Please enjoy the new edition of ROI Central Minnesota, containing the Quarterly Business Report that I co-author with Rich MacDonald.

Labels: economics, St. Cloud

Like many other economists, I will be at the Western Economics Association meetings in Waikiki this week. Several friends I expected to see there have canceled, however, mostly because of high fares due to a decrease in competition.

After the recent bankruptcies or termination of service of the Hawaiian specialists ATA Airlines and Aloha Airlines, fares to and within the Hawaiian islands have soared. When fuel surcharges are included, the cost of flying roundtrip between Los Angeles and Honolulu can be as high as $900 for peak summer dates. The cost of flying from one Hawaiian island to another (like Oahu to Maui), which had gone down to as little as $39 each way, has recently soared to $74 and $84, ...

Posting will be light the rest of the day while I fly; my ticket (booked in early May) was well north of $1000, and the only way I could afford this was to schedule flying home on the Fourth, when travel is typically low.

Lots of miles, though; and I guess I'd better use them soon, before even their costs go up!

Labels: economics, travel

Over the last three weeks we have shown a bulletin board that was titled "Daily Effects of White Privilege" on the campus. The bulletin board is in a medium-traffic area of a classroom and office building in which I work at SCSU. Each day we have taken a different picture of it and displayed it for you to look at. Above is the bulletin board, and links to each individual entry:

• Part one -- shady looking
• Part two -- Cosmo
• Part three -- May I speak with the manager?
• Part four -- the neighborhood
• Part five -- history
• Part six -- the hospital
• Part seven -- the checkout
• Part eight -- the lecture hall
• Part nine -- the news
• Part ten -- the library
• Part 11 -- Band-Aids
• Part 12 -- speakers
• Part 13 -- the mall

Please come back to the blog for more bulletin boards. They're everywhere. This post will be added to the right-side index of this blog as part of our boards-and-doors features.

Labels: higher education, SCSU

Ebon-Aide.

New Ebon-Aide™ is the adhesive bandage specially designed for people of color. From the licorice look to mocha, coffee, cinnamon, and honey skin, new Ebon-Aide™ blends with your skin to help conceal as you heal.

Ebon-Aide™ comes in three different sizes and five different shades. At last you've got it made in your shade.

Ask and you shall receive.

Labels: economics, higher education

Full disclosure: I'm the Republican chair for MN's 2nd Congressional District and volunteer in a number of ways for Representative John Kline, including parades. I was totally unaware of this activity until 2004 and reluctantly said "I'll help."

Frankly, they're fun, plain fun. We meet a lot of people. I love the parades, especially in the towns outside the metro area. Everyone, it seems, comes to watch. You have the local high school band(s), Scout troops, businesses, dance schools, and the requisite fire engines and about any local group possible. A number in our southern towns have ethnic dancing and singing groups whose members are really entertaining.

People stake out "their spot" on the parade route with blankets and chairs, hours ahead of time and nobody moves their "stuff." They show up ready to cheer their neighbors and yes, sometimes their politician. I usually hand out items, high-five the kids, and pet dogs, which I love to do. People, well most people, are very receptive to any overture we make. But there are the sour ones, those who just can't stand conservatives - they ignore a pleasant "Hi, how are you? Great day! Etc." and just snarl at you. Why be so angry? It's a parade, it's fun and it sure beats watching the news!

If you have a favorite candidate, call their office and volunteer to participate. After doing it once or twice, you'll find, you'll have a good time and be supporting "your" guy (gal)!

Labels: elections

After a week of debate where it appeared the saner members of Congress would keep their colleagues from looking like fools, the House passed HR 6377 just before leaving on Fourth of July recess last night, instructing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to "curb immediately the role of excessive speculation" in energy futures or swaps and

(2) eliminate excessive speculation, price distortion, sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in prices, or other unlawful activity that is causing major market disturbances that prevent the market from accurately reflecting the forces of supply and demand for energy commodities.

The bill, introduced by Minnesota Congressman Collin Peterson, passed overwhelmingly, with only 19 nays. I've already written this week about speculation, but some further comments seem justified.

Congress has heard lots of testimony from 'experts' contending that the price of gas would fall to $2 if we could just get those nasty speculators out of the market. The testimony most have focused on is that at the top of the article, by Michael Masters. Here that is. The focus is on index speculators, who are now buying futures contracts almost equal to the entire increase in demand for oil from China. This however does not reduce the supply of oil unless someone takes delivery of the contract. Krugman hints at this very same point; see also Craig Jones. Most futures contracts are going to be closed out by writing the opposite contract as one reaches expiration. (Futures basics.) You might keep your long position by buying another future, but that does not remove oil from supply.

Now that doesn't mean that the price isn't influenced by what is going on in futures markets. Prices have been rising in part by expectations of the future, but it was ever thus since the beginning of asset trading. The key question is, at what point does speculation become excessive? And the reaction of politicians and everyday people, in my view, is emotional rather than economic. Excessive speculation occurs, in the mind of the non-economist or Congressperson, when the price of X is driven beyond the point where he or she can afford to own it. To take just one example: A St. Cloud resident is a Green Bay Packers fan. He owns season tickets to Packer home games. He does not use these often, instead selling them for above face value. Is he a speculator? When I ask him why he still gets the tickets, he hopes some day to return to the Land of the Cheese and attend all the games when he retires. He thinks the price will be higher for him to go to games when he returns than it is now, so he is hoarding his spot in the season ticket queue.

He is preventing others from holding that ticket, and therefore is helping drive up prices now. Unlike the index speculators, he actually HAS THE TICKET. But is his speculation excessive, or is it rational? You don't know, I don't know, and the government regulators don't know.

This does not prevent, unfortunately, government from acting as if they did. Sometimes arrogance is a disguise for ignorance, and as a good example this week consider Tim Walz' antipathy to markets, as Andy Aplikowski documents. He quotes a Rochester Post-Bulletin article in which Walz denies the market.

This idea — this red herring — that all of a sudden you’re going to drill and everything is going to be better, as if the market fundamentals are at work here — that’s not happening... These are the same people that are (getting) $40 billion in profit.

"As if" Walz believes profits do NOT motivate drilling. What do you think they do it for, to drop the rocks they drill in the ocean to watch the ripples? There is, in the Walz mentality, a suspicion that people who earned a profit got this from someone, that it's undeserved. For many years we've understood profits as the return to risk born by the residual claimant, the entrepreneur. But instead we get people who believe corporations are reprobates less worthy of our trust than a government that has a monopoly on force.

