I completely agree with Jacob Silverman’s observation at The New Republic, pithily captured in the piece’s title: “Low Wages and Crappy Jobs Gave Us the Labor ‘Shortage'”. Where I disagree with him is in his conclusion:

Americans don’t need undue government coercion to go back to work. They need good jobs, better wages (including a higher minimum wage), health care, childcare, and support for sick family members. They need government investment in infrastructure, strengthened unions, and better protections in case they get sick or disabled on the job. They need the kind of dignity and support that were all too illusory in the American workplace even before the pandemic.

because I think there’s a mismatch between his means and his stated ends. Each of his means has issues. Is a higher minimum wage more conducive to higher wages or to greater unemployment? Is our problem that government isn’t paying enough for health care or that it’s paying too much? Should the primary responsibility for childcare be on the government or the family? Where should the responsibility for supporting “sick family members” reside? Will the deadweight loss produced by “government investment in infrastructure” exceed the benefits? Is there a straight line relationship between strong unions and good jobs or higher wages or the reverse?

Keep in mind that the countries with the sort of “cradle to grave” welfare systems he apparently envisions tend to be much more ethnically and culturally homogeneous than the U. S. has ever been and even they have been abandoning them in recent years under the pressure of increasing immigration. Sweden is on the cusp of electing an anti-immigrant right wing government for the first time in a century.

And why in the world should we be eager to bring more people into the country to take “low wages and crappy jobs”?

Rather than subsidizing “low wages and crappy jobs” shouldn’t we be trying to create better jobs that pay higher wages? What means would accomplish that? I think it would require a rededication to primary and secondary production which at least to me suggests a very different government strategy.

In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Mark Mills makes a point I have made here from time to time:

The IEA assembled a large body of data about a central, and until now largely ignored, aspect of the energy transition: It requires mining industries and infrastructure that don’t exist. Wind, solar and battery technologies are built from an array of “energy transition minerals,” or ETMs, that must be mined and processed. The IEA finds that with a global energy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.

The world doesn’t have the capacity to meet such demand. As the IEA observes, albeit in cautious bureaucratese, there are no plans to fund and build the necessary mines and refineries. The supply of ETMs is entirely aspirational. And if it were pursued at the quantities dictated by the goals of the energy transition, the world would face daunting environmental, economic and social challenges, along with geopolitical risks.

The IEA stipulates up front one underlying fact that advocates of a transition never mention: Green-energy machines use far more critical minerals than conventional-energy machines do. “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired power plant,” the report says. “Since 2010, the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of renewables has risen.” That was merely to bring wind and solar to a 10% share of the world’s electricity.

If you genuinely intend to accomplish a goal, you’ve got to start thinking longitudinally and, importantly, logistically. Thinking tactically isn’t enough.

There are many reasons that going 100% to solar and wind power is impractical but something that’s rarely mentioned are the materials necessary to do it, the processes necessary to produce them, and the total lifetime costs involved. For the most part solar cells and blades for wind turbines aren’t recyclable and the disposal costs should be accounted for.

When all of the complexities are taken into consideration I think you’ll reach the conclusion I have which is that if you genuinely want to achieve the objective of greatly reducing or eliminating the use of all fossil fuels we’ll need to produce orders of magnitude more than we currently do to accomplish it. That means sources other than wind, solar, hydroelectric, coal, oil, and natural gas.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Christian Broda and Stanley Druckenmiller complain about the Fed’s announcement that is wouldn’t raise interest rates for years into the future:

The emergency conditions are behind us. Inflation is already at historical averages. Serious economists soundly rejected price controls 40 years ago. Yet the Fed regularly distorts the most important price of all—long-term interest rates. This behavior is risky, for both the economy at large and the Fed itself.

[…]

With its narrow focus on inflation expectations, the Fed seems to be fighting the last battle. Just because the Fed hasn’t faced big trade-offs in recent decades doesn’t mean trade-offs aren’t coming or that they no longer exist. Chairman Jerome Powell needs to recognize the likelihood of future political pressures on the Fed and stop enabling fiscal and market excesses. The long-term risks from asset bubbles and fiscal dominance dwarf the short-term risk of putting the brakes on a booming economy in 2022.

or, as the title of this post suggests, maybe the Fed governors aren’t as independent of political influence as they like to pretend they are.

