Last night I made shrimp gumbo for our dinner. No paczkis here.

Although I didn’t grow up with cajun cooking I feel that I come by my fondness for it honestly. My French ancestry in the United States goes back about 180 years.

Tonight I plan to make a variation on Beef Wellington. My wife doesn’t care for foie gras so my variation will approximate the texture but not the flavor. To disabuse any notion that all of this is pretty lavish, my shrimp gumbo had about two 16-20 shrimp per serving and my Beef Wellington will have about 3 oz. of filet per serving. So it’s a little expensive but not excessively so. I’ve got to do something nice for Valentine’s Day.

I wanted to call notice to this piece at The Hill by Jacque Porter both because it illustrates some assumptions and patterns of thought and because it’s so consistent:

Minimum wage is a topic that draws a lot of attention, especially in California, a state that has one of the highest minimum wages in the United States.

In a debate Monday night, Rep. Barbara Lee (D) defended her previous advocacy for a $50 minimum wage.

“In the Bay Area, I believe it was the United Way that came out with a report that very recently $127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough to get by,” Lee said. “Another survey very recently: $104,000. For a family of one, barely enough to get by low income because of the affordability crisis.”

A wage of $50 an hour would total $104,000 over the course of a year.

“Just do the math. Of course we have national minimum wages that we need to raise to a living wage,” Lee said. “We’re talking about $20, $25 – fine. But I have got to be focused on what California needs and what the affordability factor is when we calculate this wage.”

Here are some of the assumptions made:

• It assumes that the price elasticity of demand for labor is zero.
• It assumes that the price elasticity of demand for a Big Mac is zero.
• It assumes that fast food franchise owners make a lot more money than they actually do.
• It assumes taxes as a percentage of GDP can be raised indefinitely OR that we can extend credit to ourselves indefinitely without adverse effect.

If those things were not being assumed, Rep. Lee would recognize that were the minimum wage raised to $50/hour it would either decrease the number of minimum wage jobs sharply or people who employ workers at minimum wage would raise prices to make up the difference or take a pay cut or both. I don’t believe that the price of a Big Mac can be increased to say, $25 without reducing the number of Big Macs sold. I also recognize that the margins on fast food franchise are in fact quite tight or, said another way, the owner can’t take a pay cut for such a large raise to minimum wage earners without reducing his or her earnings to zero.

But it’s enormously consistent. I suspect she believes that you can increase the number of low-wage workers indefinitely without putting downwards pressure on wages, that these low-wage workers should be able to support a family on minimum wage, and that if the number of low-wage jobs decreases drastically as a consequence of an excessively high minimum wage, the government should make up the difference, either with tax dollars or borrowing.

The big news of yesterday was the House’s impeachment of DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas. Big since it’s the first time an official other than the president has been impeached by the House in 150 years. I think the House erred in impeaching him although possibly for different reasons than most who agree with my view. In today’s Wall Street Journal Tennessee Rep. Mark Green has an op-ed defending the House’s action. Here are some snippets.

There are two primary grounds justifying this historic act by Congress. First, Mr. Mayorkas willfully refused to comply with the law, blatantly disregarding numerous provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Though that law contains several detention mandates, Mr. Mayorkas directed the release of millions of inadmissible aliens into the country. He abused the statute allowing for parole on only a case-by-case and temporary basis and oversaw more than 1.7 million paroles. He created categorical parole programs contrary to the statute. In the interior, he directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel not to detain most illegal aliens, including criminals. In his September 2021 enforcement guidance, the secretary directed that unlawful presence in the country was no longer sufficient grounds for removal, and that criminal convictions alone weren’t enough to warrant arrest. This guidance was contrary to the law.

Second, Mr. Mayorkas breached the public trust, both by violating his statutory duty to control the border and by knowingly making false statements to Congress. Under oath, he claimed to have operational control of the border, as defined by the Secure Fence Act, only to say later that he never made such a claim. He even testified that “the border is no less secure than it was previously”—a demonstrable lie. Mr. Mayorkas has also obstructed congressional oversight, forcing the committee to issue two subpoenas for documents, which are still unfulfilled.

and

Impeachment doesn’t require the commission of indictable crimes. The framers of the Constitution conceived of impeachment as a remedy for much more expansive failures. When officials responsible for executing the law willfully and unilaterally refuse to do so, and instead replace those laws with their own directives, they violate the Constitution by assuming power granted solely to the legislative branch. They undermine the rule of law itself—an offense worthy of impeachment and removal.

concluding:

There is little doubt that the framers, who cast aside tyrannical rule in favor of representative government, would view Mr. Mayorkas’s refusal to comply with the law and breach of public trust as impeachable. He is the type of public official for which they crafted this power. The Senate must finish the House’s work and convict Secretary Mayorkas.

I would be completely flabbergasted if the Senate convicted Sec. Mayorkas. For one thing the offenses for which he was impeached probably apply to the entire cabinet and President Trump’s cabinet before them. We know, for example, that several successive DCIs have lied to Congress and also violated the law. Where do you stop? Indeed, what are the stopping criteria?

