"Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan How can you ask for what you want, much less get it, if you don't know the words?
My whole life has had a broader Democratic party (electeds, magazine writers, think tankers, etc.) stuffed with people (not just! but them too!) whose primary purpose seemed to be relitgating the 1972 Democratic primary over and over again and making sure the fucking hippies (and women and gays and minorities) who voted for McGovern (and before that, RUINED EVERYTHING INCLUDING THEIR LOVELY LITTLE WAR IN VIETNAM) never worked in This Town Again.
That's exaggeration, of course, but The Discourse of the 90s and the aughts didn't make any sense to me until I understood that bit.
It is not an exaggeration to say that DC is filled with people who will back a genocide to the end, and put Donald Trump in power, rather than admit the hippies are right about anything. Yelling at hippies, and blaming them for their own mistakes, is why they are in politics.
Yes the hippies are almost dead, but the people in power will burn the world down before letting "generational shift" happen. Young (then) nerds like Jon Chait would write glowingly about Scoop Jackson (contrasting what could have been to "when the Democratic Party's foreign policy remained in the grip of McGovernism") in the aughts to please the editors who signed their checks.
The death and destruction caucus among professional Democrats remains powerful, and their second favorite hobby is yelling at hippies.
Reading the DaoDeJing (Tao Te Ching) with liberal democracy in mind is actually quite a scary proposition:
"The truth is not beautiful. Fine words are not trustworthy. The good do not argue. The argumentative are not good. The wise do not try to know everything. Know-alls are… https://t.co/PNA33e1UWn
“Why Did Harvard University Go After One of Its Best Black Professors? [Quillette]. Roland Fryer Jr. The article is interesting, but this factoid caught my eye: “Fryer’s first major published work, co-authored with Levitt, deconstructed the 1920s-era Ku Klux Klan…. [T]hey were surprised how expensive it was to become a KKK foot soldier: a $10 initiation fee, $6.50 for branded robes, a $5 annual membership charge, plus a mysterious yearly $1.80 ‘imperial tax.’ That’s equivalent to about $350 today—a lot of money for many of the joiners. Fryer tracked the money flow, and found that it fuelled lucrative paydays for upper management. An imperial ‘Kleagle‘ could pocket $300,000 a year (in 2006 dollars). D.C. Stephenson, the “Grand Dragon” of Indiana, made double that. The KKK has the look of what Levitt and Fryer call a ‘classic pyramid scheme,’ but for gullible racists.” • Hitler’s Nazis had to buy their own uniforms, too. I wonder if the Nazis got that idea from the KKK, just as they copied Jim Crow from us (see here “shirt movements” in interwar Europe, perhaps prefiguring the tactics of color revolutions).
...Meanwhile, it's worth remembering that when Harry Truman first proposed single-payer healthcare it was rejected by Dixiecrats because they might have to integrate their hospitals. So now the US has healthcare that's twice as expensive, and produces crap results. The WHO international study ranks the US 37th in healthcare outcomes like life expectancy, vaccination rates and infant mortality--between Costa Rica and Slovenia.
Imagination is more important than intelligence - Albert Einstein
Like most of my generation, I've watched the Star Wars series since I was young. One more recent addition is the "Light and Magic" documentary (on Disney+) about how Lucas' projects produced today's special effects. Lucas and his coworkers pioneered digital, computer-generated effects, even providing the impetus to invent Photoshop, the grandaddy of all photo-editing software.
Lucas himself has larger ambitions than special effects in his films, too. At one point in the documentary, he says cultures are all founded on myths. Lucas previously confessed Joseph Campbell's scholarship about myths was one of his inspirations. Star Wars is a myth, a story that can conceivably lead to a culture. The question of questions: would this new culture be an improvement, or simply the occasion for more drama.
The idea that myths are foundational to cultures is really nothing new. There's no record, for one example, that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and confessed he "could not tell a lie" to his father. That's a foundational myth for the USA. So is the idea that the founding fathers were some saintly men with special access to truth and wisdom. They were smart men, but seriously flawed. Many of them were slave owners. Thomas Jefferson even had a 14-year-old slave mistress, Sally Hemmings, something that would horrify the #metoo generation.
Lucas describes his pitch to Hollywood studios for Star Wars as a film that included World War II dogfights, but in space. That means that, in reality, Lucas is actually reviving nostalgia, dressed up with special effects. His "American Graffitti" film gave us nostalgia about cruising (driving around) in California's Central Valley, so that's not particularly new, either.
And that's part of the problem with Star Wars. It's just more wars--as though we haven't had enough of them. And the warfare is a throwback. The idea that space wars will include tail gunners is frankly unrealistic. The myth looks to me to be more of the same, not a cultural shift.
One interesting sideshow is the work ethic of the Industrial Light & Magic workers. They were recruited from the special effects nerds who loved movies about Flash Gordon, King Kong, Godzilla and the Kraken. They were passionate about their work, and would often work 18 hour days to produce the special effects Lucas, James Cameron ("The Deep") and Stephen Spielberg ("Indiana Jones") would use to make their movies.
The passionate commitment to work was a driving force in the successful completion of the kind of effects now available for filmmakers worldwide. There are few such eloquent tributes to a love of work as "Light and Magic."
One special effects wizard tells how his daughter became reluctant to grow up. He answers by encouraging her to become a filmmaker, then she can remain a child.
Is science fiction influential? Scientific American notes that modern tech billionaires are striving to make the science fiction of past eras a reality. They love the gadgets (some of which can work, others not) and ignore the political assumptions behind the technology.
More and more, I've started reading the credits to films, and not just Lucas' sci-fi fantasies, just to see how many people have supported this particular illusion to make it believable. It takes some work not to be fooled.
Here are a few facts about dieting that are not widely known. I seldom write about diet since it is so personal, and often more controversial than politics or other soap operas. But here you go...
A pound of fat has 3500 calories. This means if you eat 50 extra calories daily for a year--and don't change your activity level--you will gain more than five pounds (50 x 365 / 3500 = 5.2 lbs). Do this year after year, and pretty soon we're talking some serious weight gain, not easily erased overnight.
If you adopt a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet, without doing exercise, you can lose weight--just as you can lose weight if you get chemotherapy--but there's a downside. If you lose seven pounds this way, only two pounds lost will be fat, the other five are lean body weight. The lean body weight is what burns calories, so this type of dieting eventually predisposes people to get fatter, despite the weight loss. What such dieters lose is muscle.
Normal, healthy males typically measure roughly 15% body mass as fat; females are 22% fat. Because of the phenomenon in the previous paragraph, anorexics are actually very fat--as much as 40% of their body weight is fat. They may look skinny, but the fat is marbled through their muscles, so they're skinny but weak.
Not eating extra calories is important--so portion control and not over-stuffing or binge-eating is helpful if you want to lose weight. However, diet expert Covert Bailey says diets that are just low-calorie, without exercise, program your body for famine, so more of what you eat goes to fat--unless you ramp up your metabolism with exercise. He says that in his experience, most of the famous low-calorie diets are helpful, but only if you want to gain weight. Meanwhile, Oprah confesses she started using diet pills.
