In today's video I got back 100 cards from PSA. What's up guys we're back with another epic PSA return video. We have a lot of cards to open up today but before that we have a giveaway. I'll be giving away this Axe of Despair first edition PSA 8. We're doing a PSA video so we've got to give away a PSA card. Like the video be subscribed turn on notifications let me know down below your favorite card you see in this video and hopefully we got some awesome grades here. Before we get into the opening of all these cards see what we got. If you're interested in any of these cards a lot of them will be available tonight on whatnot at 4 30 p.m central. I'm gonna have some available for buy now some on auction and it's gonna be a really fun stream it's our fourth stream we've done since we got back on whatnot and all of them so far have been awesome this is our first one involving graded cards so this should be pretty cool and so if you are interested you're seeing this video on Thursday then make sure you come to the whatnot stream tonight it's gonna be pretty awesome it's 30 minutes earlier than usual so keep that in mind there's also gonna be insane giveaways I've given away like over $3,000 worth of cards in the last three streams so if you guys are interested in winning stuff for free you don't have to buy anything for a lot of those some of them you do have to buy stuff but most of them you don't someone that just watched the stream and didn't buy anything want to go share a stardust last stream so that could be you and don't forget if you do check out the whatnot stream you get $15 for free if you've never been on the platform just click my link down below make sure to do that and if you want to go find me go search me ruxin34 in the app and you'll find my scheduled show and you can save it I'm also gonna have a few other shows like coming up so if you want to save those as well then you'll know when they're coming up all right guys let's get into this they have updated their boxes guys look at this thing okay let me let me zoom out real quick they used to have the smaller ones this is like a 50 card box or something I don't know what's going on here I have two of these so I'm assuming it's a 50 card box let's just open it up I've never seen this box before I don't know when they started using these it's been a while since a PSA return so it could have been a couple months ago okay I just went ahead and pulled everything out because it was gonna be too difficult to use that box so we're gonna go one at a time this is the order they were in let's see they get a little bit a junk on the back that's pretty usually you know the how it goes with grading there's often stuff in the in transit a little scratched up okay let's see what this is first card hopefully we got some Jim Minton's speaking of Jim Minton's a dark magician girl premium goal the PSA 10 that's a great start that is a really nice card dark magician girl PSA 10 we're taking that every time let's see about this one oh sang it from turbo pack our turbo pack opening if you guys missed that go watch it it was insane unfortunately this got a nine that's still a really nice card I'm so excited to have PSA returns back especially these big ones because I have not actually I actually sent in another one recently but I hadn't been sending them in just because I didn't have a lot of cards to submit at the moment we have a oh a seven you will hero inferno wings I miss a bin somewhere maybe like a little ding or something with a seven that probably means it was some sort of like light bin like really light they're they're easy to miss so I'm guessing that's what that was our first seven of the day you know you're gonna get one I mean it's just natural a lot of times you're gonna miss something UFO right always an eight man I can't even get a greatable UFO right we pull UFO right all the time it's never even greatable we've got seven eight nine ten already four cards in who would have thought oh pokemon wait what did I send with pokemon we got pokemon cards in here what was this oh the mute to v star okay we got a nine so I pulled these on twitch so go check out my twitch channel twitch.tv slash ruckson 34 we pulled these when we opened some of the crown zenith sets that's fun I think I have another one of these that's what this is right both nines unfortunately so two of me to v stars nine's on a new card not awesome let's see what else we got we have an eight necro gardener oh you're getting killed so far ultimate rares can be rough sometimes it looks like they're going to be rough in this submission oh a blaze accelerator champion pack six psa 10 is this the one I pulled I think this is the one I pulled back in the day that's sick yeah I pulled this out of like 10 loose packs at one point we're talking like three years ago maybe we can find that video to pop up so you guys can go revisit that one if you guys haven't seen that you probably haven't if you're watching in 2023 all right two 10s not bad that was a good one and we have a oh the utopia collector rare got a nine okay no big deal we have a uriah dude every time I grade these they get sevens and eights I don't know what it is next one we have dark sages and eight two oh he's a little warped you can actually see this look at this he's warped in the case that makes sense maybe that was some of the reason next card a 10 on the earth about a mortal rear up coke or a ska secret rare from the 10 that is nice anytime you can get a 10 promo as a 10 10 10 I should probably say differently but you know yeah I see that's photon I pulled a lot of these and I got a that got a nine unfortunately what else can we get a black wing dragon we pulled this one too I think out of a 10 so it looks like opening that black wing dragon 10 we might have made our money back that's insane it always comes down if those promos can grade it in if you make your money back oh chimeritech overdragon we can't get that ultra rare but hey we got a PSA 10 ultra rare honestly a lot of 10 so far I mean we're gonna got some eights in there this is not great but we're doing fine so far let's see what else we'll get next oh a dark banther PSA 10 this is what I pulled as well we pulled this out of power of the duelist so that's nice to see some of our power of the duelist openings actually paying off got a little bit of a ulti stamp sometimes you can get away with that and get a 10 that's nice very nice that card was very minty so I'm happy to see that got a 10 all right next card oh our car trooper that we we tried so hard to pull this man for some reason the collectors are hitting better in the PSA case I think that the reflectiveness is nice there's a nine unfortunately all that work for that $20 card we got a oh wing dragon of raw from premium gold PSA 10 premium golds treating as well both of our premium gold cards have gotten 10 that is nice we'll take that what was that from was that from the every gold opening you guys missed that one go watch it every gold series opening that was fun next one we have drag you got a 10 too that's sick our turbo back opening turbo back for this one wasn't turbo back six we also open turbo back for this I'm going to be recommending a lot of videos because all these are from videos go check that one out that was apparently a gym meant 10 worthy I think this is an old Pokemon card let's see oh no it's not here's the shining face we pulled this in a video like a regular rucks of video wasn't any sort of like extra channel we actually opened Pokemon packs at one point and pulled this like two or three years ago and this was hot and I just never graded it because I didn't want to send a Pokemon card in turns out it was a great card so PSA 10 I don't think it's worth nearly as much as when I pulled it but we'll take it okay next up a nine and the shining feelings enforcer that's okay that's not bad we have a nine on the Grand Nio so okay okay I don't remember where those came from maybe collections oh a 10 on the ulti vw xyz dragon catapult came in man we have some good cards so far this is a great sub so far I'm feeling this this is nice what's up next we have a tour guide secret rare I think I just had this one it looked really minty I don't think I pulled that one that was might have been from a collection or something we have a nine on the Ravi al hey that's not bad I mean ultra rare we'll take it pretty cool neck okay let's get back to the tens we got a nine on the hero medal some of these random ulti's like hero medal like looked really nice so it went ahead and and graded them our nine is past the tens which for a while the tens were beating the nines which was pretty unusual we have a fish pork blaster got an eight right out of the pack that's not good I think I graded all of those oh feather shot that would have been a cool ulti for avian fans out there just a nine still pretty nice I mean ulti's you know we've had some ulti 10 so I can't complain a nine on the neos force okay those were minty cards but I'm sure they had something going on a eight on the double dude okay eight on the double dude that sucks uh we have a oh levian ear got a 10 sick that's a really cool Jim minton chaos dragon levian ear from ot s 12 that's just a really cool artwork I love this card hey ulti 10 we're saying especially a new ulti those can be weird sometimes all right next card we have a nine I think I graded a bunch of these these tempest and uh and redox I think we got a oh a 10 on a megamorph this was just a regular unlimited mrl but I was like hey this thing's