In his New York Times column on how the United States is a racist country, Charles Blow has a throwaway line—he claims that our medical system is presently anti-black. He produces no evidence or even anecdotes. That’s what a “throwaway line” is. It’s delivered in passing without actually dwelling on it. Is our medical system anti-black? I’d genuinely like to know.

One of the things in the column with which I agree is his invocation of Sam Clemens’s famous quip: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” The word I think he’s looking for is “was”. The United States was a racist country.

Today many people still live with the consequences of that racism. There isn’t much that can be done about it without more injustices which is not a step in the right direction.

I didn’t want to let this piece by Neil Irwin in the New York Times, in which he speculates on how the post-COVID economy will differ from the pre-COVID economy, pass without comment. This part is fair enough:

The economy is recovering rapidly, and is on track to reach the levels of overall G.D.P. that would have been expected before anyone had heard of Covid-19. But that masks some extreme shifts in composition of what the United States is producing. That matters both for the businesses on the losing end of those shifts and for their workers, who may need to find their way into the growing sectors.

but this is the part about which I wanted to comment:

But as the extreme spike in first-quarter numbers reflects, there has been a huge reallocation of economic activity toward durable goods. Spending on cars and trucks is 15.1 percent higher than it would have been on the 2019 trajectory; spending on furnishings and durable household equipment is 16.6 percent higher; and spending on recreational goods is a whopping 26 percent higher.

Altogether, durable goods spending is running $348.5 billion higher annually than it would have been in that alternate universe, as Americans have spent their stimulus checks and unused travel money on physical items.

I think there are multiple things going on. First, for nearly a year people haven’t been able to buy larger ticket items. They tend to be the sort of things that people go to stores to look at and consider before buying. But stores have been closed, some permanently, supply chains disrupted, and people have put off buying them until they had more confidence in what was going on.

And, rather clearly, the main effect of the “stimulus packages” has not been to stimulate the economy but to encourage savings:

Current savings translates into future spending and, as the old GE ad used to say, the future is now. That’s what “pent-up demand” means. I’m actually a bit surprised that I would need to explain it.

But one of the factors is that people have been spending more time at home and actually using the furniture, appliances, and other things that fall under the category of “durable goods” and they’ve been wearing out. Things expected to last a lifetime or at least for a decade or so are not standing up to daily use. Everything’s a consumable nowadays.

I’m having a bit of difficulty in reading what is going on in Iran right now. Consider this report from Deutsche-Welle:

In an interview conducted in the context of an oral history project and leaked to international media, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reveals deep rifts in Iran’s leadership. Hesamoddin Ashena, an aide to President Hassan Rouhani, who oversaw the oral history project, to document the administration’s work, was fired on Thursday.

In the recording, which was published by two Persian-language media outlets based in London, Zarif is heard criticizing Iran’s political system and taking aim at the Revolutionary Guard, which he accuses of constantly interfering in the Foreign Ministry’s affairs.

Zarif says the state security organization is undermining his work. He also lashes out against General Qassem Soleimani, who commanded the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force until his assassination by US airstrike near Baghdad’s airport in January 2020.

Who leaked it, what are their motives, and what does it all mean? Is it

• anti-Western
• anti-Russian
• anti-IRG

or is it just jockeying for power prior to elections? It could be just a response to stress. Iran is under a lot of it right now.

Unlike some I don’t think that Iran and Russia are natural allies. Quite the opposite if anything. And I actually have no idea how Iran’s leaders plan to reconcile their increasingly cozy relationship with China, China’s treatment of its Uyghur people, and Iran’s vying for leadership within the Islamic world.

Similarly with Saudi Arabia. Other than declining U. S. influence in the region what does Iran and Saudi Arabia cozying up portend? It makes me feel as though something bad were about to happen. Much the way a friendly meeting between the Gambino and Lucchese families would.

The editors at Bloomberg are nervous about the Biden Administration’s agenda, dubbing it “ambitious but risky:

Biden’s intentions are admirable. He’s right to prioritize opportunity for the poor and disadvantaged — a consistent theme. He’s also right to match long-term spending increases with plans to raise taxes, because most of these outlays, however desirable, won’t pay for themselves. And it makes sense, as Biden proposes, to target those best able to afford it, hence pushing back against the trend of worsening economic inequality. In particular, he proposes roughly doubling the top rate of tax on capital gains and dividends to 43.4% (including the 3.8% Medicare tax introduced by President Barack Obama).

These goals are worthy — but Biden’s blizzard of proposals nonetheless gives cause for concern.

Spending on such a scale without waste is a bigger challenge than the president appears to think. And when it comes to taxes, the promise that the richest 0.3% will pay for everything is implausible bordering on dishonest. The danger is that the gains for the intended beneficiaries will be less than hoped, and the substantial cost won’t in the end be confined to a sliver of people at the top.

