Brainstorming Possible Public Law Reforms

There are important gaps in our public law system:

* If we are to reject taxpayer standing, voter standing, and citizen standing, we need to empower someone to enforce violations of the law that harm the general public, but not any specific person differently from any other, like many forms of public corruption.

* Judges should have the power to remove government officials who defy court orders and commit serious breaches of the public trust from office, certainly, officials who are not elected officials.

* There needs to be a parallel to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for federal officials and agents (i.e. people who act under color of federal law) that is more robust than the federal common law Bivens remedy, which doesn't cover all federal officials or all federal rights.

* The unitary executive theory adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court is just a pure political trick, with no historical basis. INS v. Chadha (1983), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that legislative vetos in duly enacted laws were unconstitutional was also a bad decision.

* The gutting of the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment by SCOTUS was a horrible legal decision not supported by any fair reading of the document.

* The grant of immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts of the President was a very bad idea. Granting both civil immunity and criminal immunity should be a matter of common law or statutory law that can be changed by Congress, not a matter of constitutional law.

* Granting unfettered pardon power to the President now looks like it was a bad idea on the part of the Founders. Notably, a great many U.S. states do not afford the same power to their Governors.

* Requiring a two-thirds majority of both Houses of Congress to override a Presidential veto greatly upsets the proper balance of power between Congress and the President. Let the President veto legislation that unwittingly contains a bad provision which the President noticed but Congress did not. But let them reaffirm and override it by a simple majority of both houses. Part of the big picture problem in the United States is that it is far too hard to legislate, so the courts and regulations adopted by the executive have to fill the gap.

* Making the respective houses of Congress the judges of their own elections was a bad idea.

* The impeachment power is too weak and too political. And, it should be easier and less political to remove a President (or any other public official) for disability.

* A proposal is pending in Colorado to remove absolute immunity for prosecutors from civil liability, which as drafted I don't support, even though I can somewhat sympathize with the motivations for it. Judges also have absolute immunity. I think that the solution is to make a finding of professional or judicial misconduct or criminal conduct have the collateral consequence of forfeiting absolute immunity, with the statute of limitations for a private civil action to impose liability in those cases running from the time that there is a final criminal conviction or of professional or judicial misconduct. If a judge convicts you of a crime and sentences you to a private prison due to a bribe from a private prison investor, and the judge is convicted of that, the judge should have civil liability to you.

* An alternative to the fault based approach of § 1983 and Bivens for civil rights violations, would be to instead adopt the takings jurisprudence that applies when the government takes property without fair compensation. Rather than being perpetrator focused, if someone is deprived of their civil rights, they would be entitled to just, compensatory only, compensation, by the government under whose color the deprivation occurred, without regard to the intent of the person violating the right, and without individual liability on the part of the agents who participated in the deprivation of civil rights. Indemnification and defense mandates of public employees basically gets you to a similar place in most cases, but denies any relief when someone is deprived of life or liberty wrongfully, if no one individual intentional or almost intentionally violates their rights (e.g. if the injuries or destroyed property or other harm arose from mere negligence or mistakes, or due to broken systems rather than malicious individuals). Thus, if you were incarcerated and later found to be innocent, or incurred attorneys' fees defending a criminal case only to be acquitted, you would be entitled to compensation from the government that brought the charges and incarcerated you, without regard to how you were wrongfully convicted or were charged with a crime for which you were not convicted. Qualified immunity and intent requirements would be much less problematic if § 1983 lawsuits and Bivens actions were secondary remedies to punish individual bad apples (and included, for example disqualification from serving in law enforcement for serious willful wrongdoing), while municipal liability for compensatory relief only was available much more easily.

* Many countries vest prosecutorial power in the judiciary rather than in the executive branch, and many states have an attorney general or DA who is independently elected to create a built in special prosecutor. There is wisdom in depriving an elected executive branch politician like a President or Governor or Mayor from having absolute control over enforcement of the criminal laws.

* Colorado has the Colorado Open Records Act and the Colorado Criminal Justice Records Act to allow pre-litigation discovery of incidents that might give rise to civil liability on the part of public officials, which makes Warne v. Hall, which prevents people from suing first and getting discovery to determine if they really have a claim, by adopting the federal standards of Twombly and Iqbal for pleading civil actions more tolerable than in other contexts. It isn't clear to me that FOIA (the Freedom of Information Act) at the federal level, provides an equally effective tool to bring claims against federal public officials.

