BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-25 Th
Who is the audience for Ayaan Ali Hirsi, & why most Biden & Harris stop exercising & listening &, instead, wring their hands?; something as good as a taco truck on every corner; Sal Khan on ChatBot...
…as saviors; Steverman on Darrick Hamilton & baby bonds, Hubbell on Fox’s imaginary worlds, Lemieux on Trump-enabler Cornel West, & Marc Cooper on ugly takeaways from the CNN-Trump love fest…
MUST-READ: Things Þt Cross My Desk Þt I Do Not Understand:
Exercising would seem to be a very normal thing for anyone who wants a long, fit, and happy life to do. And talking to one’s political supporters in a friendly way is the first and most important job task of any political leader. But according to Ayaan Ali Hirsi, when Biden and Harris do it, it requires “chutzpah”; moreover, it is an “act” to hide their underlying panic. What underlying panic? Why should they be panicking?
Let’s roll the videotape:
Ayaan Ali Hirsi: Biden’s False Border Victory: ‘One has to admire the chutzpah of Kamala Harris. Less than 24 hours after Title 42 expired, there she was, merrily clinking glasses at a Democratic Party soirée…. There was no mention of the 30 migrants who had been bussed to her home in Washington DC from Texas the evening before…. Joe Biden did his best to keep up the act, opting to go for a bike ride…
Why are Biden and Harris panicking? Because:
[Immigration-restricting] Title 42 expired… chaos to come… a failing political class that has given up solving a decades-old problem… high levels of immigration…
But:
The expected surge of migrants is yet to materialise…. America’s immigration crisis appears to be waning. Except, I suspect, it isn’t…. On one side of the Atlantic, a smiling Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will assure voters that the immigration crisis is over; on the other, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman will try to convince voters that their glossy “new” policies will make sure it is over soon…. They each sit proudly atop two creaking immigration systems that they are unable to fix but will have to defend against a fired-up opposition. Perhaps then it will finally become clear that everything isn’t going smoothly…
From my perspective, the normal for America is that we welcome a million new immigrants a year (it would be better if it were two million), and then we turn them into Americans. We are now getting back to that after the disruptive chaos of Trump and the plague:
Yes, things are very messy. Lots more people want to become Americans than we as a country are willing to let in: we are not willing to let in all comers. We could stop things from being messy were we to adopt biometric identity scans and random checks so that you would have to prove your identity to a cop every month. We are not willing to do that—we are not willing to require internal passports and become such a surveillance society.
Given those two decisions of our body politic, things are messy. But underneath that messiness, things are indeed going, as Kamala Harris said, “rather smoothly”. Each year we take in 1,000,000 people, and turn about 950,000 of them into Americans. This is a great source of national strength. This is a very good thing to do—for them, for us, and for the world. The system by which this is done is very effective. We teach, we are taught, and we learn that we have all come to America to escape the mistakes and constraints of the Old World and to make a new one where we can all dream our utopian dreams, and be free and prosperous. We thus become Americans. We all become, as Teddy Roosevelt said long ago, children of the Pilgrims either by inheritance or adoption. (But, as he also said, “we have travelled far…” from where they were, know more, and have a much wider and less crabbed field of vision.)
That the system by which this is done is creaky is no reason for Biden and Harris to stop exercising, stop listening, and wring their hands.
Except that, somehow, for Ayaan Ali Hirsi, it is a reason for them to spend their days, 24/7, wringing their hands.
Why this is a reason she does not explain.
And that raises a big question for me: Just who is the audience for this?
ONE IMAGE: Not Quite a Taco Truck on Every Corner, But Close Enough…:
ONE VIDEO: Sal Khan: How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education:
Very Briefly Noted:
Bill McBride: Two Key Housing Themes: Low Inventory and Few Distressed Sales…
Paul Krugman: ‘The unemployment rate for Black men is at its lowest level since the government began recording it… in part because we have low unemployment…. But… also because the racial gap in unemployment has drastically narrowed…
Matt Levine: Debt Is Trickier Than Equity: ‘If you are confident in your ability to write and interpret contracts… you might be inclined to issue relatively more debt and… having more contracts that you can interpret opportunistically, which you don’t get from issuing equity that requires you to act fairly…
Brookings: The Fed: Lessons learned from the past three years…
Gauti B. Eggertsson & Don Kohn: The Inflation Surge of the 2020s: The Role of Monetary Policy: ‘The 2020 Policy Framework… was too focused on the 2010-19 experience and left the Committee inadequately prepared to deal with unexpected and new circumstances such as the inflation situation in 2021…
Ben Bernanke & Olivier Blanchard: What Caused the U.S. Pandemic-Era Inflation?: ‘Contrary to early concerns that inflation would be spurred by overheated labor markets, most of the inflation surge that began in 2021 was the result of shocks to prices given wages…
Kate Duguid: What happens after the debt ceiling deal?…
Ed Nather: The Story of Mel: ‘Maybe… now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators, and “user-friendly” software but back in the Good Old Days…. Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not FORTRAN…. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers…