I wanted to draw a post by John McWhorter to your attention. In it he analyzes and criticizes the term “systemic racism”. I recommend reading the post in full as it defines systemic racism, gives education as an example, and identifies the implications and limitations of the term. Here is a telling snippet:

Our racial “reckoning” could use a reckoning about the term systemic racism. It is often used with an implication, a resonance, a tacit assumption, that to question is unthinkable. Uttered by a certain kind of person, often with a hint of emphasis or an eyeroll, we are to assume that the argumentation behind it has been long accomplished; the heavy lifting was taken care of long ago and we can now just decide what we’re going to do about this “racism” so clearly in our faces.

The problem is that this heavy lifting has not occurred. This usage of systemic racism is more rhetorical bludgeon than a simple term of reference. For all of the pungent redolence of the word racism in general when uttered by a certain kind of person, complete with the inherent threat to whites that they are racists to have anything to say but Amen, we must learn to listen past this theatrical aspect of the word and think for ourselves.

My own view is that the term is a catch-all, meaning whatever the speaker wants it to mean at the time. It has the advantage of being a bitter criticism while absolving the speaker of any responsibility to act.

Mark Krikorian looks skeptically at the Biden Administration’s handling of what very nearly everybody agrees is a crisis on our border with Mexico in this post at RealClearPolicy:

But the White House realizes it has to do something to try to slow the flow. So the administration has settled on three initiatives it hopes will remove the border crisis from the headlines. None of them is likely to work, but they’re worth looking at in turn.

The first, immediate, response has been to try to get Mexico to do what the Biden administration is unwilling to do. The White House is sending some 2.5 million vaccine doses to Mexico in exchange for a promised crackdown on Central Americans headed north. (The denial of a quid pro quo is not to be taken seriously.)

Vice President Harris consulted with Mexico’s president last week about what can only be described as a bribe to get Mexico to, as the Washington Post blandly put it, “carry out immigration enforcement functions at a time when such measures are subject to frequent legal challenges in U.S. courts or politically unpalatable to Democrats.” Or, as immigration analyst Cris Ramon told the New York Times, “All the positive humanitarian policies are being done by the Biden administration, and then the Mexicans are left with the dirty work.”

But can outsourcing the protection of America’s borders to our southern neighbor actually work? President Trump famously got Mexican cooperation on border enforcement by threatening trade sanctions — a threat Mexican authorities took seriously because they rightly feared that Trump would follow through. But that cooperation worked to the degree it did because both U.S. policy and Mexico’s were pulling in the same direction. Mexico’s National Guard would make it hard to get past its own southern border with Guatemala, but if you did get past them, the American authorities would also turn you away.

Under Biden however, Mexican and American policies point in opposite directions, negating much of the effect of Mexican enforcement efforts. Biden is putting Mexico in the position of the Wal-Mart security guard tasked with controlling the crowds desperate to get in for the Black Friday deals.

So long as the administration’s actions send the message that migrants have a good chance of being released into the U.S. (and virtually no chance of ever being removed), migrants will devise ways around any Mexican interdiction effort.

He continues by considering the prospects for addressing the “root causes” of migration from Central America which he lists as “poverty, corruption, disorder, and ineffectual governance”. I’m a bit more cynical than that. I don’t think you can separate having been a Spanish colony from those ills and try as we might there’s nothing we can do about that. The third “prong” he considers is expediting the migration:

The final prong of the Biden administration’s plan to push the border crisis out of the news is to simply fly Central Americans straight to the U.S. in large enough numbers that people there will just wait their turn rather than try to sneak across the border.

This is a revival of what began under President Obama as the Central American Minors refugee/parole program in 2014 at the beginning of the border crisis that still plagues us. The hope was that this would provide Central Americans who had some sort of legal status in the U.S. an avenue to bring their children here without having to hire smugglers to cross the border.

But it failed to make a dent in the flow — a smaller flow than we face now, but rightly considered alarming nonetheless. The main reason was that it was designed for children and other relatives of people with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or some other non-green-card forms of provisional residence. That’s a problem because the overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. hiring smugglers to bring their “unaccompanied” “minor” relatives from Central America are themselves illegal aliens.

So even when the Obama administration expanded the CAM program in 2016 to cover adult sons and daughters back in Central America, and even adult “caregivers,” the number of people who qualified was still a drop in the bucket compared to the overall flow.

