Category: Government

How is First Republic Bank different from Silicon Valley Bank?

by philg

Readers: Please help me keep these bank failures straight. “First Republic Stock Plunges After Bank Rescue Plan, Dividend Suspension” (WSJ, today):

First Republic Bank shares fell more than 30% Friday after a multibillion-dollar rescue deal orchestrated by the biggest U.S. banks failed to convince investors that the troubled lender is on solid footing.

The move erased the gains that came Thursday, when a group of banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. deposited $30 billion in First Republic in an effort to restore confidence in a banking system badly battered by a pair of bank failures.

“It’s not clear whether it’s viable as a stand-alone entity,” said Julian Wellesley, global banks analyst at Boston-based Loomis Sayles & Co. “So it’s likely, in my view, to be taken over.”

The sudden collapse recently of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank—the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, respectively—have sparked concerns that anxious customers could drain deposits from other small and midsize banks.

What do SVB and First Republic have in common other than both being supervised/regulated by the San Francisco Fed? Was First Republic as devoted to diversity and inclusion as SVB?

As Congress and the D.C. Fed flooded the U.S. with money in 2020, what was First Republic thinking about? “First Republic Expands Commitment To Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (August 31, 2020):

First Republic has engaged Management Leadership for Tomorrow (“MLT”), a national nonprofit that equips and emboldens high-achieving Black, Latinx and Native American individuals to secure high-trajectory jobs, while partnering with employers to provide access to a new generation of diverse leaders. The organization’s advisory services help institutions to better foster an environment of success for the underrepresented colleague experience.

“A diversity of backgrounds, opinions and perspectives has always been fundamental to our success,” said Jim Herbert, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of First Republic. “Management Leadership for Tomorrow has a proven track record of success in helping companies find and develop leaders from underrepresented communities.”

Individuals who self-identify as members of ethnic minority groups currently total 48% of First Republic’s workforce, with over 55 languages spoken at the company. Building upon First Republic’s long-standing culture of inclusion and diversity, MLT will provide strategic and tactical support to help further diversify the company’s workforce. In addition, the organization will collaborate with First Republic to enhance colleague and culture development programs that drive a sense of belonging and engagement.

If we count employees identifying as “women” as being in a victimhood class and we consider these 48% who were victims via “ethnic minority group” identification, the majority of the bank’s employees were victims and yet the goal was apparently to go bigger in the victimhood department. Here’s the person who was CEO for 37 years, through 2022:

James Herbert was replaced, in the CEO/COO roles, by a diverse duo:

But what exactly did these diverse executives do to cause the meltdown? And why didn’t the San Francisco Fed notice anything amiss? Let’s check a 2018 New York Times article:

The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has installed Mary C. Daly, a labor economist who currently serves as the head of research, as the institution’s new president beginning Oct. 1. … Ms. Daly, who is openly gay, will become the third woman among the 12 presidents of the Fed’s regional banks. As a senior executive at the San Francisco Fed, she has been a leading voice for addressing what she has described as a “diversity crisis” in the economics profession and at the Federal Reserve. At the San Francisco Fed, she pushed successfully to balance the hiring of male and female research assistants.

Dr. Daly attacked the diversity crisis at the San Francisco Fed, but ignored the insolvency crises brewing at SVB and First Republic? If diverse teams are smarter and more capable and the San Francisco Fed had more diversity than other regional Federal Reserve Banks, why are two of the biggest failures in the SF Fed’s territory?

Related:

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How about decimation for the Memphis police department and city government?

by philg

The Killing of Tyre Nichols seems to be fading from the news. The New York Times thinks that pizza is more important:

There has been no coherent explanation thus far of why the police killed this particular guy, as opposed to all of the other people with whom they interact daily, but presumably no explanation could justify their actions.

