A (Very) Short History of Abortion in the United States

In light of the expected overturning of Roe v Wade, I wanted to look at the not-so-long history of abortion as a political issue in the United States today.

First, let's burst a bubble.

The Founding Fathers whom conservatives idolize so much did not outlaw abortion.

What many people might find surprising about that statement is the underlying fact that abortion even existed in the 1700s. So let's take a quick detour. Not only were abortions performed in Colonial times; we have evidence of artificially-induced abortions going back thousands of years in civilizations all over the world, using a variety of methods, from surgical to herbal. And I emphasize 'artificially-induced' because as any ob/gyn can tell you, Nature herself performs far more abortions than humans do themselves: 30-40% of all pregnancies are terminated by the human body itself in spontaneous abortion or miscarriage.

Now back to those old White guys in powdered wigs...

Before a shift in doctrine beginning in the 19th century, and accelerating in the 20th, the mainstream Protestant belief in force at the time our country was founded was that life didn’t begin until “quickening,” at a minimum 15 weeks, often about 20. Until then, abortions were allowed, and it was definitely not considered “murder.” It was procedure, albeit admittedly a risky one, given the poor hygiene and medical practices of the day. So if you pictured our Founding Fathers solemnly devoting themselves to a policy of respecting the sanctity of unborn life, think again. Their belief, shared by the Catholic Church (on which more below), was that a fetus had no soul until it quickened roughly halfway through the pregnancy.

Only much later did conservative American politicians realize that abortion was an opportunity to create a divide among people and to control women, their two favorite pastimes in my experience. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church held substantially the same belief as Protestants. Abortion was a non-issue all the way up until 1869, when Pius IX did a 180 and turned the supposedly eternal and consistent Church into enemies of something they’d previously had no problem with whatsoever. Prior to that, the doctrine was in lockstep with Protestant belief, albeit with a different lexicon: in the language of the Vatican, life began upon “ensoulment,” which corresponds to that same notion of “quickening” Protestants had always embraced, i.e. around 15-20 weeks into the pregnancy. So where do Christians in America stand today? Now, of course, it is a very political issue, and if you observe the actual numbers, it is one rife with hypocrisy. It works like this: If you’re a Christian woman (or, say, a Republican Christian politician with a pregnant mistress) and you need access to a safe abortion, you get it. Indeed, 70% of all abortions are performed on women who identify as Christians, and 23% of those are evangelicals. That means that every year, there are approximately 100,000 evangelicals terminating their pregnancies, and about another 340,000 non-evangelical Christian women terminating theirs. But if you’re a Christian and someone else needs an abortion, that is apparently very wrong and that person is going to hell, and they must be prevented from accessing safe abortion care. This has serious consequences for women's health. Completely putting aside considerations of risks tied to such issues as giving birth too young or while suffering certain medical conditions, childbirth is at the best of times a risky thing, resulting in the death of the mother 14 times more often than a safe, legal abortion performed by a doctor does.

The point of this essay is not to change anyone’s mind about abortion. I am not up to that task.

But regardless of your feelings about the issue, let’s all deal in verifiable facts.

Being “pro-life” isn’t about your Bible and it’s not about your religion’s long-standing beliefs about abortion or the nature of life's beginning, because the Bible never even mentions this medical procedure, and your religion had no problem with it until a relatively short time ago, going back less than 8% of its history. Abortion is now solely about politics, and it’s about controlling women in service to a very specific political agenda in that sphere. Religion is simply a convenient excuse, as it so often is when evil people need to justify evil actions that deprive others of their fundamental rights and human dignity.

Billionaires in Space: What It Says About Our Tax System

As I write this in July of 2021, Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos has just returned from his 11-minute joy ride to the edge of space, just nine days after fellow billionaire Richard Branson did the same on his VSS Unity. (The stickler in me wants to point out that by one common definition of "space," Bezos is still the first and only billionaire to accomplish this feat, since Branson only went up about 80 kilometers, while Bezos hit 100.)

I have always been a space enthusiast. Attending the Space Symposium in 2012 was one of the biggest thrills of my life. And full disclosure: if I had $20-$30 million lying around the house, I wouldn't hesitate to spend it on a trip to space. I would go in a heartbeat.

So I don't begrudge these men their trips, and I salute the courage it took to complete them.

And, generally speaking, I am a free-market capitalist, and believe that your money is yours to do with as you please. 

But therein lies the rub: much of these billionaires' money isn't rightfully theirs. 

And that's how billionaires in space got me thinking about our tax system. 

In my system of ethics, your money is yours to do with as you please only after you have paid your debt to the society that enabled your wealth to begin with, and by debt I mean taxes, the "price...for civilized society," as Oliver Wendell Holmes called them. 

In the United States, the average worker pays an effective net average tax rate of 22.4% according to the OECD.  According to Forbes, meanwhile, Bezos pays a net effective rate of 0.98%. So Bezos has not paid his fair share to a country that has given him everything. To paraphrase Barack Obama, "Jeff didn't build this:" his company employs workers educated on our dime in our public schools; his trucks deliver goods that drive on roads built and maintained by the American taxpayer; he is protected by law enforcement funded by those drivers' taxes; his business enjoys a stable regulatory structure and transparent business environment thanks to the laws and protections of a system to which he contributes such a small share of his wealth.

This is normally where people on the Left start chanting slogans like “Tax the Rich!” and as a liberal, I agree with the sentiment. 

But the underlying problem here is not merely one of tax rates. The problem is the entire structure of our tax system and what we choose to tax: in short, we're taxing all the wrong things, because we’re stuck in a 19th-century mindset while struggling to compete in a globalized, 21st-century economy in which wealth can be shifted and hidden and protected from taxes all over the world.

I don't want to turn this into a history lesson on taxation, but the bottom line is this: we have inherited a federal tax system that primarily focuses on two things, labor and capital. Classic 19th-century thinking: labor v. the means of production. And this isn't just theoretical: because of this mindset, we make artificial distinctions between different types of income (income from labor v income from investments, etc.), and these distinctions lead to bad policy. 

And the challenges of our century are not those our ancestors faced two centuries ago: climate change, increasing inequality*, accelerating automation and artificial intelligence, the 'gig economy,' and a highly globalized marketplace with relatively few restrictions on the movement of capital, mean that we need to rethink how we tax and redistribute wealth.

Uh oh! There's the R word our conservative friends hate so much: redistribution. But it is far from being anti-capitalist; in fact, redistribution is essential to functional capitalism. When too much wealth gets too concentrated into too few hands, bubbles burst and catastrophe ensues for all. The last two peaks of such hoarded wealth coincided with disastrous economic collapses. 

Think of wealth as the lubricant that keeps the machinery of the economy moving: if it pools in one place and fails to reach others, sooner or later the whole machine grinds to a halt.

So how do we keep the gears moving in this new world? By focusing not on labor and capital but on negative externalities, and by choosing taxation that cannot be evaded by shifting and hiding resources all over the the globe.

For those who slept through their econ 101 class in college, a reminder: externalities are essentially the unintended byproducts of production, be they good or bad, that do not directly benefit or hurt the producer of the good or service associated with its production. 

Negative externalities are very common in the modern economy: the car manufacturer isn't in the business of producing or selling pollution, but that is a negative externality associated with their product, and it is one all of society must pay for. Yet in the production of that smog machine, we tax the labor of the worker who built it and the profit of the manufacturer. (Well, we try to tax the profit of the manufacturer, but we often fail. See above: capital is easily moved and concealed these days.)

What if we took an entirely different approach? What if we told the worker that her hours of labor are all tax-free and the manufacturer that they are free to keep every penny of profit, assuming all parties cover the cost of the negative impact their work and product have on the rest of us? And what if we did so in a way that the manufacturer could not avoid taxation, because the taxes were collected in the process of creating the end product?

And instead of taxing the return on capital for the shareholders, what if we instead imposed a simple yearly wealth tax on the net worth in excess of $4,400,000 per member per household (a threshold automatically increased by the lagging yearly CPI, to avoid having to revisit the cut-off periodically as inflation devalues that amount)?

Two simple forms of taxes for everyone: 1) pay a portion of your accumulated wealth to help fund the society that made your wealth possible and 2) pay the cost to cover your harm to society.

