July 04, 2020

There's So Much To Be Grateful For

July 04, 2020/ Francis Menton

It’s the Fourth of July, and everyone in America has so much to be grateful for. To name just a few of the most obvious things: a freedom-based economic system, prosperity beyond anything imaginable through all prior human history, and ongoing new miracles from information to communications to photography to entertainment. (Right now we’re streaming “Hamilton.”).
Of course, the toxic left-wing media, let alone rioters on the streets, are filled with nothing but anger, resentment, rage and hate. What is wrong with these people?
Over the past few days I took a break from my pandemic-induced exile in the country to visit my regular haunts in New York City. There, the Mayor and City Council there are doing everything in their power to destroy the place as quickly as possible. But even with still mostly-deserted streets and the few people walking around having masks on their faces, there is still plenty to appreciate. . . .

June 30, 2020

Reminder: How Progressive "Programs" Keep African Americans Down

June 30, 2020/ Francis Menton

Suddenly the country has descended into a paroxysm of guilt over the situation of African Americans, particularly the fact that as a group they have not caught up to whites or other ethnic groups in average income or wealth. Accusations of “systemic racism” or even “white supremacy” are everywhere, particularly issuing from the Black Lives Matter movement.
And accompanying the accusations are newly insistent demands for more spending on government programs and redistribution schemes of every sort. More for housing programs, more for social work programs, more for education programs, more for homelessness programs, and on and on. Perhaps the ultimate such demand is the demand for “reparations,” . . .
Even assuming that resources are infinite, is there any reason to believe that this kind of thing can ever meaningfully improve the lives of current and future African Americans in this country?
This seems like an appropriate time to remind readers that this site contains a treasure trove of posts giving details of the enormous amounts of means-tested anti-poverty and redistribution programs already in existence in this country (currently running in the range of $1.2 trillion per year if federal, state and local spending are all included), and of the total failure of any of those programs or any of that spending to alleviate poverty of African Americans or other poor Americans to any meaningful degree.

June 28, 2020

June 28, 2020/ Francis Menton

Back in April I wrote several posts on the subject of the severity and expected mortality from the Covid-19 pandemic. It is fair to say that I expressed a high degree of skepticism that the pandemic was of sufficient severity to justify the extreme economic suppression that was being undertaken at that time (much of which still remains in place today) . . .
I have been holding off revisiting the subject because I have not been able to find data that answer the principal questions that I asked in those posts. In particular, I made this statement in the April 27 post:
The best indication we will get [of the true death rate from this virus] will come when the CDC issues final data for deaths from all causes in the U.S. for the month of April. When we get that number, we can subtract from it the approximate “normal” number of deaths that would have occurred anyway during April. The difference will be a good estimate of the number of excess deaths attributable to the virus.
At this writing I still cannot find those data. If anyone can point me to a source, I will appreciate it.
But meanwhile, it is timely to come back to this subject . . .

June 26, 2020

June 26, 2020/ Francis Menton

It’s all the rage right now for progressives and their allies to call anybody who doesn’t toe the party line of Black Live Matter a “racist,” or worse, a “white supremacist.” Even better is to hurl the accusation that the entire American country is “systemically racist.”
And yet, as I repeatedly note on this blog, all you need to do is look at a little data, and you quickly realize that the jurisdictions most firmly in progressive control and for the longest time — the solidly Democratic big cities with Democratic mayors, City Councils, Congresspersons, and state governors for decades on end — are the places that have the worst outcomes for their African American citizens on every metric you can find. . . .
But what does the dynamic that brings about these disastrous results look like on the ground? . . .

June 23, 2020

June 23, 2020/ Francis Menton

Just a few days ago I was making fun of the big tech companies (particularly Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple) for lecturing us all about their woke and anti-racist values, even as their own performance in hiring African Americans, especially in the tech field, was abysmal.
In the midst of endless blather about their commitment to “diversity and inclusion” in frequent publicity on the subject, you then need to dig through reams of numbers to find the unhighlighted facts that Facebook has only 1.5% African Americans among its tech workers, Microsoft 3.3%, and Google and Apple have both stopped providing data broken out this way.
Could anybody top these guys for sanctimonious hypocrisy on the subject of race?
I have a candidate for today: high end lawyers. As a group, they are at least as woke and committed to the progressive political project as are the big tech companies. In the major law firms, every single one has a diversity bureaucracy and ongoing diversity initiatives, most have which have been ongoing for decades.
And yet, out of hundreds of firms, not a single one has succeeded in achieving the goal of having a proportion of African Americans equal to the proportion in the general population. . . .

June 20, 2020

June 20, 2020/ Francis Menton

We are living in the age of cancel culture. All icons from the past associated in any way with mistreatment of minorities are in the process of being eradicated.
Statues of Confederate figures? They’re mostly already gone. But that was just the start. How about statues of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? In New York, First Lady Chirlane McCray will decide on their fate. How about a statue of Ulysses Grant (who may have done more than anyone other than Lincoln to free the slaves, but also once briefly owned a slave before freeing him)? His statue in San Francisco was toppled yesterday. How about the weathervane atop the Dartmouth College library (featuring a sculpture of a Native American)? It now must go (it “do[es] not reflect Dartmouth’s values” says the president). Aunt Jemima? Uncle Ben? They are now unacceptable racial stereotypes. . . .
But what American institution of all those existing today has the longest and deepest association with violent bigotry and grotesque racism, including slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan?
The answer is the Democratic Party.