Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Monday, May 25, 2020

Rather, The Mystery of the Working-Class White Male...

Full article at The Atlantic, by Tom Nichols:


"So many mysteries surround Donald Trump...

But since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? [W]hy so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage. … They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. ... They shoulder most burdens in silence—perhaps to an unhealthy degree—and know that there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family.

Not every working-class male voted for Trump, and not all of them have these traits, of course. … Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?

In order to think about why these men support Trump, one must first grasp how deeply they are betraying their own definition of masculinity by looking more closely at the flaws they should, in principle, find revolting:

Is Trump honorable?
Is Trump courageous?
Is Trump a man who respects women?
Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team?

To be a man is to be an adult, to willingly decide, as St. Paul wrote, to “put away childish things.” There’s a reason that Peter Pan is a story about a boy, and the syndrome named after it is about men. Not everyone grows up as they age.

It should not be a surprise then, that Trump is a hero to a culture in which so many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence. And especially for men who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.

In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him.

I think that working men, the kind raised as I was, know what kind of “man” Trump is. And still, the gratification they get from seeing Trump enrage the rest of the country is enough to earn their indulgence. I doubt, however, that Trump gives them the same consideration. Perhaps Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return."
Questions, comments, war stories?

Rewriting the Constitution to Balance the Budget

Apparently most conservatives and populists want to re-write some or all of the US constitution. One mechanism to do that is via a constitutional convention.

Article V of the United States Constitution says that when two thirds (currently 34) of state legislatures apply for a constitutional convention proposing amendments, Congress has to convene one. That is up from 28 states at the beginning of 2017 (see map below).[1] Congress first determines if a convention has actually been triggered. It does that by counting the state applications. The counting process is called aggregating applications. One unknown is whether different kinds of state applications can all be lumped together or aggregated, or whether they have to be of the same kind. Some state applications (plenary applications) are open-ended and ask for the entire constitution to be open to amendments. Other state applications just call for specific amendments.




Presently, 27 state legislatures have applications that propose a balanced budget amendment. Six states are calling for a plenary convention. Thus, if aggregation allowed, probably 33 of the 34 applications needed to call a convention are present. Radical far right anti-government groups such as the The Federalist Society want all applications to be aggregated, and when the total reaches 34, a convention convened to consider a constitutional balanced budget amendment, but not for a plenary reconsideration of the entire constitution.

If a balanced budget amendment is baked into the constitution by a convention, the effects of that would probably be enormous. The impact will be dictated by how balanced spending is to be attained. Regardless of the details, federal spending would need to be drastically cut. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the president and GOP members of congress increased the federal debt by cutting taxes without commensurate spending cuts. That fiscal irresponsibility was during a decade-long economic recovery. Cuts during a recession would need to be large to balance the budget and pay for existing federal debt. According to one source, on-the-books debt for 2020 is projected to reach $23.8 trillion.[2] To balance the budget, millions of Americans will feel real pain and hunger.


The GOP has made its hostility to most domestic spending clear. If the GOP gets its way, social security, medicare, medicaid food stamps and probably all other non-military spending would be reduced or in some cases might be entirely eliminated. Democrats would oppose that and would probably demand major defense spending cuts in reasonable parity with domestic spending cuts. If a balanced budget ever came to pass, the ensuing political disputes would be a food fight of epic proportions. The balanced budget amendment is the Trojan Horse the GOP wants to sneak in on to decimate domestic spending and the federal government.


Footnote:
1. The 2017 article comments on the conservative strategy to gut government domestic spending programs:
Most of the resolutions enacted in the last three years add a final clause: “together with any related and appropriate fiscal constraints.” That language opens the door to any constitutional amendments that a convention might decide fit under this broad rubric, including placing a rigid ceiling on federal spending so that all (or virtually all) deficit reduction has to come from cutting federal programs such as Social Security or Medicare, with little or none coming from revenue-raising measures. Such a ceiling would reduce or eliminate any pressure to produce deficit reduction packages that pair spending reductions with increased revenue from closing unproductive special-interest tax loopholes or from combating tax avoidance by powerful corporations.

2. Off-the books debt is unfunded liabilities the federal government has incurred over the decades. It includes things like pension obligations for federal retirees. It is hard to estimate and some politicians lie about it to advance their ideological or political agendas. In 2013, one source estimated the off-the-books liability to be about $70 trillion. A 2017 estimate put the total at $210 trillion. Whatever the real number might be, it is huge. Under a balanced budget amendment, congress will have no choice but to renege on most of those promised obligations. Those people will face real pain and hunger as their pensions vaporize under the intense heat of a balanced budget. 

