Not A Believer This Time

Generally we go with the Monkees. If people say it then we are a believer that they meant it. We might not agree but we think that is their position. And speaking of believing, can you believe that Monkees gets the red underline as a questionable spelling? It is a cultural problem.

Where we are not a believer is all the rhetoric from dissenting members of Congress about the recently passed debt ceiling bill. Out of the 117 House members and 36 Senate members that voted nay there might be a few that sincerely believes their own rhetoric but not much more than that. Here is Dominic Pino at NRO with a sampler of progressive hyperventilating on the debt ceiling negotiations and related bill. Although NRO has Elizabeth Warren’s picture at the top, the post is at least as much about progressive media as progressive elected officials. We can’t find a similar list for the GOP but here is Chip Roy saying, “The Swamp Won.”

We think there are three reasons for the dishonestly. The first is most of these folks come from safe seats so they can say silly stuff. The second is fund raising. Battling against the powerful like Chip and Dominic’s list do will give great quotes for those fund raising letters. Third, and most importantly,

Sidebar: Yes, generally, we should start with the most important reason first. In this case, however, we thought it was appropriate to frame media exposure as the conclusion that really ties all three together. End Sidebar.

is exposure because of the confluence of media and elected officials. There are lots of folks and organizations like Real Clear Politics in the aforementioned Chip Roy story or here or in Dominic’s post that are looking for clicks, listeners, eyeballs, or whatever is the measurement metric to indicate success. The Congress critters and the media have goal congruence on getting attention. Chip is fighting with MTG for invitations and quotes from one set of media while Elizabeth and AOC are fighting for attention from a different group of media outlets. Folks can add value to their brand by having the most extreme sound bite on their side of the aisle. It is not a good situation but it is where we are at.

Failing To Run The Numbers

On the front page of today’s paper we had a story about our retiring Congress Critter bringing home the bacon for Wisconsin by making his last vote one for the Omnibus Bill. A few pages in it sang similar praises of Senator Tammy. We don’t have a link because the posts are not on their website. As we have said before, as bad as the Omnibus is we don’t see voting against it because it is unlikely you can negotiate a better deal. As we see it time is better spent on trying to fix the broken Congressional process.

Then we got the new issue of the National Review and read Brian Riedl’s post Utopia’s Price (here is the online link) on how progressive proposals are rarely coherent. Here is a longish quote:

This is the inescapable conclusion after one carefully reviews leading progressive bills and proposals to nationalize health care, tax the rich, slash defense, and reduce net carbon emissions to zero. The issue is not that their blueprints are misguided or would shift policy in the wrong direction, but rather that they contain virtually no policy substance whatsoever. They are vaporware: empty gimmicks and messaging bills that lack the minimum specificity to be implemented even if enacted. Most proposals make brash and expensive promises and then appoint a future commission or government agency to figure out how to make it all work.

We would agree but not limit the critique to only progressives. That is where Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch with Should, Coulda, Oughta, is:

Politicians and pundits alike are very comfortable talking about what our policies ought to be or not be. We—and I say “we” because I am guilty of this too—bring a high level of abstraction to our preferences and our complaints. This can be useful, even essential. Before you can work out the nitty gritty of how to implement a policy, you first have to figure out what the policy should be.  [Emphasis added]

This is one of Jonah’s better posts and you might read it all. We agree with Jonah’s first sentence and think Brian would too. We hope we are not being too abstract when we say it is true that folks are too abstract. We would add they are too abstract because they don’t want to run the numbers. We’re not so sure about the second sentence. Abstractions can be useful but they are not necessarily essential to creating policy. If Jonah had said they were essential to selling policy ideas we might have agreed. We have a hard time with the philosophers like Jonah because our background in accounting and economics shows us that the numbers, the nitty-gritty, go hand in glove with the abstractions. Folks are, in Brian’s great phrase, selling vaporware when they want net zero by 2050, privatize Social Security, or the examples he gives. Innumeracy came out in 1988 so we have been warned about the problem for some time.

