Zuckerberg’s Accountability

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

One man, Mark Zuckerberg, personally and individually controls Facebook and everything it does. The company is what the NASDAQ stock exchange, on which its shares are listed, calls a “controlled company.” It has been so since its initial public offering (IPO) in May 2012.

Facebook’s official IPO prospectus [search for second instance of “controlled”] confessed as follows:

“Mr. Zuckerberg, who after our initial public offering will control approximately 55.9% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock, will have the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of our directors, as well as the overall management and direction of our company. In the event of his death, the shares of our capital stock that Mr. Zuckerberg owns will be transferred to the persons or entities that he designates.”

“Because Mr. Zuckerberg controls a majority of our outstanding voting power, we are a ‘controlled company’ under the corporate governance rules for NASDAQ-listed companies. Therefore, we are not required to have a majority of our board of directors be independent, nor are we required to have a compensation committee or an independent nominating function. In light of our status as a controlled company, our board of directors has determined not to have an independent nominating function and to have the full board of directors be directly responsible for nominating members of our board.”

On April 9 of this year, facebook re-confessed, in its very own proxy statement [DEF 14A (Proxy Statement), 2021-04-09, page 2, CONTROLLED COMPANY STATUS ]:

“Because Mr. Zuckerberg controls a majority of our outstanding voting power, we are a ‘controlled company’ under the corporate governance rules of The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC (Nasdaq). Therefore, we are not required to have a majority of our board of directors be independent, nor are we required to have a compensation committee or an independent nominating function.”

A 2018 news article reported that “Zuckerberg and a small group of insiders” control “almost 70 percent” of shareholders’ votes. The reason? The Class B shares they control have 10 votes per share, while the publicly traded Class A shares have only one. While the supermajority ownership is not illegal, it makes Facebook, in practice, more like a small partnership than the widely traded public company it purports to be.

In its April 2021 proxy statement, Facebook claimed that “we have nevertheless opted, under our corporate governance guidelines, to have a majority of the members of our board of directors be independent.” An opposing proxy statement, filed by the State Treasurer of Illinois, vigorously contested this claim. It recommended a shareholder proposal that would have required Zuckerberg to step down as board chair, and Facebook to adopt rules for a more independent board. It claimed that: “1. Only one of Facebook’s nine board members is completely independent. 2. An independent board chair is best governance practice. 3. Ongoing controversies signal a need for a leadership change.”

The State Treasurers of Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont, plus the Sisters of the Holy Names, supported this shareholder proposal. A similar proposal made the previous year reportedly received 64% of non-insider votes. Guess which side won this year’s proxy contest.

What these facts prove is that Zuckerberg, and he alone, personally controls Facebook’s management structure and governance, and thus all that Facebook does. The Attorney General for the District of Columbia recently recognized this reality, adding Zuckerberg’s name as individual defendant in an action based on the Cambridge Analytic privacy scandal. Just days ago, reporting revealed that Facebook had done little or nothing after employees raised alarms about Facebook posters’ influential participation in the Qanon Conspiracy and the Big Lie that Biden and fraud stole the 2020 presidential election.

Even in our corporation-loving society, the kind of absolute control that Zuckerberg has over Facebook is extremely rare. Start-up companies, financed by venture capital, usually have their founders’ shares “diluted” out of control by the second or third round of private financing. By the time they “go public,” their founders and top executives hold nowhere near a majority of voting rights. Instead, big investment firms collectively hold the vast majority of voting shares—institutions like state pension funds, Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, and Blackrock.

Among the “Big Five,” only Google’s holding/parent company Alphabet is also a “controlled company.” Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are not. And even Google is controlled only by its two founders together, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, not a single individual. Relative to Facebook, most US corporations, including tech firms, are democracies like the US (so far), England, France and Germany. Facebook, in contrast, resembles China under Xi Jinping’s dictatorship.

Executives’ general lack of personal control of public companies has real consequences. For example, Steve Jobs, the innovative founder of Apple and its long-time CEO, was ousted in a corporate revolution and spent years in “exile” in his own firm Next, Inc. There he developed the guts of Apple’s computer operating system OS X and eventually returned in triumph to work on the iPhone.

When corporate limited liability arose in Britain and Europe during the Enlightenment, it had two purposes. The first was to encourage passive investors to support productive business by shielding them from liability for business mistakes and wrongs that they could not control. A second purpose was, by encouraging private financing of business, to free economic productivity from politics and what was then seen as oppressive royal influence and control.

Neither of these rationales applies to Mark Zuckerberg. No Enlightenment economist or thinker could ever have conceived of the power that Facebook has today—with income larger than that of many Enlightenment nations and nearly one-third of the human species as regular users. None could ever conceive that a lone man who controls all that power would have zero accountability for the wrongs he puts in motion. We all have witnessed Facebook’s historically unsurpassed power to corrupt culture and coarsen politics by propagating lies and hate.

Modern corporate law allows courts to pierce the “corporate veil” when a corporation becomes the “alter ego” of its human head. Facebook is far more than Mark Zuckerberg’s alter ego. It’s his avatar. With his complete control of the institution, he is responsible for every major mistake it makes, including every inability or refusal to remove harmful misinformation and lies from its platform.

Zuckerberg may not have actually been in the room when every decision was made. But he has the sole and complete power to reverse or modify it, without regard to anyone else’s opinion. He has repeatedly refused to exercise that power, even when urged by Congress, powerful leaders (even powerful Republicans!), and his own employees and fellow executives.

Whether in England or the US, old common-law judges would have made short work of Zuckerberg’s denials and excuses. They would have had no trouble finding Facebook to be his alter ego, and him responsible for the wrong Facebook has done and the lies it has propagated. But today’s leaders in Congress (most of whom were trained as lawyers) are mesmerized by statutes. They have forgotten the common law, and with it common sense.

Congress and our federal regulators could enact two simple remedies. First, they could make individuals like Zuckerberg, who absolutely control a corporation like Facebook, civilly and criminally liable for its wrongs. Second, Congress could repeal or amend Section 230(c)(1) of the so-called Communications Decency Act of 1996, which excused internet platforms from the same liability for defamation that had long restrained newspapers, magazines, book publishers, and TV and radio broadcasters from knowingly or recklessly spreading lies.

The choice is between a properly informed, stable and rational society and a new Dark Age of lies, confusion and conflict, brought to us for profit by individuals like Zuckerberg. Does this 37-year-old nerd, whose personal motto was "Move fast and break things,” really deserve a completely free pass?