We are informed that the problem is the culture/institution, not the individuals. See “The Myth Propelling America’s Violent Police Culture” (Atlantic, Jan 31, 2023):

This past weekend, as I watched the videos of Tyre Nichols being beaten to death, I asked myself, Why does this keep happening? But I know the answer: It’s police culture—rooted in a tribal mentality, built on a false myth of a war between good and evil, fed by political indifference to the real drivers of violence in our communities. We continue to use police to maintain order as a substitute for equality and adequate social services. It will take a generation of courageous leaders to change this culture, to reject this myth, and to truly promote a mission of service—a mission that won’t drive officers to lose their humanity.

The organization is at fault, in other words, and the problems extend to the city government as a whole because crime wouldn’t happen if there were “equality and adequate social services”. The author’s point that police officers’ behavior are primarily driven by peer expectations rings true and, therefore, merely imprisoning or executing a few rogue officers won’t stop the next murder by police.

What would happen in Roman times if there were serious problems with a military unit (and the police in the U.S. definitely qualify as “military”)? Decimation:

Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = “ten”) was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. The discipline was used by senior commanders in the Roman army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as cowardice, mutiny, desertion, and insubordination, and for pacification of rebellious legions.

The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning “removal of a tenth”. The procedure was an attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the realities of managing a large group of offenders.

A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten. Each group drew lots (sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot of the shortest straw fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning, clubbing, or stabbing. The remaining soldiers were often given rations of barley instead of wheat (the latter being the standard soldier’s diet) for a few days, and required to bivouac outside the fortified security of the camp for some time.

As the punishment fell by lot, all soldiers in a group sentenced to decimation were potentially liable for execution, regardless of individual degrees of fault, rank, or distinction.

An authentic Roman-style decimation would presumably offend modern sensibilities, but maybe the proven management technique could be adapted for our kinder, gentler world (albeit not kinder or gentler for Tyre Nichols). In addition to individual punishments for the perpetrators (they’re charged with second-degree murder so they cannot be executed), why not cut the salary of every employee in the Memphis police department by 10 percent and take away a year of pension entitlement? The chief of police (“Memphis Police Department’s first Black female chief”) and mayor (“A Democrat, he previously served as a member of the Memphis City Council”) would be fired. These kinds of punishments would give institutions the incentive to reform themselves. Absent collective punishment, which of course will seem unfair to many, why should institutions bother to change?

Related:

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The Zoom-based federal government

by philg

I spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Washington, D.C. My white friend who earns $200,000 in total compensation as a government worker was enjoying a holiday while the Black service/retail industry workers who get $15/hr had to come in for their regular shifts. Over a leisurely holiday lunch, she explained the current structure of a typical federal agency. “Nobody has to come in,” she said, “and most of the people who work for me haven’t come into the office for months. I go in two or three days a week just to get out of the house, but it is not required.” Why wouldn’t the young people she manages want to come in and get out of their crummy apartments? “A junior programmer wouldn’t get paid more than $90,000 per year, so he couldn’t afford to live in the city anyway. One guy lives out in Gaithersburg with his brother and it is too much effort to come in. The rest of the Millennials aren’t interested even if they do live, with parental support, reasonably close to our office.”

A reader recently sent me “D.C. Mayor to Biden: Your Teleworking Employees Are Killing My City” (Politico, January 20, 2023):

At the swearing-in this month for her third term as the District of Columbia’s mayor, Muriel Bowser delivered a surprising inaugural-address ultimatum of sorts to the federal government: Get your employees back to in-person work — or else vacate your lifeless downtown office buildings so we can fill the city with people again.

This is an odd position for Mayor Bowser. She was an enthusiastic proponent of Science, i.e., lockdowns, school closure, forced masking, and vaccine papers checks. Given that SARS-CoV-2 is live and kicking, she’s the last person one would expect to advocate mass gatherings in office buildings, on the Metro, etc. The virus didn’t change; why did she?

