What the experts say

The rising costs of owning a home

Homeowners who think they can handle the mortgage are getting “sticker shock” from other bills, said Nicole Friedman in The Wall Street Journal. Property taxes are on the rise nationwide, jumping 4.1 percent in 2023 from a year earlier to an average of $4,062 for a single-family home. Some areas are seeing much bigger increases, like Charlotte, N.C., where the average property tax rose a staggering 31.5 percent. Meanwhile, it “cost an average of $6,663 a year to maintain a home in the fourth quarter of 2023, up 8.3 percent from a year earlier.” That’s according to the home-repair platform Thumbtack, which considers “regular upkeep like gutter cleaning and lawn care” as well as occasional expenses. But the biggest financial drain is home insurance, for which costs rose “by more than 10 percent on average in 19 states.”

Immigrants fill a U.S. labor shortage

Since February 2020, all the job growth in the United States has been driven by foreign-born workers, said Justin Fox in Bloomberg. Critics of immigration have used this remarkable fact to claim that foreigners are displacing American labor. But that’s hardly the case. Rather, the supply of working-age, native-born Americans

is falling. “The continued aging of the Baby Boomers, the last of whom will turn 65 in 2029,” is the main factor in the diminishing labor supply. Fewer young Americans will be entering the workforce to replace them, since U.S. births peaked in 2007 and the trend “has been almost all downhill since.” Without immigration, the labor shortages faced by employers would be much worse. If it seems like “immigrants are taking all the jobs,” it’s because “no one else is available.”

The shrinking stock market

“The number of publicly traded companies in the United States is shrinking,” said Nicole Goodkind in CNN.com. In 1996, there were 7,300 public companies. Today, the number is down to 4,300. “It’s not that America has 40 percent fewer companies than it did 30 years ago.” But the number of private companies that are now backed by private equity firms “has grown from 1,900 to 11,200” since 2004. That’s kept more private companies “outside the scrutiny of the public eye.” “Is this the outcome we want?” asked JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in his annual investors letter last week. He worries that “if this trend continues, our understanding of the U.S. economy could become hazier.”