Permalink to this post

Colin Powell, R.I.P

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

During the last generation, many sad things have happened. We sold our jobs, factories and technology to China. We turned millions of workers into right-wing extremists, some violent. We fought two generational wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that accomplished little. We converted our society into a shrine to profit, with many unintended consequences. So we made our economy brittle. When the pandemic came, we utterly botched our response until our legendary innovation, in the form of vaccines, saved us. We had elected an incompetent narcissist as our president, and he fomented a so-far-failed but sometimes violent populist revolution based on lies. None of this makes me sad. Appalled, angry, committed, thoughtful and determined, yes. But not sad. What made me sad was reading about the death of Colin Powell today. It seemed the end of an era, our fleeting American Century. Powell was unique as an important historical figure, but not for the obvious reason. It wasn’t his race, although he was the first Black Chairman of our Joint Chiefs and our first Black Secretary of State. It wasn’t his distinguished service in different martial and political posts. It wasn’t even his successful management of the single major military adventure since Korea that we might call a “victory” without gagging. (More on this later.) No, there was something about Powell that instilled confidence, optimism, loyalty, even devotion. He had no ideology. He didn’t think you can solve real, complex problems with abstractions that can fit on a bumper sticker. Like most generals, he was a practical man. Powell was the epitome of quiet competence and moderation in word and deed. He exemplified the careful, thorough planning—so lacking today—that comes from knowing how many ways the best laid plans can go wrong. It’s ironic. His “Powell Doctrine” for optional wars may have been the only product of his careful mind that might fit on a bumper sticker. Yet the media often get it wrong. It has three elements: (1) overwhelming force, (2) a well-defined and limited objective, and (3) a clear exit strategy. Yet in its otherwise fine obituary, the Washington Post omitted the third point. Isn’t that the most important of the three? Win or lose, wars are painful. So shouldn’t we have a plan to end them as we go in? We lacked a clear exit strategy in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (which still isn’t peaceful yet). And where are we today? Under Powell’s careful management as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, we did infinitely better in Gulf I. We and our allies took five months to build up a force of half a million in the theater. Then we won the war in two months. We kicked Saddam out of the Kuwaiti oil fields, degraded his fighting force and destroyed his military assets. Then we came home. The majority of our casualties (unfortunately long lasting) were environmental, caused by Saddam’s burning the oil fields in departing, and by troops’ exposure to the depleted uranium we used in our tank-killing shells. Brakes don’t get much press. Engines get all the glory. But Powell’s greatest service to our country, and to humanity, may have been braking the sometimes violent extremism of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, at least for a time. Powell didn’t invade Baghdad or occupy Iraq—follies we avoided until Dubya’s self-admitted “bloodlust” after 9/11 led us astray. The press maligned Powell as “the reluctant warrior.” But isn’t that the best kind? For me, the saddest thing about Powell’s career was not his standing behind George Tenet while Tenet claimed that Saddam’s possession of nuclear weapons—later completely debunked—was a “slam dunk.” For me, the saddest thing was Powell’s decision not to run for president in 1996. Think about that. To paraphrase Will Rogers (who spoke of Democrats and horse thieves), not all Republicans are racists, but all racists are surely Republicans. The GOP has made racism a central pillar of its platform since the civil rights acts of the 1960s. But if Powell had run under the Republicans’ banner, they would have had to put a stop to it: he would have been their man. We would be living in a very different America today; Obama would have had a much easier time, and the Demagogue would still be grifting in the New York City real-estate market. I know, I know. This is speculation of the dreamiest sort. But in every age, general-presidents have come forward to pull us through the aftermath of our most difficult moments: Washington after our six-year long War of Independence, Grant after the agony of our Civil War, and Eisenhower after our species’ worst war in history, World War II. All had important presidencies because generals—especially winning ones—are of necessity practical thinkers. They are free from ideological prejudices, and they know the value of peace. We missed the chance to have Powell pull us out of our post-Vietnam, post-Watergate malaise, not to mention the growing menace of a major party’s descent into racism and division as political strategies. Powell declined the chance for the best of reasons: family. His wife Alma was reportedly depressive, and he felt she would not tolerate the torrent of racism that inevitably would engulf his family if he ran. So he didn’t run. The loss was ours, as a nation. We endured a second term of Bill Clinton, hobbled by the Lewinski scandal and an impeachment trial, which ultimately crippled the Democratic Party. The results were Dubya’s disputed election, two unnecessary wars in response to 9/11, and GOP-mounted scorched-earth resistance to our first Black president and to meaningful health-care reform. By the end of Dubya’s hapless presidency, we had nothing left but hope. We lacked the reserve of Powell’s careful planning, as job losses mounted and later sparked working-class rage and rebellion. The torrent of racism that engulfed Obama precluded investment in anything but health care. Then the pandemic came along. We may wait a long time for Powell’s like to come again. He was immensely popular, for good reason. He had great media savvy. He had an inner confidence that came from his practicality, his self-restraint, and his innate knowledge that bumper stickers hold no wisdom. He had the humility to work well with others, to make detailed, complex plans, and to revise them when necessary. He had the decency and empathy of a Joe Biden, along with immense experience in the federal bureaucracy and the public adulation that came from having won a big war with little pain. So the sadness I feel with Powell’s passing is not just over the loss of a good man. All men die. But I wonder who like Powell will rise to lead our nation, in war or peace, and how long we’ll have to wait.

Permalink to this post

Profit Mania, SWA’s Woes, Supply-Chain Bottlenecks, and our Brittle Economy

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Despite its many virtues, the United States is now a brittle society. In several ways, it’s coming apart under stress.

One reason is something that most economists and many pols have long bragged about: the profit motive. In practice, as in much of our political and economic theory, we have made profit one of our most fundamental values.

The value we put on profit is one reason for our legendary distrust in our own government. Public servants, many think, aren’t as smart and don’t work as hard as those in private industry. Why? They don’t make as much money and don’t have as much personal skin in the game. If all those government bureaucrats were really smart, they would work in the private sector and get rich.

We can pass over the moral dimension of this claim. Not only does it assume a level of selfishness that beggars the values of human religions. Most, at least implicitly, recognize our chief biological-evolutionary advantages over other species: our ability to communicate, empathize, and cooperate.

Profit is not even close to the sole driver of human striving. It’s not the primary motivation for military folk, poets, artists, scientists, doctors, teachers or athletes. These folk choose their work because they love it, or because they think it’s important or useful (or at least entertaining) to others. Try to imagine how theater or sports, let alone medicine and nursing, might work without empathy.

Some in these groups do get rich by happenstance, or as a result of excellence, popularity, or a long career of hard work. Yet for most warriors, poets, teachers, government regulators, and government scientists, the chances of getting rich are minuscule. Nevertheless they carry on, even during a pandemic.

So the notion of private profit as the primary motivator for human striving is, as Mark Twain might say, greatly exaggerated. This essay is about another problem that hasn’t gotten much press. When you design your whole society around profit, and when profit is measured in the short term (by quarterly reports) for thousands of individuals and companies separately, your system runs too lean. It lacks flexibility. It lacks any general plan. It skimps on contingency planning and the long game, sometimes ignoring them entirely. So your culture becomes brittle and prone to shattering under stress.

That’s the story of our nation’s decline over the last generation. Let’s look at a few examples.

First and foremost, our owners sold our nation’s factories and jobs abroad for profit. The motivation was clear. Foreign workers in China, Mexico, Vietnam and Bangladesh had a much lower standard of living than ours and so would work for much less pay. Transferring our factories to these nations cut labor costs and made more profit for the owners at home.