Furthermore, isn’t the real question what direction has Sec. Mayorkas received? If he was directed to take the actions of which they’re accusing him, should he be impeached for them?

I think you might find political consultant Louis Perron’s advice to the Biden campaign at RealClearPolitics interesting. Here’s a snippet:

On paper, and judging by official numbers and indicators, the economy is doing fine. Large parts of the electorate, however, do not feel the Bidenomics (yet). What should he do? Blow his own horn and propagate that the economy is doing well, or showcase how he feels the pain?

The answer depends on timing. The more time there is available, the more an incumbent should fight to change the public perception and mood. After all, an incumbent president or prime minister has a unique ability to affect the media. This, however, has to be done very carefully, in the right tone, and in sync with where people are emotionally at the current moment. For Joe Biden, the main opportunity to do this starts with the State of the Union speech, and the window of opportunity will close at the convention. After that, he will be left with step number four.

That is, vulnerable incumbents need to go on the counter-offense and rip apart the challenger. As different as they may be with respect to policy, this is the strategy by which George W. Bush and Barack Obama won reelection. The rationale goes like this: You may not like what you have, but at least you know what you have, and the alternative is a big risk, and it’s likely that things will get worse. In that respect, Donald Trump is a gift from heaven for Joe Biden, and it’s noteworthy to me that Biden purposely and consistently makes it a point to run against Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

I suspect that the Biden campaign will find some of his advice extremely difficult to accomplish, particularly his advice about mobilizing the base. The problem is that the interests of different components of President Biden’s base, e.g. white suburban college-educated voters and urban black voters, are diametrically opposed. IMO some of the base is expendable while some is not. So, for example, for President Biden I (along with Ruy Teixeira and John Judis) think that he doesn’t need to reach out to white suburban college-educated voters but does need to reach out to urban black voters. That is further complicated since those who contribute to or work in campaigns tend to come from the former group so it necessarily looms larger than it should.

I’m not much of a sports fan but I did watch yesterday’s Super Bowl off and on. I thought it was a more exciting game than I expected and Patrick Mahomes is a great quarterback.

By and large I found the ads, something that many people tune in to the Big Game to watch, fairly ho-hum.

The half-time show demonstrated to me how out of touch I am with contemporary popular music. All I can say about it is that it was certainly high energy.

I also wanted to take note of this piece by Ray A. Smith in the Wall Street Journal. Businesses see great potential (I think excessive potential in the large language model artificial intelligence (LLM AI):

Decades after automation began taking and transforming manufacturing jobs, artificial intelligence is coming for the higher-ups in the corporate office.

The list of white-collar layoffs is growing almost daily and include jobs cuts at Google, Duolingo and UPS in recent weeks. While the total number of jobs directly lost to generative AI remains low, some of these companies and others have linked cuts to new productivity-boosting technologies like machine learning and other AI applications.

and

That includes managerial roles, many of which might never come back, the corporate executives and consultants say. They predict the fast-evolving technology will revamp or replace work now done up and down the corporate ladder in industries ranging from technology to chemicals.

“This wave [of technology] is a potential replacement or an enhancement for lots of critical-thinking, white-collar jobs,” said Andy Challenger, senior vice president of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

and

Meanwhile, business leaders say AI could affect future head counts in other ways. At chemical company Chemours, executives predict they won’t have to recruit as many people in the future.

“As the company grows, we’ll need fewer new hires as opposed to having to do a significant retrenchment,” said Chief Executive Mark E. Newman.

with this the crux of the article:

As AI adoption grows, it is likely to reconfigure management hierarchies, the Oliver Wyman study projects. Entry-level workers are likely to bear the initial brunt as more of their duties are automated away. In turn, future entry-level work will look more like first-level management roles.

The cascading effect could flatten layers of middle management, the staging ground for senior leadership roles, according to the analysis.

More than half of senior white-collar managers surveyed in the study said they thought their jobs could be automated by generative AI, compared with 43% of middle managers and 38% of first-line managers.

but, sadly, I think this is wishful thinking:

Still, business leaders across the economy say they expect the new technology will augment and elevate some white-collar roles, giving employees and managers the means to do more meaningful work—both for their companies and in their careers.

At Prosus, a global technology-investment group based in the Netherlands, executives say that is already happening as AI automates more of its workforce’s tasks.

“Engineers, software developers and so on can do the work twice as fast,” said Euro Beinat, Prosus’s global head of AI and data science. “One of the side effects is that a lot of these employees can do more and do slightly different things than we were doing before.”

Prosus’s web designers, for instance, used to ask software developers to do the coding. Now they can do it themselves, Beinat says. Meanwhile software developers can focus more on design and complex code. It is “a seniority boost,” he said.

at least in the United Stats because I do not believe that businesses have ever operated that way before. What they have done is eliminated junior-level positions to save costs without recognizing that juniors become seniors. Basically, they will pull up the ladder that they’re standing on.

