I am struggling with myself, trying to determine whether to watch tonight’s Vice Presidential Debate. I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a vice presidential debate before.

Yet another reminder that this is an election like no other in living memory. We have two incumbents running against one another, both running simultaneously on their records and as “outsiders”. That was underscored by Gov. Walz’s recent declamation that “we can’t stand four more years of this”. Historically, vice presidential debates have not been particularly consequential, that despite the ages of the candidates in 2020, but this one might be different.

It should also be entertaining to see whether the debate is actually three against one which is a pretty good guess.

Since I have criticized the Harris campaign as being too thin on policy I thought it only right to read the economic policy briefing put out by the campaign. While I agree with many of the aspirations in the document, I found the proposals alternately puzzling and dismaying. I think it helps if you understand some of the phrases used in it.

For example, “tax cut” seems to mean a transfer payment administered through the tax system. It seems to be an article of faith that price increases are caused by “price gouging”, something never actually defined. Scott Sumner and others have pointed out that the available evidence suggests that price increases have been driven by demand rather than supply shocks.

I’m skeptical that subsidizing down payments for first-time homeowners will actually increase the affordability of homes. Indeed, I think it might do the opposite. When you increase the willingness to pay, prices go up. That is axiomatic.

How can we increase how much we manufacture (not how much it costs: how much we manufacture) in the United States? I think the two greatest barriers are excessive regulation and China. For the last 30 years China has targeted one industry after another, dumping goods made without the environmntal, labor, health, safety, etc. regulations we have here and making it uneconomical to compete against them.

92% of new businesses are retail or services providers. Furthermore, (speaking as a former small business owner who filled out his own tax returns) net revenue tends to be quite small for startups, i.e. their taxes aren’t very high. Reducing paperwork might be a much stronger incentive. I don’t know whether subsidizing startups is actually an investment or not.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are equally skeptical, dubbing Kamalanomics “Bidenomics II”, consisting largely of higher taxes, new and bigger entitlements, transfer payments, subsidies, more student loan forgiveness, more federal control of healthcare, industrial policy, price controls, union gifts, and green energy largesse.

There is a wisecrack attributed to many that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. I’m not sure that’s always true.

I can think of three movie directors who made the same movie more than once. In each case at least to my eye the original was better but maybe you have a different view. The three I can think of are:

Raoul Walsh: High Sierra (1940) and Colorado Territory (1949)
Frank Capra: Lady for a Day (1933) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961)
Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

and that doesn’t even count the many variations on the same theme that Alfred Hitchcock directed e.g. The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and North By Northwest. Each features a dashing man on the run eluding his pursuers, encountering a romantic interest largely by chance, and finally triumphing.

Can you think of any other instances of the same director directing literally the same movie although undoubtedly with a different cast and likely a change of scenery?

Update

I’ve got one more than I think counts: Howard Hawks—Rio Bravo (1959) and Eldorado (1966). I recognize that they didn’t start out to be the same movie but Hawks was working with the same writer (Leigh Brackett) and the two of them kept rewriting and adding scenes to Eldorado until it was effectively a remake of Rio Bravo.

Update 2

I’ve got another. Cecil B. DeMille and The Ten Commandments in 1923 and 1956.

Speaking of ends we are reaching the end of our tomato harvest for this year. This year we planted Cherokee Purples, Genuwines, Romas, and Midnight Romas. I’m using the last of our Romas along with some of our last Midnight Romas. The Genuwines were an experiment that worked out well. We’ll probably plant all four of those again next year.

This season has been a real wrestling match with the squirrels who refuse to be deterred. They also refuse to eat the tomatoes. They just take a bite and leave the rest which is a waste.

My wife and I have a friend who is in deep mourning. She has been an Oakland Athletics fan her entire adult life and the As have played their last game in the Oakland Coliseum. They will play for three years in Sacramento (!) before moving into their new home in Las Vegas.

As you may recall I rarely post on local events happening outside Chicago or Illinois. However, the reports of the mayor of New York City having been indicted on charges of corruption in office moved me to post a little sympathy card for the people of New York.

Believe me, Chicagoans understand your pain.

On a related note the White Sox are poised on the brink of unseating the 1962 Mets as the worst major league baseball team in modern history.

In his latest Wall Street Journal op-ed Karl Rove is bemused by President Joe Biden’s plans to aid Vice President Harris’s campaign for the presidency:

What does Joe Biden think he’s doing? More important, what do the geniuses running his White House communications shop think they’re doing?

