Ryan Rappa thinks the Fed is going to have to make debt relief part of any plan to control inflation. Actually, I should specify that whoever wrote his commentary’s headline thinks that, because Rappa’s essay mainly just ruminates about the problem. The closest he comes is this:
This risk is multiplied by other forms of debt, including mortgages, car loans, student loans, municipal and corporate debt, and financial leverage. Altogether, the total is in the ballpark of $100 trillion, much of which needs to be rolled over or refinanced on a regular basis, just like the federal debt. At least $2 trillion of this belongs to “zombie companies” that cannot make ends meet without borrowing more at ultra-low rates, and there are many near-zombie companies yet to come out of the woodwork.
As a result, the Fed has largely lost control of its most powerful tool against inflation. Yes, it plans to raise rates in 2022, but given the size of our collective debt, each minuscule bump is like trying to fix an electrical outlet with the power turned on.
I’m not so sure this is really a problem so much as a consideration to factor in. Massive debt and the interest payments thereto could mean smaller adjustments to interest will have bigger effects.
Naturally, there will be pain, but ultimately, there is no solution if people don’t insist on change, so motivating them could be part of a longer term solution, while ameliorating their experience could produce short-term fixes.
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Following up on a question I sent to the state Department of Health, spokesman Joseph Wendelken tells me that instances of people being hospitalized while testing positive for COVID, but for whom COVID is entirely unrelated to the reason they’re in the hospital, account for only about 6% of the number.
The question gained increased prominence in Rhode Island as Christmas break approached and Kent Hospital Chief of Emergency Medicine Laura Forman told National Public Radio that the virus was spreading like “wildfire,” and “even patients who are coming in after car accidents or with ankle sprains are testing positive.”
According to Wendelken, “someone who goes to the hospital for another reason but is COVID-19 positive would not get admitted unless that other health issue was dire.” After “a closer clinical analysis on the charts of a subset of patients,” the DOH came to the conclusion that the virus “played a role ” in the conditions of 94% of patients testing positive for COVID.
Applying that percentage to the latest data from the DOH, of the 325 people currently listed as “hospitalized with COVID,” the virus would be deemed entirely incidental for about 20.
Nonetheless, the need for Rhode Islanders to postpone procedures because they are not “dire” must be counted among the costs of the current condition of our health care system. Though seasonally elevated, the number of COVID patients in Rhode Island is still down considerably from this point last year. If patients who would otherwise have been admitted are being turned away, then one would expect hospitals to have excess capacity, rather than experiencing a crisis.
I’ve asked if the state has a sense of how many patients are being turned away and whether patients for whom COVID is a factor in their illness are also not being admitted unless they are in dire circumstances.
Featured image by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash.
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Thinking about Governor McKee’s (let’s just say) uninspiring leadership on COVID in preparation for my weekly conversation with John DePetro, I wondered why we can’t just follow the obvious path of sanity.
Never in my life have I heard so many people talking about believing science and engaging with concepts of risk and mitigation, but it’s all become meaningless because there is no talk of tradeoffs. There’s no discussion about acceptable risk.
If public health authorities wanted, they really could offer the public a clear presentation of the actual risks to people of different ages or in different circumstances. They could then illustrate the practical (and realistic) benefit of each form of mitigation.
We could then figure out where we should focus as a community and what we can or are willing to do as individuals. But the conversation pulls up short of that sort of consideration, perhaps because the panicked people and those looking to make ideological gains know they couldn’t dominate that discussion.
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As the editor of the Rhode Report puts it while linking to this story, “This is what is important to the morons of the Democrat Party”:
As of January 1, restaurants across Rhode Island are no longer allowed to give out single-use plastic straws unless a customer asks for one.
Violators will get warnings for the first and second times that they fail to follow the law.
It is in the nature of zealots to be relentless. Just so, as COVID was first engulfing the planet, Rhode Island legislators were working on a law against the intentional release of balloons.
