Tag Archives: U.S. politics

July 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.

The Poor People’s Moral Budget

This report tries to quantify the costs of inaction on a lot of America’s social and environmental problems, and makes the case that the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action. I tend to buy this, although they don’t give references in their summary and I bet if you dig deeper they may have cherry picked studies that produce the largest savings. Still, it illustrates how easily politicians can trick people by comparing the cost of action to an assumed zero cost of inaction, which is never the case. I don’t how you would go about educating the public about that, other than starting in kindergarten and teaching people how to look at evidence, think and draw conclusions.

Universal Basic Income, VAT, and baby bonds

A few 2020 Presidential contender highlights:

  • Andrew Yang (polling at about 1%) is promoting a Universal Basic Income of $1000/month for all U.S. citizens 18 and older regardless of income. He would pay for it by scaling back some other assistance programs and instituting…a VAT.
  • Cory Booker (polling at about 2%) is promoting “baby bonds”, where every baby gets a $1000 bond annually, and low-income children get up to an additional $2000 per year.

These are all ideas that (any) Democratic President and Congress could explore together, if they were to get a chance and managed to keep the corporate lobbyists at bay. I am 1000% in favor of VAT. It is just one of those things that all other modern countries do and the U.S. does not. It works and we just need to do it. Other taxes people hate can be reduced.

Both the UBI and baby bond ideas are supposed to address inequality quickly. The baby bond idea is supposed to particularly help racial disparities in wealth very quickly, but there is no reason the UBI could not do that with some fine-tuning. I like the idea of setting kids up with assets in principal, but in practice I am afraid unscrupulous relatives, Wall Street and payday lenders will find a way to take advantage of them. The UBI would essentially just be a “Social Security for All” scheme. We have the bureaucracy for that all set up and ready to go, so it seems practical to me. The only other difference I see between the two is that the government can more easily go back on a promise to pay you in the future than it can take money away from you that it has already paid. But of course it can do either, let’s not be naive.

My verdict – I’d like to see a VAT and a carbon tax used to fund education, infrastructure, and research. All of these things should help keep people busy if technology really does lead to unemployment. People can study to upgrade their knowledge and skills, design and build infrastructure and other types of capital goods, or go into research and teaching. Unemployment and disability insurance could also be beefed up to cover the gaps.

my campaign platform

I always fantasize in election years about what my campaign platform would be, in a fantasy world where I had political skills and was running. It’s not a useless fantasy, because it gives me a benchmark to measure candidates against when I’m thinking of who to vote for. So here goes:

  • Education – “free college” and trade school yes, but also universal preschool, lifelong education, and strong incentives for private sector skills training and retraining.
  • Infrastructure – I’ve talked a lot about this. Plan at the metropolitan area scale, take a broad view of infrastructure to include housing and green infrastructure. Include strong incentives for private sector capital investment.
  • Innovation – Flood universities with funding for basic research across the board. Make some bets on a few “moon shot” technologies like quantum computing, nanotechnology, fusion power, and advanced biotechnology. Include strong incentives for private sector R&D.
  • Corruption – also known as “campaign finance”, but that sounds boring. This is really about having voters rather than dollars decide elections, and having elected officials write laws that benefit a critical mass of citizens rather than a few large campaign donors. It’s really a prerequisite to achieving anything else in the long term. Hammer the fuckers relentlessly and voters might respond.
  • Nuclear Weapons – Sure I want world peace, but the public is incredibly cynical about that and this is a place to start. Remind people how horrifying and dangerous they are, and that we have way more than we could ever rationally need for any purpose. If we want others to give them up or stop pursuing them, we can easily lead by example. Just put them away as they wear out and don’t make new ones.

Maybe I’ll elaborate on these in future posts, if I get a chance.

Now, which politician do I think is the best match? I have a lot of research and paying attention to do. I think Bernie Sanders would be the strongest on campaign finance, and just making progress on that issue in an 8-year administration might be worth putting him in office. I also think he might be strong on peace. I think his instinct is to expand the welfare state without taking the first three steps to accelerate income growth over time. I’m not sure who I think would be strongest here. Possibly a rational, moderate Republican actually, if such an animal still exists. But I will never support any politician from that party as long as it continues to stand for bigotry, science denial, and war.

June 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!

Most hopeful story:

  • There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.

 

what would reparations for slavery actually look like?

This New York Times article attempts to answer the question, but left me a little confused. It seems that many serious studies go back to the idea of “40 acres and a mule” promised to freed slaves by Abraham Lincoln. That promise was never honored. There are several estimates of what that could mean today. But see if you can make sense of this statement: ” He used the current average price of agricultural land and figured that 40 acres of farmland and buildings would amount to roughly $123,000. If all of the four million slaves counted in the 1860 census had been able to take advantage of that offer, it would have totaled more than $486 billion today — or about $16,200 for each descendant of slaves.” There are also ideas for “longer-term investments in education, housing and businesses that build up wealth”.

Here are a few facts the article points out. First, the net worth of the average black household is only about a tenth the net worth of the average white household. I knew there was a gap, but the size of the gap is shocking to me. Second, the United States has paid reparations to descendants of citizens held in Japanese-American internment camps.

Personally, I support reparations in principle, although I think native Americans and anyone born into poverty through no fault of their own suffers just as much as an African American in a similar economic circumstance. One idea would be to pilot social programs like universal health care, child care, and free college initial for African Americans and Native Americans, and then expand them to the general population as they are fine tuned and shown to be successful.

