At The Hill Nicholas Sargen analyzes the Biden Administration’s strategy for reducing reducing income inequality:

A key priority of the Biden administration is to lessen the disparity in income between the wealthiest U.S. households and the rest of the populace: The top 10 percent today account for one half of pre-tax national income.

Emmanuel Saez of U.C.-Berkeley contends that income inequality is the greatest since the Gilded Age of the 1920s. It has resulted in strains between “the haves,” who are collage educated, and “the have nots,” who are less well-educated and tend to live in rural areas or inner cities.

As America has become more polarized, there is growing recognition that the latter groups can no longer be ignored. Still, many wonder what can be done to lessen the disparities in income and wealth.

The measures he considers are direct payments, increasing income taxes on the wealthiest, and increased federal spending on infrastructure, R&D, and education.

He lost me with this claim:

What is clear is that there are no easy fixes.

Actually, there are some easy fixes. It’s just that the policies that have created the disparity aren’t related to direct payments that are too low, inadequate taxation, or not enough spending on infrastructure, R&D, or education and have constituencies of their own. Let me offer some examples.

One of the biggest reasons for accelerating income and wealth inequality is the massive subsidies that the federal government but even more importantly the Federal Reserve has been lavishing on the wealthiest people in the society over the period of the last 20 years. They range from direct subsidies to the banking industry especially during the financial crisis to being able to borrow at little or no interest and use the proceeds to purchase stocks and bonds. The solution to that is like the old vaudeville joke:

Man to doctor: It hurts when I do this (he rams his head into the wall).

Doctor to man: Stop doing that!

I’ll give you another one. Presently, about 15% of the population is composed of immigrants, many with limited English and few skills that employers will pay more than minimum wage for. Besides, why pay more? There are plenty more where those came from. My preferred strategy for dealing with that is to limit immigration to people who can actually pay their own way and a few genuine refugees. Make it practically impossible to work in this country without permission with serious, strenuous workplace enforcement. That would make our system resemble that of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, countries we resemble in other ways, rather than the mess we have now. Unless you have some clever way of ensuring that uneducated non-English speaking peasants from Third World countries can arrive here and immediately start earning above median income, our present system is guaranteed to increase income inequality.

Another one. When income inequality really began to take off was during the Clinton era when tax reform encouraged companies to reward executives with stock options or other deferred income. Not only did that increase the incomes of top executives by an order of magnitude it changed their incentives in perverse ways. I think we can consider that an experiment that has failed. Time to shut it down.

Fourth, disincentive offshore outsourcing by making companies that do so ineligible to bid on government contracts.

Finally, remember H. L. Mencken’s wisecrack: there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. Stop proposing simple-minded solutions: give people more money, raise taxes, spend more on education. Those solutions are neat, plausible, and wrong.

You might be interested in Robert Cherry’s reflections at RealClearPolicy on the sharp increase in the number of homicides in U. S. urban areas:

This past year, there was an unprecedented homicide spike; over one-third across urban America. These increases followed an upward trend since 2014, the year in which Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. However, underpinning the national trend has been the growing proportion of homicides of black men. In 2019, black male homicides were 60 percent more than white male homicides, up from 21 percent more in 2005. By contrast, among women, the ratio remained remarkably stable with black female homicides generally close to 56 percent of white female homicides. Thus, the 2020 spike is not simply an anomaly brought about by the pandemic but a continuation of a persistent trend driven by gun violence in black communities.

Significant factors seem to be

• Percentage of black population
• Poverty
• Families headed by a single parent

I thought that Mr. Cherry’s analysis suffered from a major flaw: the word “gang” does not appear in it. Not just the homicide rate but the rate of violent crime is strongly related to gang activity. Why are gangs so prevalent in urban black neighborhoods? It’s not genetic. I think they are a sign of a learned behavior and families headed by a single parent are just one aspect of that social dysfunction.

