NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.
Alleged picture of Zmiinyi Island allegedly taken on New Year’s Eve ‘21 by (allegedly) Ukrainian Google user allegedly named Дмитрий Качуровский.
I’m sure you’ve heard about Snake Island.
A small garrison of brave Ukrainian soldiers were stationed on a tiny outpost called Zmiinyi (Snake) Island, keeping an eye on the Black Sea, when Russia invaded the entire country. Zmiinyi, deep in the Russia-controlled Black Sea, was swiftly isolate. A Russian warship broadcast a surrender request:
This is a Russian warship. I propose you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and unnecessary victims. Otherwise you will be bombed.
The Ukrainian troops, after consulting for a moment, replied:
Russian warship, go fuck yourself.
The Russians then commenced bombardment. All soldiers on Snake Island were killed. President Zelensky promised to award them all the posthumous Hero of Ukraine medal. Americans talked about “the spirit of Bastogne” alive again. Entrepreneurs started selling t-shirts. It’s a really inspiring story that makes you almost envy the noble Ukrainian fighting spirit.
So it’s a shame it isn’t true.
As soon as someone responsible in the press thought to ask the Russians about the story, the Russians replied with confusion. There was no bombardment at Zmiinyi, they said. The Ukrainian garrison surrendered peacefully. The Russian Navy took 82 prisoners. Our media duly reported this disagreement about the facts… in the tenth paragraph. Of a ten-paragraph story.
It’s now Sunday, and the meme shields are finally starting to come down. Russia has released video of several people it claims to be the captives, telling their side of the story. The Ukrainian government has acknowledged that the martyrs of Snake Island may still be alive (presenting this as fantastic news) (which it is! just not for Ukraine’s narrative).
There are three reasons this is happening, and all three are good reasons to assume that most of what you are getting out of the Ukraine War right now is nonsense:
The Fog of War: It is genuinely difficult to find out what is going on during wartime. War is confusing, chaotic, and difficult to document. Everyone “in the know” is fanatically paranoid about keeping their information secret. “Loose lips sink ships” and all that. People who spend lots of time in war zones asking, “Hey, so what are you guys up to?” and posting the answers on Twitter end up shot as spies. Also, war moves fast. It is absolutely possible that the Ukrainian government on Friday morning simply did not know what had happened to their Snake Island outpost, and assumed the worst. This is normal and you should expect it in all wars.
Yes, the U.S. Intelligence Community knows a ton about what’s going on in this war. They probably know everything. But they aren’t going to tell you about it, so the fog of war persists.
Propaganda: Wars are not won or lost, finally, on the battlefield. They are won by morale. One of the most important duties of a wartime government is to buck up morale. This is done through propaganda. There’s nothing inherently wrong with propaganda, mind you. Rosie the Riveter saying “We can do it!” is propaganda, but it’s fine. The message is necessary, it’s objectively inspiring, and it’s completely true. Nevertheless, competent governments tend to run highly effective propaganda campaigns that cast doubt on negative stories and encourage belief in positive ones, often in ways that (if not outright dishonest) show a reckless disregard for the facts. We aren’t used to this anymore, because it’s been a very, very long time since the last war between two competent governments. I mean, the third-world countries that usually get invaded really try to propagandize, God bless ‘em, but they’re just terrible at it, and they’re usually defending horrific governments to boot. Some of you reading this are probably too young to remember Baghdad Bob, the head of Iraq’s Information Ministry under Saddam Hussein, but, oh man, Baghdad Bob! He was so outlandishly bad at propaganda that he became an early meme, complete with collectible DVDs and bobbleheads. Seriously, look him up. As Americans broke into Baghdad itself, Baghdad Bob was still insisting that our boys were “committing suicide under the walls” and that he encouraged more of us to kill themselves. Pure comedy!
But the Ukrainian government is an actual functioning government. They are much, much better at this than most other recently-invaded states, and it shows in which stories they get to go viral. (Russia is also doing propaganda, of course, but everyone assumes they’re lying, so it doesn’t go anywhere.) Assume that some of the stories you’re seeing are being actively manipulated by the Ukrainian government to cast them in the best possible light.
You and I have spent years learning the rule that (in America) the Right and the Left police each other. This is how we cancel out the lies of each side and find the truth. If Donald Trump makes up an insane lie, the Democrats pounce on it and make memes about how dumb he is. If Joe Biden makes up an insane lie, the Republicans pounce on it. That is the order of things. So if Right and Left actually agree on something (or at least don’t contest it), then it’s definitely true.
This is absolutely not the case with the Ukraine war. Both Right and Left (in America) want the same outcome. They are all promoting similar (pro-Ukraine) viral stories, and nobody is policing them. If President Zelensky made up an insane lie, he would just get away with it. Those stories are getting through our mental filters, partly because human brains are fundamentally bad at handling the confusion that reigns during war, partly because we’re out of practice at recognizing propaganda, and partly because our most reliable heuristic for truth has gone offline, apparently for the duration.