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Governor Dan McKee implemented an inflexible COVID-19 vaccine mandate on Rhode Island’s healthcare workers in the midst of a healthcare worker shortage. How much did the mandate exacerbate under-staffing? Director of Health Dr. Nicole Alexander Scott was asked this at a press conference on November 16.
“It’s a contributing factor that is small in the grand scheme of things,” Alexander-Scott said, noting that Rhode Island is at 98% compliance with the state’s vaccination policy.
98% of healthcare workers in the state had gotten vaccinated. So 2% did not get vaccinated. Two percent of 65,000 comes out to 1,300 healthcare workers involuntarily removed from their jobs by Governor McKee’s vaccine mandate.
Contacted by Anchor Rising on December 29 about this, the office of Governor Dan McKee did not offer comment. The office of Rhode Island Director of Health, Dr. Nicole Alexander Scott, replied,
Healthcare facility administrators have reported to us that the healthcare worker vaccination requirement has helped stabilize the workforce because less illness among staff means fewer people having to isolate and quarantine (and miss work). For this reason, the major health systems in Rhode Island put healthcare worker vaccination requirements in place before the State enacted a regulation statewide.
But this does not altogether address the crux of the matter, which is that the vaccine mandate itself has “destabilized” the workforce by removing 1,300 healthcare workers. Let’s stipulate that the number of vaccinated workers is, in fact, 98% and not a lower number, which would increase the number of workers sidelined. Governor McKee and Director Alexander Scott have involuntarily removed 1,300 workers from an already short-staffed healthcare system during a pandemic on the basis of a rigid mandate that was implemented without an analysis as to its impact on public health.
1,300 is not a “small” number on its face. Further, in the absence of an analysis, there is no basis to assert that 1,300 fewer workers is just a “small” contributing factor to the state’s serious healthcare short-staffing problem.
Now it is clear that it was not. Kathy Gregg at the Providence Journal yesterday broke the disturbing news that the Rhode Island Department of Health had established and issued guidelines, obtained by Gregg, on December 30 for COVID-19 positive healthcare workers to work at hospitals and nursing homes.
Governor McKee and his Department of Health now need to explain, carefully and with specificity, how it can be that COVID-positive healthcare workers pose less of a risk to patients, long-term care residents and the overall public health than 1,300 healthy ones.
Featured image by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
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Most people with whom one speaks on an unseasonably warm winter’s day in New England will not express despair. There’s a reason defenders of the status quo bring up weather as an alternative reason to taxes and regulations for why people leave the region.
Of course, every development can have its dark lining if that’s the message one wants to convey:
New England is warming significantly faster than global average temperatures, according to a new study. …
With the annual temperatures in New England expected to rise sharply in the coming decades, the authors of the study say shorter, milder winters will present a variety of challenges for rural industries such as logging, maple syrup harvesting, the ski industry, and a range of other consequences.
This is life, and things change; the question is how we should handle it, not how we can try to prevent its happening. While having sympathy for those who’ve build livelihoods around a changing status quo, we should also have confidence that, on the whole, a warmer New England will have more opportunities for economic activity, not fewer.
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Even as long ago as the late ’90s, when I finished up my undergraduate studies, the seeds of cancel culture were visible. Contrarian that I am, I would often challenge professors’ and other students’ arguments in classes that fostered debate, and some disputants were clearly looking for excuses to invalidate my case out of hand. Political correctness hadn’t blossomed into identity politics, yet, so the invalidators at least had to have the patience to wait for me to use a word or phrase that they could proclaim as a code-word for what I really meant, despite what I was saying.
An online conversation in which I’ve been engaged over the past day has had a similar feel. In a post on inequality, I recalled a progressive activist who claimed that moving to the suburbs was “white supremacy.” So that readers could follow the claim back to a source, I linked to a November 2016 post in which I provided a transcript of those comments. That post also describes what I thought the “alt-right” (along with “nationalism”) was at the time:
The concept is not… to pick a particular era in American history and call it true; the concept is to affirm that America, in the amorphous, evolved way of a non-ethnic national identity, stands for something — something that President Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform. Being an American nationalist, in other words, is upholding the values, traditions, and founding documents of the nation, as contrasted with rewriting the country according to a far-left vision.
