Category Archives: Web Article Review

Michael Boskin and the golden rule

A few serious economists, like Michael Boskin at Stanford, are defending the Republican tax plan. Basically, the argument is that the economic growth benefits of stimulating corporate investment in “equipment” outweighs the outright bribery of wealthy campaign donors.

Summers’s own research results dramatically drive home that point. Using data from a variety of countries and time periods, some as short as five years, he and Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, (who also opposes the current tax bill) have made the strongest case I know that equipment investment can have a large impact on GDP growth. Moreover, the effect they estimate is much larger than in the conventional models used in most studies, including those relied on by government revenue scorers.

“The analysis suggests a strong and causal relationship between equipment investment and economic growth,” according to Summers and DeLong. They concluded that, “an increase of three or four percentage points in the share of GDP devoted to equipment investment is associated with an increase in GDP per worker of one percent per year.” So, to achieve the 0.3% increase in annual GDP growth that is now being debated, equipment investment would need to rise by 1% of GDP per year, sizeable to be sure, but well within the range of historical experience.

Summers and DeLong also calculate that the social returns from equipment investment are far larger than private returns. Thus, they concluded that “a strong case seems to exist for making sure economic policy does not penalize, and in fact, rewards, investors in equipment”; and that “measures that reduce the tax burden on new equipment investment are likely to be especially potent in maximizing the equipment investment engendered per dollar of government revenue forgone.” Finally, they noted that, “policies with an anti-equipment bias include tax rules that subsidize assets that can easily be levered … [and] pieces of equipment are frequently more difficult to use as collateral for debt than are investments in structures.”

This fits with the “golden rule level of capital” you learn about in economics 101, where “capital” is the “plants and equipment” mentioned above. If as a society you are investing too little in capital (and you have to invest just to hold it steady as it wears out, let alone increase it) your rate of growth is lower than it could be. Deficit spending to increase capital is a sort of free lunch in this case, because growth will offset the expenditures. It is not too hard to imagine this sort of logic extending to investments in research and development, education, and public infrastructure. (By the way, if you really care about economic growth, WHERE IS OUR TRILLION DOLLAR INFRASTRUCTURE BILL YOU LYING SONS OF BITCHES!)

Maybe reducing the corporate tax rate in the U.S. really is a good, efficient policy that will boost growth. My questions are first, how do we know the corporate tax cut will be invested in capital rather than just pocketed? Second, are the lost tax revenues hurting investments in education and infrastructure which could be equally or more beneficial? Third, how can the Republicans torpedo the health care system that was finally starting to help the working class and small business owners, and still sleep at night? It’s hypocritical and immoral. And finally, how can we just accept the rot of institutionalized corruption where politicians are elected by dollars rather than votes, when other advanced countries (a club we may not belong too much longer) don’t do that?

Arctic Report Card 2017

NOAA has released its Arctic Report Card for 2017. It sounds like 2017 was relatively cool, but the longer-term trend is still sharply warmer.

Taken alone, observations made in spring and summer 2017 might encourage a relaxation in the concerns over environmental conditions in the Arctic. However, when taken in context, there are many strong signals that continue to indicate that the Arctic environmental system has reached a ‘new normal’. While modulated by natural variability in regional and seasonal fluctuations, this ‘new normal’ is characterized by Arctic air temperatures that are warming at double the rate of the global temperature increase. Accordingly, there are pronounced decade-long declines in the extent and volume of the sea ice cover, the extent and duration of the winter snow cover, and the mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic glaciers. Temperatures are increasing in the surface of the Arctic Ocean, contributing to later formation of the sea ice cover in the autumn. Temperatures are also increasing in the permafrost on the adjacent continents. Arctic paleo-reconstructions, which extend back millions of years, indicate that the magnitude and pace of the 21st century sea-ice decline and surface ocean warming is unprecedented in at least the last 1,500 years and likely much longer.

a radical proposal for the North Korea standoff

Philip Bobbit from Lawfare says the current strategies of the U.S. and China governments towards North Korea cannot succeed.

Our current approach to the North Korea problem is a combination of both kinetic and diplomatic threats occasionally alternating with the offer of incentives. This approach cannot succeed. There is nothing the U.S. can do to North Korea that will lead to its renunciation of its nuclear weapons program. North Korea—even before it has developed the capability to strike the U.S. homeland with nuclear weapons—already poses an unacceptable risk of retaliation against our allies in response to an American military intervention. Moreover, there is nothing the U.S. can do for North Korea that might induce it to denuclearize because the Kim regime is convinced that, for domesticreasons, the country can only be assured of remaining in power by keeping its country on a war footing against the United States. Finally, there is nothing the international community, including China, can do to North Korea in the way of greater sanctions, or for North Korea by abating sanctions. Neither action could possibly persuade the Kim regime to give up its nuclear weapons because the regime has concluded that only its threats to others have preserved it thus far.

