If you're into retrospectives, and who isn't, your must-read du jour is Dave Barry Year in Review: 2024 was an exciting year, and by ‘exciting,’ we mean ‘stupid’.
Excerpt-wise, there is so much to pick from. And if you're as wise and as deft with your mouse as I suspect you are (and also immune to shameless flattery), I'd guess you've already clicked over and started reading.
But let's go to (I think) 2024's Peak Stupidity Month:
JUNE
...the Biden re-election campaign struggles to change the public perception—largely created by videos showing the president looking lost and confused—that the president is sometimes lost and confused.
Democrats insist that these videos are “cheap fakes,” and that in fact Biden is sharp as a tack, but unfortunately the public never sees this because he only exhibits this sharpness when there are no cameras around to capture it, kind of like Bigfoot.
So there’s a lot on the line when Biden and Trump square off in a much-anticipated prime-time debate, which was proposed by the Biden campaign, apparently on the advice of the Boeing Corp.
It’s obvious from the start of the debate that the president is struggling. He has trouble finishing, or even starting, his sentences; he spends much of the debate staring vacantly into the distance like a man who’s trying to remember where he put the remote control, unaware of the fact that he is holding it.
In short, it’s a very bad night for Biden.
Q. How bad is it?
A. It’s so bad that, by comparison, Donald Trump seems, at times, to be almost lucid.
Actually, it’s worse than that. It’s so bad that even professional journalists can see how bad it is. In fact suddenly everybody in Washington is acutely aware of the president’s decline, which previously had been apparent to only the entire rest of the world population.
It's not as if the other 11 months were full of rationality, either. Boeing is featured prominently. Sometimes implicitly, as in "You will never in a million years guess the name of the company that built this spacecraft."
Also of note:
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Okay, one more retrospective. It's from Jacob Sullum, who is not as funny as Dave Barry, and he describes How pols and cops blamed victims and passed the buck in 2024. Many examples, here's one you may have missed:
Collision Coverage. Last February, Police Chief Harold Medina of Albuquerque, NM, ran a red light and slammed his department-issued pickup truck into the side of a sports car, severely injuring the driver.
Medina, who said he was fleeing from a fight between two homeless men that had escalated into gunfire, blamed “gun violence” for his reckless driving.
You may recall that the TV show Breaking Bad was set in Albuquerque. No wonder they never caught Walter White.
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But seriously, folks. I mentioned yesterday that I was on "Team H1B". Let me
excerptsteal Harvard econ prof Greg Mankiw's post explaining why: The Case for More H1B Visas.Apparently, there is an ongoing debate in Trumpworld about whether more H1B visas are a good thing. From an economic perspective, the answer is a clear yes.
From the standpoint of economic efficiency, allowing a highly skilled immigrant to work at a U.S. firm is, for standard reasons, beneficial. The transaction is voluntary, so both the employee and employer are better off. And there are no obvious negative externalities (not counting, of course, pecuniary externalities). In addition, the U.S. government collects more revenue in the form of payroll and income taxes.
From the standpoint of economic equality, allowing a highly skilled immigrant is again beneficial. The relative wage of skilled versus unskilled workers depends on, among other things, the relative supply of the two types of worker. When highly skilled workers immigrate into the United States, the demand for less skilled workers rises.
Think of technology firms that need both engineers and janitors. When the supply of engineers rises, the demand for janitors increases, leading to higher janitor wages.
So an increase in H1Bs visas not only expands economic liberty (arguably a good thing in itself) but also increases both efficiency and equality.
Score one for Vivek and Elon.
Update: A friend points out there may be significant positive externalities in form of new knowledge that highly skilled immigrants would produce. I agree. That strengthens the case.
A slam-dunk, but unfortunately that doesn't make it inevitable.