Category: Government

Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition?

by philg

Back in 2016, I wrote “Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.?”, pointing out various advantages for American society if we could reduce alcohol consumption. This proposal was not well-received!

What about in the Age of Corona? Technocrats are gearing up for a massive testing and tracing operation. Example: “Here’s A Way To Contain Covid-19 And Reopen The Economy In As Little As One Month” (Forbes, by a Boston University econ professor). Excerpts:

The solution is PCR group-household testing of all American households every week. … If a household tests negative, each household member would be notified to go to their local pharmacy to receive a green wristband coated to change to red after one week.

This system is voluntary. But if you choose to have your household tested and receive your green wristband, you’ll be permitted by your employer to return to work, by your teachers and professors to return to school, and by proprietors to enter their restaurants, shops, cafes, etc. You’ll also be allowed to frequent the beach, attend concerts, go to the movies, …

Any household that tests positive will be required by the local board of health to quarantine in place for two weeks and then be re-tested. Households that don’t voluntarily get tested will be free to come and go as they wish. But without their green bracelets, they will have a hard time entering into workplaces and other establishments. Employers who hired the untested could face legal liability. The same holds for any business serving the public who lets someone onto their premises without a green bracelet.

My Dutch friend: “This will be just like it was for Jews after the Nuremberg Laws and similar. They were perfectly free, but couldn’t run a business, buy a movie ticket, or go to school.”

Electronic bracelets can also work: “People-tracking wristbands tested to enforce lockdown” (BBC). See also “US, Israel, South Korea, and China look at intrusive surveillance solutions for tracking COVID-19” (zdnet)

Covid-19 is a pernicious disease. It has killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide so far. But what if we could use the above technology and infrastructure to stop a much more destructive killer: alcohol. WHO says that 3 million deaths worldwide are attributed to alcohol. The average age of a death with/from Covid-19 in Massachusetts is 82 and more than 98 percent of those who died had “underlying conditions.” Alcohol often kills people who could have lived for another 40-100 years. In terms of life-years, therefore, we could save many more by discouraging alcohol consumption.

(Is Covid-19 different because an alcohol-related problem is due to a failure of personal responsibility? Consider the child of an alcoholic or a passenger in a car struck by a drunk driver.)

Given that people can brew their own beer or distill their own vodka, presumably it is not possible to achieve a 100 percent reduction in alcohol consumption. But if restaurants, bars, and airlines (to the extent any are left) were not offering alcohol to every customer and there were no convenient liquor stores (“essential”!), wouldn’t it be fair to expect at least a 10 or 20 percent reduction in alcohol-related deaths? (marijuana consumption increased following legalization in Washington State; shouldn’t we expect alcohol use to be reduced following prohibition?)

Since Americans have now decided that “saving lives” is more important than what used to be considered individual rights… If we succeed with alcohol prohibition using test/trace tech, why not use the same technology to attack HIV/AIDS, which has killed more than 700,000 Americans? (Covid-19 would have to kill 7 million Americans to take away a comparable number of life-years, due to the much younger age at which HIV/AIDS victims perish.) There continue to be 6,000 deaths annually here in the U.S., which is roughly comparable to the life-years lost from 60,000 Covid-19 deaths.

None of these public health interventions were doable in the 20th century. Epidemiologists predicted that HIV/AIDS would spread beyond the LGBTQIA+ community and kill millions of Americans. White upper-middle-class single Americans were terrified in the 1980s by this disease that merited cover stories of TIME magazine multiple times. Nobody would have tolerated the criminalization of sex outside of marriage in order to “save lives”. Today, however, there is no limit on the power of the government when there is a public health goal. (Maybe outlaw all sexual activity? If people want children they can be imported via immigration and/or produced locally and without HIV risk via IVF.)

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Donutnomics during the Coronaplague

by philg

I caught up recently with my source for “Fast-food economics in Massachusetts: Higher minimum wage leads to a shorter work week, not fewer people on welfare”. He owns donut shops and, following minimum wage hikes, had workers asking for their hours to be cut so that they could continue to be eligible for various forms of welfare, including means-tested housing and health insurance subsidies.