At this point, I’m following QAnon theorists to get their take on the war. I think their takes are completely wrong (a week ago they were promising the war wouldn’t happen at all, and that U.S. intelligence was lying about everything), but, hey, I usually think the Left is completely wrong, too. Either way, I still need somebody to challenge my takes, and one thing you can say for QAnons is that they are determined to challenge the mainstream narrative.2
Other than that, I think the point of this blogletter today is simply to get you to put on your skeptical goggles and accept that we don’t really know what’s going on in Ukraine. Is Ukraine actually making a dent in the Russian advance? Maybe, maybe not. Do Russians control any Ukrainian cities? Maybe, maybe not. Did a Ukrainian blow himself up to take down a bridge the Russians were approaching? I’m not ruling it out. Did Ukraine shoot down a Russian paratroop transport. Seems possible. Is Russia preparing to unleash hell on civilians with thermobaric weapons? Could be. Does President Zelensky actually keep dropping badass quotes just off-camera? God, I hope so.
…and that hope, right there, is the whole challenge in a nutshell.
Sidebar: If you want to raise your IQ, you should stop reading Nate Silver’s™ FiveThirtyEight.com™ and replace it in your news diet with Nate Silver’s actual Twitter feed. This way you get all Nate’s very smart takes, instead of the takes of the terrible Vox-reject writers who have taken over his website. You also get to see the Bluepills dragging Nate every time he points out something uncomfortable, which suggests some possible reasons why FiveThirtyEight the website has gone so far downhill. I do miss his articles, though. He wrote good articles, and now all I get is 280 characters.
For the record, QAnon believes President Putin has launched this war because the state of Ukraine does not legally exist—it has always been part of Russia because of some kind of border registration error (?) in the early 1990s—and because U.S.-funded biolabs inside Ukraine have been running hideous experiments on Ukrainian civilians ever since Ukraine joined the globalist cabal. The Russian attack on Chernobyl was not because of Chernobyl’s strategic position or other tactical concerns, but because some of the worst stuff was happening there.
This all sounds, well… let’s just say that it isn’t grounded in the available facts any better than the Snake Island story was. But every time we promote a big viral Ukraine story that turns out false, we end up feeding the idea that you can’t believe anything you see in the media, and that feeds QAnon.
Indeed, I think the main difference between QAnon and me is this: I think the media mostly tries to report the truth and is just extremely bad at it (indeed, often maliciously biased), so you end up with media reports that are maybe one-third true, or sometimes entirely true but with a bizarrely misplaced emphasis.
By contrast, QAnon thinks you can’t believe a single word out of the media or anyone aligned with it, because they are actively engaged in a coordinated conspiracy to deceive. I just don’t think the media is capable of that level of organization or cleverness… perhaps because I’ve read their reporting! The best cure for QAnon would be for our media to, first, stop trying to suppress dissenting views and, second, to suck less at everything it does.
Yet you may be thinking to yourself, “Hang on, James! The Fed has been throwing bags of money into the economy at record rates for over ten years!” This is true. The Fed has created new money at an astounding rate since the financial crisis. They’ve been shoveling money our way so fast that keeping baseline interest rates near zero for a decade wasn’t enough. They had to introduce new ways of printing money and handing it to Wall Street, like so-called “quantitative easing.”
And yet inflation in the 2010s was much lower than it was in the 1990s and 2000s! That’s why we all forgot about inflation, and why it was such a surprise when it hit in 2020! So maybe printing money actually doesn’t cause inflation??
It’s a fair question.
After the 2008 financial crisis, there were widespread fears that government “stimulus bills” to aid the recovery, combined with Federal Reserve monetary stimulus, would expand the amount of money in our economy too much, causing runaway inflation and even more economic havoc than the Recession. I shared those fears, and opposed the stimulus bills. But I was wrong. There was no havoc. The recovery proceeded slowly but steadily, quantitative easing went off without a hitch, and inflation never reared its head. It was one of the three biggest political mistakes I ever made.1 What gives?
There are many people out there who argue that the amount of money-printing we are doing today really doesn’t cause inflation. They tend to think that only much larger amounts of money-creation would directly cause substantial inflation. Therefore, the current round of rapid price increases must be caused by something else: perhaps large-scale supply-chain disruptions, changing demographics,2 and/or corporate consolidation.3
I think these explanations of inflation all shed some useful light on the problem, but I still think the major cause of inflation today is money-printing. Yet, if you’re going to believe me, I’d better offer an explanation of what happened in the 2010s! So here are two:
Ramesh Ponnuru argues that the Great Recession stimulus didn’t cause inflation because the financial crisis actually contracted the amount of money in the economy, and so even the vast amounts of money the Fed threw into the economy at the time was only barely keeping pace with the vast amounts of money draining out. He thinks we should have spent a lot more money. Even if we had spent more money, he thinks, we would only have been barely keeping pace with the contraction. This tracks pretty well with what we see in the money supply:
During the Recession, the Fed printed a lot of money, and Congress poured a lot of it into the economy, and… it barely held things steady. Compared to the jump in money after the pandemic stimulus, the economic stimulus to get us out of the Great Recession isn’t even noticeable. All this fits nicely with Ramesh’s explanation.
I’m not sure that tells the whole story, though.
