Category: American Life

Today’s resilient children and the Addams Family

by philg

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate (i.e., everyone in Florida, to judge by the AI Data Center quantity of electricity that our neighbors are burning on lights and animatronics).

The somewhat spooky Addams Family was on TV from 1964-1966, the years in which President Lyndon Johnson was getting the U.S. into the temporary debacle of the Vietnam War and into long-term insolvency via Medicare, Medicaid, and other welfare state expansions (it’s not a “great society” if anyone has to work). The show was considered suitable for all ages, like pretty much everything else broadcast in prime time.

What about for today’s tender children? Sixty years after its original broadcast, the show is considered too challenging for children under 13. From Amazon Prime:

In researching this blog post, I discovered something remarkable: the Addams Family was originally a New Yorker magazine cartoon series (in the pre-all-Trump-hatred version of the magazine). From 1956:

Here’s something kids could learn from (Wikipedia):

The sudden cancellation in 1966 brought issues for Addams, as he faced a drop in income with the show no longer in development. His second wife Barbara Barb was a practicing lawyer who had engaged in “diabolical legal scheming” during their marriage, and had convinced Addams to sign over the rights to future television and film adaptations, as well as rights to some of his other cartoons. Following their divorce she remained in possession of these rights until 1991, when she sold them to allow development of the Sonnenfeld films. Addams could also no longer publish his comics in The New Yorker as Shawn’s ban remained in effect even after the television series concluded. Addams became bitter towards the magazine “for disowning his family”

(Charles Addams died childless. The above-cited marriage to the clever lawyer lasted two years.)

Loosely related, but I can’t help bragging about the Greenspun Family’s one brush with greatness… my father’s college classmate, Fred Gwynne, played Herman Munster. I don’t think that a scholarship student like my dad was invited to the same parties as the son of a Wall Street partner and a Fly Club member (“no Jews please”; the similar Porcellian Club’s first Jewish member was Jared Kushner, Harvard Class of 2003), but maybe they overlapped in a core class.

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Immigration kills pride in paying income tax?

by philg

It’s National Immigrants Day, perhaps known to Native Americans as “National Steal All the Land Day”.

Before the personal income tax Americans enjoyed a feeling of pride in their private charitable and community efforts. When a natural disaster occurred (see Climate Change Reading List: Johnstown Flood for an 1889 example) people knew that there was no FEMA and therefore they voluntarily contributed money, materials, and time to relief efforts and felt pride in helping their fellow Americans. One of Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s “eliminate private property” proposal was that humans enjoy feeling generous and if you don’t have the option of voluntarily donating property then you are denied an opportunity to feel good.

In the 20th century we switched to a system of forced extraction for good works, especially during the Lyndon Johnson administration when Medicaid, food stamps, and other cradle-to-grave welfare programs were introduced. To the extent that these welfare programs were being spent on people for whom a taxpayer had some fellow feeling it might have been possible to feel pride in paying tax. Irving Berlin was famous for enjoying his role in contributing to American society via paying tax and the Treasury Department promoted a song that he wrote on the subject:

Some of the lyrics that today’s pro-Hamas Americans might not appreciate…

You see those bombers in the sky,

Rockefeller helped to build them,

So did I.

A thousand planes to bomb Berlin.

They’ll all be paid for, and I chipped in,

That cert’nly makes me feel okay.

Ten thousand more, and that ain’t hay!

I wonder if open borders has finished the process of killing any joy a typical American might feel in sending his/her/zir/their money to the IRS. Almost all of us agree that it is worth paying taxes to finance infrastructure construction, e.g., gasoline tax to build and maintain the Interstates. Some of us agree that it is worth keeping an American underclass on welfare for four generations or more. Very few of us, however, seem to be excited about providing migrants with taxpayer-funded housing, food, health care, etc. Some Americans would rather help the world’s unfortunate in situ at a vastly lower per-person cost (if we spend $1 trillion/year on welfare for immigrants and their descendants, for example, that’s $1 trillion that we can’t spend on relatively low-cost-per-person programs that would save vastly more lives if spent on poor people in poor countries). Some Americans are haters and don’t want to help foreigners other than via voluntary trade.

