Jan
15
2024

Let Us Turn Our Thoughts Today to Martin Luther King

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No mail, no newspaper, … why, it must be Martin Luther King Day!

It's also the fifth year in a row the University Near Here isn't doing anything to celebrate. Sad! It used to be a Pun Salad yearly tradition to poke fun at their annual moral grandstanding. My detailed obituary for the practice is here.

The best UNH can do is to post suggested activities for Black History Month 2024. There are six of them! And one of them, a "NON-UNH AFFILIATED COMMUNITY EVENT", is this very morning, a Pancake Breakfast ("with a program of music and spoken word following breakfast") down at South Church in Portsmouth.

The remaining events sound much less fun, and somewhat less nutritious. Especially notable is the "Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Kickoff and Training" for UNH students, where it's promised to teach how to "fill Wikipedia's representation gaps".

If you wonder how Wikipedia got to be so tendentiously woke: this is how.

For those of us who aren't quite as woke, Rachel Ferguson has a worthwhile article at the Dispatch: What Conservatives Can Learn from MLK’s Economic Views. Excerpt:

Those on the right especially seem to agree that the conservative resistance to King’s efforts stemmed from a racial animus now happily discarded. Whatever legal objections that stood in the way of approving the Civil Rights Act of 1964 seem trivial in retrospect. Even a politician like Barry Goldwater—pro-integration but constitutionally careful—publicly regretted his own scrupulosity in light of the terrors of Jim Crow. Yes, the fringes today are attempting to resurrect overt racism, but they’re largely seen as embarrassing dupes worth calling out. And attempts to dunk on King for his personal moral failings are greeted with a shrug. After all, conservatives have lots of heroes with much worse failings, and it’s usually us who argue—contra leftist iconoclasts—that one must take the good with the bad.

But the same cannot be said for King’s views on economic justice, which became increasingly radical in his later years. While his vision of racial harmony—or at least the bare outlines of it—has cross-partisan appeal, his interest in things like a universal basic income, union protections, and nationalized health care puts him at odds with free market conservatives. To be fair, it also put him at odds with his own father (who favored a full-throated capitalism) and with much of the black church tradition (which argued vehemently against the civil rights movement asking the government for economic support). King was no communist: Such a position was unthinkable in the black church, which roundly condemned the godlessness of communism. But he did call himself a socialist, and he refused to repudiate Marx entirely.

Historical note: Back when there was intense debate about creating a Federal Holiday for MLK, his inconvenient radical beliefs went largely unmentioned by the advocates.

Also of note:

  • They were told there would be no math. GeekPress's Paul Hsieh has a brief but amusing post on Politicians And Probability. Which I will just duplicate in its entirety:

    In 2021, 101 members of the UK Parliament were asked "If you toss a fair coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?". Only 52% of the MPs got the answer correct.

    The answer is, of course, 1/4 or 25%. However, this is an improvement from 2011, when only 40% of the MPs got the answer correct.

    First immediate thought: What would be the result if we asked US Congressmen the same question?

    Second immediate thought: If that many legislators don't understand such a basic principle of high school math, are they qualified to be making big policy decisions that affect all our lives?

    Instead of asking gotcha questions on the causes of the Civil War, they should be asking candidates this kind of question. That would be fun.

    Oh, and it occurs to me that, since we're talking about Brits, the snark above should really be "They were told there would be no maths." My abject apologies.

  • And mostly everything else too. Veronique de Rugy has a "we toldya so" article the in latest print Reason: The Fiscal Hawks Were Right About Debt and Interest Rates.

    While some nations tremble at the thought of high indebtedness, we Americans bask in the warm, comforting glow of $34 trillion in government IOUs. Why worry about a debt crisis when everyone wants to buy U.S. debt?

    Those of us who advocate fiscal prudence have been asked that question repeatedly in the past 15 years. We would point to the host of unfunded liabilities looming in our future. They would respond by pointing to the trend of declining interest rates over time. Low rates, they said, meant we should be able to handle interest payments on outstanding debt while growing the economy with smart investments. Indeed, thanks to low interest rates, payments on federal government debt as a share of GDP dropped from more than 3 percent in the early 1990s to 1.5 percent in 2021. Debt seemed cheap and manageable, so why worry?

