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A year ago I posted “What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do for us today?”

That posting reflected the national discourse of the time, which was mostly about the extent to which government should redistribute income among residents and the portion of the economy to which Soviet-style central planning should be applied. In the intervening 12 months, the national discourse seems to have shifted back to the 1950s and 1960s concerns of Dr. King, i.e., rights for black Americans.

I’m wondering what he would make of our current situation in which young black Americans are preferentially admitted to our most elite universities but, once there, say that they feel “unsafe” (see Yale) while, on the other hand, crazy high crime rates in mostly-black cities, such as Baltimore and Detroit, are seldom newsworthy.

Readers: What do you think Martin Luther King, Jr. would be saying to us right now? I’m going to guess that he would have been opposed to the $15/hour minimum wage (since it will greatly exacerbate unemployment among black Americans, roughly double that for whites) and argue instead for an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit.

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“Drunk with Power” is a New Yorker review of The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, described by an Amazon reviewer as a “dreadfully dull and pedantic tome”. Perhaps this is a situation where it is better to read the review than the book!

There is some interesting material in here. The U.S. has a Prohibition Party, founded roughly 150 years ago, that still holds meetings:

Some of the old warriors kept the faith. (The Prohibition Party never disbanded, and held its most recent convention in July, by conference call; Gerrit Smith doubtless would have been more impressed by the technology than by the turnout, which was eleven.)

Alcohol is still a problem:

There are about thirty thousand gun-related deaths per year in America—and about ninety thousand alcohol-related deaths.

Though perhaps consumption was more than in the old days:

By one estimate, in 1810 the average American consumed the equivalent of seven gallons of pure alcohol, three times the current level.

What do readers think? Given enough immigrants from societies where alcohol is not consumed, combined with a decreased tolerance for anything that is upsetting, violent, or risky, could the U.S. return to Prohibition, at least on a state-by-state basis?

Related:

• Why can’t a country’s productivity be predicted by alcohol consumption?

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Taiwan has elected Tsai Ing-wen, a childless never-married 59-year-old (Wikipedia). This is a non-traditional status for a 59-year-old person and I’m wondering how revolutionary this is. Germany, of course, is led by the childless Angela Merkel.

Readers: What other countries are led by people who never had kids? And could this affect their decision-making? (e.g., perhaps Angela Merkel isn’t worried about the long-term demographic shifts that her policies entail; by the time Germany is no longer recognizably “German,” she will be likely be dead)

Notable historical examples of childless leaders: Adolf Hitler, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh.

Arguable: George Washington (Wikipedia says that he was an active stepfather to Martha’s children).

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Looking at “The 4th Democratic debate transcript”…

Clinton: We have to get the economy working and incomes rising for everyone, … We need a president who can do all aspects of the job.

We will have a planned economy.

Sanders: ordinary Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, 47 million people living in poverty, and almost all of the new income and wealth going to the top one percent.

If voters aren’t angry enough about this, the government can let in another 10 million immigrants and tweak the “poverty” definition so that an advocate for higher taxes can talk about the “100 million people living in poverty.” (Actually that does raise the question of why, if life in America without rich parents is an intolerable grind, there are any migrants who want to come to the U.S. Did Tashfeen Malik come here because she thought that Bernie Sanders was going to get elected and redistribute wealth to her? Why wouldn’t all migrants seek to stay in their home countries and/or Europe?)

Sanders: And then, to make a bad situation worse, we have a corrupt campaign finance system where millionaires and billionaires are spending extraordinary amounts of money to buy elections.

How well did being backed by rich people work for Mitt Romney in 2012? Are the Koch brothers more powerful than the average American voter’s desire to be taken care of by the Great Father in Washington? Have they picked our next president yet? According to “Koch Brothers Officially Back Carly Fiorina” it would seem that we will all soon have to buy Compaq-brand PCs.

O’Malley: Eight years ago, you brought forward a new leader in Barack Obama to save our country from the second Great Depression. And that’s what he’s done. Our country’s doing better, we’re creating jobs again. But in order to make good on the promise of equal opportunity and equal justice under the law, and we have urgent work to do

It is great that we were sent a savior. But how come, after seven years of being saved, we still have “urgent work to do”? We were able to win World War II in four years. From the latest AOPA Pilot: “Of the 294,000 aircraft built in the United States for the war, 21,583 were lost domestically during test flights, ferrying, training, et cetera, and 43,581 were lost en route to and during theater operations. Most surplus aircraft were destroyed for their aluminum, but some were sold to civilians. Airworthy P–51 Mustangs sold for less than $1,000.”

Sanders: … we should have health care for every man, woman, and child as a right that we should raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour; that we have got to create millions of decent- paying jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.

