Tuesday Morning Potpourri--Women and politics

John R. Lott, economist and senior research scientist at the University of Maryland is a brave man. In 2001 he published a study that concluded that legalized abortion increased murder rates from 1/2 to 7%. This refuted the study by the authors of Freakonomics.

According to this article in Cybercast News Service, the Economist magazine tells of two Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economists who said the Freakonomics study was error-filled and went on to say, "To be politically incorrect is one thing; to be simply incorrect, quite another."

Lott has gone on to publish a book Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't. My
library didn't have it (so instead I came home with The Bias Against Guns:Why Almost Everything You've Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong, his follow-up to More Guns, Less Crime), but in an interview on Cybercast News Service, he tells about his conclusion that the increase of government spending is due to women getting the right to vote. He makes a pretty believable case. Lott says that the federal government had remained at 2-3% of the gross national product from the beginning of our country until women started getting the vote, and expenditures only grew by huge amounts after women's suffrage.

Lott says, "Young single women are more liberal than young single men," but become more conservative as they marry and have children. Divorced women become more liberal than they were when they were single. He also talks about how no-fault divorce has made women more likely to work and have fewer children to protect themselves in case of a divorce.

He also has some interesting things to say in the second article about how when Mexico made it more difficult to vote, using photo IDs (which actually required two trips to get--no mailing them) and disallowing mail-in voting, voting actually increased because people believed that their votes actually counted. When Lott looked at voter turnouts in the U.S. where regulations were implemented, he found that voter turnout was reduced only where there had been a lot of fraud.

This week, Uncle Jay explains the concepts of liberal and conservative.

Does this woman belong in Congress? Rep. Laura Richardson has had three homes in default. She had over a million dollars worth of homes that she wasn't making payments on, plus she owed $9,000 in taxes. She also has around a third of a million in campaign debt. We Americans are supposed to understand the effects of changing jobs four times in one year. Is the idea of renting a new concept to her?

Outside politics, kudos to this mom. I hope her son learned his lesson. I wouldn't have done the "D" for "Dumb" thing, though.

Under the heading of "Don't watch this if you're humor-deprived," this video by No Fear Politics makes the point that Republican political-type women are prettier than Democratic ones by using very selectively chosen pictures. It looks like glamour shots for the Republicans, and I don't know what for the Democrats. Doctored ones, perhaps?

Juanell Garrett--Midwest Voices '08