But that's not the point either. There's no need to believe the government is more immoral than corporations. There's little argument from either side of this debate that corporations are quite willing to co-opt or corrupt government to do their bidding, or that it's easier for them to do so than the hordes of consumers. It is that Walz and the others in Congress do not comprehend how the wealth we live in today came from. In the book with the title that I made this post, Ludwig von Mises stated this well:

Economics is so different from the natural sciences and technology on the one hand, and history and jurisprudence on the other hand, that it seems strange and repulsive to the beginner. Its heuristic singularity is viewed with suspicion by those whose research work is performed in laboratories or in archives and libraries. Its epistemological singularity appears nonsensical to the narrow-minded fanatics of posi­tivism. People would like to find in an economics book knowledge that perfectly fits into their preconceived image of what economics ought to be, viz., a discipline shaped according to the logical structure of physics or of biology. They are bewildered and desist from seriously grappling with problems the analysis of which requires an unwonted mental exertion.

The result of this ignorance is that people ascribe all improvements in economic conditions to the progress of the natural sciences and technology. As they see it, there prevails in the course of human history a self-acting tendency toward progressing advancement of the experimental natural sciences and their application to the solution of technological problems. This tendency is irresistible, it is inherent in the destiny of mankind, and its operation takes effect whatever the political and economic organization of society may be. As they see it, the unprecedented technological improvements of the last two hundred years were not caused or furthered by the economic policies of the age. They were not an achievement of classical liberalism, free trade, laissez faire and capitalism. They will therefore go on under any other system of society’s economic organization.

And thus there is no check on the ability of people to vilify speculators, because of course the oil can be brought to market in any number of ways! It occurs to me that people do not know what the world was like before the Industrial Revolution (or perhaps they want to go back to those halcyon days?) and how recent our gains against disease and starvation and the Malthusian world. Anthony de Jasay writes about how the modern progressive glorifies envy by its ignorance of these gains on the subsistence level:

Most of us react to the decency or otherwise of large incomes and quickly made fortunes by moral reflexes that evolved under the capitalism of a generation or two ago. They have not yet been adjusted to the changes capitalism has since undergone. One such change is the flood tide of pension funds in the Anglo-American type of capitalism which, after all, sets the mode of operation the rest of the world is beginning to imitate. The needs of pension funds and the competition between their managers sets the maximisation of asset values as the primary goal, and the more classic goal of profit maximisation by corporate enterprise tends to become a mere instrument of the primary goal. Socialists whose rejection of the "system" is visceral rather than intellectual, call this "Casino capitalism," run by and for "speculators".

It is that same visceral reaction that lead 402 Congresspersons yesterday to cast aside the gains that result from finding more ways to spread risk in the world to those willing to bear them, gains that allow pensions, homeownership, life insurance, and the development of new technologies -- the very ones the modern progressive says we should trust instead to give us energy rather than tapping the oil deposits we already know exist. Ignorance of that history is a peril to us all.

Labels: economics, Energy, libertarianism, socialism

This is part thirteen of a continuing series, background here. Previous drawings can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here, and a billboard for the other six here. This appears in the classroom and office building stairwell nearest my office, and has been left up for months. This is the next to last edition, and soon we will have an index for all thirteen days. There will be a second set from another bulletin board next week.

I am not interested, for those who have asked, in having this display taken down. It's not my job to decide what the university wants to present to students, staff and visitors (read: parents and incoming freshmen visiting campus for orientation). I would rather have this material out there for people to see, as it is my opinion that this is what the campus views as part of its function.

Honestly, I cannot find a connection between the picture and the plaque in this one and for awhile thought the picture was mislabeled except for the giant #5 on the podium. I can only guess that this is a complaint of a lack of political candidates of color. Ironic, if so, and rather dismissive of politicians as being harassing.

UPDATE (Sat.): This was scheduled to go up Wednesday. I don't know why this remained in draft. I will post more of these pictures next week.

Labels: higher education, SCSU

A stitch in time? The Chicago Tribune reports,

The Commerce Department reported Friday that after-tax disposable incomes jumped by 5.7 percent in May, the biggest one-month gain since a 6.3 percent increase in May 1975 when Ford was president. He was fighting a recession that year with a program to mail individual taxpayers $50 checks.

This time around individual payments range from $300 to $600 with couples getting up to $1,200. In all, $48.1 billion in rebate payments were made in May and through this week, the government announced Friday, payments total $78.3 billion -- three-fourths of the $106.7 billion scheduled to be paid to 130 million households. The payments are to be completed by mid-July.

Bolstered by the big 5.7 percent surge in after-tax incomes, consumer spending rose by 0.8 percent last month, the best showing since November. Even after removing the effects of higher gasoline and other products, inflation-adjusted spending rose by a solid 0.4 percent, the best performance since last August.

Since consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of total economic activity, analysts said the big jump in May should guarantee a positive reading for overall economic output in the current April-June quarter of around 1.25 percent to 1.5 percent, up from 1 percent growth in the January-March quarter.

Personal income (not including the tax rebates) were up 1.9% in May, with surges in proprietors' income (profits for nonincorporated firms). $179.6 billion was added by the Economic Stimulus Act. Overall, 14% of the increase in disposable personal income (personal income minus taxes) was spent in May. Call that a short-form marginal propensity to consume, mostly from temporary income. Some of it will be spent later, but most will be saved. You can see who's doing what here (h/t: Barry Ritholz) who finds some of the stories "terribly sad". I suspect there's some selection bias going on...

Consumer sentiment is falling, and that might be a bad thing this time around, but so far the economy seems to be in a slow growth period and might stay there for a few more quarters.

Labels: economics

From the Heritage Foundation. If you live in Minnesota and are in the top bracket, put yourself above Denmark if Obama wins. It's not likely to do much for labor supply, either.

Labels: economics, Obama

The Moving Picture Institute, producers of Indoctrinate U, blogged recently about the University of Colorado's notion of having a chair of conservative policy.

The ongoing debate about higher ed reform tends to be quite polarized, and there are many issues upon which the different sides of the debate are seemingly never going to agree. But [Bud] Peterson's plans for a conservative chair were different. They had a peculiar unifying effect as commenters from all sides expressed strong reservations about a faculty position that seemed more concerned with candidates' political viewpoints than with their expertise, and that also contained more than a hint of tokenism. Chancellor Peterson's efforts are understandable, many conceded, but that does not make them especially viable.

