Fox News and San Francisco

Fox News has been putting a lot of emphasis lately on painting San Francisco as a city run by incompetent liberals - I presume hoping some of the paint will spill onto Nancy Pelosi.  

Yes San Francisco has major problems.  No, the "liberal" government of San Francisco is not the reason.

San Francisco is being buffeted by forces that no other city in the America faces.  San Francisco sits in a spectacularly beautiful setting with a marvelous climate.  In the winter the low temperature never gets much below 40 degrees, in the summer the daytime high temperature is almost always in the 60 to 80 degree range.

Since it's founding it has been a place lots of people want to live and are loath to leave.  But the city sits on 7 square miles of steep hills, landfill and sand dunes, surrounded by water on three sides, and riddled with earthquake faults.  Locations within the city where it is safe to build multi-story buildings are limited.  The building limitations have limited the the population of the city to under 800,000 people.

The tech industry that started in Silicon Valley loves San Francisco and much of it has moved north to San Francisco in the last two decades, pushing San Francisco to the point of being one of the most expensive cities in the world.  Tens of thousands of the residents of San Francisco can no longer afford to live a normal life in a place where they grew up or chose to move to.  Some left, many have tried to stay, disgruntled and feeling abused.

To understand Prop 47, which your article cites as the source of San Francisco's petty crime problem, some back story is necessary.  From the late 1970's through the early 2000's Republicans, with financial support from the prison guards union, controlled California.  Their main policy goals were cutting taxes and getting tough on crime.  As a result California's prison population exploded and thousands of young people ended up with criminal records limiting their future options.  The tax cuts usually cut social programs that helped socially disadvantaged and mentally ill folks, contributing to the explosion in homelessness.

In the mid-2000's California voters tossed out the last vestige of Republican control of the state, but the problems from 30 years of Republican exclusive focus on tax cuts and being tough on crime still haunt the state.  The imbalance is demonstrated by a simple statistic.  

In 2010, about 14 employees of the State of California were paid more than $500,000.  One was an educator, the president of the University of California.  The rest were all employees of the Department of Corrections.

The single event that was emblematic of the problem that sparked Prop 47 was a 25 year prison sentence handed down for stealing a piece of pizza.  

Many prosecutors always opposed Prop 47 but a 2018 University of California study that compared the changes in crime rates in California under Prop 47 with other states found trends in California matched trends in other states.

But even though Prop 47 has worked at reducing prison populations and been good for most of California, in San Francisco the combination of a large, disgruntled population displaced by the tech industry living in the midst of vast wealth has created a culture of disrespect for the law.  But Prop 47 is a state law, San Francisco does not have the power to change it and must comply with it.

Private police?  High taxes or not, how many new police officers can the city afford when to lure new officers it has to offer a salary to live in or near a city where a one bedroom apartment costs around $4000 a month, and the median home price is $1.6 million?

It is going to take many years to continue to unwind all the narrow minded policies pushed by Republicans for 30 years, and the problems with wealth taking over San Francisco.  As a lifelong resident of California, who spent many years registered and voting as a Republican, I know California's problems have more to do with the Republican anti-tax and tough on crime views that Fox News thrives on than with anything the left has ever done.

Conflict in the Middle East - Who Pays for it?

In the last couple days President Trump has authorized a drone strike killing a prominent Iranian general.  Iran followed up with missile attacks on Iraqi bases where US forces were stationed.

Although his administrations vague intelligence justifications remind me off the justifications for the Bush administration invading Iraq to destroy what turned out to be a non-existent nuclear weapons program I don't feel like at this point I am in a position to second guess the President on whether his first strike was wise or foolish as policy.

What I do fault President Trump for is escalating our presence in the area after adding a trillion dollars a year to our national debt with his 2017 tax cuts. 

For 40 years Republican administrations have relentlessly cut taxes on the wealthy, effectively pushing more and more of the tax burden onto the middle class.  At the same time they have continuously increased "Defense" spending.  As a result our National debt has grown from 30% of GDP to around 110% or GDP.  As a country we owe more than we produce in a year.  After 40 years of tax cuts the richest of the rich have so many tax perks and deductions they often end up paying almost no tax.

Much of the increase in "Defense" spending over the last 40 years has been to support ongoing interventions in the Middle East.  This is a curious definition of "Defense".  The notion of a middle eastern country invading the United States is laughable.  Even the terrorist attacks spawned out of the middle east were in response to our constant meddling in their neighborhood.  

We regular folks may benefit a little from our constant Middle East meddling to keep the oil flowing.  But most of the benefit flows to rich folks who have business interests in the Middle East.  Their investment interests have driven most of our interventions in the Middle East.  

I can live with our government protecting rich folks investments half a world away.  What I find indefensible is government paying vastly more for "defense" to protect rich folks Middle East investments, while the rich folks pay ever tinier fractions of their wealth as taxes, even as the National debt our kids and grand kids are going to be left with piles up.  Particularly since it is mostly the not so rich that serve in the military, and die for our country in Middle East conflicts half a world way. 

