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The tone of this election year seems to be more feverish than in previous elections. Mitt Romney was quite calm when he said that 47 percent of Americans wouldn’t vote for him because they paid no income tax and/or received a lot of government handouts. He didn’t say that those voters were immoral. He recognized that they could legitimately perceive that it wasn’t in their interest to vote for him.

People today seem to be taking the opposite tack compared to Romney:

• Paul Krugman in the New York Times says that electing Trump will melt the planet
• “GOP must confront Trump nightmare” says the editorial staff of the Boston Globe (same folks portrayed in the movie Spotlight as not bothering for about 10 years to pursue a story about child sexual abuse in churches… but Trump is urgent!). The article concludes with “There’s only one right answer.”

Is there in fact only one right answer? Start with a voter who perceives her job being at risk due to immigration and therefore votes for Donald Trump. According to the current thinking among Democrats, she is “wrong” and/or “evil” and/or “supports fascism/racism/etc.” I haven’t heard anyone say “Well, she is differently situated than I am and therefore naturally would have different interests and vote for a different candidate.” An environmentalist friend says that Donald Trump is an evil populist and that the entire planet will be put at risk if he is elected. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, not the same kind of “populist” due to his experience in Washington. A Sanders victory will ensure that Planet Earth heals.

Some Facebookers are essentially demanding that all of their friends stop whatever they are doing to pay attention more or less full-time to the Great Cause of preventing Donald Trump from becoming a Hitler-style dictator.

I’m wondering why it wouldn’t be legitimate for a person to say that state or local laws were of more interest and that, to the extent political energy was available, he or she was concentrating attention on those laws. Let’s go through some examples.

• Consider a parent with a child who is not being challenged in a public school. That’s a 7-year-old mind going to waste for six hours per day. The federal government and the President have essentially nothing to do with what happens in this school. Would it be wrong for that parent to say “I don’t care if Trump, Bernie, or Hillary wins because I’m working on getting individual assignments for children at Johnnie’s school”?
• How about a Minnesotan who had sex with a successful married dentist and is collecting $22,596 per year in tax-free child support under Minnesota family law. The same child could yield $100,000 per year under Wisconsin law. Would it be unreasonable for the Minnesotan to say “I’m more interested in getting Minnesota to remove the cap on child support so that I can quadruple my spending power than in who occupies the White House”?
• Alfred A. Stoner needs his glaucoma meds every morning, but his state criminalizes marijuana possession. If his state law were changed so that marijuana were legal, as it is in Colorado, for example, he wouldn’t have to worry about being imprisoned. Is Mr. Stoner a bad person because he says “I am putting all of my political effort into marijuana legalization because I would rather be at home with President Trump in the White House than be in prison with Hillary Clinton in the White House”?
• Melissa Labralover wants to take her dog to a neighborhood field to run every morning and every evening with other dogs, but it is illegal to have an off-leash dog in her town and this field is covered in weeds and broken glass (due to teenagers who were forced to turn to beer after being unable to get the glaucoma medication that they required). She wants to see her town budget to clean up the field and to amend its laws so that dogs can be off-leash within the confines of the field. Is she allowed to say “My income is modest so my tax rate is low and I really don’t care what they do 3000 miles away in Washington because what would make the most difference to Rover and me is a dog park”?

Readers: In terms of things that would have a direct impact on your life or your family members’ lives, are you most interested in seeing changes at the federal, state, or local level?

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From “The Golden Generation,” a New Yorker article about Chinese citizens who live in Vancouver:

Last year, the son of China’s richest man posted pictures online of his dog wearing two gold-plated Apple Watches, one on each front paw.

Who else has found a use for the Apple Watch?

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One thing that I noticed during my sojourn in Vail Valley was that the ski resorts seem to have a lot of volunteer labor. Beaver Creek has greeters everywhere to answer questions, hand out tissues, hand out postcards, etc. One volunteer said that she does it for the annual pass. I asked “How often do you ski?” and she replied that she doesn’t ski at all, but likes the ride the lifts in the summer for hiking. Presumably this relationship is mutually satisfactory but a mutually satisfactory employment relationship can give rise to a profitable lawsuit.

I found Winter Park’s ad for ski patrol volunteers, for example. The volunteer must work for 17 days and pay $90. In exchange he or she receives an annual ski pass that retails for $400-600. If a “day” is 8 hours, that’s as little as $2.25 per hour in net compensation and the government did not receive Social Security or Medicare payroll taxes on this wage.