I should note that I wasn’t exactly a booster of the “alt-right.” I can find only about three times I’ve ever used the phrase, and they trace back to the time Rhode Island Public Radio reporter Ian Donnis asked me for the conservative point of view on Stephen Bannon. Everybody in the mainstream was calling Bannon and Breitbart “alt-right,” a label Bannon had used at least once, and as I wrote to Donnis, it seemed to many conservatives that attacks on them as “white supremacist” were manufactured by the Left (just as they were with the Tea Party), and we were inclined to “give Bannon the benefit of the doubt and remain ready to push back on him and his boss if they actually do or say anything like what the Left appears to be making up.”
So, once again, we live in two worlds. In the world of many conservatives, the “alt-right” was represented by Breitbart and others, as contrasted with, say, National Review, and were documentably not promoting the racist messages the mainstream Left was claiming they were. Thus, although (as I suggested about a year after the above quotation) racist elements eventually took ownership of the label, it was, in 2016, yet another example of progressive activists’ infusing a phrase with a meaning in order to blow up their opposition. Many of us had never heard the term until those activists began applying it to the likes of Breitbart, so that’s what we took it to mean.
In the world of my recent disputant, fringe far right figures like Richard Spencer held an irrevocable and decisive ownership of the term from the beginning, when he coined it in 2008. Progressives pay much closer attention to the fringes of the Right than most conservatives do (the better to associate their reasonable opposition with them), so in their world, Bannon and Donald Trump were obviously giving the racists secret winks, knowing full well what they were doing. Meanwhile, the rest of us conservatives were idiots, dupes, or disingenuous for not reviewing the explanations of people who hated us instead of treating English as what English is: a language in which words mean what people appear to be using them to mean and can easily disconnect from their etymology. (One example that sticks in my mind is a woman using the phrase, “circle jerk,” while chatting amidst children with other soccer moms on the sideline.)
Maybe Trump and Bannon were indeed winking, but as I told Donnis in 2016, conservatives were only giving them the benefit of the doubt with a watchful eye. We’ve too often seen the mainstream media and Democrats play the “racist” card.
No doubt, my disputant and I will disagree on whether conservatives’ “watchful eye” was careful or closed (some conservatives disagree on this point), but in terms of having a discussion of tangentially related matters, it’s much healthier to take terms’ different meanings as an interesting obstacle to work through on the way to understanding what the other person actually thinks and believes. Of course, that’s the opposite of finding reasons to invalidate them.
Featured image by Vladislave Babienko on Unsplash.
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It took a whole day of intermittent exchanges and brought me to the point that I thanked him for the conversation and wished him a happy New Year, but Bill Prady finally told me what, specifically, his argument was. I’m glad he did, because if one party to a discussion simply insists that the other party should already know what is meant, they’ll keep talking past each other, which pretty well describes the condition of political discourse these days.
Unfortunately, Prady’s case came in the form of a segment from John Oliver, who wraps his argument in sneering condescension. The gag is that he pretends he’s explaining something to people who aren’t watching so those who are watching can feel superior because they already know they’ll agree. That this sort of sneering affirmation has a mainstream audience puts on stark display why we’re such a divided country. Oliver presents everything as if it’s obvious, and if you don’t see it, you’re just one of the bad people. Simple as that. You can either be on the delivering side of the sneer or on the receiving side. And on the good side, you don’t have to worry about consistency; even as he presumes moral superiority for identifying the evils of bigotry, he pauses to make mob jokes about an Italian mayor.
Nonetheless, it’s worth hearing alternative arguments, even when delivered in the form of an extended insult, because if you pay attention, you can start to see where the real differences are and where the hope for cooperation is.
