I have not written about l’affaire Epstein and I do not intend to but, speaking of denial, if you believe that he has been getting the legal deals he has been getting for the last 20 years out of a spirit of bonhomie, you are not merely in denial but in a state of fugue. The only credible explanation I can come up with is that he has something on somebody. Maybe a lot of somebodies. Alexander Acosta is not the last notable on whom the mud will land.

Here’s your quiz for the day. Who is being shielded by the blanket non-prosecute deals (I suspect their legality is in serious question) in the Epstein matter?

1. Alexander Acosta
2. Bill and Hillary Clinton
3. the entire upper echelon of Clintonistas (which means the DNC)
4. Donald Trump (same social circle as Epstein)
5. George W. Bush (it was during his presidency that most of these deals were forged)
6. Alberto Gonzales (he was Attorney General when the deals were cut)
7. Robert Mueller (he was head of the FBI when the deals were cut)
8. Whoever was U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in 2007
9. Barack Obama (he was president when the matter re-emerged in 2011)
10. Eric Holder
11. It goes a lot deeper than that
12. Aw, they just cut deals like that for anybody with money. Or who they think has money.

My guess is that 1) the attempts to tar Trump with this particular brush are pretty feeble; 2) the Clintons’ reputation will be even more damaged if such a thing be possible; 3) the revelations have barely begun; 4) it could be all of the above; and 5) we may never know.

The key theme of the day seems to be denial, as in psychological denial. Devoted Clintonista Rahm Emanuel is in denial that the political party to which he has devoted much of his life is leaving him behind. Progressives are in denial that the more they cry “Racism!” the less effect it has. Inflammatory charges cannot be the basis of your diet. They are more like seasoning. Too much and the whole dish become inedible. The editors of the Washington Post are in denial that Turkey has become Islamist rather than secular Kemalist and an Islamist Turkey cannot be our ally.

Today I’ve also seen denial that there is no demonstrable relation between nominal personal income tax rates and income inequality. Effective tax rates may be another story.

People say that I’m in denial because I don’t leave Chicago/Illinois. I understand the problems and the risks well. I have nowhere else to go. It is where my job is and I am not rich enough to live anything but a hardscrabble life without my job.

All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore all men are Socrates.

That wild flight of illogic is from Woody Allen’s Love and Death. It resembles a fallacy of irrelevance called “the genetic fallacy”. The genetic fallacy has nothing to do with DNA but with determining whether something is true or false based on the history of the claim or its source. Those are irrelevant to whether a claim is true or false.

David Leonhardt opens his latest New York Tmes column wth an evocation of the genetic fallacy with respect to immigration policy:

The history of American opposition to immigration is to a large extent a history of racism, which was often promoted by powerful or influential people.

Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1921 that “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.” Henry Cabot Lodge warned, in an 1896 speech on the Senate floor, that immigrants could devastate the “mental and moral qualities which make what we call our race” — and Theodore Roosevelt praised Lodge for “an A-1 speech.” Roosevelt also told a friend he was worried about the “multiplication” of “Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaums and Rabinskis.”

Given that history he is struggling with his own, accurate perception that circumstances have changed:

As regular readers know, I have become somewhat hawkish on immigration. I think our immigration policy should take into account the sharp rise in inequality over the last few decades. One way to do so would be to reduce, or at least hold constant, the level of immigration by people who would compete for lower- and middle-wage jobs while increasing immigration among people who would compete for higher-wage jobs.

History also makes this point. It’s not just a coincidence that the period of strongest income gains for middle-class and poor families — starting in the 1940s — followed, and overlapped with, a period of falling immigration. “Immigration restriction, by making unskilled labor more scarce, tended to shore up wage rates,” the great labor historian Irving Bernstein wrote.

The economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have noted that the foreign-born share of the labor force fell to 5 percent in 1970, from 21 percent in 1915. Countries with “slower labor force growth” in the middle of 20th century, they note, “experienced deeper income inequality reductions.”

Since the 1970s, of course, immigration has surged, as has income inequality. Many other factors play a role in rising inequality: corporate consolidation, slowing educational attainment, the decline of unions, falling tax rates on the rich and more. Some of these are substantially more important than immigration. But immigration belongs on the list.

In particular he struggles with what he considers Trump’s racism and Trump’s support for immigration laws based on skills rather than on family ties, sponsorship, or a lottery as our present system is. Whatever you think of Trump that is fallacious. You cannot evaluate the wisdom of a policy by assessing the motives of those who support it.

