Category: Politics

What was learned from the Mueller Report?

by philg

Today was the big exciting day for the Mueller Report. I don’t have the patience to read 400 pages. The nytimes coverage of the report fails to distinguish between stuff that was previously known and stuff (if any) that was newly uncovered by this crack team of investigators working for two years.

From the NYT:

While the report does not find that the president or his campaign aides had committed any crimes in their contacts with Russians, it lays bare how Mr. Trump was elected with the help of a foreign power.

What did the Russians do? Reveal to Americans that Hillary Clinton was secretly planning to raise taxes and government spending?

[The same newspaper previously attributed Hillary’s failure to defeat a political amateur to “misogyny” among the unwashed masses of Republican voters. So maybe the Russians revealed to the American people that Hillary, contrary to outward appearances, identified as a woman?]

Also from the article:

At the very least, in the face of repeated Russian efforts to make contact with Mr. Trump’s advisers, none of them thought to contact the F.B.I.

Are they talking about during the campaign? So they’re surprised that the Republican candidate wouldn’t want to call up a government agency controlled by an incumbent Democrat? Or are these Russian contacts that happened after Trump’s election?

And the NYT is also trumpeting that Donald Trump tried to thwart an investigation whose primary purpose was to find criminal fault with either him or his close associates? Wasn’t that previously reported?

Readers: Please help me and others out! What was in this eagerly-awaited (at least among my Facebook friends!) report that wasn’t previously known and/or obvious?

Related:

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Washington, D.C. chosen as national capital so that founding fathers could profit

by philg

As we send in your checks today to keep the wise planners in D.C. funded, let’s consider why D.C. is where it is.

In our government-funded K-12 system, I learned that the location between Maryland and Virginia was a political compromise and that the interests competing were those of multiple states.

From America’s Founding Fathers, a lecture series by Allen Guelzo, a professor at Gettysburg College, I have learned that actually the interests competing were those of individuals.

The original idea was a capital near Philadelphia on the Susquehanna River. Why relocate to a swamp along the Potomac River? Professor Guelzo says that this was a much better location for shareholders of the Potomac Company, which was building canals to facilitate shipping up and down the river.

Who were the shareholders and principals of the company? George Washington was one of the biggest! And his Mt. Vernon estate happened to be quite close to the eventual site of the national capital. Many additional “founding cronies” helped themselves to what they expected to be massive personal profits by moving the site of the capital to the river whose navigation they were improving.

Maybe the next Mueller investigation can look at whether Donald Trump has been scheming to move the capital to Palm Beach?

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If the IRS did run its own online service for tax filing, would it need to use hardcopy and snail mail?

by philg

“Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.” (ProPublica) is about a bipartisan effort to prevent the IRS from making it easy to file taxes. The IRS is in a unique position because it alone has records on what Americans have earned via W-2, 1099, and K-1. Even if TurboTax has better software, for example, it can never start with the authoritative data. (Consider the taxpayer who runs a small Schedule C business and simply loses a 1099 form or the taxpayer who is involved in a bunch of partnerships and loses a K-1; even if these folks are diligent and accurate about rekeying the information from pieces of paper they receive in the mail, they will get flagged for a correction or an audit.)

Given the mournful history of computer (in)security, though, and the lack of Estonian-style electronic authentication for citizens and other residents, I wonder if the hypothetical IRS systems that people are conceiving would ever be practical. What would stop a clever hacker from getting in and downloading information on what every American has earned for the preceding year?

Would the IRS in fact have to rely on mailing printouts to taxpayers’ previously filed addresses? Maybe the hardcopy would contain a generated random key for logging into a web site to enter corrections and tweaks. But what other secure way does the U.S. Government have of reaching residents?

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Zero progress in American politics since 1776

by philg

I’ve been listening to America’s Founding Fathers, a lecture series by Allen Guelzo, a professor at Gettysburg College.

It turns out that all of the things that Americans fight and fret about today were issues around the time of the country’s creation (i.e., the traitorous and illegal secession from Great Britain).

People questioned whether a republican form of government made sense. From the notes:

… there had been only a few examples of successful republics in human history—particularly, Rome and Athens—and they offered only a handful of useful rules for guidance:

First, a republic must be harmonious. It cannot be divided in purpose; it must be guided by a common vision of the public good.

Second, it must be homogeneous—composed of citizens who are ethnically, economically, and socially more or less equal in wealth and status.

Third, a republic must be small, if only because harmony and homogeneity break down whenever the boundaries of a republic are drawn to include too many different kinds of people or so much territory that people cannot keep vigil over their fellow citizens.

Fourth, every citizen of a republic must be independent and self-sufficient enough to be able to occupy a public office.