Ed Luce: Beware Elon Musk’s warped libertarianism: ‘Musk, like Thiel, has the right to say what he likes…. But this does not give him the right to be taken seriously. The sooner people see Musk’s political motives for what they are… the better for society’s mental health…
Adrian Wooldridge: The Tory Party Has Turned Into a Conservative Clown Show: ‘History won’t be kind to the right-wing political spectacle unfolding before the UK: Political parties can survive all sorts of problems and still win elections. They can survive bad leaders. They can survive disastrous local election results. They can even survive economic crises. But, in Britain at least, what they cannot survive is becoming a clown show…
¶s:
Ben Steverman: Meet the Baby Bonds: ‘Darrick Hamilton grew up shuttling between two worlds… Brooklyn Friends… Bedford-Stuyvesant…. A precocious and popular student, he took to heart the Quaker emphasis on social justice and morality. Most of all, he had parents who were devoted to getting their children ahead…. He insists, though, that this success shouldn’t be celebrated as a triumph over adversity. He despises the way classic rags-to-riches stories can be used to cast blame on those who can’t climb out of poverty…. It was his advocacy of baby bonds, though, that brought his academic work off progressive wish lists and into the real world. Hamilton developed the idea a dozen years ago, proposing to give each baby born in the U.S. a trust fund established and guaranteed by the federal government. The goal is to narrow the vast inequalities that exist at the moment of birth…
Robert B. Hubbell: Apocalypse (not) now: ‘When Americans went to bed… Friday [May 12] evening, Fox News was running a “countdown timer” to the apocalypse… the expiration of Title 42, a Trump-era Covid policy that allowed for the expedited removal of foreign nationals seeking asylum in the U.S…. According to Fox… “hordes of illegal immigrants” would bust through the US border and overwhelm American civilization…. As of Sunday evening, the story of the “Title 42 apocalypse” had almost disappeared from the Fox News website. It was buried as twenty-six stories below the headline on Sunday, which blared, Former US attorney says top levels of DOJ, FBI making 'political decisions' not to investigate Bidens…
Scott Lemieux: I’ve been falling so long, it’s like gravity’s gone. And I’m just floating: ‘Cornel West’s endorsement of Jill Stein—and hence, for all intents and purposes, Donald Trump—before the election that (inter many alia) brought us the end of Roe v. Wade and January 6, was a long overdue hint that at least in his political punditry mode he was no longer a figure of the left in any meaningful sense. And yet I wouldn’t have expected him to go the full Greenwald/Taibbi like this…
Marc Cooper: Coop Scoop: Four Ugly Takeaways from the CNN Trump Love Fest: ‘The 75 minutes of the CNN Trump Town Hall Wednesday night was one of the ugliest exhibits in the recent history of the diseased media/political complex with which we are saddled. My takeaways. 1) Donald Trump is not only unchanged but he is worse and more dangerous than ever…. 2) The MSM is one more piece of antiquated, decaying American infrastructure that cannot meet today’s challenges to democracy and freedom…. 3) The New Hampshire and its Audience Erodes All Faith In Humanity…. 4) We are not necessarily headed for fascism…not necessarily. But at a minimum, we now live in a country where just about half or at least a third of the people have mentally detached themselves from American democracy and are now active, or passive, enthusiasts and supporters of a xenophobic, know-nothing form of domestic fascism championed by a psychopathic liar and cheater…
With better border control (which includes treating would-be immigrants with dignity and according to the law) we could have a better mix of skilled immigrants with visas and fewer unskilled immigrants without. Of course we could have more skilled immigrants immediately while the border is getting under better control.
Does Ms Ali Hirse just not like immigrants?
Thoughts on the Brookings Conference
Blanchard-Bernanke: I take them to be saying that [at least they are consistent with] at first inflation was helpful in facilitating income maximizing changes in relative prices arising from price shocks but that afterward there was “overshooting” by other relative prices (wages?). This seems plausible. Given the information gleaned from the model, what should the Fed have done differently? [This in not the same as asking if they should in real time have had a model that would have enabled them to have done things differently, but that, too, is a question worth asking.]
Fruman: No hint of how/why inflation at any stage raises real GDP? (Tricks workers into accepting lower real wages a la pre-expectations Keynesianism?) Even accepting the monetary/fiscal policy => Real GDP & Inflation = NGDP, “monetary -fiscal” dodges the question of what should _monetary_ policy do given fiscal policy to return inflation to target when real GDP is maxed.
Clarissa: The Fed delay in raising rates in Nov 2021 (Sept 2021 when TIPS first exceeded target) was a tactical error, (shared by other central banks) not abandonment of FIAT framework. [Let’s take his word for it.] He hints (Or do I over interpret?) that the delay occurred because Powell announced in November to finish the taper before the hike. [I wish we could develop a consensus that the Fed should never announce instrument settings unconditional on future events in advance.]
Eggertson sheds light on the rate hike delay: “As late as the fourth quarter of 2021, the median forecasters—both FOMC and private sector—were expecting inflation to drop back from north of 5 percent in 2021 to the neighborhood of 2-1/2 percent in 2022. It wasn’t until March of 2022 that the Fed forecasters saw inflation moving up to over 4 percent in 2022”
I can’t prove it, but the Q42021 FMOC expectation looks really inconsistent with Q4 2021 TIPS _5 year_ expectation of 2.7-3.0%. [I wish we could develop a consensus that the Treasury should issue some intermediate tenor TIPS.]