Following up on an earlier post, I’m going to muse a little bit here on media bias. You don’t need to read a lot of right-leaning sites to encounter the ironclad conviction that the media lean left. On left-leaning sites there is an equal and opposite conviction—that the media lean right. There has even been a book purporting to prove that latter conviction. It leans heavily on the genetic fallacy, the mistaken belief that if it’s corporate it must be right-leaning (Sen. Elizabeth Warren is both corporatist and left-leaning), and that ironclad conviction.

How can that be? And why?

In one of my earliest posts on this blog I nade the observation, obvious to me but apparently not to others, that everyone sits at the center of his or her own universe. Consequently, they typically see themselves as more in the center than they actually are. Anyone to their right must be on the right; anyone to their left must be on the left.

I think that my political views defy characterization to some extent. I’ve variably been termed left-wing, right-wing, a classical liberal, a pragmatist, and—my favorite—eclectic. But I have empirical or at least quasi-empirical evidence that I’m smack dab in the middle. Every time I take the Political Compass that’s where I land. I’ve also been called both left-wing and right-wing for the same opinion—as good an indication of being in the center as any.

Consider the infographic at the top of this page, thoughtfully provided by All Sides. You may notice something about it. I, systematically and conscientiously, lean most heavily on sources they rate as “Center” which in their terms means balanced between left and right.

Quickly scanning through their ratings and tallying Left, Right, and Center resulted in about 40% of the media sites being Left or Left-Leaning, about 23% Right or Right-Leaning, with the remainder Center, i.e. balanced. That alone would seem to provide evidence to support the right-wingers’ view. All Sides does not do this but I believe that if you weighted the sites by reach and influence the effect would be even more pronounced with the Left or Left-Leaning sites over 50%, the Right or Right-Leaning sites under 23%, and the remaining sites Center.

How, then, could anyone whose views were to the left of center imagine that the media had a right-wing bias? I think it can be explained by the possibility that, once you have a certain level of conviction, anyone who doesn’t agree with you sufficiently must be right-wing.

At 8:00am CDT I plan to restore the CSS I was previously using for this site so that we can diagnose the problems that users of Internet Explorer and Edge are having (dark background). Apparently, it can’t be diagnosed any other way.

In New York Magazine Josh Barro laments that infrastructure project in New York are so expensive:

New York’s infrastructure problems are not the same as the whole country’s. This is not an article about “our crumbling roads and bridges.” Some of New York’s roads and bridges (and tunnels and stations) are indeed crumbling, but those can be fixed in normal ways through normal financing mechanisms. The experience of New York City Transit head Andy Byford’s “speed team,” which is accelerating service by fixing faulty speed sensors and raising unnecessarily low speed limits in the subways, shows some of those fixes can even be inexpensive. And the repairs requiring significant additional labor time can be addressed by making maintenance a spending priority, as the MTA already did once when dragging the subways out of the malaise of the 1970s.

Where New York stands out is the massive price tags associated with proposed and actual new projects, and the delays and limitations of vision they impose on new construction. Second Avenue — perhaps the most appropriate corridor for a subway line in the United States that, as of 2016, did not have one — has taken nearly 100 years to go from proposed subway service to actual service and then only along a fraction of the planned route. Dense but unserved corridors in the outer-boroughs, like Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, are unlikely to see subway lines in your lifetime. They would simply be too expensive to build.

Why are these projects so expensive in New York?

Preferred project alternatives are chosen by politicians, and then review and outreach processes are run to support those preferences, even when they add cost and even when they provoke community objections that must be expensively addressed. Design choices are often grand instead of practical. Environmental reviews take too long and do not consider the cost and negative environmental impact of tying transit projects up in environmental review. Government agencies do not work well together. Projects are overstaffed, and labor rules — often made more complicated by the difficulty agencies have in working together — reduce productivity. The MTA tries to shift the risk of cost overruns onto outside companies it contracts with, even if those overruns are caused by factors outside their control; the companies are not stupid, and they respond to this by inflating their bids for work on MTA projects in what’s known as the “MTA premium.” New York has unusual laws about contractor liability that make insurance very expensive. And on and on.

I think that Mr. Barro would be astonished to learn that New York’s problems are exactly like those everywhere else. Roads and bridges are more expensive everywhere in the United States because of a network of corrupt arrangements that guarantee they will be expensive. They are so pervasive they aren’t even recognized as being corrupt any more.

And it isn’t limited to infrastructure projects. It extends to the military, to education, and to health care. It extends to everything we attempt to do through the government. In a sense it’s the price we pay for our lack of social cohesion relative to the comparatively small ethnic states of Europe.

I’m not arguing for no government. I’m arguing for limiting our goals more realistically or, as my many times great-grandfather put it, “don’t set the fence too far”. And better, more transparent government with fewer people becoming wealthy through its actions.