Federal telework policies vary, but in general they’re generous — a major change from the situation that prevailed before 2020. Pre-pandemic, only 3 percent of feds teleworked daily, even as the private-sector workforce across the country had made at least some strides. After Covid, parts of the government caught up in a hurry, embracing telework in the name of public health.

For federal employees, and the public they serve, the new flexibility has some upsides. Beyond the fact that some people just don’t much like commuting to an office every day, the prospect of being able to work from home even if home means Tennessee or Texas is good for retention, since a federal paycheck goes a lot farther once you leave one of the nation’s priciest metro areas. (It also might accomplish, inadvertently, the longtime GOP goal of moving chunks of the bureaucracy away from the capital.)

According to John Falcicchio, the city’s economic-development boss and Bowser’s chief of staff, the federal government’s 200,000 D.C. jobs represent roughly a quarter of the total employment base; the government also occupies a third of Washington office space — not just the cabinet departments whose ornate headquarters dot Federal Triangle, but plenty of the faceless privately held buildings in the canyons around Farragut Square, too.

“Or another way to look at it is Metro,” the regional transit system, he says. “It’s about a third of what it used to be.”

The D.C. city government is setting an example by making its own workers come into the office five days per week? No!

He also made clear that Bowser wasn’t calling for the same back-to-normal as Comer’s legislation: Her own government currently expects non-frontline workers to be in offices at least three days a week, not five, something he said would be a good model for feds, too.

The D.C. government laptop class, in other words, can leave for the Delaware beaches on Thursday evening and not return until Tuesday morning.

When I was up in Boston, I was somewhat surprised to find a friend who is a senior federal official living there. She manages a $2 billion budget and a correspondingly epic number of people. She hasn’t been required to report to her D.C. office since March 2020.

Now it’s photo time!

A young Covidian and her dad, both masked, board our jammed BOS-DCA flight (somehow I doubt this was a required business trip!):

Want to pay $8 for a cup of drip coffee, but don’t want to take the Covid risk of a jammed flight to San Francisco? Blue Bottle is all over D.C. (this one in Georgetown):

The C&O Canal has looked better:

(George Washington was a huge investor in the Potomac Company, which sought to build a canal like the above, and thus had a massive financial incentive to bring the nation’s capital down from NY or Philadelphia to the swamps of the lower Potomac.)

The DCA VOR, out the window of an American Airlines 737 (JetBlue is no longer cheaper!):

Yachts from which the laptop class can now work (maybe the lobbyists rather than the civil servants):

The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, increasingly surrounded by monuments to our various wars:

The Watergate, where a president whose crimes were negligible compared to Donald Trump and the rest of the January 6 Insurrectionists got into trouble:

(It’s the boring rectangular office building in the back, not the curvy buildings near the river.)

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On welfare in Boston at $210,300 per year

by philg

In a comment on an earlier post, Alex expressed surprise that Joe Biden was popular with a majority of American voters:

This is the guy Republicans are finding tough to beat? It says a lot about how bad everything has become.

My response:

Alex: I don’t think it is surprising that Biden, or anyone else who is a Democrat, is tough to beat. If we model American voters as trying to recapture some of the 50% of the economy that is government, the majority’s best hope is typically a Democrat because the majority of Americans benefit from a larger government (government employee, receiving means-tested benefits, on traditional welfare, married to government employee, government contractor, income too low to pay significant income tax, etc.).

I decided to check the Bidenflation-adjusted numbers for means-tested program (“welfare”) eligibility up in Maskachusetts. In Boston itself, it seems that, as of 2022, a family of 4 could qualify to live in “city-funded” (i.e., taxpayer-funded) housing at below-market rates while earning up to $210,300 per year. The main web page links to a spreadsheet:

The adults in that household would have a strong incentive to vote Democrat!