It’s important to remember that the Fed didn’t spend 2008-2019 giving free bags of money to everyone; the Fed gave free bags of money to banksand financial firms. You, peon, aren’t allowed to roll up to the Fed’s Discount Window and ask for one bag of free money and a side of fries. The free money is for Goldman-Sachs, not you. And what’s one thing banks, financial firms, and their rich owners all love spending money on, more than anyone else in the country?
That’s right:
…and other investment assets, such as municipal bonds, housing, and credit default swaps oh is that too soon?
When banks, financial firms, and rich people get free money, they invest it. If lots of them get free money, that should drive up the price of investments.
If the stock market reflects the real state of the underlying economy, then stock prices should increase more or less at the same pace as GDP. Growth in the real economy feeds growth in the stock market.
But if lots of free money is flooding the stock market, the price of stocks will begin growing faster than the real economy. Finance columnists call this “asset price inflation,” but that’s just a fancy phrase that means “inflation in the stock market plus maybe home prices.”
Have we seen any asset price inflation happening recently?4
Why, yes. Yes we have. Thank you for asking.
In a healthy stock market, the red line (the stock market) stays close to the blue line (the real economy). If the red line goes above the blue line, that’s a sign of stock market inflation, aka an economic bubble, aka an approaching recession… and, as you can see, the red line today hasn’t been this far above the blue line since before World War II. The same thing’s going on in home prices:
Not my graph, but simple enough: the green line is overall prices in the economy and the red line is home prices. When the red line goes above the green line, that’s either a housing shortage, or — as we learned to our regret in 2008 — a housing bubble. Opinions are divided on whether we are currently in a shortage or a bubble. My contrarian take is ¿Por qué no los dos?
So here’s another possible way of explaining the low-inflation decade we just lived through: inflation was actually very high all along. We just didn’t notice, because the U.S. Government was giving free money only to banks and financial firms, which invested it. Inflation was happening in the stock market, and Millennials complained they couldn’t afford to buy a house, but this inflation didn’t hit the average voter at the gas pump or the grocery store. (In fact, older voters enjoyed their rising property values!)
Then, in 2020, the U.S. Government finally started giving the rest of us free money, aka those nice big covid relief checks… and boom, suddenly everything’s inflating, not just stocks and housing.
You could pick Ramesh Ponnuru’s explanation or mine. Or you could pick some combination of alternative explanations that do not involve monetary inflation. Or, the most likely explanation: some combination of the above. (Good luck choosing right. Economics is not really a science yet. It’s still closer to gut instincts and pig entrails.)
Since I find Ponnuru’s explanation and mine persuasive, the bottom line for me is: it looks like printing money does cause inflation after all. The past ten years of low-inflation money printing were therefore a peculiar exception, not the rule. Today, we pay the piper.
The others were my belief that the Iraq War would be clearly good for most Iraqis within a very short timeframe, and my belief that Donald Trump was too broadly dishonest (and too fundamentally unlikable) to win the primary, or win the presidency, or deliver on his most important promises once in office.
As I mentioned in the last article, there are disagreements between different camps about whether price increases from one or more of these factors even counts as inflation. Such price increases might be just… real price increases, whereas inflation is often defined as nominal price increases without a change in the real (inflation-adjusted) price. But price increases, however defined, show up in the Consumer Price Index, our main measure of inflation, and get seen as inflation, so we do have to consider how these factors are contributing to CPI.
Graph footnotes: index year is 1987. Chart is obviously logarithmic due to exponential economic growth over time. S&P index data comes from data.nasdaq.com; GDP data from MeasuringWorth.com. Both indicies go back further, but, since U.S. GDP was not officially calculated before the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, I only took these charts back to 1944. I don’t trust pre-1944 GDP figures and certainly not pre-1934 figures.
Now, there’s some reason to dispute whether cutting off the chart in 1944 was a good idea. When you use historically reconstructed GDP measures, you can take this back as far as the 1870s, when the earliest precursors of the modern S&P 500 started indexing the stock market. And what you find on those charts is that stock prices were way higher than the size of the economy would suggest, and that they gradually deflated over the course of 60 years to arrive where they were at the end of the Great Depression. This makes for a much less dramatic final graph, as it starts to look like the 2010s are more of a return to the Gilded Age than an epic financial bubble. In the end, I decided that this is more likely an artifact of imprecise pre-war GDP measurements rather than the actual factual truth… and, even if I’m wrong about that, it’s worth remembering that the Gilded Age was marked by a brutal business cycle of drastic bubbles and rapid collapses, which was a major reason for the creation of the Federal Reserve.
Sovereign debt is more complicated than family credit-card debt. But not THAT much more complicated.
NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.
You see a dumb meme. I see the clearest illustration of modern U.S. federal debt financing ever drawn. It should be in every macroeconomics textbook.
This is an attempt to explain the national debt (and its dangers) in a way anyone can understand, so share away. Naturally, I skip past some of the complicated parts, and I tried to keep anything technical in footnotes.
It’s easy to understand how credit-card debt can destroy your life: you just run out of money.