Lack of pride in paying taxes seems to be a factor in state-to-state moves. Quite a few of our neighbors say that they moved from California or the Northeast because they didn’t agree with what their state and local governments were spending money on, e.g., race discrimination (“DEI”), gender-affirming surgeries for teenagers, a fully funded work-free lifestyle for migrants, etc. Without taking the dramatic step of renouncing U.S. citizenship, though, and paying the associated exit tax, none of us can escape paying federal income tax (exception: moving to Puerto Rico). Therefore, the shift in government spending in favor of migrants wouldn’t motivate Americans to move but it could result in less life satisfaction.

Speaking for myself, the taxes that I most enjoy paying are the following:

  • property tax, despite the epic quantity, because Palm Beach County and Jupiter do great jobs with the schools, the roads, public safety, etc.
  • aviation fuel tax because I love airports and air traffic control
  • gasoline tax because I value being able to get from Point A to Point B on smooth roads without traffic jams (Florida accomplishes the smoothness, but nearly every part of the U.S. seems to be plagued with traffic jams)

I’m sure that there are some progressives in Maskachusetts who actually do love paying state and federal tax that funds a work-free lifestyle for migrants, but my suspicion is that overall our decision to open U.S. borders in 1965 was one that has made us significantly less happy with the 30-50% of our working lives that we spend working for the government’s benefit. Running an asylum-based immigration system has perhaps made the situation worse because tens of millions of the migrants currently resident in the U.S. never expressed any affinity for the U.S. or American culture. They just said that they were afraid of being killed or attacked in their home countries.

Related:

  • “The downside of diversity” (New York Times, 2007): “the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The [Harvard] study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.”

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Grandson of the National Gallery donor is now funding the U.S. military

by philg

From the New York Times:

Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter. … A grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, Mr. Mellon was not a prominent Republican donor until Mr. Trump was elected. But in recent years, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

The article doesn’t mention that Grandpa Mellon was perhaps the greatest donor to the American people in the history of the nation. He gave his art collection and an endowment to establish the National Gallery of Art. He did this despite being the subject of what ChatGPT says what was a politically motivated tax fraud lawsuit by President FDR:

The government under FDR’s Treasury and Justice Department pursued a civil case (and attempted criminal charges) against Mellon for alleged under-reporting of income in 1931, improper loss transactions (“wash sales”) of stock, and questionable charitable deduction claims (e.g., an art collection transferred to a trust) that might reduce his tax liability. The case dragged on for years: a grand jury outside Pittsburgh declined to indict Mellon for fraud in 1934. In 1937, after Mellon’s death, the Board of Tax Appeals concluded there was “no doubt” the record did not sustain a fraud charge and found his trust and transfers to the art-trust valid. The government still obtained some additional taxes owing, but far less than originally sought.

His children Paul Mellon and Alisa Mellon Bruce were also major donors to the museum. Collectively they must have given money and artworks that are worth tens of $billions today. (Contrast to today’s billionaires who skip out on paying capital gains tax and send money straight to Africa.)

How about if we start a thank-you card-writing campaign? The $130 million donated is $130 million in taxes we won’t have to pay! (Yes, I recognize that all marginal federal spending can be considered additions to the debt rather than additions to collections from working Americans, but eventually taxpayers have to pay the debt unless it is inflated away to insignificance in our inflation-free Scientifically-managed economy.)

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Multiculturalism comes to the old neighborhood

by philg

As we get our houses ready for National Immigrants Day (October 28), from a friend in Maskachusetts:

I just drove on Sandy Pond Rd in Lincoln. A Somali (I assume, since he was black with lighter skin and curly hair) took out a prayer mat, oriented it toward Mecca and was doing a midday prayer on the side of the road (there’s no sidewalk). Right in front of a house belonging to a family with a last name of Goldstein.

(Note the hateful failure to capitalize “Black”, but the friend who used the hateful language is an immigrant and, therefore, it would be wrong for me to criticize him while he is enriching us with his presence.)

