Category: Government

Racial equity in the world of IDs

by philg

The credentialed white elites of the Northeast used to say that Black people weren’t smart enough to get ID. Now, after remarkable progress toward racial equity, they’re saying that it is they themselves who aren’t smart enough. REAL-ID will supposedly be required soon for getting through TSA. Maskachusetts began issuing REAL-ID in March 2018 (source). Folks in MA agree that Floridians are stupid and that Florida doesn’t run its state government properly, which is perhaps why Florida wasn’t able to begin issuing REAL-ID until January 1, 2010 (i.e., more than 8 years prior to MA; source):

I can’t figure out why physical ID cards are required. Wouldn’t it make more sense to do retina scans and have your ID looked up based on that? I don’t see why this is different, from a privacy perspective, than forcing people to get a picture taken and a plastic card issue. Is it that, in theory, the government could scan our retinas from a distance and track everyone who walks around a city? Privacy-oriented folks could simply wear mirrored glasses.

Some data from “Real ID deadline is weeks away and most states aren’t fully compliant yet” (CBS):

As of last week, New Jersey had the lowest compliance rate in the nation — just 17% of its state-issued IDs are Real IDs. Pennsylvania reported 26%, while Washington and Maine tell CBS News they are at 27% compliance. New York reports 43% compliance, and California has reached nearly 55% compliance. [Maskachusetts was at 57%]

For comparison, the CBS article notes that Florida is “virtually 100% compliant” and Texas is at 98% (both scores achieved without either state taxing personal income).

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Federal government weighs in on a 15-year-old pupusa dispute (Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia)

by philg

Our energetic government employees have been vilified for inefficiency (most recently by the notorious DOGE), but the example of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia shows that federal workers can be very energetic indeed.

CNN:

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, entered the US illegally sometime around 2011, but an immigration judge in 2019, after reviewing evidence, withheld his removal. That meant he could not be deported to El Salvador but could be deported to another country. A gang in his native country, the immigration judge found, had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”

(“could be deported to another country” is inconsistent with what Democrats on X and Facebook are saying, i.e., that the noble Abrego Garcia had the right to permanent residence in the U.S.)

ChatGPT, regarding the value (in 2025 dollars) at stake in this deadly dispute:

​In El Salvador, pupusas are a beloved and affordable staple. Typically, a standard pupusa costs between $0.25 and $1.00 USD, depending on factors like ingredients, size, and location.

A federal employee, in other words, determined that a gang member who didn’t like a pupusa ten years earlier (maybe the gang prefers panes rellenos?) was lying in wait for Mr. Abrego Garcia to return to El Salvador so that he could be executed. Therefore, Mr. Abrego Garcia could stay safe in the U.S.

(It’s unclear to me why Mr. Abrego Garcia is safer in Maryland than in El Salvador. The murder rates in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are more than 20X higher than in El Salvador. The border was fully open for four years and any Salvadoran, including cornmeal-hating gang members, could enter the U.S. and stay permanently temporarily (latest extension by the Biden-Harris administration, oddly in conflict with the fact that the State Department rates El Salvador as safer for American travelers than France or my beloved Sweden (see below).

Additionally, Mr. Abrego Garcia would be at risk in Maryland from his wife, with whom he apparently has a history of physical violence (ABC). Suppose that she has availed herself of her 2nd Amendment rights during Mr. Abrego Garcia’s sojourn in El Salvador? He returns to Maryland as a hero to all Democrats and is promptly filled with lead by the wife.

Surely the United States is now home to far more non-imprisoned violent Salvadorans than El Salvador itself (which successfully exported nearly all of its violent criminals to the U.S. and then imprisoned the rest).)

I’m at a loss to understand how Americans imagine that our English-speaking government workers are capable of sorting out what happened in a pupusa exchange 15 years ago.

Separately, here’s a hero of climate change alarmism:

According to Maryland Sen. Van Hollen, we’re in a “climate crisis” exacerbated by a “climate emergency.” What’s the right thing to do in that situation? Tap into a lake of Jet A and fly roundtrip to El Salvador without first making any appointments (nytimes):

It wasn’t possible to meet via Zoom or phone?

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Should the USPS launch an authenticated voice and text service?

by philg

The phone system has become useless, with seemingly 90 percent of calls and texts being from scammers (SMS: “Hi”). The USPS is losing money and trying to justify its existence as a sink for taxpayer dollars. What if the USPS launched a competing voice/text/email service in which every participant was authenticated? People could sign up by going to a Post Office and showing an ID or by receiving a PIN code at their regular physical mailing address. Instead of giving your phone number to a bank or doctor’s office, you’d give your USPS “RealNumber” and then the institution could contact you without getting lost in the tide of spam. Because the security would be guaranteed to be as good as physical letters carried by USPS, medical records could be exchanged via this service instead of by FAX(!). This would be a good way to receive bills because they wouldn’t get buried in the daily tide of spam.