Why isn’t ski country also an employment litigator’s paradise?

[Despite state laws that absolve ski resort operators from most liability on the “you were falling down a goddamn mountain” theory, a prominent skilaw.com billboard on I-70 shows that litigation and skiing can be mixed.]

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If we model voting as a social phenomenon, this image shows why Hillary Clinton wins the Massachusetts primary:

There was not a single other candidate that anyone in our town was willing to be seen supporting. (Maybe I will go down there at 5 pm with a “Jesus Loves Trump” sign and a blood pressure meter to see what happens!)

(As per usual, most of the ballot was taken up by candidates running unopposed. One interesting item is that the Democrats in Massachusetts have positions titled “State Committee Man” and “State Committee Woman” for which there is a gender ID requirement. There was not an interesting electoral contest for these positions, as each one had a single unopposed candidate. But the existence of these positions raises the question: what if a successful “State Committee Man” decides to identify as a “woman” at some point subsequent to his/her election? How are these positions meaningful in a transgender age?)

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A cornerstone of the Democrats’ plan to reduce American inequality is higher tax rates. Rich people will keep working, not move taxable activities offshore and/or pursue other tax avoidance strategies, and the government’s coffers will fill up like Pharaoh’s grain warehouses during the seven fat years. Wise officials will then ladle out the cash to the deserving poor and inequality will be reduced.

Is there any alternative to this approach, I was asked at a dinner party by some rich government-connected residents of Cambridge? (they support Bernie Sanders, of course!)

My answer was that a big element of inequality in the U.S. involves real estate. Start with the government’s decision to double the population compared to the “good old equal” days of the 1950s (paying Americans to have children; encouraging immigration both legal and illegal). Add our spectacular failure in all aspects of urban planning and you get the inevitable outcome of only a handful of Americans being able to afford market-rate housing in places where anyone would actually want to live. We have added 150 million people but hardly any new cities or towns that have the features that most people desire. So you need to have a great job and/or be favored by a government ministry that hands out free housing in elite neighborhoods such as Manhattan, Cambridge, San Francisco, etc.

What if we took some of the effort and money that we currently invest in government handouts and used that to create additional attractive cities and towns? (I proposed this idea for an evil billionaire back in 2007, but the evil billionaires are obsessed with saving the rest of the planet instead.) We have a lot of land in the U.S. so there is no reason for land per se to be out of reach for a lower-middle-class American.

[Of course the standard approach to reducing inequality would be to improve public education, but Americans have rejected the Finland-style system in which only successful students can become teachers (see “Smartest Kids in the World Review”) and there doesn’t seem to be any other proven formula.]

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Politicians and the media are relentless in reminding us that the U.S. is a winner-take-all society where the Top 1% or 0.1% have collected all of the money. If the top 1% are “winners” that makes the bottom 99% “losers”. “Disney Introduces Demand-Based Pricing at Theme Parks” (nytimes) is hard to square with this picture:

Disney tends to increase ticket prices once a year — recently, at well above the rate of inflation … Disney’s price increases have been modest considering the soaring demand, analysts say. During the company’s last financial quarter, which ended on Jan. 2, domestic park attendance rose 10 percent from a year earlier, setting records. Attendance in the final quarter of 2014 rose 7 percent from the same period in 2013.

Are the Disney parks packed with foreigners (Orlando Sentinel says it is only about 20 percent)? If not, how did tens of millions of people manage to afford to take a week off work, travel to Orlando, and spend at least $100 each day for each family member? (Orlando Sentinel)

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As a resident of Massachusetts I am purely a spectator of the U.S. political scene. Though I will try to get down to the local school to vote for Bernie on Tuesday, our votes generally don’t count; most candidates on our ballots are running unopposed and, for the rest, the outcome is seldom in doubt.

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday and people have been in a tizzy for months over the prospect of Donald Trump as President. My Facebook feed is about 30 percent comparisons of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.

Stupid Question of the Day: What could Trump actually do that would be so bad/dramatic?

Let’s assume that Trump isn’t going to start a nuclear war. He has too much property to protect, even if much may be mortgaged.

Now what? The President can travel around the country making fine speeches (if Obama) or blunt ones (if Trump), but the President doesn’t make laws, set tax rates, or determine the budget. Maybe Trump wants to build a 100′-high wall somewhere but if Congress doesn’t fund it then he will have to pay for the wall himself, just as you or I would.