I’m skeptical of Cenk Uygur’s claim that 60% of the American electorate are progressives in his piece at The Hill. I think it’s more like a very vocal and local 20%. He’s outraged that Bernie Sanders is not getting a fair shake in the media:

The people on TV don’t like Sanders because he represents change and they got into their positions of power in this current system — and the last thing they want to do is change it. These television anchors claim they have no perspective. Think about how absurd that claim is. Of course you have a perspective — it’s just that you have privileged your own perspective so much that you assume that it must be the norm for everyone. In reality, that is the deepest bias you can have.

The New York Times and The Washington Post are arguably worse. Their core assumption is that maintaining the status quo is not a perspective, so it is the correct baseline by which to judge all other perspectives. Anyone who wants to challenge or change the current system is treated as a radical and delegitimized. This is a form of deplatforming. You implicitly never share the opinions you don’t agree with while never acknowledging it and pretending that your perspective is the only legitimate one. This de facto deplatforming is in some ways more odious because it’s done in the dark of night without having the honesty to admit it.

But I agree wholeheartedly with this:

Establishment Democrats are not progressives! No one fights progressive policy ideas more than corporate Democrats, especially Democratic leadership. If you think they are on our team, even though they oppose all of our policy proposals, you either don’t understand politics or again you’re so biased that you treat progressives as invisible, which is exactly my point.

which is very much the reason that I think that progressives are far less numerous than Mr. Uygur does. More than anything “establishment Democrats”, i.e. Democratic officeholders and bureaucrats, want to hold onto their jobs and that means nominating candidates who at least have some chance of winning. They recognize that, however he may fare in the primaries, Bernie Sanders has little chance of winning the general election.

The reality of American political life is that, although many Americans are not above snatching a $20 bill if it’s left sitting on a table unattended, they aren’t much interested in politics. Those who are interested are not representative and those who are representative aren’t interested.

Those in the media deal in simple stories. Winners and losers. Horseraces. Boxing matches. Nuance does not photograph well. The danger of a press that is in lockstep agreement is that they’ll force the real stories into the Procrustean bed of their preconceived notions. Nobody who doesn’t conform to that consensus will get a fair shake.

Today the subject that people are fulminating about is the murders of 12 people and the wounding of several more in Virginia Beach yesterday. The editors of the Washington Post have an explanation for it:

Mass shootings at schools, newspapers, concerts, nightclubs and factories have become a threat to public health and safety in the United States, an epidemic of violence resulting in hundreds of deaths every year. Would the nation’s politicians be mute and paralyzed if, say, 199 people were killed by food poisoning, a defective toy, or an automobile part malfunction? That is the number who have died in mass shootings so far this year (along with 643 nonfatal gunshot wounds), according to one group that keeps track. Sadly, sensible gun control generates headlines for a few days after each massacre, but then nothing happens.

The reason for this inaction is no mystery: Politicians are intimidated by a gun rights movement, led by the National Rifle Association, that has for too long stood in the way of action.

I think it’s a little more complicated than that. I think that more people want to be able to own firearms than want to deny others the ability to do so and politicians recognize that.

Second Amendment absolutists point the finger in a different direction: they think that “gun free zones” are the cause of these murder sprees.

I have no idea what precipitates these incidents. In a county of 330 million there will inevitably be a certain number of people who are disturbed enough to do such things. The U. S. does not have the largest number of mass shootings on a per capita basis. Norway, Serbia, France, and other European countries all have more. Some of these countries have much stricter gun control laws than we.

What to do? I suspect that changing our laws with respect to mental illness and its treatment would be more productive than gun control laws. Maybe one’s view of the matter depends on whether one owns a gun or is mentally ill.

In 1965 Gene Moore, president of Intel, noted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit was doubling every year and went on to project that would persist for ten years. In 1975 he downgraded that to doubling every two years and that projection held true until 2012. The rate of increase has ratcheted down again and the end of “Moore’s Law” as it’s called is now in sight. From IEEE Spectrum:

Two of the world’s largest foundries—Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung—announced in April that they’d climbed one more rung on the Moore’s Law ladder. TSMC spoke first, saying its 5-nanometer manufacturing process is now in what’s called “risk production”—the company believes it has finished the process, but initial customers are taking a chance that it will work for their designs. Samsung followed quickly with a similar announcement.

TSMC says its 5-nm process offers a 15 percent speed gain or a 30 percent improvement in power efficiency. Samsung is promising a 10 percent performance improvement or a 20 percent efficiency improvement. Analysts say these figures are in line with expectations. Compared, though, with the sometimes 50 percent improvements of a decade ago, it’s clear that Moore’s Law is not what it used to be. But judging by the investments big foundries are making, customers still think it’s worthwhile.

The number of 5nm foundries is decreasing which suggests that the research and development that might lead to 3nm manufacturing id declining as well.

For decades software developers have been relying on better, faster, cheaper hardware to redeem their inefficient designs. Today’s developers rarely have the skills necessary to produce efficient software and almost never have the time that it requires.