* While allowing all U.S. District Court judges to impose national injunctions can be problematic, mostly because it allows for forum shopping, it is also deeply problematic to allow the federal government to re-litigate issues that it has lost in other jurisdictions over and over again, which is just reverse forum shopping. Maybe national injunction power needs to be reserved for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

* Felons should be able to vote. But maybe they shouldn't be able to run for public office without some process establishing that they were reformed or just the passage of time of a certain number of years after they fully served their sentence.

* A statutory obligation for all law enforcement officers to be unmasked and clearly display their badges subject to narrow exceptions that would have to be authorized much like a search warrant on a case by case basis, wouldn't be a bad law.

* We need a better structure to limit the use of military force and covert operations by intelligence agencies to legally authorized act, that doesn't simply give the President absolute power.

* No President should have the power to unilaterally impose any taxes, including tariffs.

Better Isn't Impossible, Other Countries Do It

 

U.S. Homicide Rate At Record Low

There are lots of theories about why this is the case.

It isn't just better medical care that turns homicides into aggravated assaults, because almost all form of serious crimes have declined.

This number also conceals greater regional variation between high crime states and low crime states, but the trend apart from a little year to year noise in individual states, has been widespread.

Prosecuting Federal Officials For State Law Crimes

Prosecuting federal officials for crimes arising under state law committed in the course of their federal duties is not only not forbidden by the supremacy clause, it is actually expressly contemplated and provided for by a federal statute. 

In those cases, the case is started in state court, but may be removed to federal court, where the case continues to be prosecuted by state prosecutors in federal court with a federal judge presiding.

28 U.S. Code § 1442 - Federal officers or agencies sued or prosecuted

A civil action or criminal prosecution that is commenced in a State court and that is against or directed to any of the following may be removed by them to the district court of the United States for the district and division embracing the place wherein it is pending:

(1) The United States or any agency thereof or any officer (or any person acting under that officer) of the United States or of any agency thereof, in an official or individual capacity, for or relating to any act under color of such office or on account of any right, title or authority claimed under any Act of Congress for the apprehension or punishment of criminals or the collection of the revenue.

(2) A property holder whose title is derived from any such officer, where such action or prosecution affects the validity of any law of the United States.

(3) Any officer of the courts of the United States, for or relating to any act under color of office or in the performance of his duties;

(4) Any officer of either House of Congress, for or relating to any act in the discharge of his official duty under an order of such House.

(b) A personal action commenced in any State court by an alien against any citizen of a State who is, or at the time the alleged action accrued was, a civil officer of the United States and is a nonresident of such State, wherein jurisdiction is obtained by the State court by personal service of process, may be removed by the defendant to the district court of the United States for the district and division in which the defendant was served with process.

(c) Solely for purposes of determining the propriety of removal under subsection (a), a law enforcement officer, who is the defendant in a criminal prosecution, shall be deemed to have been acting under the color of his office if the officer—

(1) protected an individual in the presence of the officer from a crime of violence;

(2) provided immediate assistance to an individual who suffered, or who was threatened with, bodily harm; or

(3) prevented the escape of any individual who the officer reasonably believed to have committed, or was about to commit, in the presence of the officer, a crime of violence that resulted in, or was likely to result in, death or serious bodily injury.

(d) In this section, the following definitions apply:

(1) The terms “civil action” and “criminal prosecution” include any proceeding (whether or not ancillary to another proceeding) to the extent that in such proceeding a judicial order, including a subpoena for testimony or documents, is sought or issued. If removal is sought for a proceeding described in the previous sentence, and there is no other basis for removal, only that proceeding may be removed to the district court.

(2) The term “crime of violence” has the meaning given that term in section 16 of title 18.

(3) The term “law enforcement officer” means any employee described in subparagraph (A), (B), or (C) of section 8401(17) of title 5 and any special agent in the Diplomatic Security Service of the Department of State.

(4) The term “serious bodily injury” has the meaning given that term in section 1365 of title 18.

(5) The term “State” includes the District of Columbia, United States territories and insular possessions, and Indian country (as defined in section 1151 of title 18).

(6) The term “State court” includes the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, a court of a United States territory or insular possession, and a tribal court.

28 U.S. Code § 1455 - Procedure for removal of criminal prosecutions

(a) Notice of Removal.—

A defendant or defendants desiring to remove any criminal prosecution from a State court shall file in the district court of the United States for the district and division within which such prosecution is pending a notice of removal signed pursuant to Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and containing a short and plain statement of the grounds for removal, together with a copy of all process, pleadings, and orders served upon such defendant or defendants in such action.