Very sensible, though some seem quite willing to accept tokens.

We're ordering up a copy of IndocU, by the way, and looking for a place to show it this fall on campus. Interested parties may contact me on the blog's email address, comments at blog url without the www part.

Labels: higher education, SCSU

Following onto yesterday's post, I note this article (permalink for Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers) that quotes university officials thinking the Heller decision on gun bans has left the door open to finding campus gun bans unconstitutional.

In elaborating on the decision, Justice Scalia wrote that the "court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings."

On the surface, that sentence appears to protect the policies of colleges and universities that prohibit students from carrying guns on campus, said [lawyer] Mr. [Robert] Clayton.

However, the Supreme Court ruling might leave open the possibility that a campus ban on firearms might be challenged on the basis that a particular campus was not a "sensitive" environment, he explained.

The word "school" is often interpreted to mean an elementary school or high school, so one line of reasoning goes that we can't be sure this is supposed to apply to colleges and universities. Another issue is where the school is located.

Even if they remain in place, campus gun bans may be less effective if cities are not allowed to enact tight gun controls, said Mr. White, because the majority of shootings involving students in urban settings occur not on college property but in the surrounding neighborhoods.

Would it be unreasonable to ask that universities keep a lockbox at the edge of campus (at a few different locations) so students would be able to pick up their firearms as they walked home from campus, even while continuing to ban them on campus? Does the Court intend to differentiate between rural campuses and urban, and if so how?

I sincerely doubt the higher education establishment will give up campus gun bans without a fight; I end up agreeing with this article that there is an invitation by the Court to bring the fight to them.

Labels: guns, higher education

Glenn Kessler in the WaPo, June 13,

Sen. Barack Obama said Friday that as president he would impose a Social Security tax increase on people making more than $250,000 a year as part of an effort to extend the program's solvency without cutting benefits or raising the retirement age.

Currently, taxes funding Social Security end once a worker reaches $102,000 in earnings, a ceiling that is indexed to inflation. Workers and employees share the cost, with each contributing 6.2 percent. Under Obama's plan, which the presumptive Democratic nominee outlined at a retirement community here, there would be a "doughnut hole" on earnings between $102,000 and $250,000 where no additional taxes are paid.

Obama has spoken of such a concept before, but Friday marked the first time he had set a threshold for imposing new taxes. Obama was vague on whether that figure would apply only to payroll income.

Video of speech here. This isn't particularly new; he pitched the doughnut plan at the Pennsylvania debate with Hillary in April. Larry Lindsey criticized this proposal in the Wall Street Journal last Friday as being anti-FDR as was as a sharp increase in taxes on the self-employed.

A high-income entrepreneur would see his or her federal marginal tax rate rise to 53% from 37.7% under Sen. Obama's tax plan. He proposes a 4.6 percentage point hike in the personal income tax rate, a loss of some itemized deductions, and a 12.4 percentage point hike in the Social Security payroll tax. This would take a successful entrepreneur's effective marginal tax rate higher than what it was under Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon, when the maximum tax on an entrepreneur was 50%.

That's enough for run-and-hide, the prevailing tactic of the Obama campaign when its proposals get draw flak.

Obama economic advisor Jason Furman, yesterday in a letter to the WSJ:

Mr. Obama has stated that he would like to extend solvency while protecting middle-class families and asking those making over $250,000 to pay their fair share. As president, he would work with Congress on a bipartisan basis to design the details of such a change, including the tax rate, how it is phased in over time, the linkage between these tax payments and benefits and other critical design elements of this plan. He has not proposed a 12.4-percentage point tax increase on earnings above $250,000.

Bump goes the bus, claiming another victim under its wheels.

Labels: economics, Obama, politics

So it appears the Ford Ranger may not end up in the scrap heap. Because of fuel efficiency issues, the relatively gas-sipping Ranger looks like it might stay in production for two more years.

"With high gas prices, the Ranger is looking a lot more attractive," said analyst Erich Merkle of IRN Inc., adding that he was aware that Ford was considering keeping the truck alive.

The Ranger debuted in 1982 as a 1983 model, replacing the Ford Courier. The truck has been lauded for its quality and capabilities, but Ford has not made a significant investment in the Ranger for more than a decade, leaving it to languish.

But at 21 mpg city and 26 mpg highway, the Ranger is the most fuel-efficient compact pickup on the market today. And despite going more than a decade without a significant redesign, it is still the nation's No. 2 compact pickup after the Toyota Tacoma.

Ford originally planned to end Ranger production this year, but agreed to keep St. Paul open for another year as part of its 2007 contract with the United Auto Workers.

So of course politicians will lay claim to being persuasive about the Ranger. Here's St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman:

"Today's report that Ford is considering an extension of the life of the plant is welcome news to Saint Paul. Since before I was elected, I have been calling on Ford to keep the plant open indefinitely. We have been in constant communication with Ford, and we are thrilled with the news that a plant extension may be on the table. "

Norm Coleman and Tim Pawlenty have engaged in shuttle diplomacy with Ford's Detroit executives as well. But do we really think this had anything to do with keeping those plants open? Or is it more simply that Ford has found other lines that might be losing more money than the Ranger and intends to close those instead? With sales declining generally but Ranger sales up, you had to think they might keep making them regardless of any political pressure.

Labels: economics, Minnesota

Joshua Sharf writes about the Democratic National Convention rules on gender balance for its delegations (which is causing some male delegates to be bumped in favor of females):

So why not by, say, income distribution? (Can't find enough poor people.) Or religion? (Don't want Muslims on the same stage as Obama.) Or educational level? (Yes, professor.)

The possibilities are mindless. Really.

Looks to me like another drawing: "I know when I go to the Republican National Convention, I'll see people who look like me." Of course, the purpose of education is to assure they don't go to the RNC!

Labels: politics

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this week (temp link; permalink for subscribers) discusses "survival training for campus shootings." Seems about time, yes? So what are they recommending?

...some campus-safety experts say colleges must better prepare those who do not wear badges. In April the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators published "The IACLEA Blueprint for Safer Campuses," in response to the Virginia Tech incident. The group recommended that colleges train students and faculty and staff members in how to respond to such emergencies. Among the training methods it recommends are residence-life programs, orientation sessions, and print and digital materials.