You start out with a small imbalance in your budget: you’re making $3,000/month, but spending $3,500/month. Rather than cut expenses, you put the extra $500 on a credit card every month, with a 18% annual interest rate, and start making minimum payments—which is only $25, the first month. That’s not so bad! So next month you put $525 on your credit card. The month after, $550. Then $576. (The extra dollar is interest.) And so on.
But, after two years of this, you have $13,000 in credit card debt, and your minimum monthly payment is $709 — which is more money than you’re actually getting out of the credit card to help pay your actual monthly expenses!
Finally, you realize, you have to cut your expenses and live within your means. You reduce your expenses to $3,000/month. But, alas, it’s too late: your debt has taken on a life of its own, and you find yourself going deeper into debt just to pay the debt you already have. A year later:
You’re still only paying the minimum every month—it’s all you can afford. The big cuts you’ve already made simply aren’t enough anymore. Unless you can cut your expenses even deeper (or get a big raise at work) and put everything you have into fighting your debt, it will just keep growing. After five years, you’ll spend more on your credit card minimum payments than you spend on rent:
By Year Eight, you’re bankrupt.
Millions of Americans make this juggling act work for a while, but, unless they cut their expenses drastically, the credit card company eventually demands a higher minimum payment than the family can possibly afford. Bankruptcy court then cuts their expenses forcibly. A family has to live within its means, tightening the belt in tough times. “Act your wage!” Don’t spend more than you earn. Those are clichés because they are true.
The United States Can’t Run Out Of Money
People naturally apply that logic to their country. If the country spends more than it receives in taxes, it’s probably going to get into trouble, right? Politicians posturing as deficit hawks use lines like “Washington should have to do what millions of Americans have to do every month at the kitchen table!” because it’s easy to understand (and easy to get mad about).
But it’s not that simple. The United States of America does not have to live within its means, because it has something your family doesn’t have. It has something even other countries don’t have: a printing press that makes U.S. Dollars. The government can’t run out of money. It has a system.
When the U.S.A. doesn’t have enough money to pay its bills, the U.S. Treasury borrows money (called “bonds”)1 from investors. Investors include foreign governments, mutual funds, pensions, insurance companies—and even other parts of the federal government, like the Social Security Trust Fund:
Note to the graph-blind: this graph is only here to add some colorful details. It’s not actually important. Chart by The Balance, and their visualization/sourcing is better than mine.
We’ll eventually have to pay all those people their money back, plus a small amount of interest. We normally pay back our bondholders back by selling more bonds. Then we use that borrowed cash to pay off the original lenders. This is kind of like paying for a credit card bill by getting a new credit card and putting the bill for the old card on the new one.
When a family takes out a lot of loans, lenders start to worry that the family won’t be able to pay the loan back. So the family’s credit score goes down, and lenders demand bigger interest payments, to balance the risk of default. It’s the same with the federal government. As the government takes out more and more bonds, lenders who buy bonds demand steadily higher interest rates.
Suppose we sell Peter a $500 bond at 3% interest. A few years later, we owe Peter $515 in cash. We get that cash by selling Alastair a bond for $515. Seeing what we’re doing, Alastair demands 5% interest for his loan. Higher interest means that, when it’s time to pay back Alastair, we owe him $525, not $515. We raise that money by selling a loan to Peppa for $525… only she demands 7% interest. Now we’re on the hook for $535. Even though we only took out $500 to begin with, our minimum payment is inching upward.
Starting to sound like our household credit card debt crisis? It should. Here’s a pie chart for the federal government in fiscal year 20202:
…but not to worry! Here’s where the printing press comes in!
The Federal Reserve (a quasi-independent agency that controls the printing press) manipulates the interest rate for Treasury bonds.3 This manipulation is not a secret and is perfectly legal. It’s a big reason why the Federal Reserve (aka “the Fed”) exists.
The Federal Reserve manipulates the interest rate by printing money and giving that money to banks, financial firms, and rich people in general. (The details are extremely complicated.4) Interest rates for everyone are determined by how quickly the Fed is giving fresh money to banks at the moment. So, if the Fed wants lower interest rates, all it has to do is print more money and give it to banks faster.
This puts the U.S. Treasury in a unique position. It’s kind of like if you controlled the interest rate on your credit card debt. “Oh, that debt is growing too fast!” you would say. “Let’s just reduce that interest rate from 18% to 3%! That should take care of it!” It would work, too. If your salary went up even a tiny bit, just 1% per year, your credit card debt would grow slowly enough to remain manageable until your increasing income overtook it. You’d pay the debt off in a few years.
For the past ten years, that’s been the U.S.A.’s basic strategy for our national debt. Since the crash, the overall U.S. economy has been growing about 2% every year, which means the Treasury is collecting about 2% more in taxes every year. So, as long as the Federal Reserve can keep interest rates below 2%, we can keep selling bonds forever, because our economy will grow fast enough to generate new tax revenue to pay the bonds off.
Sure, the total national debt is huge and getting huger, but who cares? Debt is just a number. As long as we can make our minimum payments, we’ll be okay. And as long as interest rates stay below our economic growth rate, we can make those payments.