President Trump would appoint federal judges. Is there any evidence that he would do a worse job at this than anyone else? His own sister is a Federal appeals court judge, nominated to that job in 1999 by President Clinton. Presumably Trump, like other Presidents, would delegate the grunt work of finding good candidates for various positions. Are we afraid that Trump will hire inferior advisors somehow? Why wouldn’t he just ask his sister for help with judges and similarly qualified people for help in other areas?

Barack Obama has said that he was going to do a bunch of stuff that never got done. He was going to close Gitmo. He was going to tax oil. Politifact has a longish list. In retrospect it seems that it didn’t make any difference what Obama said since Congress has the real power. What’s the practical downside of President Trump for those of us who don’t watch TV and who don’t pay close attention to what the current President says?

He’s not a candidate that I have ever considered supporting, but I would like someone to explain why does the sky fall if Donald Trump is elected?

[And, separately, what if Barack Obama were to nominate Donald Trump’s sister to the Supreme Court?]

Related:

• “What a Donald Trump presidency might actually look like” (Los Angeles Times) says that spending and government programs would be more or less unchanged.
• “The Donald and The Terminator” (WSJ) on the failure of Arnold Schwarzenegger to accomplish anything in California: “… here’s the thing about bluster. Against entrenched interests, it almost always loses. For a simple reason: The interests are entrenched because they know how to game the system. American history is thus littered with elected populists foundering in office on the presumption that their personal appeal would be enough to carry the day. That’s what happened to Mr. Schwarzenegger. He came into the governor’s mansion vowing to lower the tax burden, impose some spending restraint and revive the state’s economy. Instead, he ended up signing a huge tax increase even as the state’s deficit spending continued and the debt nearly tripled under his watch.”

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Those of us with big collections of Canon EOS lenses have had to watch enviously as cameras with Sony sensors outclassed all of the Canon bodies, regardless of price. The Nikon system, anchored by Sony sensors in camera bodies such as the D800, inspired the most envy. Sony’s own systems didn’t seem that awesome, however, due to the lack of lens choices. The latest DxOMark tests, however, show that the lens options for Sony mirrorless systems are not to be sneezed at. Some of the better lenses ever tested are the Zeiss 25/2 and Zeiss 21/2.8, both designed for the Sony A7 camera. If you want an awesome 50/1.4 it seems that the Sigma 50/1.4 “Art” lens is the best mixture of optical quality and price/weight and it is available in a Sony mount (but for their DSLR cameras rather than the mirrorless? This would then require an adapter).

Even Pentax is now crushing Canon in the DSLR image quality area with its K-1 body that includes the Sony 36 MP sensor lifted from the A7.

So… Canon doesn’t make bodies with competitive image quality and most of the great new lenses are coming from third-party makers such as Sigma and Zeiss. How does this happen to a market leader?

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Here’s an excerpt from an article by a sex worker:

I arrived in New York City from Chelyabinsk, a city right in the middle of Russia, when I was 19 years old, with $300 in my pocket. I turned 24 in March and have managed to save $200,000…

If she continues to save at this rate ($40,000 per year), she’ll have put away $1.44 million in today’s dollars by the time she is 55 years old (a standard retirement age for a government worker). If we assume that her funds are invested in securities that are actually available in the market (the current yield on TIPS is 1.06 percent real; source), she’ll still have adequate retirement funds (though likely nowhere near as large a cashflow as a retired police officer or firefighter who uses the overtime system thoughtfully).

If only we could get our politicians to exhibit this much fiscal prudence! (good first step: laws prohibiting politicians from giving public employees defined benefit pensions, unless they first get a letter from God telling them (a) how long all of their workers will live, and (b) what actual market returns will be for the next 50 years).

This is why I can’t be enthusiastic about someone like Michael Bloomberg as a presidential candidate. He kept ladling out the pension promises to New York City workers. The city won’t become insolvent as long as the following conditions hold: (1) there is no major innovation in medicine that allows retirees to live longer, (2) Wall Street continues to be the world’s money center, and (3) markets continue to boom. That’s a lot of risk to impose on future residents and taxpayers.

Related:

• “The Rules of Engagement” (by the same author)
• Americans’ inability to think about pension costs on display in the Boston Globe

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I can’t understand why Americans have trouble maintaining a health weight…

(from the supermarket in Dillon, Colorado)

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