Tag Archives: U.S. politics

poverty, race, and math

Here’s some math on U.S. poverty.

  • from Census.gov: estimated U.S. population on July 1, 2019: 328,240,000
    • “Black or African American alone, percent”: 13.4% (this works out to 43,984,000, rounding all numbers to the nearest 1,000)
    • “White alone, percent”: 76.3% (this works out to 250,447,000)
  • from Urban Institute: U.S. poverty rate in 2021, all races: 13.7% (44,969,000)
    • Black poverty rate: 18.1% (7,961,000)
    • White poverty rate: 9.6% (24,043,000)

A few points/opinions, which I hope will not be too controversial.

  • A long history of legal and institutional racism in the U.S. is an obvious fact, a moral outrage, and needs to be corrected, particularly in housing and education.
  • A greater fraction of the black population is poor compared to the white population.
  • There are more poor white people than poor black people in the country.
  • You have to be careful comparing averages between groups of very different sizes.
  • From a moral perspective, if you want to help the most people, you would not only help black people. You would try to help people who need help in both groups, while trying to even out the disparities.
  • From a political perspective, an incessant focus on race, and rhetoric equating race and poverty, is going to turn off a lot of poor white voters. This ends up electing politicians who are not going to help poor people of either race.
  • There are other races, there are many mixes of races, and there are many confusing census questions about whether people consider themselves hispanic instead of or in addition to the other races. I am not a professional demographer, and do not know the absolute best way to handle these issues.

June 2021 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.

Most hopeful story: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.

checking in with Noam Chomsky

In this Alternet article, Noam Chomsky describes the business class as Marxists waging a class struggle. They never give up and working class is always on the defensive. So if the working class is less aggressive, which he says they have been since the “centrist Carter administration”, big business will get the upper hand as it has in the U.S. He sees some hope in the movement started by Bernie Sanders.

jobs, jobs, jobs, families, infrastructure, and more jobs…and Richard Nixon, from the bottom of my heart go fuck yourself!

Adam Tooze has a nice visualization of Biden’s spending proposals. Is this a tree plot? a cartogram? I’m not sure, experts please weigh in. A few things I noticed:

  • What Biden talks most and least about does not always match the largest and smallest proposed spending amounts. I think this is called “messaging”. For example, more would be spent on electric vehicle subsidies than on community college.
  • There is no clear line between the infrastructure package and the families package. For example, there is spending on public schools in the former and child care facilities in the latter.

That’s just scratching the surface. You could (and should) stare at this graphic for hours, and then there is a long article to go with it. But I have to go make breakfast now because I can hear the children getting grumpy, which means my precious little bit of early morning quiet thinking time as a working-parent-of-small-children-with-no-childcare-or-grandparent-support is now over. If Biden gets this stuff through our dysfunctional Congress, it will be mostly too late to help my family but I hope it helps others. Thanks Obama…Bush, Clinton, other Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon at least. Especially Nixon, fuck you – a quick skim of the article reminded me of the bipartisan childcare program of the 1970s that you vetoed. Oh and also, fuck you Ralph Nader because maybe Al Gore would have gotten some of this stuff back on track 20 years ago. And last but not least, thank you once again Bernie Sanders for not pulling a Nader.

What is infrastructure?

This apparently is a political question. I am not an expert on all types of infrastructure, or a financial expert, but I am somewhat of an expert on urban water infrastructure. The definition of infrastructure I typically use is from the Statement No. 34 of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board: Basic Financial Statements—and Management’s Discussion and Analysis—for State and Local Governments. Here is how it goes:

As used in this Statement, the term capital assets includes land, improvements to land, easements, buildings, building improvements, vehicles, machinery, equipment, works of art and historical treasures, infrastructure, and all other tangible or intangible assets that are used in operations and that have initial useful lives extending beyond a single reporting period. Infrastructure assets are long-lived capital assets that normally are stationary in nature and normally can be preserved for a significantly greater number of years than most capital assets. Examples of infrastructure assets include roads, bridges, tunnels, drainage systems, water and sewer systems, dams, and lighting systems. Buildings, except those that are an ancillary part of a network of infrastructure assets, should not be considered infrastructure assets for purposes of this Statement.

