The View from Right Field

Universal Preschool: “Investing” Versus “Spending”

Among the pieces of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion package of social programs is a big “investment” in preschool education.  I think preschool education is really important.¹  When our children were little, we sent them to a local Montessori school starting when they were three years old.  We kept our daughter there until first grade, even though there was a public kindergarten, and we kept our son there until third grade.  We were more than happy to use our own money for our kids’ education, whether you call it “investment” or not.

What I am concerned about, however, when it comes to the Democrats’ plan for universal preschool is whether it is going to be “investment” in children or “spending” for more public education bureaucracy and staffing, etc.

Big Changes Coming?

Monday is the Democrats’ self-declared day of decision, the day Democratic leaders in Congress have set as their deadline for passing a huge package of new social programs.  Whether it is going to pass – and/or what’s going to be in it – is unclear, but Monday is supposed to be the day. 

The programs include things that European countries already have, so we should have them, too, we are told.  Of course, Democratic leaders don’t explain that Europeans get these benefits because they, i.e., the middle class, pays more taxes than we pay in the United States.  Joe Biden has said that all these new benefits are “free,” by which he means “free” for the middle (and upper middle) class, because taxes are being raised on corporations and the rich and not the middle (and upper middle) class.

Vaccine Equity

It’s interesting how ideas bounce around the world.  Back in February and March, the stories in the United States were about how hard it was to get the vaccine and whether shots were being distributed “equitably”.  There were complaints that minority communities were not getting their fair share of vaccines and that whites were getting shots that “belonged” to minorities.

Much the same thing happened earlier this month in New Zealand.  David Seymour, the head of ACT New Zealand, a right/libertarian party, got in trouble for publishing a “Priority Access Code for Maori” for Covid vaccinations.  But as Mr. Seymour explained, his publishing of the code had no practical effect.  The code wasn’t private; other people knew it; and the people giving the shots were vaccinating anybody who showed up anyway.  Plus, New Zealand has had fewer than 2,000 cases of Covid and just two deaths since January 1, so it really doesn’t matter the exact order in which people get shots.  The key is getting them vaccinated.

Who’s Worse on Foreign Policy: Biden or Trump?

Donald Trump did a bad job on foreign policy.  I talked about that a lot, though, eventually, I got tired of saying it over and over, so I mostly stopped.¹  Even though I felt that way about former President Trump, I did not vote for Joe Biden because, in Illinois, I did not need to.  President Biden was going to win Illinois.  And I was very concerned about President Biden’s domestic policy – or, rather, the domestic policy of his supporters.  Still, when President Biden won, I was hopeful American foreign policy would be better than it had been under former President Trump.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been.

On February 19, President Biden told the Munich Security Conference that “America is back.”  That was the hope: President Biden would restore, or at least start to restore, America’s credibility and reliability around the world.  But the way we left Afghanistan was a disaster.  Obviously, President Biden was handed a terrible mess in Afghanistan.  President Trump signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020, under which we were to leave on May 1, 2021.² 

Designing Things For the People Who Use Them

Tim Harford wrote recently about the problems he had interpreting the instructions for a mail-order Covid test.¹  It was, he said, a matter of what behavioral economists call “the curse of knowledge,” i.e., “the difficulty a well-informed person has in fully appreciating the depth of someone else’s ignorance.” 

As Mr. Harford notes, “[a]nyone who has assembled a Lego set can attest that, with enough care, it is possible to provide clear instructions even for complex tasks.”  The problem is that too often people don’t take “enough care.”

September 11 – 20th Anniversary

Lots of people will be writing lots of words about the 20th anniversary of September 11.  President Biden will probably talk, inter alia, about how victory over al Qaeda and the death of Osama Bin Laden meant we could get out of Afghanistan.  The Taliban will be talking about how their victory forced us to get out of Afghanistan.  And I am sure former President Trump will have something to say, too.

I will just link to two posts, one that I posted on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, mostly about our visit to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in 2006.  The other is something I wrote about the movie “United 93” after seeing it, also back in 2006.