This piece by Vishnu Modur at Notes on Liberty, a libertarian-leaning group blog, on “South Asian” identity made me start thinking. Here’s a snippet:

For decades, the United States hyphenated its India policy by balancing every action with New Delhi with a counterbalancing activity with Islamabad. So much so that the American focus on Iran and North Korean nuclear proliferation stood out in total contrast to the whitewashing of Pakistan’s private A.Q. Khan network for nuclear proliferation. Furthermore, in a survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that gauges how Americans perceive other countries, India hovered between forty-six and forty-nine on a scale from zero to one hundred since 1978, reflecting its reputation neither as an ally or an adversary. With the civil-nuclear deal, the Bush administration discarded the hyphenation construct and eagerly pursued an independent program between India and the United States. Still, in 2010, only 18 percent of Americans saw India as “very important” to the United States—fewer than those who felt similarly about Pakistan (19%) and Afghanistan (21%), and well below China (54%) and Japan (40%). Even though the Indo-US bilateral relationship has transformed for the better from the Bush era, the increasing use of ‘South Asia’ on various platforms by academics and non-academics alike, while discussing India, represents a new kind of hyphenated view or a bracketed view of India. Many Indian citizens in the US like me find this bracket unnecessary, especially in the present geopolitical context.

Here’s where my musings led me. One of the fascinating things about human languages is that using a just about any human language, at least any I’ve ever heard of, you can talk about things that don’t exist. In the jargon, things that have no referent. Does “South Asian identity” have a referent? I don’t believe so.

For it to have one Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Nepalese, Tibetan, Sri Lankans, Burmese people and many others would need to profess some commonality. Do they? I don’t think so. Frankly, I believe that much of the last 70 years has been a search for an Indian identity, never more so than since the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance became the ruling parliamentary coalition there.

I think it’s not unlike talking about European or, sadly, American identity to an increasing extent.

There are nearly 20,000 languages and dialects spoken on the Indian subcontinent and about 40% of the people are proficient only in their mother tongue. The common language for most is Hindi but not all Indians are proficient in it. India consists of 36 states and union territories. Under the circumstances how can one speak about “Indian identity”. What would one mean by it? As far as I can tell it speaks more to what they aren’t rather than to what they are.

None of that detracts from India’s standing in Asia. But IMO India is more of a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional empire than it is a nation.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the decision by the Biden Administration to drop the DoJ’s anti-discrimination suit against Yale:

This is what “equity” means in practice. Traditionally racial justice meant an insistence that every American be treated equally without regard to race. But the Democratic left, with Mr. Biden’s support, has adopted critical race theory from the universities. The theory attributes every disparity between the races to “systemic racism,” whether or not there’s evidence of specific acts of discrimination. The Biden Administration’s policy goal now is to dictate the racial outcomes that progressives want—even if it means discriminating by race to get them.

Dropping the Yale suit is a blow to equality under the law. But Students for Fair Admissions, which lost its Harvard suit at the First Circuit Court of Appeals in November, has always recognized that its best chance for a victory against racial bias in admissions is at the Supreme Court. Meantime, the group says it will file its own suit against Yale.

Most Americans don’t want the government to pit one race against another. In the last two years voters in two of America’s most liberal states—Washington and California—voted down ballot initiatives that would have repealed bans on racial preferences. A 2019 Pew survey found that 73% of Americans believe race should not be a factor in college admissions.

The Biden Administration has signaled in promoting “equity” that it has abandoned fair and equal treatment. This will lead to further social division and resentment, as it has in every society that has practiced favoritism by race. The resulting injustice and confusion will continue until the Supreme Court stops ducking the issue and rules against racial favoritism once and for all.

Not only will that version of equity injure blacks by accepting racial discrimination with a wink and a nod, it will injure the reputation of the U. S. on the world stage. No dirty little secrets stay at home any more.

I’m only partly in agreement with Jason L. Riley’s observations in his most recent Wall Street Journal column. I agree with this:

The greatest success of the civil-rights movement wasn’t a new government program but getting government off the backs of blacks by defeating Jim Crow. Nothing the government has done since then in the name of advancing blacks has been more effective than simply ending government-sponsored discrimination. Black poverty fell by 40 percentage points between 1940 and 1960. It continued to decline in the wake of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society interventions, but at a much slower pace.

Similarly, blacks were joining middle-class professions at a much faster pace in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s than they would after affirmative-action programs were implemented in the 1970s. In fact, we now have evidence that suggests racial preferences have been not only ineffective in helping the black poor but also counterproductive. After the University of California system ended race-conscious admissions policies in 1996, black and Hispanic graduation rates rose dramatically.

