Category / Economics

by Hoosier Econ

The Financial Costs of Hoosiers Overdosing on Heroin

heroin-addiction
Heroin is clobbering the state of Indiana and it comes with an enormous financial cost. Law enforcement, imprisonment, children removed from homes and other costs are all there for many to dissect. The DEA recently put out an alert of a possible explanation of why people are overdosing on heroin.

    The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) today issued a nationwide alert about the dangers of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues/compounds. Fentanyl is commonly laced in heroin, causing significant problems across the country, particularly as heroin abuse has increased.

    In the last two years, DEA has seen a significant resurgence in fentanyl-related seizures. According to the National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS), state and local labs reported 3,344 fentanyl submissions in 2014, up from 942 in 2013. In addition, DEA has identified 15 other fentanyl-related compounds.

    Fentanyl is a Schedule II narcotic used as an analgesic and anesthetic. It is the most potent opioid available for use in medical treatment – 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and 30 to 50 times more potent than heroin. Fentanyl is potentially lethal, even at very low levels. Ingestion of small doses as small as 0.25 mg can be fatal. Its euphoric effects are indistinguishable from morphine or heroin.


Costs associated with saving an overdosing addict are skyrocketing as well. More municipalities are wanting police to carry heroin antidotes since they are usually first to encounter a person overdosing. Foxnews.com had a post about the antidote naloxone.

    Naloxone reverses the effects of opioids – drugs derived from opium, including heroin – on brain receptors. But a price increase late last year means that instead of buying 400 naloxone kits for a little under $21,000 – at $51.50 per kit paid to a third-party distribution company – that’s now enough for only 200, at just under $100 per kit, a negotiated discount that’s $5 cheaper than what he was quoted.

by Hoosier Econ

Indiana Businesses Stuck With Unemployment Taxes

Indiana business owners get hammered with an aray of taxes that the public doesn’t take into consideration. One of them is unemployment taxes they have to pay. Indiana is still paying off the loan from federal government when the economy went south in 2008. Here is more from News-Sentinel.com:

    “We have a surplus? That’s because employers are eating it,” said Black, controller of Nowak Supply Co., 302 W. Superior St., which in the past two years has paid $10,000 in federal tax surcharges because Indiana still has not repaid all of the $2.4 billion it borrowed from the federal government in 2008 when the recession wiped out the state’s unemployment compensation fund. Nowak, which paid more than $14,000 in state and federal unemployment taxes last year, expects to pay another federal unemployment tax surcharge this year in excess of the $6,000 it paid last year — a penalty shared by other employers throughout the state.

    Then the recession hit and the account’s black ink turned into a raging river of red, which resulted in officials from Indiana and at lest 25 states to seek more than $47 billion in federal loans to keep unemployment benefits flowing. Indiana was supposed to have repaid its loan five years ago but still owes about $900 million, Frank said — debt that will be repaid in part by the penalties Nowak, Black and no doubt countless other business owners consider so unwise and unfair.


Unemployment taxes show that it makes businesses think about or actually hire less with its regressive taxation formula:

    After all, if a company’s penalty is determined by the number of employees, isn’t that just one more incentive to keep the labor force as small as possible?

by Hoosier Econ

NCAA & TV Ad Revenue from March Madness

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The NCAA Basketball Tournament kicks off in a few days. As America tunes in to watch the games the NCAA will watch their bank coffers fill up. How much does the NCAA make each year during tournament time. According to Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College, hundreds of millions:

    “The institution itself that’s based in Indianapolis, makes money primarily through television rights to the March Madness basketball tournament. They get somewhere in the neighborhood of $770 million dollars a year. That constitutes around 90% of all of the revenue that goes to the NCAA,”


Television stations are more then willing to pay that type of money to the NCAA for rights to air the games. Here is their ad revenue from 2013:

    Over the past decade (2004-2013), the NCAA men’s basketball tournament has triggered more than $6.88 billion of national TV ad spending from 269 different marketers. Ad revenue in 2013 was $1.15 billion, up 3.8 percent from the prior year.

by Hoosier Econ

Bee Hives Are Not Dying Globally

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You can read the rest via Bjorn Lomborg Facebook page.

by Hoosier Econ

Number of Indiana Children Receiving School Vouchers

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Here is the most recent data by the state of Indiana showing children receiving school vouchers-

This school year, 29,148 students received vouchers, or 2.6 percent of the total state student population, according to the Choice Scholarship program’s annual report released in February. IDOE paid those private and Christian schools nearly $116 million in the 2014-15 school year.

by Hoosier Econ

Beer Sales Spike When Food Stamps Received

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A study of food stamp recipients led to an interesting find for one group of college professors. Here is what they found:

When monthly food-stamp distributions fall on a weekend, beer sales to that population jump – by up to 7%.