The bottom line: exercise is essential for any permanent weight loss. Exercise doesn't burn many calories, but it does start to re-program your metabolism so that more of what you eat goes to feed muscle mass rather than being stored as fat. Exercise also helps you avoid depression and think more clearly.*
Glycemic Index
Glycemic index measures how fast food consumed appears in blood as glucose--the fuel for most muscle and brain processes. Faster is not better, though. Refined sugar--a candy bar, for one example--would have a high glycemic index. When your blood sugar (glucose) spikes, it also makes for an increased level of insulin, a chemical which often lingers after the spike in blood sugar. When insulin has consumed all of the candy bar, and is still in your blood, you typically feel hungry, and often hungry enough eat another candy bar...which spikes the blood sugar. When your muscles don't burn that glucose, your body stores it as fat.
Eran Segal makes an important qualifier for generalized glycemic indexes. In his study, he found that how fast people metabolize different foods varies, as you might expect. After all, it's an evolutionary advantage to have a variety of different kinds of digestion, so humans can adapt to different environments.
So differences in genetics, and that microbiome--the bacteria in your gut--can have enormous impacts. Segal reports that some people can eat ice cream, and their glucose spikes upward, while others experience no such spike because their digestion doesn't assimilate it rapidly.
Fibrous foods, for example apples, can have a low glycemic index not because they lack sugar, but because digestion has to get past all that fiber to get to the sugar.
While it may be true that there is no one, ideal diet for humans, as Segal suggests, my money is on the fibrous foods, and avoiding the highly processed foods (white bread, refined sugar, etc.) to keep that glycemic index low.
Either way, vegetables and fruit have a tremendous caloric advantage over meat and dairy.
A hundred calories of meat can fit in the palm of your hand. A hundred calories of spinach, watermelon or strawberries fills a fair sized container.
I've heard many people complain that cereal (refined grain) leaves them hungry after a short time. This is typical for refined, low-fiber food. A serving of unsweetened oatmeal typically has an lower glycemic index than bacon, eggs and toast, so it will "stick to your ribs." It has plenty of fiber, so it digests slowly, releasing glucose into your bloodstream gradually, unlike the refined food. I've seldom met anyone who complains that the bulky, low-glycemic index food doesn't satisfy their hunger especially if it's heavy on beans and rice. Vegetarian Indian food, or Mexican food is extremely filling, and keeps that hunger away for a while.
However, hunger pangs are not always to be avoided. If you want to lose weight, hunger pangs may appear as your body consumes fat. No need to give in to that impulse to snack at midnight...if losing weight is on your agenda.
And speaking of calories, tea has none, but look at the following:
12 oz Coke: 140 calories 12 oz (regular) beer: 153 calories 12 oz (higher alcohol, craft beer: 170 - 350 calories
Iced tea, even with two teaspoons of sugar only has 32 calories.
I hope this is useful when you make dietary decisions, especially during the holiday.
===
Disclaimer: I'm not a dietician or MD. The advice above is not strictly anecdotal, but a lot of it comes from a variety of sources, including my own experience. I've been (mostly) vegan for more than 30 years now. Eating that diet is not particularly hard to do, even when dining in restaurants, as long as one can adapt. I'm not a perfectionist about this. For example, I won't ask the Chinese restaurant to eliminate egg from their fried rice (it's such a small amount, anyway) and I'll eat pastries without being concerned if they aren't entirely vegan. I'll even eat an egg or sausage from time to time, and a slice of turkey at Thanksgiving. But I'd estimate 95% of the calories I consume are neither meat, nor egg, nor dairy, nor refined food (sugar, oil).
When I had hernia surgery, the Kaiser surgical team took a look at my mostly naked body and told me I was an inspiration [blushes]. They may have just been trying to encourage me before they anaesthetized me, but I'm pretty sure they were sincere. The bottom line: This diet has served me well.
*The facts about dieting and weight loss above rely largely on a lecture by a nurse/dietician who measured my body fat content the old fashioned way--weighing in air, then in water. Many modern scales do this the digital way, with sensors, but this lecture predated the availability of such scales.
As the Eran Segal video shows, your mileage may vary. Still...when it comes to ice cream vs. fruit or veg...I'd stick with the latter.
The elimination of public housing programs,
beginning with the second Nixon administration in the early 1970s. New
public housing was no longer built, and some existing public housing
project were demolished.
The State Legislation dissolved California’s 400 local redevelopment agencies in
2011. They, like the Community Redevelopment Agency in Los Angeles,
were required to spend 20 percent of the budgets on public housing. The
elimination of these subsidies was a major blow to the construction of
new non-market low-income housing.
Wage stagnation while housing prices continued to rise, priced many people out of housing.
Two
forms of up-zoning have raised the market value of private parcels and
existing housing, forcing some residents into homelessness. One form of
upzoning was parcel level zone variances and zone changes, granted by
the LA’s City Planning Commission and City Council 90 percent of the
time. The second form of up-zoning was through City Council ordinances
often attached to Community Plan updates.
In
the United States homelessness is a choice made by public officials. It
cannot be whisked away by ignoring the causes listed above.
Planning Watch – Abroad: My
previous columns focused on local planning and housing policies,
explaining how they increased the numbers of unhoused, rent-gouged, and
overcrowded people. But I have not written about US foreign policy.
After all, the same elected officials whose housing programs produced so
much homelessness and dead homeless people, also support U.S. foreign wars that lead to similar outcomes, homelessness and death.
This was clear in many Henry Kissinger obituaries. For example, according to Yale historian Greg Grandin, in Kissinger’s Shadow,
between 1969 to 1976 Kissinger was responsible for the deaths of 3 to 4
million people, as well as the systematic destruction of
infrastructure, buildings, and housing.
Cambodia. As Richard
Nixon’s Secretary of State, in 1969 Kissinger was responsible for a
secret war that dropped 540,000 tons of bombs to destroy Cambodia’s
insurgents. This resulted in 300,000 deaths and the destruction of
one-fifth of the country, including people’s houses.
East Timor.
Under President Gerald Ford, Kissinger encouraged Indonesia to invade
East Timor. Done in secret, the US proxy war resulted in enormous
destruction, including 200,000 deaths.
Chile: Under President
Nixon, Kissinger turned to the CIA to violently overthrow and murder
Chili’s elected leader, Salvador Allende. The US instigated coup results
in the death, torture, and imprisonment of 40,000 Chileans.
Argentina:
In 1976 Kissinger orchestrated the overthrow of Argentinian President
Isabel Peron by Argentinian General Jorge Rafael Videla. The Videla
regime’s “dirty war” resulted in the death of between 10,000 to 30,000
opponents, many dropped into the ocean from helicopters.
Bangladesh:
In 1976, Kissinger and Nixon backed the Pakistani invasion of West
Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The resulting genocide murdered 300,000 to
500,000 Bengalis.
Vietnam: On behalf of Richard Nixon, in 1968
Kissinger was able to stall the Paris Peace Talks initiated by President
Lyndon Johnson. Since the new Nixon administration was unable to
re-start the stalled peace talks, they pursued mass bombing of North
Vietnam to terrorize the country’s government into submission. In
total, the war resulted in 3,800,000 deaths and the destruction of much of the country.
Indonesia: A decade before Kissinger was Secretary of State, in 1965-66 the U.S. government supported
the Indonesian government and their proxies in the anti-communist and
anti-Chinese genocidal murder of 500,000 to 2,000,000 people.
Iraq: Under the Clinton administration (1993-2001), US bombing of Iraq’s no-fly zones killed 500,000 people and destroyed public and private infrastructure. Beginning in 2003, the second Iraq War resulted in the 300,000 more Iraqi deaths.