Liberals also insisted that more black political representation would translate into more black upward mobility, but the historical record says otherwise. Poor blacks in Marion Barry’s Washington in the 1980s, and Sharpe James’s Newark, N.J., in the 1990s, saw their economic plight worsen. Even under our first black president, racial disparities in income and homeownership widened. It turns out that political clout is neither sufficient nor even necessary for a group to advance economically. Blacks and Hispanics experienced record low poverty and unemployment rates before the pandemic under President Trump, who has rarely been accused of bending over backward to help minorities.

Where I differ is here:

If history is any guide, what blacks most need from the government is for it to get out of the way. Stop forcing poor black children to attend failing schools by denying them school choice. Stop increasing the minimum wage and pricing black young adults out of jobs. Stop implementing occupational licensing regulations that prevent black entrepreneurs from starting a business. And stop pretending that policing is a bigger problem than violent crime in poor black neighborhoods. In 2019 there were 492 homicides in Chicago, according to the Sun-Times, and only three of them involved police.

I agree that school choice and limiting occupational licensing to where it’s genuinely needed would probably help blacks. But I don’t think that what blacks need most now is for the government to “get out of the way”. That was 50 years ago. I think that what blacks need most now is for government to perform its most basic function: enforce the law and do it without regard to race. The law should not be applied more harshly to blacks than whites or more leniently. It should apply to all who break the law without respect to race. Gain the trust of black people by protecting them from violent crime.

That applies to immigration law, too. Being reluctant to enforce our laws because people are fleeing from lousy countries may be well-intentioned but hurts blacks disproportionately.

In a piece at New Yorker by Dhruv Khullar on the reasons that health care workers are declining or at least delaying vaccination, this passage caught my eye:

Another major hurdle is mistrust of both the political and the health-care systems. The problem is most acute in historically marginalized communities, which already live with racial disparities in life expectancy, maternal mortality, access to medical care, representation in clinical trials, informed consent, the physician workforce, and covid-19 outcomes. And it’s exacerbated among health-care workers who are underappreciated and poorly paid. “In many cases, vaccine hesitancy is not a lack-of-information problem. It’s a lack-of-trust problem,” David Grabowski, a professor of health-care policy at Harvard, told me. “Staff doesn’t trust leadership. They have a real skepticism of government. They haven’t gotten hazard pay. They haven’t gotten P.P.E. They haven’t gotten respect. Should we be surprised that they’re skeptical of something that feels like it’s being forced on them?”

I’ve written about trust before here. Trust is not the default position, especially among Americans. It’s hard to earn, easy to lose, and once lost even more difficult to regain. Waffling positions or even worse having it revealed that the positions you took a couple of months ago were self-serving undermines trust.

William Galston, in his most recent Wall Street Journal column, also expresses support for compromise on the COVID-19 relief bill:

The Covid-19 relief bill is the first test for the Biden administration. It’s no surprise there’s disagreement on how to proceed. One controversy is strategic: How vigorously should the administration pursue bipartisan support for its legislation, and what price should it be willing to pay to achieve it? Some Democrats—myself among them—believe that the president’s calls for unity will be hollow unless he does all he can to reach a bipartisan agreement that satisfies his core objectives. Monday’s meeting with 10 Republican senators to discuss their $618 billion offer was a good first step, and conversations will continue.

Let’s pause here. To some extent that’s begging the question. What are President Biden’s “core objectives”? If a $15/hour minimum wage, bailing out profligate cities and states, and sending handouts to the top 3% (or, as has been pointed out, to the top 20% of income earners) are among them, there’s no room for compromise at all.

Continuing

The Senate Republican plan meets the administration’s funding request for vaccinations and other health-related measures, but offers less for extended unemployment payments, aid to schools, and checks to individuals. It doesn’t increase the child tax credit and provides no direct aid to states and localities. But even this may be too much for House Republicans.

Step back from the details, and it’s clear the administration proposals serve four distinct policy objectives: relief, stimulus, investment and structural change. The details matter, but measures to mitigate immediate hardship enjoy the broadest support. Measures to promote economic and social change—such as increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour—are the least popular. Proposed investments for the future, such as rebuilding and restocking the National Strategic Stockpile, are also widely supported, in part because of their relatively modest cost.

He goes on to observe that the analogy with the Obama Administration’s approach to the situation in 2009 which the Biden Administration seems to be following is weak. Due to steps already taken consumer spending as well as household saving are actually pretty good. The primary impediments to recovery in some sectors are government actions not money.