We are years into Obamacare, spend nearly 20 percent of GDP on health care, and don’t already have health care for Americans? There are going to be millions of currently unemployed people rebuilding our infrastructure? Who wants to be the first to drive over a bridge that has been built by the Obamacorps (folks who spent 99 weeks playing Xbox)?

Clinton: I would work quickly to present to the Congress my plans for creating more good jobs in manufacturing, infrastructure, clean and renewable energy, raising the minimum wage, and guaranteeing, finally, equal pay for women’s work. … decreasing the out-of-pocket costs by putting a cap on prescription drug costs; by looking for ways that we can put the prescription drug business and the health insurance company business on a more stable platform that doesn’t take too much money out of the pockets of hard-working Americans.

The Citizens for a Planned Economy will support this! Hillary’s ministry of wages will set the fair salary for every woman in America (maybe they can use the federally mandated child support guidelines as the starting point). And the federal government will also allocate revenue to favored companies in the health insurance and pharma industries.

Clinton: And third, I would be working, in every way that I knew, to bring our country together.

Except for the Republicans, whom she hates, because they are staging a “concerted assault on voting rights, on women’s rights, on gay rights, on civil rights, on workers rights.” (a little farther down in the transcript)

O’Malley: I would lay out an agenda to make wages go up again for all Americans, rather than down. Equal pay for equal work, … raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour

“I too can find wise ministers to run a centrally planned economy.”

O’Malley: we need a new agenda for America’s cities. We have not had a new agenda for America’s cities since Jimmy Carter. … that will invest in CBVG transportation,

Okay, what is “CBVG”? And why can’t state governments make agendas for cities within their states? Should there be the same agenda for Honolulu, Hawaii and Bangor, Maine?

Sanders: I stood up to the gun lobby and came out and maintained the position that in this country we should not be selling military style assault weapons.

So Americans will be able to buy an AK-47 but it has to be pink with polka dots?

Sanders: I have supported from day one and instant background check to make certain that people who should have guns do not have guns. And that includes people of criminal backgrounds, people who are mentally unstable.

I’m not a gun expert, but does all of this paperwork make a difference? Didn’t Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik acquire guns through a friend (latimes)? And wouldn’t they have passed most background checks in any event?

Clinton: He voted to let guns go onto the Amtrak

How else are you going to shoot yourself when you’re stuck for what seems like an eternity on an Acela train crawling feebly between Boston and New York? (Regrettably it seems that the bill Sanders supported was for guns in checked bags, so you wouldn’t have access to your beloved gun while Amtrak was making you miserable.)

Clinton: He voted for immunity from gunmakers and sellers which the NRA said, “was the most important piece of gun legislation in 20 years. “

If it were possible to sue gun manufacturers for damages following shooting deaths, wouldn’t all guns then be made offshore and imported by LLCs that were dissolved every year or two?

O’Malley: I’m the one candidate on this stage that actually brought people together to pass comprehensive gun safety legislation. This is very personal to me being from Baltimore. … It was because we were burying over 300 young, poor black men every single year … I drove our incarceration rate down to 20-year lows, and drove violent crime down to 30-year lows

The New York Times just ran an article showing that O’Malley was so successful that Baltimore is now slightly safer than El Salvador and Honduras. There were 344 homicides in 2015 and 93 percent of the victims were black.

O’Malley: I’ve never met a self respecting deer hunter that needed an AR-15 to down a deer.

Spoken like a man who has never planted a rhododendron or tulip…

Clinton: Well, sadly it’s reality, and it has been heartbreaking, and incredibly outraging to see the constant stories of young men like Walter Scott,

Supposed the court system and prison industry in life; supporting Hillary in death.

Clinton: One out of three African American men may well end up going to prison.

Sanders: We have a criminal justice system which is broken. Who in America is satisfied that we have more people in jail than any other country on Earth, including China?

But our federally-mandated child support system requires that we put a lot of these guys in prison (see “Post-Divorce Child Support Collection”).

Clinton: I took on the health insurance industry back in the ’90s, and I didn’t quit until we got the children’s health insurance program that ensures eight million kids.

She took on the industry and ultimately gave them 8 million new customers, whose premiums are paid for by tax dollars? Can she please also take on my industry?

Clinton: We finally have a path to universal health care. We have accomplished so much already.

Sanders: … we have to deal with is the fact that 29 million people still have no health insurance.

We have moved from an expensive system in which tens of millions of Americans were uninsured to a crazy expensive system in which tens of millions of Americans are uninsured.

Sanders: We’re not going to tear up the Affordable Care Act. I helped write it. But we are going to move on top of that to a Medicaid-for- all system.