minty I'm gonna grade it we pulled this one I believe so why does well take that 10 that's pretty nice we have a ghost oh it's a nine oh this would have been huge as a 10 I remember this one looking nice but with these they always look amazing and then when you look at them closer you somehow miss like a print line so that's probably what happened here but a nine on this is still really good because these are so hard to get I mean look at the foil oh the foil's so good on these it's literally some of the best goes foil it's so bright it's like blinding almost it's amazing so I probably miss like a print line in there or something like that I can't see one here but pretty much every time yeah there's always something on those it's so hard to find them no matter how many angles you look at it at there's something you missed okay that's why those gold series hot of my 10s are insane to find we have a okay another nine on tempest come on tempest at least give us one 10 oh a scapegoat ulti 10 cool I think I got this in a collection I was like you know what I'll grade this thing it looks pretty nice scapegoat ulti ps a 10 we'll take that that's pretty nice what else we got oh a sky striker ace hey a day that must have been really nice for me to grade this because this is more of a playable card I wouldn't recommend grading a card like this but I was like it's so minty I'm just gonna go ahead and grade it so hi ate got a ultimate rare ps a 10 so that's pretty cool I wonder if there's a lot of those gradient I'm not sure because it is sort of a playable card oh hobby league I tried some hobby league they got an eight we'll see I mean those can be really hard to have minty because like they fray on the edges and stuff or like turn up and stuff oh you're a full red fighter first and that would have been such a nice one it looks like it might be a little OC that might be why I got the nine still a really nice card I mean it looks awesome all right next card a uva nabanaga that's cool collector rare from ancient guardians we'll take that ps a 10 looking good a lot of 10 so far I'm liking this sub so far oh a solemn judgment another one another playable one but it's also an iconic old school you know it's in metal it's not metal raiders but it is a version of that card that's pretty sick ulti we have a redox we did get a 10 on the 10 10 on the 10 I don't know which one would be 10 but we got it we have a a nabanaga we went for the tactical evolution version as well that's a nine that's okay still nice card we have a redox okay got a nine we need a tempest now to at least have both of them in 10 oh speaking of elemental hero shining flare wingman got a ps a 10 that's a sick card if this was an ulti it'd be insane money but the ultra still an awesome card as well okay good start so far we have a water dragon I had this one set aside to grade for so long because it looks so good and I guess I was right ps a 10 I was gonna send this in like a higher end sub with like less cards but I was like you know what I'll send it in the boat because it's not really worth that much I love the look of this card oh this is definitely going in the collection this one will not be available on whatnot tonight that is a sick card wow that one is definitely going into the collection that's an awesome one okay that was exciting that's one of my most exciting ones yet uh dig your suit I knew that one looked good that's another playable card that I graded some ultis that were a little iffy if you should grade them or not but they're all getting 10 so I'll take it uh miss archfiend first ed from force of the breaker heck yeah this thing looks like it's a little off-center I think I might have gotten a little leniency there this is probably in the 60 40 maybe oh maybe not actually it got a tilt a little bit hey we'll take that though two cards to go let's see we have a oh a gem meant in come on lord of striking thunder that's got some really nice sintering up things right in the middle we've got more 10s than 9s here this is insane what else we got transcendent wings this would be such a cool 10 it's a go with like uh the wing caribos and stuff that's the halfway point I think uh we're doing really well I can't complain about this so far all right halfway point I hope you guys have been enjoying your uh your all your tea and snacks and whatever you're eating and popcorn of course what is on the back here this is the first card so they always get covered in crap so that's why I got the handy dandy towel thing to get that off a little bit of a scuff there I think I can get off okay we got everything off the back of that let's see if it was another 10 like last time invasion of chaos dark magician of chaos original IOC whoa it's our first day that would have been amazing but hey that's a pretty awesome on limb where did that card even come from did I pull that all right next card we have a oh bionic dragon of the ice barrier that's a sick secret rare from hitting arsenal I don't think it's a huge money card but I don't know about tens that's that's pretty nice ooh black lesser soldier soldier of chaos about his legend hero revenge just a nine but a really nice card we have a beast skull dragon from metal raiders I think this is the one I pulled from our openings back in like the 2022 tens so when we opened every 2022 10 I think that was the card so a little bit off center make sure and since I got a nine we have a we did get a tip it so we got both tempest and redox we'll take that that's awesome let's see what else another redox really cool I think a great like six of those because we opened so many of them ghost rare we went for it unlimited ghost shirt just got an eight though that's unfortunate okay must have well you know ghost rare scratches stuff like that we have an oh and eight on the tempest that one must have been you know had something I missed we have a redox another nine so I'm gonna have a lot of those probably some available on what not tonight we have another redox what else can we get we have a another tempest PSA 10 we're taking that what else we got next a eight on a blast yeah this is from when we opened every 10 I figured I'd throw these in because I only had one of them but blaster not so good what was the other one that I don't have the uh oh another tempest all right tempest 10 makes sense we have a grand ball ulti that would have been so nice and 10 even at nine that's an amazing card look at that card that is awesome all right next card we have a dog mo great attending one of these in our last sub so uh that would be cool to get another one but a nine still pretty nice what else we got left cybernard dragon that have been another nice 10 come on come on come on player neos nine oh here come the nines it's a nine train come on 10s get back to it a nine on the hero barrier it's a nine streak and we should start it with this one I think we had a nine oh that's an original secret rare from ancient prophecy just a nine that would have been a cool 10 as well let's see what else we got card of safe return first ed oh more nines come on come on a fishboard blaster one got an eight one got a nine how those get separated so much I don't know a 10 yes we got a phoenix enforcer bsa 10 we've got like a shadow from out tall the nine stack is very nice jim men 10 we'll take that I think I might move these stacks over just because they're creating a shadow at this point we'll put the seven there we'll have we'll have a new stacks to start let's go here with a mass dragon nine okay that's right out of a turbo pack six opening we have a big shield gardener that's from tp5 that would have been a really nice 10 tp cards in 10 are awesome we have a two world oh so many nines in this one turn it around come on pyramid turtle another nine that's one that we pulled out of cp cpo2 actually we have a lot of I think that's the only card one of the two cards that have cp in ps8 10 uh ghost rare oh look nice go shift it down it is solemn judgment oh I don't think we've hit a 10 we've hit like 110 out of this box it's been rough we have another nine of the turtles the turtles are nines no what else we got come on oh a seven oh the elemental hero shining flare wingman shift the name shouldn't affect the grade so I don't think it was that it's probably something else you know 10 promos they often have like bends or something like that come on give us something a nine on the fiend sanctuary that's another cp that's a cp ultra that would have been huge come on give us a 10 magicians unite a nine as well oh man it was such a good start we're getting killed now oh there we go acid trap hole dark dual stories is just a promo but hey this is a really nice looking card acid trap hole we are taking a gem meant in on that what do we got here dark world lighting all these cp cards are getting nice this is why I originally didn't great I was like I don't think they'll get 10s but maybe they will that's why I went for it oh a first edition amazon swordswoman for magicians force these are actually pretty rare that's a nice car I think I have two of these now do I still have the other one I think I do I think I have two amazon swordswoman so that's actually a huge one very nice what else can we get we have who an original air force another one from the 2002 every 10 opening that we did you guys haven't seen that one at some point or yeah you got to go check that one out nice ultra what we're down to like what 12 ish cards left come on got an eight okay yeah surprise surprise come on got an eight what else will we get