What’s going on during coronaplague? “Business is down 50 percent,” he replied. “But we should be able to get a loan from the government that will pay for two months of salaries.”

What’s the main challenge right now? “Almost all of my workers could make more collecting unemployment than by continuing to work for me,” he said. This has created a delicate situation. Given that unemployment is now more lucrative than full-time work, does he lay off the best workers, rewarding them financially for their high effort and dedication to his business? Or does he lay off his least productive workers, thus inadvertently rewarding them financially for their weak efforts and lack of dedication?

How about around the rest of the neighborhood? Other than the supermarket, our town has one source of food that remains open: a pizza and sub shop that has a few tables, but was always primarily a take-out business (it occupies half of a gas station). The owner-chef says that business is down 60 percent.

Readers: Are you as surprised as I was by these numbers? Most donut sales are drive-through and/or takeout to begin with. Wouldn’t people want to escape their houses, enjoy a traffic-free 5-minute trip to the local donut shop, and come back with a delicious coffee and donut? And why are pizza/sub sales down? I have a tough time believing that our neighbors have finally learned to use their $250,000 dream kitchens.

A neighbor is an accountant for small-to-medium-sized businesses here in Massachusetts. He reports that every employer with whom he works is besieged by employees, especially the part-time and low-wage ones. Are they nervous about the future of the economy and want extra hours and overtime pay so that they can save up? No. Like the donut slingers, they want to be laid off because they can achieve a similar or higher spending power by collecting conventional Massachusetts unemployment plus $600 per week from the Federales.

Consider someone who works 25 hours per month at $20 per hour, helping out a retail store during busy hours. That’s $500/month, which would entitle the worker to roughly $200/month in benefits in the event of a layoff. Right now, however, unemployment will pay closer to $2,800/month.

How about a full-time minimum wage worker? Let’s call that 172 hours times $12 per hour = $2,064 per month. Unemployment will pay over $3,000 per month.

I met a 24-year-old who works for a national retail chain that is headquartered in Massachusetts. She has been cut from five days per week in the office to two days per week working from home. “I hope this lasts through the summer,” she said. “I’m making at least $200 extra per week while hardly doing anything.” (She has a 24-year-old friend, meanwhile, who has been terrified by reports of young people cut down by Covid-19. The slender healthy young person will not leave her apartment.)

How typical are these experiences in which an employee actually has a higher spending power by being laid off? “The $600 Unemployment Booster Shot, State by State” (nytimes) says “Workers in more than half of states will receive, on average, more in unemployment benefits than their normal salaries”:

It looks as though there are some strange bedfellows in this table. New Hampshire and New York, for example, are two of the states that offer the highest reward for continuing to work (still a minimal difference in spending power compared to playing Xbox and watching Netflix all day).

One of the main themes of the Bell Curve (1994) is that American society becomes more unfriendly each year to those whose IQ is below average. I wonder if this is being amply proven by the current landscape of work-versus-welfare alternatives. The Bell Curve says that in the old days it wasn’t that helpful to have a high IQ. If you were born a peasant you could think big thoughts while digging for potatoes. It wasn’t that harmful to have a low IQ. If you worked harder you’d get paid more. If you committed a crime, of which there was a short list of easily understood prohibitions, you’d get imprisoned. Our modern world, on the other hand, has thousands of crimes, many of which are non-obvious and/or not regularly punished. Would a person with an IQ of 90 be able to figure out that saying “I didn’t do it” to a law enforcement officer could result in 5 years in prison (Brogan v. United States), more than pleading guilty to killing a fiance in order to get the insurance cash?

Pre-plague Massachusetts already presented a non-obvious landscape for planning out a life of earning. Having a child and living on welfare yields a greater spending power than working at a median wage job (CATO analysis). Having sex with a married dermatologist yields a greater spending power than going to medical school and working as a primary care doctor (our family law). Having sex with three different already-married above-median-income partners and collecting child support from each yields a substantially greater spending power than marrying a median-income partner. Add to all of these we now have a situation in which workers are much better off financially being fired than continuing to work. And, of course, they’re also way better off in terms of exposure to the dreaded coronavirus if they stay home and play videogames or watch TV.