Although colleges everywhere have developed training programs for their employees, many stop short of asking students to think through how they might react if they heard gunshots in their building.

That's a mistake, says Randy Spivey. "Since Virginia Tech, there's been a lot of focus on law-enforcement response strategies and notification procedures," he says, "but very little on what to do if you're that person in the event."

"[R]residence-life programs, orientation sessions, and print and digital materials" to do what? Let's go to the taskforce report. I see twenty points, most of which deal with what the campus security forces should do. Under a heading "Prevention and Education Programs to
Address Campus Safety Risks" is point 19, as close as we get:

Faculty, staff and students should be trained on how to respond to various emergencies and about the notification systems that will be used. This training should be delivered through a number of delivery options, such as in-person presentations (i.e., residential life programming; orientation sessions for students and employees); Internet-based delivery; and documents.

Give them another training, it appears. So what is two paragraphs later? As an "ancillary issue",

IACLEA does not support the carry and concealment of weapons on a college campus, with the exception of sworn police officers in the conduct of their professional duties.

They follow this with a position statement (on page 12 of the report) making it clear they don't want students with guns, using the claims that students would accidentally discharge their weapons "where large numbers of students are gathered or at student gatherings where alcohol or drugs are being consumed, as well as the potential for guns to be used as a means to settle disputes between or among students." And, they argue, in a situation where an active shooter was present, the campus police could have problems distinguishing between the bad guy and the student with a permitted weapon acting in defense.

Instead, they want students to get training videos (watch the trailer and ask, do you want this in your child's dorm orientation?) and pamphlets. They also want (point 16) criminal background checks on all students, faculty and staff,and to have "behavioral assessment teams" including public safety officials to decide in advance which student is potentially a threat to campus (point 17). Qui custodiet custodiens?
Photo courtesy Joel Rosenberg, who really needs to comment on this.

Labels: guns, higher education

The Minnesota Coincident Indicator series is one of the fifty state series created by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. The latest data on employment has moved this indicator down substantially, decreasing the odds that we are going to avoid a local area recession here in St. Cloud, though the local area data was more positive for May. I am still waiting for the next budget report (and its estimates of sales and income tax collections), but if that picture above stands, the recession call may be just academic soon.

Labels: economics, Minnesota

A reader asks whether a law proposed by some in Congress and Obama to limit oil speculation is a good idea? I was asked at a presentation yesterday how much of current oil prices I thought were speculation. Jim Hamilton has been trying to estimate that for about a month now, and my answer is the same as Jim's and Paul Krugman's -- if you are speculating and forcing price up above equilibrium, there ought to be a surplus that has to be stored somewhere (and storage isn't cheap.) Krugman's graph is instructive.

The story from foreign exchange markets, that we first learned from Milton Friedman, is that speculators stabilize rather than destabilize markets because they are providing new information to the price. If they were providing bad information and destabilizing prices, they would be buying high and selling low, not a good way to make money. Instead speculators are seen as buying when prices are lower than their best guess for equilibrium and selling when prices are higher than equilibrium. Both forces push the price towards the market-clearing level. Mark Perry has another graph that illustrates this.

Stopping speculators either stops the stupid ones from losing money or prevents stabilizing the price of oil. Why would government want to do either? If you're going to blame the speculators for anything, says Arnold Kling, blame them for keeping oil prices too low in 2006-07.

I am reminded in this of a story I always tell in principles classes (again, based on a chapter in Heyne's intro book): We are all speculators. Those who want to expand drilling now think the price is going to go up in the future without increased supply (and look at the flat supply from the last two years as evidence in favor of their view.) Those who don't want to expand drilling are speculating either on finding a warp drive or a willingness of Americans to drive in very dangerous cars. (I listened to a friend the other day happily discuss building an electric car with an old Karmann Ghia chassis with a fiberglass body. All smiles until I asked, "wouldn't that be dangerous?" "Well, I'd only drive it to the nearest town." "What share of accidents happen within two miles of home?")

Labels: economics, Energy

My friend Omer Gokcekus is a very curious economist (and I mean that insofar as he plays in more areas of economics than I do, and that he joined me in an Indian restaurant in Yerevan, Armenia one night -- now that's curious!). He also writes interesting articles, but I don't think he sent me this one before:

Our findings show that globalization has benefited the American wine drinker. We find that there is an overall decrease in the real price of a shopping cart of all 100 wines from year to year. For instance, the real price (in 1988 prices) for the basket of the entire Top 100 list was $4,313 in 1988; $3,132 in 1993; $2,533 in 1999; and $2,421 in 2004. That is nearly a 44% decrease in prices from 1988 to 2004. At the same time, there was no significant change in the quality of the wines on the Top 100 list...

Our econometric analyses show that the decreasing wine price over the past 17 years can be explained by the loss of shares of the Old World countries: Replacing a French wine with a U.S. wine lowers the average real price by 1.0%; an Australian wine by 1.1%; and a wine from non-incumbent countries by 1.5%. To put it differently, replacing an Old World wine (French, Italian, etc.) with a New World wine (US, Australia etc.) lowers the average real price by 1%. Replacing an Old World wine with a New-New World wine (Chile, South Africa etc.) lowers the average real price by 2.5%. The increased presence of newcomers puts significant downward pressure on prices.

h/t: Marginal Revolution. His paper on corruption due in my book this fall will be a highlight.

UPDATE: #1 is a local cook at a number of places, most recently he's been cooking at a local bistro that wants to sell good wine and food. I was invited to stop for coffee yesterday and walked in instead on a wine salesman pouring some samples of his latest ideas. Wines from Spain and Australia -- one of the latter an incredible shiraz -- and only one Old World of the nine we sampled. (Nine, by the way, is too many, but that's another post.) How little time has passed since these wines were almost impossible to get.

Labels: economics, food, wine

Via OTB, I see that United is having too many leakages from its business travelers (and the price discrimination they impose) and thus is using an old ploy to reinforce their market segmentation.

United Airlines said Friday it will start requiring minimum stays for nearly all domestic flights beginning in October. It is also raising its cheapest fares by as much as $90 one-way.

The second-largest U.S. carrier said the moves are among a number of changes it is making to combat record high fuel prices. The Chicago-based airline has been among the most aggressive in the industry in pushing fares and fuel surcharges higher in recent months, and its latest policy could prompt other carriers to consider following suit.