GASB 34

This seems like as good a definition as any. So Biden’s proposed bill is really a capital assets bill. Which doesn’t have much of a ring to it. But neither did infrastructure, it’s a bizarre word that we’ve just been saying a lot so it has started to sound less bizarre. Capital assets, I learned in my undergraduate economics classes, are the economy’s food, and as it consumes them we have to add more just to keep the amount of them level (maintain, repair, rehabilitate, or replace when the time comes). We can increase economic output up to a point by adding even more capital assets to increase the absolute level, although there is such a thing as adding too much (looking at you, old Soviet Union, and possibly modern Japan), and we are almost certainly way below the point that would be too much. It makes total sense to borrow at a reasonable interest rate and invest in capital assets that will provide a return on that investment, and if you can borrow at no interest or even a slight negative interest rate, and you are below that optimal level of capital assets, warm up those printing presses! You can also, in theory, incentivize the private sector to make appropriate capital investments on their side. Investments in education, training, research and development then round out the investment in capital assets by providing the work force and capacity to innovate that set the stage for long term investment. Oh, and you want to try to do all this without irreversibly fucking up the atmosphere and oceans. Easy peasy!

What infrastructure is definitely not is only roads, bridges, and highways. That has been the limit of imagination of many of our elected officials when talking about infrastructure. So good for this administration for taking a more expansive view, and seizing the initiative. We’ll see if this is the one big thing this administration manages to get done in its two year “grace period”. Why do we have a system where we can only do one thing every 8 years?

U.S. Marines “reinventing themselves”

The U.S. Marine Corps is retooling to (be prepared to, but hopefully not) fight a war with China, according to Scientific American. Basically, this involves a focus on amphibious landings to take islands, and then defending them with lots of drones and missiles. The Army can fight big wars with lots of tanks, if needed.

This sounds like a fun video game, and it is good to be prepared, but please politicians let’s not let a world war happen. The drum beats are getting louder every day. I think we need some kind of peace group that meets regularly to define the issues and work on resolving them, or at least keeping them nonviolent. But the drum beating seems to serve domestic political purposes in many countries – remember a military-industrial complex needs an enemy so it can keep eating and growing, especially in countries with elected leaders. And as long as the military-industrial complex is eating and growing, it is willing to pretend it is under the control of elected civilian leadership, even though it could depose that civilian leadership at the drop of a hat. But threaten it or back it into a corner and there is no telling what will happen. So in the U.S. at least, no politician will threaten it (since, I don’t know, approximately November 22, 1963), or nobody willing to threaten it gets seriously close to power. But none of this has anything to do with fighting an actual war. Not even the military-industrial complex wants that, but they will beat their drums right up to the point of war, hoping their opponent will back off and make them look strong. It’s easy to see how this can lead to catastrophe.

what Singapore does well

After reading this long article in the London Review of Books, I find myself reflecting on my own experience in Singapore from 2010-2013. Here’s my take on what they do well. First, they educate everybody. Everybody is not an international math champion, despite what you might think, but everybody gets a solid education through at least a two-year vocational degree. Second, they build their economy by attracting foreign investment and being a center of trade. Third, they have rational guest worker policies for both skilled and unskilled workers. I think all this keeps the economy humming along pretty well. Then, they have rational tax policies. They help the population build wealth through a subsidized housing program (often called “public housing” in the international press, but think of it more like a condo you own with the government as your condo association. If you meet certain requirements (which include race and fertility, policies that would not translate well everywhere), you essentially get to buy your condo at a discount and sell it at full price. Then there is essentially a forced saving scheme, which is invested in the well-managed sovereign wealth fund and given back to people in annuity form at retirement age.

That’s what I liked. I felt the focus on economics resulted in a society where a lot of people really are all about money, and people are somewhat cold to each other. The idea of technocratic government and leadership development works up to a point, but it results in a certain arrogance that does not always match ability. They have comprehensive and highly efficient public transportation, but they still separate residential and commercial land uses and this results in really long commutes for people. And if you are not from there, the place just feels a bit crowded, loud and claustrophobic after awhile.