The first is straightforward enough, but current proposals do not go far enough to prevent the pooling and stagnation of wealth. If we exempted the first $4,400,000 per household member of net worth for all households, an annual wealth tax of 14.84% would raise about $4 trillion dollars per annum from the top 1% of households. More importantly, it would prevent so much wealth from sitting idly on the sidelines and pump it back through the economy. It would not raise a dime from anyone under the top 1% of households, and more than enough wealth would be exempted per household to prevent it from even knocking a household out of the top 1%. 

The second comes down to just two areas of negative externalities associated with consumption: we stop taxing all labor (work is supposed to be GOOD, right, so why punish it?) and focus on consumption's principal negative externalities:

1) Pollution and water waste. $3 trillion a year could be raised from simply making all of us pay for the pollution we create and the water we use. Two trillion dollars is the estimated current cost of climate change to our economy, and we are also depleting our supply of freshwater sources at an unsustainable rate. 

So let's just agree that if you pollute and use water (both of which we all do), you pay. And keep it simple and impossible to evade: 1) $4.83 a gallon tax on all diesel, ethanol, kerosene, and gasoline production; 2) a $0.468 federal tax on every kilowatt hour of electricity produced by non-renewable means (set to automatically increase to account for declining use of non-renewables); and 3) a federal tax of $.00825 on every gallon of water used (by both residents and industry).

Now, if you know anything about power and water consumption in the US, you might be losing your mind right now. And if you don't, let me help set your hair on fire: an average household would spend over a thousand dollars a month on energy, fuel, and water, not including the indirect cost of higher prices of goods and services tied to higher fuel prices, about a threefold increase. But households can control their energy and water use and thus their tax rate, and keep in mind that in this world, there is no income tax at all, because we aren't taxing labor anymore. 

Still, poorer households would struggle, so I would propose a straightforward energy/fuel/water subsidy averaging** $462 per member per household per month to the lowest quintile of earners, $303 for the second-lowest, $145 for the middle quintile, and $70 for the top two quintiles (all amounts adjusted by the CPI every year automatically). This means a net (after subsidy) of about $1.28 trillion would be collected. And since recipients could spend this money on anything, they could keep more of it by conserving energy, so there is a strong incentive for everyone to think about energy consumption.

2) Preventable healthcare costs. Most of the money we spend on healthcare is a reaction to illnesses caused by the use of substances that destroy our health. If you cut through all the noise and outliers, these substances are primarily saturated fat, sugar, tobacco, and alcohol. I am not suggesting we outlaw any of these. I believe in freedom of choice. But I am suggesting that we should all pay our fair share if we contribute to higher healthcare costs by using them. 

Isn't taking responsibility for our actions supposed to be a trait all Americans embrace? Every cigarette consumed in the US generates an annual cost of about $1.20 in healthcare costs. Should non-smokers pay for all that? Every dollar spent on alcohol generates about $0.704 in healthcare and other costs associated with drinking. Should non-drinkers pay for all that? Obesity and diabetes cost us trillions. Should healthy eaters pay for all that? A federal tax of $12.00 per pack of cigarettes produced, a $38.38 federal tax per equivalent of one liter of pure alcohol production, and a $8.28 federal tax on every kilogram of ingredients classified as 'added sugars' or 'saturated fat' by the FDA would shift more of the burden to those who choose to use these products. 

It's not about controlling people's choices, but about making sure we all accept responsibility for our choices and compensate society for the damage our choices inflict. 

In short, it's all about personal responsibility.

After using the same formula above to create a food subsidy to offset higher grocery costs ($462 per member per household per month for the lowest quintile of households by earnings, $303 for the second, $145 for the middle, and $70 for the top two quintiles), these taxes would net approximately $560 billion a year for the federal government. And households would determine their own tax rates through their eating and other consumption habits.  

Annual wealth tax, energy/water tax, and consumption tax. With just three sources of federal tax collection (not including usage, application, leasing and other fees the government charges us for particular services), we have eliminated all income tax and completely ended the game of cat and mouse we constantly play to get corporations to pay their fair share.

And just think about how much more transparent and simple this system is: no deductions, no tax havens, no tax credits, no shady accounting. The vast majority of corporations would not even have to file taxes! Why? Because in order to capture the tax revenue in a way that neither corporations nor consumers can avoid taxes, we would choose only a few strategic points in the supply chain to collect it. 

For all the pollution taxes, we would charge those only to the energy companies who produce the fuels and electricity supply. For any fuels/energy imported, we would collect the tax from the US importers or distributors. They in turn just pass along the costs through the rest of the supply chain. The Treasury has no need to track it from that point because the tax has been paid and we don't want to double tax. And water taxes are simple, since the tax would be applied to all metered water usage in the US, making the tax easy to calculate and collect.

For the food, alcohol, and tobacco taxes, the taxes would be collected from the distributors. Why not the manufacturers? Simple: all these products can and often are manufactured overseas, and one of the major goals of this system is to stop having to chase money all over the globe. But regardless of where, say, a bottle of wine is produced, it needs a distributor in the US to get it to our consumers. So we collect the tax there. Manufacturers would only be charged in cases where they themselves handle distribution for their products.      

Suddenly, offshoring corporations and setting up foreign tax shelters and all the other dodges lose all value overnight. Why? Because we aren't taxing profits anymore.

And did you notice something else that happened in those numbers above? We completely eliminated all welfare and food assistance programs in our federal budget in favor of direct transfers and a modified system of universal basic income. No more food stamps, no more unemployment benefits (since your monthly payment isn't tied to your employment anyway), no other transfers of any kind. Which makes the whole system easier and more transparent. And since it involves payments to all households, no one can say they're being left out.*** The only other government-run income program would be Social Security, which would remain in place as-is (and become sustainable by removing the contribution cap).  

What else got simplified? Regulation. For example, wasting energy is no longer economically practical at these levels, so who needs greenhouse gas regulations? All manufacturers will be tripping over themselves in a desperate dash to become as energy-efficient as humanly possible in order to remain competitive. We wouldn't need tax credits for solar panels or rules about emissions for cars: a marketplace operating in this tax environment would immediately create all the incentives we need to solve these problems.

We have also created enough federal revenue for offering Medicare to all uninsured Americans and universal TK/K education and two years of free community college or trade school for all Americans. By adding in that elimination of the Social Security contribution cut-off, we also guarantee our retirement system's solvency for decades to come.   

Of course, all these NETs (Negative Externality Taxes) would immediately start changing patterns of consumption**** throughout the economy, so the rates would have to be revisited frequently until the system stabilized. 

Better yet, we could implement a system of DTRs (Dynamic Tax Rates) that automatically reset tax rates every year based on new trailing year data. For example, we could set a target of four trillion 2021 dollars, automatically adjusted by the CPI every year, as our goal to collect from top 1% of households by net worth, automatically adjusting exemptions and thresholds to meet that goal. And pollution, water, and consumption taxes should be automatically recalculated each year based on the updated cost estimates of the associated negative externalities, total usage, revenue goals, etc., as long as transparent formulas are used to arrive at the numbers.

Imagine a world in which, 30 years from now, we have to explain to college students what 'tax shelters' and 'tax loopholes' and 'tax deductions' were, because they are no longer used to avoid responsibility.

Imagine a world where corporations are powerless to hide their wealth from the society that makes them rich, and they actually thank us for that, because we've simplified their tax structure to such a degree that most do not even file returns, and they save billions of dollars in accounting and administrative costs.

This is the tax structure for the 21st century. It's time to create an economy that works for every American and that prepares us for the challenges of a new reality. So let's stop punishing people for working and stop playing an endless game of global cat-and-mouse with billionaires and create a simple, effective tax system that moves us forward into a brighter and more sustainable future.

---

Footnotes:

*Obviously the 19th and 20th centuries were also marked by extreme inequality, but the trend was towards greater wealth being accumulated by the working classes, even in the face of extraordinary personal fortunes starting in the Gilded Age. That trend ended two generations ago and the working classes have stagnated ever since.

**I say "averaging" in these cases for each quintile, because you want a smooth progression at a much more granular level than quintiles to avoid steep cut-offs that can create disincentives to work. We don't want scenarios where, for example, someone turns down a job because it would mean a steep and sudden reduction in her monthly subsidy. And to ensure no one lives in abject poverty, the lowest 1% of income earners would get a total combined monthly subsidy of $1073.33 per month (in 2021 dollars).

***This is a lesson I learned when studying Scandinavian politics as an undergrad: by giving at least some level of almost all benefits to all classes, regardless of their need, you co-opt class resentment and division. 