Related:

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Shopping for health insurance on healthcare.gov

by philg

Our government has decided that it is okay for a doctor or hospital to charge an uninsured customer 10X what an insurance company would pay for a service. Thus, an American who doesn’t want to pay 10X the fair price and risk bankruptcy has no choice but to sign up for health insurance. He/she/ze/they cannot pay the $25,000 that an insurance company would pay for a serious issue and defer the purchase of a new car. Instead, he/she/ze/they must deal with a bill for $200,000 and aggressive bill collectors and lawyers from the hospital.

I recently decided to see if it would make sense to get a policy from healthcare.gov for our family. There are three big providers in eastern Florida: Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and University of Miami. The site has a way to enter these providers and see if they’re in the network for the plan. Here are some of the quotes:

The consumer is supposed to evaluate 174 alternatives, build a spreadsheet and run a Monte Carlo experiment to figure out which is likely to result in minimum spending? You’d be a fool to have insurance that didn’t cover these three networks, as we discovered to our chagrin last year with Humana. Healthcare.gov offers to help you register to vote, but it doesn’t offer to limit results to insurance policies that will pay these essential providers.

I thought that Blue Cross had deals with everyone and yet this $66,000+/year policy ($72,000 including the out-of-pocket maximum) is presented as not covering any of the places that you’d want to go if you needed a specialized specialist:

Perhaps we could work it from the other side? Here’s what Mayo Jacksonville says they’ll take:

The consumer is supposed to recognize, therefore, that Mayo takes “Aetna” and “Blue Cross Blue Shield” but not the versions of “Aetna” and “Blue Cross” that are sold on healthcare.gov? How many people are this sophisticated? Mayo Jacksonville takes “Cigna EPO”, but, according to healthcare.gov, not “Cigna Connect 900 EPO”:

As Obama said, if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor so long as your doctor doesn’t work at any of the good clinics or hospitals in the nation’s third largest state. I scrolled through all of the 174 plans and never found one that covered more than University of Miami (and that was rare).

Maybe this is peculiar to Florida? Friends in Maskachusetts who had been paying $30,000 per year to Blue Cross (in pre-Biden dollars) switched to MassHealth (Medicaid; there was an income test, but no asset test on the MA signup web site) and found that their choice of doctors was much wider. That seems to be the case in Florida as well. Mayo Clinic is happy to accept Medicaid. Cleveland Clinic says they take Medicaid. University of Miami takes Medicaid. In other words, Americans have voted to set up a system in which a person who works and pays $72,000 per year for health insurance has inferior access to health care compared to what someone who has never worked enjoys.

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If student loan forgiveness is illegal, can it still be accomplished via an infinite payment pause?

by philg

Continuing with our Thanksgiving theme, we can give thanks to the most generous members of our society. The most praiseworthy generosity is, of course, giving away money that other people earned. If we accept that stealing a neighbor’s car and donating it to charity makes me a more charitable person, Washington, D.C., is home to the world’s most generous humans. As we try to chew our dried leftover turkey, let’s look at a notable example of generosity from the central planners… “Biden extends student loan payment pause as debt relief plan remains on hold” (NBC):

The Biden administration announced Tuesday that it would extend the payment pause on federal student loans, as President Joe Biden’s debt cancellation plan remains blocked in court.

The payment pause, which was previously set to expire in January, will be extended until June 30 or until the litigation is resolved — whichever comes first. If the litigation has not been resolved by June 30, payments will resume 60 days after that.

“I’m completely confident that my plan is legal,” Biden said in a video announcement. “But it isn’t fair to ask tens of millions of borrowers eligible for relief to resume their student debt payments while the courts consider the lawsuit.”

Federal student loan holders have not been required to make payments since March 2020, when President Donald Trump signed the CARES Act, which paused payments through September 2020 and stopped interest from accruing to alleviate the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

In theory it is Congress that sets the budget. So it might be illegal for a president to forgive loans, such that the borrowers don’t have to pay for their gender studies degrees and the cost can instead be shifted onto the working class. And, since Congress can spend money and transfer costs from the working class to the laptop class, the original payment/interest pause in 2020 was definitely legal. But maybe it is also legal for a charitable president with a big heart to keep extending the pauses via executive order. The loan isn’t “forgiven” (illegal unless Congress does it and more accurately described as “transferred to the working class”), but it never has to be paid so long as a great humanitarian/philanthropist is in the White House. The original value of the loan eventually becomes insignificant due to inflation.