His solution, if I understand it correctly, is for China to agreed to repel any U.S. invasion, using any nuclear weapons if necessary. China technically has agreed to repel any invasion of North Korea already, but to use nuclear weapons only in retaliation for a nuclear attack. It sounds crazy, but I get the logic that the key to appeasing a paranoid dictator could be to address the paranoia directly.

There is, however, an available strategy that has not been considered and may promise success: a nuclear guarantee for the North Korean regime from China. If China were to give a credible nuclear guarantee to North Korea in the case of a U.S. invasion or preemptive strike against Pyongyang, there would be little point in North Korea risking the survival of its regime by developing long-range nuclear weapons. Such a policy should not be confused with the current mutual defense pact between North Korea and China, one cornerstone of which is China’s no-first-use policy. From Kim’s point of view, there is much security to be gained by such a guarantee of deterrence against the U.S. and much security to be lost if North Korea continues its present course when further technological revolutions in the U.S. render the North Korean arsenal ever more vulnerable. Our aim must be to reorient Kim Jong Un’s paranoia, making him more afraid of losing a unique opportunity for security in the eyes of his own people than he is afraid of dependence on China.

It seems like a simpler, and equally logical, approach on its face would be for the U.S. to pledge to never invade North Korea in exchange for North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons. The U.S. could withdraw some weapons from Asia in return, which would be a good idea anyway. I guess the problem with this is that U.S. promises would not be credible in North Korean eyes. Or, to be more cynical, they need their population to fear imminent U.S. attack in order to keep them under control.

Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046

This report from the Congressional Budget Office contains lots of facts and figures on nuclear weapons, along with some underwhelming proposal for reducing their costs a little bit. But no proposals for limiting them or even scaling them back by much.

What strikes me right away is not how expensive they are, but how cost-effective they actually are. That is, no country could ever afford to match the firepower and deterrent effect of nuclear weapons with conventional weapons. That is one thing that makes them so diabolically hard to get rid of.

The other thing that struck me is how easy they actually are to get rid of. Keeping them in good working order takes a ton of maintenance effort and constant upgrades. It is not just the nuclear material or even the nuclear weapon that has to be upgraded, but the aircraft carriers, submarines, bombers, missile silos, and all the associated hardware, software, and personnel required to keep all of these components running. Just stop investing and pretty soon, you will not have a functional nuclear arsenal. Of course, having a nuclear arsenal in a state of disrepair is probably not a particularly safe thing. To unwind a nuclear program, you would have to have an organized program of decommissioning and destroying the things as they become functionally obsolete. Maybe nobody has given much thought to how to actually do that, so maybe we are locked into maintaining the arsenal because no alternative has been seriously considered.

The report does go into nuclear strategy a little bit. One thing I had never thought about is that if you go for a strategy of “minimum deterrence”, which means just the bare minimum number of weapons needed for a credible threat of retaliation, it might lock you into a strategy of targeting civilians. In other words, you want your opponent to believe you would lob your limited number of weapons at their cities rather than military targets. I’m not sure I quite get that – I suppose the idea is that with more weapons you could retaliate against military targets first, see how that goes, and still have the option of taking out cities as a last resort, really just out of spite. It’s also possible that with a smaller arsenal, a weak leader could be more tempted to launch a preemptive strike. I have a hard time seeing the morality of any of these scenarios.

2017 garden retrospective

Now that there is snow on the ground and any possibility of actual gardening has ground to a halt, I find myself thinking about the growing season that just passed and the next one coming up. This wasn’t a great gardening year for me. A brand new human being sprouted in my household in January and ended up requiring a lot of care and maintenance throughout the growing season, along with the care and feeding of a four-year-old seedling we already had. The actual garden got mostly neglected. Weeds took over around mid-summer and I didn’t put the effort into beating them back that I would like to.

Still, the two trees and various perennials I planted in 2016 just chugged along all season even under and among the weeds. Their roots should be growing and strengthening, the seed bank will gradually shift toward “weeds” I like, and I think there is plenty of hope that the garden I originally envisioned will gradually start to take shape in the next few years. It helps that what I envision is only semi-tame to begin with.

