Isaac Laquedem

Endorsements 2: NO on the Metro transportation tax

Who has not had the temptation at an all-you-can-eat buffet (remember them?  They're a pre-Covid thing) to take some of everything, on the reasonable ground that once you've agreed to pay the fixed price for the meal, all the food is free.  The food is even more delicious when someone else has to pay for it.

A long time ago Metro's transportation wage tax proposal, Measure 26-218, started life with good intentions, and then its planners discovered the buffet line.  Metro proposes to tax private employers with more than 25 employees up to 0.75% of their payroll.  Metro put the measure on the ballot without committing to a specific tax rate.  At the maximum allowed rate, an employer with 26 employees who are paid an average of $50,000 each would pay $9,750/year in additional taxes.

Metro has designed its proposal to appeal to the voters as much as possible:  first, by scattering the gravy far and wide across the region, promising not just light rail to Tigard (the main consumer of the future revenues) but also to highway, bike, and sidewalk projects from Cornelius on the west to the near edge of Gresham on the east, and second, by designing the tax in the spirit of that old verse from the 1930s:  "Congress, Congress, don't tax me; tax that fellow behind the tree."  (Senator Russell Long later popularized a slightly different version of the idea.)

The measure's proponents boast about that feature, pointing with pride to the fact that "91% of our region's businesses are exempt from the tax."  What is not to like about a tax that provides goodies for nearly everyone and puts the bite on hardly anyone?

Well, for starters: 

1.    The tax marks Metro's entry into the field of big-ticket transportation, a new venture for the agency.  The field is already occupied by many other jurisdictions, including cities, counties, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and TriMet.  On a deep level Metro's request tacitly acknowledges that those units of government are failing at dealing with transportation issues, or that they have simply decided that issues other than transportation are more important to their citizens.

2.    Related to point 1, Metro plans to spend a significant part of the funds to remedy the deficiencies of those other units of government, for example, by building sidewalks for students that the City of Portland has not seen as a priority, by improving pedestrian crossings on state highways that ODOT has messed up, and by stepping into the minefield of reducing gentrification in Portland's Albina district.

3.    Metro won't say what the actual tax rate will be, nor how long it will keep the tax in effect.

A cynic (who, me?) might surmise that Metro included the other suburban projects in the measure as inducements to voters to make their bosses chip in to pay for a light rail line to serve a corridor that already has two major arterials, Interstate 5 and Barbur Boulevard.  The more fundamental reason that I'm voting against Measure 26-218 is that until Metro demonstrates a compelling reason for the voters to let it enter the field of big-concrete transportation, it should focus on improving its current services.

Vote NO on 26-218.

Endorsements 1 (The Portland City Council): Wheeler and Mapps

A wise man I knew used to say that it's good to know a senator, but it's much more useful to know the mayor.  With that in mind, I'm starting endorsement season with the Portland city council. 

The Mayor's race is not about whom to vote for so much as it is about whom to vote against.   Mayor Wheeler came to the position with a record of accomplishment as a county commissioner (think of the Sellwood Bridge) and as state treasurer.  Unfortunately for his reputation he then took on the mayoralty of Portland.  His four years in office reminds me of Warren Buffett's famous line, "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

Portland's City Hall has fairly earned a reputation for the civic equivalent of bad economics, as a government that can barely govern itself.  Mr. Wheeler's record met City Hall's reputation, and at the end of his term it is the reputation of City Hall that has remained intact.  Against a candidate with a modicum of business and political experience it would be an easy call to give someone else a chance to try and fail and to endorse the challenger.

And yet this year's challenger, Sarah Iannarone, falls short of the mark.  She proposes platefuls of ideas, some good, some unusual, and some simply out of the city's realm.  She identifies the pressing need to bring the police department back under city control, and then wanders off into creating standards for the lockdowns of public buildings, including schools, which are not under city control.  She proposes to "get big money out of politics" (a quotation from her website) but also to establish a public bank, an instrument for patronage politics.  If Mr. Wheeler has done too little in facing the challenges of 2020, Ms. Iannarone's agenda is too much.  I reluctantly favor giving the Mayor another term.