(b) Requirements.—

(1) A notice of removal of a criminal prosecution shall be filed not later than 30 days after the arraignment in the State court, or at any time before trial, whichever is earlier, except that for good cause shown the United States district court may enter an order granting the defendant or defendants leave to file the notice at a later time.

(2) A notice of removal of a criminal prosecution shall include all grounds for such removal. A failure to state grounds that exist at the time of the filing of the notice shall constitute a waiver of such grounds, and a second notice may be filed only on grounds not existing at the time of the original notice. For good cause shown, the United States district court may grant relief from the limitations of this paragraph.

(3) The filing of a notice of removal of a criminal prosecution shall not prevent the State court in which such prosecution is pending from proceeding further, except that a judgment of conviction shall not be entered unless the prosecution is first remanded.

(4) The United States district court in which such notice is filed shall examine the notice promptly. If it clearly appears on the face of the notice and any exhibits annexed thereto that removal should not be permitted, the court shall make an order for summary remand.

(5) If the United States district court does not order the summary remand of such prosecution, it shall order an evidentiary hearing to be held promptly and, after such hearing, shall make such disposition of the prosecution as justice shall require. If the United States district court determines that removal shall be permitted, it shall so notify the State court in which prosecution is pending, which shall proceed no further.

(c) Writ of Habeas Corpus.—

If the defendant or defendants are in actual custody on process issued by the State court, the district court shall issue its writ of habeas corpus, and the marshal shall thereupon take such defendant or defendants into the marshal’s custody and deliver a copy of the writ to the clerk of such State court.

Parenting

 

Good parenting is raising children who are a force to be reckoned with.

For those not familiar with the comic, Puck (left) informally adopted Daphne (right) as a toddler when Puck was still in college, in episode 3 on February 15, 1998, and has raised her for entire life in the comic over 28 years of our world time (Daphne now has a little sister, Miranda, who is about the same age as Daphne was when Puck adopted her, who is the child of Puck and her common law, soon to be legal, husband, Colin). This is the last panel of comic 831. The comic is currently on episode 843. It is set, primarily, in a medium sized city in Canada.

Old Suits

In a long period of disuse during the pandemic, almost all of my suits, many of them favorites that I'd had for many years, became unusable for anyone. Even an extremely poor person going to a thrift store for a suit (and lots of people could use my rather large sized suits) can't use one that moths have eaten the crouch out of.

Still, it is a shame to see a beloved item of clothing, worn often for important things, go, especially when it has huge amounts of remaining good fabric. A friend of my wife sometimes donates to a charity, similar to Thread Up, that may have use for the fabric, so that's probably where it will go.

I've been gradually replacing them, with about three new ones in the last year or two, now that people are going to court and depositions and even mediations in person on a regular basis again. But it will take time fore me to become sentimentally attached to the new ones.

I've invested is cedar for the closet, in an attempt to prevent a recurrence of this tragedy, although I'm cautiously pessimistic. It's worth trying, but I don't have high hopes.

The Economic Foundation Of A Liberal Geopolitics And Political Economy

The liberal answer to the despotism of Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and other petrostates is ultimately pretty straightforward: use technology to make oil and other fossil fuels, which are also damaging our environment and driving climate change, irrelevant, replacing this with energy obtained from cleaner and decentralized renewable energy and vehicles that run on electricity.

Authoritarianism thrives in economies where the key factor of production is ownership of resources, whether that's farm land, gold, sliver, coal, or oil.

In contrast, in a commercial economy, where the most important factor of production is not just labor, but intelligent, voluntary work, you need to spread out economic resources to induce those willing, smart economic contributions from many people. The decentralization of wealth and power that flows from that favors a more open, democratic society, since the funds to run a state must be obtained through taxation of the many secured with their democratic permission, and not just ownership of those resources.

Commercial economies need to be market based. But they don't need to be truly "capitalist" in the Marxist sense, and indeed, ideally aren't. In a truly capitalist economy, in this sense, capital (i.e. raw wealth) is they key factor of production and ownership of it, while more amorphous than wealth based upon ownership of raw resources, can lead to similar effects.

If owning the factory or equipment becomes as important as owning land used to be in medieval and early modern Europe, you get a society that may look like a commercial economy, but is just as controlled by oligarchs as the economies that came before it. In the extreme of a capitalist society, financial wealth can dominate and replace land or oil as the concentrated factor of production that facilitates an economy based upon ownership of the key factor of production by a few.