Gaza:
This leads us to the current Israeli war on Gaza. Despite the enormous
propaganda blitz, we know that the US government has provided enormous military aid to Israel,
stationed two US Navy aircraft carrier strike groups near Israel, given
diplomatic cover to Israel at the UN Security Council, and shared
intelligence with the IDF.
As for the results, there is no
information on the number of Hamas fighters killed or captured by
Israel, but there is data on non-combatants killed by Israel.
Furthermore, Israel has blocked the entry of food, water, fuel, and
medicine into Gaza for the past nine weeks. As of December Reuters reports
the Israeli military has killed 15,899 people in Gaza, 70 percent of
whom are women or children under the age of 18. Al Jazeera English gave
an updated Dec. 5 total of 1.9 of 2.3 million people displaced, 16,248
overall deaths, including 4,885 women, 7,112 children, 79 media workers
and journalists, 130 UN staffers, and 150 health workers.
Regarding housing, according to the Scientific American, as
of December 1, 2023, 1.7 of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been
displaced because Israel destroyed or damaged their homes. Israel also
destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure, including half of all
buildings.
While the US military is not directly involved in the
Israeli attacks on Gaza, it has actively supported Israel with weapons,
intelligence, and diplomacy, similar to previous US proxy wars in
Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, and East Timor.
Even
though the mainstream media does not connect the dots between US
domestic and foreign policy, common themes of death and destruction of
homes and infrastructure link the two. Even though these domestic and
foreign policies have enormous bipartisan support in Congress and the
White House, most of the public disagree. .They want an immediate Gaza cease-fire.
Dick Platkin
is a former Los Angeles city planner and veteran Planners Network
member who reports on local planning issues for City Watch LA, which
published an earlier version of this article. Please send any comments
or corrections to rhplatkin@gmail.com.
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d
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In the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress just empowered the Pentagon to learn who owns the defense contractors that supply it. This is good for national defense and bad for private equity.
Today’s piece is short. It’s about two useful provisions that Congress quietly slipped into a major defense bill. These new legal requirements will force private equity firms to tell the Pentagon whether they are mucking around with weapons makers.
These provisions are especially important at a moment when the U.S. is supplying, or failing to supply, three areas of possible conflict - Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
Seeing Like a Pentagon
Using metaphor of blindness to sight is common throughout human history, because everyone understands what it means to open your eyes. It suggests not just a change in the ability to sense light, but a step change in how we think. “I was blind but now I see” is in the bible, a metaphor for seeing a spiritual truth, being able to reckon with the profundities of reality. In “Seeing like a State,” James C. Scott conveys a similar notion for bureaucracies. How a state collects information, aka sees, is a highly political question, because you can’t govern what you can’t see.
In August, I wrote up an important shift among antitrust enforcers, in a piece titled “Government Stupidity Is a Design Choice.” In it, I described how the Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division, prompted by Congress, tweaked a form, called the Hart Scott Rodino form, that companies must fill out when they want to engage in any corporate acquisition worth over $100 million.
Dealmakers will now have to answer basic questions, such as “Why are you merging?” “Who is on your board of directors?” “How does your industry work?” “Who is lending money for the buy-out?” They will have to give information upfront about subsidiaries, their product lines, defense contracts, their power in labor markets, and previous acquisitions, which is particularly important when a firm is rolling up a lot of smaller entities. If China is financing the bid, or a giant private equity firm, they will now have to tell the government.
The old form required none of this. The government got virtually no useful information from it, meaning that every day a government lawyer would receive a bunch of notifications that two random companies are merging, and he’d have to start with virtually no information, and then with a few hours of research decide which were worth investigating. No matter how smart you are, no one can learn a lot about, say, the paint industry, the mail sorting software industry, the pool cleaning industry, and the semiconductor design industry in one day starting from zero. So a lot of unlawful mergers just went through, because the government was blind.
The old form was the equivalent of being told to do an X-Ray and being given cardboard X-Ray glasses from the 1950s. The new form is an actual X-Ray machine.
While the new form hasn’t gone into effect yet, it will be very effective. How do I know? Well the big D.C. and New York corporate law firms that advise all large companies, private equity funds, foreign governments, and large institutions were absolutely furious about the shift. (Here are, for instance, angry notes to clients from Wilmer Hale. Steptoe. Kirkland and Ellis. Dechert. Wilson Sonsini. Sullivan and Cromwell. Covington & Burling. Etc.)
But while corporate lawyers might be mad about this change among antitrust enforcers, now they’ll have to deal with another part of the government getting that same X-Ray machine. The Pentagon.
12/10/23 re: “Sacramento has an ugly addiction to sprawl” p.D13
The Bee correctly decries Sacramento's addiction to sprawl. Sprawl is not just a polluting mess, it’s an unhealthy, regressive “tax”–every driving age adult must own a car to shop or get to work. Seniors who can’t drive and children are, in effect, second-class citizens.
As someone who protested this for literally decades both in a Community Planning Advisory Committee and as a private citizen, government’s tone-deaf response has been beyond frustrating. My best guess is that land speculators (i.e. "developers") are firmly in command, and their proxies in government have difficulty understanding that alternatives exist since their paycheck is conditioned on them not understanding. The late Grantland Johnson once said that it's widely acknowledged that, in all of California, the Sacramento region is the most in the hip pocket of development interests. That's not a contest anyone would want to win.
Meanwhile, the region has 20 years of unbuilt infill.
"The study’s findings were striking in their similarity to [Soloman] Asch’s original results. In the non-incentivized group, the average error rate in the line judgment task was 33%, closely mirroring Asch’s findings. However, in the incentivized group, the error rate dropped to 25%. This suggests that while financial rewards can reduce the impact of group pressure, they do not eliminate it. [emphasis added]
“When we started the study, we could not imagine to be able to replicate the original findings as close as it turned out,” Franzen and Mader told PsyPost. “We thought Asch’s findings were overstated. We also believed that providing incentives for correct answers would wipe out the conformity effect. Both did not happen. The replication turned out to be very close to the original results and providing monetary incentives did not eliminate the effect of social pressure.”
The conclusion is also of interest to contrarianism.
Regarding what people should take away from the findings, the researchers remarked: “Here we like to cite Mark Twain, ‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.'”
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My observation of local political clubs aligns perfectly with the above. Such clubs are far more interested in social cohesion, rubbing their hands together as they huddle around some political bonfire ("Isn't Trump awful!" "Aren't those Democrats corrupt!") than in discussing public policy alternatives that might extinguish the fires.
It's essentially "My tribe is better than other tribes" ... which degenerates into a game called "Ain't it awful." It's the essence of inside-the-box thinking...or not thinking at all.
This is a shame not only because it means the public remains uninformed--they are too busy huddling with their homies--but because political inertia, not sensible thinking, rules the land. These are nice people, but, as Abe Lincoln said, good intentions are a second-rate virtue.
The insistence on adhering to one's own (and typically one's parents' own) ideology is a quasi-religious phenomenon. Persecuting heretics is part of that particular tendency.
----
A little bit of the consequences of tribal loyalty rather than clear thinking driving public policy:
1. Sacramento County just voted to postpone any climate mitigation actions for 15 years. (Meanwhile, a tree fell on my house, thanks to a powerful windstorm in early 2023...it was bad enough that my homeowners' policy was canceled. But hey, that global warming is a hoax.)