Related:

  • “Student Loan Pause Could Cost $275 Billion” (CRB): The pause costs over $5 billion per month and extending it through the end of 2024 would cost at least $120 billion. This would bring the total cost since Spring of 2020 to $275 billion. This represents about 70 percent of the cost of the President’s announced debt cancellation plan and is higher than the ten-year cost of President Biden’s proposal to double the maximum Pell Grant by 2029.
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The Lost Bank lesson: Make sure you have a lot of friends in Washington, D.C.

by philg

I hope that each of you did his/her/zir/their reading assignment from a month ago, i.e., The Lost Bank: The Story of Washington Mutual – The Biggest Bank Failure in American History.

Now that I have finished the book myself and have given folks a chance to avoid spoilers, a brief post about the end of the book.

It turns out that it wasn’t clear that WaMu had actually failed. Even when it was seized by the FDIC, wiping out shareholders and bondholders, and then sold for almost nothing to politically connected and savvy JPMorgan Chase, the bank may well have had sufficient liquidity under Federal rules. A quiet bank run, in which billions of dollars left WaMu daily, was precipitated by the following factors: (1) leaks from Washington, D.C., (2) the FDIC insurance limit of $100,000 per depositor (almost enough to buy a car today!), (3) consumer ignorance regarding the practicalities of FDIC insurance, (4) consumer reluctance to become embroiled in a process of getting money from the FDIC. If not for the leaks about the regulators’ concerns, the bank run probably wouldn’t have happened and the regulators wouldn’t have been able to seize WaMu’s assets.

We may never know the answer to whether the bank actually met the relevant criteria for being shut down. Kirsten Grind, the Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the book, gives various estimates for the bank’s liquidity on the day of shutdown but is unable to say which one is correct.

Why is it that 5 banks enjoy roughly half of U.S. commercial bank assets?

Partly this is due to the reasons discussed in the previous post regarding this book. But it is also due to the fact that the government treated some of the biggest New York banks differently than WaMu, only slightly smaller. The NY banks, donors to Senator Charles Schumer, had similar liquidity issues to what WaMu suffered. But they were deemed “systemic risks” a.k.a. “too big to fail” and, therefore, were showered with government money (taxed, borrowed, or printed) that was denied to WaMu. A handful of political appointees and government workers at the Fed, the US Treasury, the FDIC, and the OTS had a tremendous amount of discretion regarding which banks would get bigger and which would be seized.

So in addition to the topics mentioned in my previous post, the book serves as a good example of the importance of lobbying and political donations!

Related:

  • “A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits” (NYT, 12/13/2008): Senator Schumer plays an unrivaled role in Washington as beneficiary, advocate and overseer of an industry that is his hometown’s most important business. Mr. Schumer led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the last four years, raising a record $240 million while increasing donations from Wall Street by 50 percent. That money helped the Democrats gain power in Congress, elevated Mr. Schumer’s standing in his party and increased the industry’s clout in the capital. Calling himself “an almost obsessive defender of New York jobs,” Mr. Schumer has often talked of the need to avoid excessive regulation of an industry that is increasingly threatened by global competition.
  • Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money? (includes photos of Seattle from August 2019, including one in which the truth of the Rainbow Flag religion is proven mathematically)
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Tax Day for procrastinators: big increases due to inflation

by philg

Happy Tax Day if you filed for an extension.