We have a similar situation for business owners. The smartest and most successful business owners had their free government cash arranged within days. They had no trouble figuring out which bank to use, what forms to fill out, etc. (The biggest banks helped the biggest customers, taking advantage of the fact that a hotel or restaurant chain with 100 directly owned locations was considered 100 “small businesses” rather than one big business.) The honest, but not-too-bright, small business operator? He/she/ze/they was mostly out of luck.

How about people who want to collect conventional welfare? Here’s part of an email from our local school:

The events of the COVID-19 emergency may have changed financial circumstances for your family. As a consequence, your students may now be eligible for the Free and Reduced Price School Meals (FRL) program. If they are eligible for the FRL program, the national Pandemic-EBT program may provide additional benefits in the form of food assistance cards.

Details of the Pandemic-EBT program may be found at https://www.mass.gov/info-details/pandemic-ebt-p-ebt. It is a supplemental program provided through the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance. Eligibility is based on the FRL status, so, if your family circumstances have changed, you may wish to apply for enrollment in the Free and Reduced Price School Meals (FRL) program.

The application form is attached. You may fill out the Word document and upload the completed application file electronically to the Free & Reduced Lunch Application Submission Folder. That is the preferred application method. You could also print out the PDF version, fill it out, sign, and scan it, then upload it electronically to the Free & Reduced Lunch Application Submission Folder. Either method provides for the confidentiality of your information.

So… as long as you have a scanner and/or an Office 365 subscription, free meals will be coming your way! Here’s an excerpt:

Confusing: Each of your six children can be “foster”, “homeless”, “migrant”, and/or “runaway”. If a child has run away, however, how would there be an adult filling out this form?

(The form also says “We are required to ask for information about your children’s race and ethnicity. This information is important and helps to make sure we are fully serving our community.” Dare we ask if the white poverty industry employees will try to prepare ethnically appropriate meals for each child? It will like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino trying to make Hmong meals for the neighbors?)

Is this truly accessible to a person with a below-average IQ?

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Heteronormative Prejudice and Gender Binarism from the Census Bureau

by philg

Note the priority given to the options for a person who might live in the same house or apartment:

Image may contain: text

Textbook Heteronormativity.

The gender ID choices:

Textbook Gender Binarism.

Aside from the agency’s failure to get up to speed on LGBTQIA+ issues, I have to say that Census has given us a good example of web design. Maybe it is best not to try to figure out what these forms cost the taxpayer, but the overall IT budget is in the $billions.

A 2019 article, “2020 U.S. census plagued by hacking threats, cost overruns”:

The effort to move the census online aims to streamline the counting process, improve accuracy, and rein in cost increases as the population rises and survey response rates decline. Adjusting for 2020 dollars, the 1970 census cost $1.1 billion, a figure that rose steadily to $12.3 billion by 2010, the most recent count. The 2020 tally is projected at $15.6 billion, including a $1.5 billion allowance for cost overruns.

U.S. population was 205 million in 1970 compared to 330 million today. So a 61% rise in population corresponds to a 1400% increase in cost.

We are informed by the New York Times that Vladimir Putin does all of our voting for us (but it is the Chinese who post coronapanic on Facebook). Will Mr. Putin also fill out our Census forms?

T-Rex’s work, which includes security, data storage and performance testing, is projected to cost taxpayers up to $1.4 billion, according to the census budget.

So if the $1.4 billion in spending includes a firewall, we will have to complete these forms ourselves…

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If you thought you’d get masks and ventilators faster through the Defense Production Act

by philg

When friends on Facebook expressed anger that Donald Trump had not used the Defense Production Act to expedite production of N95 masks and ventilators, I would endear myself to them by linking to “The Navy spent $30B and 16 years to fight Iran with a littoral combat ship that doesn’t work” (Australian-designed high-speed ferry with some guns on the deck).