Value for money in public spending demands minute attention to detail. Promises to spend half a trillion here and half a trillion there suggest the outlay is itself the purpose — the bigger, the better — when the goal ought to be what the spending will buy, preferably at least cost. It’s worth noting that many aspects of Biden’s plans are actually expensive by design, for instance requiring federal contractors to pay higher-than-market wages, strengthening the bargaining power of organized labor, and raising new import barriers.

Done right, spending on infrastructure can boost private investment and growth; done wrong, it builds bridges to nowhere. Universal access to broadband internet is eminently desirable; it might be achieved economically and efficiently, or at inordinate cost. Two years of tuition-free community college could mean expanded training in skills demanded by employers, hence higher incomes and faster growth; or it could cause delayed entry into the labor force with loss of wages and no offsetting benefit. With so many American schools failing their students, fixing K-12 education is a more compelling priority.

In all these areas, management is everything. “Think of a number and double it” isn’t good fiscal policy.

What they’re saying should sound familiar because it’s very closely aligned with what I’ve been saying around here. I don’t have an enormous amount to add to their analysis. The private sector seems to be taking care of universal access to broadband already, at least if Elon Musk’s StarLink means anything. Maybe he’s counting on the federal government’s underwriting the program. It would be typical of him.

Does it really makes sense to pay additional subsidies to higher education when we aren’t creating enough jobs that require college educations as it is? And if it does make sense doesn’t a narrowly tailored program focused on needed skills and available jobs make more sense?

You can raise marginal rates but that doesn’t ensure you’ll raise additional income.

Finally, I think it’s better to pick one good thing and do it very well than to use a scattershot approach with no real intention of seeing your plans through to the end in the hopes that something will actually work. Maybe it’s just me.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal chortle over Illinois and New York Democrats scrambling to retract their earlier pledges about gerrymandering:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker campaigned in 2018 against partisan gerrymandering, saying he would “pledge to veto” any 2022 map drawn by the state Legislature. He insisted on “an independent commission to handle creating a new legislative map.” Last month Republicans in the Legislature proposed to create a redistricting commission appointed by the state’s Supreme Court.

But as the partisan pens meet paper, Gov. Pritzker now says he’ll be satisfied with a map drawn by his legislative allies. In a recent press conference he walked back his veto pledge and scored Republicans for objecting to Democratic-controlled redistricting. “I hope the Republicans will choose to work with Democrats on the map. Right now it looks like they’re just saying no,” he said.

Democrats control more than 60% of seats in one Illinois legislative chamber and nearly 70% in the other. They occupy 13 of 18 seats in its federal House delegation. The Democratic-controlled redistricting will naturally seek to preserve those state-level majorities and ensure that the House district lost to the new Census apportionment is majority-GOP.

Campaign promises against gerrymandering don’t mean much when a state government is under one-party control. In New York, Democrats are hard at work neutering the bipartisan commission set up in 2014 to limit partisan manipulations of the electoral map.

Democrats in Albany first tried to withhold funding from the commission, which is composed of four Democrats, four Republicans and two independents. Now it’s placed an opaque constitutional amendment on the ballot this November designed to tilt the balance of power on the commission ahead of its deadline to submit a map in January.

The amendment would eliminate the requirement that the commission’s co-directors have support from commissioners appointed by the minority party, and weaken bipartisan vote requirements for the commission to send a map to the Legislature. It would also eliminate the supermajority requirement for the Democratic-controlled Legislature to approve any map, further boxing out the GOP.

These changes to the delicate compromise that made the “independent” commission politically palatable increase the chance that it will fail to vote on a map at all. If that happens, Albany Democrats would have free rein to carve up districts as they please. Democrats are looking to expand their 19 to 8 majority in the Empire State House delegation.

None of this should be surprising to observers of the gerrymandering debate. Both parties try to exploit their dominance in states to give their candidates an edge. The special cynicism comes from those who claim to be high-minded in supporting an “independent” commission that delivers similar partisan results. Ditto for the media who wink at such shenanigans.

The reality is that whichever party controls the state legislature will redraw its districts following reapportionment to give advantages to their incumbents and impose disadvantages on the opposition party and upstarts.

No reference to gerrymandering in Illinois can really be complete without a tip of the hat to the Illinois Fourth Congressional District:

As you can see in some places it’s just a few feet wide. It was drawn that way to ensure that Chicago would elect at least one Hispanic representative and that was the only way the map could be drawn to unite enough Hispanic voters in, obviously, two different neighborhoods to ensure that outcome. But that was a long time ago and it’s obsolete. It needs to go.