To be clear, this doesn't mean that we should resort to Marxism's flawed "labor theory of value." What matters is results, not effort. Treating goods and services made less efficiently as more valuable than the same goods and services made efficiently is just dumb. But ideally, know how and efficiency that maximize the value of labor relative to the value of ownership of property is the goal.

This approach, like every approach has winners and losers, which somewhat align with modern political identities. Right wing politics are favored on one hand, by people who want to increase the importance of ownership of property as a key factor of production, and on the other hand, by people who are only capable of providing inefficient labor, who don't benefit from a system that rewards widespread and diverse forms of efficient labor.

Another threat to the political structure of a decentralized commercial economy is intellectual property. When it is too strong, as it is in our economy, ownership of intellectual property prevents innovation rather than encouraging it, and concentrates wealth in whomever owns a right to royalties from it.

The fundamental project of those seeking a healthier political economy in the West is to undermine the importance of merely owning wealth and intellectual property.

In the case of intellectual property, we've kept that at bay so far, by making it easy to copy and having lots of opportunities to innovate and make older intellectual property grow obsolete, although laws weakening intellectual property rights would help.

In the case of finance, we've tried to create financial institutions that make it possible to funnel access access to resources to people who have good ideas, while lowering the returns to ownership with low interest rates and modest returns to ownership of equity. But tax laws that favor unearned income over earned income have helped undermine this, as has the weakening of estate and inheritance and gift taxation that facilitates the transfer of wealth to dumb money.

Disgust and Horror Overload

This is just from this week and only captures about half of the miserable awful things that happened. It is one nightmare after another. Sometimes you just have to hang on and hope that the situation resolves, doing what you can, but recognizing that it is a collective effort.

Who Has The Most Oil?

 

The Case For Socialized Sidewalk Snow Removal And Mainteance

A 70 year old friend of mine writes on Facebook that she just got a new electric snowblower because her "HOA dues no longer cover snow shoveling driveway and sidewalk."

There are lots of reasons that HOAs are horrible institutions. But one of the things that they do often do well is that they make removal of snow from sidewalks a collective neighborhood function, rather than something that must be done by each individual in the neighborhood.

When are people going to wake up and realize that decentralization and private responsibility is not the solution to all problems?  We seem to understand this for roads, but not for sidewalks.

Collective neighborhood snow shoveling is much more efficient since you can mechanize it with industrial grade snow blowers and snow clearing equipment. 

Even if the work is outsourced to landscaping companies so that it can be mechanized, it is still less efficient to have many separate landscaping companies do the work in the neighborhood in a patchwork fashion, rather than having one provider do it, in addition to being more expensive per unit or for the neighborhood as a whole, despite not providing the service for everyone in the neighborhood.

Also, if the HOA bought its own snow clearing equipment and hired someone directly to do the job (as many municipal governments and school districts do), cutting out the middle man which its scale would often make feasible, it could do it more cheaply than hiring a landscaping firm to do the job, since it wouldn't have to cover the landscaping firm's profit and overhead costs (e.g. marketing, office and insurance costs that the HOA already incurs, billing and debt collection costs that the HOA already incurs, etc.). It could even provide a measure of economic relief to HOA members by preferring to hire residents to do the work (also reducing commuting times and demands on local road infrastructure, and making an inability to do the job at all or on  time due to heavy snow making roads less passable less of a concern).

Collective sidewalk snow clearance also produces much better returns because sidewalks are a network. One delayed or not done at all link in clearing snow from sidewalks dramatically reduces the value of the sidewalk system for everyone, even if everyone else does a perfect and timely job of clearing the sidewalk in front of their house. And, in real life, perfect compliance with early sidewalk cleaning by each homeowner rarely happens for understandable reasons like being out of town, or being sick or infirm, or working atypical shifts like three twelves or having to work multiple jobs, so that you are at work when it snows.

The same logic applies to maintaining sidewalks in good condition when they crack. A badly broken sidewalk in front of one house makes the entire sidewalk network less useful for everyone who uses sidewalks in the neighborhood.

Sidewalks are a good that everyone in the community benefits from, and the homeowner benefits little from having the sidewalk in front of their own home clear. Clearing sidewalks is something you do for the benefit of your neighbors. 

There is a collective action problem which HOAs solve when they correctly treat sidewalks as a common element owned by the community as a whole and managed by an entity that is responsible to the entire community.