With lower labor costs, the owners could still make a profit while offering lower prices for their goods and services. So they could beat both foreign and domestic competition. Their foreign factories came to dominate global commerce—but not from home, from abroad.

As we are slowly discovering, that change put production under the control of the nations—principally China—where the factories are located. So we lost control over our supply chain right from the source.

Is it really any wonder that, today, China’s politics, energy problems, endemic corruption and radically different socio-economic system are now causing us economic problems, in addition to those caused by our own shortage of truck drivers? We have little or no control over basic production and can’t even seem to manage shipment from the Far East to our distribution centers, stores and population.

This, in a nutshell, is a big reason for China’s meteoric rise and our nation’s corresponding decline. As I wrote in an earlier essay, our own factories don’t even make enough nuts and bolts for our own domestic use anymore, let alone more sophisticated products like computer chips and subassemblies. Mostly China does.

So how, pray tell, are we going to win a war with China over Taiwan, where most of our computer chips are made? Even if we make our military stuff mostly here, an embargo by China could strangle our domestic civilian economy and bring us to our knees. So it had better be a short war—for military and economic reasons as well as humane ones.

A second example—and a classic one!—is Texas’ electricity market. Texas divorced itself from national regulation and the national electricity grid on purpose. It wanted to set up a localized and isolated market for electricity as an experiment in “pure” free marketry. It wanted “spot” prices to rule the electricity market, from millisecond to millisecond. The goal: let the profit motive cut prices to the bone and, at the same time, increase private profit.

That strategy worked well until the recent cold snap, aka “polar vortex.” That rare but increasingly likely weather event froze key equipment, peaked demand, and broke the system. Spot prices rose astronomically, leaving factories and people not just stalled and frozen in the dark, but left to contend with ridiculous energy bills afterward. Now Texas is fighting an uphill battle against free-market cant to fix its system to withstand the next polar vortex. Good luck with that!

A third example appears to be what happened to Southwest Airlines (SWA) last weekend. SWA has long been investors’ darling in a cyclic and highly volatile industry. Why? It runs lean and therefore profitably. It has a highly efficient hub-and-spoke flight system. Single planes often fly in big circles, so that flight crews can sleep in their own beds and avoid jet lag. SWA doesn’t employ a lot of idle pilots or flight attendants against the chance that some might get sick. It doesn’t have a lot of airplanes sitting on the tarmac as spares. It’s a lean machine.

When all went well and according to plan, SWA made good profits and worked well. So what likely happened this week? There was bad weather in the South, but that didn’t seem to decimate other airlines. The Airline Pilots Association insists it didn’t call for a sickout. So why were thousands of SWA flights canceled and tens of thousands of customers left stranded during a holiday weekend?

Some think that a small cohort of pilots, especially in Texas, pulled an “unauthorized” sickout on their own—what used to be called a “wildcat strike.” Texas is a hotbed of politically motivated vaccine resistance, with a governor to match, and SWA recently announced a vaccine mandate for workers. The pilots’ union denies that and claims that SWA’s lean operations made it “brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure[.]“

In either case, “brittle” is the right word. With an operation that lean, just a dozen or so pilots calling in sick could produce the same result.

How long will the pain last? How many of those tens of thousands of passengers left stranded last weekend will never, or rarely, fly SWA again? For reasons of location and price transparency, SWA used to be my own preferred domestic airline. Now, probably not so much.

A fourth example of inflexibility is developing right now. Prices of used cars have been high in part because of a shortage of new cars. Some of our own car-production lines have halted because they lack the computer chips that all cars, whether or not electric, need to run. The chips are mostly made in the Far East. China makes some, but a single company in Taiwan (TSMC) makes many of the most sophisticated.

What caused the shortage? The current story is that lockdowns and slowdowns due to Covid-19 have cut the production of chips abroad. But China is a global seller and a strategic thinker. Couldn’t part of the reason be that China is subtly diverting its output toward less adversarial nations, including developing ones?

And again, what happens if we and China go to war over Taiwan? What happens if Taiwan’s huge chip factories get bombed—whether by design or by accident—or the power plants supplying them do? Our own domestic car-makers stay idle, maiming an important sector of our economy for months or years while plants half a world away get rebuilt.

You might say that this is just one of many unintended consequences of our thoughtless shedding of factories and jobs for greater profit over the last thirty years. But there is a difference: the pandemic. To the extent that conventional wisdom is right—and the slowdown in chip production is mostly pandemic-driven—it illustrates the folly of believing that a “service” economy, which ultimately makes nothing, can survive, let alone prosper, on its own in hard times.

As recent near-pandemics (MERS, SARS and Ebola) show, Covid-19 will not be the last pandemic, nor necessarily the worst. As and if production continues to drift from our homeland in a search of ever-lower wages and ever-higher profit, our logistics, goods economy and economic fate will increasingly fall into others’ hands. Where will our high-sounding rhetoric of “freedom” and “self-reliance” be then?

The moral of these stories is simple to state but hard to resolve. Individual selfishness by way of profit can be a powerful motivator—hence the comparative success of capitalism. But in a highly complex, advanced society under stress, letting individuals and thousands of private companies all go their own way doesn’t always produce optimal outcomes. No less than a high priest of capitalism—Alan Greenspan—so confessed after the Crash of 2008 broke the US economy.

Our own current, domestic supply-chain mess illustrates the problem. President Biden just announced that the Port of Los Angeles will soon start working 24/7 to reduce the backlog of cargo stuck in containers in the port or on ships in the harbor awaiting open berths. But as an expert recently opined, the Port Authority doesn’t operate the derricks and cranes that unload the cargo, let alone the trucks needed to carry it away. The derrick owners have to see profit ahead to work the derricks. Then a number of private trucking companies, plus thousands of independent truckers, have to see it in their interests to load their trucks with cargo at 2:00 a.m., without a place to unload it until well after dawn.

The point here is simple. Our supply chain is geographically, structurally and institutionally diverse and mind-bogglingly complex. Each little part of it is focused on his, her or its own profit. So when it breaks, as it has just now, organizing a fix is a Herculean task. The expert on the PBS NewsHour suggested it might take months, if not a year or more.

A letter writer to the NYT suggested a much simpler solution. Take desperate Haitians waiting for asylum at our southern border, give them temporary working visas, and train them as truck drivers. This could be done in maybe six weeks, before the crucial holiday season. Then (and this is my extrapolation) the US government could use the Defense Production Act to commandeer idle trucks and get the cargo moving.

The point is not that this could or even should happen. There are obvious non-economic considerations. And there are simpler solutions still: recruiting the National Guard to drive the trucks.

The point is that our economic system—with a thousand points of profit and over a thousand human egos to match—is simply incapable of organizing such an effort in a reasonable time, at least without strong external pressure. By the time all the derrick operators, trucking companies and individual truckers finished their profit analyses and marketing plans—and negotiated a nationwide agreement—the holiday season would have passed, with dismal results. A herd of cats just can’t respond expeditiously.