Inevitably, of course, someone would start spamming within this system, but USPS could kick spammers out much more easily and durably than other services (the spammer couldn’t sign up again without getting an ID in a different name and getting a new residential or business address where mail was being received in that name). On the third hand, the USPS makes nearly all of its current revenue by delivering spam (unsolicited mail) so maybe they wouldn’t be able to resist selling the right to spam everyone in the system.

As others have noted, USPS could also start a bank as post offices in many other countries have done (taking advantage of their many physical locations). Then the authenticated bills received via the RealNumber could be paid directly.

Readers: Does this idea make sense?

A recent Facebook post of mine:

Why can’t pig butchers be more specific? Text today: “Hi, Monica. This is Linda. Do you have time to take care of my pet? I need to go on a business trip for a few days and I hope you can help me. I will treat you to a seafood dinner when I come back”. Who says “pet” in this context? And “seafood”? That’s a supermarket section, not a colloquial dinner plan. Is there some language in which the above umbrella terms would make sense in a text message or conversation? If so, which one?

Related:

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If consumption taxes and carbon taxes are good, why are tariffs bad?

by philg

We’re informed by America’s expert class that Donald Trump’s tariffs, money paid to the government when an item from overseas is purchased for use here, are disastrous.

We’ve been informed for 30 years by America’s expert class that consumption taxes, such as sales taxes, airline ticket taxes, gasoline taxes, etc. are good. In fact, one way to make America better would be to have a European-style 20 percent value-added (consumption) tax, i.e., money paid to the government when an item from overseas is purchased for use domestically (and also when a domestically produced item is purchased). Trump’s 10 percent general tariff plus California’s 10 percent sales tax rate (varies a bit by city/county) comes pretty close to the European average of 22 percent consumption tax (VAT).

Our elites also say that what would really deliver us the paradise on Earth to which we are entitled is a carbon tax. We consume too much, especially of transportation, and the result is epic CO2 emission. A consumption tax, especially for things that have to be transported long distances, would go a long way to healing our beloved Spaceship Earth. A tariff, of course, isn’t a laser-targeted carbon tax, but it is most certainly better than no tax at all for plastic being made in China and then shipped across the wide Pacific Ocean.

Finally, we’ve been told by experts for at least 20 years that we are undertaxed (our structural annual budget deficits certainly lend some credence to this theory!). The government needs more revenue of all kinds so that it can do great things for us.

Trump’s tariffs may simply be a prod to negotiating lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers in other countries to U.S. exports. But even if they were to be applied long-term, based on everything that elites and progressives have previously said, shouldn’t they be a positive for both the U.S. and for the world? Why the hysteria from Democrats when higher tax rates, carbon taxes, and more government revenue are precisely the things that they’ve been asking for?

A neighbor’s house this morning, below. Why wouldn’t a progressive celebrate discouraging the importation of a gas guzzling Porsche 911 like the one in the photo (daily driver parked on the street because the homeowner’s garage is presumably full with the valuable cars). This homeowner could have used a nudge in the direction of a planet-healing domestically produced Chevrolet Bolt instead.

The whole situation is almost as confusing to me as climate change alarmist Senator Mark Kelly’s switch from Tesla to pavement-melting gasoline-powered Chevy Tahoe. Trump has seemingly delivered almost everything that elite progressives have asked for and yet they’re forecasting a doom spiral.

Related:

  • “Trade, Firms, and Wages: Theory and Evidence” (Amiti and Davis 2011), in which economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Queers for Palestine University (a.k.a. “Columbia”), and NBER, found that high tariffs boosted wages for workers “at import-competing firms”
  • “There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness” (New York Times! Guest essay by a young history professor): “They are the opening gambit in a more ambitious plan to smash the world’s economic and geopolitical order and replace it with something intended to better serve American interests. … it seeks to improve the United States’ global trading position by using tariffs and other strong-arm tactics to force the world to take a radical step: weakening the dollar via currency agreements. … some sort of reset of the economic order probably makes sense for the United States.” and then the more familiar NYT perspective… “But the slash-and-burn approach of the Mar-a-Lago Accord isn’t the answer. For one thing, it is hard to find an economist outside of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who thinks it is a good idea. But even if, despite all the chaos it will unleash, the United States eventually prospers as a result, we will have traded away the core economic and political values that make America truly great. … The most valuable asset of the United States is not the dollar but our trustworthiness — our integrity and our values. If the world envisioned by the Mar-a-Lago Accords comes to pass, it will be a sign that not only our currency but our nation has been devalue” (My rating for this last sentence: Completely FALSE! Our most valuable asset is the entire continent that we stole from the Native Americans! As a thought experiment, imagine if the roughly 350 million Americans lived on the territory of Sudan. How rich would we be?)
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Department of USPS Efficiency

