What’s wrong with this sentence?

A report ordered up by President Trump in March, and produced by officials in July, concluded that refugees had delivered $63 billion more in federal, state and local tax revenue than they had cost in federal benefits through the decade ending in 2014.

I mean as analysis. That’s from a Washington Post editorial in support of the U. S. accepting more refugees.

The answer is that it’s comparing apples and oranges—federal, state, and local revenues vs. federal benefits only. If you really wanted to determine the net cost (or profit) from refugees, you’d compare federal, state, and local revenues with federal, state, and local spending as a result of refugees.

The state and local costs of refugees, immigrants, generally, actually, dwarf the federal costs. There are education expenses, health care expenses, roads and sewers, law enforcement, social services, and thousands of other expense line items large and small to include in the reckoning. I think we can agree that if you consider only the revenues and ignore most of the costs you’ll find a benefit every time. That’s generally not what is thought of as “cost-benefit analysis”.

I’d support changing the mix of immigrants into the United States to include more refugees, giving priority to the people who’d helped us in our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria and their families but I think we’d be better served as a society by reducing the total number of immigrants. Immigrants are presently 14% of the population—the highest in as long as we’ve kept records. I think we need a breather.

Avik Roy’s concern about the latest iteration of health care insurance reform, expressed in his Washington Post op-ed, is that it has the wrong balance between administration by the states and “market-oriented” reforms:

The core idea in the bill is to take the money Obamacare spends on expanding coverage to the uninsured and give it to state governments in the form of block grants. States, in turn, could use these block grants to address the health-care needs of their populations.

It’s an attractive idea, in theory. Let states become laboratories of democracy, with some states using market-based approaches and others using government-centered ones — and then we’ll see who does best at covering the uninsured.

But Cassidy-Graham, in its current form, would put a heavy Washington hand on the federalism steering wheel. The bill would make it relatively easy for blue states to expand the role of single-payer health care, while making it rather difficult for red states to achieve market-oriented reforms. Lawmakers would be wise to revise the law so that it is more evenhanded.

You would think that would attract more progressives to the plan but apparently not. What attraction does a centralized national system hold for progressives? Such a system for the United States would be unprecedented. It wouldn’t be like Canada’s system—Canada’s system is administered by the provinces. Such a system would be an order of magnitude larger than the systems of the United Kingdom, France, or Germany and two orders of magnitude larger than Switzerland’s. Size really does make a difference and my experience has been that size rarely results in greater efficiency.

But I think the notion of market-oriented reforms in health care is illusory as well. Can the problems with our health care system really be remediated with changes on the demand side alone? I’m skeptical. I think that changing the supply side of the health care equation is what’s really needed but that, apparently, is off the table.

Bryce Covert calls for the entire credit bureau industry to be nationalized in an op-ed in the New York Times:

These private institutions hoover up our data, often without our knowledge and consent, and then sell it off to banks, landlords and even prospective employers. The companies rake in some $10 billion in revenue every year. They wield enormous power to ruin our lives — if not through a data breach, then through errors on our credit reports. One in four consumers has an error on his credit report that could affect his scores, yet it can be very difficult to correct the record.

Although they call themselves bureaus, there is nothing governmental about what these private companies do. We let them take on a role that can have outsize consequences. And the free market doesn’t work here, because none of us can refuse to be a part of this system and opt out if we don’t like how we’re being treated. There’s no legal right to ask Equifax to remove your data from its registries or to stop it from getting more in the future.

Why should we continue to allow private companies to make money from us while ignoring our needs? Let’s nationalize Equifax and the other two major credit reporting companies, Experian and TransUnion. We could follow other countries’ example and hand the duty of tracking our financial histories over to a public registry instead of a private profiteer.

I found Ms. Covert’s reasoning mostly incoherent. If revenue, influence on our lives, or a lack of accountability were justifications for nationalizing companies, it seems to me that Google, Facebook, and Apple would be prime candidates for nationalization. What large company wouldn’t satisfy the criteria Ms. Covert is applying?

I agree with her in one particular: I see no reason that we should subsidize the credit bureaus’ business model. There is a ready solution for that: strict liability. Under strict liability it wouldn’t be necessary to demonstrate wrongdoing, intentional harm, or recklessness for a lawsuit to succeed. All you’d need to do is be able to demonstrate injury.

In her zeal for expanding the role of government she does give us one thigh-slapper:

The United States government is, of course, not impervious to data breaches, nor does it have a perfect track record of fending them off. In 2015, it announced that hackers had stolen “sensitive information” on 21.5 million people. But the government is at least accountable to public pressure.