This has been done before, and the way you got around the rule was to use consecutive ticketing. It does not appear that the airlines can enforce back-to-back restrictions directly, so using a three-night-stay minimum is going to help them. The question will be whether or not low-cost airlines will match United. I'll say 'no'.

Labels: economics

This is part twelve of a continuing series, background here. Previous drawings can be found here, here, here, here, and here, and a billboard for the other six here. This appears in the classroom and office building stairwell nearest my office, and has been left up for months. This is the next to last edition, and soon we will have an index for all thirteen days. There will be a second set from another bulletin board next week.

I am not interested, for those who have asked, in having this display taken down. It's not my job to decide what the university wants to present to students, staff and visitors (read: parents and incoming freshmen visiting campus for orientation). I would rather have this material out there for people to see, as it is my opinion that this is what the campus views as part of its function.

In this picture, the drawing seems to be of children in a classroom. A student of color at the board (on the left half of the picture) says "Please Listen". Two blonde-haired white children playing to the right say "Yeah I don't care" and "Thank you." A second black student (smaller than the others) says to a third blonde, "Why aren't you listening?"

Think teachers ever go through this in their classrooms?

Labels: higher education, SCSU

I've written on this feminist mindset in the past, here, here, and here among other posts. This post is lifting comments by feminist professors who attended what appears to be a second-tier conference for Medievalists, professors of medieval studies. A number of them are knowledgeable in their areas of expertise but too often, given the dumbing down of American education, the hard core courses of this topic are sorely lacking for students. So, these professors morph into other areas. Topics of some of the papers from the annual congress in Kalamazoo, MI. included: papers on human waste (yes, you read this correctly), disability studies in the middle ages, major distortions of classic literature with underlying themes not of content but application of today's social agenda to the classics and the typical rant by the feminists. It's not your grandparents' Middle Ages history.

This conference featured such terms as "heteronormativity," "hibridity, "heterosyncrasies" as well as the standard "patriarchy" and typical, defensive mindset. Guess you need a PhD. in something to understand most of these terms.

The feminists appeared in full force. Six female professors met the first day for a discussion by the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. They concluded that feminists needed to redouble their efforts to fight patriarchy (the hardy feminist perennial). The round-table turned into whining, moaning and complaining. Why? Seems that a number of today's young women "don't want to take another feminist class." This was followed by a session devoted to strategies for sneaking postmodernist theory into the heads of reluctant undergrads who would rather not listen to this drivel. "In my students' demographic, they hear the word 'feminist' and they shut down."

I can tell you why - feminism is a losing proposition. BTDT. There is nothing to be gained when young people are exposed to "feminists" whose sole mission in life is to trash men, particularly white men. If you are a female and you want to succeed in life (versus live off the public dole in a university or government position), study something with some substance, like math, hard science, engineering, medicine, business, computers, economics, etc. If you don't want these areas, fine but don't sit around whining about lack of students in your "social" curriculum when the real issue is lack of content. As for students, continue to ignore the feminist babble so rampant on college campuses today and go study something worthwhile.

Labels: Feminists, higher education

I suspect the under-40 American does not remember much of the days of the comedy album (or cassette, or 8-track), but for those of us who were early teens around 1972, George Carlin was the guy that gave you the "seven words you can never say on television", which when played on your crappy stereo in your bedroom caused howls of laughter and a furtive look out the door to see if Mom had heard those words. I had lots of music then, but this and Big Bambu were probably the two records I played most. When #1 son was a teen, we listened to some of Carlin's newer material and I was able to dig out the older stuff (I still have many of my albums) and we howled to Al Sleet the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. Did he become an angry liberal in the 1980s? Yeah, and so what? Even then, his routine on airplanes was sidesplittingly funny. (It's interesting how it evolved before and after 9-11; such was his humor.)

Gone now, a reminder of how time marches past as much as my teen now being in his twenties, and my Littlest starting high school in a few months. What humor will she hear that makes her giggle as much as Al Sleet? (She went camping this weekend with her youth group, came back with a picture of her friend playing "chubby bunny" which is a measure of how many marshmallows you can have in your mouth. Her friend got eight and a photo on MySpace. Good stuff.)

Labels: entertainment

Here's a good example of why unions want to pass card-check, and how the DFL is helping them:

Workers at the newest hotel in Minneapolis, Hotel Ivy, have signed union cards and organized as part of UNITE HERE Local 17.

The employer was bound to a card-check agreement under the terms of financing provided by the City of Minneapolis to help build the hotel. The City provided $6 million in tax increment financing for the $100 million development, which renovated a historic 1930 Moorish-style tower as part of a larger project that includes 136 hotel rooms, 92 condos, and a 17,000 square foot health club.

The new bargaining unit will include about 50 workers, reported Martin Goff, director of organization for UNITE HERE Local 17. ...

"It took about two weeks to organize," Goff said. "We had some people we knew inside from our other hotels." Once Local 17 recruited an organizing committee, Goff reported, "the committee signed up virtually everyone." Goff said 86 percent of the workers signed union cards.

Now I'm not defending Hotel Ivy here, because if you take the dime of TIF, you do the time of dealing with card-check. But understand how a union card works, versus a private ballot. Let's hear it from a former organizer for UNITE HERE, in testimony before Congress.

A “card check” campaign begins with union organizers going to the homes of workers over a weekend, a tactic called “housecalling,” with the sole intent of having those workers sign authorization cards. Called a “blitz” by the unions, it entails teams of two or more organizers going directly to the homes of workers. The workers’ personal information and home addresses used during the blitz was obtained from license plates and other sources that were used to create a master list.

In most cases, the workers have no idea that there is a union campaign underway. Organizers are taught to play upon this element of surprise to get “into the door.” They are trained to perform a five part house call strategy that includes: Introductions, Listening, Agitation, Union Solution, and Commitment. The goal of the organizer is to quickly establish a trust relationship with the worker, move from talking about what their job entails to what they would like to change about their job, agitate them by insisting that management won’t fix their workplace problems without a union and finally convincing the worker to sign a card.

...From my experience, the number of cards signed appear to have little relationship to the ultimate vote count. During a private election campaign, even though a union still sends organizers out to workers’ homes on frequent canvassing in attempts to gain support, the worker has a better chance to get perspective on the questions at hand. The time allocated for the election to go forward allows the worker a chance to think through his or her own issues without undue influence—thus avoiding an immediate, impulsive decision based on little or no fact. After all, the decision to join a union is often life-changing, and workers should be afforded the time to debate, discuss and research all of the options available to them.