****Not to mention wealth management. We would need to clearly define what constitutes taxable net worth. As one of the few countries on Earth to tax its citizens based on their citizenship versus place of residency, inevitably more citizens will choose to renounce their citizenship if they are sufficiently adamant about evading taxation. We cannot stop that and shouldn't try. Let them leave....and deny them entry visas/green cards.

An Open Letter to the Biden North Carolina Campaign

Dear Joe Biden Campaign in North Carolina,

I’m a CEO and a business owner and a Democrat. I live in a swing district (southeast Charlotte) in a swing state (North Carolina) in an historic and unpredictable election. Here’s my experience with your local campaign:

My area is blanketed in Trump/Tillis (senate)/Bishop (representative) signs along roadways, conveying a visual impression that my area is in the bag for Trump. (And as you know, now more than ever, perception drives and even creates reality.) 

My Biden-supporting neighbors are disheartened and demoralized. They’re complaining they can’t even get stuff like bumper stickers. It took me TWO MONTHS to get mine when I donated. So I finally bought a ton off Amazon and have been driving all over south Charlotte delivering them to people upon request in response to my NextDoor posting.

To address the signs issue, I contacted the local campaign office and volunteered to put up Biden signs all over town along heavy traffic routes. Their response? “Sir, if you’d like to buy yard signs, they’re $25 each. Thanks for calling.” <click>

So I tried to find the area or even state campaign website. Apparently you haven’t heard of SEO and/or don’t have such sites because the closest result I found was a 2018 landing page for a speaking engagement Biden was doing in Raleigh. Ugh.

I finally found a FB group and had to request to join. (Request pending as of this writing.)

I can find no Twitter account for Biden NC. (I have 35,000 Twitter followers, so I had hoped to use my account as a megaphone for them, but you can’t amplify a non-existent voice, right?)

As an expert in both project management and digital marketing, I’m absolutely appalled at this experience and what it says about your campaign’s ability to execute a ground operation and to compete on digital platforms, and am starting to feel the local campaign is doing everything it can to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

I’m not doing anything else - financially or operationally - to assist a local campaign operation that makes it this hard to help it and that seems determined to fail in this must-win election.

Reach out if you want help. I’ll be happy to pitch in.

Respectfully,

Christopher Hughey

No, White Men are Not Bigger Victims of Police Shootings....

The other day on Twitter, someone said that Black Lives Matter is a baseless movement because, and I quote, “White males are killed at over 2x the rate of Asian males.” The logic (if such a word can be used here) seemed to be that unless Black men are killed at the highest rate of any demographic group you can name, there is no reason to be concerned about police brutality and racism. It was such an appallingly stupid response that I didn’t even know where to begin to point out all its flaws, especially in a short-form medium like Twitter. So I invited the fellow to stop and give some more considered thought to the matter and see if he could possibly come up with a few things wrong on his own before I did it for him. I gave him a day. Since that has now passed and he still cannot seem to grasp the huge holes in his reasoning, it would appear that I am obligated to fulfill my commitment to do it for him.

Writing about racism is not new to me. Indeed, it was the subject of my most recent entry on this very blog. So I was already pretty familiar with the relevant statistics. But let’s look at the ones referenced directly by this tweet: if you look at all Asian, Black, and White men killed by the police for the last six whole calendar years (2013-2019), we see that 2% were Asian men, 36% per Black men, 61% were White men (doesn’t add to 100% due to rounding). So yes, based on share of population, White males were killed at roughly twice the rate of Asian men per capita (while Black men were killed at the rate of almost three times their share of the population). So, case closed, right? We should be starting a White Lives Matter movement to protest how much more often White men are killed compared to Asian men!

Not so fast.

This reminds me of those frustrating times when you try to discuss history with people who get all their knowledge of the past from Breitbart-inspired memes and factoids, such as that old chestnut about how Nazis were really liberals because Nazi is short for “National SOCIALISM!” (Take THAT libtards!) I could write an entire book about the stupidity and ignorance behind such statements, and it’s exactly the same sort of “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” factor at work here. The point is that facts without context are meaningless. And just as pointing out that the Nazis used the word socialism in their name is useless because it had nothing to do with their espousal of any liberal beliefs (quite the opposite), so, too, is it a red herring to point out that White men are killed more often than Asian men.

So let’s deep-dive this.

First things first: the statistics cited by the tweeter are for all police shootings. But the Black Lives Matter movement’s primary concern is not simply police shootings, but police shootings of defenseless Black people. So the relevant statistic is this: of those shootings, in how many cases were the victims definitely unarmed? In that same time period, 711 undisputedly unarmed Asian, Black, and White men were killed by police. In those cases, the statistics become even more skewed: Black men were shot dead while unarmed at a rate almost 3.5 times their share of the population, while both Asian and White men are grossly underrepresented in this category (by 3.3x and 1.3x, respectively). (And that is just taking into account cases where there is no disputing the armed v unarmed status of the victims.) That means Black men are killed by the police while unarmed at a rate almost 12 times higher than Asian men and almost 5 times the rate for White men.

But what of the claim that we shouldn’t be worried about Black men because White men are targeted more than Asians? I am tempted to dismiss such nonsense out of hand, since the underlying victim complex is laughable. An argument that amounts to “Well, sure that group is targeted far more than any other group, but my group is slightly worse than a third, very small group, so shut up!” is not really worth a lot of mental effort. But let’s keep diving just for the sake of completeness. Let’s ask the question: why are Asian men shot so much less often than Whites? The answer is actually pretty simple: they are shot less often than Whites because police target them less often that Whites.

The meaningful question, therefore, is, “Are Asian men shot while unarmed at a significantly different rate after controlling for how often they are actually targeted to begin with?” Let’s look at the data. In 2014, the last year the DOJ has posted to their website, Asian/Pacific Islanders targeted for arrest were just under 1.6% of all cases involving Asians, Blacks, and Whites, and unarmed Asian men killed by the police made up just over 1.6% of all such cases involving Asian, Black, and White men. So in fact, there is very little difference there. In fact, if anything, Asian men are slightly over-represented, not under, compared with Whites. Meanwhile, of those three groups, Whites made up about 70% of all arrests (slightly lower than population share) but only 54% of all police shootings of unarmed victims, making them considerably under-represented among victims. Blacks were about 28% of the arrests, but 44% of all unarmed police shooting victims, making them grossly over-represented, by a factor of over 1.5.

So let’s cancel the pity party for White men. They are not, in fact, targeted disproportionately compared to Asian men. As we saw in the recent armed protests against quarantine and social distancing rules, simply being White in American works as an amazing shield against being targeted by the police. Had a large group of angry, armed-to-the-teeth Black men stormed a government building, the headline would have been “Large Group of Black Men Shot Dead by Riot Police.” To deny that simple fact of American life is to indulge in the most egregious White privilege of all: the comforting privilege of self-delusion and false victimhood.

The Liberal Case Against Reparations and For an Equality New Deal

I was talking to a fellow liberal the other day about politics and social policy and she brought up reparations. Interestingly, she brought it up in such a way that she just assumed I supported the idea. To her, it was a central part of liberal dogma, so it didn't occur to her that I would disagree. But, as with the other areas where I depart from traditional liberal views, this is actually an area where I disagree with liberal dogma precisely because of my liberal values, not despite them.

Before I lay out that argument, though, let's revisit the definition. According to Wikipedia, the generally accepted definition of reparations is "a political justice concept that argues that [monetary] reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves from Sub-Saharan Africa who were trafficked to and enslaved in the Americas as a consequence of the Atlantic slave trade."

There are immediate concerns here that pop straight out of the definition itself. For example, who exactly are the descendants of slaves? There are people alive in the United States today living and identifying as whites who are in fact descended from such slaves. They have never suffered personally from racism, nor do they face institutional or systemic barriers to success based on their ancestors' experience. Are we going to pay them? And if not, are we admitting that this is thus not at all about past slavery but about current racism?

If we are saying it is in fact more about racism than slavery, then do we simply pay reparations to all black people? Would Barack Obama, whose father was from Kenya and whose ancestors therefore never knew slavery in the Americas, be entitled to such a payment? The part of his family that reaches back to the 19th century in America is white. They were more likely to be slaveholders than slaves.

So already things are getting very muddied, and we haven't even broached the subject of what exactly reparations would accomplish. What exactly are we hoping to achieve here? Let's say we somehow magically solve the problem of identifying the whom: no one seems to be giving much thought to the consequences of making such payments. As a white male born and raised in the South, I can tell you that the plan would backfire horribly, because I know racists and I know how they think. But more importantly, the payments simply would not solve anything. 

