We’ve been watching the coverage of the fires in Los Angeles. My heart goes out to those who’ve lost their homes and everything they own. I suspect that what’s unfolding is the greatest disaster in the city’s history.

There will be plenty of time for blame and recriminations later.

KTLA’s coverage has been excellent, it can be accessed via the Internet, and there’s a Roku app for it.

If anybody wonders why I keep harping on government corruption, keep in mind that I live in Chicago in the state of Illinois. Since 1960 Illinois has had 11 governors, six Democrats and five Republicans. Of those one Republican (20%) and three Democrats (a whopping 50%) have been convicted of charges relating to corruption. As I speak the longest-service speaker of a state legislature (and, coincidentally, chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party) is one trial for corruption. I doubt that anybody doubts that he’s corrupt but I have no idea whether he’ll be convicted or not.

Illinois Policy provides a rundown of corruption in Illinois.

And that’s just the stuff that’s against the law. Practices may be corrupt without being against the law. For example, present Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is on tape discussing trading for a Senate seat with then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich. He didn’t report the conversation to the authorities. That’s not against the law but it is corrupt. Public employees unions contributing to political campaigns is a corrupt practice. “Pay-for-play” even if there is no quid pro quo is a corrupt practice. I could go on practically indefinitely.

Here’s IP’s conclusion:

Government corruption cost Illinoisans $550 million in lost economic activity every year, with a $9.9 billion total loss from 2000 to 2017. Chicago is even worse.

Chicago was ranked as the most corrupt metropolitan area in America for a fourth consecutive year in 2023. It led the nation with an average 41 corruption convictions per year from 1976 to 2021.

Whether in treasure or trust, corruption costs Illinois. Vigorous federal prosecution can help curb it, but not much will change until state leaders get serious about ethics reforms.

It’s not just ethics reforms. Failing to provide the necessary contributions to public employee pension funds is a corrupt practice.

While we’re on the subject what do you think the incoming Trump Administration and Congress will do about immigration? My guess is that other than half-hearted attempts at building the wall that Mr. Trump promised back in 2016, not much.

I think the obvious measures like universal mandatory E-Verify will be unpalatable to too many Republicans and doing house-to-house sweeps will be a bridge too far, especially without the cooperation of local officials which will not be forthcoming.

At the Wall Street Journal Jeremy Neufeld provides what strikes me as prudent advice. Don’t eliminate H-1B visas and don’t leave them as-is. Reform them.

A civil war has erupted among Donald Trump’s supporters over the H-1B program, America’s primary visa for skilled workers. Does putting “America First” mean ending the program, as Steve Bannon believes, or supporting it, as Elon Musk and Mr. Trump argue?

The debate stems from a fundamental flaw in the H-1B program: A randomized lottery is used to select which applications are reviewed. In effect this means the lottery determines who gets a visa.

Awarding visas by chance means that while the program can bring in world-class talent, including Mr. Musk, it also brings in thousands of middling workers. They compete with citizens for jobs and contribute less meaningfully to productivity and innovation. As constructed, then, the lottery doesn’t serve American interests and needs to be replaced.

The H-1B program is supposed to be reserved for workers in occupations requiring specialized knowledge, but that can include anything from biochemists earning hundreds of thousands to acupuncturists making less than the median household. This means that the country’s flagship skilled immigration program is seriously underdelivering, wasting scarce slots on low-paying jobs. Many are going to basic information-technology workers.

The problem isn’t the pool of talent; it’s how we choose from it. There are nearly four times as many H-1B applications every year as available slots. This disparity is worsened by companies that flood the system with applications for candidates meeting the bare minimum requirements for an H-1B. Companies that need top talent get crowded out. In 2022, 35% of all new H-1Bs went to companies dependent on them.

Here’s his proposal:

A more straightforward ranking by salary regardless of occupation would allow us to prioritize the sectors most likely to contribute to innovation. These rankings could also be adjusted by age to ensure we are retaining bright professionals at the beginning of their careers. A 24-year-old making $150,000 is generally preferable to a 63-year-old making $160,000.

These reforms would increase the average H-1B wage by 41%. This would translate into a $1.1 trillion boost to America’s gross domestic product over 10 years—nearly twice the effect of the 2020 plan. In other words, without increasing the number of slots, we could nearly double the value of the H-1B program.

I would add that IMO the biggest gap in the H-1B visa system is enforcement. Disney’s abuse of the system ten years ago was far from the only example of enormous abuse of the system.

The H-1B visa system was not intended to provide entry-level employees for big IT and financial firms but all to frequently that is what is happening. As Mr. Neufeld notes it is for “occupations requiring specialized knowledge”.