According to Politico, the president will spend the fall on the road doing a tour “that will focus largely on the administration’s accomplishments” in “substantive, higher-payoff events.”

“The schedule will be robust and he plans to leave it all on the field,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt promises. Axios reports that the president plans to “communicate directly” with Americans “on how the Biden-Harris Agenda will pay dividends now and 10, 20 and 30 years into the future.”

This strategy may sound smart to West Wing staffers spit-balling how to occupy Mr. Biden’s time. But the Harris-Walz campaign team has to be less than thrilled about the possibility of a Biden valedictory tour in the months before the election.

Among the reasons behind his puzzlement are that President Biden’s communication skills have not improved since June, President Biden going on the road takes eyeballs aways from Vice President Harris, and, worst of all, he’s tying Vice President Harris to his administration as closely as he can and that is rather apparently seen as a liability by the Harris campaign:

If Mr. Biden goes through with this plan, he’ll be making his economic record even more central to the election. Though Ms. Harris has worked hard to close the gap, she trails Mr. Trump in the NBC poll on who’s better at “dealing with the economy” by 41% to 50% and “dealing with inflation and the cost of living” by 40% to 48%. Mr. Biden’s insistence on being involved could widen that spread a bit.

It isn’t just Mr. Rove who’s wondering if the president isn’t trying to undermine Vice President Harris’s campaign.

This post by Mark Judge at Chronicle may give you a new perspective on Amazon, the Washington Post, Mark Judge, or all three. Here’s a snippet:

At Amazon, things are very tightly organized. You are given a uniform, training, and very clear guidelines. There is a point system that penalizes you if you are late or absent. You get a point for arriving late or leaving early, even on your 30-minute lunch break. If you hit eight points you’re gone. You are expected to perform with efficiency.

It was reported that Bezos doesn’t mind firing a lot of workers because if they are there too long, the thinking goes, they get complacent. Bezos believes that workers who have been at the company too long get comfortable and their productivity declines. Amazon’s reported goal is to filter out the bottom 6 percent of performers to avoid a “march to mediocrity.”

The number of people who quit or are fired each year at Amazon is higher than the total employment at the company. Seventy percent of those hired leave within 90 days. This is double the turnover rate for similar employers and it costs Amazon an estimated $8 billion every year. When I worked at Amazon, there was a crazy dual emphasis on both working you to death and trying to make sure you didn’t quit.

That sounds remarkably like the workload of a Japanese salaryman and I can’t help but wonder if it is not deliberate. Consider this:

(Extracted from Amazon’s web site.) Mr. Judge has mentioned the high turnover rate at Amazon. I can’t help but wonder if kar?shi (death from overwork) is a phenomenon there. I suspect not.

His main point in the piece is that both Amazon and the post should be reformed by treating Amazon employees the way they treat Post employees and Post employees the way Amazon employees are treated which sounds remarkably vindictive to Post employees to me.

There is a crisis in elementary education. Far too many students are unable to read at grade level. Consider this piece by Hannah Schmid at Illinois Policy:

There is an early literacy crisis nationally, and students’ futures are at risk when they are already behind in fourth grade.

In Illinois, only one-third of fourth-grade students met or exceeded reading proficiency standards on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Every two years, fourth and eighth grade students across 50 states and District of Columbia take the national reading exam. According to the Nation’s Report Card, it is “the only assessment that allows comparison of results from one state with another, or with results for the rest of the nation.”

Illinois is one of 35 states and the DC in which just one-in-three (or fewer) fourth grade students met or exceeded reading standards in 2022.

Despite a smaller decline in proficiency following the pandemic compared to some other states, Illinois’ early literacy rate is the same as it was 12 years ago, meaning increases in education spending have failed to improve the literacy rate.

Research has pinpointed third grade as a critical reading milestone because students need to have learned to read by then or they will not be able to absorb the rest of their educations.

For more than 30 years we have been told by Republican and Democratic administrations that higher education was the key to a bright future for the United States. Judging by the above it’s no wonder that most of the employment growth over the last five years has been among immigrants. The jobs on offer either require no education or a college education. Young people educated here can’t hack it. Over that period real spending on education has nearly trebled. Here in Chicago on average a CPS teacher earns $70,000—40% more than the national average. That’s about the household income here and the CTU is angling for more.

My question is what’s the resolution? If young Americans aren’t prepared for college work, what good is college to them? Spending more seems to accomplish little.