Let's walk through the scenario.

It's January 1st, 2025. After five years of exhaustive vetting and screening, the government has finalized its list of recipients for reparations. Today, the first payments hit their accounts. Let's say we settled on $10,000 a year for 10 years. 

You're a young, African-American male named Marcus Washington (more on that soon) who has just graduated college the prior spring. It's no small miracle you accomplished that feat, given that in America, many more African-Americans per capita live in poorer areas than whites do, and we fund our schools almost entirely through the local tax base, leaving you set up to fail from the day you walked into kindergarten. You were also at a disadvantage in college because of the resource challenges you faced in high school.

Reparations will do absolutely nothing to change these facts or address this injustice.

But despite those challenges, you did it! So now you've been sending out job applications since May, but, so far, you haven't had much luck, which means this reparations money comes in handy. You're not unemployed; however, as a college graduate with a degree in engineering working 30 hours a week at 7-11, you are definitely underemployed. You've done everything right. You've even paid for a professional resume review. Yet the interviews just don't seem to materialize. A significant contributing factor is something you can't control: that name, Marcus Washington. As someone with a name the general population associates with African Americans, you're less likely to even get called in to interview. And even if you had a "whiter"-sounding name, the fact is that unemployment rates for you as an African-American are higher than they are for almost everyone else.

Reparations will do absolutely nothing to change these facts or address this injustice.

But finally, after plugging away at it for another couple of months, you get it: a coveted job in your field. Congratulations! But if you're like the average black man in America, you're earning only about 70% as much as your white peers. What's worse is that this gap has in fact widened in the past generation: your father earned on average 80% of what his white colleagues earned. We're actually going backwards on the racial wage gap. And no, you cannot dismiss this gap based on differences in levels of education: blacks earn less than whites even when adjusting for education. In other words, a black man with a PhD is on average doing worse than a white man with the same degree, so we are indeed comparing apples to apples here.

Reparations will do absolutely nothing to change these facts or address this injustice.

Still, despite earning less than your white colleagues, you're doing OK. Engineers do pretty well financially, after all, even at a 30% pay cut. So it's time to get a place of your own! No more living with Mom and Dad. So let's go apartment-hunting. Despite the fact that your community has no shortage of nice apartments, you seem to be hearing that places have no availability when you email the leasing offices. Well, maybe they do, maybe they don't, but studies show that if they see a "black-sounding" name or hear a voice on the phone they believe is that of an African-American, they are more likely to refuse to rent to you.

Reparations will do absolutely nothing to change these facts or address this injustice.

Eventually, of course, you do find an apartment. So now you have your job and your apartment. Time to relax! Let's go to the movies. As you exit your vehicle, you walk past a white family getting into their car. Is it your imagination, or do they seem to quicken their pace and lock the door as you approach? Maybe, maybe not. Hard to judge an individual situation like that. But what you do know is that many whites associate young black men with violence and danger. And racists like to trot out statistics that show that black men do indeed get convicted for more crimes than white people do. But there are two problems here: one is "get convicted for" as opposed to "commit:" blacks are more likely to be convicted or forced to plea out when charged with crimes compared to whites. The other issue is why we are looking at race as the determining factor here to begin with: it's not that blacks commit more crime than whites, it's that poorer and less educated populations commit more crimes than do wealthier and more educated ones. And for reasons that should be painfully obvious even if this is the very first time you have read about racism in America, blacks face far more hurdles to getting an education and becoming economically upward-mobile compared to whites. But of course, people don't wear t-shirts saying, "Lock Your Doors, Folks, I Grew Up Poor and Was Deprived of a Good Education by a Racist System." So people look for other visual cues to identify perceived dangers, and skin color is a very easy one to flag in a person's brain.

Reparations will do absolutely nothing to change these facts or address this injustice.

But you brush aside your irritation at this white family's caution. It's winter. Maybe they were just in a hurry to get out of the cold? So you go into the cinema and watch your movie.  And as you watch, you notice something. The more violent characters and the ones depicted as being more brutish and of lower socioeconomic standing all have names Americans associate with people of color. You're trying not to see racism everywhere, but it's disturbingly obvious. The more sympathetic characters have names that sound "whiter." Why is that, you wonder? Probably because the American scriptwriter is as subject to the same hidden prejudices and racist assumptions that so many white Americans suffer from. This isn't paranoia: it's a proven fact: white America in general - and yes, that includes even those who swear they don't have a racist bone in their bodies and actually believe that about themselves - tends to automatically conjure up images of aggression and failure simply at the mention of names that they associate with people of color, as Dr. Colin Holbrook found to his dismay in the cited study.

Reparations will do absolutely nothing to change these facts or address this injustice.

You exit the theater feeling a bit shaken. You head back to your car: your pride and enjoy: a brand-new BMW 3-series you treated yourself to as a reward for graduating and landing that great job. (Little do you know, by the way, that you paid more for that car than your white peers would have and your car insurance rates are also higher.) As you approach your vehicle, you stand in front of your shiny new Beamer and look for your keys. That's when a bright light flashes in your face and a tense-sounding voice tells you to back away from the vehicle. As a young African-American male in America, you know the drill by now. You're in an affluent neighborhood, approaching a nice car, and you're guilty of that most unforgivable of crimes, EWB: Existing While Black. You know that your life is in grave danger right now. Move your hands too quickly and you could be shot dead by an officer who most likely would not even be indicted, never mind convicted, for your execution. You acknowledge the officer verbally and very, very slowly raise your hands. He checks your identity and you prove ownership of the car. No violence this time. But what about the humiliation? The idea that you are not really even a full citizen in your own country? That every single day you have to prove both who you are and who you are not in ways that no white person will ever be asked to do in this nation? That you cannot even feel safe around the very people whose sole job is to keep our citizenry safe?

Reparations will do absolutely nothing to change these facts or address this injustice. They will do nothing to facilitate change of any kind, save one: reparations will be the new "America can't be racist, because look, we voted for a black president" meme to white America, except that the effect will be permanent and more damaging this time. And this is where I come back to my perspective as a white man raised in the South around overt racists. I know how their brains work. The day that first reparations check is mailed, racist white America will declare all racism permanently atoned for and eradicated. Think of it much the way you might think of a lawsuit settlement for a wrongful injury that debilitates a man physically and mentally for life. You write the check and you walk away. You go and live your life, feeling you've paid your debt. But what has the money changed if the victim is no longer able to function or enjoy a decent quality of life? Your guilt may be assuaged, but can the victim now magically care for himself? Walk? Think clearly? Clean up after himself? Money changes none of that. It just makes you feel less guilty.

And that in a nutshell is why I oppose reparations: it's just too damn easy. It's a way for white America to just cut a check and walk away from its responsibilities to change all the horrible injustices and barriers to success and well-being cited above (and so many more that I would literally need a book to document them all).

I can't end an objection to reparations that centers on racism without offering some alternative. It is not enough to just say "no" to reparations. We must say YES to something else. And for me, that something else is to use that same amount of money to fund an Equality New Deal, not just for African-Americans, but for all minorities and women, all the groups that to this day continue to see their success blocked by centuries-old barriers. Among the features of this Equality New Deal must be:

1) The ending of reliance on local tax bases to fund schools. Few things reduce upward economic mobility as severely as our unequal schools. If you are poor, you likely live in a place with a smaller tax base. If you have a smaller tax base, your schools get less money and fewer resources. As a result, you get a lower-quality education, and the cycle is perpetuated on down the generations. I am not suggesting anything so radical as the federalization of the American school system. Such an approach would never get off the ground and if it did, it would likely get shot down in the courts. What I am suggesting instead is that we target the poorest 33% of American school systems (as measured not by current expenditure, since that is a choice, but by per capita property tax collection in their districts, adjusted for local cost of living) and simply give them annual grants that equate to the funds needed to provide them the same resources as enjoyed by the average American school system. No strings attached: allow them to retain full, local control. The only caveat would be that progress must be demonstrated each year, and that systems that fail to improve would have to submit to temporary oversight boards in order to keep receiving the funds.

Furthermore, for the next generation, as we wait for the effects of the above measures to permeate throughout the affected populations over the coming 20-30 years, we must offer federally-funded "catch-up" programs for qualifying students. These programs would be one to two semesters of pre-college preparatory training to help students who wish to attend college, but who, because of the poor quality of the education they received, are not fully ready, despite having high school diplomas. To qualify, a student would take a standardized exam in reading, writing, mathematics, civics/history, and basic science. Based on the scores in those four areas, they would then be offered remedial courses to correct any deficiencies and ensure that they are truly ready to attend college. This will help close the performance gap we so often see in our colleges and universities when comparing the outcomes for students from poorer v wealthier school districts. It is hoped that after 30 years, this program could be scaled back or even ended if we achieve more uniform quality of education.