come on blue eyes bpt that would have been a crazy 10 this is the one we pulled with jobber I think it looks so good oh a nine is so nice but a 10 would have been massive on that card okay here it is I think this is the magninot we pulled from the base set two-pack leonhardt senate so let's see what he grades a nine I mean honestly not bad for a pokemon card watsy pretty hard to grade I'll take that this was from leonhardt so this is pretty cool shout out to leonhardt for sending me this pack I think it was a we did a charity event like two years ago I gotta go back and revisit that it was a really cool video we opened up some old a you go back and stuff go check that one out my editor is gonna be asking me what was this video what was this video I'm gonna be searching for a lot of videos to recommend for you guys but there's a lot of good ones from these openings okay another okay another one of those we'll take that I mean I can't complain about redox I submitted a lot of those we have a chain disappearance man all those turbo pack cards I think we got the track was the huge one other than that's been mostly nines fishboard got eight nine wow that's rough we have a card of destruction or card destruction I should say that's oh that was so nice a nice glossy print got the nine it's such a nice old school card very iconic that hand just reaching out there it's really cool last few cards come on what can we get we got a nine on a chain destruction from tournament pack four these are so hard to get tens on if we got a 10 on this it would have been insane I don't even know if there is a 10 of this card so that would have been huge yeah we're talking the TP four version very rare come on big shield garden another why don't have so many big shield gardener I think it was from my TP binder that I had all these we have a another redox that's a nine we'll take it two more cards come on give us some 10s we only got like three 10s out of this box it's been rough ooh an st ghost rare it's probably another ghost rare no okay what's the last card I mean it's been a crazy one the first box was insane we got so many 10s not as much as the second box but it's still been really good what will the last card be oh a title got a 10 so we almost have the full set in 10 we just need one more that's pretty sick that's a good way to end it another PSA 10 kind of flew through those because you know I mean we're not gonna you know diddly dally around but hope you guys enjoy this still fairly long video and uh we pulled some amazing 10s out of here I went pulled I don't know if that's the right word but if you enjoyed the video make sure to subscribe to channel for more PSA returns more openings and more epic content like this and don't forget to check out the whatnot stream use my link down below get that $15 free and come get some of these tonight at auction shout out the toe and foe show daxer jt show puppets of doom ronestor diana dizzy missy colt america deutzer supreme stage 21 and then a Thai show ayun moussa junior barding mimic gecko and thomas plane thank you guys for supporting the channel I'll see you guys in the next video peace


Aloha and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm your host, Kaylee Akinna, president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. One of the things that Grassroot Institute does is research and education on matters that concern our laws in the state of Hawaii. The state legislature has just finished its 2019 session, and we want to take a look at some of the more notable bills that were passed and how they might impact your life and our economy. Someone summed it up and said, well, it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it wasn't as good as it should have been. Well, I've got a couple of people here today to help us take a look at some of the key bills. The first is Executive Vice President of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, Joe Kent, who in that role manages the tremendous team of people who are researching and analyzing and coming up with better solutions for the economy, government, and society. Joe, welcome back again to the program. Always good to have you. Yeah, thank you so much. You're doing really good work. Thank you. And then along with Joe, we've got another member of the Grassroot team from right outside of the city of Washington, D.C. right now. She is our policy director, Malia Blomhill. Malia takes a look very carefully at the various bills, especially from a legal point of view, a financial point of view, and gives us great input. Malia, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you. Good to have you back. Wish we could have you more frequently here in Hawaii. Well, together, I want to introduce these wonderful members of the Grassroot team and really dig in and learn a little bit about of their mana'o, as we call it in Hawaii. They're thinking about what took place in the legislature. First a question to either of you. What was the session's final result? Was it as bad as it could have been? Was it as good as it should have been? Malia, you were watching from afar very closely. What did you see? Well, in a sort of half-full way, it could have been a lot worse. It could have been much, much worse for the average taxpayer. One of the things that we dodged was an excise tax hike that would have been relatively substantial, going up from 4 to 4.5%. That was a sort of narrow escape. And then the other thing, the minimum wage bill, which kind of went back and forth and back and forth, and it looked like it was going to go through and really, really hike the minimum wage a lot in a very little bit of time. That also got defeated. There were a lot of big spending bills that did not actually materialize. So from that perspective, it could have been worse. Well, that's a faint praise, but at least praise is worth something, and we'll pass that on to our legislators. Joe, how about you? As you looked at the session, what did you see? I think it could have been a lot better, and that's because there were some taxes that actually passed this year. We had the REIT tax, which is the Real Estate Investment Trust tax, and we had the estate tax pass, and we have a new tax on vacation rentals as well. So we've got a whole flood of new taxes to think about now. And it would have been better if more of Hawaii's people could keep their money in their pockets. We'll talk about that a little bit more, but one of the things that makes the legislature work is the way it conducts its business. We had been very concerned about a practice called Gut and Replace, whereby a bill is introduced by one title with very little content actually sometimes remaining by the end of the cycle of that bill. So it doesn't necessarily get all of the scrutiny it deserves from the public. This practice had a little bit of development in this legislature. Joe, how many bills were actually involved in what we would call Gut and Replace? Well, we tracked about 14 Gut and Replace bills, and those are bills that changed dramatically, and they were completely gutted and completely replaced with other language. We had one bill that was about computer science, and it turned into kind of a collective bargaining type of bill, and so those are very different concepts, and they change right at the end of the process where people don't get as much chance to comment on them as well. So it's kind of a transparency democracy issue. We also had six Frankenstein, what we call Frankenstein bills, and that's when you have the contents of a bunch of different bills all kind of stitched together into one what we call Frankenstein bill, and that's similar to the Gut and Replace issue where we don't have enough time or means to comment on that, and so the public doesn't have a chance to participate. Malia, citizens have been so alarmed by this that many of them have launched a suit that went to a certain degree. Well, tell us a little bit about that suit that was brought in and what we can expect in the future. Well, the Civil Beat Center for Law and the Public Interest and along with the League of Women's Voters, Common Cause Hawaii, they've all been very vocal about their issues with Gut and Replace and Civil Beat and the Common Cause launched a suit challenging one of the Gut and Replace bills from last session. I need to go check exactly which one. The point was that it had no, like a typical Gut and Replace bill, no actual relationship between what the bill was, what it began, and what it was when it actually was passed inside. So they challenged it in court saying that it basically was unconstitutional. It defied the Constitution's requirements for free readings. The legislature defended the practice. And they even tried to follow it. They filed an amicus brief in favor of it, you know, basically arguing that it gives them certain flexibility to deal with things and so on and so forth according to their processes. The problem is, is that if that was what the legislature used Gut and Replace for, if they used it to deal with a sudden emergency that appeared halfway through the session, I don't think people would have such a problem with it. It's really the practice of taking a bill that, you know, was actually probably defeated, you know, in one house and jamming its contents in at the very last minute to a bill that had already passed that house that didn't like it and kind of sneaking it through that way. It's that element of it that really is a transparency accountability problem. Well, the lawsuit against the lawsuit charging this practice is unconstitutional. It lost at the circuit court level, but they have filed an appeal or an intent, a notice of appeal. So they will be appealing the decision. So we will be watching very closely and inputting to that to see that we have greater measures of transparency for the public. Now, there's another issue that came up in the legislature. It didn't get as far as some people wanted to do. It had to do with the minimum wage laws. Now, let me say at the outset that the Grassford Institute were committed to a couple of things. One is improving the economy by bringing down the cost of living. That would help people to be able to afford to live here. And there are things government does that helps that and hurts that. We promote those things government does that actually helps to bring down the cost of living. Another thing that we're promoting is putting more money into the pockets of workers, especially those workers at the lower end of the wage spectrum. And I think that's the same goal as those who want to raise the minimum wage, but the research we have discovered shows that raising the minimum wage by forcing businesses to pay a certain amount actually hurts the very people it's aimed to helping.  