Some Labor Day Questions

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First published in 2015, I’ve updated it for today.  In an ideal world, I’ll be able to update it again next year, with a yet more optimistic tone.

The Wall Street Journal asked some questions on Labor Day 2012, and supplied some answers.  Here are some of those questions and answers, which remain as valid this Labor Day.

  • Q: How are America’s workers doing? Not good. Over the past decade, over the ups and downs of the economy, taking inflation into account, the compensation of the typical worker — wages and benefits—basically haven’t risen at all. … The Labor Department recently said that 6.1 million workers in 2009-2011 have lost jobs that they’d had for at least three years. Of those, 45% hadn’t found work as of January 2012. … Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday that unemployment is still two percentage points higher than normal….
  • Q: Things ARE getting better, though. The US economy is creating jobs, right? Back in December 2007 when the recession began, there were about two jobless workers for every job opening.  When the economy touched bottom in mid-2009, there were more than six unemployed for every job.  At last count, the BLS says there were 3.4 jobless for every opening.
  • Q: How much of this elevated unemployment is because the unemployed just don’t have the skills that employers are looking for right now?  …the bulk of the evidence is a lot of the unemployment really is the old-fashioned kind: the kind that would go away if the economy was growing at a stronger pace. Mr. Bernanke said as much at the [2012] Jackson Hole conference….

In 2019, the jobs situation was drastically improved.  The overall unemployment rate was at an historic low, and there were more job openings than there were folks to fill them.  The black unemployment rate was at a record low.  The Hispanic unemployment rate was at a near record low.  The women unemployment rate was at a near record low.  Wages, both real and nominal, were growing.

The Wuhan Virus Situation severely damaged that, but by late 2020, our economy was in rapid recovery, GDP was up sharply, folks were getting jobs again, and inflation still was at an historic low despite that heating up economy.

We now have high, if slowing inflation, and the necessities of life: food, shelter, energy for heating/cooling our shelter, and fuel for getting to work remain priced well above what they were those nearly four years ago, with real wages lower than they were then, even if that gap is slowly closing.

Labor Day is here, and this time around, it represents the traditional beginning of the Presidential election campaign season. The question before us now is which of the two administrations currently on offer offers the better plan for getting us out of this lingering doldrum—the one that wants reduced regulation and smaller government or the one that sees government as the answer to our problems and wants to grow it commensurately.

Happy Labor Day.

“Honest Mistake”

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That’s the claim Maryland’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Wes Moore is making about his false claim of have earned a Bronze Star which he put on his application for a White House fellowship 18 years ago. At 27 years old, when he made his claim, Moore was old enough to know better. Somewhat older when he was discharged, he was still old enough to know better.

Moore’s claimed sequence of events:

While serving overseas with the Army, I was encouraged to fill out an application for the White House Fellowship by my deputy brigade commander. In fact, he helped me edit it before I sent it in.
At the time, he had recommended me for the Bronze Star. He told me to include the Bronze Star award on my application after confirming with two other senior-level officers that they had also signed off on the commendation.

So far, no problem. He was acting on his commander’s suggestion based on the award being recommended.

However.

Moore said he was “disappointed to learn” that he hadn’t received the Bronze Star towards the end of his deployment.
“But I was ready to begin the next phase of my life, because the reward for service is never an award—it’s the opportunity to give back to your country. When I returned home, I was focused on helping my fellow veterans, a mission I continue to advance as governor,” he said.
“Still, I sincerely wish I had gone back to correct the note on my application. It was an honest mistake, and I regret not making that correction….”

That last is his lie, and it’s indicative of his stolen valor. He knew by the end of his deployment—his own words—that the recommendation for his being awarded the Bronze Star had been turned down. He knew, further, that medal recommendations often are turned down. His pious-sounding words of serving others being its own reward are given the lie by those words of his immediately following.

That level of military decoration is not something any service member forgets about. He chose to not bother to correct his fellowship application after he knew the recommendation for his Bronze Star had been turned down.

