At The Hill Jonathan Turley remarks on a court challenge to some of the provisions of the American Rescue Plan Act, the Bid Administration’s “stimulus package”:

The question is, when should preference be given over a common resource desperately needed by everyone? For example, the Biden administration and many states gave preferential treatment to minority communities in the allocation of early vaccines; states like Montana and Vermont gave people of color priority in receiving shots. That meant many other citizens had to wait, due to their race, for a vaccine in the middle of a lethal pandemic. Yet, advocates cited greater vaccine “hesitancy” in minority areas and other historic barriers to medicine as justification.

The court’s concern in the Greer case is that the Biden administration’s rationale would allow the use of racially discriminatory policies throughout the government. This is a far more nuanced constitutional issue than past challenges. Rather than impose a quota system or a direct exclusionary policy, Greer and others complain that the government can achieve the same result by prioritizing certain groups in the receipt of benefits.

The alternative is to maintain a bright line against the use of racial criteria in government programs. In a 2007 case, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that position most succinctly by declaring that the “way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Chief Justice Roberts had it precisely correct. Two wrongs still do not make a right.

I do think that such provisions will be increasingly common even after they’re struck down by the courts. Receiving a handout from the government too readily becomes a way of life and the ability to secure them becomes a form of discrimination of its own. If everyone were equally able to game the system, we’d all be Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

An “auto-antonym” is a word that means a thing and its opposite. This tweet from the Reverend Jesse Jackson:

Mayor Lightfoot is right to be concerned about accurate & fair press coverage & the mayor’s proposal of including people of color in one-on-one interviews is morally justified. She is making a strong & righteous case for inclusion & diversity in the press & its coverage.

(hat tip: Shia Kapos’s Illinois Playbook) suggests that “inclusion” has now become an auto-antonym. What Mayor Lightfoot had said was that she would give interviews on the occasion of her second anniversary as mail only to “black or brown” journalists. That is not inclusion. It is exclusion. Rev. Jackson should know better. When Jesse Jackson is on the same side as George Wallace and Orval Faubus there’s something definitely wrong.

I’m glad to see this. From Stars and Stripes:

WASHINGTON — A pair of House lawmakers introduced a bill on Thursday that would expedite the visa process for Afghan military translators, amid growing calls from Congress for the Biden administration to act quickly to shuttle allies out of the country ahead of the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

The bill from Reps. Jason Crow, D-Colo., and Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, would allow applicants to the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program to forgo a medical examination, which can cost thousands of dollars.

It’s welcome and long overdue.

It took a while to get to the tactical significance of the air-launched drones described in this article by Garrett Reim at Flight Global. Here it is:

Designed for counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency missions, the Reaper and Gray Eagle are increasingly vulnerable to being shot down by fighter aircraft and surface-to-air missile batteries fielded by sophisticated foes, such as China and Russia. Long-range air-launched effects are seen as a way to keep the large UAVs outside the weapons engagement zone of US adversaries, thus keeping the aircraft relevant for more years.

“By employing these smaller [unmanned air systems], Reaper and Gray Eagle operators will be able to penetrate, disintegrate and exploit anti-access and area denial air defences, and support operations in any domain,” the company says. “Meanwhile, the greater standoff afforded by these smaller [unmanned air systems] increases the survivability of the larger aircraft by placing them outside the kinetic range of tactical surface-to-air missiles.”

I wonder what the relationship between these devices and Russia’s hypersonic weaponry that is in development.

All I needed to see was the title of this piece in the New Atlanticist, “An Afghanistan At Peace Could Connect South and Central Asia”, to remind me of one of my favorite Yiddish wisecracks: As di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah (“if my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather”).

While I think that the framing of inflation as “the Biden tax” by Alfred Ortiz in his post at RealClearPolitics is political posturing, I also think that the underlying point is sound. Inflation does fall heaviest on the poor and people earning middle incomes:

Inflation acts the same way as a tax by reducing the value of earnings. It devastates retirees and those on fixed incomes by making them poorer through no fault of their own. And it hurts small businesses, which must constantly raise prices, reducing sales and alienating customers.

It does so in multiple ways. Not only do they not have the excess income to adjust to inflation they are not as well-positioned to seek other jobs or to ask for raises. And raises may not be forthcoming because it’s cheaper to automate their jobs away.

Add this to the mitigation plan—without increasing spending which will merely aggravate the problem—which I keep on asking for in the full recognition that no such plan will ever be proposed.