A July post from the church in the middle of town:

In April, we posed–and eventually distilled–a question in response: What if we activated one of our spaces–the parsonage–to provide urgently needed temporary housing to refugees?

We wish to state clearly that using the parsonage for refugee housing is not necessarily what will be proposed at a special congregational meeting on September 29, but the “what if” of this hypothesis (some might even call it a lightning rod) is what we are working with to ground our debate, open our hearts, and stretch our imaginations.

*The recommendations for length of stay per family vary from several months to about a year.

In Massachusetts, appropriate housing is hard to find and expensive. Newly arriving refugees are often put up in a crowded hotel room for up to 90 days while they are connected with essential services and look for other housing. Some families are transferred to shelters.

A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is at the bottom of every page of the church’s web site:

(See Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?)

The July post had estimated the cost to the church of helping out migrants at roughly $48,000 per year, mostly in foregone rent. I contacted a friend who is a member of the church to ask whether this expenditure had been approved by the congregation:

That issue was put to rest before the meeting, thank Heaven. … What we voted on is a $7 million improvement of the stone church, which I favored. 95% of the Church agreed. Progress!

So the Righteous voted to spend $7 million on themselves and nothing on the migrants whose cause they champion.

Related:

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Desperate enough to rent a billboard…

by philg

… but not desperate enough to spend time with someone who doesn’t share her love for Kacklin’ Kamala.

New York Post:

What do we see at marrylisa.com?

  • 41 years old (also, “Wants marriage and kids within the next 2-3 years with the right man”?)
  • Loves cats!

Her “non-negotiable items” include the following:

  • Must be Democratic or liberal or left leaning politically.

Preferences for a mate:

  • 35-45. Flexible within a year or two at most.

One open question is why she insists on a single gender ID (“a man”). She’s a self-described Bay Area liberal. Why the heteronormativity? Second question: How is she going to produce “kids” (plural) starting at age 44?

In the background:

  • Lisa didn’t focus on dating in her 20’s and early 30’s – she prioritized finishing college, starting a career, learning new skills and working on personal development.

Let’s ignore the improper punctuation (should be “20s and early 30s”) and ask whether her life plan made sense. The New York Post article says that Lisa Catalano is “a vintage clothes retailer”. In other words, she could have the job that she has without ever having finished high school, much less having earned a college degree. So she spent the years in which she was most attractive as a mate, plus tons of tuition money and foregone income, to earn a degree that has no value to her at the moment. The result of this plan is that she’s out on Tinder at the age of a normal human grandmother.

Loosely related, “‘Men seem to make life for women worse’: single US women share the woes of dating in 2025” (Guardian):

By 2030, 45% of prime working age women in the US, defined as women aged between 25 and 44, will be single according to Census Bureau historical data and Morgan Stanley forecasts – the largest share in history.

Kellie, 43 [i.e., grandmother age], from Georgia, joined the substantial number of respondents who felt that social media narratives had made dating toxic and pitted men against women.

“I wish I could have met my person before the stupid gender wars, social media and red pill rhetoric that has ruined people’s view of dating and marriage,” she said.

Danielle, 29, a public relations professional from Tennessee, said her future partner would need to be “kind, thoughtful, emotionally available, considerate, reliable, and responsible”, but also “college educated”.

“I’m very disheartened by the shortage of quality men,” she added. “Men my age are less educated, their social skills are abysmal, and now they’re running into the arms of Trump and ‘incel’ forums.”

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Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?

by philg

People in the U.S. who say that we have a critical shortage of affordable housing and that income and wealth inequality are a “crisis” simultaneously say that we must keep our borders open to low-skill migrants, elderly and disabled migrants, and others who will never be able to pay a median rent. The people who observe that the U.S. health care system is unusable due to lengthy waiting lists and capacity shortages also say that we should bring in child migrants with diseases that will entail months of hospital stays (at a cost of $millions and with a result of extending waiting lists for native-born Americans; see, by contrast, Australia).