One more word of warning from what I’ve heard as “Murphy’s Law of Computers”. A computer makes as many mistakes in two seconds as twenty people working twenty years. Lately, I’ve been using ChatGPT on a regular basis and I think it has improved my productivity significantly. But I have the ability to distinguish between the garbage results that it produces and the good ones. That takes a certain amount of knowledge and expertise.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune remark on President Biden’s Thursday of last week:

Reasonable Americans don’t see Biden as a malicious or nefarious man because he’s not. But they do see him as having some worrying cognitive issues because, well, that’s clear to everyone except perhaps the president himself. Even in the one news conference of his career where it was crucially important not to confuse one political leader or country for another, Biden was unable to pull that off. For those of us who have had difficult conversations with angry, elderly parents over driving or living circumstances, it was especially painful to watch.

and

That said, the report raised legitimate and troubling concerns about Biden’s careless and self-serving handling of those classified documents.

We were not fond of how Biden blamed staffers at his hastily arranged news conference. We think there is palpable hypocrisy in how Democrats amplified, and crowed about, Donald Trump’s trove of classified material sitting around at Mar-a-Lago when Biden clearly was doing much the same thing a few hundred miles to the north.

Sure, Biden cooperated with the special counsel whereas Trump huffed and puffed and obfuscated and obstructed, which is a material difference here. But that’s analogous to whether or not you cooperated with a police officer who pulled you over for speeding. It’s a good idea to do so, and will be taken into account, but it doesn’t mean you are innocent of the offense.

concluding:

Clearly, Democrats have a problem with their nominee, which explains tweets like “Pritzker/ Whitmer ’24” showing up on Friday morning. The only solution is Biden vanquishing any and all doubts through his cognitive performance over the next few weeks. That won’t be easy for him. But only he can fix this situation.

Special Counsel Hur’s explanation of why he did not charge President Biden may well have had partisan motives. In the body of the editorial the editors describe it as “sly”, “brutally effective”, and “rhetorical masterpiece for the ages” but none of that is relevant to the basic question of the president’s mental acuity.

In his Washington Post column Marc Thiessen asks

If the president is “struggling to remember events” during his “painfully slow” interactions with others, how can he effectively conduct diplomacy or make decisions on matters of peace and security?

There are wars raging in Europe and the Middle East; U.S. forces are under attack in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea; the risk of war in the Pacific is growing; and rising numbers of people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list are trying to slip into the United States by illegally crossing the southern border. And apparently the commander in chief dealing with these overlapping crises is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

We’re now beyond concern about whether Biden is fit to serve a second term; we should be concerned about whether he is fit to finish his first.

while CNN quotes James Carville:

The fact that Biden isn’t doing the Super Bowl interview and probably won’t debate, says James Carville, “that’s a sign your staff doesn’t have much confidence in you.” And while it’s “never too late” to change candidates, “the later it gets the more confusing the process gets.”

I cite these not as proof of their truth but as corroboration of the point I have been making. Damage control by the president’s surrogates is unlikely to succeed and, as Mr. Carville also observes, the president’s age and mental acuity aren’t going to improve over the next four years. I can understand that President Biden was outraged by the, to the eyes of partisans, gratuitous remarks of the special counsel regarding his age and memory but he still should never have given Thursday’s snap press conference.

One of the things that struck about the news this week was the sharp contrast between spin and reality. The spin on the failure of the immigration reform bill to pass the Senate was that Donald Trump’s call for Republicans to reject the bill and was purely politically driven. Was that the reality?

My understanding of the bill was that it allowed 2 million migrants into the United States, a combination of “asylum seekers” (5,000/day X 365 days), “gotaways”, and unaccompanied minors before requiring the president to take any action. The counter-spin is that it “normalized” the status quo.

Lost in the spin and counter-spin was whether it was the right policy or not. I do not think it is the right policy and I will give just one, simple example of why it is not.

Here’s the history of what are called “housing units” (homes plus apartments) in Chicago over the last 20 years:

or, said another way, the number of housing units in the City of Chicago has remained unchanged over the period of the last 20 years. The number of migrants entering the country has been 1-2% of U. S. population per year for the last several years. To house those people the number of units would need to increase at that rate. They are not.

That doesn’t even include the reality that the trend has been to reduce the number of what are blithely referred to as “affordable housing” with much more expensive housing units. To accommodate the present rate of migration we would need to reverse that trend and build millions of unit affordable to the people who are moving here. That would cost billions, possibly trillions.

Consequently, accepting the number of migrants we have been is unrealistic.

This morning I listened eagerly to the talking heads programs to see the direction that spin would take following President Biden’s lousy snap press conference last week. It was pretty obvious that the position the Democratic huddle had arrived at was premised on what I think is the reality of the 2024 president election. If the election is a referendum on Biden, Biden loses; if the election is a referendum on Trump, Trump loses.

Why do I say “Democratic huddle”? Because so many of the Democrats being interviewed were using precisely the same wording to a) defend President Biden’s mental acuity and b) contrast President Biden with Donald Trump. My own view is that James Carville’s comment pretty much said it all: President Biden’s demurring from being interviewed prior to the Superbowl illustrates a lack of confidence in his mental acuity that no amount of defense will overcome.