It doesn’t help that the highest unemployment in the U. S. is already in the sectors that previously had been most likely to employ these economic migrants.

I have multiple concerns about the Biden Administration’s feckless handling of the situation including I’m concerned that it may poison the well, i.e. allowing many low-skilled economic migrants with limited educations and command of English may sour Americans on admitting actual political refugees or immigrants we actually want to encourage to come here. I don’t think that the reality that we’re nearing or at the highest proportion of immigrant policy in the nation’s history right now is irrelevant. If there’s a maximum level of tolerance, it may provoke a reaction.

Let’s start out this morning with this piece by Zaid Jilani at Newsweek. In the piece Mr. Jilani reflects on why “anti-racism” is gaining such a hold on progressives. It isn’t because it’s politically effective:

What can be the harm in talking about how every universal policy especially benefits African Americans or Latinos?

That’s a question that Yale University researchers Josh Kalla and Micah English recently explored in a working paper that tested various types of messaging to promote progressive policies. “Political scientists have really been doing this type of research for decades and they’ve always shown that associating these policies with racial minorities makes people less likely to support them,” English told me in an interview. “But given the shift in racial attitudes in the past few years we thought that maybe the story would be different this time around.”

English and Kalla took six different policies—increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, upzoning housing, and decriminalizing marijuana and erasing prior convictions—and then asked people if they supported them. But they framed the issues differently to see which rationale was most compelling. To one group, they explicitly emphasized that the policy will benefit a specific racial group or promote racial equity (the “race” frame). To another they spoke about how a policy would promote economic justice or benefit a specific class group (the “class” frame). For a third group, they used both the race and class frame together. And for a final group, they used a neutral frame that explained the policy but made no mention of race or class.

What they found is that the class frame was generally more effective than either the race frame or the race plus class frame. “Despite observed increases in support for racial justice and Democratic elites’ use of race and class plus race frames in their public messaging, we find no evidence that Americans are persuaded by these policy frames,” they conclude in their paper.

Well, isn’t that what you’d expect given white racism and all? Uh, no:

It wasn’t just that some white voters were turned off by race-oriented messaging. For African Americans, the only minority group surveyed in high enough numbers to draw a conclusion, the race frame seemed to have no advantage over the class frame.

“Something really important that we found is that the race appeal and the class appeal are about just as effective for Black voters,” English told me, speculating that these voters tend to be more pragmatic in their political approach.

Then why is it so attractive?

Interestingly, English and Kalla did find one group that was slightly receptive to the race framing, but it might not be the one why you expect: It was white Democrats.

It’s worth wondering why progressives, particularly white progressives, have become so fixated on racial messaging if there’s so little evidence that it actually works to persuade voters to support their policies. Political parties spend mountains of money on survey and focus group work; English and Kalla’s paper may be the latest showing how ineffective racial messaging can be, but it certainly isn’t the first bit of research to demonstrate that finding.

My guess is that the progressive movement is simply captured by an upper-class elite for whom anti-racism is now an all-dominating philosophy. Sure, it may not persuade your average voter—white or Black or anyone else—to support your political party to frame every message in terms of race, but it probably does impress your social cohort.

Well, what difference does it make if a few rich white progressives are dragging everything through a racial lens?

And what this latest study shows is that this elite cohort that runs everything from the major news media to the universities to America’s political parties is deeply out of touch, not only with average Americans but perhaps its own political interests. Self-defeating messaging is self-defeating, even if it makes you feel good and impresses people who already agree with you.

A remark by Ayaan Hirsi Ali at UnHerd is relevant:

If we continue to slip down this path, the thirst for tribalism will be unquenchable. That’s why moderate liberals need to stand up to the destructive forces that are taking over the Democratic party, just as moderate conservatives need to resist the tribal impulse that often grows in reaction to the other side’s excesses.

In Somalia, we failed to do this. In America it is imperative that we succeed.

as is a wisecrack attributed to Benjamin Franklin on the Signing of the Declaration of Independence:

We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Emphasizing our differences and grievances is no way to encourage us to “hang together”. But, apparently, encouraging us to hate each other is a source of social cred for some.