Sure enough, since the financial crisis, the Fed has helped keep the interest rate on a 10-year bond at approximately 2.3%.5 That’s low enough. At today’s interest rates, our economy is growing roughly fast enough to keep pace with the size of the debt. Today’s interest rate is much lower than it was during the prosperous 1990s and early 2000s. (It was about 6% back then.)
This seems like a pretty sweet deal! If the economy can grow fast enough to cover the interest, it seems like maybe the Treasury can borrow infinity dollars to pay for infinity government programs. When the Treasury has to pay it back, they just borrow even more, counting on the Fed to keep printing enough new dollars to keep interest rates low. Now that I’ve spelled it out, why aren’t we doing this? If we can print as much money as we want, why don’t we just print enough money to pay for all healthcare and make all college free and rebuild all our bridges and maybe give every American $10,000 just for funsies?
Because of inflation. The federal government stopped believing in inflation after 2010. So did many economists. Many ordinary people started thinking of inflation as “that thing that happened in the ‘70s, right?” But inflation has finally returned, and, with it, my ability to write this article convincingly.
Inflation happens whenever the Fed prints money and gives it to someone.
How Inflation Works
Suppose you’re selling a used car. Kelley Blue Book says you should be able to get $4,900-5,100 for it. You want to get the best price, though, so you sell it in an auction on eBay. After a dozen bids, your car sells for $5,000.
But now suppose that, on the last day of the auction, the Federal Reserve called several of the people bidding on your car—people who really need a car—and gave each of them a bag with $3,000 in cold hard fresh-printed cash inside. Some of them might take that $3k and start bidding on other, more expensive cars. But one of them, who has already decided he wants your car and doesn’t want to do more research, might just say to himself, “Huh, I couldn’t really afford to buy this car for more than $4,950 this morning. But now… how about I go ahead and take this bid to $5,100?” And then the next gal says, “Y’know, I have a bag of money, I can afford $5,200.” And so on. It’s plausible that your car, worth only $5,000 this morning, will now sell for $6,000 or more, all thanks to the money the Fed injected into the auction!
Now imagine that happening to every single thing people buy, both final goods (like the corn you buy at the grocery store) and inputs (like the fertilizer used to grow the corn). Prices go up across the board. That’s what happens when the Fed tosses new bags of money into the economy. That’s inflation.6
Every single time the Federal Reserve prints a new dollar without an old dollar being destroyed, it causes just a teensy-tiny bit of pressure on prices to start inflating. In fact, the Fed deliberately causes some inflation (usually around 2% annually) because a small, steady amount of inflation gives the Fed some tools to prevent recessions and promote recoveries. Inflation also has a certain amount of inertia to it, so it takes quite a lot of dollars to start moving the needle. Once the needle starts to move, though…
Well, you’ve seen the headlines:
We printed a LOT of money in the pandemic, and inflation instantly spiked.
To Fight Inflation, Interest Rates Must Rise
High inflation is bad. Costs go up at the grocery story, and, even if ordinary people get small cost-of-living increases at work, it’s never enough to keep up with inflation.7 Regular people fall behind.
As you’ve probably noticed, we live in a time of high inflation:
Since inflation is caused by the Fed printing too much new money,8 the solution to inflation is really quite simple: the Fed has to print less money. It doesn’t have to stop. It just has to slow down.
However, remember: the Fed keeps interest rates low by printing more money. When the Fed prints less money, interest rates go up.
Rising interest rates can cause all kinds of problems. In 1981, the Fed raised interest rates dramatically in order to stop double-digit inflation. It caused a major recession. But we aren’t interested in that. We’re interested only in the effect on the national debt.
If the interest rate goes up, we’re going to have to pay more interest on the national debt.9
Now the credit card crisis arrives.
Line Goes Up
Remember this chart? It’s a chart of U.S. federal government spending last year:
The blue area is stuff we actually paid for, using actual money collected through taxes. The red area is stuff we couldn’t pay for, so we borrowed the money. The green area is the interest payments on our debt. We couldn’t actually afford to pay that interest, so we also borrowed that money (borrowing from Peter to pay Paul) and counted on the Fed to print enough money to cover our costs.
That chart is how it looked when the rate on a 10-year Treasury bond was a mere 1.5%.
Here’s how this same chart would have looked if interest rates had been a modest 5% instead:
The debt payments, at this point, are large enough to become self-sustaining. If our interest rates go up like this, we will gradually have to devote more and more of our budget to just paying off the interest. Even if we cut our excess spending, it wouldn’t be enough to stop the growth of the debt payments. They will have taken on a life of their own.
Of course, we absolutely will not cut our excess spending. Oh, sure, we’ll end the dramatic, over-the-top pandemic spending of 2020. But actually balancing the budget would mean smashing Medicare to pieces and eliminating the majority of the U.S. military. (Yes, both.) We ain’t gonna do it. So our debt payments will keep growing, faster and faster.
It’s extremely difficult to find out exactly how much faster. It’s a complicated piece of math, and depends on a lot of assumptions. The U.S. government mostly makes very optimistic assumptions. For example, the Congressional Budget Office currently believes that the Fed will keep interest rates close to zero through 2031. I think it’s safe to assume their assumption is wrong. Prediction markets currently believe the CBO’s sunny estimate for 2022 is off by a factor of 8 — and that’s only looking 10 months ahead, not 10 years.