2) For all companies over 100 employees, make job applications race-, ethnicity-, and gender-blind. Initial applications would be submitted on line (as most are these days anyway) and assigned a number specific to to the candidate. Only after a candidate has moved to the interview round would names be required. Salary histories must be banned entirely, since they perpetuate unequal pay (given than employers often make offers based on past salaries versus what is necessarily appropriate for the job, and that perpetuates the cycle of certain groups under-performing in pay). Salaries should be based strictly on job title, education/relevant credentials, and numbers of years of related work experience.

3) Ban the box. African Americans (and other minorities) are disproportionately convicted of crimes and are forced into plea bargains at greater rates than are whites. When these involve felonies, that person is then tagged for life, and finding a job becomes exponentially more difficult. Every time an applicant has to tick that "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" box, the likelihood of being considered for a job plummets. We must embrace the idea that once you have paid your debt to society, it is fully paid and you should not be punished for life. There are of course cases where we must make exceptions: certain sex crimes, for example, must always be considered if an applicant is applying for a job in which s/he is responsible for children or involved with other vulnerable populations, and certain types of jobs must be exempted from the rule in order to ask about crimes related to fraud and financial malfeasance. But in cases of exceptions, the scope to ask about convictions must be narrow and focused on what is strictly relevant to that particular job.

4) We must take the profits out of prisons and refocus efforts on reducing recidivism by turning our prisons into drivers of opportunity, not despair. We currently have a system in which there is a strong financial incentive to incarcerate people, and African-Americans and other minorities are disproportionately impacted by this injustice. Furthermore, once incarcerated, such institutions not only lack any incentive to engage in rehabilitation, but are in fact strongly incentivized to do the opposite: after all, for them, recidivism is just a fancy word for "repeat business and higher profits," which is unconscionable and is one of the greatest moral outrages of our day. We must therefore completely end private prisons and refocus our system on turning out ex-convicts who are ready to start a new life, not go out and commit more crimes because they often lack the skills and education to do anything else. All prisons must offer job training, GED programs, and online college courses. This is not to "reward criminals," as critics often suggest, but to keep society safe, to keep all of us secure. A person who walks out of a 10-year prison sentence with a degree and a job skill is far less likely to end up committing more crime, after all. So who do you want getting paroled? A hardened criminal who's been brutalized for the past decade, who has no hope and no future, whose only means of survival is more crime? Or an educated, employable person with prospects and a path to success? Which one of those people is more likely to murder your child in an attempted robbery tonight?

5) Law enforcement must be reformed to stop targeting people of color and must be held responsible when it does. This requires three steps at the federal level: 1) Requirement that all police officers in the United States wear body cameras when on duty to keep them accountable. Failure to comply must result in dismissal upon the third violation, and immediate dismissal if it is deemed that the failure was both intentional and related to a violent encounter. 2) All police offers must take and pass a federally-run course on racial injustice awareness. The point of such a course is not to make everyone politically correct. The point is to train officers in the facts surrounding human bias and how it impacts their jobs as law-enforcement officers, and what they can do to mitigate it. Because the ugly truth is that we all have prejudice inside us. Only by becoming consciously aware of it and learning how to manage it can we overcome its negative impacts on others. 3) All instances of police shootings of civilians must be investigated as potential federal crimes. Leaving this to local systems of justice that are often at the very root of the problem is no longer acceptable. 4) All major police departments must pursue aggressive diversity hiring policies to ensure that they look like their communities. If a department serves a city that is 40% black, 40% Hispanic, 20% white, and 51% women, then that, as closely as possible, is what their police force should look like. 5) We must institute training programs that begin to change the culture of deadly force that is so pervasive in many law enforcement communities. While such violence affects everyone, it affects minorities disproportionately. Our 'shoot first, ask questions later' attitude must change. And it can. Police forces around the world have shown us this. We have even seen successful experiments here in the US. It can be done, with the appropriate amount of dedication, training, federal funding, oversight, and regulation.

6) We must increase both enforcement of and penalties associated with all anti-discrimination laws and regulations (which in turn must be strengthened) in the areas of housing, employment, education, and consumer affairs (including lending and insurance), and work to make sure that in every case where discrimination is proven, high-profile consequences are seen to follow. This isn't just about punishing wrongdoers, but showing society at large that we do not accept such behavior. We must not only punish it with fines, but stigmatize it and drag it into the light to demonstrate our collective commitment to change. We must also go further in our efforts to regulate economic activity that either negatively targets minorities or preys on the poor (a population where minorities are over-represented). Examples are predatory payday loans and high-interest/high-cost rent-to-own programs that increase the cost of so many goods in poorer communities. We must also address inequality in our credit, credit rating, and insurance sectors, as these, too, unfairly target many minority groups, resulting in higher costs for many financial products.

These six steps would represent a generation-long Equality New Deal. It likely represents no less economic cost than a reparations program, but will pay far greater dividends. Of course, no amount of legislation, regulation, or policy-making will ever eliminate the scourge of prejudice. Sadly, I believe it will always be with us in some form or another, always finding new ways to express its ugliness even as society moves past others. But such a New Deal can mitigate and, hopefully, eventually end the effects such prejudice has on a population that has been oppressed since the dawn of Western occupation of this continent. Along the way, the economic strength it will unleash will help our entire society and become a driver of growth and opportunity for all Americans.

On Being Tall

I often write about pretty serious stuff on this much-neglected blog, but today I am going to tackle a decidedly unimportant topic: being tall.

I was chatting with a somewhat vertically-challenged friend of mine some time ago when she commented, suddenly and seemingly apropos of nothing, "It must be nice being tall." It took me a moment to understand what had prompted her comment. We were walking through a grocery store and I was getting something off a shelf, a shelf I realized she would not have been able to reach herself. I was doing something she would have needed to ask help with...probably from a passing Friendly Neighborhood Tall Person like me.

It got me to thinking about being tall. It's not something I usually think about, any more than I would expend much mental energy thinking about, say, having dimples, hazel eyes, or Greek toes. It's just a feature of my physical existence. But her question sent me down the rabbit hole. Is being tall very different? Is it better? Are there disadvantages?

I started by asking that same friend how she saw the differences between navigating life at 4'11" (150 cm) versus at 6'2" (188 cm). Aside from the obvious things, such as managing shelves, I was surprised to hear her say that she envied how people just seem to make room for tall people versus short people. "When we're out in public together, you just stroll through the world without a care, and everyone is practically diving out of your way. I have to dart and dive my way through crowded places, and nobody moves for me." I am sure she was exaggerating a bit here to make her point, but it made me laugh out loud, this image of myself obliviously coddiwompling my way through the world as people desperately leap out of my path.

It may surprise shorter people to hear this, but I do not usually even feel aware of my height. After all, while 6'2" is tall, it is hardly freakishly tall. I don't really feel tall. I feel like a pretty average human being, physically speaking. Until, that is, I experience The Moment. The Moment is what I call that occasional experience when I am out in public and I see someone from across a room who does indeed look freakishly tall to me, only to find as I approach him or her that we are in fact the same size, or s/he is even shorter than I am. It's rather unsettling, because I suddenly feel extremely self-conscious about my height. I think to myself, "Is that what I look like to everyone? This hulking, lumbering bipedal tower of awkwardness? A Lurch?!" Fortunately, being taller than 99% of my fellow humans means I do not have to experience The Moment all that often.

One of the most challenging parts about being tall is, happily, something that goes away after childhood; but it does make that period of life difficult at times, as I am witnessing second-hand now with my own young children, both of whom are quite tall for their ages (98th percentile in height for their gender). One might think it is nothing but wonderful to be taller than all one's peers, but it comes with problems. Believe it or not, these problems are created almost entirely by the adults in their lives. The fact is that no matter how many times you remind people they're dealing with a four-year-old boy, they simply can't help judging the child by the standards their eyes are telling them they should be applying. When your four-year-old looks like a six- or seven-year-old, people treat him as such, and expect his behavior to reflect that perceived age. It's doubly problematic if you have a child who is also quite articulate and intelligent for his age. When my middle son was that age, for example, we constantly had issues with teachers and caregivers applying an impossible standard to him, because he was the size of a first-grader and had the vocabulary of a fifth-grader. But despite what their eyes and ears were telling them, they were still dealing with a normal four-year-old boy, one who was no more mature than his peers (and acted accordingly). It got to the point where we would write notes to, say, camp counselors, just to remind them. One summer, we were fortunate to get a camp counselor who was extremely sympathetic: she was over six feet (183 cm) herself, and immediately related to our concerns based on her own experiences growing up.

