In reaction to a piece on which I’d posted earlier, Matthew Yglesias makes a good point—focusing on reading and mathematics in particular is fundamental to teaching kids to be good citizens:

The piece kind of rubbed me the wrong way, even though I wholeheartedly agree that partisan politicians should not censor which aspects of American history teachers are allowed to talk about. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me until I saw a later Ray tweet on a separate subject, learning loss during the pandemic.

Dying also causes "learning loss" and is much harder to reverse.

— Victor Ray (@victorerikray) September 1, 2022

It is, obviously, true that it is bad when children die. At the same time, we know that very, very few children have died from Covid-19. I don’t want to re-run the whole argument about school closures, just to observe that I think these two Ray takes are coming from the same place of underrating the importance of basic “three Rs” education. Citizenship is important, and it is one of the functions of the school system, but the best (and most realistic) way for K-12 schools to foster effective citizenship is to teach kids foundational literacy and math skills. Incorporating works about history or politics into the curriculum is a great idea insofar as it helps keep students engaged, but it’s best to make those core skills the North Star and try to avoid hubris and tons of polarized fights about tangential issues.

He goes on to support his case pretty well.

I do think I need to repeat the point I’ve made before. I’m a skeptic about “engaging” students in the manner he suggests. When I was in college it was known as “relevancy”. Acculturation is foundational, literally, for the public school system and that has never been truer than now. The U. S. population is presently about 16% Hispanic, mostly Mexican-Americans and, due to patterns of residence and the way our public schools are organized, if most of a school’s population is Mexican-American, should the school therefore be teaching Mexican history?

I would say “no”. It should be teaching English. It should be teaching American and English history. Those subjects should be taught in the interest of acculturation which would better prepare these young people for success in the broader society rather than to take their places in a ghetto.

You can only cover so much territory in a school day which means you must make choices. Therefore, although as enrichment materials adding things not directly related to English language and literacy and American and English history is fine but they cannot become the focus of education. That’s how we’ve gotten into the mess we’re in and why Asian-American students do so well. Their families insist that they maintain focus.

Do you remember that feature that used to appear in newspapers and magazines? Can you spot what’s wrong with this picture?

Median individual incomes are from the Census Bureau. Starting teacher salaries are for bachelors only, no experience and are taken from the sites of each school district.

These figures dramatize a couple of things. First, there’s pretty obviously a national market for entry level teachers. Second, teachers aren’t paid enough in San Francisco. And third, if you’re wondering why people are moving to Texas from California and Illinois, this should give you a pretty good idea. I suspect you can buy a pretty decent home in Houston on a salaray of $61,500.

When my mom started teaching in St. Louis in 1940, teachers were required to be unmarried women. When my mom and dad married my mom when to work for the St. Louis County school system which didn’t require teachers to be unmarried. When teachers were unmarried women low wages may not have been just but they were certainly a possibility. Times have changed. Teachers must be paid a living wage and that will vary from place to place in the country.

Boy, here’s one I really agree with. The U. S. federal income tax system needs a major overhaul. Sheldon H. Jacobson writes at The Hill:

President Biden committed $80 billion over the next decade to support the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and provide help for IRS agents to get their job done. Republicans are crying foul, suggesting that every American will be targeted for unnecessary and unwelcomed harassment, especially small business owners. Like any partisan response, the truth typically falls somewhere in the middle.

Perhaps instead of throwing money at a tax code and taxation system that is designed, as some argue, to leave “billions on the table,” the time is ripe to revamp the tax code, which has almost 10,000 sections and has been amended over 4,000 times just over the past decade.

There are so many problems with our present federal income tax system it’s hard to know where to start. The code is so voluminous and convoluted no one can know for sure how much they owe. So many people are breaking the law, most inadvertently, that enforcement is inevitably capricious and arbitrary. The computer tax prep industry shouldn’t exist at all—there should be a freely available online system provided by the federal government which is the only acceptable way of filing.

My preference would be to abolish the present federal income tax, replacing it with something like the “Fair Tax”, a sort of value-added tax prebated to ensure progressivity. We’re so wed to the income tax I can’t imagine something that sensible being adopted.

James E. Campbell has a very worthwhile post at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball on projections for the midterm elections based on a “seats in trouble” analysis. Here’s the summary:

— This article updates and applies the seats-in-trouble congressional election forecasting equations to the 2022 midterm elections.

— The goal is to use micro level (congressional district and state) competitiveness assessments in combination with their electoral history to statistically generate an accurate prediction of the election’s national outcome.

— The seats-in-trouble forecasts for the 2022 midterms are losses for the Democrats of 42 seats in the House of Representatives and 1 seat in the Senate.

That’s not good news for the Democrats but it isn’t apocalyptic, either.

Lars Erik Schönander and Geoffrey Cain express their worries about Chinese state-owned enterprises purchasing farmland in the United States in this Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Alarms went off in Washington when the Fufeng Group, a Chinese agricultural company, bought 300 acres of land and set up a milling plant last spring in Grand Forks, N.D. The plant is a 20-minute drive from an Air Force base that, according to North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, hosts a space mission that “will form the backbone of U.S. military communications across the globe.”