Our Founding Fathers, including George Washington, questioned whether Americans were sufficiently virtuous to govern themselves. With the average person being primarily concerned with making money and quite a few folks “corrupt, selfish, and indolent,” how could the resulting conglomeration of these folks ever be sustainable? Washington, 1783:

the want of energy in the Federal government, the pulling of one state and party of states against another and the commotion amongst the Eastern people have sunk our national character much below par [and] brought our politics and credit to the brink of a precipice.

(i.e., we’ve been on the brink of a precipice for more than 230 years!)

During the Confederation period, Americans attacked political opponents, e.g., Robert Morris, the rebellious colonies’ first “superintendent of finance,” by alleging that people with high-level executive jobs were enriching themselves via corruption.

Politicians were not necessarily examples of traditional virtue in private matters:

[President of Congress Thomas] Mifflin retired from his congressional presidency and spent most of the remaining 16 years of his life in Pennsylvania politics and in what one critic described as “a state of adultery with many women.” Several towns and structures were named for him, but he also burned through most of his family’s fortune and ended up hiding from bill collectors.

The course is replete with examples of “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (Samuel Johnson). Patrick Henry:

In 1774, when he called on the House to begin arming Virginians for resistance to the Crown, Henry spoke his most famous words: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me … give me liberty, or give me death!”

Paying 1-2 percent of income in total tax (see this article Foreign Policy on what American colonists paid) was an intolerable state of “slavery” and equivalent to being in “chains,” for Henry, “a slaveholder throughout his adult life” (Wikipedia).

Early Americans complained about concentrations of wealth and considered themselves fortunate that the disparities were not as large as in Europe.

States maintained a degree of independence and sovereignty to a degree that would be unimaginable today. They would use this to issue their own paper currency, help their citizens escape paying debts to Britons or citizens of other states, and weasel out of their own financial commitments to the Continental Congress.

The bad news is that we’re not making any progress, but maybe the good news is that the disputes that described as “crises” every day in the New York Times were with us in the 1780s.

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New tax rates applied in New York State

by philg

“Surprise: Most NYers did well by Trump’s tax cuts but very rich at risk” (NY Post) says that, despite New York having the nation’s highest state and local tax burden and the limit on deductions for these taxes, the typical New Yorker actually paid less in 2018.

(Exception: “the big losers from the SALT cap are concentrated among the Empire State’s highest-earning residents, the 1-percenters who generate more than 40 percent of the state’s personal-income tax as well as an outsized share of New York City taxes.”)

This is counterintuitive. We should expect the new tax system to cut back on people in low-tax states subsidizing those in high-tax states (e.g., taxpayers in Nevada, New Hampshire, and Florida would no longer have to pay part of the cost of services provided in Manhattan). Maybe the answer is that almost everyone nationwide is getting a tax cut and folks who live in the highest tax states are getting a smaller one? Or New York is a special case because its taxes fall so heavily on a small percentage of its population?

I hope everyone is enjoying finalizing their tax returns. Should we have a contest in the comments to see who is grappling with the largest number of pages of forms? (Include forms for any LLCs or S Corps if you’re responsible for reviewing them, also for children if you need to file for them, and include 1099 and W-2 forms that you receive and review.) I think that I should clock in at roughly 500 pages this year.

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What happens to Julian Assange now?

by philg

The UK is not so busy with its non-Brexit Brexit that it couldn’t arrest and plan to extradite Julian Assange to the U.S. Back in 2017, Newsweek ran an article explaining why the First Amendment would be unlikely to protect Mr. Assange from a charge of espionage. The NYT says that these freedom of speech issues may not be relevant:

The single charge, conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, stems from what prosecutors said was his agreement to break a password to a classified United States government computer. It is not an espionage charge, a significant detail that will come as a relief to press freedom advocates.

Is there any chance he can beat the rap at this point?

(Also, what has been the ultimate impact of WikiLeaks? They generated some headlines that helped the media sell ads, plainly, but did governments learn anything new from WikiLeaks? Did any policies change?)

Related:

  • WIRED article explaining that the charge is an attempt to go from hashed to cleartext on a password. There is a potential issue with statute of limitations: Ekeland also points out that to expand the statute of limitations for the CFAA from the normal five years to the necessary eight in this case, given the indictment’s date of March 2018, the Justice Department is charging Assange under a statute that labels his alleged hacking an “act of terrorism.” He sees that as another suspect element of the case, if not one that would necessarily hinder prosecution. “To get the benefit of the eight years, they’re trying to call this a terrorist act,” Ekeland says. “That seems a little weird.”
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Should government workers get paid to be presidential candidates for 2 years?

by philg

Some folks who get salaries from taxpayers have announced plans to spend the next 1.5-2 years running for President. Examples:

Reviewing the complete list of declared at least reasonably virtuous candidates, there are a bunch more folks who get paid every week for doing a job that they say they aren’t going to concentrate on for the next couple of years.