What’s different this year? Inflation means that ordinary schlubs can pay tax rates that were sold as applying only to the elite. The Obamacare “Net Investment Income Tax” of 3.8 percent on top of ordinary income and capital gains taxes, for example, wasn’t supposed to hit Joe Average. But what if Joe Average tried to escape the lockdowns and school closures in California by selling a house and moving to Texas? Adjusted for inflation in the real estate market, his house might not have gone up in value at all. In other words, his purchasing power from selling the house to buy a different house wouldn’t have changed (probably reduced, actually, in terms of how big a house in Austin can be purchased with the proceeds from selling a house in California). But almost surely he will have more than $250,000 in nominal gains. This is all an illusory inflation-driven “gain” and the tax code recognizes that to a small extent by excluding the first $250,000 of house price inflation. But on the rest of it, Joe will have to pay California capital gains tax, Federal capital gains tax, and an additional 3.8 percent for Obamacare. From the IRS:

The Net Investment Income Tax does not apply to any amount of gain that is excluded from gross income for regular income tax purposes. The pre-existing statutory exclusion in section 121 exempts the first $250,000 ($500,000 in the case of a married couple) of gain recognized on the sale of a principal residence from gross income for regular income tax purposes and, thus, from the NIIT.

How about a wage slave? If he/she/ze/they was earning $170,000 in 2019 and got bumped to $210,000 in 2021, his/her/zir/their spending power is actually lower due to raging inflation. Yet now he/she/ze/they is subject to the 0.9 percent Obamacare “Additional Medicare Tax” due to having income over a fixed threshold of $200,000 (soon to be the price of a Diet Coke?).

From Delray Beach, Levy and Associates:

What kind of people are paying the bill for all of the great work done by Congress and Joe Biden? From the haters at Heritage Foundation:

In 2018, due to the cruel policies of the dictator Donald Trump, the rich Americans who earned 21 percent of all income paid only 40 percent of income taxes. Separately, keep in mind that the above chart relates to cash income. A person could be in the “Bottom 50%” with $0 in W-2 income and still have a spending power and lifestyle better than someone earning $50,000 per year (in the “25%-50%” column) due to means-tested public housing, health care, SNAP/EBT, smartphone, and broadband. See “The Work versus Welfare Trade‐​Off: 2013” (CATO) for the states where being on welfare leads to a larger spending power than working at the median wage. Maskachusetts is #3 in Table 4, with welfare being worth 118% of median salary.

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Can our government generate its own inflation spiral?

by philg

Earlier here I wondered Could our epic deficits drive inflation no matter how high the Fed raises rates? (the answer is “yes” according to one of the smartest economists in the world: Economist answers my question about high interest rates and high deficits). Regarding the latest rounds of interest rate hikes, a Democrat-voting university professor friend posted on Facebook:

If you tried to put out a fire with water, and the fire got no smaller even after 3 attempts, you’d hopefully realize this is no normal water and/or this is no normal fire. And if you were able to come to this conclusion, you would not be the Fed.

My response was “I think the government may itself be the inflation spiral. Government is nearly half the economy and everything the government pays money for is indexed to inflation. Medicare, military and similar contracts, Social Security, pensions, employee salaries, etc.”

(This was a few days before “Social Security cost-of-living adjustment will be 8.7% in 2023, highest increase in 40 years” (CNBC, today))

If everything that is part of the local/state/federal government sector is indexed to inflation, doesn’t that mean that inflation goes down only if horrific pain is being inflicted on those dumb enough to be in the private sector? If government workers are getting cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), their spending power by definition cannot change (assuming that the BLS is calculating the CPI correctly). If the CPI says prices went up by 10 percent, the government workers will have 10 percent more in salary to go chasing after a mostly fixed supply of goods. This is the classic wage-price spiral.

Government is not 100 percent of the U.S. economy, so maybe the wage-price spiral can be broken if significant spending power reductions are imposed on non-union non-government workers. But at some level of government control of the economy, the spiral should be unbreakable regardless of interest rates and regardless of how poor the private sector chumps become.