The problem is not just our own global competition with China. Something similar is happening inside China, too. China’s own internal economy is just now slowing rapidly because there isn’t enough reliable electric power for its factories. Why is that? Most of China’s power comes from coal, and it has stopped buying coal from its erstwhile principal supplier, Australia, for political reasons. So China’s heavy-handed quest for global political supremacy is now at odds with its maintaining and growing its domestic economy as it recovers from Covid-19.

Thus imperium is no panacea, either. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and China proved that—at least before Deng Xiaoping and now increasingly under Xi Jinping. No single leader, or even a small group, can possibly master all the skills and specialties required to run an impossibly complex modern nation well. And single leaders are far more likely to let extraneous geopolitical concerns interfere with a good plan for economic success.

Yet extreme capitalism, as reigns in our country now (more so in Texas), also doesn’t provide good large-scale, long-term contingency planning. Somehow, human societies have to find a middle ground between the rampant individualism among people and corporations that now prevails in the US (and especially in Texas) and the stifling central control that once prevailed in Communist China and Russia and is now making a resurgence there.

The US under FDR, and China after Deng Xiaoping but before Xi, are good places to start looking. The quest for a proper balance will—if our species survives global warming and nuclear proliferation—probably take most of our new century.

One of the most interesting articles I’ve read on the subject was published by the Economist about two years ago. It noted the last century’s grand political battles over free markets and central planning. It referred to the well-recognized failure of centrally-planned economies like the old Soviet Union’s and “Red” China’s before Deng Xiaoping.

But it also made two crucial points of recent history and technology. First, Russian and Chinese central planning had failed before the computer revolution came of age and before the advent of Big Data, the Internet and artificial intelligence. (Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, and the Soviet Union fell in 1991, while the Internet didn’t begin public operation until 1996). Maybe central planning might work better in the age of super-computers and massive online collection of Big Data in real time, with AI to help in analysis.

Second, and equally important, the article pointed out that individual corporations, including mammoth ones like Wal-Mart and Amazon, are already taking advantage of these new computer capabilities. With the aid of modern computers, Big Data and AI, they have independently developed highly successful central planning for what amount to nation-sized economies.

So why couldn’t competent government, which uses already uses supercomputers to predict the weather and the paths of hurricanes, and to study the three-billion-base-pair human genome, also do some useful planning when markets fail, as in the current supply-chain crisis?

Of course the best solution would be government and private planners working together to solve a problem, perhaps with closely linked computers. But in the meantime, with each corporation and many oligarchs focused on the isolated parts of the economy that affect their own bottom lines, no one is minding the store. In this case, the “store” is what our Founders, in our Constitution, called the “general welfare.”

If we wish to “promote the general welfare,” as our Constitution commands, we had better start developing some stronger institutions to do so. In a postwar effort to avoid another World War II, our own nation took a leading role in promoting international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization and the United Nations. Maybe what we need now is to focus on institutions that can fill the planning gap between those global institutions and the computer systems of Wal-Mart and Amazon.

In any event, our planning at the national and state levels self-evidently needs improvement. That’s the plain message of our lackluster response to the Covid-10 pandemic, the Texas Freeze-Out, the current supply-chain bottlenecks, the resulting inflation, and the SWA’s recent weekend debacle.

We need fewer ideologues and fewer people with preconceived points to prove. We need more competent technocratic experts, endowed with the latest technology, who just want to make our economy work. The latter are what we occasionally call “technocrats,” mostly in developing countries, and what so-called “conservative” ideologues deride as “bureaucrats.” But to paraphrase Mark Twain again, I don’t care what you call them, as long as they get the plan right.

Permalink to this post

More on Airline Vaccine Mandates

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

In an earlier essay, I analyzed how airlines’ continuing refusal to impose vaccine mandates on eligible crew and passengers reflects disordered thinking, as does eligible people’s refusal to get vaccinated. This note adds another reason why airlines should impose the mandates and suggests how easy and cheap doing so could be.

Covid-19 is nothing like the common cold, or even the flu. It’s a nasty, dangerous disease that attacks multiple organs. It can be utterly debilitating and, in so-called “long haulers,” can last for months or years. It kills about 1.6% of those diagnosed with it. It’s nothing to take lightly.

Unfortunately, moron-politicians have made minimizing the virus’ threat part of their career plans. They have no medical or epidemiological expertise and virtually no doctors or experts on their side. But they persist in understating the pandemic because today’s extreme political division and the information silos that support it let them get attention and votes that way. Wishful thinking is a common human failing, which bent pols can exploit.

Therefore one of the most important advantages of vaccination mandates is psychological and probative. A vaccinated person takes Covid-19 seriously. Requiring all eligible crew and passengers to be vaccinated shows fliers that everyone on board takes the pandemic seriously.

My own personal nightmare is being seated next to, or immediately fore or aft of, an unvaccinated mask-scofflaw. He/she wears a surgical-style mask that repeatedly falls below the nose, or takes it off entirely when not eating or drinking. Worse yet, the person is hoarse, coughing or sneezing and sounds sick.

When I ask gently for correction, he/she yells at me, harangues me, or gets into a fight, thereby increasing my risk of infection. A flight attendant gets involved, and the situation escalates.

This perfectly plausible nightmare is why I—and many in my social circle—won’t fly again until at least one domestic airline imposes a vaccine mandate.

Yes, there are “breakthrough” infections of the vaccinated. Vaccinated people can die and have died from Covid, and they can spread the virus.

But vaccination makes all the difference in a person’s attitude and protective action. If everyone is vaccinated, I know that my seat-mate, the passengers in nearby rows, and my flight attendant will all be my allies against the virus, not my medical enemies. They will wear masks when appropriate and are likely to wear them properly. They will think about how to protect themselves and others.

Think maybe that sort of comfort might entice more people to fly?

Anyway, implementing a mandate is not nearly as hard as worriers and naysayers think. The cabin crew need not be involved at all.

Every airline has an online reservation service. Just require passengers, in making a reservation, to upload images of their CDC vaccination cards or a link to any reputable online vaccination verification service. They can do this along with their names and personal profiles.

Then hire a bunch of suspicious folk with law-enforcement backgrounds to check the online submissions and reject any that look bogus. Hire a few legal types to ask for additional information and adjudicate disputes.

Every one of these new hires can work online, from home. When/if a refusal is final, they can decline the reservation and refund any money paid. If the alleged “proof” of vaccination appears fraudulent, they can bar the applicant from reserving online for a decent penalty period, say, six months or a year. The airline should publicize these penalties prominently on its website, in advance, to discourage fraud. The computer system can enforce the bars.

Voilá! The entire process can be managed online, and all new or critical personnel can work from home, with appropriate changes in software and systems. As it always does, the TSA will make sure that all those boarding are who they claim to be, at no additional cost whatsoever.

Would I fly again—after more than nineteen months of being grounded—if just one domestic airline broke ranks and implemented such a system? Sure.

And that airline would have my lifetime loyalty—totally apart from frequent-flier miles—for showing good judgment, good management, and empathy and care for workers and passengers. How about you?