Middle East Policy - Costs & Benefits

The Middle East has been one of our primary foreign policy problems since the end of the Vietnam War.  We have had troops in a combat environment in Afghanistan for almost two decades, twice invaded Iraq, and actively engaged in hostilities in Syria, Libya, and a number of smaller states. 

The Middle East is a tangled mass of ethnic, religious and tribal groups with grudges that go back hundreds of years.   It is a region full of dictatorships or fake democracies controlled by the powerful who fix elections to provide cover for their right to line their pockets and deny basic human rights.  It is literally half a world away from our borders and most of the region represents the antithesis of the ideals we strive for in our Democracy. 

We scarcely lift a finger for conflicts or even genocide in Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe.  But the middle east is abundantly endowed with oil, which we want for our cars, factories and industry.  Our economic wealth has been rooted in cheap oil since back when European colonial empires dominated the region.  But in the first part of the last century lots of new countries emerged as colonial empires collapsed.  The new states wanted to control and profit from the oil within their boundaries.  

70 years ago we orchestrated the overthrow of a socialist leaning democratically elected government in Iran to install a dictator friendly to our business goals.  We have since used our military muscle regularly to protect our access to oil even if that meant supporting dictators or overthrowing elected governments.  No surprise we are not popular.

Benefits of our interventionist policies:  

We may still pay a little bit less to drive our cars, heat our homes and fuel our factories but much of the rest of the world now produces oil.  Natural gas has become abundant and cheap.  Solar and wind power are moving closer to becoming cheaper than extracting and burning oil.  King oil is shaky on its throne.

Burdens of our interventionist policies:

1.  We have lost thousands of young men in Middle East wars, and hundreds of thousands of veterans are physically, emotionally or mentally disabled by their service. 

2.  Our meddling has made us the target for Middle East based terrorists who have killed thousands of innocent civilians.  Trying to protect ourselves we have made it tediously complex to get on a plane to fly anywhere.  

3.  Within our country some of us have lashed out at other innocent neighbors with middle eastern backgrounds.

4.  Probably about 10 Trillion dollars of our National debt can be tied directly to our military operations in the Middle East over the last 30 years.  

5.  Our meddling has exacerbated religious and cultural tensions in the Middle East far more often than it has improved them.

6.  We have undermined the development of democracy in the region.  Our ham-handed efforts to impose our will allows corrupt regimes to blame us for their countries problems as they line the pockets of the rich, deny basic rights to the poor, and set ethnic and religious groups against one another.  

7.  As we have seen with Syria, our lack of commitment to countries without significant oil reserves allows fake Democracies to build a power base for themselves in the region by supporting the worst kind of dictators, who accept the support because they see our activities in the region as a looming threat.

8.  Our polices have enabled the denial of global warming by using cheap oil as a crutch to avoid committing to develop cleaner ways of meeting our power and heating needs. 

The Hippocratic oath seems to me instructive about an intelligent and realistic foreign policy - first do no harm.  Our interventionist policies in the Middle East seem to be consistently doing more harm than good.  Maybe it is time we just bought oil on the open market and let the Middle East solve their own problems.

New York and Calfiornia Losing People - Impending Disaster?

When I was young I had a big extended family in the Los Angeles area.  In the 1980's, as my parents generation moved into retirement virtually all of that generation took advantage of the high price of housing in Los Angeles by selling their house and moving to less expensive places to live (Washington and Oregon).  There they could buy a comfortable house and use the extra money from the sale of their LA house to fund a more comfortable retirement.

I suspect a big part of the reason for the recent spate of hyperbolic headlines about New York and California losing people that have appeared in publications as varied as Fox news and the New York Times has nothing to do with partisan politics, and a lot to do with the fact my generation is now selling their houses in expensive New York and California markets to move to cheaper states for retirement.

California and New York are perhaps the two most economically dynamic states.  As a result they are expensive places to live.  They create lots of wealthy people who drive up prices, so regular folks, when no longer tied to a job and trying to live out their lives on what they have, leave for cheaper living situations.

It's a cyclical phenomena, not a sign of impending doom.

A News Years Fantasy - Vacations For Trump and Bernie Supporters

What if we could give all Trump supporters a months vacation in Turkey or Russia to see what life is like in those sort of Democracies run by leaders President Trump seems to feel a kinship with?

What if we could give all Bernie supporters a months vacation in Sweden as it existed a couple decades ago, so they could see what life was like before Sweden moved away from more traditional Socialism?

What Does Being Partisan Mean?

The current political environment is overflowing with accusations of partisanship.  It started me thinking about what constitutes partisanship. 

It seems to me partisanship is one end of a spectrum of behaviors involving disagreements on how, as a country, we coexist in a manner that produces peace and prosperity.

As a democracy there are always going to be different viewpoints.  People have different backgrounds, different life experiences, and, I believe, we are all endowed with slightly different brain organization that influences our perceptions.  But to be a functioning and peaceful democracy we need ground rules on acceptable disagreement.  