As an organizer working under a “card check” system versus an election system, I knew that “card check” gave me the ability to quickly agitate a set of workers into signing cards. I did not have to prove the union’s case, answer more informed questions from workers or be held accountable for the service record of my union.

...In addition to the “housecall,” the union frequently employs other tactics to manipulate the card numbers and add legitimacy to their organizing drive. One strategy is to manipulate unit size. One of the most common ways that we ensured the union could claim that we had reached a majority was to change the size of the group of workers we were going to organize after the drive was finished. During the blitz, workers in every department would be “housecalled,” but if need be, certain groups of workers would be removed from the final unit, regardless of their level of union support. In doing so, the union reduced the number of cards needed to reach a majority. Another such strategy is that organizers are told to train workers to “provoke” unfair labor practices on the part of the company in an attempt to create campaign legitimacy and coerce a “card check” agreement.

One egregious example was when Ernest Bennett, the Director of Organizing for UNITE at the time, told a room full of organizers during a training meeting for the Cintas campaign that if three workers weren’t fired by the end of the first week of organizing, UNITE would not win the campaign. Another strategy is that organizers are told not to file any unfair labor practice charges because it would slow the “card check” process and make time for the workers to question their decisions.

Coercion in voting should offend us all; we watch Zimbabwe this week where an opposition party that won a plurality of the votes in a primary has chosen to withdraw rather than risk violence against its supporters by the Mugabe government. But we hear very, very little about the legitimate threats made to workers -- not violence, but getting workers fired so that you could pass a unionization effort -- in order to support the L of DFL. That's what the city council in Minneapolis did to those workers at the Hotel Ivy. Do they care?

The AFL-CIO reports that Barack Obama has said he would sign the bill that creates card-check for all workplaces, not just those that take government money. They are hoping for change that reduces employee freedom.

UPDATE (6/24): Andy reports that CD6 DFL and Independence Party candidate Elwyn Tinklenberg is also in favor of removing voting rights from the workplace. Funny, I don't see that on the IP platform.

These are our core values:

1) A democratic process with integrity and broad citizen participation

Labels: economics, unions

Every retailer has a suggestion for where you should spend your stimulus check. Courtesy my colleague (and Vegas winter resident) Bill, I learned that Nevada has its own stimulating industry.

Only in Nevada though -- at least, legally -- will businesses be inviting customers to come spend those federal handouts with ... a lady of the evening.

Bordellos aren't legal in far-flung Clark County, or in Reno or Carson City, for that matter. They tend to cluster outside the county limits.

That was fine when gasoline was a dollar a gallon. But now even your most eager sporting gentleman may think twice about spending $50 filling his tank for the 300-mile round trip to the Shady Lady Ranch, just north of Beatty.

The long-haul truckers just aren't enough, obviously. In recent years, Shady Lady owner Bobbi Davis has seen her two closest competitors, Angel's Ladies to the south and the Cottontail Ranch to the north, close their doors. So Ms. Davis is now offering a $50 gas card to anyone who purchases $300 worth of services at her establishment, and a $100 gas card to anyone who visits and spends $500.

Not to be outdone, owner Dennis Hof at the Moonlight Bunny Ranch outside Carson City is offering to double the money of the first 100 customers who cash their federal "stimulus" check at his brothel.

He's asking customers to sign a giant thank-you card in the brothel's parlor. Once it's filled up, Mr. Hof plans to send the card to President Bush at the White House, expressing his customers' gratitude for the way Mr. Bush has helped "spur" the economy.

"What are you going to do, take your stimulus check to Wal-mart?" Mr. Hof asks. "That money is going back to China. Give it to the hookers, and it will go to tattoo parlors and beer and massage therapists and hairstylists and manicurists. We're keeping the money in America."

I am saddened to learn that prostitutes do not inhabit Wal-Mart. I would appreciate them not competing with me for my beer.

Labels: economics, taxes

This is part ten of a continuing series, background here. Previous drawings can be found here, here, here, and here, and a billboard for the other six here. This appears in the classroom and office building stairwell nearest my office, and has been left up for months.

I am not interested, for those who have asked, in having this display taken down. It's not my job to decide what the university wants to present to students, staff and visitors (read: parents and incoming freshmen visiting campus for orientation). I would rather have this material out there for people to see, as it is my opinion that this is what the campus views as part of its function.

Certainly there was an attempt to make Band-Aids look the color of the people they covered, but even in the Caucasian world there are many colors. Littlest Scholar liked her Garfield Band-Aids when she was small, and they can still be part of a fashion design.

Stores, of course, market to their customers. When I am in a downtown hotel on business and have forgotten something in my toiletries, I go to a nearby druggist. In many, because their clientèle has a higher share of people of color, there is a separate section for hair products aimed at people of African descent. For the very same reason, I cannot buy most of the Middle Eastern food products I like to eat here in St. Cloud; this is not an act of discrimination but an act of marketing, of lowering transactions costs for the greatest number. I instead travel to the Twin Cities when I want to buy, say, halvah treats for the house. In contrast, because my family likes Asian foods and St. Cloud has a substantial Asian community, I do not have to go to the Cities for those products. So why isn't the Band-Aid story analogous?

Labels: higher education, SCSU

For years we've been hearing how the ice in the Arctic Sea will melt creating havoc for polar bears, native Alaskans and other life that dares tread there. This May, the "massive Russian icebreaker" Kapitan Khlebnikov brought on board passengers for a tour of the sea with the intent to travel from the northeastern corner of Russia, across the Bering Sea and the op of Canada to Resolute Bay in Nunavut. It's spring, ice was to be melting, you get the marketing picture.

They just had a little problem - ice, massive amounts of ice, in Russian waters. In fact, there was so much ice, this Cadillac of ice breakers was forced to stop, turn off its engines, and wait for Mother Nature to decide to let her go. Seven days later, the ice finally releases the ship. Engines are turned on, speed ahead to make up for lost time.

The ice may or may not have been moving because of climate change but fooling with Mother Nature can show one's lack of intelligence, respect for her power and ability to change on her schedule. As the ice master of the ship commented after the seven day "lock down" in the ice sheet: "This waterway may look like an easily navigable shortcut across the top of the globe, but we are not in charge of the itinerary. This is still an unpredictable passage."

Labels: global warming????