My own home district, the Illinois Fifth, is gerrymandered, too, mostly to ensure that the seat remains safely in regular Democratic hands. Without such gyrations it might be a swing district in one form or another.

I found this report from Reuters interesting:

Pfizer Inc’s shipment of COVID-19 vaccine to Mexico this week includes doses made in its U.S. plant, the first of what are expected to be ongoing exports of its shots from the United States, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday.

The vaccine shipment, produced at Pfizer’s Kalamazoo, Michigan plant, marks the first time the drugmaker has delivered abroad from U.S facilities after a Trump-era restriction on dose exports expired at the end of March, the source said.

The U.S. government has been under mounting pressure in recent weeks to provide surplus vaccines to other nations desperately in need as it makes swift progress vaccinating its own residents. Many countries where the virus is still rampant are struggling to acquire vaccine supplies to help tame the pandemic.

I think this is a good move and, indeed, it should have been started some time ago. I would support shipping vaccine to India as well.

At this point many are asking why Pfizer hasn’t licensed Indian manufacturers to start producing its vaccines themselves? some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical producers are in India. They certainly have the capacity. The answer is pretty simple. India, along with China, are the world’s heavyweight champions of pharmaceutical patent violation. Give Indian or Chinese pharmaceutical producers you processes and pretty soon you’ll find yourself in competition with them on your own inventions.

My point in mentioning this is not to criticize either India or China but to point out that practices have consequences and that includes intellectual property piracy. If you can’t be trusted, people won’t trust you. Who could possibly have known?

In a piece at the National Post Matt Taibbi sardonically lauds the “Congressional Democrats’ heroic fight to save the rich”:

Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, made an inspired plea recently. The Harvard man and Alpha Epsilon Pi brother is a member of the so-called “SALT caucus,” a group of congressfolk threatening to hold up Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill if it doesn’t include a full repeal of a Donald Trump-imposed $10,000 cap on deductions of state and local taxes.

“It is high time that Congress reinstates the state and local tax deduction, so we can get more dollars back into the pockets of so many struggling families,” intoned Gottheimer, one of 32 members of the SALT caucus, which includes 8 Republicans.

observing:

However, the SALT cap didn’t so much go after “Democrats” as “affluent Democrats.” It only applied to people who itemize their taxes, which meant the 90% of Americans who take the standard deduction were unaffected. The deduction raised over $70 billion in just the first year, and roughly 56% of that money came just from the top 1% of taxpayers, living in a few states in particular.

and concluding:

After the midterms in 2018, former CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider said the Democrats were “becoming a party dominated by educated, upper-middle-class, liberal whites,” analysis that was borne out in 2020, when gains among that exact demographic helped Democrats win back the White House from Trump. It would be surprising if they didn’t develop economic policies to match, and the “SALT caucus” is a big step in that direction.

I’ll take Mr. Taibbi’s word for the motivation for the limit on state and local tax deductions—to poke a stick in the collective eye of Democrats, New York Democrats in particular. I think that the cap on state and local tax deductions is good policy even though it makes me pay more in tax than would otherwise be the case. I think that all deductions from personal income should be capped and that the cap on income eligible for payroll tax should be removed or at least raised. Without such caps our federal taxes are mildly progressive; with them they become more so.

Policies need to be evaluated along at least three axes rather than just one. Whether something is supported by the Republcian/Democratic leadership is a wholly inadequate standard for evaluating policy. I try to consider policies along three axes:

• Is it good policy?
• Are the means just, legal, and effective?
• Are the motives for the policy good?

and it is rare indeed for policies to be purely good or bad, effective or ineffectual, well or badly motivated. The world and people are more complicated than that. And beware unwanted and unforeseen secondary effects.

More simply the best policies are good, effective, and properly intentioned while the worst are bad, unjust or illegal, and imposed with bad intentions. Most policies are somewhere in between. Good policies that are just, legal, and effective, but are imposed through bad motives fall somewhere in between as do policies that are good, not particularly effective, but imposed through good motives or policies that are good, mildly effective, but imposed with bad motives.

Good policies are hard. If they were not we’d have more of them.

Speaking of cost-benefit analysis that ignores the costs, the editors of the Washington Post lay out their case for increasing immigration:

THE 2020 CENSUS offers a powerful argument for immigration. The United States in the past 10 years saw the slowest population growth rate in eight decades, owing both to plummeting fertility and dwindling immigration. Demographic stagnation, and the resulting possibility of anemic economic growth, threaten American vitality.

The census numbers give the lie, again, to the idea that this country is “full,” as President Donald Trump said, by way of justifying his assault on legal and illegal immigration, or that it has somehow reached the limits of its absorptive capacity. In fact, without robust population growth, and a steady supply of working-age strivers, there is no prospect of repairing the fraying social safety net that supports an aging population of retired Americans.