The civil bureaucracy is completely immune from public pressure and, as we have seen over the last eight months, is highly resistant to influence from elected officials. The surest way of making the problem intractable is to nationalize it.

The more you consider it the idea, the worse you realize it is. Credit bureaus’ primary customers are lenders. Any nationalization of credit bureaus would inevitably lead either to additional subsidies for banks, state capitalism at a level we’ve never seen it before, or both. Can anyone reasonably say “the problem with the United States is that we’re not subsidizing banks enough?”

I also see no way of enforcing a ban on collecting data. No, liability is the best recourse.

Investor Jeffrey Harding provides thirteen simple rules for deciding who to trust in understanding the economy:

1. Free market economists tend to be contrarians and you should listen to them—but if they are selling you something, run for the door.
2. Contrarian investors are worth listening to—but if they are selling you something, run for the door.
3. Because someone was right before doesn’t mean they’ll be right again.
4. There are permabears and permabulls. Simple Internet searches will reveal who is who. Avoid both.
5. If you increasingly hear experts say we are not in a bubble, we probably are.
6. If you get advice from someone who says, “this time is different”, run for the door.
7. If the stock market is making all-time highs, such as the present, it probably is too high.
8. If home prices are at an all-time high, such as the present, they may be too high.
9. If commercial real estate prices are at all-time highs, such as the present, they may be too high.
10. If personal and corporate debt is at an all-time high, such as the present, there may be more risk to asset values.
11. A lot of debt at this stage in the cycle will kill you on the downside.
12. Booms can last longer than you think.
13. Be patient.

My own experience is that everybody is selling something even if it’s only their ability to offer advice. Consider that in the contexts of #1 and #2. Also, the prevailing wisdom is the prevailing wisdom for a very good reason. That being said there’s a lot of money to be made by voting against it. Also lost.

I’d be interested in hearing your reactions, other than ad hominem reactions, to David Frum’s Atlantic piece in which he finds considerable resonance between two seemingly different books, Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal and Henry Olsen’s The Working Class Republican:

What Lilla and Henry Olsen, the author of The Working Class Republican, both see and recoil from is the weakening of the appeal of American nationhood—and the strengthening of subgroups: identity groups on the left; plutocratic possessing classes on the right. Instead of the broad messages of Roosevelt and Reagan, they hear the narrow claims of victim-group grievance and purist ideology.

The article does have one good turn of phrase:

Politics must be affirmative. Opposition—whether to “big government” or “white supremacy”—is a mood, not a program.

In my opinion both political parties have entered culs de sac from which there are no obvious exits and which lead inevitably to violence and misery.

There’s an old joke about a man who moved to a small town in Maine when he was two weeks old and lived there all of his life. When he died his friends and neighbors put the following inscription on his tombstone: “He Was Almost One of Us”.

The essay of Andrew Sullivan’s in the New Yorker to which I referred yesterday is now on online. It’s interesting as many of Mr. Sullivan’s writings are. I have a couple of quibbles with it.

First, I disagree with his characterization of American politics in the 1960s:

The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote.

Mr. Sullivan is too young to remember the period and in my opinion he has swallowed the popular wisdom on the presidential election of 1964 hook, line, and sinker. Goldwater had little to do with Johnson’s ability to solidify black support around the Democrats to a greater degree than ever before. The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with it. Fun fact: a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1965 than Democrats. More Southern Whites, almost all of whom were Democrats, voted for Johnson than for Goldwater.

The strategy that yielded the Democrats 90%+ of the black vote was the nasty, deceitful campaign against Goldwater and the Republicans conducted by Lyndon Johnson. You’ve probably heard about the “Daisy” political advertisement. Yes, Lyndon Johnson warned about the danger of electing Goldwater president while building up our forces in Vietnam to three times the size of the D-Day invasion force and preparing to drop more bombs on the Vietnamese than were dropped on the Japanese during World War II.

You probably don’t remember this ad, in which an implied link between Goldwater and the KKK was created. Goldwater was Jewish, a libertarian and strict constructionist, and probably didn’t have a racist bone in his body. It was just a smear campaign and it worked. The “Southern strategy” came later, in the 1970s.

I didn’t vote for Goldwater and I’m a Democrat but I can identify a nasty political campaign when I see one.

My other quibble is with Mr. Sullivan’s use of the word “tribe”. Tribes have bonds of kinship, of blood. You can’t just sign up to be a member of a tribe. You’ve got to be adopted.

Historically, becoming an American or a member of an American political party was more like joining a religion like Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. If you subscribed to the religion’s beliefs and performed the religion’s rites, you were a member.

I think the word that Mr. Sullivan is looking for is “clique” rather than tribe.