Sure, it does. We looked at two decades of research on the minimum wage studies and we found that it generally hurts the people it's supposed to help. If you have low skills and you're trying to get a job, whenever they raise the minimum wage, now you have to compete against people who have higher skills and that might price you out of the job market. And we see this again and again where people actually have a harder time finding a job when the minimum wage is raised. At the same time, you have businesses who sometimes go out of business because it's harder to pay those higher wages for the same work. And that means less jobs. So when we looked at all the studies, they concluded that the minimum wage doesn't help. In fact, it might hurt the people, especially with low skills. You know, as we take a look at this issue, it's one of the areas where we want our legislators to follow the best practices of other states, what they've learned through experience as well as research that we've garnered from across the nation. And I guess the finding you're talking about, Joe, seems a little bit incredulous. If you really care about people who are at the low wage end, it's easy instinctively to think forcing businesses to raise their salaries would be helpful. But Malia, why is this counterintuitive claim not really true? What are some examples we've actually seen in cities across the country of what happens when businesses are forced to increase the minimum wage? Well, you know, it's a sort of unfair assumption at the basis of these big jumps in minimum wage that businesses have the ability to pay these higher payrolls but just choose not to. In reality, what they're finding is that, you know, the money that they have allocated to payroll is what they can afford. So businesses try to adapt to the higher minimum wage by keeping their payroll relatively the same.  And in certain industries, you'll see unemployment rise and hours get cut drastically. So the most notorious example is Seattle when they went to $13 minimum wage. What happened was that workers ended up taking home less money despite the higher minimum wage because the hours, their overall hours decreased. Businesses basically had to decrease overall hours work in order to make up the difference. When New York City was contemplating a similar $15 minimum wage, polls of the restaurant industry, the hospitality industry, showed that the majority of businesses plan to lay off workers or cut hours to make up the difference that they just couldn't handle in terms of payroll increase. The other thing that people believe is going to happen, and we're going to see more and more of as this push for a very high jump in minimum wage cuts, is automation. It basically makes automation a better option for certain jobs. And so we'll see more automation-replacing jobs so that businesses can again maintain that payroll. Well, we'd not see the end of the minimum wage push, and it's likely that although it failed this time to reduce, to increase minimum wage from a little over $10 to $15, that that proposal will be back again. There's another proposal that comes up perennially, and that is the increasing of our general excise tax. And that's probably because that's an easy one to sound small. That is to say, increase the general excise tax by about half a percent and you may go from 4.5 to 5, and it doesn't sound very big. But in reality, it's a huge impact upon the general public, as well as upon those least able to pay taxes. Joe, do you want to tell us what happened with GE tax to increase attempts this term? Yeah. Well, there was an attempt to increase the general excise tax by 0.5 percent across the state basically to pay for education. If low education is a sound need, the tax increase would hit a lot of people who are on low income. In fact, they call it a regressive tax, and regressive meaning it kind of hurts the poor. And this general excise tax is even worse because it pyramids. In other words, if you can imagine a snowball starts to roll and it becomes a bigger snowball and eventually becomes an avalanche, that's kind of how the general excise tax works, because as the tax is taxed from thing to thing in Hawaii, it grows and it hits the taxpayer at the end. And that means that the consumer at the end who may be on a fixed income or may be struggling to get by has to pay quite a big proportion of their income off just for the general excise tax. It's a very regressive tax. And in addition to that, there has also been a push to pouch increases in general excise tax in worthy causes. Perhaps one of the most worthy causes is our educational system and paying teachers more, and certainly teachers who work well deserve to be paid more. But there were a couple of problems with this GE tax being tied to that. Number one, the increase in GE tax actually hurts teachers themselves and the families of students who have to pay the taxes. The second problem is, as we've shown in previous Think Tech programs here, we're not sure that the lack of money is the problem in our school system. It could be the problem, but the data is not there that shows that the reason teachers don't get paid enough and that programs aren't funded enough. The data is not there that says it's the lack of money. What we need is more transparency to see how the $3 billion or so when we consider all the costs of the educational system are being used. And if it's a lack of money, we can solve that problem, but it may very well be something else that could better be resolved through more efficiency and accountability and so forth. There's another issue which we want to talk about. It's a bill that got transformed in different ways, but it was also for a worthy cause called Aloha Homes, or homes that would be actually on land owned by the state government and provided as long-term leases for those in need of that. Joe, let me go to Malia. Malia, do you want to tell us a little bit about that before we take a break, maybe take a couple of minutes? Of course. So Aloha Homes was a really sort of revolutionary approach to the affordable housing crisis in Hawaii. The idea was that they would create a program that would build and offer 90, I was going to say homes for sale, but that's actually one of the big issues, is that it would offer homes to presumably low-income residents for 99-year leases. And Grassroot identified this bill as one of those bills that has really very good intentions, but some sort of problematic execution in regarding the 99-year lease holds, the probable spending, what it would cost to build these homes. Well, SB 1, the Aloha Homes bill, the original one passed the Senate but stalled in the House. It's one of, it became one of our gut and replace bills because a unrelated House bill that passed the House did not include Aloha Homes, went through the Senate and somewhere in its journey through the Senate picked up the Aloha Homes, all the Aloha Homes language. Now it eventually turned into, let's just do a study, which there's the morphing of a bill for you, incidentally. So you got a lot of lessons here, huge spending, and also got new plans. So instead of implementing a program, it's just a study, but it could come back this coming year. And after we come back from a short break, I'd like to ask you each to discuss some of the elements of the Aloha Homes bill, although we don't know exactly what will come out of the study, some of the elements that may be a little problematic for Hawai'i's taxpayers and for the people who live there. I'm Kili Ikeena on Think Tech Hawai'i's Hawai'i Together. We'll be right back with Joe Kent and Malia Hill after this short message. Don't go away. Aloha, I'm Cynthia Sinclair. And I'm Tim Appachella. We are hosts here at Think Tech Hawai'i, a digital media company serving the people of Hawai'i. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawai'i. We are a Hawai'i nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to ThinkTechHawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. Hi, I'm Mabuhai. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawai'i. With ThinkTech Hawai'i, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, Mabuhai, and aloha. Welcome back to Hawai'i Together on ThinkTech Hawai'i's broadcast network, and I'm just delighted to have Joe Kent, executive vice president of Grassroot Institute, and Malia Blomhill, the policy director with us today talking about some bills in this past legislature. One that I'd like to ask a little more inside on is the aloha homes. You know, really, we don't have a lot of detail to fix on that right now because it's in study form rather than an actual law. But there are some concerns about some of the elements of that bill. But first, you know, what could be wrong? You know, what could be wrong with the government operating a program to provide homes through a 99-year leases for people, just like Singapore? In fact, that may be one of the first questions I would ask. Joe, Hawai'i in many ways models itself after practices elsewhere. Why is it a good idea or not a good idea to look at Singapore as the model for our housing solution? Well, Singapore is a good place to look for policy issues, generally, because it is one of the most free-market economies in the world. I think it's number two, Hong Kong's number one. So I don't mind looking at Singapore or anywhere else for policy solutions. The problem is that a Singapore's housing solution may work for Singapore, but here we're bogged down by so many regulations. Our island is different and everything, and it would be kind of a government housing project. And in the past, government housing projects haven't fared very well across America or even in Hawai'i. A lot of times with a government housing project, it takes away the incentive to take care of the property, and so the property falls into disrepair. They call that light. And so a lot of these projects, after a while, they get so much light that the government either has to tear down the project or find a different way to do it. We're concerned that that may affect this Aloha Homes bill, but also there's so many ideas built into this Aloha Homes project. It's kind of the junk drawer of ideas. And there were so many ideas, it was getting so complicated and unwieldy, you might say, that maybe that's why they did all that gutting replacing at the end. Well, I think you're right. Singapore is a tremendous model of a free market economy, but Singapore has certain dualisms, I won't say contradictions, but dualism. On one hand, they've got a phenomenally well-developed free market economy that allows businesses basically to flourish, and we can learn a lot from them, especially according to the economic freedom of the World Report that ranks them as one of the two best free market economies on the planet. We also have a massive government sector, which is very, very wealthy and capable of doing things that our Hawaii government is not capable of doing because of that wealth base. And so more than 50% of the people, in fact, the vast majority of people in Singapore are actually on government subsidized homes. We don't have anywhere near that amount of wealth. But the other thing is we've got a commitment to letting free markets compete, especially in the housing industry as well as other industries. And what we're looking at and failing to see is that in Singapore, we're looking at a model in which the government actually is the major player and the controller of the housing market. And that is something that could be very problematic. Also, if you're looking for a home, getting a 99-year lease may not be the best solution. Maybe I could ask Malia to address this. Absolutely. One of our concerns was these 99-year lease holds have the potential to trap you in the home because according to the original plan of Aloha Homes, if you sold your home before your lease hold was up, you wouldn't actually get most of the sale profit. 75% of the sale profit has to go to the state. So rather than basically creating a flourishing market in homes, what this idea does is it traps people in a home that maybe they would like to move on from, but can't because they're stuck in this 99-year lease. They have forfeited any of the opportunity to make any money off of the sale. We usually talk about home ownership as a route to the middle class. This first step into equity, this first step into being able to have the ability to strike out entrepreneurship and businesses and so on and so forth. But Aloha Homes doesn't really do that. It doesn't provide the benefits of home ownership other than just a roof over your head. And that's not nothing. There is value to that, but it's not really providing what it's advertised as giving. It's not going to give people who buy in Aloha Homes that upward mobility, that equity, that sense of that opportunity. In another move, the legislature passed a couple of measures that had the favor of people who feel it is important to tax the rich and tax corporations. And that has to deal with a couple of measures. The first one was the real estate investment tax, which we saw increase in terms of its impact upon businesses. And the other one is the estate tax, for which we now will have the distinction to the governor sign it of being the most expensive state to tie in in the nation. But critics of those who would caution against these two measures say that these only would hurt the rich. They would help everyone else. But what are your thoughts about that? Maybe before we answer that question, Joe can explain a bit about what REITs are and what the legislature decided to do. Sure. Well, REIT is a real estate investment trust. That's what it stands for. Basically, it's a company that owns real estate. So you can think of a company that owns a mall or a hotel or office buildings or even apartment complexes. Many of them are REITs. Not all of them, but many of them are REITs. And with Hawaii and the rest of the nation, except for one state, they allow an exemption for the REIT income tax. But now this bill will get rid of that exemption. So now REITs in Hawaii and in New Hampshire will have to pay the tax. And also those in New Hampshire have already have to pay this tax too. So now we're one of two states that pay the tax. And that's going to make everything more expensive, really, in the state. I mean, think about folks in apartment buildings that are owned by REITs. They may be passed this tax. And that's going to hurt them. It's going to hurt tourism as hotel prices go up and mall prices and retail prices and everything else. So, or companies may just elect to leave the state too. So that's a REIT. Critics of the REIT tax say that it's like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. That this REIT process actually allows companies to have the resources to operate in Hawaii by financially well off so that they can actually pass on those benefits in the economy. Malia, the estate tax has been characterized as something that will only affect those of fairly high income levels with large wealth bases. But how does the REIT and the estate tax actually affect everyone? Yeah, there's this idea that you can tax the wealthy and there will be no repercussions. But the wealthy don't live on a separate planet from the rest of us. Our economy sort of depends on the idea that wealthy people's wealthy companies want to invest in our state, in our people. They want to be here. They want to spend money. So when you kind of hit this point where you're taxing the wealthy too much and you drive wealth, you end up driving wealth out of your state. And that has a downstream effect. We still need tax revenues from someone if there's no wealthy. They're going to come from the next people down. We still need investment. We need entrepreneurs. And all of this stuff sort of trickles down. These companies that own malls and such, they need to raise rents. They're not raising rents on just other wealthy things. They're raising rents on mom and pop store owners. So you don't tax the rich in a vacuum. Any taxation trickles down to everyone. And we will end up paying one way or the other, either because we've driven wealth out of our state or because those taxes get passed down to us down the line. Well, very good. Just a couple of other bills before we close off for the day. How about a quick response in terms of one issue, the rental car surcharge. Joe? Well, that passed. And now Hawaii residents are going to have to pay $5 for that surcharge if they rent a car. So that's not good. And that's just going to make everything more expensive too. Well, Malia, maybe we'll end on this happy note. We had some of the worst civil asset forfeiture laws in the country, which would allow police to seize property even without a felony conviction. How did that turn out this session? Well, we are actually grassroots committed comments in favor of reforming civil asset forfeiture. And that did pass. And it was very needed. The audit of our civil asset forfeiture showed that there were people who are losing property and weren't even convicted of a crime. So there's stronger measures in place to protect that. The money from civil asset forfeiture is no longer going to go directly to the people who had benefit to police agencies, but to the general fund. So there's less of an incentive to pursue civil asset forfeiture. So that was a good outcome. Very good. Malia, thank you very much. Malia Blomhill from the East Coast reporting to us today. And also Joe Kent here in Hawaii with us at the Grassroot Institute. And in closing, if you want any copies of our research and our reports on these bills or any other bills, go to grassrootinstitute.org. That's grassrootinstitute.org. Until next time on Hawaii Together, I'm Kelea Akina here on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Aloha.