We need to run the numbers on proposals. That means we probably won’t have any sweeping proposals. Rather we need to follow good practice. Try something. We would prefer to try something sensible. Test the outcomes. Evaluate and decide what to do next. For example, we are convinced that means testing Social Security would be a useful step BUT how to do it exactly is a challenge because income changes and not all income is taxable like distributions from Roth IRAs. So it is unlikely that Congress will get means testing exactly right the first time. We still encourage them to do a thorough job the first time but we, as voters, should expect that Congress will review their handiwork and make changes as necessary.

Journalists, pundits, and political opponents need to run the numbers. We need to run the numbers before the proposal and then after the proposal to see how it worked. We need to (eek!) make use of experts. We need to be serious about the nitty-gritty. One step in that direction would be serious Congressional budgeting rather than an Omnibus Bill.

The New IRS Scandal

We wanted to write about the silliness of the recent arguments about tax rates based on the illegally obtained IRS information on high income individuals but the scandal of releasing the information requires a post first. We want to compare the new scandal to the previous, and bigger one, under the 44th president.

Like the previous IRS scandal, this one is a disaster for the Democrats for two related reasons. First they are the party of big government. When government is incompetent or, more likely, fraudulent it reflects badly on the Democrats and the impact is exacerbated when the Democrats are in charge. It is why “clean out the swamp” rings true despite the challenges of really doing it. As Charles W. Cooke at NRO puts it, We Can’t Trust The IRS. If we can’t trust the IRS, is there a part of government can we trust? The Democrats are going to suffer when major government agencies are engaged in fraudulent activities.

Just as in the 44th president’s IRS scandal, next steps are going to be bad for the Democrats. The Democrats can’t come thundering down on the illegal and unethical behavior of the IRS and/or other parties because these are their supporters. They have little rhetorical room to maneuver. They can’t go The Donald and fire folks willy-nilly.

The only good news for the Democrats is that they have a compliant media to support them. Here is a CNN Business story on the Administration investigating the illegal disclosures. CNN put the word illegal in scare quotes. We think investigation would have been a better choice for scare quotes. We will be shocked if heads roll and prison time is the result. We have seen this story before.

The IRS is part of the Treasury Department. Here is CNN’s quote from the Treasury Department:

“The unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information is illegal,” said Treasury spokeswoman Lily Adams. “The matter is being referred to the Office of the Inspector General, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, all of whom have independent authority to investigate.” [Emphasis added]

First, if Treasury says it is illegal what is CNN’s problem? Second, this is about as unthreatening that Treasury could be. Third, the illegal disclosures could have come from hacking. Treasury doesn’t mention this suggesting that they know that is not what happened.

Sidebar: We have seen no discussion of this data being bona fide. We know from the W era that the press is willing to accept bogus documents that support their narratives. It is a minor point but we are curious. End Sidebar.

As weak as the Treasury Department statement is The Frontrunner’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, makes them look like Churchill. She starts out by pointing out that it is illegal:

“Any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information by a person of access is illegal and we take this very seriously,” [Emphasis added again]

There is no mention if Jen winked at the reporters as she said this. She didn’t need to because then she walks back the previous statement:

“I’m not going to comment on specific unauthorized disclosures of confidential government information. I can tell you that, broadly speaking ,we know that there is more to be done to ensure that corporations, individuals who are at the highest income are paying more of their fair share. Hence, it’s in the President’s proposals, his budget and part of how he’s proposing to pay for his ideas,”

We hope that nobody in the administration thinks that this data supports the need for higher taxes on either high income individuals or corporations. We thought about calling this a lie but that would suggest that Jen or her briefers were well informed.

The Frontrunner’s IRS scandal may not match the IRS scandal of his former boss but he still have attempted cover-ups to increase his score. Will The Frontrunner match the number of scandal’s of his former boss? Will the media care? If it wan’t our country it would be fun to watch.

A Question Of Style

We don’t have an extensive style book. In fact, it is not written down anywhere. We use we to describe ourselves, have a few nicknames like The Donald and Triple A, and use Democrat Party to describe the party on the left. It seems our style has become a matter of controversy. Red State’s Mike Miller’s extensive title is a bit garbled but explains it pretty well: The AP Is NOT Happy With the ‘Label,’ ‘Democrat Party,’ Conservatives, and It Couldn’t Be More ROFL Whiny About It. You should read it all to get the Always The Donald perspective on the Democrat Party moniker dust-up.