I think that I might have a new favorite article regarding military speed… “The 9/11 Trial: Why Is It Taking So Long?” (nytimes):

The trial of five men accused of plotting the attacks had been scheduled for early next year — almost 20 years after the hijackings. Now even that schedule won’t be met. Here are the reasons.

But they have yet to come to trial. The military’s legal proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have lurched from setback to setback, disappointing the families of the victims who have watched in frustration and dismay. Then over the summer, a military judge finally set a timetable toward a trial that envisioned a start date early next year.

Now, that schedule has suffered a one-two punch that promises more delay. First, the coronavirus crisis has cut off most access to Guantánamo Bay, complicating the work of the prosecutors, defense teams, judiciary and support staff who shuttle between the base and the mainland. Then the judge abruptly announced last month that he was retiring from the Air Force and would leave the case next week.

The crude court compound the Pentagon built at Guantánamo as a temporary outpost of the war on terrorism turned out to be expensive and inadequate.

Everyone but the men accused of the crime commute to Guantánamo from Washington, and points beyond for one- to three-week hearing sessions that have been plagued by flight delays, cancellations, mold-damaged offices and communications failures.

Judges have also canceled hearings because of hurricanes, health issues, higher court challenges and, recently, the coronavirus.

Maybe we can convince Joe Biden to promise to close Gitmo!

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Invest in Estonian-style e-governance to be ready for the next plague?

by philg

Quite a few Boston-area businesses have shut down their physical offices. Employees of Amazon, for example, are working from home. Towns and cities, however, can’t close down their respective Town Halls and City Halls because the only way to access quite a few government services is to show up in person. The same enterprise of state/local government that tries, via its public health department, to get everyone to stay home, may ironically end up being one of the only information processing operations that insists that everyone show up and get within contagious distance.

Supposedly Estonia allows citizens to do almost anything that they’d do at a city hall from the disease-free safety of their own homes.

The U.S. track record for government-run IT is admittedly mixed, e.g., with the $1 billion healthcare.gov insurance site. But maybe if we could adopt the Estonian system unmodified for state and local transactions we would be able to save time in non-plague periods and save lives in plague periods.

Readers: What do you think? Should people have to brave coronavirus to get (or issue) a building permit?

Related:

  • “Estonia, the Digital Republic” (New Yorker, 2017)
  • e-Estonia (Wikipedia)
  • e-governance (from Estonians themselves): “Estonia is probably the only country in the world where 99% of the public services are available online 24/7. E-services are only impossible for marriages, divorces and real-estate transactions – you still have to get out of the house for those.” (don’t get too excited about those family law transactions; they are not as lucrative as in the U.S. From a 2017 post: “In all three Baltic countries I learned that having sex with the richest person in the country would yield only about 200 euros per month in child support” (similar to nearby Sweden))
  • “Estonia: Tough campaign stop for Bernie Sanders”
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It’s a coronamergency, but let’s not relax any of our rules

by philg

I made it out to the local supermarket recently. The folks in our town who previously said that helping the vulnerable was their only priority continue to keep it stripped of the hand sanitizer and toilet paper that their neighbors might need. The righteous boycott of Barilla pasta, which (initially) refused to feature same-sex couples in its advertising, was apparently forgotten. The only pasta shape left from any brand was lasagna (people don’t have time to boil and bake when they’re sheltering in place?). Nearly all dairy products, however, including the ricotta cheese necessary for a standard lasagna, had been cleaned out. When did ricotta cheese become an emergency ration?

What struck me the most was being carded for the small box of wine that I bought for the lasagna recipe. It’s a national emergency, many of our loved ones will be dead soon, and the nearest toilet paper is in Canada, but we will still put effort into verifying that someone in his 50s is authorized to buy alcohol?

When I returned home, there was an email from the airport. The strict regulations for renewing security badges remain in force. People have to come in, do computer-based training (at a shared computer) to review material that they saw two years previously, and then get a new badge. The idea of relaxing this policy and extended all expired badges for six months is unworkable, apparently. Instead there will be some additional rules, e.g., people whose badges aren’t close to expiring will be turned away, etc.