Illinois isn’t just in the news about taxes and abortion liberalization. The Chicago Tribune reports that Illinois will become the 11th state to legalize recreational marijuana usage:

Marking a historic moment in an expanding national movement, Illinois lawmakers Friday approved recreational marijuana legalization.

After a contentious debate in Springfield — during which one lawmaker even cracked eggs into a frying pan to depict the “brain on drugs” — the House of Representatives voted 66-47 to allow possession and sales beginning Jan. 1, 2020. The Senate had approved the measure earlier in the week.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker plans to sign the bill into law, which would make Illinois the 11th state to legalize cannabis and the first state in which a legislature approved commercial sales. Vermont lawmakers legalized possession, but not yet commercial sales. Approval in other states came via referendum.

I’m going to put down a marker. I do not think that the Illinois legislature has the restraint necessary to realize the revenue that the governor has been predicting from the sales of legal marijuana. If there’s one thing of which we can be confident it’s that if the cost of legal marijuana becomes too high a black market will quickly emerge. I also think that the notion that sales can be limited to those over 21 is laughable.

I don’t think this move is either a tragedy or a great stride in human rights. I also think that the rewards have been greatly exaggerated while the risks have been unduly minimized. I have reluctantly supported marijuana legalization for some time, as much through fatalism as anything else.

I actually liked Chicago Tribune reporter Eric Zorn’s retort to complaints about Illinois’s taxing and spending more than I expected to:

“It’s time to stop the madness and cut spending,” tweeted state Rep. David McSweeney, R-Barrington Hills, Friday morning, renewing his objection to the Democratic proposal to generate an estimated $3.4 billion a year by raising state income tax rates on the highest earners.

If only it were that easy! If only Illinois were a profligate outlier, levying obscenely high taxes and wasting it on fluffy, do-nothing, easy-to-slash programs, we could surgically tame the budget beast.

Adjusted for population size, Illinois ranks 34th in the nation in public welfare spending, 19th in spending on housing and community development, 15th in spending on elementary and secondary education and 13th in spending on highways, according to the COGFA report.

We rank a bit higher in state and local spending on jails and prisons (12th), police (sixth) and parks and recreation (fifth), but as former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner discovered when he attempted to take the scalpel to state spending, much of the fat has already been trimmed.

Comparing state spending in fiscal year 2000 with state spending in fiscal year 2019 adjusted for inflation, higher education is down 52%, human services and public safety are down 26%, health care is down 23% and net discretionary spending is down 20%, according to an analysis by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a liberal Chicago think tank.

The Kaiser Family Foundation found that Illinois ranked 37th in state-only spending per capita in 2017 and 43rd in Medicaid spending per enrollee in 2014, the most recent year available.

Neither Rep. McSweeney’s comments nor Mr. Zorn’s responses fairly represent Illinois’s problem. My gripe is not just that taxes or spending are too high but that we’re not getting what we’re paying for, our situation is bad and getting worse, and there is no remediation possible without cutting spending, something that is apparently beyond the pale.

Illinois’s schools rank 21st in the nation, its highways 28th, and crime 28th. In each of those cases higher is worse.

I think there’s a pattern emerging here. Illinoisans are willing to pay for what they’re actually getting but the state is paying for a lot more.

Illinois’s tax system is very regressive but I would be more enthusiastic about amending the state’s constitution to allow a graduated income tax if at the same time the state’s constitution were amended to allow the legislature to control the state’s spending on public pensions.

Illinois pays more than any other state to borrow. A graduated income tax alone or conjoined with a tax on legalized marijuana will not change that. It is losing net population rapidly. That means that a smaller population will be saddled with the spending obligations undertaken by a larger population. Increasing taxes only aggravates that problem. Illinois needs to attract businesses and workers not drive them away.

As the editors of the Wall Street Journal point out with a certain amount of unbecoming glee, when details of just how a single-payer system would work in the United States are fleshed out opposition to the plan mounts, at times from unexpected sectors, in this case public employees’ unions:

“We have been successful at negotiating good quality health care for many of our members and many don’t pay for health care right now,” explained a Civil Service Employees Association organizer. “This plan would impose a cost they are not used to paying.”

Progressives say the wealthy will bear most of the higher tax burden, but union leaders were skeptical. “What is the cost?” asked the chair of the New York State Public Employee Conference. “I cannot sell an estimate to my members.”

The New York State United Teachers also worried about retirees who have left the state and continue to receive subsidized union-run health benefits. Unions “don’t want to give up what they fought so hard for and suddenly see their members either lose their coverage, or lose it because their pensions aren’t enough to stay here in this state,” said state Senator Diane Savino, a former labor organizer.

Several thoughts occur to me. The first is that however structured any conceivable single-payer plan will result in those who are presently subsidized paying more than they do now. That includes not just public employees but all workers with company-sponsored health care plans and the companies as well, insurance companies, physicians, hospitals, and other providers. No wonder the safest strategy for enacting health care reform legislation is to enact it before reading it.

The other is that the source of much present distortion is in the tax code which taxes income rather than compensation and picks and chooses which health care plans it will subject to tax.