If I get free health care under Bernie’s Medicaid-for-all why would I want to buy additional insurance through healthcare.gov? (And I hope that we’re not all getting Medicaid because with Bernie’s higher taxes we will all readily qualify for this poverty-relief program!)

Sanders: The real issue is that in area after area, raising the minimum wage to $15 bucks an hour. The American people want it. Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, creating 13 million jobs, the American people want it. The pay equity for women, the American people want it. Demanding that the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes. The American people want it.

The most accurate statement in the debate!

Sanders: I do believe we have to deal with the fundamental issues of a handful of billionaires who control economic and political life of this country.

How do we explain the loss of Mitt Romney then? The imposition of the Obamacare surtax on investment income? Is it that the billionaires have such sophisticated tax avoidance strategies that they didn’t mind President Obama and his higher tax rates? Billionaires care about tax rates in Bermuda, Ireland, and the Netherlands, but not the U.S.?

Clinton: I know how much young people value their independence, their autonomy, and their rights.

… so the central planners in Washington will set their wages, tell them that they don’t have the right to refrain from buying overpriced health insurance, etc.

Clinton: he’s criticized President Obama for taking donations from Wall Street, and President Obama has led our country out of the great recession.

Obama gets credit for the U.S. economy’s dead cat bounce! What would have happened if Mitt Romney had been elected? Every business in the U.S. would have had to go Chapter 7 with the assets sold to Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese firms?

Sanders: The leader of Goldman Sachs is a billionaire who comes to Congress and tells us we should cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

And yet these programs grow every year. This is not one of the billionaires who, according to Bernie, controls the U.S. economy then? The Goldman billionaire is one of the powerless billionaires that Congress ignores?

Sanders: We do that by doing away with the absurd loophole that now allows major profitable corporations to stash their money in the Cayman Islands, and not in some years, pay a nickel in taxes.

“I don’t want there to be any major profitable corporations that are headquartered in the U.S.”

Sanders: I pay for it through a tax on Wall Street speculation.

“I want all of the trading to happen in some other country where there is no tax.”

Clinton: I’m the only candidate standing here tonight who has said I will not raise taxes on the middle class. I want to raise incomes, not taxes, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that the wealthy pay for debt free tuition, for child care, for paid family leave.

Her Central Ministry of Wages will be setting incomes, so the promise to raise incomes is credible. We will make high-income people work longer hours, and therefore have fewer children, to transfer money to child care and family leave so that we encourage low-income

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“Airlines’ Rising Labor Costs in Focus Ahead of Earnings” is a January 16, 2016 WSJ article making some of the same points that I made in “Unions and Airlines” back in 2010. Labor rates tend to be set during times of high profit:

As fuel prices have plunged, employee pay and benefits have returned as airlines’ biggest expense item. Because the industry—which not too long ago was mired in red ink—appears to be minting money now, its pilots, flight attendants, mechanics and other workers are demanding to be rewarded for aiding in its turnaround. They also want to recoup concessions they made when companies went through bankruptcy-court protection.

This leaves nothing for investors if the good times end. Right now the good times are mostly a result of a lack of competition (the government approved every conceivable merger; efficient competitors such as Ryanair are prohibited from offering their services to American consumers for domestic flights). Perhaps the oligopoly won’t end, but profits for investors could end if the next round of labor negotiation transfers the profits from lack competition into employees’ pockets.

My recommendation: Don’t buy stock in any U.S. airline!

A reader comment is interesting:

And the regional airline pilot’s/crewmember’s pay?? Too funny. Nothing like contacting tower for takeoff, knowing the pilots in front of your airplane are making 4-6 times more money for the same job. Interesting to see how the industry looks 10 years from now!

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“Negotiating the Whirlwind” (New Yorker, December 21&28, 2015) celebrates John Kerry, but it is interesting even for folks who are not John Kerry fans due to the examples of what goes on within the State Department.

What kind of achievements can be specifically celebrated?

With the King gone, the Saudi advisers, despite their ritual expressions of distaste for Iran, agreed to be in the same room with Zarif at future meetings in Vienna. This would not be first-level news around the world, necessarily, and the war went on, and the waves of refugees kept arriving in Jordan and Turkey and on the shores of Lesvos. But, for Kerry, these were the kinds of moves—a pawn seizing a center square—that just might lead to an endgame.

(Note that Saudi Arabia and Iran severed diplomatic relations a few weeks after this magazine was printed.)