I had a checkup scheduled at a local physicians’ office. I called to see if it was still on (“no”; anything routine is pushed out until June). The automated phone system forces callers to listen to a lengthy message that hasn’t changed from pre-plague times. It gives the clinic’s FAX number so that they can continue to comply with HIPAA while the economy and society collapse.

I opened my email to find a bill for $4.98 in tolls accumulated while renting a Hertz car in Florida. The “PlatePass administrative fee” was an additional $17.85, i.e., the bureaucracy cost 358 percent more than the service consumed.

An immigrant friend used to say that the true religion of Americans is regulatory compliance because it consumes roughly the same amount of time that people in medieval times spent going to church and praying. I wonder if his perspective is borne out by how Americans are responding to coronaplague.

In this time of coronaplague, I do wonder if we need to make sure that we’ve budgeted for the fact that we can never be as responsive as societies where less time and money is invested in making rules and complying with rules. We might need a much longer shutdown than China, for example, since we have so many people dedicated to crossing Ts and dotting Is and therefore fewer who can perform tests, set up temporary hospitals, etc.

Related:

  • https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/03/17/coronavirus-is-a-national-emergency-but-lets-not-do-anything-drastic/
  • “the coronavirus is forcing authorities to admit many of their regulations are unnecessary” (Reason): Something similar is going on in Massachusetts, a state well-known for high levels of regulation, including of the medical sector. Expecting a crush in medical care needs due the coronavirus, Gov. Charlie Baker has seen the light and agreed to streamline the Bay State’s recognition of “nurses and other medical professionals” who are registered in other parts of the United States, something that 34 states do on a regular basis. … And over at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), bureaucrats have suddenly decided to approve overnight a coronavirus test that its former chief, Scott Gottlieb, has described as a “fairly routine technology.” The Roche test is 10 times faster than the process currently being used, but the FDA didn’t approve it until this past Friday—and then only for this particular emergency.
  • “I Got the Coronavirus Test. My Ordeal Was Just Beginning.” (Politico, 3/15/2020): “On Thursday, March 5, I began my own odyssey trying to determine if I, too, had contracted COVID-19 … I spent the next 11 hours at the ER getting tested for multiple contagions. A doctor wearing a breathing apparatus over his head and chest … She informed me they would send the two specimens to Maryland’s public health department for COVID-19 testing, which could take as much as 48 hours. I was then told to go home and await the results. Back at home, I noticed the paperwork did not supply me with a way to track my testing, nor did it provide me with a point of contact for my results… Late Sunday, March 8, I heard from an outbreak investigator at the county health department. She had discovered that only one of my two specimens had been sent in for testing, despite a two-specimen protocol; the other was still sitting in an ER refrigerator.”
  • Canada is apparently more holistic and flexible. On March 17 they decided to extend expiring pilot medical certificates at least to August 1 (AOPA).
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If the British are right, everything the U.S. is doing about coronavirus is wrong

by philg

From my secret source in Ireland… “Coronavirus: What are the British up to?” (RTE):

The UK scientific and medical advisers do not expect the infection rate to peak for another three months.

They believe that it is too early to take drastic measures, and that if they are taken now, they will have to be held in place longer than most people expect, and because of that they would lose effectiveness just when they were most needed, because people would get bored and stop practising the hard disciplines of “social distancing”.

In a Channel 4 news special programme on the virus shown on Friday night, Professor John Edwards, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who also advises the British government, said there are two ways to deal with this virus.

Either stamp it out by curing every person in the whole world who is infected, which we are no longer able to do, or managing the spread of the virus until herd immunity is reached. When challenged about a potentially large death toll, he said “there is no way out of this”.

What, he asked, happens when the lockdown is relaxed? The virus will come back and the risk of a sudden, overwhelming peak rises again.

In other words, the U.S. is due for a massive outbreak of coronavirus in the late spring or early summer.

If the U.S. had a universal taxpayer-funded government-run health care system like the NHS (but with welcome mats spelling out “No Human Being is Illegal” in 15 languages) and no Orange Menace in the White House, Americans would all go to the clinic, get tested like the South Koreans do, and this would purge our great nation of this virus (not to say “foreign virus”), right?