Good afternoon and welcome to this IEEE webinar. For many people who get involved in economics, one of the main reasons for doing so are questions about why economies sometimes boom and sometimes stagnate and why some are rich and some are poor. It is not an exaggeration to say that there is nobody on the planet who is more interesting and informed on these questions than our guest today, Professor Robert J Gordon. During his presentation of the next 25 minutes Bob will look at trends in productivity growth in Europe over the decades and draw some parallels with the United States. He will also look at how the pandemic has affected productivity trends and what sort of lasting impact there might be from the past 18 months of the changes it has brought about. Before taking your questions on these topics and I am sure on some of the other big and burning questions in macroeconomics today, let me share a brief bio. Bob is Stanley G. Harris Professor in the social sciences and professor of economics at Northwestern University in the United States. His recent work on the rise and fall of American economic growth and the widening of the US income distribution have been widely cited. And in 2016 he was named one of Bloomberg's top 50 most influential people in the world. He is author of the rise and fall of American growth, the US standard of living since the Civil War published in 2016. He is also author of macroeconomics 12th edition and the measurement of durable goods prices, the American business cycle and the economics of new goods. Our speaker today is also a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association and a fellow of both the econometrics society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The entire event today is on the record and my colleagues tell me to let you know to tweet to your heart's content at the handle at IIEA. With that over to our speaker today and many thanks for joining us. We very much look forward to your presentation the Q and A session afterwards. Delighted to be here. Let me announce the title of my talk, the transatlantic productivity slowdown, Europe chasing the American frontier. So let's start by identifying what I mean by Europe. What we often call Western Europe consists of the 15 nations that were in the EU prior to its enlargement in 2004. So that includes all five of the big nations, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain and almost all of the remaining Western European nations except for Norway and Switzerland. We're going to compare the path of productivity growth over the post war period for the EU 15 versus the United States. The time pass look quite different but there's some important similarities that I'm going to pull out. And to understand the slowdown, I'm going to both look at the usual way of decomposing the slowdown using growth accounting but I'm going to look at it another way which is perhaps more novel and more interesting and that is to ask which were the industries that contributed to the slowdown? Were they the same industries in Europe and in the United States? So here let's look at the post war history of productivity growth in the United States. There are four eras that we can distinguish. This goes, these are five year moving averages. So the dot you see here for 1955 is the average growth rate from 1951 to 55. And you see that there is an era of strong productivity growth near 3% going up to the late 60s. Then a slowdown from the early 70s through the mid 90s at about one and a half percent. Then a very notable revival up to almost back to 3% again for the five year period ending in 2003 and then a very demonstrable slowdown that left us with productivity growth of only about half a percent during the five years ending in the teens. There's been a revival in the last year and a half associated with the pandemic. We'll talk about that briefly at the end and you may have questions you wanted to forward to me about that. Here's Europe, it looks quite different. Europe had very rapid productivity growth coming out of World War II. So over the five year periods ending between 1955 and 1970, productivity growth averaged around 5% more than double the US during that period. Then there was a very rapid transition to a middle period going from the mid 70s through the mid 90s of about two and a half percent and then continuous slowdown with only a slight hint of a revival in the last year or two. If you put the US together with Europe, you see that we had a continuous period of Europe with faster growth, that is the level caught up to the US as we'll see in a minute. Then the US sprinted ahead in growth from the mid 1990s until the late 2000s and then both of them are tied with mediocre growth in the period of the teens. So just to summarize, Europe grew much faster from 1950 to 72. It was catching up for the dislocation in Europe caused by the interwar period and the two world wars when the United States was able more easily to exploit the new inventions that I'll talk about later. Inventions like the internal combustion engine and electricity. Europe slowed down, but I wanted to point out that during that 1972 to 95 slowdown period for Europe, productivity growth was roughly similar to that in the early post-war period for the US. And I'm gonna make quite a bit of that in a minute. Europe's productivity level caught up and exceeded the US in 1991 to 2002 and then fell behind again. Big mystery, why didn't Europe's growth rate respond to the digital revolution of the late 90s as did the United States during that period when the United States went ahead? Who's the level of European productivity compared to the United States? Starting off only half the level of US productivity catching up rapidly through the early 90s, then Europe actually surged ahead briefly and then has fallen back. During the decade of the teens, Europe was stuck at about 90% of the US level of productivity. And then it's turned down again with this US pandemic recovery. So this might surprise you because often everybody thinks the US is way ahead in technology and productivity. But actually, Europe did manage to catch up and is still at around 90%. So not at all a bad performance. Now, was the slowdown mainly caused by a slump in investment or something about technology? The growth accounting technique used by economists takes labor productivity growth, output per hour, subtracts the contribution of what is called capital deepening. That's the growth of capital per unit of labor. And we also make an adjustment, usually a very minor one for changes in the age, sex and education level of the labor force. When we do that, taking these capital deepening and labor composition subtracted from labor productivity growth and you get multi-factor productivity growth, which is the residual leftover after we've included everything we can measure and subtracted it out from measured productivity growth. We get this residual called multi-factor productivity growth. Back in the 1950s, a famous economist called this the measure of our ignorance because we really don't know what's causing it, although it's usual to associate it with innovation and technology. So looking at it with labor productivity growth on the left side of the equation, we can decompose labor productivity growth into three sources, the residual or multi-factor productivity growth, the capital deepening and the labor composition. So taking these four eras that I designated for the US, fast, slow, fast and then slow, we can decompose the sources of this productivity growth into green for total factor productivity growth or multi-factor productivity growth. Purple is the capital deepening and the little orange section on the right is labor composition, which as you can see is the same in all four eras. So for the United States, all the way up to 2005, we can conclude that investment was not part of the story. The purple area is about the same. The all the ups and downs of labor productivity growth were caused by the green area of capital deepening. Then the slowdown in the post-2005 period. And these data here only go up to 2015, but it would be very similar if I continue to 2019. That this last slowdown has been equally due to a slack investment that is capital deepening and a near disappearance in multi-factor productivity growth. Europe, as you can see, has had a steady slowdown from period one to two to three to four, not very different in the fourth period from the US. And if you can see for Europe, the blame for the slowdown is equally shared between slower investment in the purple area and slower