by philg

We sent out a Christmas card that was postmarked West Palm Beach, December 23, 2024. The destination was Brooklyn. It was returned as undeliverable (my friend moved) on March 18, 2024, nearly three months after being mailed. An opportunity for DOGE?

If the USPS were eliminated completely, I wonder if Amazon or UPS would replace it by installing a print-on-demand system for creating junk mail in their existing trucks. The trucks would go from house to house, as they already do now for packages, and drop junk mail, plus the occasional first class communication, on doorsteps. If the junk mail printer also stuffed everything privately into an envelope maybe this could replace mailing physical documents in most cases, e.g., medical bills and bank statements. The bank would pay UPS/Amazon to print out the statement right at the point of delivery.

Separately, the folks in West Palm Beach were stamping outgoing mail with a snowman. The most recent snowfall in Palm Beach County was January 19, 1977 (that was the only snowfall on record, though I guess we could attribute the lack of snow since 1977 to Climate Change).

Related:

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Have Americans of color been enjoying a cleaner environment?

by philg

“E.P.A. Plans to Close All Environmental Justice Offices” (NYT):

An internal memo directs the closure of offices designed to ease the heavy pollution faced by poor and minority communities.

Mr. Zeldin’s move effectively ends three decades of work at the E.P.A. to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities, which are frequently located near highways, power plants, industrial plants and other polluting facilities. Studies have shown that people who live in those communities have higher rates of asthma, heart disease and other health problems, compared with the national average.

Last month, Mr. Zeldin placed 168 employees who work on environmental justice on leave, but this week a federal judge forced him to rehire dozens of them after finding that the action had no legal basis. Several E.P.A. employees said they were bracing for many of those people to again be eliminated, as the agency and others prepared for widespread reductions in force.

As president, Mr. Biden emphasized the need to address the unequal burden that people of color carry from exposure to environmental hazards. He created the White House Office of Environmental Justice and directed federal agencies to deliver 40 percent of the benefits of environmental programs to marginalized communities that face a disproportionate amount of pollution. The E.P.A.’s Office of Environmental Justice, which was created by the Clinton administration, significantly expanded under Mr. Biden.

The Trump administration has now erased all of that.

The EPA spends $11 billion every year. Apparently, roughly 40 percent of that has been going to government-identified “marginalized communities” (there are experts assigned to determine which communities have been marginalized?). There are hundreds of EPA employees, at least, working on “environmental justice”. Yet the New York Times journalist couldn’t find any evidence to cite regarding Americans of color (e.g., a lavishly paid Chinese-American school superintendent in the Boston exurbs who claims to be “a person of color”) experiencing any benefit as a consequence of this huge effort.

Is there any evidence that Americans are experiencing more environmental justice as a result of 10+ years of government effort in this direction? If one aspect of the environment is not being crowded, I would think that urban Americans have experienced less environmental now that low-skill migrants have been dumped into their neighborhoods (never into the neighborhoods of the elite advocates for open borders).

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Robinson goes to war

by philg

Incredibly, the U.S. military decided that it didn’t need to waste every possible dollar every day. The Army will now do some primary training of helicopter pilots in the Robinson R66 (rebranded the “TH-66 Sage”) at a civilian flight school in Marianna, Florida, a one-hour drive from Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee. An R44 would probably make better economic sense, but the idea of a piston-powered aircraft is apparently too terrifying for America’s bravest heroes.

See “Crew Training International and Helicopter Institute awarded U.S.Army FAA Part 141 Helicopter Flight School Pilot Program” (March 6, 2025)

Related:

the airspace (Marianna at the top center; note the magenta color for the airport, which indicates that there is no control tower):

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Taxpayers vs. the Community Engagement Specialist

by philg

A heart-wrenching story from the NYT, “Government Workers Who Have Lost Their Jobs Worry About Their Housing”:

After losing his job at the U.S. Forest Service, Cameron McKenzie was worried about finding a new job. But first, he had a more immediate concern: How was he going to pay the mortgage?

