Tag Archives: U.S. politics

my final case against Trump

I write this two days before the election. Trump has announced that he intends to cancel all spending to deal with climate change if elected. The evidence that we need to deal with climate change is so clear, and it is so clearly an existential threat to our civilization, that this is completely unethical. If I liked everything else about Trump, it would be enough, by itself, to cause me to reject him. (For the record, I like nothing about him.) Combine it with the completely unacceptable bigotry, racism, and religious intolerance, and it is just completely unacceptable. Finally, the lack of universal health care continues to be an international disgrace for our country. But we are closer thanks to Obama’s efforts to take on a Congress bought and paid for by the finance industry. Trump has vowed to destroy this progress and replace it with…nothing. Completely unacceptable.

Speaking of the finance industry, if a complex crisis like the 2007-8 financial crisis were to arise, we can’t trust Trump to understand it or to seek out advice from people who understand it. I don’t expect Hillary Clinton to take bold action to support long-term financial stability, which is what we need, but I do trust her to keep a cool head in a crisis, seek out competent advice, and make rational decisions. Similarly, in case of geopolitical crisis, I don’t expect her to be a strong force for peace, but I trust her to keep a cool head, seek out competent advice, and make rational decisions. Trump doesn’t have the ability to understand complex issues, yet he is overconfident and doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and if he seeks out the advice of others at all, I wouldn’t trust him to know whose advice to seek. Finally, he does not appear to be rational at times. I think he could easily make some horrible mistake if and when he is confronted by a crisis.

I don’t think either candidate will take bold action on campaign finance reform. Bernie Sanders was the candidate for that. Prove me wrong, Hillary!

R code to read Nate Silver’s data

Thanks to Nate Silver for posting all his polling data in a convenient text file that anyone can read! It’s a nice thing to do. Even though not many of us can do as interesting things with it as Nate Silver, it is a fun data set to play and practice with. Here is an R-bloggers post with some ideas on how to play with it.

 

ranked choice voting

Larry Diamond on BillMoyers.com talks about a referendum in Maine that could lead to ranked-choice voting being used in that state in the future. The basic idea is that if no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes on the first ballot, then votes from the lower-ranked candidates get redistributed based on how people ranked all the candidates. Ultimately, this results in a winner who is acceptable to a majority of the voters even though they may not have been the top choice of a plurality of voters. This could encourage a Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader (or Ross Perot or future Donald Trump) to run as a third-party candidate rather than competing for a major-party nomination.

…the issue at stake in Question 5 (a citizen-initiated referendum) is whether Maine will adopt a system called ranked-choice voting (RCV) in all its elections. If they approve the measure, Maine voters will have a unique opportunity to showcase the transformative potential of US democracy and to send a much-needed signal for reform at a crucial moment.

In RCV, voters select not just one candidate, but a list of candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of first-preference votes when tabulating the results, the least popular candidate is eliminated and the second-preference votes of his or her supporters are redistributed to the other candidates. The process continues until someone gets a majority.

The ability to rank all the candidates running for office, rather than voting for only one, is intrinsically more democratic. But, because it forces candidates to try to appeal to a broader cross-section of the public, RCV also makes it much more likely that the winner will be open to moderation, compromise and building governing coalitions…

How often do we have a Presidential winner who did not get a majority of the popular vote? George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are the obvious examples from my lifetime, but it has happened before. This article on History News Network answers the question.

Seven of the Presidents who won without a majority were Democrats—Polk, Buchanan, Cleveland both times, Wilson both times, Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton both times. Six of the Presidents who won without a majority were Republicans—Lincoln, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Nixon, and George W. Bush. One Whig, Zachary Taylor, and one Democratic-Republican, John Quincy Adams, finish the list.

JFK and drugs

Has there ever been a case where a politician used drugs to improve their performance in a debate? Well, according to a 2013 story in the New York Post:

The night of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate, Kennedy met with Jacobson just a few hours before he took the stage. The senator was “complaining in a voice barely above a whisper of extreme fatigue and lethargy,” the authors write. Jacobson plunged a needle “directly into Kennedy’s throat and pumped methamphetamine into his voice box.”