He concludes:

Unemployed workers need help, as do the low-income households in which most of them live. To the extent that state and local revenue losses are forcing these jurisdictions to cut jobs, the federal government should help plug the hole. But sending checks to upper-income households that don’t need the money and won’t spend it makes neither economic nor moral sense.

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle asks questions:

The problem is that life happens not in theory but in practice. Poorer countries probably won’t be fully vaccinated for years — and, for that matter, the United States might not be, either. Fewer than half of U.S. nursing home workers got vaccinated in the first round of on-site distributions at their facilities. What might resistance rates look like among Americans who don’t work with our most vulnerable? What if only 50 percent of Americans get vaccinated, about the share of people who get flu shots? What if it’s even fewer?

In that case, our best hope is probably that vaccine skeptics who assume that they’ll be immune after they get infected realize their mistake when another wave materializes. They might opt to take their chances on vaccination rather than risk a third bout of covid-19. In this situation, many people would die. But it’s almost certainly better than other possibilities.

For vaccine skeptics might dig in, creating reservoirs of infection in which new variants can arise — for example, by spreading to immunocompromised people whose infections could function as laboratories where the virus effectively experiments with ways to evade immune defenses. And since we clearly won’t keep locking ourselves down forever, we might decide, as a nation, to accept greater death rates rather than doing what it would take to actually shut down transmission.

Alternatively, we could get tired of all the dying and take the kinds of strenuous steps that have so far been off the table in the United States: making it near-impossible to live and work without proof of current vaccination. Require people to show their card before boarding a plane or cruise ship, attending a concert or movie; make such evidence mandatory for occupations as varied as nursing assistants and waitresses. And use a central, instantly checkable database so the certificates can’t be forged.

It’s not clear to me which of these outcomes is more likely. What’s obvious is that they’re all terrible. Yet it also seems clear that at least one possibility is even worse.

For some reason she neglects to consider the endgame I have long suggested would ultimately be accepted. What if COVID-19 becomes endemic in the population (practically certain) just as seasonal flu is? In my view any notion that we’re going to inoculate the entire global population and keep inoculating once a year, multiple times a year, forever is nonsense. As far as we can tell right now the mortality due to SARS-CoV-2 is about an order of magnitude higher than for seasonal flu. That’s still lower than many other diseases that used to be highly prevalent in the bad old days before antibiotics and multiple vaccinations. Life went on. But not the life that we had before 2020.

Let me ask another question we don’t want to ask. What if there’s another pandemic of equal or greater virulence to SARS-CoV-2 right around the corner? And another and another and another? I think that the lesson is that globalization, at least in the form it has taken for the last 30 years, bears risks far in excess of any conceivable benefit.

The editors of Bloomberg take a similar position on compromise on COVID-19 relief:

In weighing how to advance his new Covid relief package, President Joe Biden is wrestling with a dilemma. Does he press as quickly as possible, with or without Republican cooperation, to pass the plan he’s laid out? Or does he seek compromise, risking both delay and a dilution of his proposals, in an effort that Republicans might scorn in any case? With the question posed this way, many Democrats think the answer is obvious: Bipartisan progress is a mirage, so just get on with doing what’s necessary.

They should think again. Yesterday a group of 10 Senate Republicans proposed an alternative plan, saying they’d present the details today, and Biden has agreed to meet them to discuss it. They appear to have a total outlay of some $600 billion in mind. That’s too little to meet current needs, but it’s a basis for discussion and the president is right to see where it leads. Failing to seek a deal would be wrong for two reasons. First, Biden shouldn’t give up on uniting the country — the theme of his election campaign, and the focus of his inaugural address — within days of taking office. Second, accommodation with moderate Democrats and responsible Republicans could make his plan better.

I’m substantially aligned with their views on extending direct payments to those not in need and on the imprudence of increasing the minimum wage under the circumstances. I disagree with their views on extending aid to state and local governments. Some state and local revenues have actually grown over the last year if you can believe such a thing under the circumstances. I believe that whatever aid is extended to state and local governments must be in a form which they cannot use to offset spending that is not COVID-19 related. That would be difficult to construct and maintain but it needs to be recognized how many of them are in hells of their own making. They chose certain priorities over others and they ought not to be indemnified against the adverse consequences of those decisions.