factor, multi-factor productivity growth. So it has completely disappeared by 2005 to 2015 for the US almost disappeared. So if we look at the summary of the sources of growth analysis, changing multi-factor productivity growth is the big story for the United States in the first three intervals. And then capital deepening steps in to play a role in the final interval. In the European group of 10, the data on growth accounting here is for the 10 biggest of the 15 countries. The steady slowdown is explained roughly equally by multi-factor productivity growth in capital deepening. Labor composition doesn't add much and it doesn't change much. So the conclusion is, if you ask why productivity growth is slowed down, it's only partly because of inadequate investment that is the decline in capital deepening. Now I wanted to highlight the similarity. Here we have on a bar graph, what we've just seen in the previous slides, the four areas of productivity growth with dark red for the US and blue, of course, for Europe. I wanted to point out that in the early period, the US had productivity growth roughly equal to Europe's growth in the second period. So you can say that in the first period, the US was really exploiting those inventions that had been developed before World War II. Europe was catching up to what the US already had. And so Europe running about 20, 25 years behind had an experience between the early 70s and the mid 90s, very much like what the US had had in the previous two decades. So if we take this slowdown from what I call the early period, 1950 to 72 for the US, 1972 to 95 for Europe and compare it with the recent slow period, we get the arithmetic slowdown is exactly the same, something very interesting that people have not pointed out. So US started ahead, Europe caught up, but if we take allowance for the early start of the US, the slowdown to the decade of the teens was almost identical in both cases. Now, if we compare the early period for the US to the second period for Europe, we plot productivity growth for Europe in the vertical axis, productivity growth for the US on the horizontal axis. You can barely make out a very dim blue line that looks like this as you can see it right there. That's a 45 degree line. That would any dot like manufacturing, that's right on the 45 degree line. That says that productivity growth in Europe was absolutely identical to that in the US. If we're down here for an industry like trade, wholesale and retail trade, that says that productivity growth in Europe is lower than in the US. And anything above the 45 degree line like real estate, productivity growth in Europe was faster than in the US. So in this early period, we see a very great commonality in which industries are growing fast and slow. And interestingly, agriculture is the fastest and is right there on that 45 degree line. If we talk about what I call the early to late slowdown for the US, if we look at the industries, this is how much they're contributing to the slowdown and all the industries contributing to the slowdown in the US are producing goods rather than services with a single exception of wholesale and retail trade. And look at the big contribution being made by manufacturing. A common story that we may come back to is that manufacturing is really at the heart of the slowdown story. It's a big sector and it slowed down a lot in both Europe and the US. So here's the same picture for Europe, more uniform slowdown spread across many industries. But for Europe, all the bottom five industries in terms of the contribution of the slowdown are making goods rather than services. And again, manufacturing makes by far the biggest contribution. If you want the list of which industries are contributing to the slowdown the most, the list is the same for the US and Europe except retail and wholesale play more of a contribution for the US that's because they started out faster than in Europe. And in Europe, the professional administrative sort of white collar services are making more of a contribution than in the US. But in common, we have the five out of the six industries contributing to the slowdown are producing commodities rather than services. What about the contributions of this early delayed slowdown? Again, there's a 45 degree line which looks like this. It's a very pale blue line. Anything lying along that would say it's exactly the same in Europe and the US. So utilities, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, education all contributed about the same to the slowdown in Europe. And when we see that across the great institutional divide of the Atlantic Ocean, we see so much uniformity across these industries. It really is a very prominent hypothesis that technology unique to each industry slowed down and that's reflected in multi-factor productivity and the commonality across the different industries in the two sides of the Atlantic. If you wanted to look at how much the total factor productivity versus capital deepening mattered across industries, here you see the slowdown and total factor productivity indicated by the green bars outweighs the few industries where multi-factor productivity increased and you see for the United States a relatively small role for the slowdown and capital deepening. By the way, the outstanding industry in the United States for total factor productivity is mining, which is the fracking revolution of all that oil that's deep under the ground that's been discovered in the US in the last 15 years. Same picture for Europe, more of a contribution of capital deepening that is more of the purple bars are over on the left and mining is doing very poorly in Europe where mining is mainly coal mining rather than oil. So the most important differences for the Europe versus the US is really remarkable similarity in which industries are causing the slowdown, highlighting retail and wholesale started out faster in the US and mining is a leader in the US and a lagger in Europe. Now, let's explore some hypotheses to explain the slowdown. I've already indicated, I think that the evolution of innovation unique to each industry is at the heart of the slowdown, but indeed part of Europe's catch up was due to the catching up in educational attainment which I'll show you in a second. Part of the European catch up was due to the massive reduction in hours work per employee, shedding less productive marginal hours. Europeans work hard when they're not on vacation. And of course, this decline in hours in Europe came with the transition in most European countries to the generous four and five week vacations which are unheard of in the United States where even paid vacations of two weeks are not common. A final idea is that the traditional division between MFP and capital deepening may overstate the role of capital deepening. And I'm gonna explain that separately in a minute. Here's the educational attainment in years of schooling. Europe started out at five grades of schooling. The United States started out in the early post war with eight and a half. The United States extended high school education rapidly. There's a kink here. Completion of high school was reached pretty uniformly in the United States around 1980 while Europe was still catching up. So this catching up with European education is part of the reason that Europe caught up in the level of productivity. Here are the hours of work per year starting off with Europeans working more than 2000 hours per year or more than 40 hours per week. But a very rapid decline in European hours per year as the vacations became pervasive. And as Europe benefited from things like family leave that again are much less generous in the United States where hours per year decline much more slowly. Now here's this point about capital deepening and saturating the effect of investment. In the context of the popular growth model associated with the name of Robert Solo, in the long run the ratio of capital to output is constant. So that means that output per hour and capital per hour in the long run have to have the same growth rate. That means anything other than investment that reduces the growth of output per hour reduces the growth of capital per hour, i.e. investment. So there is a reverse feedback. If anything happens to slow down the impact of innovation to make innovation a less powerful source of growth then that's gonna drag down growth and output that's gonna drag down growth and capital and it's gonna feedback to weak investment. And I think this is one of the reasons why investment has been so weak on both sides of the Atlantic in the last. 15 