The result was clear within minutes, and an artificially energized Kennedy changed American history that night by upstaging Nixon.

the GOP’s “Growth and Opportunity Project”

After their 2012 election loss, the Republican Party made some surprisingly candid admissions and drew some surprisingly logical conclusions. I could almost begin to support a party that focused on sound, evidenced-based policies to create accelerated economic growth and true equal opportunity, while preserving a minimal but effective safety net for people who need it through no fault of their own.

We are the Party of private-sector economic growth because that is the best way to create jobs and opportunity. That is the best way to help people earn an income, achieve success and take care of their families.

But if we are going to grow as a Party, our policies and actions must take into account that the middle class has struggled mightily and that far too many of our citizens live in poverty. To people who are flat on their back, unemployed or disabled and in need of help, they do not care if the help comes from the private sector or the government — they just want help.

Our job as Republicans is to champion private growth so people will not turn to the government in the first place. But we must make sure that the government works for those truly in need, helping them so they can quickly get back on their feet. We should be driven by reform, eliminating, and fixing what is broken, while making sure the government’s safety net is a trampoline, not a trap.

Too bad their primary voters resoundingly rejected these reasonable ideas in favor of bigotry, science denial, and downright childishness. I doubt I will so much as glance in their direction again, even though I get frustrated with the subserviance to big business, warmongering and relatively narrow range of policies in consideration by the Democrats.

ending welfare as we knew it

Washington Monthly has an interesting post on Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms. I admit, even though I lived through it I didn’t know much more than the sound bite version. The fuller version is that while he did allow Congress to drastically scale back welfare as it was known at the time, which was cash assistance to poor families with relatively few strings attached, he drastically scaled up the earned income tax credit, which ended up helping more people. The article ends by making an interesting case that the debate has actually shifted somewhat to the left since the 1990s, and there is actually somewhat of a bipartisan consensus that more is needed to fight poverty and help the poor develop job skills. At the same time, the poverty rate among children and minority children in particular is still shameful.

 

What did happen is that Clinton seized on one element of the conservative welfare reform agenda – work – and used it as leverage to create the broadest expansion of federal spending on poverty reduction since the New Deal. Welfare recipients should work, Clinton agreed, and the 1996 legislation set both a five-year time limit on benefits and imposed, for the first time ever, a requirement that recipients work to receive aid.

But Clinton also argued government’s obligation to “make work pay.” “No one who works full time and has children in the home should live in poverty,” said Clinton in 1996. It was a bargain that would win over the public, which soon shed its appetite for punishing the poor that conservatives had done their best to encourage. It also enabled Clinton to push through his ambitious agenda of new programs aimed at helping the working poor.

Clinton’s biggest win was the expansion of the EITC, which was framed as a precondition to passing welfare reform and which Congress passed in 1993. Today, the EITC is the federal government’s largest anti-poverty program, delivering $63 billion in benefits a year to nearly 28 million families. This makes it nearly four times the size of the federal block grants under Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) – the successor to AFDC. Researchers credit the EITC for dramatically increasing workforce participation for lower-income women (more so than the reform of AFDC). According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the EITC lifted 9.4 million people in working households out of poverty in 2013.

facts and figures on illegal immigrants

The Week has some surprising facts and figures on illegal immigrants in the U.S. Just for fun, I’ll state it in the form of a quiz:

  1. About how many illegal immigrants are there, and what percentage of the U.S. population is that?
  2. What percentage of illegal immigrants here now have been here for more than 10 years?
  3. Is the number of illegal immigrants increasing or decreasing?
  4. What percentage of illegal immigrants are Mexican?
  5. Obviously, “illegal immigrant” means they crossed the border illegally, right?
  6. What percentage work? What percentage pay taxes? What percentage are receiving public assistance?
  7. What percentage have committed criminal offenses?