For a resident of South Bend, Indiana who wants the potholes fixed, how is it fair for that person to pay Mr. Buttigieg through 2020 while he is focused on non-local matters? How does it help us here in Massachusetts to have one of our senators going door-to-door in Iowa? Organizing potlatches in Seattle?

For residents of California, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, is it fair that their Representative or Senator is running around to early primary states instead of advocating for their interests?

Being a Presidential candidate might cause a Rep or Senator to take positions that are adverse to his or her constituents. For example, the Presidential candidate who needs to win Iowa and other farm states would advocate for central planning that raises prices for agricultural products (and/or raises taxes to pay subsidies to farmers). But a Senator from MA or NJ is ostensibly representing urban consumers who are injured by such policies and would be better off in a market economy for food. Example: Elizabeth Warren seems to have changed her tune on whether the Federal government should subsidize agribusiness.

(Americans have minimal representation in Washington even when the folks they pay actually stay at their desks. The House was set up to have one Rep for every 30,000 residents (Wikipedia), but now it is 330 million divided by 435, approximately 1 Rep per 760,000. New Jersey had one senator for every 90,000 residents when the system was set up; today it is one senator for 4.5 million.)

Readers: If a campaign lasts longer than one year should candidates be forced to go on an unpaid leave of absence or resign altogether from any taxpayer-funded job?

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It is madness to want to leave the E.U., but it doesn’t make sense to join

by philg

“The United Kingdom Has Gone Mad; The problem with holding out for a perfect Brexit plan is that you can’t fix stupid.” (nytimes) is by Thomas Friedman, a guy whom nobody can accuse of being stupid (he married the daughter of a billionaire and lives (large) in Maryland, an awesome jurisdiction for divorce litigants who can claim to be the less wealthy spouse).

What I can’t figure out how it is logically consistent for Americans to criticize the Brits for wanting to be independent and fully sovereign. We spend way more money on our military than would be necessary to prevent an invasion from Canada or Mexico. Why are we spending that money if not to preserve full sovereignty and not have to listen to anyone else in the world?

From a strictly dollars and cents point of view, if being part of the E.U. is so great,why doesn’t the U.S. seek to join? In our age of telecommunications, container shipping, and air travel (preferably by Airbus!), geography should not be a barrier.

If we want to say that anyone in the UK who opposes EU membership is “stupid”, as the giant brains of the NY Times have concluded, shouldn’t we also be trying to become part of the EU ourselves?

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Party of Science scores lower than Party of Stupid

by philg

“What Americans Know About Science” (Pew Research) is subtitled “Science knowledge levels remain strongly tied to education; Republicans and Democrats are about equally knowledgeable,” but it turns out that “equal” translates to “Republicans know more”:

Republicans and independents who lean to the Republican Party average seven correct answers, while Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party average 6.6.

A difference of 0.4 doesn’t sound huge, right? But the difference between Americans with postgraduate degrees and bachelor’s degrees was only 0.6. Being a Republican was worth about the same as two years of graduate school.

Considering that Democrats have branded themselves the “Party of Science” while decrying the purported anti-science idiocy of Republicans, these data are interesting.

Even more interesting is why we continue to have faith in our unique capacity to solve the world’s science and engineering problems. When a politician proposes a reduction in the growth of government spending on grants to science labs (not an actual cut, of course, though a lower growth rate will be characterized by “scientists” as a “cut”), the reaction includes statements that this will mean the end of scientific progress. This necessarily assumes that scientific discoveries can be made only in the U.S.

Global warming? Only Americans can help! This has the same logical basis as Tom Cruise explaining that a car accident calls for a Scientologist. It won’t be Chinese and German engineers who come up with improved solar cells, wind turbines, batteries, and CO2 vacuums. (After all, the fundamentals were all developed in the U.S. It was American Edmond Becquerel, working in a Paris, Texas lab, who discovered the photovoltaic effect; American Albert Einstein later explained the photoelectric effect while working in Zurich, Kansas.)

Who are these Americans ready to help solve the world’s toughest problems? Fully 39 percent of us know that a “base” is the opposite of an “acid”. Plainly we are going to be experts on the carbon cycle and atmospheric CO2 washing out into carbonic acid. Americans can do even better when adjusting for the sun’s influence on climate, since 63 percent of us know that the tilt of the Earth is responsible for the seasons (survey methodology).

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Green New Deal will not cost as much as feared

by philg

It turns out that a powerful Vestas wind turbine can be purchased for $199 on Amazon.com.

Related:

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