2. Sacramento County just paused it, but they previously voted to spend $1 billion to enlarge the jail.
3. The Federal reserve says 40% of the US population can't handle a $400 emergency without selling something or borrowing. Around 60% of wage earners live paycheck-to-paycheck. An estimated 65% of seniors only have Medicare and Social Security to fund their retirement. Congress is moving to consider reducing those social safety nets, though, and can get away with that because the tribes are at odds.
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
letter to Lord Lytton, 15 June 1877; in Lady Gwendolen Cecil Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (1921–32) vol. 2
First, here's a handy graph of your odds of getting exposed to COVID according to the size of gathering you attend:
That's put together for a county in Georgia, but I'd suggest it applies wherever you are.
Why be concerned if only one person has spread-able COVID?
For more about Sacramento County COVID and flu positivity, the best current public health policy has is this website/dashboard. It's only updated weekly, and not at all during holidays.
American healthcare ranks 37th in the world in outcomes like life expectancy, vaccination rates, infant mortality, etc. according to a study by the World Health Organization, between Slovenia and Costa Rica. The Sacramento Bee said "It's as though we have the healthcare of Costa Rica and pay six times more"...double what most single-payer countries pay, and single-payer ranks highest in that study.
Meanwhile, with 5% of the world's population, the US has experienced 22% of its COVID deaths.
If you're interested in more medical information about COVID and medicine in general, the Ground Truths blog is a good place to start.
Loren Kay, from a Chamber of Commerce “think” tank, and Republican State Senator Ted Gaines write that (surprise!) California must lower taxes and reduce regulation to “spread the wealth,” despite all the evidence of the past two generations that such policies concentrate wealth at the very top of the income distribution.
Since 1972, deregulation and tax reduction have been tried and tried again, yet since 1972, the bottom 90% of incomes have experienced median, inflation-adjusted gains of only $59 a year. The rest of the gains--and productivity increases made enormous real income gains possible--have gone to the top 10%, and the top tenth percent. Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston says that if that $59 were an inch on a bar graph, the bar for the top 10% would be 141 feet tall, and the bar for the top 0.1% would be five miles high.
Kay’s and Gaines’ editorials ignore any positive contribution of government research. For one example, most of the iPhone’s innovations are based on government-funded research into transistors, integrated circuits, the internet, GPS, etc. Government-funded research produces seventy-five percent of pharmaceutical innovation.
Besides the tired narrative that the government contributes nothing but hassles, Mr. Kay believes deregulated builders and developers will provide adequate affordable housing. Yet most nations without such acute housing problems understand subsidies are what really support affordability.
Unfortunately, America’s subsidies--like the mortgage interest deduction--do not support low-cost housing. Add the rest of Kay’s prescription--like the deregulation of the private sector mortgage banking that gave us the subprime mortgage/derivatives meltdown--and you’ll see new housing starts ground to a halt, demonstrating yet another of those “miracles” of the market in action.
Kay also believes whatever is cheapest is always best when it comes to energy--never mind the climate consequences of continued petroleum dependence. So...drill baby, drill!
The confidence that markets are always right in setting prices is an article of religious faith. God has an invisible hand, and markets always price in the long-term consequences, is what that religion believes. Sure, global warming means hurricanes are stronger than ever, and going to unfamiliar places like Vermont, but we can ignore the climate to save a few nickels on our electric or gas bill.
It’s sad that any mature human being could continue to promote this short-sightedness as beneficial.
If all of this pseudo-foresight manages to look like prescribing a sledgehammer to cure a headache, well that’s about what it is. Gaines’ and Kay’s cluelessness resembles nothing so much as a hypnotic trance that allows them to ignore anything that does not serve their corporate masters. We’ve had this for the last few decades, and we can see the result: the headlines proclaim that more than 60% of Americans don’t even have enough savings to handle a $500 emergency.
The big question is how long Americans are going to play the sucker in this particular game of three-card Monte.
Thomas Franks’ "Too Smart to Fail" essay explains the way we delude ourselves with "expert" opinion. As one wag says: "An ex is a 'has-been' and a spurt is a drip under pressure." Anyway, Franks documents in excruciating detail the way Americans are more interested in "pretend and extend" than genuine change.
Franks says public policy is too often insane, doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different outcome. Making sanity, not “extend and pretend,” and not a financial advantage, a foundation for public policy is what’s desperately needed. Taking that next step to share sanity with a larger community is not trivial, either.
Twelve-step programs are one example of an institution designed to bring sanity to addicts and their families. Nevertheless, if you're familiar with these programs, you'll know that one of their traditions specifically forbids the organization from taking public policy stands. They humbly admit they're too crazy to handle the turbulence that comes from going public.
Giving up taking any public policy stand has some pretty dramatic repercussions too. These programs spend an awful lot of time educating members that addiction is not a moral failing, it’s a disease. That means addicts should be treated, not punished. But what is public policy?
Primarily because of the "drug war," the U.S. incarcerates, per-capita, five times more people than the world average. America jails seven times more than the Canadians. How effective is it? Even though U.S. and Canadian demographics are similar, crime rates between the two countries have differed insignificantly for 40 years--essentially since Reagan put the drug war on steroids.
This is a very big problem, suppresses a significant portion of the population, wastes an enormous amount of resources. Medical treatment for addiction and mental health problems is one-seventh as expensive as incarceration. The Swiss de-criminalized even heroin and found crime around its clinics declined 85%.
Worse still, incarceration continues the racism that preceded the Civil Rights era. More black men are in jail now than were enslaved in 1850. Even though whites and blacks use and sell drugs in roughly the same proportion, by a wide margin people of color are disproportionately targeted to harass, prosecute and jail. So while it's illegal to discriminate based on skin color now, once someone has a felony record, discrimination is perfectly legal in housing and employment. Some states disenfranchise felons, eliminating their rights to privacy, forbidding them from using public housing. See Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness for details.
So can we persuade the public to set aside their animosity toward felons, and their racism toward people of color, to make society more humane? Twelve steppers are silent, by design, about this.
My sister suggests I’m missing the point. Twelve-step programs are practically Buddhist in their detachment (and in fact promote “detaching”), and are not suitable places for social action, she says. Besides, their precepts forbid them from endorsing public policy measures.
But don’t these people use the infrastructure and human capital our public policies maintain and support? Are we to believe that the formerly robust public participation of the American public is to devolve into a bunch of powerless drones hypnotized by TV screens?
Boy, I hope not.
Suggested Flyer for 12-steppers:
Let’s Stop Punishing Addicts, Really
Twelve-step meetings educate attendees that addiction is an illness, not a moral failing. The Open Letter from the Alcoholic often read in such meetings says “Don't lecture, blame or scold me. You wouldn't be angry with me for having cancer or diabetes. Alcoholism is a disease, too.”
Yet punishing rather than healing addicts is what official U.S. public policy does now. Currently, U.S. prisons are full to overflowing with people arrested in the drug war. The U.S. is tops in the world in incarceration at 756 per 100,000 population. The world average is 150 per 100,000.
Canada imprisons 111 per 100,000. Its demographics are similar to the U.S., and its crime and U.S. crime have differed only insignificantly for more than 40 years.
Furthermore, treating addiction rather than punishing it is more effective and cheaper. It costs one-seventh as much to treat as to incarcerate. Imagine jailing diabetics...or burning witches. About the same thing, really.