I was terribly disappointed by this article by Arthur Delaney and Dave Jamieson at the Huffington Post. It makes some of the same arguments I have about why employers aren’t able to find employees:

While some employers may be struggling to hire for one reason or another right now, economists say generous unemployment benefits are not the cause.

If demand for workers were exceeding supply, then the price of labor would be shooting up. But as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said last week, overall wage growth hasn’t increased. “We don’t see wages moving up yet, and presumably we would see that in a really tight labor market,” Powell said at a press conference. “And we may well start to see that.”

It’s terribly long on testimony, too frequently by interested parties, and too short on actual empirical evidence.

I think the most likely explanation is that it’s multi-factorial with too-generous unemployment benefits, breakdown in hiring networks (something mentioned in the article but not substantiated other than by testimony), skills mismatch, mismatches between where the unemployed people live and where the jobs are, pay, COVID-19 risk, and who knows how many other factors all playing a part. It would be nice to be able to evaluate their relative roles.

Speaking of the risk that I mentioned in the previous post David M. Shribman does a pretty good job of stating that risk in his latest column in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette:

Is that what the majority of Democrats want? Is that what the swing voters who tipped the election against Mr. Trump expected?

What both groups principally wanted was to assure that Mr. Trump wasn’t re-elected. Some also voted for Mr. Biden because he was a soothing figure, or because he had enormous experience in contrast with the perceived ineptitude of the Trump team, or because he was perceived as being a moderate.

Mr. Biden’s effort to appease the progressive wing of his party — his apparent belief that he must — has the danger of alienating the very people who tipped the election away from Mr. Trump.

But that very effort also may reflect a fundamental change in the views of Democrats, a conviction that this is not a time for governmental retrenchment, but a time to address vital questions — about race, wealth distribution, the environment, the way America views the family, education and even infrastructure — that for decades have been overlooked, or papered over.

I don’t have my ear to the ground as much as I used to but I question whether the positions being staked out represent the “majority of Democrats” so much as those of the most progressive 30% of Democrats. Indeed, I think that when you look beyond Trump to Congressional districts, Senate seats, state legislatures, and referenda are all evidence that supports that view. Despite Biden’s carrying Illinois by 17 points in the 2020 election (the same margin of victory as in 2012 and 2016 but substantially smaller than in 2008), Illinoisans rejected J. B. Pritzker’s progressive income tax by a substantial margin as well.

I found this post by David Goldman at Law & Liberty interesting. Here are some snippets:

The flood of federal spending has had a number of dangerous effects already:

1. The US trade deficit in goods as of February 2021 reached an annualized rate of more than $1 trillion a year, an all-time record. China’s exports to the US over the 12 months ending in February also reached an all-time record. Federal stimulus created demand that US productive facilities could not meet, and produced a massive import boom.
2. Input prices to US manufacturers in February rose at the fastest rate since 1973, according to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s survey. And the gap between input prices and finished goods prices rose at the fastest rate since 2009. (See Figure 3.)
3. The Producer Price Index for final demand rose at an annualized 11% rate during the first quarter. The Consumer Price Index shows year-on-year growth of only 1.7%, but that reflects dodgy measurements (for example, the price shelter, which comprises a third of the index, supposedly rose just 1.5% over the year, although home prices rose by 10%).

and

The Federal Reserve has kept short-term interest rates low by monetizing debt, but long-term Treasury yields have risen by more than a percentage point since July. Markets know that what can’t go on forever, won’t. At some point, private holders of Treasury debt will liquidate their holdings—as foreigners have begun to do—and rates will rise sharply. (See Figure 2.) For every percentage point increase in the cost of financing federal debt, the US Treasury will have to pay an additional quarter-trillion dollars in interest. The United States well may find itself in the position of Italy in 2018, but without the rich members of the European Union to bail it out.

The graph at the top of this post was sampled from that post. When you look at it closely you will see a clear inflection point in December 2017. My hypothesis is that the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 in that month is not a coincidence.

I would add that there’s a difference between a commitment to run a trillion dollar deficit and a commitment to run a $5 trillion dollar deficit. The latter is worse. In a non-linear world I can tell you if it’s 5% worse, 500% worse, or 250,000 times worse but it’s worse. The risks of that could be mitigated with more narrowly tailored legislation but I honestly can’t see that happening as long as the only risks the House is interested in mitigating are the risks of contracting COVID-19 and the risk of not being re-elected.