Permalink to this post

Disordered Thinking on Covid Mandates

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

For a nation of practical people, our thinking about Covid vaccines and vaccine mandates is astonishingly disordered. About a third of us can’t seem to apply simple arithmetic to weigh the odds of getting sick and/or dying with or without vaccines. Our corporate CEOs similarly can’t seem to think straight about their workers or their customers, the majority of whom are vaccinated and would feel safer if their fellow workers and customers were vaccinated, too.

This essay summarizes the Covid risk numbers and analyzes our predicament. The table below uses linked, publicly available sources to compile the annual odds of suffering or dying from various causes unrelated and related to Covid-19. How the odds are “normalized” to one year is explained in the last column of the table and in the notes below it.

Annual Odds (in 100,000) of Dying or Suffering from Causes Unrelated and Related to Covid
Odds of	Odds Per 100,000	How Normalized to a Year
Dying in Car Crash	20	In linked source
Dying in airplane crash	0.01	In linked source
Catching Covid Nationwide (overall*)	8,203	See Note 1
Dying of Covid in Texas (if unvaccinated*)	141	See Note 1
Dying of Covid in Calif. (if unvaccinated*)	108	See Note 1
Dying of Covid in Ohio (if unvaccinated*)	121	See Note 1
Dying of Covid in Vermont (if unvaccinated*)	32	See Note 1
Having serious post-vaccine heart complications	0.1	See note 2
Dying post-vaccine from any cause	1	See note 3

* The CDC apparently does not routinely distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated patients in recording cases or deaths, let alone state by state. At least I was unable to find these numbers after a diligent search of the CDC Website for Covid. This is not surprising, since the CDC began collecting data over half a year before any vaccine was approved on an emergency basis (the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on December 11, 2020).

So the numbers in the table marked by an asterisk (*) are estimated. We can’t use the numbers from relatively small clinical trials showing vaccine effectiveness, because: (1) no vaccine existed for nearly half the relevant pandemic period, beginning January 2020; and (2) without direct data, there’s no way to know what part of a total population was never exposed to the virus. The best we can do for cases is divide the overall case number by the total population of the United States to get an overall infection-risk factor for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. (Vaccines’ effectiveness varies with time and ranges from above 80% for hospitalization—apparently increasing slightly with time [scroll down to graphs]—to just above 50% for mere infection among nursing-home residents.) The studies so far just don’t permit accurate calculation of risk of infection among the vaccinated generally.

Death risk is another story. We have a solid number (in the table’s bottom row) for all deaths after vaccination, from all causes whatsoever, presumably including breakthrough infections. Since this death rate is for each dose, rather than for each person, it overestimates the death rate per person and therefore is a conservative estimate. (People who took the Pfizer or Moderna two-dose vaccines had two chances to die afterward, but not all the vaccines were double-dose.) The table’s death rates for the unvaccinated reflect subtraction of this conservatively high rate for vaccinated people (1 out of 100,000) from the state-by-state rates calculated after normalization per Note 1.

Note 1: To normalize to a year, multiply total cases deaths per 100K (for precise tallies of deaths by state, from this interactive map [scroll down]), by 365. Then divide by 590, the number of days from February 29, 2020—the date when CDC reporting began—to October 9, 2021, the date of publication of this post. Then round to the nearest whole number.

Note 2: The most common, non-transient and serious side effect of vaccination is myocarditis or pericarditis. A total of 906 confirmed cases occurred over more than 396,000,000 reported doses given. This fraction is normalized to an annual number as in Note 1. This number includes all cases of myocarditis and pericarditis occurring after vaccination, without proof that the vaccine caused the effect. Therefore it is conservatively high.

Note 3: The CDC data show a total of 8,390 confirmed deaths, from any cause whatsoever, occurring after 396,000,000 reported doses given, normalized to an annual number as in Note 1.

* * *

What rational person, looking at these stats, wouldn’t decide to get vaccinated ASAP? Covid-19 is a nasty disease, even if not fatal. It can last for months or years and ruin your life, not to mention your family’s. The annual risk of catching it or even dying from it is orders of magnitude (powers of ten) higher than dying in a car or plane crash, and orders of magnitude higher than getting serious complications and/or dying from the vaccine itself. For people who assess risks by weighing the odds, getting vaccinated is a mathematical “no brainer.”

CEOs and board members of major corporations are generally well-informed and sensible people accustomed to quantitative reasoning. So it’s unlikely there are many vaccine refuseniks among them. They get themselves and their families vaccinated because they stay informed and don’t take unnecessary risks. (Some reporter or Ph.D. candidate should research these numbers. I’d be surprised if research turns up more unvaccinated, medically eligible people among CEOs, members of corporate boards and their families than single digits in percentage terms.)

If this is so, why would business chiefs let their workers and customers go unvaccinated? That doesn’t make any sense.

It might not matter if workers commute to work by Zoom or if workers and customers can spread out, as in a capacity-limited department store or supermarket. But almost every business that produces a physical product has venues like assembly lines where workers must work in close proximity, increasing their risk of infection. As a result, businesses such as slaughterhouses had to shut down, as early as April 2020, sometimes repeatedly, to stem their internal pandemics and reconfigure their production lines to provide more protection to workers and less access to the virus.

So why didn’t corporate leaders mandate vaccines for their workers long before the highly contagious delta variant arrived in the United States? Its arrival in and likely dominance of the UK were known in April of this year. Now, a mere six months later, it’s estimated to be causing 99% of current US cases nationwide [scroll down to “SARS-CoV-2 Variants”]. Major businesses that have difficulty with social distancing, such as theaters, sports stadia, and restaurants, would have fared much better economically with early vaccines, testing and mask mandates for both workers and customers.

One sector in which corporate resistance to vaccine mandates has been especially devastating is travel. As early as March of this year [scroll down to original post date], the CDC recommended that unvaccinated people avoid cruises. By August, a number of prominent cruise lines had mandated vaccines. Yet, two months later, US airlines are just now beginning a slow process of making sure that their crews are vaccinated, with United and American leading the pack. Vaccine mandates for passengers are still not even on the table.

Think about that. What’s the ratio of passengers to crew on airplanes? Probably about fifty to one, and more on long-haul, wide body planes. The pilots mostly stay in their cockpit. The flight attendants constantly move around. Although often close to each other in their work and sitting areas, they seldom stay close to any particular passenger for more than thirty seconds.

So you don’t need a degree in statistics to understand where the big risk is: passenger-to-passenger contagion. On most airplanes, many passengers sit cheek-by-jowl with complete strangers for as long as the flight lasts—five hours for transcontinental flights and fourteen hours for trans-Pacific flights. The latter point is why Qantas, the Australian national airline, has announced [scroll down to “International travel requirements”] that it will require both vaccines and recent Covid tests for its international passengers, albeit starting in December.