I didn’t listen to or read President Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. I think he’s a boor, dolt, and provocateur and I doubt that he said anything that would change those views. Judging by the reactions I’ve read the speech like the man himself was a Rorschach test—your reaction is more dependent on the views you came in with than what you actually took from the speech.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal express grudging approval for the threats issued to North Korea in the speech:

The President abandoned any nuance, even by his standards, in denouncing the “rogue regimes” in North Korea and Iran. He was especially unabashed in describing North Korea’s offenses, calling it a “depraved regime.” These aren’t words typically heard at Turtle Bay, where others among the depraved sit on the Human Rights Council, as Mr. Trump also had the effrontery to point out.

But he really rattled the seats with his threat to act against North Korea if the U.N. fails to do so. “No nation on Earth has an interest in seeing this band of criminals arm itself with nuclear weapons and missiles,” Mr. Trump said. “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

The threat to destroy the North offended the foreign affairs cognoscenti, who view Mr. Trump as a barbarian. And at first hearing the “Rocket Man” reference to dictator Kim Jong Un does sound like an insult better left to teenagers in the school yard.

Then again, Mr. Trump inherited the North Korean nuclear crisis, and he is trying to get a cynical world’s attention that he intends to do something about it. Traditional diplomacy isn’t getting through to Mr. Kim and his entourage, or to their patrons in Beijing. After years of Barack Obama’s diplomatic niceties that ducked the problem, maybe the world needs to be told some unpleasant truths about an evil regime with a weapon of mass murder and the means to deliver it.

but they didn’t care for his notions of sovereignty:

“We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government,” he said, “but we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties, to respect the interests of their own people and rights of every other sovereign nation.”

How about the rights of their own people? Defined in such narrow terms, “sovereignty” and “interests” don’t include room for how nations govern themselves, which matters to how dangerous they are to their neighbors. In his own speech Mr. Trump rightly spent many sentences deploring how North Korea and Iran treat their people.

I wonder what rights they have in mind? The United States is an outlier. Freedom of expression, the press, and of religion are all much more expansive here than in other countries including countries which are our closest friends and relatives, e.g. the United Kingdom, and, as I noted in an earlier post, they’re under assault here. Many European countries recognize a “right to roam” which is called “trespassing” here.

As I have pointed out before there are more slaves worldwide today than there were in 1860 and the country with the most slaves? India, notionally a free and liberal country.

I think that the editors are responding to the U. S.’s bad habit of forcing their own notions of rights and government on other people. The “spheres of influence” they decry are the way of the world in the absence of American hegemony.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal report on a Brookings survey that found that students at American institutions of higher learning are rejecting liberal values:

‘Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government,” wrote Ben Franklin. “When this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved.” Imagine what Franklin, James Madison and the other Founders would make of a new Brookings Institution survey showing that American college students have no clue what the First Amendment means.

John Villasenor surveyed more than 1,500 undergraduates, and among the alarming findings: Most American college students do not know that even hate speech is constitutionally protected; half agree that it’s okay to shout down a speaker whose views they don’t agree with; and nearly one of five believe it is acceptable for a student group opposed to a speaker to use violence to keep him from speaking. Some of the answers vary by political identification, but overall the findings suggest great confusion.

Mr. Villasenor’s conclusion is blunt. “Freedom of expression,” he says, “is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses.” We’d take that further. Given that a functioning democracy rests on free expression, what do these results say about America’s future when these students leave school and begin to take their places in public life?

This survey provides additional evidence that the deeply illiberal incidents that have occurred at various colleges and universities around the country are indicative of something that’s more than anecdotal.

I’ve made no secret of my skepticism about intellectual property, an Orwellian term if ever there was one, particularly in the notion that the creation of intellectual property as an alternative to making stuff and performing services that people are willing to pay for is a viable growth path for the United States. One of the things that makes me skeptical is the remarkable double talk and maybe even double its proponents deploy.

Consider this post at RealClearPolicy by Andreas G. Elterich. Its title alone is enough to set my teeth on edge: “Don’t Antagonize China Over IP Theft”. Can anyone imagine writing “Don’t Antagonize Dillinger About Bank Robbery” or “Don’t Antagonize Timothy McVeigh Over Mass Murder”? Either he believes that intellectual property is property or he doesn’t. If he does, its theft is a crime.

And predictably he hauls out what he presumably thinks are the big guns:

Instead of chancing a trade war and further eroding the reputation of the U.S., the administration should take steps toward trade liberalization, thereby spurring economic growth.

Here’s a suggestion for him. Instead of trying to use quiet diplomacy, why not use shame? The Chinese authorities need to come to understand that their actions are shameful and those who do them are not worthy of respect. I believe that’s more likely to change their actions than any amount of quiet diplomacy.