I remember practical issues from my own childhood, too. One summer, when I was 12, my local amusement park ran a promotion where they were giving kids a discount based on their size, up to age 12. The taller you were, the bigger the discount. (As an aside, can you imagine such a promotion these days?! I am a little horrified they thought this was a good idea. But this was 1983. A different time.) My mother sent me with my birth certificate, because she knew they were never going to believe I was 12. She was right. Even with the birth certificate in hand, I sensed they thought I was getting away with something.

As an adult, I continue to reap unfair benefits from being tall, benefits that far outweigh discounted roller coaster rides. Sadly, society prefers its men, and especially its leaders, to be taller, and judges them accordingly. It's an absurd notion, given what really counts in modern civilization, but of course that is just another example of how our physical and psychological evolution has yet to catch up with even the idea of civilization. During the 99.9% of our evolution, being taller/bigger had clear advantages, especially for leaders. Being bigger meant being more imposing, being more able to impose one's will physically, and being perceived as stronger and more prepared to face the challenges of a hunter-gatherer existence.

But being taller does nothing to make me a better leader, or even person, in a post-modern service economy fueled by mechanized agriculture. If anything, it is objectively disadvantageous. I require more fuel but in exchange for not providing more. I take up more space in a world in which space is often at a premium. And in an economy in which longevity is no longer a problem for the tribe (as it allows workers to contribute for longer, as opposed to being a burden to the tribe when people outlived their ability to hunt or gather), I am at a disadvantage, too: shorter people live longer.

Despite all this, though, I am afforded completely undeserved advantages. Taller men earn more. We have an easier time dating. We are more likely to win elections. People even listen to us more. I have witnessed this last phenomenon many times in my career as a businessman. People just seem to want to defer to me more than they do to shorter people, which is just patently absurd. Height gives me no greater insights or wisdom or intelligence or experience. And yet I very often myself leading meetings because apparently everyone just seems to subconsciously decide that Tall Chief Ooga Booga Man must be in charge of this particular hunting party. It often makes me wonder where I would be in life had I stopped growing at, say, 5'7" (170 cm). Had I, as millions of shorter men are forced to do, had to rely strictly on my actual talents and intelligence, would I have achieved as much? I like to think so. After all, there are millions of highly successful short people. But I will never know for sure how big a contribution an accident of genetics has made in my life.

So, all in all, do I like being tall? It's a mixed bag. There are days I wish I could just move unobtrusively through the world. And as a lover of travel, I have often found my height a limiting factor. (I could write a whole blog entry on adventures I have missed out on due to my size, and it's no treat walking through the streets of, say, Beijing, towering over almost every single person by a whole head, banging my noggin into low-hanging signs.) And as someone who dates, I occasionally wonder, "Would this woman be out with me right now if I were short?"

That last point makes me crazy. As someone who has used dating apps, I can tell you that there are far too many women out there who put too much emphasis on a man's height. It's incredible to me how many women simply reject shorter men out of hand. Many put it right there in their profiles: "No one under 6 feet (183 cm), please!" is a very common refrain. I try not to judge them too harshly. After all, physical attraction just is what it is. You can't control your attraction to taller people, any more than another person can stop himself from being attracted to, say, brunettes. The hormones want what the hormones want, I suppose. Still, it's a bit heart-breaking to think about all the wonderful relationships that will never happen just because that charming, intelligent, witty fellow happened to be a few inches too short according to some random cut-off.

Overall, being tall sometimes makes me feel a bit like a lottery-winner or heir at a gathering of self-made millionaires: I have what they have, but came to it more through luck than merit. But that doesn't make me less grateful. The occasional sore forehead aside, it's not a terrible thing to be.

An Unemotional, Amoral Argument Against Capital Punishment

This past week, the state of Texas executed white supremacist John William King for the 1998 hate-crime of murdering an African American truck driver named James Byrd, Jr. While I can't say I personally mourned Mr. King's passing, I do object to the fact that we as a society murdered him in an act of primitive revenge unworthy of a so-called civilized society. And I was disturbed to see how many so-called liberals were cheering his execution. To me, the idea of a pro-capital punishment liberal makes as much sense as a pro-KKK civil rights activist.

But of course, as soon as one begins a debate about capital punishment, emotions immediately flare and the 'arguments' for and against rely very little on facts and logic and very much on appeals to our baser instincts. Inevitably, religion gets brought into the argument. As usual, either side of this moral argument (as with every other moral argument) can equally rely on their favorite holy book to support their position. Just as I could make equally strong arguments for or against rape, incest, slavery, murder, infanticide, and even polytheism using the Bible, for example, I could build a strong case both for and against capital punishment using that maddeningly inconsistent and morally ambiguous text. (Yet another reason I am not a believer.)

So let's just leave morality, emotion, and religion completely out of the debate, shall we? If none of these can give us clarity and each can be used equally easily by both sides, it seems illogical to rely on any of them to settle the argument. Let's just proceed with facts and evidence, and in the process dispel some myths and misunderstandings about capital punishment, to wit:

1) Its value as a deterrent to others. The argument here is based in human psychology. It's very simple: I don't want to die, so I will be less likely to commit a capital offense knowing that doing so could cost me my life. This argument shows a very poor understanding of both 1) the evidence we've accumulated about the deterrent value of capital punishment and 2) basic human psychology. To the first point, the most obvious flaw in the argument that it is a deterrent is the fact that the United States executes more people than all but five other countries (China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia) and yet has the highest violent crime rate of any highly developed industrial country (by quite a wide margin). So if capital punishment is doing such a bang-up job of scaring potential murderers, why don't we have the sixth-lowest violent crime rate after those other countries who execute so many people? (Note that none of those other five countries is exactly a peaceful paradise either.)

But, you may understandably object, is it fair to compare us to other countries, given our other unique qualities, especially the ubiquity of firearms in the U.S.? OK, so let's compare internally. Do the states that execute the most have lower violent crime rates than non-death penalty states? Surely all those potential murderers are too scared to do the deed in bloodthirsty Texas, for example? Well, apparently they aren't. Texas has a homicide rate that is three times higher than Maine, which does not have the death penalty. And the most violent state in America, Louisiana, ranks 13th in total number of executions since 1976.

I believe this failure of capital punishment to act as a deterrent is strongly related to the second weakness of the deterrent argument itself: basic human psychology. First of all, even if a murderer is acting on a premeditated  plan, few criminals count on being caught, so I do not believe there is much mulling over the consequences going on here. In other words, the idea of being executed only impedes one's plot to the extent that one plans on getting caught in the first place.

But secondly and most importantly, most murders are not committed while the perpetrator is in a state of mind to consider the consequences in any rational way.

Let’s say I am an abusive husband intent on permanently silencing my wife and dispatching my children while I’m at it, I am hardly in the frame of mind to stop and carefully consider what this means for my life expectancy. That's the last thing on my mind until after the deed is done, at which point it is too late for the death penalty to weigh on my reasoning. 

But of course, once I have committed these murders, suddenly the death penalty is all I can think about. And what exactly am I now thinking? The police are closing in. A cop has just pulled me over. I have my gun at the ready. I strongly suspect he's pulled me over because the jig is up and there is an APB out on me and my vehicle. So if self-preservation is my goal, what is the logical thing for me to do in a state with the death penalty? Simple: murder the cop, because I know it's them or me. And I should also eliminate anyone else who stands in my way. 

And this is not a hypothetical at all: how many times have you read stories of murderers going on sprees after they kill their first victim(s), only to die in a hail of bullets in a shootout that often takes law-enforcement officers' and other innocent lives? But what's my smart play if I am in a non-death penalty state and the cops are closing in? Simple: try my best to get away, but, if all else fails, turn myself in peacefully, because that guarantees my survival (while violently resisting risks getting me shot).

The third and final issue with the appeal to the psychology of the human survival instinct is that it is by no means a given that a rational person will view life imprisonment as preferable to the death penalty. While some people might desperately seek to avoid it (and thus become even more violent once one crime has been committed, as above), others may find the prospect of execution as preferable to life imprisonment and thus not be deterred at all. Indeed, for people of this mentality, capital punishment may seem like an easy way out compared to the alternatives of either prison or suicide.