After making clear which ideological stage he’s on, Oliver presents about the most clear-cut example one could find of a government entity depriving a black family of its property a century ago, at a probable long-term cost to them of millions of dollars. He then describes the racism built into federal government housing policy in the 1930s and 1940s and ties it to the present with anecdotes about racial discrimination among real estate agents and appraisers. This history, per Oliver and Prady, has prevented black Americans from gaining net worth alongside their white countrymen and proves the existence of “systemic racism.”
The setup is a motte and bailey. The defensible motte that could gain wide acceptance is that families like the Bruces of California, whose property in Manhattan Beach was wrested from them a century ago, have a real claim to compensation. Notions of “systemic racism” are the bailey that they hope to capture alongside the motte.
Real estate appraisers’ offering dramatically different results based solely on the race of the property owner is straightforward racism. The claim of “systemic racism” is more like saying the entire enterprise of buying and selling property is intrinsically racist. Thus, in that view, it isn’t enough to live life differently from the racist appraiser; you have to actively work to “dismantle racist systems,” and those who control the bailey will tell you which systems those are because obviously you can’t see them for yourself.
Perhaps our inability to see the racism in the system, however, is an indication that the claims of social justice warriors don’t follow from their premises. For example, Oliver and Prady would have us believe that “systemic racism” prevented black families from building wealth in suburban housing, and yet when “anti-racism” becomes a call to action, activists like Mike Araujo insist that moving to the suburbs is “white supremacy,” and that everybody must “reject their whiteness” or be “complicit in the murder of black bodies.”
How they get from one claim to the other is worth understanding, and the subject of home loans provides a useful structure. Even if it was long ago, they suggest, government loan programs with racism baked in set black and white Americans on different paths, with effects that have become so pervasive that the entire system is premised on the racism. True, the fact that somebody’s grandfather was denied a federally backed loan does not mean that the grandchild is not, in fact, a credit risk. But (the argument goes) the grandchild’s poor credit is a result of the original racism, so objective lending standards — and even the idea of credit worthiness, itself — are racist notions perpetuating white supremacy.
The problem is, as we move farther from actual properties and actionable claims, the indefinables of human life play more of a role, the focus on material transfers does less to address those now-systemic problems, and imposing a repair becomes more difficult without compounding injustices and doing more harm. After a century, causes and effects become tangled up with the choices and behavior of individuals, so truly addressing inequity can require healthy changes in how people make their choices. (Wokism explicitly rejects this sort of claim; in fact, Prady called me racist for suggesting it.)
Here’s where the topic returns to data and where the lens of race proves itself harmful. The “anti-racists” have no problem believing that our entire society is built to funnel privilege to the powerful, but they wholly disregard the possibility that the response to their race-based demands will leave the powerful untouched, causing greater injustice to other disadvantaged people who happen to be white.
If Oliver’s claims were really as obvious as he sneeringly insists, how does one explain the notable lack of progress in black median wealth since 1989 (see Figure 1 at the link), a half-century after the ’40s? I know, I know… “systemic racism.” OK. Fine. But what form did it take? In the context of housing, Oliver tries to bring us up to the current day with claims about racist appraisers and real estate agents’ sneakily steering white families away from black neighborhoods, but that’s not proof of anything “systemic.” Systemic shows up in data.
Toward that end, look at Figure 1 at that last link. White wealth rocketed up starting during the Clinton presidency, in 1995, and then cratered back to its earlier state with the housing crash. Meanwhile, black wealth kind of arched a bit and then sunk back down. What was going on, then?
Well, a big part of it was a shift in both mortgage and banking regulations during the Clinton Presidency providing implicitly government-backed loans to underqualified borrowers, sold in some degree as a reversal of infamously racist redlining that Oliver maligns, and then packaging those bad debts into fancy instruments for the profit of investors. At the time, and then again when the federal government began to reconsider the initiative under President Bush, the debate had a distinctly racial element.
Although presented as the beneficiaries of such policies, lower-income households (including minorities) didn’t benefit much, because they never built equity in the homes they bought, while the investment-class got rich and the values of non-subprime properties rode the upward wave. The federal government’s policies ever since seem to have focused on rebuilding that boon for the investors, again with minimal benefit to minorities.