What went well:

  • The Asian pear tree grew like crazy in its second season, and is now about as tall as it was advertised to be. Early in the season, it was swaying alarmingly in high winds, but the bottom seemed stationary so I didn’t stake it. Later in the season, it seemed to strengthen and stiffen, and is now doing well.
  • The Asian persimmon grew a little bit in its first year. Any growth was welcome after my first attempt with an Asian persimmon was dead on arrival. We will see how it does next year.
  • Other perennials did just fine in their second year, including lemon balm and butterfly milkweed. The yarrow the previous owners had, which I moved, continues to do well. My chives and garlic chives both did well and flowered. Violets and green and gold both started to fill in nicely as ground covers. The previous owner’s black-eyed Susans are doing well and even getting a bit aggressive. They have a bunch of bee balm that is doing well, which is good because I think I destroyed all the bee balm I planted myself when trying to pull out some aggressive daisies. It’s not that I hate daisies, but they don’t have much redeeming ecological value and one small clump is enough for me. A couple of the previous owners’ purple coneflowers are still hanging on too.
  • My greatest triumph of the year was getting wild strawberries sprouted and established.
  • My plan to attract black swallowtails with parsley, dill and fennel was a qualified success. Something ate the dill early on, but the parsley survived all year, and the fennel grew like crazy (I didn’t know fennel was such a large perennial, I plan to keep it but may move it elsewhere.)
  • Thai basil and Thai sweet basil did awesome in our big tubs as usual.
  • Maypop – Planted a couple vines as a long-term substitute for clematis and they took off. Will see if I end up regretting this some day.
  • I’m almost embarrassed to say my dandelions and chicory are doing well, but hey, I have had a soft spot for these “weeds” ever since I was a kid and they are always welcome in my garden.
  • I had a pitcher plant and Venus fly trap that were very happy for awhile growing in Sphagnum moss under my air conditioning condensate line. The Venus fly trap petered out sometime in the fall, but I brought the pitcher plant in for the winter and it seems to be bumping along.

What didn’t go well:

  • No luck even sprouting anise hyssop or mountain mint. I have never read anywhere that these seeds are hard to sprout.
  • I made a half-hearted attempt at miner’s lettuce again. A couple anemic seedlings just petered out as soon as it got hot.
  • Surprisingly, no luck with sunflowers, because squirrels just ate them right away.
  • I tried cilantro in window boxes, but it just bolted right away. The flowers were semi-interesting for a few weeks and attracted interesting little pollinators, but then they just died and looked terrible the rest of the year.
  • No luck sprouting Thai chilis.
  • No luck sprouting parsley, but of course it is easy and cheap to buy at almost any farmers market or hardware store.
  • Surprisingly, my white clover petered out in the hot summer and dry fall, which is one thing that allowed so many other weeds to come in. The roots are probably doing fine and we’ll see if it bounces back in the spring.
  • Sunchokes – these came roaring back in one of the big tubs in the spring with no intervention on my part, then gradually started to look really anemic and gross in the summer before dying completely. This doesn’t mean the roots are dead and won’t come back next year, of course.
  • White mulberry – one of these bounced up to small tree height in a matter of weeks in late summer and early fall. I don’t want it and need to do something about it ASAP before doing something requires a chain saw rather than a hack saw.
  • French sorrel looked anemic and weed-covered in the summer, but seemed to perk back up a bit in the fall.

Plans for next year:

  • Sunflowers – just direct seed tons of them, more than the squirrels can eat. Sunflower seeds are cheap. I still like my idea of using them as sort of a biological fence to keep out neighbors’ weeds.
  • Miners lettuce – still want to try to get a stand of this established. I may try a combination of direct seeding and transplants.
  • Sea kale – the one new seed I plan to order this winter.
  • Anise hyssop and mountain mint – I want to take yet another shot at these. Maybe just start a whole bunch of them and try some direct seeding too. And if none of that works, maybe break down and mail-order some plants.
  • Thai basil and Thai sweet basil – I’m excited because I saved seeds from plants last fall. If they don’t sprout, these are easy to buy our local Asian market.
  • Thai chilis – I want to try getting these to sprout again. With all the recalcitrant seeds that don’t want to sprout, I think I will stop being so stingy with seeds, and start putting large numbers of them in plastic bags with moist paper towels on top of a heat mat.
  • Parsley and dill – I like using these to fill in empty spots where I might put perennials in the future, mostly to attract caterpillars. Maybe I’ll put these in the window boxes. I want to try getting parsley to sprout, but if not I’ll just buy some.
  • Fennel – like I said, the one I have is doing fine and I just want to move it.
  • White mulberry – I’m going to try cutting the monster to the ground and “mulching” it with Epsom salts. Supposedly, these can dry out a tree stump without actually being toxic to anything nearby.

So, next steps are to research how early I can set out some of these plants, and start counting back to when I should be starting the seeds. Fun stuff.

how to defraud the U.S. Census

From the Department of Pre-crime, a guy the Trump administration might appoint to run the 2020 Census might try to cook the books. It seems a little unfair to accuse someone of a crime they haven’t even had an opportunity to consider committing yet, but I found it interesting to consider how it could be done. This sort of thing definitely happens in some countries, for example to perpetuate minority rule in spite of demographic change.

Each census starts with a simple questionnaire sent to every household. In 1970 and 1980, over 75% of those queried sent back responses. In 2010 that figure dropped to 63.5%, and in 2020, with distrust of government at an all-time high and increasing fears of data breach, the response rate will likely be significantly worse—current estimates range from 55% to 60%. To identify the non-respondents—at least 40% of Americans—the Census Bureau will have to exert considerable energy.

