In a piece at The Atlantic Richard Alba (sociologist), Morris Levy (political scientist), and Dowell Myers (policy, planning, and demographics) underscore a point I have been making over the last twenty years, after Ruy Texeira and John Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority—that the notion of a “majority minority” America would run into a few potholes:

In recent years, demographers and pundits have latched on to the idea that, within a generation, the United States will inevitably become a majority-minority nation, with nonwhite people outnumbering white people. In the minds of many Americans, this ethno-racial transition betokens political, cultural, and social upheaval, because a white majority has dominated the nation since its founding. But our research on immigration, public opinion, and racial demography reveals something quite different: By softening and blurring racial and ethnic lines, diversity is bringing Americans together more than it is tearing the country apart.

The majority-minority narrative contributes to our national polarization. Its depiction of a society fractured in two, with one side rising while the other subsides, is inherently divisive because it implies winners and losers. It has bolstered white anxiety and resentment of supposedly ascendant minority groups, and has turned people against democratic institutions that many conservative white Americans and politicians consider complicit in illegitimate minority empowerment. At the extreme, it nurtures conspiratorial beliefs in a racist “replacement” theory, which holds that elites are working to replace white people with minority immigrants in a “stolen America.”

The narrative is also false. By rigidly splitting Americans into two groups, white versus nonwhite, it reinvents the discredited 19th-century “one-drop rule” and applies it to a 21st-century society in which the color line is more fluid than it has ever been.

The irony is, of course, that today it is the “anti-racists” who are promoting the “one-drop rule”. The reality of the situation can be illustrated from my own family’s history.

Back at the turn of the 20th century my father’s paternal grandmother objected to one of son’s French-Irish girlfriend on the grounds that she wasn’t German. She refused to allow their marriage. They married after she died. My paternal grandfather didn’t encounter the problem his younger brother did—my paternal grandmother was German. More German than he, in fact. On the other side of my family my mother’s uncle married a Mexican girl. Their children, my mother’s cousins, are an interesting mix—my maternal grandmother’s family was Irish and French. Those cousins are my contemporaries and I have never thought of them as anything but white.

The reality of today is that many if not most Hispanics consider themselves to be white and that intermarriage among people of different races and ethnicities will continue. Most of us in the U. S. are mutts. My ancestry is Swiss, Irish, French, and German; my wife’s is English, Scottish, Irish, and Albanese (it’s a long story). Increasingly, there will be Americans who add Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, etc., Chinese, Japanese, and Indian into the mix. Most blacks in the U. S. except in certain isolated pockets, e.g. the Gullahs in the Southeastern United States, are already mixed race. Will they continue to identify and be identified as black? My guess is both. I think that many of the people who proudly claim Native American ancestry would be surprised to learn that’s not actually true but they do have sub-Saharan black ancestry.

I think that the present claims of “systemic racism” are counter-productive. I’m not denying that racism exists and creates problems. But everybody has grievances, some grievances are more serious than others, and bundling them all up into one unactionable grievance is not particularly productive.

I hesitated about posting on this subject since it’s a bit out of my comfort zone. You are presumably aware that a recent “bug-finding” event found 238 security vulnerabilities in the Army’s systems. Brad D. Williams reports at Breaking Defense:

WASHINGTON: The third annual Hack the Army event uncovered 238 security vulnerabilities — 102 rated “high” or “critical” — in Army tech.

The bug bounty event, which began in January and ran for six weeks, invited military and civilian security researchers to find vulnerabilities within a limited time frame. This allows the Army to proactively fix the prospective cyber targets, ideally before a bad guy can exploit them.

For perspective, Hack the Pentagon found 138 unique, validated vulnerabilities in 2017, Hack The Army found 118 late fall, and Hack the Air Force found 207, according to a story Sydney did on the program.

“We cannot afford a ‘next time we will do better’ mentality. I strongly believe a proactive approach is critical, which means finding potential problems and addressing them before they are realized,” said the Defense Digital Service’s Maya Kuang, who participated.

This year’s event included 40 military and civilian participants. Eligible civilian security researchers received more than $150,000 in total bounty payouts.

The reason I was moved to remark on this is the several recent, highly-publicized ransomware incidents. There have been a number of suggestions of using Cyber Com to oppose these exploits.

Now, you might think that for legal and cultural reasons our military was well-positioned to protect itself against cyber-security threats. The discovery of so many vulnerabilities suggests that just isn’t the case.

What’s the issue? Lax discipline? Cyber-security just not a priority? They don’t have the capacity to deal with the situation? If any of those is the case it doesn’t exactly bode well for our military’s ability to protect the civilian sector against attack if they can’t even protect themselves. Consider physical analogies and you’ll see what I mean.

Yesterday I completed listening to the entire run of the old time radio program, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. When running errands in my car I listen to old radio programs, streamed from the Internet via my phone. Listening to the news or commentary has been too distressing for the last several years and listening to music doesn’t occupy my mind the way radio drama does. So, for example, when I drove to work five days a week I would listen to one episode on the way to work and another on the way home. Except for a few months in 2020 when I worked entirely from home I commuted a few days a week to work until February 2021 when I changed jobs. Now I work entirely remotely and it’s slowed down my radio listening progress.