The deal shouldn’t have taken the federal government by surprise. U.S. Department of Agriculture data show that Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland leapt more than 20-fold in a decade, from $81 million in 2010 to $1.8 billion in 2020. Beijing hasn’t outlined a strategy, but large-scale state backing for these investments indicates there is one. In 2013 the government-owned Bank of China loaned $4 billion to Hong Kong-headquartered WH Group, the world’s largest pork producer, to buy Virginia’s Smithfield Foods. WH now controls much of the U.S. pork supply and revenue because of the deal.

concluding:

Congress should authorize the USDA to cut through byzantine ownership structures and find the true foreign owners of farmland. The recently introduced Farmland Security Act of 2022 would require the department to release all data on foreign investments in American agriculture. The agriculture secretary should be added to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which reviews flows of foreign money into sensitive businesses such as surveillance-camera equipment and semiconductors.

Afida is also overdue for a basic government audit that might reveal new data and improve disclosure practices. The last audit was in 1989. Major Chinese companies such as the Fufeng Group, which happen to buy up large plots of land near sensitive American military installations, should have to make their case or be shown the door.

I don’t think that foreign governments or state-owned enterprises should be able to purchase American land at all and foreign nationals and foreign-owned companies should only be able to purchase land to the extent that Americans or American companies can buy land in their countries. I’m referring to fee simple ownership. If only fee tail ownership is open to Americans in those countries, nationals of those countries should only be eligible for fee tail ownership in the United States. I don’t care whether the country is the Netherlands or China. The Agriculture Foreign Investment Disclosure Act allows a lot more than that.

In 2017 the Taiwanese company Foxconn entered into negotiations with the State of Wisconsin on a plant to be built outside Racine which, in its ultimate form, would include a $10 billion investment by Foxconn, substantial tax breaks given to Foxconn with waiving of environmental regulations by the state, and 13,000 jobs. There was a groundbreaking ceremony in 2018. In 2021 the project was “scaled back” to less than $1 billion in investments by Foxconn with fewer than 1,500 jobs to be created. To the best of my knowledge no construction has been done on the site which was eminent domained for the purpose. The state and county lost a substantial amount of revenue; people were forced out of their homes.

In his Washington Post column Henry Olsen crows:

Companies such as Panasonic and Intel seem to be tripping over themselves to announce that they will build new plants in the United States to manufacture car batteries and semiconductors. The recently passed Chips and Science Act and other government subsidies are a big reason for these decisions. That’s good news for national security and for American workers.

Semiconductors are the bread and butter of high technology. Made from incredibly thin silicon wafers, semiconductor chips carry electric charges to help power our phones, computers and cars. Without a steady supply of semiconductors, any advanced economy would come to a standstill.

Anything that valuable is crucial to a nation’s security. If a hostile nation obtained control over a large portion of chip factories, it could economically blackmail its foes, much as the Arab oil embargo in the mid-1970s wrought havoc on the global economy.

As with other crucial manufacturing capabilities, the United States has steadily outsourced semiconductor fabrication to plants in Asia over the past 30 years. Even though the semiconductor was invented in the United States, only about 11 percent of global production takes place here. Fully two-thirds occurs in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan — which are all threatened by China’s rise. Given that Communist China is trying to create its own semiconductor industry to dominate global production, it’s not hard to imagine a future in which Chinese power threatens our advanced economy.

That’s why the passage of the Chips bill was vital to our national security. It allocated $52 billion in government money to help semiconductor firms build plants in the United States, offsetting much of the cost disadvantage that had driven production away. Ten new chip foundries are already planned for the United States within the next three years, and many more will surely be announced in the coming months.

In general I make a practice of not getting too excited based on announcements or press releases, reserving my interest until I see what actually emerges. Maybe that’s because I hail from the “Show Me” state.

Shorter: don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

The message of this New York Times op-ed by Vanessa Veselka is summed up in its slug:

The world’s blood banks are filled with “donations” from America’s poor.

Is that really true? Consider this study:

Being a college graduate, being employed, being physically active, and never being a cigarette smoker were factors positively associated with blood donation.

which suggests that Ms. Veselka’s experience (high school dropout, living on the streets, selling her blood to survive) is atypical.

It is in fact true that blood and plasma are major U. S. exports but here are the major importers:

Unless Netherlands, Germany, and Italy are re-exporting the plasma the claims in the op-ed don’t seem to stand up to scrutiny.

I find the sale of human body parts which includes blood questionable. Furthermore, I find the practice of brokering human body parts even more questionable. I will, however, acknowledge that the practice has benefits, especially considering the reality that true donations may fall short of the need.

The United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth has died. She will be succeeded by her eldest son, Charles. The people of Britain, many of them for the first time in their lives, will have the occasion to say “God save the King!” This despite the majority no longer believing in God.

I am not much of a monarchist. Indeed, that is true of quite a number of Britons these days (38% these days, more among the young).

Now the fate of the monarchy is in Charles’s hands. Will he reign under his own name or will he assume another as king? It has been over a century since the United Kingdom has had a king under other than his given name but more than 330 since it has had a king named Charles.

Will he be the last king of the United Kingdom?

And how do you know?

I read just about everything I come across about the war and I honestly have no idea. Everything from “Russia has already lost” to “Russia’s victory is inevitable”, “Ukraine has begun a counter-offensive” to “Ukraine’s counter-offensive has already been defeated”.

The volume of propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation is so great I honestly don’t know how anyone can be confident in the outcome.