The sad reality is that in today’s political climate the only people who will propose the immigration reforms we need are those who don’t care that they will be called racists which means that some of them will be racists. Mr. Leonhardt’s search for a political leader who will “figure out how to make a principled case for less immigration” will be in vain because such any such figure will inevitably be called a racist whether it’s true or not.

When identifying solutions to problems you must consider the things that you can control, those you cannot control, and those for which the cost of the solution you are considering is not justified by the results you can hope to achieve. I think that income inequality and, in particular, that so many black Americans, the descendants of slaves, remain poor 150 years after slavery was abolished, are problems that need to be solved.

We cannot control that some jobs have greater value than others. The cost of compensating everyone equally regardless of the value of what they do would be too high. Our immigration policies, as Mr. Leonhardt documents in his column, have adverse consequences for income inequality, are things we can control, and the costs of the changes being proposed are acceptable. We should not be deterred from making the changes to our immigration policies needed for the 21st century because some racists would embrace them or because it requires someone who doesn’t mind if he’s called a racist even to propose them.

Something I’d meant to mention yesterday but didn’t get around to was how few primetime Emmy nominations were awarded to network television programs. If This is Us were moved to say, Lifetime where it would be completely at home, network programs would have received only two or three nominations.

Is network television particularly lame these days, do the networks just not care about the Emmies any more, or what?

I did not follow GoT but I did find this post at Vulture interesting from a show biz perspective. In the article they list the 25 biggest winners in Game of Thrones from 25 to 1. My pick for biggest winner—HBO—was listed in the article as #3 so I wasn’t that far off the mark.

It certainly has made a lot of careers. I can’t think of any other TV show that catapulted so many unknowns into major movie roles.

I am not as sympathetic as the editors of the Wall Street Journal over the alleged plight of the heirs of IRAs being induced to withdraw the proceeds more rapidly:

Under current law, a 5-year-old grandson who inherits money in an IRA can “stretch” the mandatory distributions over his lifetime. That allows for longer tax-free growth, giving legacy-minded investors a way to build family wealth. The Secure Act would require the IRA to be emptied within 10 years. This would speed up the tax liability, which could also push the bunched-up distributions into a higher tax bracket.

Maybe there’s an argument that IRAs weren’t meant to be used as vehicles for inheritance. Nevertheless they are, and the figures can be large. Mitt Romney’s retirement account made news in 2012 when financial disclosures, which specify wealth in ranges, said his IRA held between $21 million and $102 million. Those numbers were thought unusual, a result of savvy investments Mr. Romney made in Bain Capital projects.

Still, you may be surprised: Fidelity Investments says that its last census of 401(k) millionaires includes 180,000 of its account holders, along with 168,000 IRA millionaires, plus another 22,000 educational workers or nonprofit staff who are 403(b) millionaires. And that’s only Fidelity. Some 33,000 federal workers have accumulated $1 million or more in their Thrift Savings Plan accounts, which can be rolled into IRAs.

Rather than spend this on wine and cruises, some of these people may prefer to pass on as much money as possible, perhaps to help their grandchildren pay for college or starter houses. If savers spent years building up their accounts with that goal in mind, it is hardly fair to switch the rules for everybody who’s still alive six months from today.

Under present law they are able to withdraw from those erstwhile IRAs slowly rather than paying taxes on them all at once as would otherwise be the case. That’s largely welfare for the rich.

I think that IRAs need reform but I’m indifferent to these heirs. For example, I don’t think I should be required to withdraw from my IRA while I’m still working. The State of Illinois is seeing to it that the taxes I’m paying are rising faster than my income which makes it darned hard to save. I’m not poor but I’m not rich, either. If I stop working not only must we curtail our present not particularly lifestyle, I won’t be able to save. Our only luxuries are our opera subscription, the fish I buy, and the dogs. It may be that our home will become a luxury we cannot afford. Consequently, I’m working far past what most people think of as retirement age and plan to continue as long as I’m able but I see the hand writing on the wall.

I was saddened that the Washington Post editorial on the UN’s report on global poverty contained so little real insight. You can read it if you like but it can be summarized by the title of this post. It doesn’t address why poverty has declined or the factors that can reduce poverty.