So in summary, the deterrent argument is supported neither by the actual evidence we've accumulated nor by what we know about human psychology and basic human nature. 

2) Its cost. Perhaps I should have led with this, given that it is most frequently the first non-emotional argument I hear. It is simple in its chilling calculus: "Why should I, an American taxpayer, have to pay to keep a murdering scumbag alive, fed, clothed, and housed for life?" It's extremely easy to dispense with this argument: lawfully killing people in a country with a strong commitment to rule of law is a very expensive business, and is far, far more expensive than simply imprisoning them for life. This is so well documented and such an easy calculation that I won't bother going into further detail when others have already done all the research.

Of course, the obvious counter to this argument is that we should simply streamline this process and kill our victims more quickly and efficiently. And all we have to do to achieve this goal of emulating countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and China, is to completely abandon our centuries-long commitment to the rule of law and our tradition of juris prudence. In short, all we have to do shake off is our democracy and everything our country stands for. Easy peasy.

3) Its equality of application. Another argument typically thrown out to support the death penalty is that it serves to reinforce our collective moral beliefs by teaching citizens that actions have consequences. However, objectively evaluated, it teaches no such lesson at all. Quite the contrary: even a casual observer of our penal system would quickly conclude that the true lesson to be drawn is that in our society, at best, some actions have some consequences for some people some of the time. This is not a matter of debate. Simply look at how the death penalty is applied. According to the ACLU, people of color, for example, make up 43% of those executed since 1976, far out of proportion either to their population or to their crimes. And your skin color as an accused criminal isn't the only area in which the system is unfair: your skin color as a victim matters, too. People accused of killing white people are far more likely to be executed than people accused of killing people of other races. So if capital punishment is meant to be an expression of our values, what does it say about our values when it so clearly favors whites? I blush at the thought of answering that damning question.

4) Its reversibility. This takes no time to cover. There are two easily proven statements here: 1) the United States has often executed innocent people and 2) to my knowledge, death remains an irreversible condition. If both of these statements are accepted as true, and in the absence of a methodology to reverse the first fact going forward (quite impossible), then the death penalty cannot be called a workable solution for a society that claims to value justice. If we could magically ensure that all those convicted  of capital crimes are indeed guilty, we would "only" have the three issues above to contend with. But given that University of Michigan professor Samuel Gross estimates that up to 4% of current death row inmates may in fact be innocent of their crimes, I would say we're in no pending danger of having to fall back solely on those other factors.

So in conclusion, the death penalty is not a deterrent, is not cost-effective, is not evenly applied in a way that reflects our aspirational values, and is irreversible and thus cannot be fairly applied, given our imperfect system of determining true guilt. Therefore, the death penalty is, logically, an unacceptable option for any civilized and rational society. 

Quod Erat Demonstrandum. 

BESTism, or how we can save capitalism from hollow consumerism

Before you dive into this piece, you might want to go back and read the original blog piece in which I introduced BESTism. It will save us both some time! 

You back already? That was a suspiciously fast read, but OK!

So as you know from having read that original piece (which you totally read, right?!), my goal is to suggest an alternative to our current system of consumerism in an effort to save capitalism from itself, because my feeling is that if we don't, the ever-widening inequality of our current system and the sense of purposelessness it brings will eventually cause it to collapse, and that would be catastrophic for our society.

Let's start by attacking and destroying a false premise, to wit: that capitalism and consumerism are essentially synonymous and the latter is inevitable in the former. You have only to examine other capitalist countries to see that in fact there is nothing inevitable about it if the people and their leaders choose to avoid it. We have not taken than route here in the US, so our economy is 70% based on consumer demand. And look where it has left us. Most people feel our country is on the wrong track. Millions of Americans feel hopeless and without a sense of purpose, driving addictions and suicide rates to ever-higher peaks. Opioid addiction is skyrocketing. Suicide rates have risen an astonishing 30% in just 17 years. I even think our obesity epidemic is partially due to this sense of hopelessness: we are becoming a nation of nervous, emotional eaters.

I believe these trends are tied to how hollow we collectively feel our pursuits are. There is no unifying sense of purpose. There is no moonshot. No war on poverty. No grand goals and projects to make us feel that we are all contributing to something bigger than we are as individuals. To change that, I propose we refocus our economic activity, not through command-and-control communism, but by a modified form of safety-net capitalism in which we direct more resources towards Building,  Exploration, Science, and Teaching.

Let me go ahead and rip a Band-Aid off for you right now: this absolutely means higher taxes for everyone. But before you balk too loudly at that, I ask you to consider not the COST of your current tax burden but your RETURN on it. Are you happy as a citizen? Are you economically secure and confident that you could stay that way if you encountered any setback? Are you healthy and assured of coverage if that changes? Are you confident in the infrastructure you rely on every day? If you answered no to those questions, or even most of them, then you should consider that perhaps you're getting a poor return on your investment with your taxes.

Before we move on to the BEST, let's start with two dependencies: health and basic economic security. If you don't have those two things, nothing else matters and you can't focus on the 'big picture,' since you are forced to spend all your energy on merely surviving  (which is key to why Republicans' success relies on keeping people poor and unhealthy). And right now, too many Americans don't have those basics. So to me, any successful system in the 21st century is going to have to have two features: universal healthcare and basic guaranteed income. I believe the simplest route to providing those is to expand Medicare to everyone, allow the importation of cheaper drugs from places like Canada, allow Medicare to use its leverage to negotiate better drug prices, and to send every US citizen and legal resident aged 18 and older $1040.83 a month (in 2019 dollars, adjusted by the trailing year CPI minus 0.5% every year, and fully adjusted for inflation every five years). Parents would also receive $368.33 per month per minor dependent. To keep the system simple, to avoid fraud, and to avoid rural voters becoming resentful of urban ones, I do not think we should make regional/urban COL adjustments. If local municipalities want to make up the difference, they can introduce local schemes to do that, funded by local taxes. For example, New York City may wish to introduce a local tax to supplement their UBI (universal basic income), given that one can't even rent a room in that city at that rate. Another advantage of UBI is that it eliminates our complex web of welfare programs. Combined with universal Medicare, we could eliminate dozens of programs, from Medicaid to SNAP to CHIP. And while yes, taxes would be quite high, keep in mind that your income is now supplemented and you never have to worry about healthcare premiums (except for Medicare supplements) and everyone is getting the UBI, so you're getting back a lot of that money. One question many people will want to ask is, does EVERYONE get the UBI? And the answer is yes. The goal is to avoid class resentment. We all get the exact same check every month, and everyone pays in. (And speaking of paying in, this system assumes we lift the cap on Social Security contributions. Retirement should be simplified, too, with Social Security payments simply becoming a threefold increase in your UBI check starting on your 68th birthday.)

A supplementary way to ensure everyone has the basics is to make work worthwhile. That means a minimum wage of $15 per hour for everyone aged 18 and over, to be phased in over four years,  and then to increase to $20 within four years of that. After that, we should permanently solve the minimum wage issue by pegging it to the CPI. It should increase automatically by the CPI minus 0.5% points every year, and have a catch-up with CPI every five years. (This is to avoid sparking inflation.) 

The above measures would be paid for by the appropriate combination of payroll, capital gains, and dividend taxes, and a yearly 4% wealth tax on the value of everyone's non-retirement stock/bond/mutual fund portfolios and bank accounts, with the first $10,000,000 exempt (with that threshold to increase automatically by the CPI every year).

So, now we have healthy citizens who don't live in constant fear of losing their jobs. All but the very least materialistic people are still incentivized to work, because very few people are happy living on such a paltry sum (though at least you won't starve if you're one of those people). Now we can focus on actually accomplishing something as a society, by dedicating more to doing our B.E.S.T.

1) Building. Think about all the ancient civilizations you studied in school. Rome. Egypt. Greece. Tell me the first thing that comes to mind. If you're like most people, I suspect your brain immediately conjured up images of amphitheaters, coliseums, pyramids, and temples. In short, the legacy you associate with these civilizations is most tangibly expressed in the buildings they left behind for us. What will future civilizations think of us based on our own works? Not much, quite frankly. They might be impressed with a few isolated works of architectural genius and a stadium or two. But mostly their archaeologists will just scratch their heads and say, "well, they certainly liked their strip malls and Starbucks, didn't they?"  