(Why “non-union”? Union workers typically would have an automatic COLA increase and we could also consider union workers part of the government sector because they depend on the government to sustain their union power.)

Loosely related… prices and government worker wages go around in the Bois de Boulogne:

Related:

  • “Inflation Is Unrelenting, Bad News for the Fed and White House” (New York Times, today): “This is a self-inflicted wound that will impact the most vulnerable members of our society the most,[” said Mohamed El-Erian] (I think that El-Erian is saying what I say above, but more succinctly; everyone involved with the government will be 100 percent protected from inflation, which means that the peasants are going to be destroyed to keep those affiliated with the government from feeling any pain)
  • “Retirees Catch a Break With the Social Security COLA” (WSJ): On Thursday, the Social Security Administration said recipients will get an 8.7% increase in their payments next year and, for the second year in a row, that actually exceeds estimates of how much their costs increased. That is according to a 35-year-old initiative to measure the true rate of inflation facing those over 62, via an experimental consumer-price index produced by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, known as the CPI-E; the E stands for “elderly.” … This year, the COLA was 8.7%, more than the 8% rise in the CPI-E.
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Hurricane lies from state media (NPR)

by philg

“Some don’t evacuate, despite repeated hurricane warnings, because they can’t” (state-sponsored NPR):

Depending on a family’s financial situation, evacuating away from a storm can be costly.

“Many modest- to low-income households simply don’t have the cash or credit,” said Joshua Behr, research professor at Old Dominion University, in a 2018 interview with NPR.

Behr emphasized that the poorest may often wait until the last minute to evacuate, resulting in little to no availability for affordable hotel rooms.

The tragedy of inequality yet again and the obvious remedy is an expansion of the government that funds NPR so that enhanced transferism can be implemented.

As discussed in Practicalities of evacuation from Florida’s west coast, however, all of the quoted material from the NPR article is a lie. The county-run shelters near Fort Myers are (1) free, (2) pet-friendly, (3) equipped with backup generators, (4) stocked with free food and water, and (5) accessible via free transportation (Uber or government-run; summon via taxpayer-funded Obamaphone or wait for the flood and the knock on the door from the public safety crews). A poor person would actually save money by going to the shelter because he/her/zir/their food would be paid for. (The information regarding hotel rooms is also a lie; plenty were available starting at about $60 per night as of the day before the storm made landfall.)

Aside from lack of funds, what other obstacles could a person face in getting to safety?

And while many emergency warnings and notices are now printed in both English and Spanish, there’s still a gap when for those who speak other languages.

More than 400,000 households in Florida speak Haitian as their primary shared language, according to the Census Bureau. Tens of thousands of Floridians speak Portuguese, French, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, German, Russian, Italian or another language as their primary shared language at home.

“While looking at an evacuation map at a county in Florida, I saw they have it in both English and Spanish and thought ‘OK, that’s great.’ But also there are people there who may not speak either language,” said Cuite.

Cuite says alongside the language barrier being an issue for people, there are also different levels of literacy to account for.

“Some people may not be able to read, which makes things like finding their evacuation zone a challenge,” she said.

NPR has previously informed us that low-skill immigrants make a country rich. Today, NPR informs us that a substantial number of migrants can’t speak English or Spanish, are illiterate in all languages, and live in households in which all members are illiterate in all languages. Putting these two together, we can infer that this Army of the Illiterate will boost what we are told is the world’s most advanced economy.

Our neighborhood came through the overnight thunderstorms, which Mindy the Crippler did not appreciate. The phone shrieked a couple of times with a tornado warning and the federal government’s advice to Floridians to take shelter in basements (the nearest of which is in Atlanta?). There was heavy rain at times and some branches had come down from the palm trees. The neighborhood teenagers played football on the green (I also removed my shirt and a nice young lady paid me $100 to put it back on).

There have been no power glitches so far and no wind gusts above about 30 mph.

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