In comparison, cruise-ship passengers sleep and can stay in separate cabins. They can even take meals in their staterooms, with room service. They can avoid close contact with any other passengers simply by using common areas strategically and taking the stairs to avoid elevators. (Long before Covid, my wife and I routinely took the stairs on cruise ships, even when transiting multiple decks, to avoid contagion with colds and flu. Elevators are obvious hot spots for airborne contagion, and using the stairs is good exercise.)

Airline passengers have none of these options. Worse yet, passengers in adjacent rows, and sometimes even right next to you, are usually complete strangers. These strangers stay right next to you for hours, far longer than in any theater, stadium or restaurant. Nevertheless, as of the date of this post, no US-based airline, to my knowledge, has mandated vaccines for passengers. Why not?

For both workers and passengers, the crux of the matter is feeling safe. How can you feel safe when there are no mandatory steps to keep you safe from contagion?

Mask mandates help a bit, but they suffer from two big disadvantages. The most important is that some types of masks are intrinsically unsafe, and many wearers don’t seem to care. Surgical-style masks are easier than N-95s to put on and make it easier to breathe. But they can fall down below the nose, easily and often, where many mask wearers repeatedly let them stay. Imagine yourself sitting next to a passenger coughing and sneezing and letting the mask drop below his nose every five minutes. Feel safe now?

If my own social circle (including Zoom) is any guide, the absence of mandates for vaccination, testing and effective masking can explain the airline industry’s slow economic recovery. We’re mostly comfortably retired or semi-retired people in our seventies. Before the pandemic, most of us made from four to six round-trip flights per year, including transcontinental and even trans-Pacific flights.

Post-delta, a few of us have already started traveling by air, even internationally. But I would estimate that maybe half my social circle has not traveled by air at all since the Covid pandemic began. I personally have not set foot on an airplane since February 26, 2020. I don’t intend to until the industry gets its act together.

So far, it hasn’t. Instead, it’s awaiting President Biden’s regulatory vaccine mandate to give it “cover” for requiring even workers to get vaccinated. It appears to be avoiding doing the obvious to make passengers safer.

As my wife and I travel by car between her home in Berkeley, CA, and mine in Santa Fe, NM, we pass the desert town of Mojave, CA. There airlines have created a huge parking lot for temporarily mothballed airplanes. (The dry desert air there is kind to aluminum.) Since the pandemic-caused economic crash in April of last year, the mothballed fleet has shrunk a bit. But it was still there, and still sizeable, when we passed it last month.

Resurrecting the airline industry is not proverbial rocket science. It’s simply common sense, coupled with a bit of empathy toward workers and passengers. Corporate leaders ought to have both, even if they themselves travel in corporate jets with four to twelve passengers and few if any strangers.

The millions of currently unfilled job openings have a simple cause, now becoming increasingly clear. Paul Solman, PBS Newshour’s economics commentator, calls it “the Great Resignation.” Many workers feel underpaid, abused and marginalized. Many have for years. But for millions, the crux came when they were expected to show up for work and expose themselves to Covid-19 without much thought to protecting them with vaccines, testing, social distance, or masks. It got worse as they saw their co-workers and families decimated. The pandemic, it seems, has made millions of workers see just how little protective “leadership” they were getting from their bosses during the worst pandemic in a century.

So the slow recovery of businesses like airlines, theaters, stadia, and restaurants is a matter of simple cause and effect. Make workers feel safe, and bosses can employ more of them, perhaps even without raising wages. Make customers/passengers feel safe, and there will be more of them.

To do that, bosses have to stop pandering to know-nothings and extremists and get to work on safety. They have to use all the known tools for controlling the pandemic. Most of all, they have to use them in order of known and proven effectiveness—vaccines first, testing second, and distancing third. Masking, while also effective, is very hard to get right and keep right in crowds.

Covid safety is not a marketing ploy, far less a brand popularity contest. It’s not something that proper “messaging” can control. It’s an application of cause and effect to now-well-known principles of science and to the public’s reaction to their application. When people’s health and very lives are at stake, they pay attention, whether they are workers or customers.

Yes, the know-nothings might sue to challenge mandates. That’s a routine legal expense. But millions of would-be passengers, like me and my social circle, will just not fly. Which is worse, a sizeable downturn of unpredictable duration, with mothballed planes in the desert, or a routine legal expense? It seems a question that answers itself. (Anyone who thinks the refuseniks are going to win, let alone for big damages, doesn’t understand the US legal system and its distinction from politics.)

At the end of the day, corporate bosses must see that the vaccine-resistance “movement” has no rational basis. Moron-politicians pander to it and inflame it for perceived political advantage having nothing to do with Covid safety or economic recovery. If not clear from common sense, this point should become increasingly clear from practice, as simple mandates begin to break the back of vaccine resistance.

Corporate failure to understand and apply these truths is not “leadership.” It’s disordered thinking along the public’s last line of defense in an increasingly corporation-dominated world. If disordered thinking retards the economic recovery and cuts bottom lines, corporate leaders have no one but themselves to blame.

Endnote on Future Pandemics. As I outlined in an earlier essay, the continuous and unstoppable evolution of viruses, coupled with increasing population density and air travel, threatens to increase the number and severity of future pandemics. Just since the turn of our new century, we have had two near-pandemics and one averted one: MERS, SARS and Ebola. The death rate from Covid is about 1.6%. That for Ebola ranged from 22% to 88% in various outbreaks; what saved us is that Ebola is not airborne.

But what happens if a new, airborne pandemic evolves, with a death rate somewhere between Covid’s and Ebola’s? Airplanes are by far the principal vectors for global transmission of airborne pandemics. So airlines’ reaction to Covid has been a dress rehearsal for unknown future threats.

Unfortunately, that rehearsal has been an unmitigated disaster. If the death rate were as little as three times as high (about 10%), we would now be in the midst of a global economic depression worse than that before World War II. Supply chains would not just be strained; they would be completely broken. Airlines would be mostly out of business. To avoid such a future catastrophe, airlines must start, right now, making health decisions rapidly, based on science and public safety, not marketing or politics.

ERRATUM: An earlier version of this post put the Covid death rate at 3.4%. That was an early worldwide figure from the WHO, taken from this source. Today I calculate the current US deaths/cases ratios as follows: for the whole US 1.6%, and for some states, from the interactive map in this source: Texas 1.6%, Ohio 1.6%, California 1.5%, and Vermont 0.9% Thanks to Commenter Maxwells22 (on Daily Kos version) for pointing out the error.

Permalink to this post

Early-Childhood Education: our Future’s Most Critical Infrastructure

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

California has the world’s fifth-largest economy. It just decided to invest $2.9 billion in early-childhood education. That includes a free “extra” year of education before kindergarten, for children at age four. This essay describes why the entire US must do the same—and more!—to maintain our competitiveness and global leadership.

The science is absolutely clear. The years of early childhood—especially those before conventional education now begins—are the most important for children’s mental and social development. During those years, children’s brains are growing and developing rapidly. Their neurons are exploding in both numbers and their connections to other neurons, which are the means by which our brains record our memories and intelligence.