Moore knew better, and he knows better. It would have been easy enough to check at the end of his deployment—which he hadn’t needed to do; he already knew: his own words, again. At the very least, his DD214, which every serviceman is issued upon discharge or retirement, lists all the awards and decorations—medals—that the service member received. He chose not to correct his “error” until it became public.

Alongside Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat Governor and Progressive-Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz’ stolen valor regarding his own lied-about retirement rank, this stolen valor behavior, this insult to our nation’s military personnel, both current and discharged/retired and those who’ve actually been in combat, been wounded or maimed, been killed defending our nation, is what Party does.

Wrong Mindset

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As self-driving cars, misnomerly termed AI-driven cars, become more common, or at least less uncommon, there is growing concern about the ethics of the AIs involved. It’s a valid question, but it aims at the wrong target.

What will the roadway scruples of AI look like?

What to do about avoiding collisions vs the consequences of an avoidance maneuver? Relatedly, dodge the large animal but don’t bother about the small animal? Which property is more legitimate to avoid if any avoidance maneuver means collision with something or damage to the maneuvering car—into the ditch or into the tree to avoid another collision.

There are easier questions, too, whose answers left to the AI are just examples of laziness.

Is taking the fastest route the core metric that should guide autonomous vehicles, or are other factors just as relevant? Focusing on getting to the destination quickly would allow self-driving ride-share vehicles to make more trips and more profit, but might result in more danger. Giving priority to safety alone could slow and snarl traffic. And what about choosing routes that let passengers enjoy the journey?

After all,

The trade-off between safety and speed is “the one thing that really affects 99% of the moral questions around autonomous vehicles,” says Shai Shalev-Shwartz, chief technology officer at Mobileye…. Shifting parameters between these two poles, he says, can result in a range of AI driving, from too reckless to too cautious, to something that seems “natural” and humanlike.
The software can also be calibrated to allow different driving styles, he says. So, for example, an autonomous sports car might drive more aggressively to enhance a sense of performance, an autonomous minivan might put the biggest emphasis on safety and an off-road vehicle might default to taking a scenic route.

There’s no need to leave those factors solely in the software. It’s just not that hard to break them out into separate routines, with the human car driver selecting one when he gets in and boots up his car. Planning a trip is what humans do now, whether a trip across town or to another city or the short trip to the grocery store, even if the latter is planned sub rosa. That needs to be in the hands of the human.

Even if we decide to turn driving over to the AI system running the autonomous vehicle, only the driving itself should be turned over—while maintaining human oversight and real-time overruling capability and responsibility during the driving. It’s hard enough for a human to make the value judgment call regarding a broad variety of collision scenarios, especially regarding those outlined at the start of this post. It’s impossible, at least for the foreseeable future, for humans to write code to wire those judgments into the software running a car.

Autonomous vehicles cannot be only AI operated. The human must be responsible for the decisions he makes in validating the car’s real-time decisions, or overruling them. Or flipping a switch and taking over the task of driving because the software has gotten over its code.

Kamala Harris’ Tax Policies

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And misallocation of those tax collections. Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to raise taxes on Americans and our corporations by some $5 trillion over the next decade and cut other taxes by more than $4 trillion. Or so she claims, especially regarding the latter. The former can be taken as gospel; raising taxes, especially on those Evil Rich Americans, is what Party does.

Under her plan, taxes would go up sharply on some high-income households, and top marginal tax rates would reach their highest point since 1986. The wealthiest investors and company founders would encounter sizable s that they don’t face under current law.

That capital-gains tax bill is made the more sizable by her plan to tax capital gains that haven’t been realized—i.e., gains that don’t exist.

Her claim to not have any tax increases on households making under $400,000 is shown to be a sham promise by her decision to ignore the effect her corporate tax increase to 28% and her increase in the diktated [sic] minimum corporate tax to 21% would have on middle-income workers and shareholders. The impact includes that tax on phantom capital gains that Harris wants to impose on us middle class workers who own shares of companies in our own, however miniscule, portfolios.