Dear Michele,

After reading about your comments on how the caribou have lived better in Alaska after drilling in Prudhoe Bay started, I was reminded of a paper I had to read in graduate school. Co-authored by my professor Tom Willett (along with Ryan Amacher; it's in this book if you want to read it), it talked about the preservation of the marshes in Louisiana where birds wintered over that were atop gas and oil reserves. Meanwhile let me refer you to this 2005 study by the Reason Foundation, which has a synopsis of what happened.

Deep in the marshes of Louisiana, there is living proof that oil and wildlife can mix. The Rainey Sanctuary is such an important bird sanctuary that even the public is not allowed to visit, but because they own the land, many years ago Audubon weighed the benefits of oil and gas development against the environmental hazards, and chose to go ahead. Of course, they took the precautions they thought necessary to protect the birds, but they also reasonably determined that the risks of environmental damage were outweighed by the size of the revenues from development.

Rainey’s 26,000 acres of brackish and freshwater marshes are a rich feeding area for wintering waterfowl. And in the early 1980s, gas wells in Rainey brought in close to a million dollars in revenues to the preserve. The wells have been in operation for decades, and the wildlife doesn’t seem to mind.

Thus, despite the National Audubon Society’s opposition to oil and gas exploration on public lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, state chapters of the Audubon Society have demonstrated that it can be done responsibly at the Rainey preserve in Louisiana and in Michigan at the Baker Sanctuary.

Here's the policy summary from which the above is taken, and the whole study. The secret is to call the Nature Conservancy or some other environmental group -- it's irrelevant economically, but I'm sure important politically -- and give them ANWR. Then turn to the exploration firms and say "you want that oil? Work it out with this group." I only use the Nature Conservancy in this example because they have experience with selling oil rights. It's time to put the power of Coase to work for energy by offering some of the proceeds to the environmental groups. Call it "free-market environmentalism". I encourage you to read the links in this paragraph.

Best wishes,


P.S. Notice also the principle of privatizing public lands. You could make a mark in this area.

Labels: economics, Michele Bachmann, Minnesota

Mark Perry titles his post "It's an 'Educated-Take-All' Economy", with a graph showing the returns to education for median family income. Quoting a news article first (in italics):

Barack Obama said that he was trying to put together tax and spending policies that dealt with two challenges. One is the competition from rapidly growing developing countries, like India and China. The other: the U.S. becoming what he called a "winner-take-all" economy, where the gains from economic growth skew heavily toward the wealthy.

...Wouldn't one way for Obama to solve this "problem" be to have the government shut down all American colleges and universities, eliminate all federal funding for higher education, or have the government put limits on the number of students attending college?

There is rising income inequality, but the inequality is due to the increasing gains to education over time. It's not so much that the "rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer," as much as it's "the college-educated are getting richer in an Information Age Global Economy, and the high school dropouts are staying the same or getting poorer."

So is it possible to use the tax code to correct for income inequality that is the result of educational differences? And is it desirable? When we've debated the creation of public funds for higher education financial aid through scholarships, one issue was the tax rate on human capital formation. Should the tax system be changed to raise the tax rate on human capital formation through education, as it appears a President Obama would do? Note that his plan includes higher marginal rates on the wealthy compared to McCain, as much of the revenue going to lower-income households are in the form of credits rather than rate cuts. More highly progressive systems are, in fact, a means of taxing human capital. Maybe he'd be better off just taxing height.

Larry Lindsay notes this morning that the combined effects of the Obama tax proposals would move the entrepreneur earning more than $250,000 per year would see a rise in his marginal tax rate to 53% from 37.7%. Obama thinks the entrepreneur will simply take it in the shorts. Lindsay says, not quite:

One of the lessons from the disastrous economics of the 1970s and the subsequent Reagan tax cuts is that everyone – particularly entrepreneurs – responds to incentives. If you take away 10% of a high earner's after-tax income at the margin, he will cut his taxable income by at least 4%. At the margin, this taxpayer now takes home 62.3% of his earnings, a figure that will drop to 47% under the Obama plan. According to a widely accepted economics rule of thumb, the entrepreneur's taxable profit would drop by 11.2%.

Now consider how the Obama plan would affect the taxes paid by such an entrepreneur with a taxable profit from his business of $500,000. Under current law, he would pay $27,148 in Social Security and Medicare taxes, plus $142,969 in personal income taxes, for a total of $170,117. If the taxpayer did not change his behavior at all, under the Obama plan he would face a $31,000 Social Security tax hike and a $11,494 hike in his personal taxes – or a 25% tax hike. But, if the taxpayer responds as the economic models predict, his taxable profit would drop to $444,000. His Social Security and Medicare tax bill would still soar to $51,580. But his income taxes, even with a higher tax rate, would drop to $132,882 for a total of $184,462.

In other words, Sen. Obama is planning on a combined series of tax hikes to produce $42,000 in tax revenue, but consensus economic modeling suggests the government's net take would rise only $14,000.

See also J.T. Young from earlier this week. But even that is a short-run analysis. What is the incentive for someone to study for the higher-income majors in school if we raise the rate of taxation on human capital formation by 25%? With smaller cohorts of new workers coming into the labor force in the future, each worker will need to be more productive to fund current Social Security and Medicare liabilities. The Obama tax plan stifles the incentive to be educated in fields that are highly productive. People don't luck into MBAs and law degrees or medical research (though perhaps Mrs. Obama thinks so) ; they do so in pursuit of their dreams, of which Mr. Obama would like 53%.

Labels: economics, Obama, taxes

Progressivism is politics as religion. Left-leaning progressivism strives to impose values on society every bit as aggressively as the Christian right pushing a moral agenda of 'family values.' Whether the supreme authority over individual liberty is a secular state or a religious one, the operative word is 'supreme.' Progressivism is ultimately about total control.

Progressivism is immune to restraint; it respects no constitutional limits on government. The progressive may prefer the near-sacramental word 'holistic' to describe the effort to create a better world, but, as National Review's Jonah Goldberg reminds us, Mussolini coined the word 'totalitarian' for the progressive vision — a society where everyone belongs, where everyone is taken care of, where everything is inside the state and nothing is outside the state, where there are no hard trade-offs.

Craig Westover in today's PioneerPress. I cannot stress enough the connection between Goldberg's (and Westover's) view and those expressed by Thomas Sowell, described by Kenneth Silber:

The "vision" of the anointed is a world view in which social problems exist because of the negligence or malevolence of the benighted and thus can be solved by imposing the views of the enlightened few on the rest of society via government action. To believe otherwise to view social conditions as largely outside of anyone's control and subject to innumerable trade-offs and constraints is repugnant to left-leaning political and intellectual elites, Sowell argues, because it robs them of the opportunity to display their superior concern and insight.