years. So what is this idea that innovation is becoming less potent, less powerful? I like to go back to the great inventions of the late 19th century sometimes called the second investor revolution. And they are led above all by electricity and all of its uses in industry and in households and the internal combustion engine of making possible cars, trucks and air travel. Chemicals and plastics also were part of the second investor revolution. And these industries and the revolution of the assembling line propelled US productivity from 1920 to 1970 and Europe with about a two decade lag propelled its productivity growth from 1945 to 1995. So that's the second investor revolution. What about the third investor revolution the so-called information and communications technology revolution or ICT? Robert Solo again, a name you've just heard looked at the data around 1987 and said in a memorable quote we can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. And suddenly five years after Solo wrote the productivity statistics began to reflect the big impact of the ICT revolution in boosting US productivity growth as we have seen but not in Europe. Now I've done a separate paper analyzing what went wrong in Europe and the data tell us that the EU fell behind the United States in this 1995 to 2005 period both in producing ICT equipment and in using it. Productivity growth and producing ICT equipment during this 10 year interval was an unbelievable 17.5% per year in the US versus only 5% in Europe. If we separate out industries in the service sector that are intense users of ICT equipment the US had much faster growth in these industries than did Europe. And part of this is retailing in the United States with the famous big box stores that are much less common in Europe. There are much smaller differences across the Atlantic in industries that are not intensive in ICT use. A big puzzle which I'm not going to claim to have an answer to is if the EU lagged behind in 1995 to 2005 why didn't it catch up after 2005? I think the financial crisis and the turmoil in the European Union and the Euro back in the early teens had a lot to do with that. But once again, the pale blue line that looks like this is a 45 degree line. If we plot European versus American productivity growth in that revival decade of the late 1990s, early 2000s we've seen that across the board on average this is a regression line. Europe had about half the productivity growth of the United States and information and communications technology up here transportation and public affairs were industries where Europe did relatively well in terms of the use of technology but manufacturing again agriculture and trade were doing relatively poorly in addition to these other industries down here below the line. So these are the main conclusions I wanna reach in the formal part of my discussion. I've got some other slides to tell you if they become relevant in the question and answer period. So the conclusions are that Europe started out at 50% of the level of US productivity caught up by 1992 and fell back especially in that decade of 1995 to 2005. In the most recent decade going up to 2019 the EU and US productivity grew less than 1% per year uniformly not different. The common sources of the US and EU slowdown I think are the wearing out or using up of the innovation benefits of the second industrial revolution and the big difference across the Atlantic is the greater exploitation of the US by the US of the third industrial revolution the digital or ICT revolution particularly in the production of computer equipment but also in the use of the ICT equipment. So I'll say for the discussion period some reflections on what is happening during the pandemic in the United States and I can show you some results about that as well. So thank you for your attention and I look forward to your questions.


It's happening, Magnet Sights. Okay, so I came across this post on my Facebook today. It was talking about these five qualities that are most important to people in a relationship, okay? Now, it says to put these in order of importance to you, okay? The qualities of the things that are important are sex, communication, finances, looks, and religion. I'm going to give you my five in my order, alright? And when y'all get done watching the video, make sure y'all post down below the order that's most important to y'all, alright?  I thought of mine 10 seconds after I read it.  I went straight forward. I'm looking at it from meeting the person to dating, marriage, all that stuff, alright? I'm thinking of it as in real life how I'm going to do, alright? So without further ado, here's my list, alright? First is looks. Some of y'all be like, you usually professional, not the fucker, nah, that ain't it, you know what I'm saying?  You know what I mean? Nah, nah, nah. Okay, look. The reason why I say looks is because first of all, how am I going to even want to get to know you unless I'm attracted to you? I got to be attracted to you, correct? You got to be attracted to me, correct? I'm not talking about the situations where it's like, oh, I work with her and I got to know her over five years, nah, because I wasn't attracted to her at first, I just learned her personality. Now, I want to be initially attracted to a woman. So, looks are new at our uno, and you guys, you know me, I like sexy more than I like beautiful. Sexy does something to me. Sexy like, sexy makes me say, ooh, damn, she look good, but sexy also ignites my loins, you know what I'm saying? Like, beautiful.  Some girls is like, pretty cute, like they got that pretty, but they're really cute, like I just don't even want to, anyway, that's a different video. So, number one, looks. Number two, communication, okay? The reason why I thought about this is because, you know, some, some brothers will say, nah, n***a, n***a, sex, sex is number, n***a, n***a, well, actually, this would be number, number, yeah, yeah, looks is number one for me, most important so far, okay? So, um, sex is number, no, I'm sorry, communication, now look, communication because the majority of the time, we are communicating, no matter what it is. So, if we can't talk, if we can't have a stimulating conversation, we can't laugh, we can't have fun, if we don't understand each other, if we can't work problems out, what the f*** am I doing with you? All right?    Now, number three, sex, yes, because that is how we make love, that is how we communicate our love for each other and that actually keeps the, it, it, it beyond, besides communication, communication creates to me a bigger bond than even sex does because like I said, it's the majority of the relationship is communication, but sex creates a bond in a whole other different way.  You know it. You don't have to put it on you or you don't put it on somebody else and saw how it changed the dynamic or your relationship and how either how close you were to each other or how that close that person became to you, like, damn, I put it on them, I didn't expect this to happen to them, you know what I'm saying?  So, sex is number three because it's going to keep the, the relationship passionate, it's going to keep a connection, it's going to keep a fire in our eyes and in our relationship. Now, finances is next. Look, I want to spend the rest of my life with a person I can do things with, you know, do a lot of activities with, travel the world with, you know, and just enjoy financial stability. Most relationships break up over money. So it's extremely important to me to have your money in check. If you don't have it together when we first meet, that's fine. Shit. I don't have my problems with money, but I'm saying you can work on it together because financial stability creates a peace of mind unlike any other, especially living in this type of society right now. We live in. Sex is religion and the reason why I say that is some of y'all would say number one, because you don't want to become unevenly yoked. But number, it's, it's, it's last for me because at the point in my life, I am searching for truth and every other thing that I've looked at so far as religion has not worked for me. I found holes in it that people, even the most studious can't answer for me. So I'd like to find something that I can feel comfortable with and you know, know that it is the one true way if, if there is one at all. So since I'm still in search for it and God is last on my list for now. So let me know what y'all think is your top five as I will review. Mine was looks, communication, sex, finances and religion. All right, all the inscribers.