Let’s compare this to animal hoarding, as explained by the Minnesota-based Animal Humane Society (I picked Minnesota because the noble citizens there are passionate about importing as many Somalis as possible, regardless of education level or propensity to work):

Animal hoarding is an accumulation of animals that has overwhelmed a person’s ability to provide minimum standards of care. … Rescue hoarders believe they’re the only people that can adequately care for their animals. Their hoarding begins with a strong desire to save animals. They also may have an extensive network of enablers, and are in complete denial about the dangerous or unhealthy conditions in which the animals are living.

Does the analogy hold up? Below, from Politico, a situation that has changed exactly nobody’s mind in Maskachusetts regarding the merits of open borders.

Related:

  • the UK is jammed with advocates for open borders despite a 2023 report by Human Rights Watch about “this system [of taxpayer-funded everything for migrants] has increasingly been plagued by serious deficiencies, in violation of people’s human rights to housing, food, education, health, and social security”
  • national ASPCA page: Animal “hoarding” can be identified when a person is housing more animals than they can adequately and appropriately care for. … guardians believe they are helping their animals and deny this inability to provide minimum care.
  • “‘You’re not welcome here’: Australia’s treatment of disabled migrants” (BBC): It is one of few countries that routinely rejects immigrants’ visas on the basis of their medical needs – specifically if the cost of care exceeds A$86,000 ($57,000; £45,000) over a maximum of 10 years. New Zealand has a similar policy but Australia’s is much stricter. … The government defends the law as necessary to curb government spending and protect citizens’ access to healthcare.
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U.S. population has doubled and housing construction has remained constant

by philg

Happy National Construction Appreciation Week to those who celebrate.

We’re supposedly building roughly the same number of new houses and apartments that we did in 1960 when the U.S. population was 180 million, i.e., roughly half of what it is now. St. Louis Fed:

During the intervening years we had an influx of about 80 million immigrants (Pew for 1965-2015 then add for the extra years before and after) and we are also home now to the children of those immigrants. How is it possible that we haven’t been building more houses in the aggregate?

One possible answer is that families are much larger today and, therefore, we have more people in the typical house or apartment. But 1960 was prior to the age of no-fault (unilateral) divorce. ChatGPT:

Another possible answer is that we have people living in tents, California-style. But Brookings says “Our calculations show that the U.S. housing market was short 4.9 million housing units in 2023 relative to mid-2000s”. I.e., if we assume a household size of 2, at most 10 million Americans and migrants are living in tents. (Note that this 10 million number is roughly comparable to the number of undocumented migrants who came across the border during the the Biden-Harris administration.)

A final possible answer is that we are living in shabby old houses. I asked ChatGPT:

Maybe this is good because it shows that we did such a great job building homes circa 1960-1980 that they’re not wearing out? ChatGPT says it is not good:

I can’t figure out how this happened. We are informed that migrants are skilled eager construction workers. Labor is 30-50 percent of the cost of building a single-family house. We are richer in migrants than at any time in U.S. history. Why wouldn’t we have at least the same ratio of housing starts to population size that we had in 1960 before we began to be enriched by migrants?

In fact, the New York Times says it is more or less impossible for us to have built any houses without immigrants: “How Would We Build Homes Without Immigrant Labor and Foreign Materials?” (April 1, 2025)

Related:

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A visit to the United Flight 93 crash site

by philg

As part of the return trip from EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) this year, we stopped at the Flight 93 National Memorial. It’s a 30-minute drive from the idiot-proof ridgetop airport that serves Johnstown, Pennsylvania (see Climate Change Reading List: Johnstown Flood).

The architecture is moving and designed around a walkway that follows the flight path of the airliner that jihadis had hoped to turn into a weapon against the U.S. Capitol. The path picks up after you go to a lower section of the memorial where the Boeing 757 actually crashed.

The building itself contains a lot of information about 9/11, not just the Flight 93 history. Visitors can listen to three phone messages to family members left by passengers on Flight 93.

Here are some of the outdoor signs:

A Harley is parked just outside the main building and includes Todd Beamer‘s final recorded words: “Let’s Roll”.

The walkway to the Wall of Names:

There’s a 93-foot-tall Tower of Voices of wind-driven chimes that look like aircraft parts (audio recording).

It’s a fitting memorial to a group of people who gave their lives in order to spare the lives of Americans on the ground.