This is less true of driveways. Mechanization from economies of scale is still present, although it can be moderated with outsourcing to landscaping companies. But the benefits of driveway snow clearing primarily inure to the homeowner whose driveway is cleared. There isn't the same network functionality problem.

But, of course, in the HOA suburbs no one cares about sidewalks because everybody drives everywhere, which also makes not only the people in the HOA less healthy, but also makes the community less vibrant.

And, then there is the issue that 70 year olds face a vastly elevated risk of serious physical harm when they try to shovel their own driveways and sidewalks. This is true for driveways as well.

The other lurking issue is that many suburbanites in HOAs are cash poor and time rich. Paying HOA dues or a more efficient landscaping company to do the job costs money which many people in these communities don't have. Doing it yourself with a cheap and inefficient snow shovel doesn't cost money, even though you are effectively valuing your own time and effort at a tiny hourly rate when comparing the time it takes you to the time it takes a professional to do it with the proper equipment.

The tradeoff between doing things in the monetary economy v. doing things in the non-monetary household or by barter or volunteering is an understudied issue in economics.

Cherry Blossoms And Climate Change

 

This is a very long data set (1213 years), that wasn't designed by anyone concerned about human created global warming.

New Almanac Data Points

I have my 2026 World Almanac now and there are some statistics I keep a close eye on.

* As of March 31, 2025, the U.S. had 1,307,679 active duty military personnel. This is as small as the U.S. military has been by that measure since before World War II. At its peak, it was more than 50% bigger. Roughly 55% of U.S. active duty military personnel are non-Hispanic white men (with significant variation from one military service to another).

* Birth rates for women in all age categories under age 25 were at their lowest for all of recorded history and prehistory in North America.

* Infant mortality has increased each year since 2020. The anti-vax movement and the impact of the ban on abortions in many states could be factors.

Trump's Misguided Battleship Program

 

The centerpiece of the Trump administration’s revamp of the U.S. Navy is the largest surface combatant America will build since World War II.

The U.S. Navy will buy two new “battleships” as part of the “Golden Fleet” effort, President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Navy Secretary John Phelan announced Monday at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump said the Navy will start by purchasing two ships and eventually purchase 10, with a goal of 20 to 25 in total for the class with the start of construction planned for 2030.

From USNI. 

Battleships were retired from the U.S. Navy for a reason. The reason hasn't changed, although this is a "battleship" more in name than in fact. 

The last U.S. battleship, the USS Missouri (BB-63), left active service when it was decommissioned on March 31, 1992, after serving in World War II, the Korean War, and the Gulf War, and is now a museum ship in Pearl Harbor.

Battleships were large, heavily armored surface combatants built around multiple very large unguided slug throwing naval artillery guns (up to 16" diameter rounds). The problem was that they were sitting duck targets that could be defeated with modern munitions despite their heavy armor, and had only short range with low accuracy. Guided missiles which had longer range, greater accuracy, and didn't require so much bulk, replaced them.

Nuclear missiles were placed on nuclear submarines which were more stealthy and less vulnerable to counterattacks. 

Every other navy in the world, except Russia, which has one "cruiser" along these lines, has also learned this lesson and many world navies don't even see much use for larger surface combatants like destroyers and cruisers, largely limiting themselves to frigates, air independent diesel coastal submarines, and corvettes.

Trump's proposed nuclear missile carrying "battleship" with 35,000+ tons, about the same number of cruise missiles as existing destroyers and cruisers, a vaporware rail gun, two 5" naval guns, two vaporware large laser guns, four defensive laser guns, about eight air defense guns, and a helipad propelled by a diesel engine isn't what the U.S. navy needs. A price wasn't announced but it would be in the double digit billions per ship.

The last attempt to build a railgun centered ship, the USS Zumwalt destroyer, was an epic failure.

In the end, the Navy will spend lots of money over the next three years (at most) on R&D that will be abandoned when Trump leaves office or dies, if not sooner. 

This "battleship" also is ill suited for the conflicts and likely naval adversaries that the U.S. may face in the coming decades. It isn't suited for a war with China over Taiwan or the waters near the Philippines, for naval conflict with Iran near the Persian Gulf, with Russia, or with North Korea.

U.S. Health Care Spending Still Rising Because Our System Is Broken

Americans pay a huge amount for healthcare, while getting results that are below the developed world norm. Partially this is because a mixed government-private sector system leaves no one controlling costs, so we pay more to all forms of health care providers than any other health care system on Earth. And, partially, we pay much more for administrative costs. Further, the way we finance health care leaves many people either with no access to health care, or facing bankruptcy if they get seriously hurt or sick.