Worst of all, even though the evidence is that all races consume drugs in equal proportions, people of color suffer disproportionately in the drug war. They are many times more likely to be harassed, arrested and jailed than whites. It may be illegal to discriminate because of skin color, but it is not illegal to discriminate against felons. They often cannot even vote, nor use public housing.
Action Items:
1. Let your state, local and federal representatives know you disapprove of this policy of incarceration.
2. Work to repeal three strikes and determinate sentencing laws. (fcnl.org is one organization doing this)
3. Let your 12-step program’s reps know that ordinarily taking stands on public policy is not this organization’s role, but this case is an exception.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is perhaps, the most complex political dispute on the planet. What makes it so complicated is that both sides see themselves as victims, and each depicts the other as an aggressor. And on one level, both are right.
Israel was born of antisemitism. This is an important starting point for understanding the conflict. There is a tendency of many on the left to see Israel as simply an instrument of Western Colonialism. While certain Western Powers did play an important role in the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, seeing Israel from this perspective fails to take into account the impulse that drove millions of Jews to seek refuge there.
Zionism, the idea that Jews should return to their ancient homeland in Palestine, was initiated by Theodor Herzl in response to the Dreyfuss Affair. Dreyfuss was a French Army officer who in 1896, was wrongfully accused of spying for the Germans. His trial and conviction revealed a shocking level of antisemitism, not only in the French military, but also, in the larger society. Herzl, an assimilated Austrian Jew, was devastated by this revelation. Doubting that Jews would ever be accepted as full citizens in European society, he issued a call for a First Zionist Congress to meet in Basel in 1897.
Zionism played an important role in the birth of Israel. But it actually came on the scene quite late. It did not have a major demographic impact in Palestine until the rise of Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s. In 1922, even with support from the controlling colonial power, Great Britain, Jews constituted only 11% of Palestine’s population. By 1931 that number had grown to 16%. After 1934 (when Hitler was appointed chancellor) immigration gained momentum, and by 1945, Jews constituted 31% of the population of Palestine–Muslims 60%, Christians 8%.
The end of WWII left millions of European Jews without homes or a homeland. Most did not want to return to countries that either could not protect them, or actively collaborated with the Nazis. This added a new dimension to Zionism. More than simply a safe place to practice their religion, the creation of a Jewish state was increasingly seen as fundamental to their survival. The Holocaust had convinced most that they must acquire a capacity to defend themselves. They needed a state of their own. “Never again” would they allow themselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter.
That’s pretty much where the founders of Israel were coming from. A people traumatized by an organized, methodical effort of a major industrial power to physically exterminate them. I do not see Zionism, as such, as the driving force in the creation of Israel. The main impulse was survival. Zionism provided a religious and mythological framework that connected a vast array of different nationalities to a cultural core and to a land from which they had been separated from for 2000 years. Religion in Israel is more than a belief system: it is a “deed” to the land. The Palestinians
My involvement with this issue began in 1987 when a Palestinian friend invited me to travel to Jerusalem to spend a few weeks in their home. From what little I knew about this conflict, I was sympathetic to the Palestinians–but more sympathetic to the Israelis. I held a view that I believe was widespread in the American left at that time. I thought the Jews did what they had to do to secure their survival—what any people in their place would have done. At the same time, I understood that the creation of Israel inflicted a wound on the Palestinians. However, I saw the on-going conflict as due to the stubbornness of the Palestinian: their refusal to come to terms with the existence of Israel and their unwillingness to accept a solution that could be mutually acceptable.
My friend knew my thinking on the situation and organized a trip that would allow me to see things from a different perspective. We visited every major city and refugee camp in the West Bank and Gaza, and talked with a wide variety of different Palestinian activists and groups. I didn’t take long for me to recognize what was wrong with my previous point of view. I had not understood what the Palestinian realty was all about.
The debate over relative victim-hood disappears when you are over there. One people have all the rights and the power to enforce them—the other have no rights. They are essentially powerless. That doesn’t mean that Israelis are always abusing and mistreating Palestinians. It means that whenever there is a conflict between an Israeli and a Palestinian, it is ultimately up to some Israeli (police, judge, administrator, military officer, etc.) to decide how to settle it. That’s the bottom line to living under military occupation.
If military power, the ability to defend themselves and control their own fate, is the central motif of Israeli culture, powerlessness, the subjugation by outsiders, has been defining feature of Palestinian history. It began when their homeland, without their consultation or consent, was divided in two to provide the territory for the new Jewish state. They rejected the decision of a UN, which at that point in time, was dominated by a few major Western Powers. They attempted to resist militarily, but were overwhelmed in a short, one-sided war. By the end of that war, somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 thousand Palestinians lost their homes and ended up in refugee camps–many in Gaza. Indeed, the current population of Gaza consists largely of the descendants of those refugees.
The 1948 war—the “Nakba,” or catastrophe for the Palestinians–was only the beginning of their tragic saga. A critical turning point came in 1967 when another war resulted in the Israeli conquest of what was left of the land granted to the Palestinians by the UN resolution–the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. For the past 56 years, Israel has controlled these territories and has prevented the Palestinians from consolidating them into a nation. Instead, they have subjected them to one form or another of military rule.
Unless you are living and travelling with Palestinians, walking in their shoes so to speak, it is difficult to get a true picture of what a military occupation is all about. It is a life of constant harassment, humiliation, and insecurity.
Military checkpoints are everywhere, making any trip to see friends or relatives an unpredictable and complicated hassle. Everything the Palestinians want to do—buying a new car, remodeling a kitchen or putting a new bathroom in one’s house, requires written permission: interminable paperwork. Decisions are arbitrary, and denials cannot be appealed.
And then there is the relentless encroachments of the settlers—bullying and threatening their way onto the land, seizing farmsteads and homes that lack “proper documentation” or are on “sacred” soil—mentioned in the Bible. Their threats are backed up with automatic weapons and the certainty that in stealing other’s lands, they are doing God’s work.
Many of the settlers are Americans. I talked with a number of them—one who had spent the summer of 1967 in San Francisco (the Summer of Love –“come to San Francisco with flowers in your hair”). They see immigration to Israel as “returning” to their real home–a place they have been disconnected from for over 2000 years. Apparently there is no statute of limitations when it comes to abandoned real estate in Palestine. They see the Palestinians who live in the villages and cities, the people whose parents, grandparents and distant ancestors built the houses, erected the fences and planted the olive trees, as “squatters:” illegitimate interlopers who need to find some other place to live.
Young Palestinian men are rounded up on the word of informants they cannot confront or cross-examine. 40% of Palestinian men have been arrested and held under one or another of the 1600 military orders that control every aspect of Palestinian life. When charged with a crime, Palestinians are tried in Israeli courts and can only be represented by Israeli lawyers. Because they are not citizens of Israel, they cannot vote in Israeli elections and thus, have no political or peaceful means to influence the laws and policies they have to live under.
Israelis like to talk about their generosity in granting Gaza self-rule. One only has to go to Gaza to see what a poor gift that was. Gaza is a little strip of desert surrounded by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. It has no natural resources and 96% of its water is undrinkable. It is one of the most densely populated places on earth, made up of impoverished war-refugees and their descendants. 80% of its residents live below the poverty line. It has been accurately described as an “open-air prison.” Israel did not give it—it dumped it. A slow-burning fuse
Palestinians are not fools—they know what is going on. They have been haggling and negotiating with Israel since 1967 to get control over the lands taken in the war. Negotiating with Israel, according to a joke going around, is like this. Two men decide to have lunch together. They order a number of different plates, and at some point, they begin to argue over how to divide up the bill. While the argument is proceeding, one of the men begins eating off the plate of the other. That’s a pretty apt description of the Palestinian’s experience in negotiating with Israel.