Here’s the Hollywood version with the “Let’s Roll” line about 4 minutes in:

RIP especially to the crew: Lorraine Bay, Jason Dahl, Sandra Bradshaw, Wanda Green, LeRoy Homer Jr., CeeCee Lyles, and Deborah Welsh. Airline crews enable us to live richer lives by assuming a higher level of risk every day than those of us who earn our wages by flying desks.

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Diversity tour of Shaker Heights near Cleveland, Ohio

by philg

Photos taken walking around a rich white neighborhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio back in July…

Joe Biden won 90 percent of the vote among the folks here (Wikipedia). Quite a few houses sported political signs, 100 percent of them advocating for progressive Democrat points of view. Example from a $1 million house (a fortune by Rust Belt standards!):

Maybe the owner doesn’t want to replace the sign with one that is better condition because that wouldn’t communicate that he/she/ze/they has had a longstanding relationship with Black Lives Matter. What would happen if a Black Life from Cleveland proper wanted to dip into the “public” Shaker Heights swimming pool? Unless accompanied by a resident, he/she/ze/they would be excluded due to non-residency:

We did find some genuine diversity in the Van Aken District. One visitor was dressed in a full burqa with eye slit. Her companion wore a modest abaya with parts of her face showing and everything else covered. They walked by this clothing store whose message wasn’t exactly Islamic:

None of the closeted conservatives of Shaker Heights had the temerity to display any political message outside of their homes. One of the better examples of independent thinking was this house with a “resist” sign, an upside-down American flag, and a Ukrainian flag:

A sampling of the signs in front of some other $1 million houses:

I wonder if these signs help maintain neighborhood political monoculture by discouraging anyone who disagrees with the posted messages from buying a house. This would result in an increase in happiness among residents, according to Harvard University research as covered by the New York Times: “The downside of diversity” (2007).

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

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Why isn’t Cleveland gentrified?

by philg

Some photos from a recent trip to Cleveland. Here’s some signage from the Cleveland History Center:

By 1920, according to the local history nerds, Cleveland was rich in precious immigrants, had achieved a dream level of diversity (30 different ethnic groups), and was “progressive”. Just a few years later, though, the economic and population growth was over. It doesn’t seem as though Cleveland per se has ever recovered even as many of its suburbs have prospered and even though Cleveland is home to one of the world’s most successful health care enterprises, the Cleveland Clinic.

Nearly every other American downtown has become gold-plated. How did Cleveland manage to fail?

Across town at the Aquarium, the scientists say that immigrants “cause harm to the habitat”:

Back to the history center… It’s free to anyone who wisely refrains from work (EBT card) and they’ve preserved their COVID signage and mask-wearing habits:

The museum reminds those who are buying Cirrus SR22 G7s at $1.4 million (now fully deductible in Year 1 due to the recent One Beautiful Bill) that we live in an inflation-free society. A P-51 Mustang that could take off at 12,000 lbs. and cruise at 315 knots cost $50,000 brand new or $3,500 lightly used:

If Tesla can get Optimus to work, how about a return to wood-sided cars? The robot can apply polish to the wood every week:

The museum’s collection is especially strong in hybrid and electric cars, some more than 100 years old. Visitors are reminded that Cleveland was at one time a close second to Detroit in mass production of automobiles (which raises the question of why Cleveland auto manufacturing faded into insignificance).

The museum was hosting a special show of Islamic-American fashion:

A temporary exhibition featured Black photographers and, as it happened, all of the photographs on display were of Black subjects (i.e., there weren’t photos of architecture, landscape, or nature taken by Black photographers, but only pictures of Black people by Black people):

(More than half of the money for any museum like this comes from taxpayers, either through deductibility of donations or from direct grants from the government. So taxpayers are funding exhibitions from which some artists/photographers are excluded due to skin color, apparently contrary to the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.)

In a similar vein, the museum had a show devoted to women and politics, ignoring the other 73 gender IDs recognized by Science.

I wonder if nonprofit orgs are, after government and universities, principal sources of division in American society.

Circling back to Cleveland, though, why is this waterfront city such a spectacular failure?

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