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar began airing in 1949 and continued right until 1962. Its last episode aired on September 30, 1962, the second to last regularly scheduled radio drama to end production. Right afterwards the last episode of Suspense aired and that brought the curtain down on the Golden Age of Radio.

YTJD recounted the adventures of insurance investigator Johnny Dollar. He lived in Hartford, Connecticut. His cases took him all over the world. YTJD featured one of the cleverest devices in radio: a reading of Johnny’s expense report. That was one of the show’s tags: “The man with the action-packed expense account”.

Over the years eight actors voiced Johnny Dollar. They were in chronological order:

More than 800 episodes were produced of which about 500 are extant and publicly available. Most episodes are about a half hour long although in 1955 they adopted a somewhat different format: five 15 minute episodes a week which told a single story. For me that was the high point of the series. You could just pack more character development, atmosphere, and action into it.

I had never listened to any of the Mandel Kramer episodes until I determined to listen to the entire series. He was topnotch. If it hadn’t been for the great Bob Bailey he would’ve been the best Johnny Dollar to air. And Dick Powell? Nobody did hardboiled detective better than he, whether in the movies (Murder, My Sweet) or radio. If you’ve never listened to his radio series, Richard Diamond, you have a treat. The talent involved in that show was tremendous. Powell starred, Blake Edwards wrote most of the episodes, and the greatest radio actress of them all, Virginia Gregg, voiced Diamond’s girlfriend, Helen.

Speaking of immigration U. S. Customs and Border Protection has updated their statistics to include May 2021. The results are above.

To my eye that does not appear to support the hypothesis that March and April’s striking increase in “enforcement encounters”, as they call them, were just a transient blip or that June’s numbers had been timeshifted into March or April.

One possible interpretation of VP Harris’s remarks in Guatemala is that the Biden Administration has recognized that Candidate Biden’s comments during the campaign were interpreted by people in Central America as an invitation and now they need to counteract that.

There’s an old vaudeville wisecrack about if we had some ham we could make a ham and cheese sandwich if we had some cheese. That’s what I thought of when I read this post at RealClearPolicy by Juan Jose Daboub and Gonzalo Schwarz. They say the way to solve our problems with immigration from Central America is to invest in the economies of countries there:

Imagine bringing millions of jobs to the region by nearshoring or re-shoring jobs from China and other countries outside of the Americas to the Western Hemisphere. While this sounds daunting, the rewards would be immense for opportunity and job creation. The pandemic-induced slowdown in international logistics and production chains shined a glaring light on the over-reliance of the United States on Chinese manufacturing. Suddenly the thought of having logistics and production systems in Central America – much closer to home for the U.S. – goes from inconceivable to a winning proposition for everyone involved. Some might argue that it’s even a matter of U.S. national security to find more congenial international partners.

I agree with that as far as it goes but, sadly, it’s a lot tougher than it sounds. The reason these countries are in the shape they are is bad government and there really is no practical way to make an end-run around their governments. The strategy proposed by the authors is, I wish I could say surprisingly, to fund an endeavor of theirs:

To make these ideas actionable, an investment strategy would envision more private partnerships and collaboration among businesspeople in Central America and the U.S. One such example is the recently created ThinkHUGE initiative. (HUGE stands for Honduras, USA, Guatemala and El Salvador Business and Investment Council) This is a private-sector-led effort for impact investment that will create thousands of jobs in the region by fostering conditions for capitalizing on nearshoring opportunities in textiles, pharmaceuticals, and other industries, as well as investing in key infrastructure projects, including U.S. technology-based energy and telecommunications. ThinkHUGE envisions that small and medium enterprises in the United States run by Central American immigrants will also be encouraged to expand their markets and work with local businesspeople in Central America.

Now all they need to do is demonstrate how that money is just not going to disappear. What provisions do they foresee for oversight?

Who is the most important person in government right now? According to Dean Baker in this post at The American Prospect, it isn’t Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or anyone else in the executive branch. It isn’t Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or some committee chairperson or anyone else in the legislative branch. And isn’t Chief Justice Roberts or Stephen Breyer (although I think he’s a close second) or any other individual in the judicial branch of government. It’s Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell:

The story was that if too many people have jobs, then workers will have more bargaining power, and be able to get larger pay increases. These higher pay increases would get passed on in higher prices, which would lead workers to demand still higher wages, and we suddenly have a wage-price spiral like in the 1970s.

As Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell has broken sharply with this fixation on inflation. He has listened to the complaints that progressive Fed critics have been making for decades.

We have said that inflation is not always just around the corner. And when the Fed raises rates, it disproportionately hits those who are most disadvantaged in the labor market: Blacks, Hispanics, the disabled, workers with less education, and people with criminal records. We argued that the Fed needs to take seriously its legal commitment to full employment, not just its commitment to price stability.

Powell has explicitly embraced this logic. He has committed the Fed to keeping its key federal funds rate at zero until the economy approaches full employment. He sees the latter as being in the range of the 3.5 percent rate that we were seeing before the pandemic, not the 5.0 to 5.5 percent rates considered a floor by many economists just a few years ago.