Sidebar: At first we thought ROLF was a competitor to the NFL but it is not. It is an acronym for: Rolling On the Floor Laughing. We don’t know why “the” gets left out of the acronym and “on” is in. End Sidebar.

We take a longer view than Mike. Democrat Party is a mild jibe. It is like calling your siblings by a childhood names rather than their adult names. It is way kinder than the 44th president saying R (as in Republican) stands for reverse and D (as in Democrat) for drive. That was nasty but might just fit in the acceptable range. It is off the charts kinder than tea-baggers, the sexual slur Tea Party members were subjected to by the media and others. That was clearly unacceptable.

Part of good politics is the art of mild jibes. We need to encourage those so that the nasty and unenlightening comments like fascist, Hitler, socialist, and McCarthy to name a few stay out of our discussion. We are unmoved by the complaints and are sticking with our style, Democrat Party it is on Men With Gloves.

Bad Word (?) At PSG Match

Yesterday soccer players from Basaksehir and PSG walked off the pitch after an alleged racial incident with an official. Our first observation is that it was fortunate this was during COVID-19 and the fans were locked out. Otherwise, stopping a game so early could have been a disaster. Soccer fans are noted for their bad, no we really mean violent, behavior.

We were listening to Tommy Smyth and Rodney Marsh discuss the situation on Grumpy Pundits. Rodney opined that there should be zero tolerance for slurs with a standard punishment like an eight game suspension (unpaid we would expect). At first listen it sounded like a reasonable proposal. Us conservatives like rule of law and we believe that organizations can restrict employee speech. We see four questions to answer or problems to resolve before action is taken: when, what, how, and the nature of soccer.

When do you take action? To us the answer is clear. These types of action should be taken immediately after the game when there is time to investigate. You can’t be handing out red cards willy-nilly.

What is a slur? For example, during the discussion Rodney used the term “linesman.” Is that a slur? Is it a slur only when there is a woman official? It is hard to be sure about what caused the PSG fracas but one possibility is that the official in question called a black man a black man. Since the man in question seems to be an assistant coach, he didn’t have a number to identify him like the players. The complexity grows because there are so many cultures and languages in soccer.

Sidebar: An eight game suspension is a big penalty for a player but we would expect that a conviction would be a career death sentence for an official. This fracas is a really big deal for him. End Sidebar.

How do you adjudicate the process? There has to be an initial process and the opportunity for appeal. If you tell us that it will be three faculty members doing the judging then we don’t want any part of it. If the penalties are severe, and they should be, then how to enforce them is the most difficult part.

Fake hate crimes are not unknown. Athletes are known for their games playing and the gamesmanship but soccer is, perhaps, the most extreme case. Soccer has a special penalty (yellow card) for simulation. That is, offensive players were taking so many dives in hopes of convincing the referee to award a penalty kick that soccer had to introduce a new sanction to reduce the dives. And soccer is known for player embellishment like falling over like they have been poleaxed rather than hit by an angel’s wing. We were watching a game a few weeks ago when one player slapped another player on the face. It is a red card by rule but the slapped player went down like he had been hit by Sonny Liston’s best shot. The referee checked and the slapping player got a red card. That means the player was thrown out of the game and his team had to play a man short for the rest of the game. Combining hate speech penalties and soccer is going to be a challenge both because of the nature of hate speech and the nature of soccer.

A Research Project

We have been away from sophisticated statistics for a long time so we leave this one up to somebody else.  Black Lives Matters (BLM) has captured sports.  Teams were walking off because of Kenosha.  Then there is COVID-19.  Both of these scourges are having an economic impact on sports.  Trying to sort them out is going to be a challenge.  Our priors is that BLM will a have a bigger long-term negative impact than COVID-19 but we recognize that this is a tricky empirical question.  Who has the guts and the skills to do a serious investigation?  We would love to see it.

More Perspective On The Harper’s Letter

Earlier we said that we did not share David French’s rosy view on the Harper’s letter on Justice and Open Debate.  Our perspective was based on events at universities around the country.  Douglas Murray at Unherd has a similar perspective to us based on the letter’s contents, the letter’s signatories, and the reaction to the letter.  Of course you should read everything that Douglas writes.