By contrast, the other City Council race is an easy call.  Incumbent Chloe Eudaly faces a strong challenge from the hypertalented Mingus Mapps.  Commissioner Eudaly's signature accomplishment of her term has been to impose local rent and eviction control and levy annual registration fees on landlords, a measure on its face designed to protect tenants that has had the predictable effect of encouraging owners of rental houses to sell rental houses to homeowners and get out of the rental business.  It's also had the effect of steering apartment builders to friendlier cities.  (One prominent apartment developer has shut down its Portland operation entirely.)  Construction is still continuing, but in a different form -- in the past two years nearly half of the new condominium projects in Multnomah County have four or fewer units.  Instead of building rental duplexes and fourplexes, developers are replacing rental houses with owner-occupied plexes.

Commissioner Eudaly's other major misstep was to propose sweeping changes to reduce the voices of neighborhood associations in land use planning decisions.  Although after the fact she said that she intended her proposal to bring more voices to the table, her proposal was directed at reducing neighborhood voices - most egregiously in providing that neighborhood associations would not have to abide by open-meeting laws.  The strident voices of neighborhood associations are why a freeway doesn't run next to Division Street.  Portlanders may confidently vote to replace Commissioner Eudaly with Dr. Mapps.

Endorsements Zero: a general thought on taxation

If one of the three main selling points of a request that you approve a new tax is that you won't have to pay the tax -- it's a tax entirely on other people, or on businesses, or on sales of things that you don't buy -- then the promoters are tacitly admitting that the cause isn't good enough to spend your own money on -- or theirs either, if the promoters are all exempt from the tax themselves.  I'll be elaborating on this thought later in endorsement season.

The Laquedem Plan for the second presidential debate: Scrabble

The debate between President Trump and Vice President Biden earlier this week told us nothing new about the candidates.  The president criticized Mr. Biden for not proposing any specific plans for his term in office, and then talked over him whenever he started to give specifics.  Mr. Biden was more restrained, but eventually gave up trying to address Mr. Trump's disconnected thoughts and spoke directly (and effectively) to the American people.

A second debate in the same format won't tell us anything new or interesting about the candidates.  Let's admit that we are tuning in mainly to watch for gaffes and blunders, with the same morbid attraction that we have for seeing tightrope walkers and trapeze artists put themselves in danger. 

If Messrs. Trump and Biden are going to meet again to do battle, it should be in a novel format.  Hence the Laquedem Plan to Rework the Second Presidential Debate.

Let them play three games of Scrabble on national television.

Let us see how they interact over a game board, what words they choose, how becomingly they achieve victory, and how gracefully they accept defeat.  Let us read what we can into their choice of words, their game strategies, their use of bonus squares, and their inventiveness with J, Q, X, and Z.  Do they open up new territory on the board with long words that leap to the borders?  Or do they play conservatively and defensively, filling squares in ones and twos?   Do they challenge each other's words? 

It's said that you can learn a lot about a man's character by playing golf with him.  Let's bring the character test to the table.

Game on!

Harvard Professor Raj Chetty explains COVID-19's impact in a nonpartisan way based on actual data and economics. We should listen.

Here is a link to actual data on the effect of the pandemic on the American economy.  It's a website, "Track The Recovery," maintained by a group of economists led by Harvard professor Raj Chetty.  Bloomberg News has a good description of Professor Chetty's work, and the data on which it's based, here.

Among the most pointed findings is that "the recession has nearly ended for high-wage workers, but job losses persist for low-wage workers."  The money quote from the Bloomberg article:

On video calls with dozens of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as Treasury officials and state and local policymakers, his message has been consistent: Get the virus under control at all costs—a task the U.S. has so far failed at pitifully. No matter how many businesses are allowed to reopen, normal economic life will not resume until their customers feel they’re no longer at risk of contagion. In the meantime, he tells them, target assistance to the people, businesses, and places that need it. There’s no use sending stimulus checks to people making $150,000 a year or cutting their payroll taxes. They have plenty of money; what they lack is places to safely spend it.