Simply, lagging births and slowing immigration mean fewer workers, less production and the specter of languid economic growth, or none.

and they point to Japan:

Those skeptical at the proposition that immigration is a bulwark against falling birthrates should mull the counterexample of Japan, where a dwindling population has contributed to a listless average annual gross domestic product growth of 1.3 percent in the decade ending in 2019. (The U.S. average over the same period was nearly 2.3 percent.) Faced with a critical labor shortage, Japan, traditionally resistant to immigrants, finally enacted a measure in 2018 to expand the number of semiskilled workers it admits each year.

which conveniently ignores quite a number of things about Japan. For example, even though Japan’s population is declining its per capita GDP is rising:

Japan does not have income inequality anything like we are seeing in the U. S. and the top 1% are not capturing most of the increases in income. Per capita spending on education and health care in Japan are substantially lower than in the U. S. as well.

Rather than being a cautionary tale Japan is the future to which we should aspire.

Additionally, there is scant evidence that the U. S. is suffering from a “critical labor shortage”. If it were real wages for semi-skilled workers would be rising much faster than they are. Indeed, the problem in the U. S. is, as Jared Bernstein pointed out that every time anybody’s wages start to increase the “immigration spigot is turned on”. Keep in mind Joschke Fischer’s observation from Germany: “We wanted workers; we got people.”

In the U. S. it makes some sense to bring in workers with specialized and in-demand skills whose taxes paid will exceed the cost of educating their children and providing them with all of the services we presently do, e.g. safety, sanitation, transportation, etc. We cannot produce economic growth by importing workers on whom we will spend more than they can conceivably add to the bottom line which, sadly, characterizes most of the migrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador who enter illegally via our southern border.

In her most recent Washington Post column Megan McArdle laments that President Biden’s proposals amount to politics without budgets:

If I have to pay for some new government program, I care a lot about whether it will be worth the money. If someone else is paying, it has to meet only the bare-minimum criteria of “sounds vaguely nice.” Which is perhaps why so much of President Biden’s address to Congress sounded more like a half-baked Democratic wish list than a coherent policy agenda.

The most striking moment was probably this one: “The Defense Department has an agency called DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . . . to develop breakthroughs that enhance our national security. . . . It’s led to everything from the discovery of the Internet to GPS and so much more. . . . The National Institutes of Health, the NIH, I believe should create a similar Advanced Research Projects Agency for health.” That agency would have one purpose: “to develop breakthroughs to prevent, detect and treat diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes and cancer.”

“Let’s end cancer as we know it,” Biden added. “It’s within our power.”

Why was this so striking? For one thing, it has been almost 50 years since President Richard M. Nixon initiated America’s “war on cancer.” Since then, the National Cancer Institute has spent at least $100 billion on research and treatment. Though we’re certainly closer than we were in 1971, cancer remains uncured. And while I’ve spoken to a lot of cancer experts who are hearteningly hopeful, none suggests a cure is a sure thing so long as we spend enough money.

Biden’s assertion that all we need is DARPA for cancer encapsulates his administration’s style — as well as its contrast with the style of our last Democratic administration.

The National Cancer Institute is doing great work on innovative treatments, notably the immunotherapies that are already revolutionizing cancer care. If the administration thinks there are gaps in the institute’s research program, by all means identify and fund them. But what in tarnation does DARPA for cancer add that NCI won’t?

concluding:

The less constrained Biden administration, by contrast, seems willing to float anything that promises any benefit to anyone, running as far down the Democratic wish list as bond markets or voters will tolerate. We’re barely having an argument about whether this spending is worth what it costs (and, if it is, why can’t we just ask taxpayers to pay for it?).

Because in the end they’ll have to, even if we put it off for a while by borrowing money or printing it. And when that bill comes due, it would be nice if we could look back and think that, in the main, what we got in exchange was worth it.

If you only reckon hypothetical benefits and ignore the likelihood of those benefits materializing, their cost, or their return on investment, it’s pretty easy to pass cost-benefit analysis. That’s why, in my post on mission statements, I enumerated several criteria for limiting wish lists like those to which we were treated on Wednesday evening:

• It has to be achievable.
• It has to be achievable by the means proposed.
• It has to be achievable by the means proposed within a stated timeframe.

There are a couple of criteria I didn’t mention:

• It should be paid for.
• The cost of the secondary effects should not outweigh the net benefits of what is being proposed.
• There should be consequences for failure to meet the proposed objective other than not being re-elected.

We genuinely need to recognize that we are setting the stage for a future in which interest payments crowd out other spending and we will be impelled to fully monetize the debt or default.