This dynamic is visible, as well, if we dig into the data on net worth at a more-granular level. Yes, home ownership is an important part of wealth accumulation, but it is arguably not the area with the greatest discrepancies. The median value of the primary residences of white homeowners is only about 53% greater than that of black homeowners (“only” as compared with the overall gap in net worth), with white families having about 17% more mortgage debt, reducing that “value” gap.
As we move down this line of thought, we begin to see that race has become incidentally, and blaming all white people for “systemic racism” is not the proper lens.
According to this 2011 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics working paper on “Inheritances and the Distribution of Wealth,” only about 29% of all families receive any kind of inheritance (as gifts or after wills) over their lifetimes at all. That’s a good chunk of Americans, of course, and the numbers are racially disproportionate no matter how you slice them, but it does show that a big majority of people of all races are not conveying generational wealth, and what is conveyed concentrates at the top.
Go back to the “financial assets” chart on Fed’s net worth tool. On first glance, at the median, it looks like the “typical” white household has ten times the assets of the typical black family, even though almost all people of every race have some kind of holdings. But now click on the button to view the data as the mean (or average), not the median. Whites’ $50,000 median financial assets shoots up to a $481,000 mean. That shows that most of the wealth is in the hands of just those at the top. Check out the chart for average financial assets by income group. The top 10% by income have average financial assets of $2,320,410. All the other deciles are clustered under $500,000. The mean/median comparison, here, continues to show the wealth concentrated even higher up the scale.
This applies to net worth, too. The average of the top decile is $4,786,630, and everybody else is below $834,770.
Oliver and Prady are making the case that racism prevented black families from participating in the great wealth accumulation of the past eighty years. They also suggest that the game is essentially over, and simply insisting on race-neutral rules from here on will leave black families permanently behind. The last two charts I linked, however, tell a different story. In 1995, the top 10% of all households took off, and the project of government policy ever since increasingly seems to be keeping them from coming back to Earth.
The way to accomplish that feat, however, while not destroying our civilization, is to stop protecting the privileged and start allowing everybody else to draw wealth toward themselves. This is a project of freedom, not of redistribution, most especially because giving anybody the power to make nationwide decisions and impose restrictions provides an opening for the powerful to ensure the money doesn’t flow from them. They’ve got plenty of lawyers, accountants, politicians, lobbyists, and (yes) activists to figure out how to accomplish that. Will we learn nothing from the racist home loans of the mid-1900s and the disproportionate gains following Clinton’s housing and banking changes?
Indeed, one wonders whether the entire woke, “anti-racism,” “white supremacy” push (which the elites and big businesses love these days) is a ploy to keep the rest of us at each other’s throats over race when, really, we’ve mostly passed out of racism. As long as the elites can point to disproportionately negative outcomes for minorities, they can rope the 90-something percent of the rest of us who aren’t benefiting from their privilege into the definition of the problem so that any payoff can come from us.
It’s the elites taking advantage of all of us and making the most of the fact that minorities are disproportionately affected. For a laugh, take a look at the “racial equality counterfactual” section of this Federal Reserve study, which purports to show “how far our world is from racial equality.” In other words, Table 1 shows what the change in households’ net worth would look like if we had perfect racial equity and the races were evenly distributed across the wealth spectrum.
Yes, the biggest increase in net worth, 117%, would go to blacks in the top quintile. The biggest losses of net worth? That would come from “others” (read, “Asians”) and whites in the bottom quintile, at -51% and -13%, respectively.
There you go. “Racial equity” means taking from the poor to give to the rich. Take special note, by the way, of the fact that the smallest group of changes is between whites and blacks in the middle classes, which gets us back to the claims made for home ownership.
The discouraging thing about my exchanges with Bill Prady is that he’s intent on declaring me a racist when there’s a very clear path by which we could get on the same side. It’s a shame. Rather than focusing on racial differences and calling each other names, we should be working together to spread the wealth around naturally, through our ingenuity and hard work. All of us would benefit.