When food stamp funds are distributed on Saturday or Sunday, monthly sales of beer jump as much as 51 ounces more a month among those eligible for food stamps, the study found. That could be a lot of booze: Close to 23 million households receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, widely known as food stamps, according to the latest government data.

Their research was very extensive and spanned several years.

This jump in beer-buying only appears for food-stamp-eligible households and not for the non-eligible households, according to the report titled “One More Saturday Night: Food Stamp Timing and Monthly Consumption Patterns.”

The authors analyzed data from Nielsen Homescan Consumer Panel Dataset, which includes purchasing information from between 40,000 and 60,000 households in the years from 2004 to 2011. Because the households each use a scanning device, the data includes detailed information about the exact products in the consumer basket including beer and tobacco. What it doesn’t include is what’s spent at bars and restaurants.

You can read the rest of Wall Street Journal article here.

by Hoosier Econ

2015 NFL Free Agency: $1.5 Billion in Contracts Signed by Players

suh dolphins
NFL free agency kicked off on Tuesday March 10th. Numerous players either stayed or left their teams in pursuit of greener pastures. How much in contracts were signed this past week? Sportrac.com has a system set up tracking these numbers and here is the breakdown from studying the signings.

– Over 100 free agents signed

– Average length of contracts is 3 years

– Total amount of all contracts signed (disclosed/undisclosed) tops over $1.5 Billion

– Total amount of guaranteed money NFL teams must pay is $634 Million. The top five contracts account for $170.9 Million of that.

NFL contracts almost never get fully paid out. Each year these contracts are reworked, players cut, retirement or clauses are invoked terminating the amounts paid. Guaranteed money is paid out in full barring any contract clauses not met.

by Hoosier Econ

States Tax Revenue Still Down

Cancel out the noise of propagandist who continually say the economy is booming and follow the data. Wall Street Journal shows compelling data of states tax revenue is in bad shape as spending increases. Here is what the Wall Street Journal found:

There are 30 states still collecting less in taxes, adjusted for inflation, than when the recession hit, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study that examined the data through September. Income-tax collections grew on a real basis by 7.1% since late 2008, while sales-tax receipts rose by 1%, according to an analysis by Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York.

state tax revenue
Government employment is actually down on the state level. Most of the attrition is probably attributed to from an aging workforce i.e. retirement:

State and local governments are employing 620,000 fewer people than they did six years ago. New municipal-bond sales stand at a more-than-15-year low as states remain hesitant to start public works and other capital projects.

If anyone tells you all you have to do is magically raise taxes and all ills are solved, they are terribly wrong.

Coming out of the recession, several states raised sales-tax rates to make up for deep revenue drops. In Arizona, a sales-tax increase was only temporary, meant to serve as a three-year bridge until collections returned. Still, total tax revenues as of the third quarter of last year remained 10% below their prerecession levels on an inflation-adjusted basis, according to the Pew analysis.

You can read the rest of the Wall Street Journal article here.

by Hoosier Econ

Women Wanting “Big Butts” on the Rise

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A trend has been rising last few years with women…..Big Butts. Think it’s a joke, take a look at some of the money spent in pursuit of this fashion according to the Hollywood Reporter:

According to the American Association of Plastic Surgeons, desire for bigger behinds in the past five years has led to the fastest-growing cosmetic procedure, the “Brazilian butt lift,” in which fat is liposuctioned from other regions in the body to pad and “pop” the butt. “The biggest jump percentage is in butt enlargements,” says Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Lawrence Koplin.

For a price: The cost begins at $9,500, the procedure takes three to six hours with a minimum of 10 injections per cheek, and most Brazilian butt-lift patients must sleep on their stomachs and cannot sit down for two weeks.

There are even devices that can be bought for the appearance of a big butt:

Lisa Reisler, who with partner Susan Bloomstone invented Booty Pop padded panties in 2010, says: “We are now selling a pad that’s 40 percent larger than when we launched, and there are tons of requests. It used to be if your husband said your booty looked big in jeans, it was an insult. Now, it’s a compliment.

You can read the rest of the article here.

by Hoosier Econ

How Americans Will Spend Their Tax Refund

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American Morning News interviewed Kay Bell from BankRate.com explaining a survey they with 1,003 adults and how they will spend their tax refund. USA Today posted the survey and here is how it broke down:

34% say they’ll use it to pay down debt

33% say they’ll save or invest the money

26% say they spend the extra cash on necessities such as food and utility bills

3% want to use it to live it up and go on vacation or a shopping spree

Here is another snapshot of Americans thinking on income taxes/tax refunds that would make Dave Ramsey shake his head at:

Some people view having extra money withheld from their paychecks for income tax as a way to save, says Bankrate.com tax analyst Kay Bell. But she advises against it because “the bank of Uncle Sam” pays no interest.

The rest of the article is here and has some more good stats obtained by the survey.