Starve the brain of “input” during those years, and you have a stunted mind all the way to and through adulthood. Provide it with high-quality education, designed by people trained to nurture young minds, and you create competence, reasoning power, social skills, and even the occasional genius. The gain in mind power per unit of exposure to learning is greater during these early years than at any time during a person’s life.

Today we have extraordinary science to verify and reinforce these points. We have CAT and PET scanners that can peer into living, growing brains. But we don’t really need them. The Jesuits have long recognized the importance of early education, saying, “Give me the child until the age of seven, and I will give you the man.” Most sources attribute this saying to Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who died in 1556.

If you are a keen observer, you can see the process in operation yourself. Watch a bright, healthy child of one to two years old. See where and how he or she shifts and focuses attention. Try to direct and focus that attention and see what happens. All this occurs before the child has acquired language, even before the first words are spoken.

That’s why affluent parents often start reading to their kids even before the kids have acquired language. That’s why some parents play classical music for kids still in the womb—an effort that research suggests has a stimulative effect.

One of the most important factors in preschoolers’ mental development is the number of different words they hear in the course of each day. Better-educated households offer their kids a richer vocabulary, producing better language skills. Professional early-childhood education can help close this educational missile gap.

And therein lies the rub. Today’s kindergarten takes kids at 5 years old. So if the Jesuits are right—and modern science says they are!—public education now neglects five out of the most important seven years of a child’s development.

That’s 71%, nearly three-quarters. It’s also the most important three-quarters, because the explosive pace of postpartum brain growth soon has to slow down for the rest of the body to catch up. Children who enjoy a rich learning environment—being read to at night and having heard Mozart in the womb—thrive. Those that don’t suffer lifetime deficiencies in comparison.

A friend of mine, a retired elementary school teacher, tells a tragic story. Once she had charge of several four-year-old children from a poor background, for just a short time. There was nothing wrong with them. They seemed to be healthy and active, and they spoke normally. But they couldn’t name common colors like red, green and orange. When given a children’s book to hold and examine, they didn’t know what to do with it. They didn’t open it or turn the pages: they didn’t know how to start. It seemed they had never seen a book.

My friend concluded that their household environments had been learning deserts. How different they might have been if immersed for two or three years in a home where their parents read to them every night! How might they have grown in a professionally run, high-quality learning environment for just a few hours per day!

That is what free, universal, professional, early-childhood education would do. It would give all children the rich learning environment that those four children lacked, regardless of their families’ origins, backgrounds and income. Nothing we could do as a society would be as cost-effective in redressing the rampant inequality that is now tearing our society apart.

But that’s just the beginning of early-childhood education’s benefits. Households mired in poverty often have other problems, too. Children there may suffer from absent or abusive parents, inadequate nutrition, social chaos, or just simple neglect. With five or six hours of daily education, they could experience a different world and come to know it. The attraction of that different world would give them a taste for learning that would last them all their lives. And meals offered in early-childhood schools could make up for critical gaps in children’s nutrition, which can affect not only learning and intelligence, but growth and general health, too.

Early-childhood education’s benefits don’t stop with the children themselves. They also benefit the parents or other custodial adults. For the kids involved—ages two to five or even one to five—early-childhood education would substitute for day care. It would allow adult custodians to go to work full time and earn a decent living, without worrying about the kids.

Some day-care centers provide little beyond custodial care, i.e., baby-sitting services and some toys to play with. Proper institutions of early-childhood education would provide every child with a carefully planned, beautifully rich educational environment based on all the recent discoveries about children’s psychology and mental development. With adjustments for age, it would mark the difference between prison (a holding facility) and university.

Universal early-childhood education would also elevate workers in what is now known as “day care.” It would convert today’s day-care centers into sophisticated educational institutions at the cutting edge of child-development science.

Those who now change diapers and wipe rear ends would do so under the supervision of people with degrees in child development and/or special training. They would learn while they work and have good pathways to career advancement. The whole process of converting from “day care” to early-childhood education would improve the training, day-to-day work, career development, prestige and pay of what are now low-paid day-care workers.

For centuries, if not eons, educating children has been left to overburdened women as an onus of gender. Apparently no one but the Jesuits recognized as early how important it is in giving us bright, reasonable, knowledgeable citizens, not to mention the occasional genius.

Now, with the aid of modern science, we know how mind-bogglingly important educating our youngest children is, beginning as early as possible after birth, and maybe even before. We also know how important it is to liberate half of our potential workforce—women—from work that many are not good at, many don’t want to do, and many are too ambitious in other careers to do well, regardless of talent.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all is inequality. If the affluent don’t have the time to play Mozart to their fetuses and read each night to their kids, they can afford to buy machines or hire people that can. Poor parents can’t do either. So their children suffer from lifetime stunted mental development through no fault of their own.

This vicious cycle entrenches multi-generational poverty. At the same time, our society (outside of affluent homes) belittles early-childhood development, often relegating it (especially in poor neighborhoods) to people who are not properly trained, not properly respected, and (considering the importance of their work) grossly underpaid.

All these things need to change. The society that changes them first and best will have the same sort of advantage over others that the US once enjoyed by virtue of its early introduction of universal, free public education in general.

Once in the vanguard in that regard, the US is now late to the party. So playing catch-up may be the most important infrastructure of all. In the long run, what could possibly be more important than properly nurturing the mental and social development of all our children to their full potential?

Permalink to this post

The Dems’ Self-Defeating Self-Negotiation

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Few things have been more frustrating than watching the Dems negotiate their two big infrastructure bills among themselves. They’ve let themselves be sucker-punched by Republicans and Joe Manchin.

Not only do they seem to have no idea why or how. They don’t even seem to feel the pain.

Two facts are not just relevant but crucial. First, the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill enjoys such overwhelming popularity among all voters that it was reportedly able to garner 69 votes in the Senate, even in the current dysfunctional, hyper-partisan climate. Second, although less well known, the “Build Back Better” bill—the so-called “partisan,” “soft” or “social” infrastructure bill—also enjoys wide popularity.

So if Dems want to expand their majorities in Congress and make sure that the Demagogue never holds the White House again, the very best thing they can do is turn popular support for both infrastructure bills into laws that magnify Joe Biden’s presidency. They can do that by emphasizing what the bills will do, in real life, both for Dems and former Dems who went Republican because the Demagogue promised them so-far-elusive magic.

Yet what have the Dems done so far? They’ve let the GOP and Joe Manchin limit the debate to the price tags.

That approach beggars both effective strategy and common sense. Every seller of goods knows that you discuss price last. So does everyone who’s ever negotiated with a spouse or parent over a desirable but costly purchase. You first establish how desirable the purchase or investment is and all the good it can do. Then you get to the price.

But even that’s only half the story. In this case, discussing price first is catastrophically dumb because it falls right into the GOP’s routine propaganda game plan. It lends itself to GOP-incited fears of deficits and inflation.