The best evidence we have shows that rising health spending in the United States since 1975 can explain roughly the same share of the growth in income inequality as increased trade, outsourcing or automation. It has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills. Rising health care spending is killing the American dream.

Despite devastating out-of-pocket costs, Americans are generally insulated from the true cost of health care premiums. However, the expiring subsidies on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, where more than 20 million Americans get their insurance, show just how exorbitant premiums have become. Consider a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 a year. Without subsidies, their health insurance premiums next year will approach $32,000 (akin to buying a new Toyota Camry).

Those of us who get health care insurance from our employers — some 160 million Americans — may be breathing a sigh of relief. But our health care premiums are also staggering (an average of $27,000 a year for a family of four), and the fact that our employers pay part of the tab isn’t much of a reprieve. That’s because decades’ worth of research shows that, even though employers pay most of workers’ premiums, those costs are passed on to workers in the form of lower wages and fewer jobs. That’s why the rise in health spending above the rate of inflation over the past decade has depressed wages by nearly 10 percent, according to my calculations. And because premiums are a bigger share of total pay for lower-income workers, the job cuts triggered by rising health care spending fall disproportionally on low- and middle-income workers and fuel income inequality.

Americans spend more on health care than other countries because we pay higher prices for identical goods and services, are quicker to adopt new and costly medical technology (whether or not it is cost effective) and have higher administrative costs in our complex, decentralized system. Health care markets have consolidated so much that in many regions, hospitals and other providers can charge near-monopoly prices. The fact that we pay providers per service delivered (rather than a fixed salary) also plays a role.

Next year insurance premiums will increase 10 percent for employer-sponsored plans and 18 percent for individual plans on the exchanges compared with 2025. In both markets, they’re going up because the price of medical care is rising (think hospital mergers, staffing shortages and tariffs that make drugs and devices more expensive) and Americans are increasingly using expensive weight loss and diabetes drugs known as GLP-1s. The exchange plans are seeing a sharper increase than employer plans because of the uncertainty lawmakers created over whether the Affordable Care Act subsidies would be extended. Insurers had to factor in the risk that healthier people would be less likely to buy insurance if the subsidies expired, which would lead to a sicker insurance risk pool and higher costs. . . .

One person’s health care spending is another person’s health care income — profits, jobs and paychecks for the tens of millions of people who work in the health care sector. And some higher spending does lead to better care. As long as they’re in competitive markets, higher-priced hospitals deliver higher quality care. 

. . . [A]s a result of Medicare payment rules created in the 1980s, the government program pays more (sometimes double) for care delivered in a hospital or hospital-owned doctor’s practice versus in an independent doctor-owned practice, even if the care is identical. That makes it more profitable for doctors to merge their practice with hospitals than remain independent. These mergers give doctors and hospitals bargaining power and drive up prices and insurance premiums.

From the New York Times (Opinion).

The loss of ACA subsidies will more than double premiums for people who get their health insurance on the health insurance marketplace, which is mostly made up of self-employed people and early retirees. That's an important reason that I moved back to being a W-2 employee this year after twenty years of being self-employed.

The change disproportionately hurts small businesses, including farms, and because of this, together with massive cuts to Medicaid and immigration changes that make it much harder for hospitals to hire foreign doctors (who disproportionately serve rural areas where U.S. doctors prefer not to work), rural healthcare in the U.S. is on the brink of collapse, with many rural hospitals expected to close and fewer doctors serving rural areas. Red states that banned abortion are also seeing a huge exodus of obstetrics and gynecology doctors, with new graduates also reluctant to take positions in these states.

Indeed, the MAGA base will be hit harder by GOP healthcare changes, and other Trump 2.0 policies from tariffs to reduced access to government benefits than Democrats in blue states, who tend to live in more resilient cities which are buffered by more caring state and local governments, while many of the Trump 2.0 tax cuts will help more upper middle class Democrats than working class Republicans.

Cheese Is Good, Teens Are Tame, Crime Is Down, Lot Of Americans Are Immigrants

* A study linked eating cheese to lower dementia risk.

* Teen alcohol, nicotine, and drug use in the U.S. is at record lows, and cocaine and heroin use, while not at record lows, it much lower than it was a few decades ago.

Teen use of alcohol, nicotine and marijuana remains at record lows, according to national survey results released Wednesday. . . .

