I’m all for stricter gun control, but the evidence is not all that convincing that fewer legal guns would reduce US homicides, of which the large majority are committed with stolen handguns. Given the low per capita gun ownership rates in some countries with high homicide rates, how do we know that making it harder to purchase guns legally would make a dent in homicide rates?

Speaking of “per capita” gun ownership rates in the US, it’s true that Americans own more guns “per capita” than any other country but that stat is highly misleading, being based on number of guns divided by number of people. It doesn’t say anything about how many Americans actually own guns. As it turns out, gun ownership by household has actually been declining in the US for years. It’s a minority of Americans who own most of the guns – and it’s not at all clear that these gun owners have much to do with gun crimes. Specifically, just 20% of US households own 65% of the guns and according to Pew Research, gun owners are more likely to be white (over twice the rate of other ethnicities), suburban/rural, Republican, older (50+), and outdoorsy. Multiple gun owners appear to be mostly collectors and hunters (e.g. different guns for different game, from quail to bear).

While I would be happy if people didn’t hunt (except as a means of population control for species that are over breeding due to lack of predators, like deer in the East), it’s hard for me to see the connection between old white Republican hunters and homicide rates in the US. Per the FBI, rural counties (those under 50,000 population) have less than half the violent crime rate (and about two-thirds the murder rate) of urban areas, which have half the gun ownership rates of rural areas.

Clearly more research is needed. For instance, it would be nice to have county- and country-level comparisons for percentage of individuals or households owning one or more guns (as opposed to the phony “per capita” statistics) but so far I haven’t found any. But  we still need to go beyond correlational studies and look at the actual causal chains between gun laws and violent crime.

I’m thinking the impact of gun control is subject to a dose effect. That is, unless gun control laws are super strict and impact whole communities (not just law-abiding hunters), the effect may be pretty minimal. If some gun ownership were still allowed, those who want guns would probably find ways to obtain them illegally.

Problem is, such broad bans would violate the Second Amendment, which is about the basic right to self-defense (at least according to a recent Supreme Court ruling). It’s not that the Second Amendment prohibits gun control – it doesn’t, as long as gun control is based on the characteristics of guns and the people who buy them. What does violate the Second Amendment (per Scalia et al) are bans that apply to all types of guns and all types of people, such as community-wide bans that include simple handguns or regulations that are so onerous that they effectively function as a ban.

Obviously if no one had guns, no one would be killed by guns. And since it’s a whole lot easier to kill with a gun than with most other kinds of weapons, a society without guns would have fewer murders. But gun control advocates usually don’t push for complete bans on gun ownership; they push for increasing regulation of the gun market and for restrictions on types of guns and types of people who can own guns. Most gun control initiatives sound reasonable – I’m just not sure they would make that much of a difference. We need better, less politicized research on the matter.

Even if a modest Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) were possible to fund within the current government budget (see previous posts where I performed this trick), hence not requiring a tax increase, there are still potential problems. Some working age adults (especially young men with limited education and skill sets) may prefer to manage on a BIG rather than get a job. Or they may choose a “career” of part-time or intermittent work, which would undermine real career-building. A reliable, unconditional and generous BIG would probably encourage procrastination and discourage self-sacrifice in the service of long-term goals, especially in those for whom school and full-time work aren’t exactly enticing prospects. Live with mom or a bunch of roommates, work part-time in food service or take an occasional gig, and prolong adolescence a few more years – and before you know it, the ol’ brain is past its optimal age for learning and skill acquisition, and the prospect of nose to the grindstone is even less appealing.

I’m not saying that with a generous BIG a huge number of people would succumb to the temptation of lifelong slackerdom, but some will – but many more will succumb to delaying entry into responsible adulthood (that’s shorthand for acquiring resources for family, home, and retirement). How many? Enough to put a real dent into the labor supply, productivity growth, GDP, and tax receipts.

A too-generous BIG would disincentivize work for enough people that it would trigger an economic death spiral. The basic causal chain: reduced labor supply/tax receipts –> higher taxes –>more tax payers at the margins opt out of labor market –> tax receipts go down even more –> less money to fund BIG….

Bottom line here: a successful BIG has to achieve a sort of homeostasis: enough to eliminate abject poverty and provide resources/options for a better life while not being so much that too many people opt out of work and tax paying. This isn’t a matter of To-BIG or Not-To-BIG – but how big BIG should be.

The idea of “too big to fail” is that certain corporations, especially banks, are so large and interconnected that the government would have to bail them out in the event of failure to avoid catastrophic ripple effects throughout the economy. Thus during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s committed over $600 billion in taxpayers’ money to the six biggest U.S. banks through purchases of distressed assets and low-interest loans.

Increased government oversight and new regulations are supposed to reduce risk of massive bank failure and thus obviate the need for future bailouts. However, the US financial system remains highly concentrated: by the end of 2014, the five largest U.S. banks held assets of $6.7 trillion dollars, 39 percent of that year’s GDP value of $17.3 trillion. The risks that $6.7 trillion in assets pose to our 17 trillion dollar plus economy are massive. A loss of “just” $1 trillion would have been six percent of the 2014 GDP.

Some contend that regulating big banks will never be enough, however, because regulations alone cannot eliminate the risk of bank failure, and the failure of these huge financial institutions would still wreak havoc throughout the economy without government intervention. If we really want to eliminate the need to rescue banks in time of crisis, banks will have to be smaller so that their financial fortunes are less consequential to the larger economy (or so the argument goes).

Those in favor of breaking up the biggest banks also note that a purely regulatory approach ignores the prevalence of “regulatory capture” in the banking industry, as regulators tend to identify with the institutions they are supposed to regulate, especially when these high-paying institutions are considered potential future employers. Rules that seem to have teeth when enacted may end up pretty toothless in practice. If the big banks can’t be properly regulated, there will be another financial crisis – and, most likely, another bailout. Some argue that the only solution is to limit the damage by limiting how big banks can get.

Michael Grunwald disagrees. He argues that breaking up the biggest banks may sound great in theory but is much less so in reality. Grundwald points out that the debate over size has been one-sided, ignoring the benefits of bigness (e.g., economies of scale,  ability to finance very large corporate undertakings, like mergers and acquisitions), the potential costs of breakups (e.g., lower productivity, higher transaction costs), and what’s already been done to address the too-big-to-fail problem (something called Dodd-Frank).

Plus, the U.S. banking system is actually smaller as a percentage of the economy and much less concentrated at the top than is the case in many developed countries.  Breaking up the big banks would make US banks less competitive in the global marketplace for financial services.As Grundwald puts it, “If Uncle Sam breaks up the US mega-banks, their largest clients would just move their business to huge foreign banks that could still provide one-stop shopping for a variety of global services.” The resulting pain wouldn’t just be felt by overpaid financiers – it would be felt throughout the US economy.