The Diversity We Are Missing Today

In of his new book, Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy, Jeffrey Garton writes about the meetings at Camp David on August 13 to 15, 1971, when Richard Nixon and small group of advisers¹ broke the link between gold and the US dollar (i.e., “closing the gold window”), instituted wage-and-price controls, and more.²  In describing the meeting Mr. Garton emphasizes there was a real diversity among those present.  It was not, course, a diversity of race or sex.  They were all white men.  (It was, after all, 1971.)  But there was a diversity of viewpoints.  Coming into the meeting, some opposed wage-and-price controls (President Nixon had always opposed them because of his experience in the Office of Price Administration in 1942); some were okay with them.  Some thought we needed to close the gold window immediately; others wanted to do the rest of the program and then wait and see.  The investment tax credit, which had recently been repealed, was to be reinstated.  The key was that a number of people with different viewpoints met, talked, and in a weekend came up with a set of policies to change the world economic system.³

When You Go to a Baseball Game, There Is Always a Chance You’ll See Something You Have Never Seen Before

Which may have happened at the Cubs-Pirates game last night.  Let me set the scene: The Pirates took a 3 to 0 lead in the first inning.  The Cubs got five in the seventh to take a two-run lead, but the Bucos tied it in the top of the ninth.  Nobody scored in the tenth or top of the eleventh.¹  In the bottom of the eleventh, the Cubs had runners on first and third with one out.  Ian Happ was batting right-handed, his weaker side.²  Ian hit a really high pop up to the infield – and the second baseman totally missed it!  Sergio Alcantara scored, and the Cubs won.  Here’s the play (see at 7:40):

Covid and Charging More for Not Getting the Vaccine

Some governmental units and companies are requiring their employees to get a Covid vaccine shot: staff at nursing homes and hospitals; teachers; and more.  Delta Airlines is taking a different approach: they’re adding a $200 monthly surcharge on the cost of health insurance plans for employees who won’t get a shot.¹  The reaction seems to be: that’s a great idea.  After all, if you get Covid and have to go to the hospital, which is a lot more likely if you don’t get a shot, it costs a lot of money. 

I understand the reaction.  We need to get people vaccinated.  Requiring them to get a shot.  Adding a surcharge to an employee’s health insurance premium.  Whatever it takes.  This is a pandemic.

November 2, 2016 Seems Like Such a Long Time Ago

When we were in Portland, Oregon, in 2017, to see family, we did what people visiting Portland normally do.  We drove 100 miles south to Eugene to see the Eugene Emeralds, then a Cubs farm team.  While there, I bought this tee shirt:

Nancy Pelosi Criticizes Representatives’ Trip to Kabul While Apparently Forgetting Her Trip to Damascus in 2007

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been very critical of House members Seth Moulton, a Democrat, and Peter Meijer, a Republican, for their visit on Tuesday to the airport in Kabul.  Representatives Moulton and Meijer said they flew in “crew-only” seats on a plane with empty seats.  Among other things, Speaker Pelosi said, "It's not just about them to Afghanistan, going into the region, there's a cost on our resources as well.  This is deadly serious."

I don’t know if Representatives Moulton and Meijer should have gone, though I do understand their desire to see what was going on for themselves.  In any case, I find Speaker Pelosi’s criticism of the visit a bit funny.  She may not remember 2007 when she led a group to Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, even though President George W. Bush said she should not do so.  Because of Syrian support for Hezbollah and interference in Iraq, among other things, the United States had a policy of not meeting with President Assad.  But Speaker Pelosi felt she could decide for herself what was right and the heck with President Bush’s policy.  

After Afghanistan: What Next for American Foreign Policy?

After the collapse in Afghanistan, the questions for many are: Why did it happen so quickly¹ and why we weren’t prepared.  Which are good questions.  But I have a different question: What’s next for American foreign policy?  In that regard, I was surprised by the very negative reaction from Europe to our quick and unilateral pullout from Afghanistan.  One might have expected concern from Asia, but the comments from Europe were very interesting.  Here are excerpts from an article Wednesday’s Financial Times (behind the FT paywall):

“European allies had hoped Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency would bolster Nato’s relevance after Donald Trump’s acrimonious years.  Washington’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan is prompting a rethink.

The Afghan People Deserve an Apology for What Joe Biden Said Yesterday

At some point in the future, I hope we have a president decent enough and honorable enough to apologize to the Afghan people and the Afghan armed forces, for comments made by Joe Biden yesterday.¹  In defending his decision to leave Afghanistan and the way we are doing it, President Biden said:

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. …

We gave them every tool they could need. …  

We gave them every chance to determine their own future.  What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”

“An Indelible Stain on His Presidency”

That was is what Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who was ambassador to Afghanistan under Barack Obama,¹ said of Joe Biden’s policy in Afghanistan a week ago.  As I said on Saturday, Donald Trump deserves much of the blame for how our involvement in Afghanistan ended.