He’s done the math — finding another job in the environmental sector could take months — and keeping up with the nearly $2,700 monthly payment on his three-bedroom home in Blairstown, N.J., will be a challenge, if not impossible. “Even on unemployment,” said Mr. McKenzie, 27, who worked as a community engagement specialist, “I’m not going to be able to make my mortgage payment.”

Mr. McKenzie’s termination was among thousands of federal job cuts, part of a purge of the work force under an executive order signed by President Trump.

It’s the New York Times, so it is important to stress that the “community engagement specialist” profiled happens to be a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:

Mr. McKenzie, who worked at the U.S. Forest Service, said he and his husband are planning to list their New Jersey home — which his husband first purchased in 2022 for $215,000 — in May, when there’s more greenery to make it more attractive to potential buyers. Though they used to split the mortgage payments, Mr. McKenzie took on the task when his husband started law school. He estimated that around half of his $87,000 salary was going toward the payments and a construction loan the couple took out to cover renovations.

Who else is profiled in the article? “a single mother with three children” working as a “a health insurance specialist” and “Nathan Barrera-Bunch, who was a management analyst at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs … staying in Washington might not be feasible. It all depends, he said, on whether his fiancé, who still works for the federal government, can keep his job and if Mr. Barrera-Bunch can find a new one.”

In other words, the NYT apparently couldn’t find a single fired federal employee who was in a heterosexual partnership of some sort. Nor could they find an example of children growing up in a two-parent household.

Let’s circle back to Mr. McKenzie. If his cash compensation was $87,000 per year it seems fair to assume that he was costing taxpayers $250,000 per year (salary, benefits, pension, office space, etc.). What does a “community engagement specialist” do that justifies 100 percent of the personal federal income tax of perhaps 20 median-income families being harvested (i.e., for those 20 families, not a penny of their tax dollars can be used to deliver other services to them)?

I tried to answer my own question and found these slides from the Forest Service that include contributions from two community engagement workers. Here are some samples:

The white male cares about social justice, but is hogging this position that pays 2-3X private sector wages and thereby preventing a Black trans female from enjoying it? Only a white male can understand “Recreation Equity”, apparently:

Taxpayers keep funding DEI and yet don’t get any diversity, equity, or inclusion. The folks who get paid to achieve DEI aren’t discouraged by their long track record of (paid) failure:

Whiteness is to blame, it seems, but the white people won’t give up their unearned jobs and fat government salaries:

Critical Race Theory is not being funded or applied by the government, except in the minds of paranoid MAGA:

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How’s the first month of Trump-Vance going? (and was every part of government devoted to 2SLGBTQQIA+ advocacy?)

by philg

Other than riling up Democrats into fits of hysteria, has the Trump-Vance administration accomplished anything so far? Or have all of their initiatives been thwarted by judges?

Here’s one where a judge forced the CDC to stick with its old web site (NYT):

A federal judge has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to temporarily restore the pages it has taken down from its website to comply with President Trump’s executive order barring any references to race, gender identity or sexual orientation.

Judge John D. Bates of the D.C. Federal District Court issued the temporary restraining order at the request of a left-leaning advocacy group, Doctors for America, saying the deletions put “everyday Americans and most acutely, underprivileged Americans” in jeopardy.

Let’s look at one that doesn’t seem to fall under the rubric of “race, gender identity, or sexual orientation” .. “Trump Is Starving the National Endowment for Democracy” (The Free Press, whose brand is skepticism):

what’s happening at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a very big deal, and has not been previously reported.

NED, a key U.S. instrument for supporting grassroots freedom movements around the world, is under siege from Elon Musk’s DOGE. An order from DOGE to the U.S. Treasury that blocked disbursement of NED funds has crippled the organization—which received $315 million for fiscal year 2025—and its affiliates, The Free Press has learned.

The third-of-a-$billion/year enterprise is all about “democracy”, right? What if we check its web site?

LGBTIQ+ communities in Africa are often on the frontlines of the struggle for human rights in the region,” says Dave Peterson, Senior Director of the Africa program at the National Endowment for Democracy(NED). “As one of the most marginalized groups in many countries, respect for the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons is a key indicator for the overall respect for human rights and democracy in a society. Attitudes towards the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons is gradually shifting throughout the continent, which bodes well for the prospects of greater tolerance and inclusion.

It actually is about gender identity and sexual orientation because there is no “democracy” unless Rainbow Flagism is the official state religion. Without this $315 million/year spend there will be no democracy in Africa.

