More children will further depress job market Re: “Changing government incentives is first step to restore family formation,” April 27
Robert W. Patterson recommends explicit incentives through the tax system to bear three or more children per family. In my demography class, we learned that overpopulation exacerbates unemployment and now we have, in places, five people for every available job. This is a prescription for breeding the next generation of unemployed.
Short-term solutions to bring equilibrium to the job market include deporting all of our illegal aliens and making changes to immigration and related systems. However, we still need long-term solutions to rein in our reproduction and prepare all the children we do have for the jobs we know are likely to come in 20 years, while preparing unemployed adults for work.
We have many more unhappy people than jobs. Let’s not make more.
Christopher Marsh
Vienna
Using retirement funds for housing will jack up prices
Re: “Waiving early retirement withdrawal taxes could end housing crisis,” April 24
Hugh Hewitt’s idea of allowing early withdrawals from retirement accounts to pay off mortgage debt is dubious. It might benefit some people, but once it became routine to spend retirement money on
housing, that would just bid up real estate prices.
It would not stimulate much construction. Enough housing has already been constructed in most places, with an actual surplus in
some areas. However, it would bid up land prices, since they aren’t making any more land.
This would not be a blessing for young couples who are trying to afford their first home.
Nicholas D. Rosen
Arlington
Collective bargaining is a bust in California
Collective bargaining, at least as conducted in California’s public agencies, is a classic “the emperor has no clothes” scenario. For collective bargaining to work, public employee unions and agency management must have approximately equal power.
The problem is that the public agencies don’t have equal power. In the real world, an employer represents the stockholders’ interests. But how can politicians represent voters’ interests when they are dependent on employee unions for their election?
Private sector unions also have to be as concerned as the employer that the business remains competitive. But public employee unions don’t have to worry about public entities going out of business because the politicians can just increase taxes to meet their demands.
Rich McKone
Lincoln, Calif.