I agree with him that far too frequently the Federal Reserve has stressed the “stable prices” flank of its dual mandate at the expense of its other mandate, low unemployment. Worse than that they certainly appear to be operating under the mistaken view that they are running the economy (something not in their empowering legislation) or that the prime purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure the DJIA goes up.

And where is the Fed in regulating banks and other parts of the financial sector? IMO they’re more in collusion with them than regulating them. Dr. Baker dismisses that as unimportant or at least a lot less important than full employment:

As far as financial regulation, it is important, as I have often said. But it is orders of magnitude less important than maintaining full employment. There is a myth about the cause of the Great Recession, that it was about the financial crisis, and not the collapse of the housing bubble. This myth was useful to Wall Street because it was their rationale for bailing out Citigroup, Goldman, and other behemoths who would have been sunk if we allowed the market to work its magic.

The claim was that the bank bailout was necessary to avoid a second Great Depression. I have often challenged proponents of this view, and in response have never gotten more than vigorous hand-waving, name-calling, and an occasional obscenity. The bailout prevented a once-in-a-century opportunity to eliminate a huge amount of bloat in the financial sector in one fell swoop.

I agree with that conclusion. I think that rather than bailing out Citigroup, Bank of America, et al. they should have been nationalized and split up. In 2008 they had a fully capitalized value of zero. Regulating banks isn’t the highest priority until it is and then it’s too late to minimize damage to innocent bystanders.

Present policies are incredibly perverse. State and local governments are slowly removing the impediments to the economy while the federal government is doing its level best to give people money to save (because that’s all they can do with it). Meanwhile the Fed is ensuring that savings aren’t worth anything. It’s not merely poorly aligned, it’s perverse.

In his latest Washington Post column George Will laments that today’s U. S. is incapable of “great building feats”:

Construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge took four years in the 1930s, but after a 1989 earthquake, when one-third of the Bay Bridge had to be replaced, the project took over two decades. A nation planning to quickly spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure should wonder why the repair proceeded so sluggishly — and why economists have found that the inflation-adjusted cost of building a mile of the interstate highway system tripled between the 1960s and 1980s.

The Claremont Institute’s William Voegeli considers this evidence of “activist government’s dysfunction” — government’s inability, or unwillingness, to do one thing at a time. Government cannot simply repair a bridge; it must do so while complying with an ever-thickening, sometimes immobilizing web of ever-multiplying environmental, labor, safety and other mandates. They also now include, as part of what Voegeli calls the Biden administration’s “shock-and-awe statism,” Washington’s obsession with “equity” — racial distributions of government goods and services.

Remember Barack Obama’s 2010 epiphany about the nonexistence of his promised “shovel-ready” projects? According to Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge in “Capitalism in America: A History” (2018), “Today bigger highway projects take a decade just to clear the various bureaucratic hurdles before workers can actually get to work.”

I think that’s what’s called in the trade an invidious comparison. For one thing it’s comparing apples and oranges. The federal government was only tangentially involved in the construction of the Bay Bridge. It wasn’t even a state project. It was a local project. It was financed by bonds approved by voters in San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, and Del Norte Counties. It’s a good example of a point I’ve made before: people are frequently willing to pay for the things they need and they themselves are the best judges of the things that they need.

As to whether the United States is capable of great building feats today I have one word for you: Starlink. That was largely paid for by funding provided by the FCC.

There is a fascinating analysis in the Wall Street Journal by Allysia Finley and Kate LaVoie on the effects of out-migration on states’ ability to tax:

New IRS data compiled by research outfit Wirepoints illustrate the flight from high- to low-tax states. The chart above shows the adjusted gross income (AGI) that states lost or gained from population migration in 2019 as a share of their total AGI. States in the Sun Belt and Mountain West generally gained income while those in the Northeast and Midwest lost income.

The image above may be too small for you to read. There is a larger available by clicking on the image. Now you may spy with you little eye that Illinois doesn’t appear in that chart at all. I turned to the original report from Wirepoints and it displayed pretty much what I expected:

Of course Illinois was dead last. It probably didn’t help that Illinois Gov. Pritzker was touting his graduated income tax for Illinois which Illinois’s citizens wisely rejected.

Keep in mind that these results are for 2019. I can only speculate what the comparable charts for 2020 would show for the biggest losers: California, New York, and Illinois. I’m going to take a flyer and suggest that it wasn’t good news.

Let’s return to the question I asked a few posts ago: given the weakness of progressive candidates, a Senate majority only by virtue a tie-breaking Vice President, and a very narrow House majority why has the Biden Administration lurched so much towards a progressive agenda? I think the answer is that they need the progressive wing of the Democratic Party if they’re to accomplish anything, they figure they can blame the Republicans for obstructionism, so they can escape blame for failure to get their agenda passed but not for being too timid. Time will tell if it’s a shrewd calculation.

I think they’re wrong about the sentiments of the American people and it’s a mistake. Blacks and Hispanics in particular are more focused on pocketbook issues and violence and crime in their neighborhoods than the ideological purity being demanded by a rather small percentage of the electorate.