In his latest Washington Post column George Will notes somewhat wryly that a considerable portion of the financial incentives of the Biden Administration’s electric vehicle (EV) tax credits like those of the Obama Administration before it are captured by the top 5% of income earners:

What the White House calls a “fact sheet” says Biden’s administration will “support market demand” for EVs by “driving demand” with “point-of-sale incentives” to encourage “deployment” of EVs. Translation: Subsidies, including tax credits for purchasers, will fiddle the market by lowering EV prices enough to manufacture a demand sufficient to justify manufacturing the vehicles in quantities that the administration says are vital for the planet. Biden even wants $15 billion to build 500,000 EV charging stations. When U.S. automobile sales exploded from 8 million vehicles on U.S. roads in 1920 to 23 million in 1930 without tax credits, the private sector, responding to real rather than synthetic demand, built sufficient gas stations.

There are tax credits of up to $7,500 for EV purchasers, until a manufacturer sells 200,000. GM and Tesla have reached this camp. GM wants the tax credit restored and made permanent. Internal Revenue Service data for 2014 showed that the biggest beneficiaries were households with adjusted gross income of at least $100,000. One percent went to households earning less than $50,000. States, too, have joined the market manipulation. In California, where about 47 percent of EVs are sold, buyers can gain up to $15,000. That such subsidies “work” is shown by what happens when they end: In 2015, when Georgia ended its $5,000 state tax credit, EV sales plummeted 89 percent in two months.

Biden’s policy to use less affluent Americans’ money to entice more affluent Americans to buy EVs is only one of the contemplated regressive policies by which his administration would transfer wealth upward. Another such policy would cancel student debts for some of the fortunate minority of Americans who, having college degrees, will likely enjoy lifetime earnings significantly higher than those of the less fortunate majority. And if Democrats repeal the $10,000 cap on deductions of state and local taxes by individuals filing their federal income taxes, this would almost entirely benefit very wealthy taxpayers.

I don’t think we should be subsidizing such purchases or “investments” at all but I also don’t be believe that we should be subsidizing oil consumption or driving which we do in thousands of ways. The maze of government subsidies are a tiger from which it is very difficult to dismount.

IMO Mr. Will is misreading the reasons for the policy. I think it’s an attempt at moving the Overton window on EVs by providing incentives to the top 5% of income earners who form the elite and the society’s opinion makers.

I’m skeptical of the assumptions being made by supporters of EVs among them that battery production can be scaled to the necessary levels. Mr. Will is right to call out the small improvements that EVs will provide but I’m not sure that the data are which he relying are up-to-date. This post on the subject suggests they may not be. I think that fans of EVs should also consider that vehicles powered by fuel cells (hydrogen) are greener than either EVs, gas-, or diesel-powered vehicles.

There’s a book review at RealClearEnergy you might find interesting. Here’s its opening paragraph:

On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science – in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Read the whole thing.

To some degree the article and the book it reviews is a dialogue between Richard Feynman’s axiom of absolute intellectual honesty and science and striking some balance between such honesty and mitigating risk. My question is somewhat different: how do you mitigate the risk of eschewing absolute intellectual honesty in favor of politically and economically motivated goals?

I want to commend an Atlantic piece by Amanda Ripley to your attention. The piece, entitled “Can the News Be Fixed?” that largely addresses the question of how can journalists rebuild local TV news, and perhaps even restore trust in the media? Here’s a telling snippet:

In the second year, he began to see a path forward. The problem “wasn’t the way the news was presented,” McLaughlin told me. “It was what the news is. The traditional format was still pretty desirable: the idea of a man and a woman at a desk and a weather segment halfway through. The work that needed to be done was in story selection and production.”

The focus groups seemed to appreciate reporters who had deep knowledge of the community and the subject matter. And, to McLaughlin’s surprise, the groups didn’t just say they wanted more in-depth stories. They actually behaved that way. When Scripps tested Hello SWFL stories that were seven or eight minutes long—an eternity in the business—audiences watched them to the end, as long as they were well told.

Fear, meanwhile, wasn’t working as well. Since the 1980s, TV news stations have inundated people with shocking coverage of crime and other spectacles. “The rule used to be: If you can scare the hell out of people, you can probably get them to watch five more minutes,” McLaughlin said. But across a dozen focus groups, the Hello SWFL test station discovered that younger people were put off by hysterical coverage of petty crimes—or of crimes happening far away.

I think the piece expresses a number of misconception, e.g.:

If American audiences are losing their taste for reductive “he said, she said” coverage, and for litanies of problems and risks without solutions, that would be a good development.

Did American audiences ever have taste for that? Or was it what reporters and editors thought was appealing and presented the way they should it should be presented? “Point-of-view” reporting, the present highly agonistic style, is what’s taught in the J-schools these days. Maybe it has nothing to do with what consumers want and a lot to do with what reporters and editors want.

I also was forced to consider several different, contrasting definitions of the word “fix”. There are fix as in repair, fix as in make steady, fix meaning rig, falsify, and fix as in neutering an animal. I think the news is already fixed. Just not in the way Ms. Ripley probably means.