Because I don’t want to write a book on this subject, I would like to end this blog with a few final thoughts. I will write more later.
1) For a historical overview, I would recommend reading Simha Flapan’s book—“The Birth of Israel: myths and realities.” He uses historical documents, dairies and personal papers to establish that Israel’s Zionist leadership –all of them, from Ben Gurion on– did not accept the boundaries laid down by the UN, but intended to eventually bring the whole of Palestine under Jewish control. That was, and still is, the Zionist vision of Israel. That is why Israel never published a map of its boundaries—leaving expansion open– and that is why it did everything in its power to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state—which would have set limits to its growth.
2) The establishment of settlements, which began under Begin, was aimed at creating “facts on the ground.” The goal was (and is) to establish an irreversible process of Israeli takeover of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Israel has short-circuited the negotiation process—and has made creating a Palestinian state extremely difficult.
3) The new right-wing Israeli government is giving the green-light to settlement expansion.
4) The formation of an alliance between the USA, Saudi Arabia, and Israel threatens the one leverage the Palestinians have had in their struggle with Israel—the ability to deny Israel peace and normal relations with the Arab World until the Israelis come to terms with the Palestinians. This new alliance promises to side-line the Palestinian issue, reorganizing power relations in the Middle East without solving the Palestinian issue. How to Look at Hamas
All of the above was well known to Hamas. They acted to derail the process towards a new political arrangement in the Middle East. I believe they knew exactly what they were doing. They consciously and deliberately designed a horrific crime against unarmed Israeli civilians. They knew that this went to the core of Israel’s very purpose for being—a state to protect its people from slaughter. They knew that Israel would not be able to control its rage and desire for revenge, and that in order to destroy Hamas, who was ensconced in the population centers of Gaza, it would have to deal a devastating blow to innocent Palestinians. This would enrage the Arab and Muslim world, and bring an end to any efforts for a reconciliation with Israel.
So far, it looks like Hamas has achieved what it set out to accomplish. Indeed, it may even have succeeded in giving life to the moribund goal of Two-state solution. Is Hamas to be congratulated? Do the ends justify the means? It appears that many on the left are prepared to accept Hamas’ slaughter of innocents, and to see their brutality as merely payback for past wrongs done by Israelis to Palestinians.
This thinking will spell the death of the left. The ends do not justify the means—the means determine the ends. Wanton brutality and inhumanity only begets more of the same. Many of us have lived long enough to see how movements that sought to embrace the highest human ideals were undermined by brutal methods—the purges of Stalin, the Cultural Revolution of Mao, and the killing fields of Pol Pot. In 1948, over 100 Palestinian villagers—men, women, and children were slaughtered at Deir Yassin by the Irgun. And the Palestinians have never forgot it. Just as the Israelis will never forget October 7. Reconciliation between these two peoples can never be built on acts of cruelty and brutality. Hamas is an outlaw movement. It must be held responsible for its crimes. I believe that it will end up doing more harm to the Palestinians than to the Israelis
Without a higher moral vision, the left is just another player in an endless saga of bloodshed and suffering.
Matthew B. Hallinan received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. In Beyond Biology, he brings together his years of study and independent research to answer a question that has long fascinated him: How could humans have gone through the same kind of evolutionary process as every other animal and yet have come out so different? This question has been central to Hallinan’s intellectual life. His passion for the subject is not driven simply by curiosity, but rather by a sense that time is growing short for us to come to terms with our place in the natural world. More
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” ― George Orwell
It's worth remembering that (per Henry Kissinger) insurgencies resisting that force don't have to win, they just have to survive.
Meanwhile, between 1982 and 2017, US population increased 42% while spending on policing increased 187%...
Yet police solve only 15% of the "blue collar" crimes (muggings, robberies, etc.) in California, and less than half (40%) of the murders. According to the FBI, blue collar crime costs the nation $12 billion annually. Wage theft costs $50 billion, and "white-collar" crime (subprime mortgages, financial fraud) costs $1,000 billion.
Guess who goes to jail more often?
And Sacramento County Supervisors just voted to spend a billion dollars expanding the County Jail. Yes, the jail is full, but 60-80% of its prisoners aren't convicted of anything other than being too poor to afford bail.
Update: 11/19/23 UPI publishes an article saying 58% of those surveyed think the justice system isn't harsh enough.
The wide lanes of Salt Lake City make even big SUVs look diminutive.
Ten is plenty — and nine is even better.
The lightning-fast twelve-foot lanes that run down countless roads in U.S. neighborhoods are associated with a roughly fifty percent higher rate of crashes than nine-foot ones, a new study finds — but many state and national design guidelines are still encouraging engineers to build them based on the false assumption that wider is safer.
The finding is a result of a painstaking Johns Hopkins analysis of more than 1,100 non-interstate street sections in seven major U.S. cities — and amazingly, it may be the first time the relationship between lane width and safety has ever been comprehensively studied on such a large scale.
Roomy roads are proven to encourage faster, deadlier driving regardless of the speed limit, but previous research based on more limited data found less correlation between gargantuan lanes and high crash rates — with some researchers and engineers even arguing that narrow roads are more dangerous because they increase the possibility of “side friction” between cars. Unlike the 129-page Hopkins paper, though, those studies didn’t go street-by-street on Google Maps and use advanced machine learning to identify and control for all the other traffic-calming features that might be cutting crashes besides paint, including the number of lanes, the curvature of the road, and the presence of bike lanes, street trees and generous sidewalks.
Even in the absence of good data on lane width, though, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ Green Book — a national design guide known simply as “the Bible” among traffic engineers — has long recommended minimum lane widths between 10 and 12 feet on the high-volume arterial roads that criss-cross many U.S. neighborhoods. Many state street design standards, meanwhile, skew towards the upper bound of that range to avoid liability, based on the assumption that wider lanes are more “forgiving” of drivers’ mistakes; some streets in the researchers’ sample even clocked in as wide as 16 feet.
In Europe, by contrast, minimum lane widths typically vary between 8.2 and 10.6 feet — and that difference may be showing up in our higher fatality totals.
“When you compare the U.S. to other countries, the rate of traffic fatalities is almost 10 times higher here than it is for our European counterparts — and it’s just getting worse,” said Dr. Shima Hamidi, the principal investigator on the study. “The main reason is just car dependency. We’re designing our streets for more convenient and fast driving — and a big component of that is lane widths.”
Of course, all this new data will only confirm the suspicions of sustainable transportation advocates, many of whom have been calling for a re-striping revolution for decades.
Back in 2014, “Walkable City” author Jeff Speck named ditching the 12-foot lane “the number one most important thing that we have to fight for” in the battle to end America’s pedestrian death crisis — and he came to that conclusion based largely on a literature review that was conducted way back in 2003. (The Hopkins researchers didn’t look at how lane width affected pedestrian crash numbers, specifically, but a Transportation for America analysis found that non-interstate arterial highways — which frequently feature 12-foot lanes or wider — were the site of 70 percent of walking deaths in urban areas in 2020, despite the fact they make up just 15 percent of overall roadways.)