How much is $315 million/year? Compared to the wired-in federal deficit, almost nothing. Compared to what is needed to start a Silicon Valley company, enormous. Let’s look instead, though, at what kind of work by private sector Americans is required to keep the NED desk workers and their NGO pals comfy. We start by assuming a male working class peasant earning $50,000/year. No female is going to want to marry him due to his low wages (she can gain more spending power by having sex with an already-married higher-income guy in Massachusetts or California) and, therefore, he is going to be a single filer. He’ll pay about $6,000/year in federal income tax (nerdwallet). More than 52,000 peasants, then, have 100 percent of their federal income tax spirited away by NED to proselytize for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. For those 52,000 peasants, not a penny of their tax money will be available to spend on roads, airports, border patrol, scientific research, etc.

How about the only American enterprises that make our government look efficient? The gravy train for university administrators cannot legally be slowed down (NYT):

(The NYT article headline says there are “Cuts to Medical Research” and only readers who dig into the article learn that “research” itself is not being cut, but only fees that universities tack on to keep a full slate of deans in central administration. As much of what universities do is promote DEI and 2SLGBTQQIA+, it seems fair to say that government paying overhead fees on research contract is another way that the government promotes Rainbow Flagism. See, for example, University of Michigan’s $250 million in spending on DEI (NYT) or MIT’s “Assistant Dean of LBGTQ+, Women and Gender Services”.)

Fair to say that those with entrenched interests in getting money from federal taxpayers are winning so far?

Loosely related… one area of success seems to be in changing minds at the New York Times. “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship” (Feb 15, 2025) is unthinkable heresy. Two constitutional law professors:

In Wong Kim Ark, the leading case on birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court explained that “jurisdiction” referred to being born “within the allegiance” of the sovereign. The court held that a child born of parents with a “permanent domicile and residence in the United States” was a birthright citizen. Wong Kim Ark’s parents, as persons who came in amity, had entered into the social compact and were entitled to all the benefits of that compact, including not only the protection of the laws but also the benefits of citizenship for their children. Under the common law, the court observed, “such allegiance and protection were mutual.”

This is also why, as prominent editions of Blackstone’s commentaries explained, invading armies were excluded. “It is not cœlum nec solum” — it is neither the climate nor the soil — that makes a natural-born subject, “but their being born within the allegiance and under the protection of the king.”

For Trump to prevail, all that a modern court needs to do, in other words, is find that undocumented migrants are “an invading army.”

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Trump listens to at least one African in shutting down USAID

by philg

Folks are upset that Trump and DOGE may shut down USAID and cut U.S. foreign aid spending (state-sponsored NPR). This is consistent with a classic 2005 interview “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”. Quotes below, but not in quote style for improved readability (my highlights in bold).

The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

SPIEGEL: … corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers …

Shikwati: … and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.

SPIEGEL: Would Africa actually be able to solve these problems on its own?

Shikwati: Of course. Hunger should not be a problem in most of the countries south of the Sahara. In addition, there are vast natural resources: oil, gold, diamonds. Africa is always only portrayed as a continent of suffering, but most figures are vastly exaggerated. In the industrial nations, there’s a sense that Africa would go under without development aid. But believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.

SPIEGEL: But AIDS didn’t exist at that time.

Shikwati: If one were to believe all the horrorifying reports, then all Kenyans should actually be dead by now. But now, tests are being carried out everywhere, and it turns out that the figures were vastly exaggerated. It’s not three million Kenyans that are infected. All of the sudden, it’s only about one million. Malaria is just as much of a problem, but people rarely talk about that.

SPIEGEL: And why’s that?

Shikwati: AIDS is big business, maybe Africa’s biggest business. There’s nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical.

Shikwati: Why do we get these mountains of clothes? No one is freezing here. Instead, our tailors lose their livlihoods. They’re in the same position as our farmers. No one in the low-wage world of Africa can be cost-efficient enough to keep pace with donated products. In 1997, 137,000 workers were employed in Nigeria’s textile industry. By 2003, the figure had dropped to 57,000. The results are the same in all other areas where overwhelming helpfulness and fragile African markets collide.

Shikwati: … jobs that were created artificially in the first place and that distort reality. Jobs with foreign aid organizations are, of course, quite popular, and they can be very selective in choosing the best people. When an aid organization needs a driver, dozens apply for the job. And because it’s unacceptable that the aid worker’s chauffeur only speaks his own tribal language, an applicant is needed who also speaks English fluently — and, ideally, one who is also well mannered. So you end up with some African biochemist driving an aid worker around, distributing European food, and forcing local farmers out of their jobs. That’s just crazy!

A 2017 look at the interviewee:

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