History suggest ground rules like civility, and formal procedures for resolving disagreements are useful, but ultimately the crucial value in making good public policy is respect for facts.

Disagreements over matters where there is no underlying factual context to provide guidance is not partisan - it's just having a different view of a problem.  Those disagreement behaviors rely on civility and process to smooth over rough spots. 

The other end of the spectrum of disagreement is where people use personal attacks, platitudes, misdirection or simply lies to distract from inconvenient facts that impact the view of the world the speaker wants to promote.  To me that is the purest form of partisanship. Unfortunately that form of partisanship can thrive within the framework of civility and process if tolerated by voters.
  
It is difficult for any politician to resist partisanship.  Their ambitions and livelihood rely on promoting a particular point of view.  They invest years, and build a career, based on a particular point of view.  If facts turn out to show their view is misguided, it is a rare politician that can acknowledge that they were promoting ideas that did not in fact turn out to be as beneficial as they represented.

Voters without political ambition may support a particular point of view for years and develop an emotional attachment to that view.  But our careers and livelihood are not generally impacted if we change our view in light of facts.  However, if we indulge emotionally comforting views by disregarding facts we as a country will make bad public policy choices.  Those choices will affect our long term interests, and the interests of our children and grandchildren.  

We as voters need to understand the difference between speaking different world views, and partisanship.  If we are not clear on the differences between holding different political views and partisanship, and cannot distinguish between disagreement and partisanship, politicians certainly won't.

Measuring our 21st Century Economy with 19th Century Metrics

Politicians and Journalists all seem to accept the assertion we have a "good" economy because unemployment is hovering around historic lows, about 4%.

In the 19th Century the unemployment rate really meant something.  People who didn't have jobs had no income, so when folks lost their jobs there was an immediate impact on consumption based demand, which would in turn cause other folks to lose their jobs.  In the 1800's and early 1900's our economy flipped back and forth between spurts of rapid growth and depressions on average about every seven years.  The unemployment rate was the perfect canary in a coal mine to warn of an impending recession or depression.

But we don't live in the 19th Century, we live in the 21st Century.  In the early 20th century labor organizations started to make progress on job security for workers, so employers couldn't start firing people the second they saw an advantage to their bottom line.  Then mandatory unemployment insurance spread across country.  During the Great Depression In the 1930's Social Security and further worker protections were enacted. 

Those changes ended Depressions.  After generations of our ancestors experiencing depressions every seven years or so we have not had a depression since the Great Depression in the 1930's.

The events that caused the Great Recession, if they had happened in the 19th century, would have sparked a horrendous depression.  But they didn't, because the drop in consumer demand was minimized since laid off folks had income from  unemployment checks, and then many older workers dropped out of the job market to receive pension and Social Security checks.  We have stumbled along with mediocre growth since the Great Recession. 

Our 4% unemployment rate is not a sign of economic health, it is a sign of economic stagnation.  Our 4% unemployment rate masks the fact that the number of people actually working as a percentage of the population, has dropped from 64% of the population before the Great Recesssion, to around 60% of the population today.  Because the population has grown by 30 or 40 million people growth hasn't completely collapsed, but where I live in the Bay Area employers tell me they have permanent help wanted signs because there are never enough workers to fill the available jobs (our foolish immigration policy doesn't help).

Wages are so historically low the 68 million people drawing social security see no reason to get a job.  So their spending still provides a floor under consumption, but they are not capable of fueling growth because they live on a fixed income.

So if unemployment figures don't explain whats happening how do we understand our current economy?  

Maybe stop ignoring debt?  Levels of virtually every kind of debt are near historic highs.  Consumer debt, lending on real estate, corporate debt - and most glaringly, our national debt.

Government debt didn't matter in the 19th century because the world ran on the gold standard, so governments that ran up debts hobbled their economy.   We ran up debt during wars, then paid it down between wars.  The Civil war ran the National debt up to about 40% of GDP, then it dropped down to about 5% of GDP right before jumping up near 40% of GDP in World War I.  The debt dropped for a few years, then climbed to about 45% by the Great Depression, then up to 116% of GDP during World War II.  

After World War II debt dropped from 116% down to about 30% by 1980.  

Since 1980 it has gone from 30% to over 100%.  Since 1980, as a percentage of GDP, we on average have incurred more debt each year than GDP growth.  That change in economic trajectory can be traced directly to Republicans focusing on cutting taxes on the wealthy for the last 40 years.  Since the Trump tax cuts our national debt has grown more than twice as fast as GDP growth.

But economists disregard government debt in computing GDP, so policitians hail GDP numbers as a badge of their competence and ignore the rising debt.  

We have painted ourselves into a corner.  We can't pay off our debt by taxing consumers without undermining consumption and growth.  Only those with wealth beyond their needs can be taxed without undermining consumption.  But that has been politically untouchable.

It is not a sustainable economic model.  Unemployment as the canary warning impending short term economic problems no longer works.  But the correlation of GDP growth to national debt growth is our modern canary warning us of long term economic stagnation.