Tariffs and Economic Growth

Posted on by
Reply

The good editors at The Wall Street Journal spent a lot of ink and pixels decrying President Donald Trump’s (R) tariff moves. They saved the money bit for the end, though maybe not in the way they intended.

The best response to the warning from the first-quarter GDP decline would be for Mr Trump to call the whole tariff thing off. Short of that, settle for 10% across the board and call it a day. If that’s too much of a come-down, Republicans will need to pass a pro-growth tax cut and accelerate their deregulatory push as their best chance to liberate the economy from its tariff kidnapping.

Those first two sentences are irrelevant, whatever one might think of Trump’s tariff moves. Republicans need to pass a pro-growth tax cut and accelerate their deregulatory push—and pass serious spending cuts—independently of any tariff moves.

Demonstrating her Naked Bias

Posted on by
Reply

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is at it again. At a recent “judges’ conference” in Puerto Rico, she said this about “relentless attacks” on judges “designed to intimidate:”

The attacks are not random. They seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity. The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.

So far, so good. She’s decrying attacks by the likes of then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) on two Supreme Court Justices he specifically named. She’s decrying the smear campaign against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Right?

No. She went on, speaking to judges, not those who threaten them:

I urge you to keep going, keep doing what is right for our country, and I do believe that history will vindicate your service[.]

There it is. Jackson has prejudged cases currently before activist (my term) district judges who’ve overstepped their roles and are looking to dictate foreign policy from their benches, presaging how she’ll rule when any of those cases come before the Supreme Court.

Another Alternative

Posted on by
Reply

A letter writer in an earlier WSJ Letters section took issue with Allysia Finley’s op-ed in which Finley favored removing sugary foods from SNAP eligibility, characterizing Finley’s position with typical Leftist exaggeration:

[U]nder Ms Finley’s principle it would be appropriate for the government to withhold such benefits for given people unless they adhere to government diktats on such lifestyle choices as individual diets, exercise habits and so forth….

In Wednesday’s Letters section, another letter writer responded:

[T]hose who support taking sugary treats off the SNAP menu aren’t suggesting that the government monitor lifestyle choices—they’re simply encouraging the government to restrict harmful foods from the program. … Given that taxpayers are paying for that food, this would help fulfill the government’s fiduciary responsibility to manage taxpayers’ money wisely in another way: the policy would also minimize food-stamp recipients’ healthcare bills, for which taxpayers are also paying.

She’s absolutely right on this. There is, though, another alternative to the earlier letter writer’s exaggeration: if a citizen doesn’t want to have to adhere to government diktats, the citizen shouldn’t take the government’s schilling in the first place. This choice often involves hard, uncomfortable tradeoffs, but in the vast majority of cases, they’re entirely possible while in the medium- and longer-run being beneficial.

This is Naïve

Posted on by
Reply

Perhaps it’s even disingenuous. Roland Fryer, of Harvard University, wants to bring algorithms into college/university admissions offices under the claim that it would help reduce endless, unproductive battles over race- and class-based affirmative action.

Of course, they would do no such thing. Algorithms are nothing more than software packages written by humans as tools to speed decision-making in narrowly defined areas in accordance with equally narrowly defined criteria. Inescapably, though, those decision-making software packages and their defined criteria have embedded within them the personal biases and world views of those human programmers, software testers, and their supervisors. The databases on which those algorithms are trained also are written by humans and so themselves contain human biases and world views. On a (slightly) higher level, there’s another layer of human bias and world view: it’s humans who select the databases to be used for algorithm training.

The presence of these biases and world views is inescapable and wholly independent of the intentions of the humans involved. Even those with the purest of intentions and the strongest efforts to control the impact of their biases and world views will have those leak into their algorithms and training databases. Even efforts to balance to net zero those biases and world views by using a political and social cross-section of humans in those production efforts are subject to the same shortcomings via the selection of those humans and the definitions of what constitutes a suitable cross-section.

That all of this still could lead to strong bias in the algorithms, despite the best of intentions, is amply demonstrated by Alphabet’s overtly racist Google Gemini AI package (which Alphabet claims has been corrected, but only after the fact, not before the AI was released and in use), Robby Starbuck’s suit against Meta over that company’s AI smearing him as involved with the J6 riot and an extremist organization, and Mark Walter’s suit against OpenAI over its ChatGPT smear accusing him of embezzlement.

Colleges and universities, despite Supreme Court rulings banning consideration of race in their admissions decisions, still do that under other names and rationalizations. Using these human-written and so too-likely biased algorithms in their admissions decisions would merely give those institutions another way to disguise their admissions misbehaviors.

Blue Slips

Posted on by
Reply

Blue slips are a Senate piece of paper the withholding of which enables a single Senator to block a nominee from the Senator’s State or for a position in the Senator’s State from Senate consideration for confirmation. The blue slip process is not binding on anything; it has only the force of Senate custom.

Senate Minority Leader and Progressive-Democrat Chuck Schumer (NY) has withheld his blue slips for two nominees for US Attorneys for New York’s Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Judiciary Committee Chairman, says he’ll honor Schumer’s blue slips.

Why?

On what basis should a single Senator preempt and wholly block from exercise the will and judgment of 22 Senators on the Judiciary Committee? Why should a single Senator be allowed to preempt and wholly block from exercise the will and judgment of 99 other Senators in the Senate as a whole?

Because the Senator whose State the nominee is from knows that nominee best? Because the Senator for whose State position a nominee is proposed knows his State best?

Maybe that close personal knowledge springloads the particular Senator to a biased position against that nominee, whereas the Senators of a committee or the other 99 Senators as a whole are better disposed to an objective, or a more balanced political, assessment of the nominee.

It’s long past time to get rid of this archaic blue slip tool of obstruction, one abused by both parties with equal abandon.