Two-thirds of 12th graders this year said they hadn’t used alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or electronic cigarettes in the previous 30 days. Thirty years ago — before the advent of e-cigarettes — the figure was closer to about one-third.

Among 10th graders, 82% said they hadn’t used any of those substances recently. Among eighth graders, 91% didn’t use any of them. Both are records for those ages in the annual survey. . . .

The new results come from the federally funded Monitoring the Future survey, run by the University of Michigan. The annual survey has been operating since 1975 and has long been considered a top source of national data on teen substance abuse. This year’s findings are based on responses from about 24,000 students in grades 8, 10 and 12 in schools across the country. It was conducted from February to June this year.

Teen drug use has been gradually declining for decades, and fell dramatically at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when students across the country were told not to go to schools and to avoid parties or other gatherings. Experts expected at least a bit of a rebound as pandemic restrictions eased, but that hasn’t happened.

The 2025 results show no increases in teens’ use of alcohol, marijuana, cigarettes or nicotine vapes in any of the three grade levels. In 2024, researchers had noted an uptick in the use of nicotine pouches, but that too held steady this year, the survey found.

Energy drinks are as popular as ever, with daily consumption reported by 23% of 12th graders, 20% of 10th graders and 18% of eighth graders.

The survey also found a striking increase in heroin use. Use by 12th graders in the previous 12 months rose to 0.9% in 2025, from 0.2% the year before. Use by 10th graders hit 0.5%, up from 0.1%. And use by eighth graders also rose to 0.5%, up from 0.2%.

Cocaine use held steady for 10th graders, but rose for eighth graders — to 0.6% — and 12th graders — to 1.4%.

Teen heroin and cocaine use are “leagues below what they were decades ago,” but the increases warrant close monitoring, said Richard Miech, survey team lead at the University of Michigan.

The teen heroin and cocaine figures are small enough that they could just be mostly a statistical random sampling variation.

* Teens in the U.S. are having sex less (from an AP news story of May 13, 2023):

[A]ccording to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . . . 30% of teens in 2021 said they had ever had sex, down from 38% in 2019 and a huge drop from three decades ago, when more than half of teens reported having sex.

Teen pregnancies and the teen birthrate are also at record lows for all of history and prehistory in North America.

* As noted in the previous post, property crime rates are at record lows. And, violent crime rates are also very low.

* Meanwhile, prior to Trump taking office, the percentage of Americans that were foreign born was at an all time high.

Quick Hits

* Property crime rates in 2024 were the lowest that they've been since 1976.

Pretty sure that the labeling of this lines is wrong.

* Immensely increased H1-B visa fees will devastate the supply of physicians in the U.S., especially in rural areas, that are already being pummeled by immense cuts to Medicaid funding and ACA health insurance subsidies used mostly by self-employed people like farmers.

* Large office properties in metropolitan Denver are selling at immense discounts. Some of them are being converted to apartments or condos.

* In a broken clock's right twice a day moment, Trump's push for American automakers to start make microcars in the Kei car and Smart car sizes wouldn't be a bad thing, although his opposition to electric vehicles is horrible policy.

Physicians' Specialties And Their Political Identity

Draw whatever conclusions you wish. I suspect that lawyers would also show wide variation based upon the nature of their practice.

Private Equity v. Local Landlorrds

Private equity is playing a larger role in the housing market. Why?

Because rapid increases in interest rates, that have increased faster than the residential real estate market has time to compensate for them with lower inflation adjusted housing prices, has made buying homes unaffordable for home buyers who rely on significant mortgage debt to buy a home (especially, but not only, first time home buyers). This has created increased demand for rental housing which private equity is filling by buying single family homes (it has been a major player in the apartment market for a long time).

But, local government limitations on new housing are still more important to tenants and prospective home owners. Private equity isn't moral, but neither are smaller landlords. The main difference is that private equity concentrates the profits more than ownership by smaller landlords (and is less likely to spend its profits locally). The proportion of landlord owners housing and rental prices are predominantly governed by market forces that affect both equally and are heavily influenced by local zoning and building codes.

How did we get in this mess?

For a long time interest rates were exceedingly low in order to stimulate the economy. Housing prices soared to adapt, but low interest rates made those higher prices affordable. 

But, for a variety of reasons, nominal housing prices are sticky. 

In the short run, listing prices, home value appraisals, and conventional wisdom about fair market value selling prices are based on historical sales prices which are necessarily retrospective and often include comparable sales that pre-date the rise in interest rates, but mortgage rates reduce buyer's ability to pay almost instantly.