In the years since Speck made his bold proclamation, pedestrian deaths have increased a shocking 52 percent nationwide, but national lane width guidelines haven’t changed much.
Hamidi points out that even communities that have created their own skinnier statewide standards aren’t necessarily losing lane width, either. The state of Vermont — which adopted the nine-foot minimum standard when it became the first state to depart from the Green Book in 1997 — hasn’t actually built any roads that narrow in the years since; only a slim majority of the 13 state DOTs the researchers surveyed (53.8 percent) said they had conducted any type of lane width reduction project at all.
From a survey of 13 state DOT representatives.Graphic: Johns Hopkins
With this new data in hand, Hamidi is hopeful that states will finally feel empowered to be more aggressive about rethinking lane size, at least in areas that don’t truly need the extra space, like bus corridors and roads with frequent freight traffic. Because if they do, they’ll open up a conversation about what’s possible on their roads — not to mention a lot of new asphalt. She calls lane width reduction “probably the most cost efficient way to repurpose streets,” while simultaneously avoiding the thorny political challenges involved in removing a driving or parking lane completely.
“A three-foot difference per lane can make the difference between having a bike lane or not, or between having a sidewalk or not,” she added. “Lane width reduction is important, but equally important is thinking about how to best use that extra space that’s going to be freed up as a result … These things go hand by hand, and can lead to a world that is so much safer for pedestrians and cyclists.”
Kea Wilson has more than a dozen years experience as a writer telling emotional, urgent and actionable stories that motivate average Americans to get involved in making their cities better places. She is also a novelist, cyclist, and affordable housing advocate. She previously worked at Strong Towns, and currently lives in St. Louis, MO. Kea can be reached at kea@streetsblog.org or on Twitter @streetsblogkea. Please reach out to her with tips and submissions.
"The law, in its magnificent equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the street and stealing bread" -- Anatole France
"The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor. The man who has struck it rich in minerals, oil, or other bounties of nature is found explaining the debilitating effect of unearned income from the state. The corporate executive who is a superlative success as an organization man weighs in on the evils of bureaucracy. Federal aid to education is feared by those who live in suburbs that could easily forgo this danger, and by people whose children are in public schools. Socialized medicine is condemned by men emerging from Walter Reed Hospital. Social Security is viewed with alarm by those who have the comfortable cushion of an inherited income."
John Kenneth Galbraith — “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National Policy Committee on Pockets of Poverty (13 Dec 1963)
J.D. Tuccille, the Libertarians, and surprisingly, the highly respected University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton School may have set a world record for utter nonsense and wrongheaded scaremongering.
Don’t you love predictions of 20 years? They are so safe. You can’t be proved wrong. Twenty 20 years from now, the world will have changed many times, and anyway, no one will remember what you said.
Aside from the idiocy of making a 20-year economic prediction, the entire premise of the article is wrong.
20 Years to Disaster “The United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt.” J.D. TUCCILLE | 11.6.2023 7:00 AM
For decades, budgetary experts have warned that the U.S. federal government is backing itself—and the country—into a corner with expenditures that consistently exceed revenues, driving the national debt ever higher.
What Tuccille, the Libertarians, and the Wharton School seem not to understand is that federal deficits are absolutely necessary for economic growth.
You have seen this graph many times:
GRAPH I
Federal “Deficits” (red) and Gross Domestic Product (blue) rise in parallel.
And this graph:
GRAPH II.
Before every recession (vertical gray bars), federal deficits (blue)
decline. Then, to cure the recession, the government increases federal
deficit spending.
The latest red flag is raised by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), which says that the federal government has no more than 20 years to mend its ways. After this time, it will be too late to remedy the situation.
Every time the federal government “controls” (i.e. cuts) spending, we have recessions if we are lucky and depressions if we are not as fortunate:
U.S. depressions come on the heels of federal surpluses.
1804-1812: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 48%. Depression began 1807. 1817-1821: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 29%. Depression began 1819. 1823-1836: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 99%. Depression began 1837. 1852-1857: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 59%. Depression began 1857. 1867-1873: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 27%. Depression began 1873. 1880-1893: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 57%. Depression began 1893. 1920-1930: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 36%. Depression began 1929. 1997-2001: U. S. Federal Debt reduced 15%. Recession began 2001.
Having learned nothing from history, Tucille, the Libertarians, and Wharton continue the same old ignorance about federal deficit spending: They equate personal finances with our Monetarily Sovereign government’s finances, not recognizing the massive differences between the two.
While monetarily, non-sovereign entities like you and me need to run balanced budgets over the long term, or we’ll face bankruptcy, the federal government must never run a balanced budget and never will face bankruptcy.
20 Years to Control Spending
“Under current policy, the United States has about 20 years for corrective action after which no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt whether explicitly or implicitly (i.e., debt monetization producing significant inflation)” Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters, authors of the October 6 Penn Wharton Budget Model brief, write in summarizing their findings.
“Unlike technical defaults where payments are merely delayed, this default would be much larger and reverberate across the U.S. and world economies.”
To say that the above is 100% bullshit would be to insult bullshit. Here’s why:
The federal government, being Monetarily Sovereign, has the infinite ability to create its sovereign currency, the U.S. dollar. It has infinite dollars with which to pay its bills. It never needs to default.
Despite concerns about “debt monetization” (aka “money printing’) causing inflation, this never has happened to any nation in world history.All inflations have been caused by shortages of crucial goods and services, most often oil and food.
Many years of massive U.S. federal deficits didn’t cause today’s inflation. Only when COVID caused shortages of oil, food, computer parts, shipping, metals, lumber, labor, etc., did inflation arise. Now, the government’s massive spending to prevent and cure recession continues while inflation ebbs. The massive federal spending has helped cure the shortages and thus cure the inflation.
The reason for worrying about accumulating deficits and the resulting growing debt, the authors explain, is that “government debt reduces economic activity by crowding out private capital formation and by requiring future tax increases or spending cuts to accommodate future interest payments.”
1. The historical fact that increasing government deficit spending increases economic activity (See Graph I, above) seems lost on the Wharton authors.
Mathematically, GDP = Federal Spending + Nonfederal Spending + Net Exports
2. There is no historical example of “crowding out of capital formation.” In fact, the federal money added to the economy increases the funds available to the private sector for capital formation.
3. Future tax increases are not necessary because federal taxes do not fund federal spending:
A. All federal tax dollars are destroyed upon receipt by the U.S. Treasury. The tax dollars come from the M2 money supply measure, but when they reach the Treasury, they become part of no money supply measure. The reason: The Treasury’s money supply, being infinite, cannot be measured. B. Even if the federal government collected zero tax dollars, it could continue spending forever. It has the infinite ability to create spending dollars. C. The purposes of federal taxes are not to fund federal spending but rather:
a. To control the economy by taxing what the government wishes to discourage and giving tax breaks to what the government wishes to reward.
b. To assure demand for and acceptance of the U.S. dollar by requiring taxes to be paid in dollars.
c. To fool the public (and presumably Wharton economists) into believing federal benefits require federal taxes. (This last purpose is promulgated by the rich to discourage the populace from demanding benefits that would narrow the Gap between the rich and the rest.)
If debt gets too big, lenders can’t be paid back, credibility is shot, the dollar loses value, and the economy tanks.
This is the oft-claimed “ticking time bomb” that never seems to explode. There never has been and never will be a time when the federal debt “gets too big” to be paid.