Right now, the British government believes that the biggest impact it can make in terms of slowing the spread of the disease is to request that anyone with a persistent cough or fever should self-isolate for seven days, which is the main infectious period, and not bother contacting a GP or even the phone helpline.

The technocrats in England don’t even want people to go to the doctor, much less fire up the PCR testing machines!

Separately, the article shows that microaggression against the Latinx is muy bien:

Boris Johnson, in his inimitable way, described the resulting chart (or curve, as economists like to say) as looking like a sombrero. And he said the aim of public policy is to “squash the sombrero”.

How is the course of an epidemic in any way like the profile of a sombrero? Isn’t it just up and then down? If Mr. Johnson wants a profile with some action on the brim, why not an English bowler hat? Why pick on our neighbors to the south whom our most righteous Hollywood stars celebrate even as they make plans to migrate to Canada rather than Mexico?

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Most expensive school building in the United States goes over budget…

by philg

… before the first concrete has been poured.

Yeoman suburbanites west of Boston voted overwhelming to build themselves the most expensive, on a per-student basis, school ever constructed in the United States (see betterlincolnschools.wordpress.com ). It will be 2.5X the cost, per town-resident student, of Newton North, a nearby high school that was formerly the high-water mark for lavish government spending.

At $600/square foot for a combination of renovation and new construction, I figured that it was set up so that there was no possibility of a cost-overrun. Here’s an email from the school superintendent:

Last night, the Lincoln School Building Committee met to review the outcomes of going out to bid for the construction portion of the Lincoln School project that is slated to begin in June. As construction bids have come in for the school building project, the total bid value has exceeded our budget for the project by 3.5 million dollars. This is forcing us to make some significant cuts from the 100% design to remove elements from the project. These cuts are going to be hard and feel frustrating, and perhaps dispiriting, at this juncture in the project. However, this is the process working – we are confronting the real costs of the project now, before work has begun, so we are sure we are building within the budget the community has provided. This is not unlike what would happen if a homeowner was planning a big kitchen remodeling project, and when they received quotes from contractors, the quotes were all higher than what the homeowner had budgeted. Tough choices to cut some aspects of the project would need to be made. Maybe the counters will be Corian instead of quartz, the island will be 10 sq./ft. smaller, and the old refrigerator will be kept until it needs to be replaced. While it is disappointing to have to make these decisions, the homeowner will still be getting a wonderful new kitchen.

They already took $15-20 million out of the construction budget via an Enron-style accounting maneuver (letting a third party company buy the solar panels in exchange for an agreement to purchase power at above-market prices for 30 years). This was necessary because state law limits the amount that a town can borrow as a percentage of property value and Lincoln was trying to go over the limit. Somehow this off-books borrowing from the solar panel vendor doesn’t count and the town therefore managed to move forward as the most indebted town in the state, but not over the limit.

The town committee volunteers/experts predicted that property prices would rise once people heard about the fancy new school building and they’d be able to borrow more. Instead, however, property prices have fallen since the vote to approve the school (i.e., the market may value the new school building at $0). So the town can’t borrow more for what the school superintendent compares to a Whole Foods heater-uppers new kitchen.

I think this is of more than local interest because of the human psychology involved. First, there is the faith that an upgraded building housing the same teachers and students using the same curriculum will yield superior academic outcomes. Then, there was the in-person town meeting Vote of the Righteous in which retirees who had no chance of ever sending a child to the Palazzo of Education enthusiastically voiced their support for saving Planet Earth by bulldozing the existing school (sections that were 25-year-olds and sections that had been renovated 25 years earlier) and creating a Net Zero structure in its place.

What is most interesting for explaining decisions in the rest of the country was that people were able to come together to agree to spend the money, but later fought amongst themselves regarding how to pay for the spending. Massachusetts enables towns to use a progressive property tax structure such that owners of lower-value property pay a lower rate. Would a town of self-described “progressives” vote for progressive property tax? It turned out to be a tougher question than Hillary v. Trump and depended quite a bit on whether one occupied a higher-than-median-value home!