 

Why does the Republican Party support the death penalty and oppose abortion? The reason is economics, not ethics

The recent experience with the novel coronavirus and the economic effects of the shutdown gives us all an opportunity to calculate how much the pro-life party values life. Approximately 30 million Americans lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic. The shutdown if continued through the phased reopening without being rushed will save perhaps 1 million American lives. It follows that to the (mostly Republican) politicians who wished to end the shutdown in the early summer, one life to them is worth not more than about 30 jobs. It also explains the Republican fascination with the death penalty. If the average death penalty case costs about $100,000 to try, which we can evaluate as equal to roughly 2 jobs for a year, but if only one out of every 40 people convicted of a death penalty crime is actually executed, then each execution produces roughly 80 jobs, a very decent return on investment from this coldly capitalist point of view.

The same analysis explains also the Republican position on abortion and right to life. If a healthcare team of four people can perform two abortions a day for 250 business days a year, equaling 500 per year altogether, then each abortion produces only 1/125 of a job for a year, far below the job production from capital punishment. What we have taken for years as Republican hypocrisy about human life may merely be economics. Further research is needed to determine the normative Republican value for job-life equivalence. I think it will turn out to be about 20 jobs per life.

Are you better off than you were four years ago (IV)?

https://www.vox.com/2018/10/3/17928698/brett-kavanaugh-blackout-drinking-alcohol 

Are you better off than you were four years ago (III)?

https://www.statista.com/chart/21269/daily-deaths-covid-19-selected-countries/ 

Are you better off than you were four years ago (II)?

We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 12, 2018

Are you better off than you were four years ago? (first in a series)

 

The nations in green were still willing to welcome American tourists this summer.  

 

https://matadornetwork.com/read/map-shows-weak-us-passports-right-now/

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention orders a stop to evictions. Why doesn't it order everyone to wear a mask in public?

This week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, acting under authority given to the Surgeon General and the Department of Health and Human Services, issued an order entitled "Temporary Halt in Residential Evictions to Prevent the  Further Spread of COVID-19," which you can read in the Federal Register here.  The order prohibits landlords from evicting residential tenants for nonpayment of rent if:

• The tenant has tried to obtain all available government housing assistance;
• The tenant expects to earn $99,000 or less in 2020 ($198,000 or less for a couple), or was not required to report any income in 2019, or received a CARES Act Economic Impact Payment;
• The tenant can't pay the full rent due to substantial loss of household income, work, or wages, or a layoff, or extraordinary medical expenses;
• The tenant is trying to make timely partial payments of as much of the rent as possible; and
• Eviction would likely make the tenant homeless or force the tenant into group living.

How does CDC get the authority to freeze evictions of residential tenants?  It comes from 42 USC §264, a provision of federal law that authorizes the Surgeon General to "make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

The  Knower of All Things observes that an order prohibiting residential evictions in the United States won't do anything to prevent communicable diseases from entering the United States, and it won't do anything to prevent communicable diseases such as COVID-19 from spreading from state to state unless the assumption is that evicted tenants will change states.  He adds that if CDC has the power to issue an order to prohibit residential evictions, then CDC also has the power to order everyone to wear a mask in public, which CDC recommends but is strangely reluctant to direct.

It's time for CDC to face up to facts and act on its own advice.

 

"Vote often and early for James Michael Curley" - and in North Carolina, for the president too

President Trump is a man of great versatility and flexibility of mind.  How else can we reconcile his strident opposition to voting by mail with his encouraging his North Carolina supporters to go to the polls and vote a second time in case their first vote didn't arrive at the county in time?  The White House has told us that his comments were misinterpreted - that he was not in fact telling people to vote twice, which would be a felony - but was merely asking his supporters to be sure that their votes were received and counted.  

The President doesn't always speak through the White House press office.  He also tweets.  Sometimes his tweets confuse the public (what exactly is "covfefe"?).  On other occasions, he makes his meaning quite clear.  In a tweet this week, he explained his position on double voting: "On Election Day, or Early Voting go to your Polling Place to see whether or not your Mail In Vote has been Tabulated (Counted). If it has you will not be able to Vote & the Mail In System worked properly. If it has not been Counted, VOTE." 

 One odd consequence is that if he wins the North Carolina election in November we may never know whether he was actually the favorite, or whether thousands of his North Carolina votes were the result of his supporters committing election fraud.  In effect he's setting the stage for not just a tainted defeat, but a tainted victory.