Again, the Wharton economists demonstrate they don’t understand the differences between a Monetarily Sovereign government and a monetarily non-sovereign government.
Alan Greenspan: “A government cannot become insolvent with respect to
obligations in its own currency. There is nothing to prevent the federal
government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to
somebody. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can
always print the money to do that.”
Ben Bernanke: “The U.S.
government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its
electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars
as it wishes at essentially no cost. Scott Pelley: Is that tax money that the Fed is spending? Ben Bernanke: It’s not tax money… We simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account.
Statement
from the St. Louis Fed: “As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose
debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become
insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government
is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.”
“It
would be an unfettered economic catastrophe,” economists Joseph
Brusuelas and Tuan Nguyen predicted earlier this year of such a
scenario. “Our model indicates that unemployment would surge above 12%
in the first six months, the economy would contract by more than 10%,
triggering a deep and lasting recession, and inflation would soar toward
11% over the next year.”
Strange how history says exactly the
opposite. Following many years of massive federal spending, unemployment
was at historical lows. The reason: Federal spending stimulated GDP
growth, which required more labor.
So long as investors believe federal officials will eventually balance their books, you have a grace period as debt grows—that is until the debt burden is so enormous that it crushes economic activity.
History shows that balancing the federal books creates recessions and depressions.
The so-called “debt burden” is not debt, and it’s not a burden. It’s deposits into Treasury security bills, notes, and bond accounts which are owned by the depositors.
It’s not debt because the government never touches the dollars in those accounts. The government creates dollars at will. It has no need to borrow dollars, and indeed, the U.S. federal government never borrows dollars.
To “pay off” the debt (that isn’t debt), the government merely returns the dollars in the accounts to their owners. This is no burden at all.
The purpose of T-securities is not to provide spending money to the government but rather to give the world with a safe, interest-paying place to store unused dollars. This makes the dollar an attractive international medium of exchange.
“Even with the most favorable of assumptions for the United States, PWBM estimates that a maximum debt-GDP ratio of 200 percent can be sustained,” the authors add. “This 200 percent value is computed as an outer bound using various favorable assumptions: a more plausible value is closer to 175 percent, and, even then, it assumes that financial markets believe that the government will eventually implement an efficient closure rule.” (That’s a mix of tax and spending changes to curtail deficits and debt.)
As we have demonstrated numerous times, the Debt/GDP ratio is meaningless. It tells nothing about the current or future health of an economy. It predicts nothing; it evaluates nothing. It is 100% meaningless.
That is why economists who don’t understand the fundamentals of Monetary Sovereignty love to quote it.
The 20-year countdown assumes that investors remain optimistic about the willingness and ability of U.S. officials to bring spending in-line with tax revenues. “Once financial markets believe otherwise, financial markets can unravel at smaller debt-GDP ratios,” according to the PWBM analysis.
We suspect financial markets understand history better than the economists at Wharton. We suspect they know that when the federal government spends more, stock prices rise.
As federal deficit spending has increased, the value of corporate stock has risen.
As PWBM points out, “Financial markets demand a higher interest rate to purchase government debt as the supply of that debt increases… Forward-looking financial markets should demand an even higher return if they see debt increasing well into the future. Those higher borrowing rates, in turn, make debt grow even faster.”
That’s already happening.
Increasing Costs and a Looming Deadline “To finance trillions of dollars in spending beyond what incoming revenue can support, the US Treasury is now issuing more debt in the form of Treasury securities than global financial markets can readily absorb,” Yahoo! Finance’s Rick Newman wrote on October 30.
“That forces the borrower—the US government—to pay higher interest rates, which in turn pushes up borrowing costs for consumers and businesses in much of the Western world.”
Again, the Wharton experts misunderstand Monetary Sovereignty and the realities of federal financing.
The federal government does not finance spending by borrowing (“issuing debt.”) It finances spending by creating dollars, ad hoc.
It can allow as much or as little in T-security deposits as it wishes. If the public fails to invest as much as the Federal Reserve wishes (to stabilize the dollar), the Fed merely uses its infinite money creation ability to fill the gap.
Federal spending never is constrained by the public’s desire to own T-securities.
As for interest rates, the Fed sets them not to attract depositors but to control inflation. If the Fed smells inflation, it raises rates. If the inflation scare passes, the Fed lowers rates. This has nothing to do with any need for deposits into T-security accounts.
(Sadly, raising interest rates, far from moderating inflation, exacerbates it by raising prices. The only thing that moderates inflation is federal spending to ease shortages of critical goods and services.)
Just when the U.S. federal government hits that magic unsustainable debt-to-GDP ratio of between 175 and 200 percent depends on investor confidence and how much the markets charge to finance more borrowing. PWBM estimates it will happen between 2040 and 2045—if we’re lucky.
The notion of a “magic, unsustainable debt-to-GDP ratio” is utter nonsense. Japan already has exceeded that meaningless ratio.
The U.S. Treasury concedes that “since 2001, the federal government’s budget has run a deficit each year. Starting in 2016, increases in spending on Social Security, health care, and interest on federal debt have outpaced the growth of federal revenue.”
The 2001 Clinton surplus caused the 2001 recession. See Graph I.
Options for Fixing the Mess
In September, PWBM explored three policy options to render fiscal policy less disastrous: increasing taxes on high incomes, reforms to Social Security and Medicare that reduce payouts and increase taxes, and a mix of tax increases and spending cuts.
Increasing taxes on high incomes would help narrow the Gap between the rich and the rest, which would be a good thing. It would do nothing to improve the federal government’s already infinite ability to pay its creditors.
“Reforms” to Social Security and Medicare (i.e. cuts to benefits paid to those who need them most, while increasing taxes on those who can afford them least) also would do nothing to improve the federal government’s bill-paying ability.
The “mix of tax increases and spending cuts” would take spending dollars from the private sector and cause a recession or depression. Remember this equation: GDP = Federal + Nonfederal Spending + Net Exports.
Spending cuts and tax increases would decrease Federal + Nonfederal Spending, which would reduce GDP, i.e. cause a recession or depression. Simple mathematics.
The authors predict entitlement reforms and a mix of tax increases and spending cuts would both stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio, with entitlement reform allowing the greatest economic growth.
Hmmm. Giving the economy fewer Social Security and Medicare dollars and taking dollars from the economy by increasing taxes would “allow the greatest economic growth”???? Also, pouring water out of a bucket fills it??
The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank has tax revenues hitting 19 percent
of GDP last year—the highest share in two decades. The IRS may scream
about a “tax gap” between what is owed and what it collects, and
lawmakers may supercharge the tax agency with funds, but fixing the
federal government’s spendthrift ways by squeezing taxpayers won’t just
be unpopular—it’s a scheme that defies historical trends.
Spending
cuts and entitlement reforms will also elicit resistance. But at least
they’re within reach of lawmakers who could spend no more than they
collect—or even to run surpluses to pay down debt.
Twenty years
to fix the federal budget should be plenty of time. But brace yourself.
The record so far suggests it won’t be enough.
The above is so
staggeringly ignorant one scarcely can believe it was written by humans.
Indeed, it must have been written by an Artificial Intelligence gone
rogue. Cuts to federal spending and tax increases do the same: They take
dollars out of the economy and cause recessions and depressions.
The Libertarian (aka anarchist) comments are not surprising. Anti-government ignorance is expected from them.
But, if this is the best to come out of Wharton, heaven help its students.