The answer is that although we don’t really know there are some things we can assert with confidence. Autarky (neither importing nor exporting) produces poverty. Both China and India, where most of the world’s poor lived, have greatly reduced poverty by opening their countries to exports and, to a lesser degree, imports. Could they have achieved more had they opened their markets more? We don’t really know.

Sad as it is to say, adopting liberal democracy has little or nothing to do with alleviating poverty other than possibly as a side effect. China greatly reduced poverty without adopting liberal democracy.

Policies that move workers from subsistence farming to manufacturing reduces poverty. Consequently, encouraging subsistence farming or discouraging manufacturing increases poverty. Those include bans on imports of agricultural products.

Educating women may reduce poverty indirectly by reducing the number of births.

Here in the United States we still have people who are genuinely poor. I think we would do better by, rather than fulminating on relative poverty, concentrating on real poverty. The relatively poor we will always have with us but the only reason we have genuinely poor people here is indifference. In the United States most of the genuinely poor live on Indian reservations or rural areas where the social safety net does not reach. Increasing the depth of that safety net without increasing its breadth will do little to eliminate poverty in the U. S.

At a visceral level I agree with the position of the editors of the Washington Post on the minimum wage:

What the CBO’s report does, or should, remind lawmakers is that there is a trade-off in raising the minimum wage so substantially — and that, while the upside would accrue to society’s most vulnerable, so would the downside. Those who would lose out, in the form of no job at all, would wind up not with less pay but with no pay.

That fact alone argues for proceeding with caution. So, too, does the fact that most of the U.S. workforce already lives in a jurisdiction that has raised the minimum wage above the federal level, with the highest new minimums scheduled for states such as California and New York where wages and living costs are relatively high to begin with. If research from University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube is correct, and the optimal minimum wage is 50 to 60 percent of a given regional labor market’s median hourly wage, then employment in Louisiana, where the median wage was $16.05 an hour in 2018, could be badly hurt by an increase to $15 between now and 2025. Puerto Rico, where a $15 minimum wage, if applied, would equal 150 percent of the current median wage, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, could be devastated.

The federal minimum wage is, indeed, overdue for an update, having lost about 18 percent of its real value since its last increase in 2009. The smart way to do that, however, is by pegging it to local conditions and then having it automatically grow with inflation going forward — no politics needed. The Third Way think tank has a plan that would set the national minimum wage at “one-half of the hourly wage for nonsupervisory workers” — that figure in 2019 would be $11.72 — and then allow local levels to vary above or below that depending on living costs. The Republican-controlled Senate probably will not act on the House measure. Another advantage of the Third Way proposal, therefore, is to show there is an alternative to that do-nothing approach, too.

but intellectually I agree even more with the need for reflection. What would the effect of a $11.72 minimum wage in Puerto Rico be? Louisiana? Seattle? New York City? My intuition tells me that it could well be devastating in the first two and have no effect whatever in the latter two.

The larger issue is what is the purpose of a national minimum wage? If it’s to ensure that people whose jobs are worth no more than the minimum wage can raise a family on their earnings, should that be the objective of policy? Or should the objective of policy be faster growth in the number of jobs worth paying more than the minimum wage? I think the latter.

Suggesting that we can do both is blithe. Politicians have tremendous difficulty walking and chewing gum at the same time. “Fight for $15!” sucks the air out of the room.

Said another way, it’s a way of changing the subject away from what we should really be talking about.

I see that Tom Friedman has noticed the same things I have which I think means that they are obvious. From his most recent New York Times column:

I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.

I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.

I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care.

And I was shocked by how feeble was front-runner Joe Biden’s response to the attack from Kamala Harris — and to the more extreme ideas promoted by those to his left.

He goes on:

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

I agree. Glenn Reynolds has been saying much the same thing somewhat less kindly for some time: all the Democrats need to do is not act crazy and they can’t even do that.

Maybe the candidates are right. Maybe there is an overwhelming but unevidenced groundswell of public opinion in favor of Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, late term abortions, open borders, a debt jubilee for educational debt, and extending public benefits to illegal migrants. Maybe Americans really want to see a good fight between whatever Democratic candidate ultimately wins the nomination and Donald Trump rather than the “more normal” country polls have suggested. Or maybe all of those things just represent the views of a relatively small number of activists, what’s true but unevidenced is that people who tell pollsters they disapprove of Trump will vote for him anyway because the alternative is so much worse, and that Donald Trump may well become yet another presumably unpopular president who carries more states in his re-election bid than he did when he won the first time.