What are the results when the government spends 8X as much operating an airliner than do the airlines? (See TIME article from 2013 on the $43,000/hour operating cost to the taxpayers for a 757)

As Secretary of State, however, Kerry spends much of his life onboard a worse-for-wear government jet, a Boeing 757. Both Kerry and Clinton have often had the humbling experience of the plane breaking down: a blown tire, a leak in an auxiliary fuel tank, “electronic problems.”

The article contains some bonus material. Are you unsure how to think about the reign of King Bush II? About the achievements of Hillary Clinton? The New Yorker will tell you what to think:

In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines. But he could not suffer the defeat in complete silence. He was outraged that Bush, who had won a stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, used campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his military record. [2nd paragraph, emphasis added]

As a diplomat, Hillary Clinton wins credit inside the Administration for visiting a hundred and twelve countries and helping to transform America’s image in the world after the catastrophic Bush years. She led efforts to open relations with Burma, brokered a 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and drafted economic sanctions on Iran.

The article agrees with one of the attorneys we interviewed for Real World Divorce, that “there are easier and quicker ways for an American to make money than by working”:

[Kerry] married twice into substantial fortunes.

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“The Siege of Miami” is a New Yorker article about flooding in Miami. Here’s one point that seems worth discussing..

“I believe in human innovation,” Levine responded. “If, thirty or forty years ago, I’d told you that you were going to be able to communicate with your friends around the world by looking at your watch or with an iPad or an iPhone, you would think I was out of my mind.” Thirty or forty years from now, he said, “We’re going to have innovative solutions to fight back against sea-level rise that we cannot even imagine today.”

What do readers think? I tend to be optimistic about technology for improving electric motors, batteries, windmills, and other items associated with cutting CO2 emissions. But flood control and pumps would seem to me to fall into the same category as building bridges, which Americans are getting worse over at over time (see “Longfellow Bridge repairs will now take about as long as the original construction” and “U.S. versus German infrastructure spending and results“).

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Haeir is supposedly going to buy GE’s appliance business for $5.4 billion. The Wall Street Journal says that “GE Appliances and Lighting, of which appliances is the lion’s share, were $8.4 billion in 2014.”

One thing that I can’t figure out is if the sale is of a division that makes and sells appliances only in the U.S. or if it is a division that makes and sells appliances worldwide. Let’s assume that this is a U.S.-only division. I still don’t see how it can be worth only $5.4 billion.

The Census Bureau says that there are approximately 134 million households in the U.S. Thus the appliances division is selling for $40 per U.S. household. How can it be the case that GE can’t extract at least $40 in profit over the next 5-10 years from each American household? We bought a house that came with a GE refrigerator. When something went wrong with the icemaker it was about $450 to fix. Isn’t there $40 of profit just in that one repair?

GE seems to have roughly 20 percent of the U.S. appliance market (source), which would make the $5.4 billion acquisition equivalent to something like $200 in profit per household with GE appliances, but that still seems low.

[Separately, just two months after the ice maker repair, the same five-year-old side-by-side GE fridge stopped cooling, thus ruining everything in our freezer and refrigerator. It is running continuously and yet only about 32F in the freezer compartment and 50-55F in the fridge part, with frost all over the back plate of the freezer. I have unplugged it for an overnight rest in hopes that the problem was a frozen evaporator coil and it will start working again by itself. But maybe GE will get to make another profitable service visit?]

Related:

• Now I get to pay some of GE’s bills
• The bad old days (of two refrigerator doors)

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Back in 1998, I published “Tuition-free MIT” and noted various benefits of structuring a college to live off endowment rather than tuition. Nearly 20 years later, it seems that at least some folks at Harvard are taking up the idea: “A Push to Make Harvard Free Also Questions the Role of Race in Admissions” (nytimes; as a sign of the zeitgeist it is mostly about race rather than $$ and academic performance).

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A Boston Globe story on an upgraded GPS system caught me by surprise. Apparently by the year 2022 we’ll have the “GPS OCX” system that, in theory, won’t let a 10-year-old from China send all of the cars in a major metropolitan area in the same direction at roughly the same time, thus causing massive traffic jams.

[The Globe reports that the upgrade is taking longer than it took to build the original GPS system, consistent with our local Longfellow Bridge project, and will cost 3-4X what was originally budgeted. But that would make it above-average for a military program, according to John Lehman, the Reagan-era Secretary of the Navy (WSJ article: “With so many layers and offices needed to concur on every decision, it now takes an average of 22½ years from the start of a weapons program to first deployment, instead of the four years it took to deploy the Minuteman ICBM and Polaris submarine missile system in the Cold War era. … it takes only seven years for Chinese and Russian procurement systems to produce the advanced ships and fighters of the so-called fifth generation … Today’s procurement consists of beauty contests to see who gets a 30- to 50-year competition-free monopoly.”).]

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