The "anointed" is the modern progressive.

Labels: economics

This is part ten of a continuing series, background here. Previous drawings can be found here, here, and here, and a billboard for the other six here. This appears in the classroom and office building stairwell nearest my office, and has been left up for months.

I am not interested, for those who have asked, in having this display taken down. It's not my job to decide what the university wants to present to students, staff and visitors (read: parents and incoming freshmen visiting campus for orientation). I would rather have this material out there for people to see, as it is my opinion that this is what the campus views as part of its function.

Perusing the Forbidden Library list of books includes books removed for being racially insensitive, such as Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird or the Little House books.

Labels: higher education, SCSU

Like many, I've tried to trace back my family history, particularly on my father's side. His parents are Armenians who came from Ottoman Turkey to live in America. My grandmother had two brothers and two sisters. One died, the other was spirited away to Egypt where he had children who eventually emigrated to America. My grandmother and one of her sisters married men bound for America; in my grandmother's case, her husband would be a man who had already emigrated and came to Cairo to find a bride. It's a long story not important here.

My grandmother's other sister Sara, the oldest child of the five, stayed behind to take care of their mother who had been widowed. She left Turkey and lived in the general area of Lebanon north of Beirut with a husband and a couple of children. One day after WW2 a ship comes to the area from the USSR, offering Armenians in the area an opportunity to help rebuild Soviet Armenia. Sara, her husband and son take the opportunity and move to a village about twenty miles outside of Yerevan. (Sara's daughter stayed behind because she was married to a local Arab -- at last report she lives in Syria but we have no contact.)

Once there contact with Sara's two sisters was infrequent, ending with a postcard written in 1980. More than twenty years later I took the postcard to Armenia -- no longer Soviet -- to see if I could find the descendants. Indeed the son, Movses, was still alive, at that point more than 80 years old. The house they lived in had two large rooms and was the house he had built in 1948 with his father. His parents were buried about a mile away. The family lived on a fairly meager income supplemented by kids remitting from abroad (both, by the way, also in construction. I got none of these genes.) This picture shows Movses and his wife outside their home.


I was reminded of this reading Russ Roberts' description of motivation for his new book, The Price of Everything.

The novel is the story of Ramon Fernandez, a Cuban-American tennis prodigy who finds himself in the middle of a campus protest at Stanford. ...

Ramon is the son of a legendary Cuban baseball star. After the death of his father, Ramon's mother comes with him to the United States, bringing the young boy to America.

And while the story is fiction, I was inspired by the Elian Gonzalez story. What would have happened to Elian if he had stayed in America. Would he have prospered? Would he have been torn between an allegiance to his new country and his father's Cuba?

A number of pundits at the time of Elian's return to Cuba talked about how he was lucky not to grow up in such a materialist society as America's. I try and explore this issue in the book as well.

Word comes from out of Cuba, that the real Elian Gonzalez has joined Cuba's Young Communist Union.

When I visited Movses, his oldest son's fondest wish was to travel to Moscow to see how it looked now after transition (I took it he had been there before, but I do not know this.) Of course that trip was cheap if you could get permission to travel while the Soviet Union existed. Now it was not cheap, and sometimes being Armenian in Moscow is a little difficult. In contrast I had been able to travel to many capitals around the world and lived a very different life. Not only because Nana got on that boat to Piraeus and eventually Ellis Island, but for the statue she saw when she got there and what it represented.

Labels: America, Armenia

You know, that Andy sure has some power.

When a nation manipulates a market, like energy it gives them an advantage over other nations, or imposes mandates that increase prices domestically, it harms their economy.

Less than 24 hours later, China caves in.

China will raise domestic gasoline and diesel prices by 17%-18% from midnight, the government said Thursday, as it responds to near-record crude oil futures and criticism of its fuel subsidies.

The surprise move raises prices by 1,000 yuan ($145.30) per metric ton and will be the largest increase in over four years although local prices will still be below the international market.

In a statement, the government's National Development and Reform Commission said the decision was aimed at ensuring domestic supply, noting that refiners were suffering "heavy losses."

It's the first oil product price increase since Nov. 1 and comes at a time of widespread fuel shortages in China as filling stations run out of diesel to sell or ration purchases by truckers. China is also increasing jet kerosene and jet fuel prices and from July 1 is raising retail electricity prices.

China's stock market has fallen 50% since late last year; it may be that the engine that is the Olympic Games is about to run its course. Mark Perry has a great graph of construction in China, proxied by its cement output. This supply shock won't help. Along with India and Malaysia, higher net prices to consumers could signal a decrease in quantity demanded as it already has in the US, and a peak in oil prices. As Asia last time led oil prices down in the late 1990s, could that happen again?

UPDATE: See also this from Ironman.

Labels: economics, gas, MOB

This is part nine of a continuing series, background here. Previous drawings can be found here, and here, and a billboard for the other six here. This appears in the classroom and office building stairwell nearest my office, and has been left up for months.

I am not interested, for those who have asked, in having this display taken down. It's not my job to decide what the university wants to present to students, staff and visitors (read: parents and incoming freshmen visiting campus for orientation). I would rather have this material out there for people to see, as it is my opinion that this is what the campus views as part of its function.

From yesterday's New York Times, an image makeover for Michelle Obama. Kind of dampens that drawing. Have you seen Oprah yet today?

Labels: higher education, SCSU

MN's Military Appreciate Fund (MMAF) is a state-wide fundraising initiative by the citizens of Minnesota for the Minnesota military personnel and their families. The group focuses on support for families affected by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

This Saturday, June 21, is the 4th annual MMAF 5K walk/run. Leading the event this year will be the family of PFC Ed Herrgott, the first Minnesotan killed in Iraq. You can participate in this walk/run by downloading the entry form here. Sign up your friends and relatives, take a walk, and contribute extra support to the families of our best and brightest. Added bonus: participants get free tickets to the Twins game at 1:00 PM on Saturday.

Weather should be great! If you've wanted to help our military, this is an excellent way to let our soldiers' families know they are special and we appreciate their sacrifices so the rest of us can continue to live in the freest nation ever envisioned.

Labels: American Heroes, US Soldiers

The Chicago Tribune repor