“competing” with China

This article in Defense One says the U.S. Department of Defense has been ordered to “compete” with China, but they don’t know what that means. One interpretation seems to be that it means a good old-fashioned advising, training, and arms sales. But another interpretation seems to be alliance forming and economic competition. Neither one of these is the military’s job, and they know they don’t have the expertise to perform these functions.

The article does offer some clues as to why some in the military feel threatened by the Belt and Road Initiative.

In Greenland, for example, Beijing sought to finance and build three airports that the DOD feared it could seize for military purposes if Nuuk fell behind on its payments. In Africa, Pentagon leaders are watching to see whether Beijing will invest in a West African port that could harbor its warships at need. “We need to understand it so that we know how to respond to it,” said the Army official.

February 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

Most hopeful story:

  • Here is the boringly simple western European formula for social and economic success: “public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making.” There’s even a glimmer of hope that U.S. politicians could manage to put some of these ideas into action. Seriously, I’m trying hard not to be cynical.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • We could theoretically create a race of humans with Einstein-level intelligence using in-vitro fertilization techniques available today. They might use their intelligence to create even smarter artificial intelligence which would quickly render them (not to mention, any ordinary average intelligence humans) obsolete.



Emergency powers and the fall of Weimar

Because somebody had to compare Trump’s use of emergency powers to Hitler. That somebody is the Washington Post. The main difference as I see it is that Hitler and his enablers manufactured an actual crisis, while Trump simply claims there is a crisis with no evidence or even marginally coherent logic to back up the claim. One interesting thing mentioned in the article is that West Germany at first refused to put emergency powers in their constitution, but the U.S. and NATO allies insisted they do so and eventually prevailed. They have never been invoked.

The Weimar constitution, like ours, had classically liberal aspects that guaranteed freedom of speech, assembly, religion and the right to private property. Yet born in the context of near-civil war conditions between right and left, it also gave the nationally elected president the power to dissolve the parliament and hold a new election within 60 days. Its Article 48 gave the president the power, “if public security and order” were “seriously disturbed or endangered within the German Reich,” to use the armed forces to restore them or suspend “for a while in whole or in part fundamental rights” guaranteed by the Constitution such as freedom of assembly and speech…

Terrorism, racist legislation and the suppression of opposition political parties all found justification in a supposed state of emergency that allowed an end to democratic institutions. Before March 1933, the invocation of emergency clauses of the Weimar constitution had been normalized. The willingness of parliament to cede authority to the executive eased the path for the transition from authoritarian to totalitarian dictatorship and to lawlessness.

Where the comparison holds is previously unacceptable use of emergency powers becoming normalized, which is how Germany took its first steps down the slippery slope.

more on the Green New Deal

I’m reading a lot about the Green New Deal today. But after reading about it, I decided to just go and read the actual thing itself. It’s easy to be cynical about something like this by saying it has not been developed into an implementable plan or set of projects yet (even though it mentions “projects”, it doesn’t really contain any), and that would be true. It’s really a vision and goal-setting document. Getting people on board with a vision is the first step in a successful plan. It’s a hard step and it appears to have been done pretty well in a pretty short period of time.

The second step is developing an implementable plan to achieve the vision and goals. This is a harder step. Some people are comparing this to the 2008 stimulus program, but that was not a plan because it had no clearly articulated objectives or goals other than to throw a lot of money at a lot of projects that had already been defined by someone in the past according to whatever their goals were at the time. There was no time to develop a plan in that case – in fact, the projects had to be “shovel ready” meaning taking the time to plan anything was explicitly forbidden. This time, there actually is the possibility of taking the time to develop a plan. Developing a really good plan takes some time though. To do it well, you have to look at an enormous number of projects, policies, and other measures, consider them in various combinations, and pick a set of them that is reasonably technologically and economically efficient at achieving your goals, acceptable to your major stakeholders even if not their first choice, and implementable. I think some of this planning would have to be done at the local and regional level, preferably at the metro-area scale, although the states could maybe be involved in agriculture and inter-city transportation planning.

Finally, there is implementation. This is the hardest step. Complex institutions have to be created or existing ones repurposed; money has to be disbursed; contracts have to be written, awarded, and administered; job descriptions have to be written and people hired and trained and deployed; projects have to be managed; progress has to be tracked and laws have to be enforced. A critical mass of people involved at all levels has to understand and buy into those goals and how their little cog in the massive machine contributes to them. They have to make all kinds of little decisions and course corrections every day that keep the whole massive enterprise aimed at those goals.

So hard, harder, hardest. But like I said, the hard part is already done! In my career, I’ve seen groups of intelligent and well-educated people try to jump into implementing a bunch of projects without defining goals or having a plan for how they are supposed to tie together and meet the goals. I’ve also seen a brilliant vision translated into a reasonably technologically and economically workable, implementable plan, and then fail because key stakeholders were not on board, or because the people responsible for implementing the plan never understood the vision or how their little piece fit into it, so their millions of small daily decisions gradually caused the program to drift away from a path that was aimed at the goals, and there was no mechanism to bring it back to the path. But to end on a brighter note, if you come up with a brilliant vision, a brilliant plan to achieve it, and then you only implement 25% or even 10% of it, you have achieved something that never would have been achieved if you hadn’t come up with the vision and plan. And you show that it can be done and give others a chance to pick up the fight after you have moved on.

If I have time, I’ll try to tease out in another post what I think the vision and goals actually are, and how I think they could be achieved if I were somehow made emperor.