In the long run, there are two factors. 

One is that sellers can afford to sell heavily leveraged homes for less than their mortgages and also need enough left over after paying off their mortgage to have a down payment for their next home. And, mortgages are in nominal dollars, not a percentage of the home price. Leverage makes a small decrease in home values disproportionately erode the seller's equity, and most younger home owners have lots of mortgage debt. 

Secondly, sellers are human and psychologically anchor on the price that they bought their home for. Selling at a loss feels like losing, and nobody wants to voluntarily be a loser.

If interest rates had increased more gradually, the fall in affordability caused by higher interest rates would have been more modest giving the housing market time to adjust, and allowing nominal housing prices to hold steady, while allowing inflation adjusted housing prices to fall.

But the economic models that decision makers like the Fed use to set interest rate policies give little or no weight to how fast interest rates change when they estimate the effect that this will have on the economy, because economic models are heavily influenced by equilibrium models even though they acknowledge that the economy is dynamic to a limited, but insufficient, extent.

In short, the main reason that private equity is playing a bigger role in the housing market is that the Fed has flawed economic models and isn't sensitive to the needs of younger middle class people in the housing market. Interest rates were too low in an objective sense. But increasing them so quickly did as much harm as it did good.

If private equity hadn't done it, smaller individual landlords would have, albeit, somewhat less rapidly and in smaller chunks per neighborhood spread out over many landlords in more neighborhoods. Private equity isn't new. It's been around for several decades as an important economic force. It's been around in the apartment market for almost as long. But, the reason we've seen the shift from smaller landlords to private equity is that the Fed created a huge imbalance in the single family home market, and private equity was able to respond more quickly to this sudden change (that created a sudden demand for rental housing which occupants couldn't afford to buy due to higher interest rates) than smaller landlords were.

Winners and Losers

Who is winning and losing in the post-Trump 2.0 economy?

Winning

New York City (tech)

San Francisco (finance and tech)

San Jose (tech)

Losing

Rural America (agriculture)

College towns (higher education)

Manufacturing towns in the South (trade hits to manufacturing)

Las Vegas (tourism)

Washington D.C. (federal government employment)

Disaster hit areas including parts of Florida and Appalachia

Empirical Tests Of Economic Theories

Experience tells us which economic theories are right and which are not, often with unexpected results.

* In theory, a higher minimum wage should greatly increase unemployment. In reality, the effect is almost immeasurable at U.S. levels.

* The evidence from Brexit and from Trump 2.0 and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs demonstrate that globalism is very important for a healthy economy and that departing from free trade does great harm, as does discouraging immigration.

* While a shallow microeconomic analysis would suggest that immigration hurts the job market for native born Americans, experience shows that immigration has the opposite effect, improve the job market and prosperity.

* The evidence from Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era illustrates that securities laws to reduce the likelihood of things like Ponzi schemes are actually very important even when other protections of property laws and contract laws are in place.

* Economic development studies tend to show that economic development is quite localized and culture driven, rather than being primarily driven by national laws, although national laws do matter quite a bit as shown by comparing the economies of communities on either side of a national boundary where the laws are quite different.

* Notably, lots of the litmus tests for economic development: municipal water quality, roads in good repair, regular trash collection, effective legal enforcement of debts, unambiguous real estate ownership, good quality K-12 education, and the availability of trauma center hospitals, are mostly provided at the local government level, rather than at the regional or national level.

* During the Financial Crisis, two different methods of managing the risk of high loan to value residential loans were compared which have very different regulatory regimes. 

One approach was to make a conventional mortgage at 80% loan to value, and then to have a second mortgage for the next 10-15% of loan to value that was subordinate to the conventional mortgage. This is subject to securities regulation of mortgage backed securities, with risks assessment mostly delegated to thinly regulated and thinly capitalized bond rating agencies (which are basically just credit reporting agencies for the bond market).

The other approach was to issue a single mortgage for the entire loan and to secure mortgage insurance, paid for by the borrower to protect the lender, which covered the lenders' losses if the value of a foreclosed home resulted in a deficiency judgment. This was subject to state insurance regulation.

In the financial crisis, insurance regulation was decisively proven to be superior, with no mortgage insurance firms going out of business, while essentially all of the subprime lenders, mortgage backed securities firms that packaged second mortgages for investors, and investment banks that organized this activity either ceased business entirely, underwent bankruptcy reorganization, or were saved only by bailouts with purchases of the failed firms by healthy large financial companies.