Answers (and I’ll repeat the questions, because it would be annoying if I didn’t):

  1. About how many illegal immigrants are there [Answer: 11 million], and what percentage of the U.S. population is that [Answer: 3.5%]?
  2. What percentage of illegal immigrants here now have been here for more than 10 years? [Answer: 66%]
  3. Is the number of illegal immigrants increasing or decreasing? [Answer: decreasing, from a peak of about 12 million in 2007. ]
  4. What percentage of illegal immigrants are Mexican? [Answer: 50%]
  5. Obviously, “illegal immigrant” means they crossed the border illegally, right? [Wrong: about 60% did, but 40% entered legally and overstayed their visas]
  6. What percentage work? [Answer: 73%] What percentage pay taxes? [Answer: 50%] What percentage are receiving public assistance? [Answer: 0% of adults, although children who are not citizens may receive public schooling and emergency medical care]
  7. What percentage have committed criminal offenses? [Answer: 7.5%]

August 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • Bokashi is a system that essentially pickles your compost.
  • There is an unlikely but plausible scenario where Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, could become President of the United States this fall. Speaking of implausible scenarios, I learned that RIchard Nixon made a serious attempt to pass a basic income bill in 1969.
  • Here is a short video explaining the Fermi Paradox, which asks why there are no aliens. Meanwhile Russian astronomers are saying there might be aliens.

Robert Gordon

Robert Gordon has an op-ed in the New York Times talking about productivity growth, inequality, and the Presidential candidates’ stated policy positions.

Rapid productivity growth in the dot-com era of the late 1990s originated in computer manufacturing — information and communication technology equipment — but this manufacturing has vanished since almost all such equipment is now imported.

This effect of that new technology was another important source of growth. Out went typewriters and calculating machines, replaced by personal computers, spreadsheet and word-processing software, web browsers and e-commerce. Productivity also boomed in retailing, as Walmart and other “big box” stores revolutionized retail selection, layout and supply chain management.

But by 2004, the digital revolution had achieved most of its transition in business methods. Not much has changed in offices and at retail stores since then.

His basic thesis is that we are past the peak of this particular wave of technological progress, and he doesn’t see another wave on the horizon. So technology is not providing that slow but relentless underlying trend of productivity growth right now, and the shorter-term underlying cyclical factors are also on a downward trend (size of the skilled labor force, income inequality, uncertainty over health care, retirement and education). Tax and infrastructure investment policies suggested by the candidates could help somewhat with these shorter term factors. He generally supports socialist policies like we see in “Canada, Australia, and the Nordic countries”.

My own thoughts: It’s tough for politicians to support policies that advance long-term productivity growth, like great education and a level playing field for businesses of all sizes to innovate and compete. First of all, the costs of these policies come due during their terms in office while the benefits accrue long afterward. This is a basic problem of democracy – elected officials can be punished by voters for taking on those short term costs, and solutions can involve voluntarily transferring more power into the hands of un-elected technocrats, which they have little incentive to do. (Nonetheless, many other democratic countries manage to do better than us.) Second, the interests of a few big businesses (finance, fossil fuels and the military-industrial complex) have outsize, undemocratic influence over our (U.S.) politicians allowing them to write laws unfairly in their favor and at the expense of everyone else, even businesses in other industries. This problem could be solved by a courageous amendment to our constitution, but again politicians have little incentive to cut off their own sources of funding.

Politicians can talk about infrastructure because that creates short-term jobs while also helping the economy in the long-term. We need good planning though if we are going to build the smart infrastructure that can really reduce friction in the economy while minimizing environmental impacts and improving our living environments. We don’t have that currently, just some vague ideas about building lots of roads and bridges and maybe some power lines and we’re not sure about pipelines.

Gordon rails against “defined contribution” pension plans, but I still think there is a place for them. While social security is reasonably well run at the federal level, pension plans at the state, municipal and corporate level are terribly run. So I would say either get rid of all those in favor of an expansion of social security, or go to defined contribution. Plans could be designed to help individuals manage risk more effectively (using life cycle funds and annuitization, for example). In Singapore, the system is nominally defined contribution, but the government “tops up” individuals’ contributions – everybody contributes a similar amount as a percentage of their income, then the government matches contributions from lower-income individuals at a higher rate so they can end up with similar retirement savings as higher-income individuals. This could work in the U.S., but we would have to first prevent the finance industry from hijacking the rules to siphon off money for itself.

Of course, we can also hope that the wave of technological progress is in fact not past, we are just in a momentary lull before it continues to pick up in an exponential (but episodic) fashion as it has throughout history. I am 100% positive that the history of technology is not over. The only question in my mind is whether, if we are in fact in an episodic lull, it is going to last long enough to ruin a generation or two for us puny individual humans who only live 70 years or so.