    As the 10-year Treasury rate hit 5 percent this year, with interest payments on the debt rapidly increasing and bondholders' interest in buying U.S. debt declining, it's tempting for us fiscal hawks to simply say, "We told you so." But it's more productive to understand how we ended up in this quagmire, in hopes of avoiding similar mistakes in the future.

    It's tough to see how we can avoid "similar mistakes in the future", when (for example), my own typical CongressCritter…

    … is a tireless advocate for government spending more money that it doesn't have.

  • On a related note… Patrick Carroll lists 7 Ridiculous Examples of Government Waste in 2023. It's actually a bunch of items from Rand Paul's latest ‘Festivus’ Report on Government Waste. Number one is the bipartisan elephant/donkey in the room:

    The national debt continues to skyrocket, from roughly $30 trillion last year to roughly $34 trillion today. One of the many problems with carrying such a heavy debt burden is the sheer volume of money that needs to be spent on interest. As Senator Paul’s report highlights, the U.S. Department of the Treasury spent $659 billion(!) in Fiscal Year 2023 just on interest payments.

    What’s worse, there seems to be no end in sight. “The Congressional Budget Office predicts that we will add an average of $2 trillion in debt annually for the next decade,” the report notes. “The U.S. government will add over $5 billion of debt every single day for the next ten years. We borrow over $200 million every hour, we borrow $3 million every minute, and we borrow $60,000 every second.”

    And then there's the $8,395 lobster tank for the Pentagon. (No, it's not that kind of tank. The other kind.)

  • I know cynicism is unattractive, but… it's kind of inevitable when reading Daniel Mitchell on The Right and Wrong Way to Reduce Poverty. Since we're "celebrating" the 60-year anniversary of LBJ's "War on Poverty", Mitchell quotes from a recent study published in the Journal of Political Economy:

    …we evaluate the extent to which poverty has fallen as a result of increases in market income versus increases in government transfers. As President Johnson further stated in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, “The War on Poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others”… Contrary to this goal of President Johnson, we estimate that dependence—which we define as receiving less than half of full-income from market sources—among working-age individuals increased from 4.7% to 11.0% between 1967 and 2019. Likewise, dependence among children increased from 6.0% to 13.1%. …Success in reducing material hardship has come at the cost of having a greater share of the population dependent on government for at least half of their incomes.

    When you take into account peoples' income from various government programs, true poverty is almost gone. But "dependence" has increased a lot.

    And that's where the cynicism comes in. These programs were not designed to "lift people out of poverty". Instead, they are designed to generate a large bloc of the government-dependent. Who can be relied on to (1) largely vote Democratic; (2) keep a large number of bureaucrats on the government payroll.

    After all, if the "War on Poverty" was actually won… well, we wouldn't need those bureaucrats any more, would we?

  • And speaking of those bureaucrats… they're on the revenue side as well as the expenditure side. Dominic Pino drops a truth bomb on 'em: IRS Expansion Was Never about Reducing the Deficit. Leading with this boast:

    Uh huh. Pino comments:

    First, the Biden administration wanted to raise $400 billion over the next ten years with greater tax enforcement. Some Democrats in the press were talking about up to $1 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office has evaluated proposals for greater tax enforcement for over a decade and never found an estimate greater than $120 billion. Now it’s supposed to be some great victory that, over a year after the IRS expansion was passed into law, they’ve raised $500 million.

    Second, the purpose of extra revenue from the IRS was supposed to be to balance out the extra spending from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. But the administration’s post is all about how it wants to spend the extra $500 million. Democrats want to use the money to expand government even further, not reduce the deficit.

    As I have noted before, it’s important to remember that IRS employees are some of the only federal workers who are unionized. When in power, perhaps the primary purpose of the Democratic Party as an organization is to direct taxpayer money to unionized government employees. The influx of cash for the IRS will expand membership in the National Treasury Employees Union, which donates almost entirely to Democrats. It was never primarily about the extra revenue. When the IRS comes up well short of the $400 billion Democrats wanted, they won’t care much at all, and they’ll gleefully try to spend any extra revenue without reducing the deficit.

    And, just as a reminder, estimated taxes are due tomorrow. You're welcome.


Last Modified 2024-01-22 8:59 AM EDT