verbal consent every step of the way in a sexual encounter — from undoing a button to sexual intercourse. At the time, it elicited a lot of mockery.

Deservedly so, but it has spawned less radical imitators, which leads to this thought — I would hazard a guess that there’s little need for a far-left school like Antioch when so many of the less expensive public universities have gotten almost as loony.