Oh, well. Maybe in 2022.
Featured image by Tyler Nix on Unsplash.
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I’ve suggested repeatedly that the motivation for the heavy government hand on COVID in states like Rhode Island isn’t a practical reaction to the virus so much as an emotional need to know that the government can tell people to do things when it wants. Ben Shapiro has a similar point of view:
So, why pursue useless — no, counterproductive — COVID-19 restrictions?
Because the big-government lie must be maintained. It is an article of faith. And faith requires reason-free sacrifice — it requires skin in the game, demonstration of devotion. To pursue rational policy would evidence no fealty to the notion of government-as-protective-god. To pursue irrational policy and then demand obeisance — this is the mark of the faithful. And if you are not faithful, you are a heretic.
And so regulatory genuflection becomes a test of virtue. Effectuating strict regulations is a sign of moral strength, of belief in the myth of government as catholicon. Pushing back against those restrictions is a sign of heresy.
I think the need for salvation comes first and the faith in government second, but it amounts to the same thing.
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Handling kids’ devices has become one of the most difficult challenges for parents, and the COVID lockdowns made it nearly impossible. This isn’t just restricting the amount of time a kid sits in front of a television watching shows. Modern devices are tools of social connection and legitimate information collection. Add in the need to do homework, and even attend class, and it’s impossible to set realistic boundaries, unless a parent wants to outmatch the most-strict parents of fiction.
By way of mild balance, we should remember that every development can come with a silver lining. We can’t know what current trends might be preparing the young to do in the future, even as we older folks don’t really know how to integrate new technology into their development. A century ago, how you were raised was a pretty good guide for how to raise your children. When I was a kid, boredom was pretty difficult to escape.
That field of memory arose reading Bishop Robert Barron writing about old movies and attention spans:
The coming together of daunting length and popularity [in the movie The Ten Commandments] then put me in mind of a number of other examples of this combination from cultural history. In the nineteenth-century, the novels of Charles Dickens were so sought after that ordinary Londoners waited in long lines for chapters as they were published in serial form. And let’s face it: not a lot happens in Dickens novels, by which I mean very few things blow up; there are no alien invasions; no snappy one-liners uttered by the heroes before they blow away the bad guys. For the most part, they consist of lengthy conversations among fascinating and quirky characters. Much the same can be said of the novels and stories of Dostoevsky. Though there is indeed a murder and a police investigation at the heart of the plot of The Brothers Karamazov, for the vast majority of that famous novel, Dostoevsky arranges various characters in drawing rooms for pages and pages and pages of dialogue on matters political, cultural, and religious. During that same period, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas engaged in a series of debates on the vexed issue of slavery in America. They spoke for hours at a time—and in an intellectually elevated manner. If you doubt me, look up the texts online. Their audiences were not cultural elites or students of political philosophy, but rather ordinary Illinois farmers, who stood in the mud, gave their full attention, and strained to hear the orators’ unamplified voices. Could you even begin to imagine an American crowd today willing to stand for a comparable length of time and listen to complex presentations on public policy—and for that matter, could you imagine any American politician willing or able to speak at Lincolnian length and depth? Once again, the questions answer themselves.
In fairness, there wasn’t much else to do. People also gathered in the public square to watch executions, after all.
Boredom does have its benefits, of course…. in creativity, in observation of the world around you, in development of attention span. I wonder, though. Bishop Barron finds hope in the popularity of long-form podcasts, and as a constant listener to those, I agree, although I have to admit that I rarely listen to them in one sitting, and I can’t say that’s less desirable from an intellectual point of view. Taking long-form works in small doses like that allows ongoing consideration.
Perhaps short-attention-span media will grow in the same way. Dickens wrote very long works in relatively short installments. I’ve noticed this in blog posts, and such. The ideas develop overtime, and it can be much more participatory for the reader. That may prove more conducive to big ideas… if we can overcome that other problem of refusing to engage with each other in open discussion that sometimes goes awry.
Featured image by Chris Yang on Unsplash.
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