However, President Biden is the one who has been in office for the last seven months.  He is the one who could have changed or modified the policy former President Trump set (he did it in many other areas).  He is the one who could have prepared better for what actually happened, as opposed to what he hoped would happen.  Ultimately, he wanted to leave Afghanistan, and he made the final decision for us to leave as we did.  As Ambassador Crocker said, that decision and what has happened is, and will be, “an indelible stain on his presidency.”
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¹ As well as ambassador to many other countries under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

We Have Been Reduced to Almost Begging in Afghanistan

As the collapse happens in Afghanistan, the United States has been, in effect, reduced to begging the Taliban not to attack our embassy in Kabul.  While the sub-headline in The New York Times talks of our “demand” that the Taliban not attack our embassy there, what we really said was, in effect, if you attack our embassy and we have to close it, we won’t give you money after the war is over

While Joe Biden doesn’t seem to care what happens in Afghanistan, he very much wants to avoid a helicopter-off-the-embassy-roof end to our time there.  That, and apparently only that, would be an unacceptable end of our war in Afghanistan.

60th Anniversary of the Berlin Wall

Sixty years ago today, the Berlin Wall went up.  It started with barbed wire and wound up with concrete, killing strips, and attack dogs.  The Berlin Wall seems out of date and out of history, at least out of the history we talk about today.  But for those who were alive during it, it was what history was about.

I am not going to write a lot about it here.  I have done that before.  You can find a post about the building the Wall here and pictures of the Wall here.  You can find posts about the fall of the Wall by looking in the “Berlin” subhead in “Categories” section in the right column.

Climate Change, Extreme Weather, Carbon Limits – and Adapting

If it is true the extreme weather we have been having is a result of climate change, i.e., putting too much carbon into the atmosphere, then two things:

First, my suggestion with respect to putting less carbon into the atmosphere is a carbon tax, especially a carbon tax that would be refunded to everybody equally, on a per capita basis.  A carbon tax would probably be one of the quickest, most effective, and least costly ways to cut carbon.  A cap-and-trade system might work, too.  Heavy government regulation is a less good option.  It wouldn’t work as well, and it would be slower.¹

Reality Check for @Cubs Fans: Trading Riz, KB, and Javy Was the Right Thing to Do

With trades of Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, and Javier Baez (for more on that, see here), the Cubs are getting, to paraphrase Harry Doyle, “JUST a bit” of criticism.  A few reality-check comments.

1. Lots of fans think the Cubs should have kept all three of them and, I guess, signed them as free agents in the off-season.  Which basically means paying each of them more than they would get from any other team.  In other words, the Cubs should have signed Rizzo for more than any other team would have paid him; the Cubs should have signed Bryant for more than any other team would have paid him; and the Cubs should have signed Baez for more than any other team would have paid him.  Nobody else would have signed all three of them for the top dollar they could have gotten individually, but that’s what the Cubs were supposed to do.

Does China Really Think They Can Get Women to Have More Babies by Changing Some Law?

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that China will be removing the last legal barriers to families having as many children as they want.¹  In 1979, China was worried about over-population, so it instituted a strict one-child policy.  Enforcement got quite nasty.

By the 2010s, China had a problem: not enough babies.  The population was aging.  The workforce was going to start shrinking.  In 2015, the one-child policy was changed to two children.²  The increase from one child to two children didn’t work, so earlier this year, the limit was increased to three children.  Now, all of the birth limits will be repealed.

That Was the Team That Was: Cubs 2016

It was going to happen someday.  They were going to leave.  Maybe it was better they, or at least the three of them, left together.  They played together.  Maybe it’s right they left together.

This has happened before; I have seen teams leave.  Obviously, the late 60s and early 70s.  But 1977, too.  And ’84 and ’89.  1998.  2003.  It’s sad, but it’s what happens.  You have heroes, and it’s tough when they leave.  But those heroes, especially the real ones, they stay heroes.  Ernie, Ron, Billy, and Fergie.  The Reuschels.  Sut and Ryno.  Mark, Sammy, Woody.  And then the Boys of ’16.