I had the fortune of experiencing an election while I lived there, and I came away thinking that their one-party-dominated system is not all that different than our two-similar-party-dominated system, at least in terms of barriers to entry and resistance to change. But overall, I think their system is working better in the interest of their people than the U.S. system in recent years.

what would a forward-looking infrastructure plan look like?

The U.S. has neglected its infrastructure for decades and is falling apart. Unemployment and inequality are high, and people are hurting. Real interest rates are negative, there is virtually no risk of inflation, and the U.S. dollar remains strong and stable for the near future. Warm up the printing presses and helicopters! Don’t take it from me, take it from Larry Summers, who is normally in the headlines for cautioning against this sort of thing:

we propose a crude way to take account of this by excluding a specific set of programs and investments from the constraints of pay-as-you-go when strong evidence from academic research implies they would plausibly pay for themselves in present value. This includes well-designed investments in areas like children, education, and research. Infrastructure would ideally be paid for with Pigouvian revenue measures that improve infrastructure utilization, but it too could get an exception to the pay-as-you-go principle.

a paper by Larry Summers and another guy you haven’t heard of

Under these conditions, just directing the fire hose of federal money at infrastructure projects, any infrastructure projects, can’t hurt. It might be good to do that rather than spend too much time coming up with a plan to do it the best possible way. And yet, it could be done better. We could take the time to plan when we are not in a crisis, and then be ready to turn on the taps when a crisis hits (or just crack the taps open to a slow drip when a minor challenge hits and we need to nudge the country back on course.)

Too many proposals about infrastructure just boil down to throwing money at pork barrel highway projects, or else a buzzword soup about things like sustainability and equity without specific proposals. Here is one new proposal from Rice University with some specifics. One thing they propose is that project proposals come from leaders at the metropolitan or regional scale rather than the federal government. I completely agree with this. They suggest focusing on transportation (including public transportation), public facilities (including health facilities and parks), water and wastewater, energy (including renewables), and communications (including broadband). They then get down to a laundry list of specific projects at the local scale that would benefit from funding. Pulling all of this together is a pretty good accomplishment.

These basic categories sound okay to me. I might leave “health facilities” out of it – the U.S. needs a comprehensive, universal health care system now and that is a big enough topic to deserve its own legislation and program. Education is similar. I might add housing. Housing is a huge topic and it is excluded from most definitions of public infrastructure, but it is so intertwined with infrastructure and land use that its problems almost need to be solved at the same time. I like that they included parks – I might broaden this to include other forms of green infrastructure like street trees. Maybe “green infrastructure” is a too buzzwordy term – nothing wrong with “parks and trees”, except maybe there is a gray area whether are talking about any type of park or recreation facility (an urban playground or basketball court?) or whether it has to be quasi-naturalistic. I think I would go with the broader definition. I might add “urban food infrastructure” to the list – this is somewhat nebulous, but again intertwined with the larger infrastructure system and land use issues. You don’t really want the ag industry lobbyists involved, hence the “urban” term.

A bunch of projects do not make a plan. A good plan needs to have a definition of the system that is being planned for, and measurable goals for the state or function of that system that is desired. Then any package of inter-related projects can be evaluated to see how well they meet the goals and at what cost. Then finally, a specific package of projects can be chosen and put in priority order, and funding and implementation details can be worked out. Lots of “plans” skip right to the last step I just mentioned, while others fail because the last two steps are not well enough thought out.

As far as goals, they should be set at the local level, but the basics are fairly obvious, I think:

  • Provide reliable and affordable water, energy, communication, food and waste disposal services for everyone. (This can get wonkier – you want to keep infrastructure in a state of good repair, set and meet level of service goals, and minimize the cost of each component over its life cycle by making smart maintain/repair/replace/upgrade decisions.)
  • Minimize the expense and time of moving people and goods where they need to go. (I think of this as infrastructure minimizing “friction” in the workings of the economy.)
  • Minimize the negative impacts and maximize the positive impacts of the infrastructure system on the environment and public health, or if we want to be more buzzwordy, maximize ecosystem services.
  • Make the transportation system as safe as possible for everyone. (You could roll this into either the transportation or health goals, but it is so near and dear to my heart I give it its own bullet. If we made this an explicit goal, we would not be designing our streets and highways the way we are today in the U.S. By the way, active commutes are very nice and a lot of people might like them if they had the option to give them a try.)
  • Housing – I don’t know enough to articulate this. Basically, everybody needs to be able to afford a decent roof over their heads.
  • Be prepared to react, manage, and recover from disasters and other disruptions that occur. The buzzword is resilience. (Climate change mostly fits under this goal. The words “climate change” are not a goal or a plan in and of themselves. Some bad things that happen are related to climate change, and some are just random bad luck, and some are mixes of the two. We need to be ready for all of them.)

A few more principles I think are important:

  • The federal government could fund this planning at the metro scale. The planning itself would create some government, professional, and academic jobs and build technical capacity. Something similar is already done for transportation so it could be expanded. The plan would need to be on the books, with a goal-based analysis justifying a prioritized list of specific projects selected, to be eligible for federal funding.
  • The funding should go from the federal government directly to metro areas, without passing through state politicians. Otherwise they will use the helicopters to scatter the money over rural areas where it will not do as much economic good or help as many people. States could be given a fair amount of money to plan and implement in areas unable or uninterested in doing it themselves.
  • The metro region needs to have skin in the game. The federal government should match local investments – it could match at a higher or lower rate depending on economic conditions, but something short of 100%.
  • Funding for maintenance needs to be included, and set aside in some sort of trust fund. This would need to include funding for existing infrastructure through the end of its service life, and then funding for new infrastructure to be maintained as it replaces the old. In fact, funding maintenance of existing infrastructure would be the single easiest way to benefit people and the economy right away without the considerable time and effort it takes to get new construction projects up and running. Maybe I’ll rethink my earlier proposal to leave out education, and include maintenance of public schools which would instantly improve the lives of millions of children, parents, teachers and staff. We could hit this hard and have a decent public school system in this country (again) by fall 2021.

So there’s my infrastructure plan. If you are a powerful politician reading this, please feel free to steal it and say you thought of it. My reward will be living in a decent, modern country with a growing economy and a pleasant environment.

Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed Senate, this is Chewbacca…

Donald Trump’s lawyers do not make sense. Could this be a strategy?

Why would a Wookiee, an 8-foot-tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of 2-foot-tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I’m a lawyer defending a [former President of the United States], and I’m talkin’ about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you’re in that [smoky back room in the Capitol] deliberatin’ and conjugatin’ the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed [Senate], it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.

Wikipedia, and obviously South Park

What’s the investment return on political contributions?

According to some sources I’ve looked at, a rule of thumb is 1000 to 1. So it is entirely rational for amoral rich and powerful entities (be they human, corporate, or non-profit entities) to invest their money and effort in buying politicians rather than competing or innovating. This blog post has some numbers:

Consider: The return on industry lobbying — let’s round up and call it $10 million across several Senate terms — is $124 billion in protected profit per year. Looking at the drug price mark-up in the Taibbi article — from $4 to $1000 — gives a profit increase of 250 times the original (and still profitable) $4 price in India. Let’s lower that increase, since I’m sure Taibbi picked an extreme example. Let’s say that, on average, the protected U.S. profit is “just” a 100-times increase over what’s profitable overseas…

So what’s the ROI to the drug companies on its $10 million in bribes (sorry, entirely legal campaign contributions)? If it’s $100 billion … again, per year … the ROI on campaign contributions is at least $10,000 in profit for each $1 spent to protect it, or more than 10,000 to 1.

If I’m off by a factor of 10, the ROI is … 1,000 to 1.

From a blog called Down with Tyranny

So doing away with this should boost the competitiveness and innovation of our economy quite a bit, allow small and medium business to compete on an equal playing field with big business, and allow less wealthy and powerful parties to have a voice in policy choices (“democracy” is one word I’ve heard used in this context). But who would have to make this change? The politicians being bribed, of course. There was one politician who might have tried to do something, but we didn’t vote for him. The administration we did vote for has not mentioned corruption as a priority lately, although to be fair they do have other urgent priorities.