Millions of workers left the Dems to vote Republican because they bought a stale bouquet of vapid abstractions and forgot their own real interests. For a decade or more, the has GOP sold nothing real for workers—not improved health care, not a bigger minimum wage, not better collective bargaining, not getting 60,000 factories back from China, not a clampdown on discrimination against police misconduct, harassment and discrimination against women and minorities, and definitely not keeping tech monopolies from throwing their weight around and abusing workers and small businesses like medieval empires. Instead, the GOP has sold workers “smaller government” (smaller than what?), “lower taxes” (lower for whom?), “less regulation” (less than what?) and “liberty” (which can mean anything from freedom to practice your religion to the right to kill yourself with Covid by refusing vaccines).

Price tags aren’t real to the average Republican voter, let alone a Dem. At least they aren’t when they’re in the trillions. The average voter has as good a grasp of what a trillion dollars means as how far a light-year is. All those price tags do is scare people, which is precisely what Republicans want.

What voters need to know is what the infrastructure bills will do for them. Not how many trillions they will cost, but whether they’ll give the average family $150 more per week for child care, or their newborns free birth-to-kindergarten education, to match the free public K-through-12 education that once put the US among the world’s most advanced societies. Voters want to know that their Congress reads the news and understands that science now considers early-childhood education one of the most powerful predictors of children’s success in life.

Our nation is not (yet) like a poor family, which can afford only so much and has to budget everything. There is enough flexibility in our financing to consider what we want and how we can get it before we start talking price. If the Dems discuss price at all at this stage, they should do so privately, without a word about the bottom line leaking to the public. They should be discussing all that they should invest to fill at least part of the void of multi-decade disinvestment in physical infrastructure and our people.

When a deal emerges, Dems should avoid mentioning the ten-year “top line” as scrupulously as GOP leaders reiterate the nonsense phrase “job-killing taxes.” [See Endnote below.] Why? Because the top line applies over an entire decade—a point most voters don’t understand. I don’t know any household that budgets for ten years at a time. Does yours?

If the top line comes out as $2.5 trillion over ten years, Dems should report it as “$250 billion per year, as compared to $778 billion for the military in 2020, and $1.059 trillion for Social Security payments and administration in 2019.” Then, without stopping for breath, they should cite how much of this relief will be paid for by tax increases. Last, and most important, they should enumerate what the money will be used for, in the order of importance to working voters, especially right-leaning ones.

Dems should repeat relentlessly and incessantly what voters will get. This, of course, will require the disputatious Dems, uncharacteristically, to show a bit of discipline and zip their lips for the time being. They must work this out first in lengthy negotiations. In the meantime, they can enumerate the things they think the GOP base will want most, as long as they are sure there will be some money in the final bills for each of those things.

Dems, especially moderates, should work hard to figure out what swing voters want most. Here’s my estimate of their priorities, not my own: (1) guaranteed family leave; (2) continuing child support (perhaps based on need); (3) universal free community college; (4) free early-childhood education (universal pre-K) and subsidized child care; (5) disaster relief, including strengthening infrastructure against wildfires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes; (6) climate-change mitigation; and (7) climate change deceleration, including things like electric-car chargers. (Note that climate change deceleration is the last priority, although not so in my own list.)

Finally, the Dems need to borrow a page from the GOP persuaders’ book. It’s not duplicitous to emphasize different things to different audiences, as long as everything ends up in the bill with greater-than-token funding and the eventual bottom line (seldom mentioned) is right. The Dems can and should make different persuasive efforts, with different lists of priorities (not in order of funding), to: (1) the GOP base; (2) moderate Dems, (3) progressive Dems, and (4) the constituents of the Senate holdouts, including Sens. Manchin and Sinema.

Now, however, is a time to think and bargain in private. The time for posturing, play-acting and nonsense propaganda will come once the Build Back Better bill takes shape. Premature release of a bill this important makes its survival as difficult as premature birth does a baby’s.

The part of the electorate that has swallowed GOP propaganda for years may be unreachable. But not entirely. For a substantial part of the GOP base, polls show a growing cognitive dissonance between routine GOP nonsense and what voters want to see in their own lives.

Most voters—especially non-college-educated voters in the new GOP base of lower-paid working people—are poor judges of abstract arguments, nonsense or otherwise. They are not poor judges of their own needs.

Therefore the Dems need to come up with an accurate list of benefits to be included in both bills, but especially the Build Back Better Act. Numbers are secondary.

Tell voters, as soon as possible, what you are going to do. Then itemize it, not in terms of government expense, but in terms of benefits to the typical or average voter. If government expenses must be dislosed, state them as yearly expenses, not ten-year totals. Voters will thank congressional leaders for making things simple and more like their own households’ finances.

At the end of the day, the ten-year total is only a phantom. Many voters will be dead before, if ever, the final bill comes due. And the actual final bill is as uncertain as the future. It will depend on such unknowable things as future interest rates, future presidential and congressional action, disasters and pandemics, financial panics, international tension, supply-line diversification and rationalization, future innovations and industrial disruptions, future climate-spawned disasters, and maybe even new wars.

So tell the voters what they’ll be getting and what the cost will be next year and the year after, in the order they want to hear. Then leave the crystal ball—including the eventual total bill—with prophets and the CBO.

Endnote: “Job-Killing Taxes.” No matter how often Republicans repeat it, this phrase is pernicious nonsense. Taxes that support government programs pay for jobs in government, doing all the policing, soldiering, testing, regulating, teaching and scientific research that have produced, and/or continue to produce, the following government achievements: (1) helping fight and beat the Nazis and Imperial Japan; (2) inventing, perfecting and maintaining the nuclear weapons that have deterred wars between major powers fighting on their own territory for 76 years and counting; (3) resolving major financial panics and recessions with fiscal and monetary policy after private industry failed miserably in preventing them (including, among others, the Great Depression, the recent Great Recession and the receding pandemic-caused recession); (4) developing and/or supporting private development of (a) high-altitude flight, (b) space travel, and (c) the Internet; (5) providing support and supervision for the development of, and ensuring the safety and efficacy of, drugs, medical devices and vaccines, including those for smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, seasonal flu, cervical cancer, and Covid-19, (6) keeping our workplaces safe and healthy (OSHA), our food free of contaminants and nutritious (USDA and FDA), and our soil, air and water cleansed of the worst known pollutants (EPA); (7) providing a floor of protection against fraudulent, coercive and otherwise illegal conduct by private businesses (DOJ, FDA, CFPB); (8) keeping tabs on our major storms, hurricanes and tornadoes (NOAA), plus earthquakes and volcano eruptions (Geological Survey), and warning us of them when possible; (9) and maintaining basic rules against discrimination among and harassment of workers in private businesses and in state and federal government (DOJ and EEOC).

If taxes go to toward our “safety nets,” to rescue desperate people in difficult circumstances (as in the recent pandemic with the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021), or simply for the aged (as in Social Security and Medicare), they go right back into the economy as spending on necessities. Why? Most of the people who receive this help live hand to mouth and spend most or all of what they receive.

In contrast, money that corporations and the rich save by evading taxes, whether legally or not, often goes into passive investment and savings, where it can languish outside the general economy for years. This money does little but inflate the prices of securities, making the rich richer and doing little or nothing for the poor.

Permalink to this post