We find Douglas convincing.  The letter is so bland and obvious it hardly needs to be written.  Then why is The Donald the only person or organization that is specifically mentioned?  If you were creating a list of the enemies of free speech The Donald would be well down the list.  Why is the political cutoff for signatories a millimeter to the right of the political center?  As Douglas says, Victor Davis Hanson, among others, would be a great addition.  Then Douglas covers the reactions to the letter and the reaction of the signatories to the challenges.  Here is a great paragraph on the agonized reactions of the signatories:

It must be an awful thing to discover, that. You wake one morning believing that you have just signed the usual “well-meaning, if vague” letter alongside a genocide-denier and other reputable Left-wing authors, only to discover that a former speechwriter to a Republican president is on the same list of names as yours. What a lot of weight that must be to bear. Almost intolerable in its way.

At the very least, it is not clear that the letter has improved attitudes towards free speech.  It is too soon to tell but it is entirely possible that the letter has failed and free speech is only a value of some on the right.

Still, David could be right.  The letter, in Churchill’s phrase, could be the end of the beginning.  Perhaps hate and cancellation will start to be more contested and include more folks from the left.  This would be the process that eventually would turn the tide back towards free speech.  We agree with David that it can’t be done without some help on the left.  We, like Douglas, are unconvinced help is coming from the left but it is possible.

A Matter Of Perspective

David French, at The Dispatch, thinks this is the week that liberalism fought back.  He is looking at pundits while we are looking at universities.  We end up with very different answers.  Here is David:

Now back to this week. On Tuesday, a broad range of (mainly) left-leaning academics, pundits, authors, and other public figures published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in Harper’s Magazine. This was not your standard coalition of civil libertarians for free speech. It not only included arguably the most famous living novelist (J.K. Rowling), it included a range of leftist luminaries, such as Gloria Steinem and Noam Chomsky.

We agree with David that this is good news.  You should read it all.  You should read it all now because we have bad news.  Lots of it.  Here are five recent items from various universities.  They may not have been this week but that was when we saw them.

Mike Adams is retiring from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.  We are happy for Mike.  He was an even worse high school student than MWG but he too became a college professor.  We hope Mike enjoys retirement but the email from Chancellor Jose Sartarelli is shows his, and we think UNC-Wilmington’s attitude towards free speech.  Here is Jose’s first point:

Have [Mike] continue as a faculty member and accept the ongoing disruption to our educational mission, the hurt and anger in the UNCW community, and the damage to the institution.

You should read the whole letter.  You will find that they gave Mike over a half a million dollars to retire early.  That is what stopping free speech is worth to them.  We found the letter vindictive.  We hope Mike gets something extra from them.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine has a story on members of the Princeton faculty recommending  creating a new committee.  Paul says they demand an end to academic freedom.  He is not wrong.  The faculty members want to create a committee with absolute power to punish racist behavior.  No appeals.  No due process.  It is a group of faculty rather than an official faculty action so it is only on the horizon.

John Hinderaker, also at PowerLine, has a series of posts including this one that deal with Samantha Pfefferle, a supporter of The Donald, and if she would have her admission to Marquette University revoked for her support.  It appears she didn’t but we wonder what might have happened without PowerLine.

Heather MacDonald in the WSJ has the headline, “I Cited Their Study So They Disavowed It.”  Heather says:

The authors [of the study] don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.” To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates. The only thing wrong with their article, and my citation of it, is that its conclusion is unacceptable in our current political climate.

We are not sure if the authors are running scared or if they just can’t believe that conservative writers understood them.

Then there was the tweet welcoming conservative students to Penn State that was quickly withdrawn.  You need good eyesight to pick it up but it won’t take long to read.

We hope David is right and the left is coming to accept free speech again.  We hope that universities are a lagging indicator.  We don’t think so.

 

Derek Chauvin’s Pension

Derek Chauvin in the former police officer charged with murdering George Floyd.  Zachary Evans at NRO has a CNN report with the headline: Officer Charged With Killing George Floyd Still Eligible For Pension Worth More Than $1 Million.  CNN’s first sentence tells us that the headline is incorrect:

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin could receive more than $1 million in pension benefits during his retirement years even if he is convicted of killing George Floyd.