Thomas Brunell will determine how vigorously to track down these unidentified people in diverse locations. In rural areas that commonly vote Republican, he could direct workers to scour the trailer parks, while in urban Democratic strongholds, he could order census takers to visit non-responding households only during working hours. He could spend his advertising budget wisely in some places and less so in others. He could dispatch non-Spanish-speaking personnel into Hispanic neighborhoods. He could feed fears of deportation in immigrant communities. He could use credit rating companies to locate non-respondents, although many of the poor will never appear on such registries.

There is a simpler route Brunell could take. He might choose to do little, a tool almost as effective as the nefarious schemes detailed above. So far, the Census Bureau’s budget has been held to its 2010 level, despite a significant increase in the population and the expected rise in the percentage of those who do not respond to the initial questionnaire. Without greater resources and dedicated will, the Census Bureau could leave tens of millions of Americans uncounted. The GAO has warned that the 2020 Census is at “high risk of failure,” but requests to add funds have not yet been granted by Congress. New coping technologies are being introduced, yet trial runs have been curtailed due to lack of financing. Plans to test a Spanish-language questionnaire have also lapsed. Such constraints raise the stakes. When resources are limited, how to allocate those resources becomes paramount.

 

Trump and the Apocalypse

I was joking last week that in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Trump might be trying to hasten the Apocalypse. I doubt Trump believes in the biblical Apocalypse, and for the record neither do I, but this Alternet author provides a “shocking” reminder that many of his supporters do. This shouldn’t be so shocking, when Christianity is the prevalent religion in the country, and a good chunk of the Bible is literally about the end times and judgment day. Jesus spent a good chunk of his time talking about them, and his followers expected them to happen immediately upon his death.  Jewish and Muslim traditions include some form of it too. So I am not saying you can’t be religious without believing in the Apocalypse, but if you do that you are choosing not to take your holy books literally, or to take some parts literally and others not. Or, if you are religious but this topic is a surprise to you, then you aren’t really educated about the typical and historical beliefs of members of your own religion. So make no mistake, there are people out there for whom this is the most important thing and the main thing they spend their time thinking about, and they are going to view the world differently than those of us who do not believe in these things. And there are a lot of them out there.

visualizing tunnel progress

Metro Los Angeles has put together kind of a nice graphic to communicate the status of a tunnel construction project. It’s cartoonish, and yet contains a surprisingly large amount of scientific and engineering information.

 

ignorance and common sense

You would think ignorance and common sense would be opposites. But the term “common sense” has been in fact ruined because of its adoption by ignorant people. I’m not going to name names, but I have one particular U.S. President and political party in mind. Having common sense has come to be defined as believing one’s opinion is the truth. If you believe your opinion is the truth, you not only don’t know the limits of your knowledge, you can take willful steps to avoid acquiring knowledge, and you are completely impervious to evidence or logic others might attempt to share with you. Here are some illuminating quotes from a 2016 Washington Post article somewhat sadly titled Donald Trump doesn’t read much. Being president probably wouldn’t change that.

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.”

Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time…’ ”

Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”

What is that old saying – he who knows not he knows not, he is a fucking idiot with control of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Hopefully his age, propensity for temper tantrums, and fast food habit will lead to him having a stroke and dropping dead relatively soon.

If the Secret Service is reading this, yes I hope he dies soon of natural causes, no I wouldn’t pull the trigger myself, but I would be happy to bring the next silver-plated platter of Big Macs.

On the lighter side, Trump is not the first President with a supposed Big Mac habit. Maybe he will join Bill Clinton’s vegan club. No word yet on whether Hillary has come up with a vegan cookie recipe.

Article V

I think most Americans have a basic understanding that the Constitution can be amended, but that this is hard to do and therefore is not done very often. We treat our Constitution almost as a sacred text and that is one reason that even though our country is young compared to many others, its form of government has persisted in its current form longer than almost any other (I want to say longer than any other, but someone more knowledgeable than me could probably prove me wrong.)

Anyway, there is another way amendments can happen without the consent of Congress, which is for legislatures in two thirds of the states to force a constitutional convention. Sure, we all read about that when we studied the Colonial period in elementary school, right? I can actually walk over to Independence Hall on my lunch break any time I want and see where that all happened.

It turns out that as of now, December 2017, 28 U.S. state legislatures have voted to call a constitutional convention. 34 states would represent the two-thirds required. This could be a good thing. For example, a constitutional convention could clarify the definition of a “person” and get us the clean elections we so deserve. But that is not what is behind this. What is behind this is people who want to gut the federal government’s ability to tax, provide benefits, regulate interstate commerce, and protect the environment. This could actually be the beginning of the end of the republic.