Another challenge for our country is our crumbling infrastructure. Thanks to the GOP's "Starve the Beast" philosophy, our investment in infrastructure has been entirely too low for decades now. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives us a D+. And I find that to be generous. Collapsing bridges, crumbling roads, outdated airports, poor public transportation: our country is quite literally falling apart. 

My recommendation is to drive both cultural and non-consumerist economic growth by making massive investments in building and infrastructure, both to leave a better legacy and to increase our current quality of life.

To the first goal, I would love to see every state and all five territories submit plans for a state monument to commemorate each locale's people, history, and culture, to be financed by the states and territories but with each dollar matched 1:1 in federal funds. Each state's legislature would approve the final project and its location, with Congress having a say in approving the matching funds in each individual case. Think St. Louis Arch, Statue of Liberty, etc.

To the second goal, we need to invest, invest, invest. To that end, I would suggest a ten-year, 2.8% tax on every transaction in the United States, including B2B ones and all capital gains and dividends (on top of current taxes). After 10 years, it would drop to a permanent 1.8%. In addition, we would need a permanent $1-a gallon-gas tax, to be increased by the trailing CPI + 0.1% every year. This is only fair: American drivers are not currently paying for the roads and bridges they drive on. Furthermore, this tax helps cover the negative economic, health, and environmental externalities associated with driving, and also offers a strong incentive for people to economize on gas consumption and seek alternative forms of transportation. 

This massive investment in infrastructure wouldn't just be about getting an A+ on our roads, bridges, railroads, ports, and airports. It would also be about expanding our transportation options, with investments in regional high-speed rail and, if the technology pans out, hyperloops.

2) Exploration. Few things gave Americans as much pride as our accomplishments during the Space Race of the 1950s to early 1970s. Putting a human being on the moon was an achievement for the  ages and to this day, half a century later, it stands as an enduring reminder of our former greatness. We can return to that greatness by kicking off a new, ambitious Space Race. But we should not just look to space: our oceans represent another Final Frontier, with so much of them still unexplored. Such exploration could teach us volumes about biodiversity, ocean sustainability, even basic biology and zoology, since we would doubtless discover new species. So aside from investing far more in NASA and getting them on their way to a quick return to the moon and a Mars landing by 2032, we should also establish an Oceanographic Exploration Agency. Finally, while it may sound like outlandish science fiction, we should also invest more in the greatest exploration of all: SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), or at any rate for basic extraterrestrial life. Research in this area in the past decade has shown that, with the right investment, our generation may be the last to think itself alone in the universe. I am not suggesting we have much hope of actually communicating with any alien civilizations. Unfortunately, the physics and the sheer size of the distances between star systems make this is highly unlikely if not impossible. But we are living in an age where we may yet be able to prove the existence of such life, even if it turns out to be simple in nature.

These initiatives would be funded by a 0.2% tax on all transactions in the United States, including B2B ones and including capital gains and dividends (on top of current taxes).

3) Science. Basic science drives technology. Technology drives change. Change drives culture and gives society a sense of direction. I think we need to invest far more in basic scientific research, with the benefits shared with all. I believe this can be done within our existing framework of universities, colleges, and government agencies, so to me this is just a simple question of investing more money through university/college grants and agency budget increases for agencies like DARPA, NIH, NIMH, CDC, etc. We also need to spur innovation in clean energy research, and nothing motivates innovation like necessity. I therefore propose that we phase in a simple mandate that wouldn't even require Congressional action: over the next ten years, every business with more than 50 employees that does government contracting work must be able to demonstrate it is getting 10% of its energy from renewables, increasing 10 percentage points each year. This will drive demand from energy consumers, and that will in turn drive innovation and change among energy providers. Another simple step requiring only executive action would be to declare that effective immediately, the US government will only purchase electric or hybrid vehicles for all its civilian vehicle fleet acquisitions. 

4) Teaching. Education isn't just a goal for its own sake. A better-educated society is a happier, more productive society, not to mention a society better equipped to drive the three goals above. The first thing we have to do is stop failing our poor communities. Since so much of school funding is driven by the local tax base, poor communities are stuck in a vicious cycle: too poor to educate their kids, who then grow up to get lower-paying jobs, which keeps the tax base low, which keeps school funding low. To solve this, I think we need to look at the poorest 40% of school systems in the United States and invest enough in them from federal funds to bring their spending levels up to the national median each year. To keep local government from slashing funds in order to qualify for more funds, we would measure this by the per-capita income of the residents of the school system, not by the amount of funds the locality chooses to dedicate, and funding levels would be judged by where they stood before the program was announced. These funds would be no-strings-attached. Let the local school systems decide how to educate their kids. The only caveat would be that we would need to set maximums for capital investments and minimums for teach salaries, because American school systems have an unfortunate tendency to over-invest in the former and under-invest in the latter compared to other countries.

Higher education. I hate the idea of government price controls. I truly do. Command-and-control economies always fail. But our colleges and universities are drunk with power. They know kids need those diplomas, so they keep jacking up tuition prices, often to spend on the most unnecessary of "investments." As a result, the ratio of tuition to average income gets more unsustainable every year. I propose a 30-year moratorium on real-dollar increases in tuition, with both private and public universities limited to tuition increases equal to the CPI minus one percentage point each year or wage growth minus one percentage point each year, whichever is lower. This needs to last a generation to undo the obscene increases of the past generation, increases that have seen the end of the age when people could work their way through school on their own and the dawn of the age of massive student debt. Tight regulations and oversight would be required in order to avoid the creation and exploitation of loopholes. (Think "Oh, we didn't increase TUITION. We increased USER FEES. See, that's totally different!") I also propose that all college students receive $2000 per month while enrolled in school, with assistance ending for any student whose overall GPA falls below 1.8 on the 4-point system. This assistance would last two years for an Associate's degrees, four years for a Bachelor's degree (five in special cases, e.g. some engineering undergraduate degrees that take five years). Students would be on their own for graduate work. Finally,  we need to reverse the law that made it illegal to include student debt in bankruptcies. There is no rational reason this debt should be excluded. It was a sell-out to the student loan industry, nothing more. 

These goals would be funded by a 5% tax on every transaction in the United States, including B2B ones, and on all capital gains and dividends.

In all cases where we raise money from taxes on transactions, this would include on sales to or from the government. It may sound silly for the government to pay itself taxes, but it's important we capture revenue from the entire economy, so the taxes would be transferred from the purchasing agency to the IRS.

One final word on revenue. To achieve our goals, we are going to have to address the elephant in the room: our out-of-control and irrational military spending. I am not a dove. In a world in which authoritarian regimes like Russia and China are on the rise, we cannot unilaterally disarm or even slightly weaken our military readiness. But our budget long ago stopped being about military readiness and efficiency. It is about delivering pork to Congressional districts and to the defense contractors who pay the lobbyists and contribute to campaign funds. Consider the fields of tanks that have never been and will never be used (and the military knew that when they bought them); the planes that were obsolete before they went into production; the ships that don't even work. These are all billions and billions of wasted dollars that do absolutely nothing to strengthen America. Quite the contrary: they weaken us. Meanwhile, our soldiers are paid disgracefully and often do not have the things they need. And don't even get me started on how shabbily we treat our veterans.

So what needs to happen? We need to establish a non-partisan, Congressionally-appointed commission to do a two-year, program-by-program audit and evaluation of the entire military budget for all branches. We need to evaluate not just programs but bases, both domestic and foreign, as well as all inventory, all with only one question in mind: does this help us face the threats of the 21st century, including the three main threats (terrorism, cyber warfare, and the potential for wars with China and Russia)? If it doesn't, it needs to go. Also, we need to pay our soldiers better, especially the enlisted ones. I think it is very realistic to cut military spending by 15%, increase pay for enlisted by 10% and commissioned officers by 5%, and actually INCREASE our military readiness and strength in the process. This needs to be a standing committee once its work is done, because we need to rely on them, not partisan pork-seekers in Congress, to evaluate what is best for our defense. Congress could agree to pass only legislation that includes commission-approved programs and budgets. This takes the political pressure off of them, as they can say to constituents that they are bound to obey the recommendations of the program. This could easily save us $120 billion a year.

So there it is. That is my model for how capitalism can save itself. No big takeovers of industry by the government. Minimal interference in the capitalist free markets. Just an investment in making us a healthy, happy, educated society with a sense of common purpose and a dedication to leave a livable planet and a vibrant legacy for our children and our descendants.