Another passionate discussion ensued regarding approving the construction of more housing and commercial structures in the town. This was now vital to increase the property tax base since (a) the density of the town wasn’t sufficient to support a $110 million (with solar panels) school building, and (b) the property values of the existing houses had fallen (“Lincoln home values have declined -0.1% over the past year and Zillow predicts they will fall -0.7% within the next year.”; compare to nearby “Cambridge home values have gone up 1.7% over the past year and Zillow predicts they will rise 1.2% within the next year.”).

What happens when people who enthusiastically support U.S. population increase via migration ponder the prospect of population growth within their own town? At a minimum, any project needs to be built far away from their own homes. And, they wonder, without quoting any numbers, if the per-pupil spending at the school is $25,000/year plus capital costs of $250,000 per student, how can they make sure that the occupants of the new housing don’t breed additional children that might further drive up school spending? As the average property tax per household will settle in at about $20,000 per year, if there is even one school-age child in a household, the result is a net drain on the town treasury.

A great example of the fiscal outcomes of democracy in action!

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Boeing dispels rumors that the SLS rocket will be overpriced…

by philg

… with a $40 T-shirt celebrating the Space Launch System (SLS):

Kennedy Space Center gift shop

If the project comes in on budget, it will be nearly $1 billion per launch with roughly 15 percent more thrust than the 50-year-old Saturn V.

The entire program, including the Orion capsule, appears similar to Apollo and, in fact, is named “Artemis,” after Apollo’s twin sister. I asked an astronaut why NASA would do this, 60 years after Apollo. Why not just wait for Blue Origin to have their inexpensive rockets ready at roughly the same time? “It’s what they know how to do,” he responded. My mole inside the scientific side of NASA, responding to “Unless Blue Origin fails it seems as though they will be far cheaper per pound”:

That question has been the hot topic for the last two years or so. Congress keeps pushing SLS so until there is something flying that is obviously better value, SLS will keep going. It’s a jobs program that employs all the same people that Shuttle did. And NASA has a PR push about first woman on the moon for Artemis.

If taxpayers are concerned that the true cost will be more than the $1 billion/launch planned, would it make sense for Boeing to limit the shirt prices to $25? Also, if they’re going to spend $10+ billion on a new-ish rocket, shouldn’t they be able to come up with a more original name than “Space Launch System”?

Related:

  • in the early part of this century, NASA spent at least $9 billion on the Ares I and V rockets that proved to be a dead-en (NBC)
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Every American welfare program eventually turns into welfare for rich white people?

by philg

“A Surprising Finding on Paid Leave: ‘This Is Not the Way We Teach This’” (nytimes):

One of the biggest arguments for paid leave for new parents has been an economic one: Research has repeatedly shown that women with paid time off after childbirth are more likely to keep working.

But a new study, the largest to be done in the United States, found the opposite. In California, which in 2004 became the first state to offer paid family leave, new mothers who took it that year ended up working less and earning less a decade later. They averaged $24,000 in cumulative lost wages, it found.

For first-time mothers, there was a clear negative effect. After 10 years, the new mothers who took paid leave right after they gave birth were 5 percent to 7 percent less likely to be employed, and those who were employed earned 5 percent to 8 percent less. The researchers said the earnings decreases could be because they worked fewer hours, moved to jobs with lower wages and more flexibility, or became self-employed.

These patterns held no matter the age or prior earnings of the mother, and were true for both unmarried and married mothers, though the decreases in employment were slightly larger for unmarried women

Not too surprising. Pay people to refrain from work and they discover how enjoyable it is to hang out at home!

Usually it takes a while for a welfare program to be co-opted by rich white Americans, but this one was immediately latched onto:

Despite the large sample, the effects were limited to women who took leave immediately after it became available. Only about a fifth of women who gave birth then did so, and that group might have been more inclined to step back from work in the first place.

A variety of research has found that this group was more likely to be older, high-earning, white and college educated than those who took leave after the program had been in effect for a while. Even later, awareness of the program was low, particularly among low earners — exactly the group that research has shown gets the most economic benefits from paid leave.

Related:

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