I spent a great deal of time with the Congressional Budget Office website over the past several days, and I managed to figure out what this picture looks like with a little less sunny optimism.10
Instead of assuming that interest rates stay low forever, let’s instead assume that the Fed’s response to inflation sharply drives up interest rates. The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury bond goes to 3.5% this year, 5% in 2025, and 10% in 2030. These are all pretty plausible numbers, well within historical norms. They may even be optimistic. During the early-1980s fight to end stagflation, the interest rate went above 10% and stayed there for six years. (It peaked at 16%.)
So here’s what the next few years look like, assuming interest rates sharply rise to combat inflation (and assuming the CBO’s other projections are correct).11 Watch how the green wedge grows to take up more and more of the budget:
Every time we pay off the green wedge, we have to take out more bonds, making the green wedge even larger the next year. How long can we keep this up?
The National Credit-Card Crisis
This looks a whole lot like the credit card debt crisis we considered at the start. That’s because it is, by 2030, a national credit card crisis. We end up borrowing more money to pay for our own borrowing than we borrow to pay for actual stuff we actually want. And the borrowing costs only grow, after this point, until we reach the point where we can’t pay anymore and have to declare bankruptcy.
That is how the national debt destroys us. It’s not the size of the debt. It’s the size of the interest payments. Those interest payments have been held at bay for years by the Federal Reserve’s money printer, but, if that money printer has to slow down, interest will be back with a roar, and it will gradually swallow our entire budget whole.
It is possible that won’t happen this decade. Inflation may be whipped more easily than expected. The War On Prices could be won by Christmas, and then the Fed can quickly turn on the printers again full blast, like a national morphine line. We’ve kept juggling these balls for four decades now. Who’s to say we can’t do one or two more?
But, eventually, the music stops. Eventually, the fiscal crisis starts. Eventually, our debts must be paid.
What Can Be Done
Once we’re in the fiscal crisis, we then have four options:
Cut interest rates back down below 2%, so our borrowing costs at least stop growing.
Bad consequence: inflation runs rampant, and bond-buyers might not even accept this once the fiscal crisis starts. Once they see our weakness, they may demand higher interest rates from the Treasury regardless of Fed policy.
(Also, it just might be possible that the Fed’s system of “giving free money to the richest people in our society in order to make our debts affordable” will become politically unpopular in the future. It’s kinda weird that isn’t unpopular now, but I think most people just don’t know this is how our finance system currently works.)
Cut expenses. Balance the budget. Use the surplus to start paying down the debt.
Bad consequence: Medicare and the U.S. military more or less shut down.
Raise taxes (on everyone, not just the rich, and by a lot). Balance the budget. Use the surplus to start paying down the debt.
Bad consequence: higher taxes slow the economy, which means we have to raise taxes by even more than we first expected, which slows the economy even more, which… (and so on).
National bankruptcy. Default on some of our debts, renegotiate others, and resize the national debt by fiat.
Bad consequence: well, for one, under the Validity of the Public Debt clause, it may be unconstitutional to do this intentionally.
Also, the U.S. defaulting would destroy the world economic order—one that benefits everyone, but benefits America especially much. Nothing like it has ever happened before, so no one knows quite what would happen, but economists speak of it in hushed tones like Ragnarok.
The first three options are politically impossible. Nobody will accept permanently high (and rising) inflation, nobody will raise taxes on the middle class, and nobody will make bone-deep spending cuts that would leave millions of voters screaming.
In a functional body politic, we’d compromise between the three and we’d all be able to live with it. In reality, I expect that we’ll end up choosing Door #4 and default on our debt. We might talk ourselves into it, convincing ourselves it will be okay. Or we might just wake up one morning, halfway into one of our increasingly routine debt limit battles, and find out that, oopsie, we defaulted by accident. During a debt limit crisis, the Treasury pays the bills on an emergency basis based on extremely complicated math and a lot of fancy guesswork about exactly how much money they’ll receive from taxes each day. It would be all too easy for them to make a mistake and find the Treasury empty when debtors come calling and, boom, global economic catastrophe.
One way or another, American civilization will come through the crisis to reach the other side. Time’s arrow will see to that, if nothing else. But, when the conditions are ripe, the fiscal crisis has all the makings of a national paroxysm on the order of the Iraq War or the Great Recession.
And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do to head off this crisis. I mean, in theory, we could start making these changes now, so the budget eventually balances and the debt eventually starts shrinking. But there is zero political support for that in the United States.
Elected Democrats openly admit that, not only don’t they have a plan to fix the debt, they actually want to expand it a lot more, to help pay for more programs! Right now, they are incandescently furious at Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) for blocking a multi-trillion dollar bill because the economy is still reeling from the inflation caused by their last few multi-trillion dollar bills. Manchin’s their best hope of re-election, and they hate him for it.