So it is not worth $1 million but Derek might get that much if he survives prison and lives a long life.  It is like the “million dollar” lottery games where you can win $50,000 a year for 20 years.  There is usually an alternative to get a much smaller amount in cash now or there are folks that will do it.  We remember ad and found the organization that does it.  It is basic present value.  A dollar today is worth more than a dollar at some later date.

Let’s ignore legal niceties and convict Derek.  Should he still receive his pension?  Here is some background from CNN:

The laws governing whether pensions can be stripped from police accused of misconduct vary depending on the state. Less than half of states have laws that allow for pensions to be taken away from police who were convicted of any kind of felony, while some other states allow pensions to be taken away for specific crimes like corruption or sexual crimes against minors but not for the conviction of an officer for using excessive force, according to 2017 research published in the Journal of Law, Economics and Policy.

Pensions are different than entitlements like Social Security.  Public pensions in states like Minnesota are often underfunded but they are real obligations.  If we wait to fix Social Security we will almost certainly see a reduction in benefits.  Will they be across the board or means tested is the real question?  Pensions, on the other hand, are real obligations.  Derek has earned his.  He is entitled to receive his pension based on the almost 20 years he has worked on the police force.  There are choices but basically his pension is  computed as salary (usually average of highest three) * years (19 for Derek) * a multiplier.  We no longer have access to that data but our recollection was police in Wisconsin got 2.2 percent.  We are going to use that figure for our rough calculations that follow.  As a comparison faculty in Wisconsin got 1.6 percent for some years and 1.8 percent for others.  So 30 years on the force got you 66 percent of your highest salary.  It is hard and dangerous work but a nice pension.

Derek will get a decent pension for work he has already done.  He also leaves an enormous amount on the table by getting fired.  He had 11 years to age 55 retirement.  That would add 24.2 percent to his multiplier.  If he got a average raise of 3.1 percent his salary would be up by 40 percent.  And, often in their last few years folks work lots of overtime to boost their salary average even more.

Sidebar: Here is something CNN reported that we didn’t know and can’t confirm:

Officers also usually pay some of their own salaries into the funds and typically receive their pensions in lieu of Social Security.

It would be another reason to meet the obligations to Derek.  End Sidebar.

So Derek has earned his pension.  There are lots of reasons to be concerned about state and local pensions but Derek isn’t one of them.

After COVID-19; When?

There is a danger in discussing what to do after COVID-19.  The danger of discussing alternatives is that you send a message that the danger is over.  It is not.  It may not ever be fully over but we need to have adults discuss the future.  If you are not up for that then here is a video from Mean Girls.  There are ads before the show.  The adults can discuss the possibilities of a second wave or vaccines.

The Dispatch is careful not to send the message that the danger is over but it doesn’t have much to say because it only discusses the cost of COVID-19 and not the cost of the current lockdowns.  In How Swede It Is they discuss the results from the Swedish model with less severe lockdowns.  They have a comparison between Sweden and Denmark that suggests the Swedish model is leading to more COVID-19 deaths.  It is not a robust model.  Then they say:

Nor is Sweden likely to be spared the economic devastation we are currently experiencing in more locked down countries. As several writers have pointed out, Sweden’s own government expects the Swedish economy to contract more dramatically this year than America’s.

This is misunderstanding binary choices.  The choice is not economic devastation or not.  The question is how much.  Comparing the US and Swedish economies is even less robust that Denmark versus Sweden on COVID.  The comparison is Sweden with severe lockdown versus Sweden with less severe lockdown.  And it is more that just the economy.

A more serious discussion comes from Jonathan Geach, M.D. in Eight Reasons To End The Lockdowns As Soon As Possible.  Jonathan’s publication was removed until he put a disclaimer that he was not advocating an end to policies like social distancing now.  It should have already been obvious from the title but such is the world we live in.

You should read the whole thing but two of the eight items that hit home for us were suicides and the delay of non-COVID care.  Quantifications and comparisons are going to be difficult.  The solution is federalism.  Some communities and states will take the legal steps to open up earlier than others.  Some folks will take advantage of those opportunities while others will not.  We should have a serious conversation about the alternatives.  The reaction to Jonathan’s article suggests it won’t happen.