Category: Politics

Folks have pointed me to mocking memes regarding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, e.g., “It’s so cold, I had my hands in my own pockets,” in connection with her “Green New Deal” that “offers economic security for those unwilling to work.” (original draft)

But why not respect her for ably representing the interests of her constituents? Census data show that median household income in her district is about $58,000/year. That means more than half of the people she represents are eligible for welfare (less than $83,450 for a family of 4 entitles a New Yorker to public housing). More than half would also qualify for health insurance welfare (either Medicaid or subsidized Obamacare for those who earn less than 4X the official poverty line).

“Unwilling to work” should probably be understood as “unwilling to work given the existing system of incentives.” As of 2013, six years before Ms. Ocasio-Cortez took office, welfare in New York paid 110 percent of median income (CATO) and therefore it wouldn’t be rational for the typical person in her district to work. Why is it Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s fault that Americans have voted to create a system in which work is irrational for anyone who can get welfare or child support after having sex with a high-income partner? She wasn’t old enough to vote when these systems were created.

Mitt Romney stated in 2012 as a simple fact that the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay income tax weren’t going to vote for him (Politifact):

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney said in the video. “All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

He didn’t say that these folks were stupid, irrational, or evil. They were rationally voting their interest. (Politifact says that the proportion with no federal income tax liability may actually have been as high as 51 percent.) Why can’t folks who disagree with AOC and who are differently situated in life compared to her welfare-qualified constituents credit her for faithfully representing her voters’ interests in Congress?

Personally, I’m kind of a fan. Her tweet that health insurance as a waitress was twice as costly as health insurance for a member of Congress was an inspired way to wake people up to absurdity of our health care and health insurance systems (my proposal for reform is different from hers).

Readers: Given her welfare-qualified constituents, is it fair to slam this young member of Congress for advocating for expanded welfare?

Conversation from the other day…

• Pilot 1: [makes a suggestion]
• Pilot 2: Whoa! You’re going off the reservation. And we don’t need Elizabeth Warren to tell us what a bad idea that is.

Related:

• “Should Saying Someone Is ‘Off The Reservation’ Be Off-Limits?” (NPR, 2014)

There is turmoil in our land:

• “The Chart That Shows the Financial Peril Facing Federal Workers: Just like many Americans, many government workers don’t have much emergency money set aside.” (nytimes, 7 days ago)
• CNBC says “Friday will mark the second paycheck missed by affected federal workers, whose household budgets have been completely upended.”

Where there is turmoil, however, there is often opportunity. Neither article includes the word “loan”. Yet the U.S. is packed with payday loan companies. Federal workers have been guaranteed to receive back pay, even for weeks or months in which they did no work, as soon as the government reopens (“Trump signs law guaranteeing back pay for federal workers”).

How much credit risk could there be in lending money to someone whose paycheck is guaranteed by an entity with a printing press for dollars?

Readers: What do you think? Shouldn’t it be possible to lend money to furloughed or working-but-not-yet-paid workers at a 1% per month interest rate (12%/year) and make a substantial profit? One-month LIBOR is roughly 0.2% (2.5%/year). That’s a slightly thinner profit margin than a bank gets on a typical credit card, I think, but federal workers should be a better-than-average risk, no?

Is the problem competition from existing credit unions to which federal workers belong? This credit union offers 0% interest for 60 days to furloughed workers. Tough to compete with 0%!

Related:

• NASA employee credit union: “Our special Furlough Relief Loan will allow you to access up to $10,000 for up to a 60-month term – interest free and payment free for 60 days.”

My Facebook feed is packed with demands that the government be reopened from people who previously compared Donald Trump unfavorably with Adolf Hitler.

Why do they want a government run by NeuHitler to be reopened? If a government is committing evil acts, wouldn’t it be better to minimize the number of acts that the government can commit, e.g., by sending some employees home for a paid vacation? If they weren’t catching up on Netflix series, some of these folks might be making repairs, for example, to the existing 580-mile U.S.-Mexico border fence, recently declared “immoral” by the Democrats.

(The folks who are home on Xbox or sipping drinks on a Caribbean beach are actually “unpaid” in New York Times parlance, because the paychecks will arrive a few weeks after the time off; how many private sector workers would be willing to tolerate the horrors of a paid month off work in exchange for waiting a few extra weeks for the cash?).

[Vaguely similar issue: my friends in Berkeley said they believed that the U.S. government was committing crimes comparable to what Germans and Japanese did during World War II. (Most heinous: separating children at the border from migrant parents, something that happens every few minutes in the nearby California family court without attracting their attention) Yet despite having ample resources and the prospect of a good job for the husband in France or Switzerland (the wife does not work), they had no plans to renounce their citizenship and stop paying taxes to fund this as-bad-as-the-Nazis evil enterprise.]

Finally, I learned from a patent litigator (one of the perks of being an expert witness is talking to these smart folks!) that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is going full steam ahead. They have money left over from the previous fiscal year so they’re good through February and, should those funds run out, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board will declare that the folks who accept filings are “essential”.

Ergo, we live in a country where we can still fight about patents, but we can’t visit the Smithsonian exhibits that celebrate our patent system.