Elected Republicans are happy to criticize Democrats’ big-spending ways… until they actually wield actual power, at which point the GOP becomes just as bad as the Democrats! Three of the biggest contributors to our broken pattern of spending and borrowing were named Reagan, Bush, and Trump. Republican voters reward this. Indeed, one of the big underappreciated reasons why Trump won the 2016 primary was that Trump was the first GOP presidential candidate in decades to stop pretending he cared about the debt. He vowed no cuts to Social Security, no cuts to Medicare, and big cuts to the taxes that pay for both… and, hey! Promise kept! Fiscal disaster, thy name is the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017!
Financial titans and the captains of industry could theoretically exert pressure on Washington to get its debt problem under control. But they won’t. The bond vigilantes of yore are apparently all dead, and the current Boomer-run financial industry is too focused on next quarter’s returns, too happy with its bags of free money and inflated stock prices to lift a finger against the Fed. In some ways, that’s a good thing. “The rich run the country” has been a powerful subtext in American political discourse for a long time. If that subtext became text, that might be clarifying, but also very dangerous to our political order for a whole host of other reasons.
So you’re out of luck. Ross Perot and Paul Ryan warned us, but the crisis is coming sooner or later, and no one is going to stop it.
So hope it comes “later,” and… I dunno… Buy gold?
Thank you for reading! This post is public. If you liked it, please give it to someone else who would also like it. If you didn’t like it, let me know why in the comments. (I read ‘em all!)
Next Time at De Civitate: I’m long overdue for a new installment of Worthy Links. I have a ton of good ones saved up to curate for your reading enjoyment
However, Worthy Links is a paid feature now—just about the only thing on De Civ with a paywall, but, with all this inflation going on, we gots bills to pay!—so, if you want to see all the neat stuff I’ve been reading, you may want to upgrade to a paid subscription. I’ll make it worth your while:
Technically, short-term bonds (0-52 weeks) from the U.S. Treasury are called “T-Bills,” medium-term Treasury bonds (2-10 years) are called “T-Notes,” and only long-term Treasury bonds (10-30 years) are actually called “T-Bonds.” But this is just financial jargon. They’re all Treasury bonds.
If you are a huge federal budget nerd, you may look at this chart and go, “Wait! $523 billion on the debt?! But our net interest payment for Fiscal 2020-21 was only $343 billion!” True, but we don’t care about net interest here. Interest revenues are simply revenues; they go toward stuff we can afford and are counted in the blue part of the chart. We care about gross interest. The Treasury helpfully lists exact numbers for gross interest, although I used the CBO’s rounded numbers for the sake of a clean chart.
…and the interest rates for everything else in the economy, from mortgages to the interest rate on your savings account at the bank. But we don’t care about all that today. This article is just about the national debt and how the Fed influences it.
They don’t even actually physically print the money anymore. The Fed just adds zeroes to a bank’s account in a computer system. It works just like a printing press, but with all the cool parts (the “printing” and the “press”) taken out.
The Fed tried raising rates around 2018—much to President Trump’s fury—but they only made it to 3.3% before the economy freaked, the Fed chickened out, and the interest rate dropped back to roughly 2%.
There is a dispute between Milton Friedman’s monetarists and John Maynard Keynes’s neo-Keynesians about whether money-printing is the sole cause of inflation in a modern fiat economy, or whether it is only one of several causes. There is also a dispute between those camps about how to define inflation, which accounts for much of the disagreement in the first dispute. This article brackets the whole question of cost-push inflation and other non-Fed causes of inflation, because we only care about inflation here insofar as it impacts Fed policy, thus interest rates, thus the national debt.
However, I admit that I, personally, see myself as a monetarist with Austrian sympathies, so I’m not particularly inclined toward the Keynesian view. (Any actual trained economists would see me as “an uneducated ape with too many unearned opinions”—or, in other words, an Austrian.)
This is because of the Cantillion Effect. You can read about it from libertarian right-wingers and anti-monopoly left-wingers, but both sides agree that money-printing inflation hurts ordinary people way more than it hurts banks, financial institutions, and wealthy people. The new money takes time to “trickle down” to consumers in the form of higher wages, and meanwhile the price hikes have already hit.
There may be a niggling question in the back of your head: “James, if printing money causes inflation, why didn’t we see inflation during the 2010s, when the Fed printed more money than ever before in history?” I will answer that in a separate article later this week. I didn’t want to derail this article with several hundred words on quantitative easing and the Case-Shiller home price index. (I’ll update this article with the link when I do.)
The relationship between “current interest rates” and “interest rate on the debt” is complicated, to the point where nobody can actually point directly to it… but it’s a lot more direct than you might expect. Yes, we sell a lot of bonds with 5-, 10-, and 30-year maturities… but a whole lot of our debt is in short-term stuff, highly sensitive to fluctuations in the interest rate. Since 1988, the actual interest we’ve paid on the national debt (interest payment in dollars divided by total debt in dollars) has closely tracked the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury, which in turn has been pretty darned sensitive to increases in the Federal Funds Rate (the baseline interest rate set by the Fed):
Interestingly, the 10-year Treasury seems to be a lot more sensitive to Fed rate hikes (whether actual or anticipated) than to Fed rate cuts.
Table 2-3 of the CBO’s Net Interest Costs primer (December 2020) was the lynchpin of the math. Table 1-1 of that document was also helpful. CBO’s interest rate projections are in Table 2-1 of their “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2021 to 2031” document from February 2021. Table 1-1 of that same document gives us expected revenues and outlays for each year. Smush those tables all together, and you can get a pretty decent pie chart going.