I wanted to bring this article at Washington Monthly to your attention. In it ten pundits each propose an idea to revitalize the Democrats’ outreach to the “working class”. Here are the ten ideas:

1. Impose price restrictions on healthcare to constrain prices to those paid by Medicare.
2. Constrain illegal immigration via employment (basically, E-Verify)
3. Provide more funding for institutions of higher education that graduate higher percentages of minority students.
4. Provide more benefits for the self-employed.
5. Re-regulate airlines, rail, and trucking to improve fairness.
6. Increase the number of federal employees and shrink the number of contractors.
7. Free college for the working class.
8. Block the involvement of big corporations in elder and child care.
9. Provide funding to supplement public schooling with tutoring.
10. Reorganize the administrative state.

My reactions to those proposals ranges from conditional support to extreme skepticism. The first proposal reminded of the very first lecture in Econ 101 in which the professor said “We don’t know how to create prosperity. We do know how to produce shortages.”

I also think that the emphasis on higher education is misplaced. In the countries with the highest percentages of college grads (Canada and Russia) just over half the population has college degrees. I doubt that can be improved on much. What about the other half of the population? I think the most effective way to help the “working class” is to ensure that they are able to work. In the United States that means a combination of reindustrialization and reducing immigration. Given the degree to which other countries subsidize their exports, restricting imports may be needed as well.

Something else I found mildly amusing was the brouhaha over the Surgeon-General’s remarks on alcohol consumption. Sarah D. Wire reports at USA Today:

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s new Advisory on Alcohol and Cancer Risk outlining a direct link between drinking alcohol and increased risk of developing seven types of cancer was released Friday amid a review of federal guidelines for alcohol consumption.

The move drew praise from Dr. Michael B. Siegel, professor of public health and community medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, who said it is likely not a coincidence Murthy’s advisory came as the fight over how much alcohol the U.S. should deem safe as part of a healthy diet is being debated.

The secretaries of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are conducting an every-five-year review of dietary guidelines, including for alcohol consumption, which is due to be released later this year. With just over two weeks left before the Biden administration ends, this could be one of Murthy’s last chances to influence the outcome. Murthy didn’t directly call for changing the dietary guidelines in his advisory, however.

“My sense is that he probably got fed up, and he basically has had enough of the alcohol industry influence, and is basically just saying, that’s it. We’re gonna have science decide this, not politics. So he came out with this definitive statement, unequivocally saying that alcohol is a carcinogen and that moderate drinking is a risk factor for cancer,” Siegel said.

The dietary guidelines provide advice on what Americans should eat and drink to meet nutrition needs, promote health, and prevent disease. They are used by doctors to suggest lifestyle changes and by the federal government to determine how food assistance can be spent.

That was followed by a call to place warning labels on all alcoholic beverage containers, something the industry, obviously enough, vehemently opposes.

Why amusing? Anyone who’s read How to Lie with Statistics should have the same reaction. I’d be willing to wager that the same logic as is being used about alcoholic beverages could be applied to placing warning labels on the offices of every physician in the country. I would be willing to wager that the morbidity and mortality due to medical error exceeds that due to light alcohol consumption by a significant margin. I am agnostic on the risks of moderate alcohol consumption.

Furthermore, I would claim that an effective ban on all food and drink would reduce morbidity and mortality to zero. We’d all die of thirst and/or starvation.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune, cited here via Yahoo, have some New Years Resolutions for Illinois Gov. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Johnson, and the Chicago Teachers Union. I will only quote their advice to the CTU:

Back off; read the room.

I think they’re whistling past a graveyard. Neither Pritzker nor Johnson need to worry about standing for re-election in the near future and, as long as their creature, Mayor Johnson, remains in line the CTU has nothing to worry about.

There is something of a kerfuffle over political cartoonist Ann Telnaes’s resignation from the Washington Post. Here’s her account:

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.

While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.

Her post includes the cartoon in question. David Shipley, the editor who killed the cartoon, saw it differently. He says he killed it because it was boring and repetitive.

My bet would be that, if the cartoon had not included a caricature of Jeff Bezos, the cartoon would not have been killed, the message being don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Back in high school you might have been taught that Galileo was imprisoned because he taught that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around as the Church taught but that’s not exactly what happened. What actually happened was that Galileo wrote a book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The book included a character lampooning the present pope, Urban VIII, as a fool supporting the geocentric model. Urban had earlier expressed openness on the subject as long as Galileo steered clear of biblical interpretation but being made a fool of by his pal Galileo was a bridge too far. So Galileo was imprisoned.

Once again the moral is don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

The most astonishing thing I heard on the “talking heads” programs yesterday was a reaction any Congressional move to secure the border to the effect that Democrats should oppose securing the border other than in the context of “comprehensive immigration reform”. I was reminded of nothing so much as Marechal Foch’s famous quote: “My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, excellent situation, I am attacking.”

I say “astonishing” because the individual has, apparently, not been paying attention. I’ll just use Chicago as an example. For the first time in decades the Republican presidential candidate carried one of Chicago’s wards in the presidential election. The wards that should be Mayor Johnson’s base of support are in an uproar over the hundreds of millions the city has spent on migrants. The mayor’s approval rating has plummeted to the mid-teens.