Left unanswered, so far, is what Harris intends to do with those tax revenues. Her silence here stands against the backdrop of the Biden-Harris administration’s years long cuts, in real terms, to funding for our defense establishment, leaving us the weakest we’ve been in decades at the moment of greatest national security danger we’ve faced in decades.

This tax policy also is one of the reasons Harris floated her price controls proposal—to try to distract us from the policies she’s serious about slipping past, a squirrel maneuver which a compliant press is actively aiding her with its concentration on price control proposals while minimizing coverage of the rest of her ideas.

Parenting is Hazardous to One’s Health?

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That’s what the United States Surgeon General says. His solution?

[Surgeon General Vivek] Murthy prescribes a mix of institutional actions such as child income-tax credits and workplace management training on one hand, and individual action such as seeking more mindfulness and self-care on the other.

Sure. The typical progressive mix of throw money at the problem along with feel good self-care claptrap. Nothing about taking care of the children directly. Nothing about local community involvement, and no, I’m not talking about it taking a village nonsense. I’m talking about misdiagnosing the problem because the Progressive-Democrat Surgeon General bureaucrat possessed of a medical degree has missed the underlying problem altogether.

It’s not the powerlessness of parents, nor is it their loneliness; although, the latter does play a part.

Parents have nearly complete power over their children except in some jurisdictions where government asserts itself as the sole possessor of children, whether through public schools locking parents out of their children’s education or emotional problems or directly by locking parents out of the government’s decisions regarding children’s sexual health. “Nearly complete” because parental power does not extend to abusing children. That’s the short and simple of parental power.

Now, the loneliness aspect. The loneliness of parents isn’t from being a parent, it’s from lack of community in the local neighborhood. The folks in too many neighborhoods don’t interact with each other, so they don’t know each other, so they’re in no position to support each other. Yes, yes, both parents work in a double potful of those cases. So what?

I grew up in a household where both my parents worked. At the same time, I grew up in a neighborhood where most households had both parents working. In those days, though, there weren’t backyard fences for individual privacy in the neighborhood. Instead, all those backyards, and front yards, too, functionally ganged together as one large playground for the neighborhood kids to play together, sometimes with ad hoc games, sometimes with less informal games: croquet courts, football (yes, we played tackle), sometimes out into the streets for baseball. The noise of children having fun was loud and common, from toddlers more closely watched by the various parents through high schoolers playing those football and baseball games, and soccer today—and where basketball hoops were set up in driveways, those games, too.

The parents interacted among each other, too. They all knew each other, and they all looked after all the kids, emphasizing their own, to be sure, but all of them. They even had each other’s kids over for snacks or a dinner.

We’ve lost that capacity now, with those ubiquitous fences isolating the back yards, and the children and adults, from each other. We’ve lost that capacity now, too, with today’s adults—parents—more self-centered, me-time demanding, and less community oriented. Today’s neighborhoods are eerily silent of kids playing outdoors.

That sense of community is much harder to achieve in many inner city (and a growing number of outer city) neighborhoods, but that’s not the loss of community among parents and families, it’s the destruction of community through two mechanisms. One is the crime rate. Too many city, county, and State governments reduce, or leave already inadequate, funding for policing the neighborhoods and don’t prosecute criminals that the police do catch. Crime expansion makes the neighborhoods unsafe for parents or children to go outdoors, for adults interact, and for children play with each other.

Community: gangs fill a lot of that—children need their own sense of community, and gangs, however dysfunctionally or crime-oriented fill a lot of that. Those gangs are potentiated, too, by the lack of policing in the neighborhoods.

The other aspect is the lack of effort in or facilities for encouraging newly arrived immigrants to assimilate into American culture. Instead, the newly arrived immigrants hold themselves apart, keeping themselves and their children apart. And they become old immigrants, establishing themselves in their own small (or large) enclaves, into which further newly arrived immigrants of the same culture go to live, and to stay apart.

Lose the loneliness by tearing down those fences; throwing the kids outside to play, without their electronics; talking to the neighbors; get adequate numbers of beat cops in the neighborhoods; prosecute crimes—especially by the gang members. Take concrete, measurable steps to get immigrants assimilated rather than held apart.