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Vote-by-Mail vs Vote-in-Person vs Absentee Voting

“Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters. They're fraudulent in many cases.” -- Donald Trump commenting in April 2020 without any evidence of voter fraud, a few weeks after he cast his absentee ballot in Florida’s primary

“They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” -- Donald Trump referring to the Democrats’ proposals to expand vote-by-mail in response to the Covid-19 pandemic on Fox & Friends in March 2020


An article in Wired magazine last month, The Weird Partisan Math of Vote-by-Mail, discussed the differences between the two. The article noted that research indicates vote-by-mail doesn’t help Democrats. That raises the question of why Republicans oppose it.

Wired explained the vote-by-mail situation as in three schemes. Seven states use traditional absentee balloting. That requires voters to give a reason why they can’t vote in person. That is the most restrictive scheme. The no-excuse absentee scheme is less restrictive and allows anyone can vote if they request a ballot. That scheme or some variation of it applies to about half of the states. The least restrictive scheme is  universal vote-by-mail. Five states, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, use that scheme. So do many counties in California. Under universal vote-by-mail, state government automatically mails a ballot to every registered voter, and voters then (1) have about two weeks to mail the ballot back, or (2) they can drop it off in person by election day.

Wired comments that the effect of universal vote-by-mail increases voter turnout. Some research indicates that when voting is more convenient, more people vote. Effects of vote-by-mail are complex. Sometimes it favored republicans and sometimes democrats.  Younger people tend to vote more if vote-by-mail is available. A not yet published paper that has been submitted for peer-review draws these conclusions:
We collect data from 1996-2018 on all three U.S. states who implemented universal vote-by-mail in a staggered fashion across counties, allowing us to use a difference-in-differences design at the county level to estimate causal effects. We find that: (1) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to affect either party’s share of turnout; (2) universal vote-by-mail does not appear to increase either party’s vote share; and (3) universal vote-by-mail modestly increases overall average turnout rates, in line with previous estimates. All three conclusions support the conventional wisdom of election administration experts and contradict many popular claims in the media.
Wired interviewed the lead author, Daniel Thompson, who indicated that a small advantage may be present for democrats, but the data is uncertain on that point:
“After they controlled for those trends, the Democratic advantage shrunk to either 0.9 or 1 percent—with a 0.4 or 0.5 percent confidence interval. That is indeed small—but is it really “neutral”? ‘We can’t rule out that there are some small effects,’ said Thompson. ‘But given the level of uncertainty, we can’t even say that the effect is greater than zero with a high degree of confidence.’” (emphasis added)

The situation is just as complicated for states that want to expand absentee voting. In Wisconsin’s primary this year, democrats worked to expand absentee voting and it benefited them. But in Florida, with its long tradition of absentee voting, Republicans constitute a bigger share of absentee votes.

A research article published in 2004 looked at the effect of Oregon’s universal vote-by-mail (VBM) scheme. That analysis indicated that VBM did not change voter any of several voting behaviors very much. The data indicated that Democrats were somewhat less successful at mobilizing their non-voters than Republicans were.

Public opinion generally supports VBM. Recent polling indicated that about 80% of democrats, 64% of independents, and 54% of Republicans support voting by mail. So if one is willing to give weight to public opinion, VBM is an acceptable way to proceed, at least during the pandemic.[1] It doesn't seem likely that widespread VBM and/or absentee voting is likely to have a major effect on election outcomes.





Footnote:
1. My preference is to establish universal, mandatory voting by whatever means the states want. Unexcused non-voting would trigger a progressive tax penalty that increases for voters with higher incomes. Australia has such a mandatory scheme and it works fine there. Some research indicates that mandatory people tends to lead to better-informed voters and voting.

“Compulsory voting is assumed to have both primary and secondary effects on citizens' political behaviour. While compulsion increases voter turnout, its effects on political engagement, democratic satisfaction, and electoral advantage are still debated. This study hypothesizes that compulsory voting increases citizens’ political knowledge, either because voters choose to become informed given the requirement to vote, or because the process of voting itself imparts incidental knowledge. It also hypothesized that knowledge is distributed more evenly in compulsory systems. Multivariate analysis of data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (Modules 1 to 4) finds some support for the first hypothesis, and stronger evidence in support of the second hypothesis. These findings inform normative debates on the merits of compulsory voting rules.”

The Epitome of Hypocrisy

This 3:46 video expresses the epitome of hypocrisy of Fox News. It shows a series of short clips of various criticisms of President Obama. All of the criticisms apply in spades to the current president.





For context, the current president's golf outings have cost taxpayers about $134 million since January 2017. Obama's outings cost taxpayers about $12.7 million over all 8 years.

Thanks to Snowflake for bringing this blatant hypocrisy to my attention.