They aren’t. The CBO’s spending projections are charmingly absurd. CBO predicts drastically smaller deficits than we’ve had during the entire past decade (including the financially good years), despite obvious economic headwinds. This is because the CBO is required by law to pretend that Congress’s silly budget tricks and loopholes aren’t fake. In reality, the red wedge on those charts, representing our overspending, is likely to be two or three times larger than in these charts… and the green wedge, representing our debt, will get even bigger even faster as a result. But it’s beyond the scope of this article, and probably beyond the scope of my math skills, to fix all that.
NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.
Abraham Lincoln giving his famous “House Divided” speech about slavery, in 1858, while running for Senate. He lost the election by nine points. Seven years later, he banned slavery nationwide. Think long-term.
There is a theory—prevalent on both Right and Left—that pro-lifers should not want to actually win Dobbs v. Jackson (the Supreme Court case that could finally reverse Roe/Casey), because their victory will inspire an almighty backlash that results in abortion enthusiasm, a blue wave, court-packing, and federal pro-abortion laws. According to this theory, pro-lifers need to change more hearts and minds before actually toppling Roe, or their fleeting victory will backfire into final defeat. I’ve encountered this theory in conversation with enough people (including more than one De Civ reader) that I think my reply bears sharing more widely.
Several times in the pandemic, Public Health™ has made similar arguments. For example, we shouldn’t encourage people to wear masks, because they’ll just get overconfident and engage in riskier behaviors. Or: the CDC shouldn’t expedite vaccine approval to save a hundred thousand lives in winter 2020, because if there are any problems people will lose confidence in the CDC and it won’t be able to save even more lives later on. This led one of the best pandemic science journalists, Zeynep Tufecki,1 to coin a new rule:
She’s right. Masks do not “backfire” and lead to “overconfidence” any more than seat belts cause car accidents. We know this now in 2022… but the available evidence strongly favored it even in 2020. The “backfire” argument boiled down to wild speculation, a certain degree of midwit smugness,2 and plain old natural human fear that we might try something and fail.
Likewise, we should assume that, when we have a legal case where the Supreme Court will either uphold protections for the unborn or strike them down, winning is better than losing.
The evidence that winning > losing is, in this case, quite strong:
Pro-lifers have (for decades) been measurably more devoted to the issue at the ballot box than their counterparts on the other side. This sometimes wavers when pro-lifers in general are depressed (e.g. Romney 2012), but it’s a consistent rule-of-thumb in politics that pro-lifers show the hell up. Pro-choicers are not as intensely pro-choice as pro-lifers, and may prioritize other issues. This has been a political law for long enough that we should demand quite a lot of evidence before reversing our expectation.
Sometimes, after a political coalition scores a major, binding victory, it de-mobilizes, rests on its laurels a bit, and the opposition has a chance to strike back. (We saw this after the passage of Obamacare.) However, since Dobbs will, at best, send abortion policy back to the states for fifty state legislative battles, the pro-life movement is (if anything) gearing up right now, not de-mobilizing. Dobbs is not our Obergefell. It’s the long-delayed beginning of our national abortion debate, not its end.
The pro-choice coalition is not measurably larger than the pro-life coalition. Although most Americans say they want the Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade, it is clear that most Americans have no idea what Roe v. Wade says, because most Americans also support a wide range of abortion bans that clearly violate Roe v. Wade (including the one at stake in Dobbs!). Self-identification as pro-life or pro-choice wobbles with the political winds… but, when it comes down to it, the evidence of the past 50 years says that the American abortion wars basically come down to ~20-30% of the population who want to ban abortion (with narrow or no exceptions), ~20-30% who want to guarantee abortion is legal up to the moment of birth, and ~50% of Americans who would really rather not think about it and can we please just argue about taxes and jobs instead.
We have put all this to the test! The 2021 elections in New Jersey and Virginia took place after Texas’s S.B.8 effectively ended Roe/Casey in Texas, a front-page national news story. Incumbent Virginia Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe specifically tried to make abortion an election issue. (Incumbent New Jersey Democratic governor Phil Murphy did not.)
S.B.8 did not even blunt Republicans’ momentum. In Virginia, the result was a 12-point swing from the 2020 results, in Republicans’ favor. McAuliffe narrowly lost his job in a state that most commentators considered safely blue. In New Jersey, the result was a 13-point swing toward Republicans from the 2020 results (not quite enough to dislodge Gov. Murphy). Abortion had no clear effect whatsoever. The red wave swept both state capitols anyway.
“But S.B.8 was only one far-off red state! If Roe falls, it affects the entire nation equally!” Nope. Under S.B.8, a single state attempted to set its own abortion policy (and succeeded). If Roe/Casey falls, every state will get to set its own abortion policy. There is no plausible way for a ruling in Dobbs to threaten popular pro-abortion policies in pro-choice states like Virginia, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Colorado, or any of the other 2022 battlegrounds.
Dobbs will have the same impact on those voters that S.B.8 did… and 2021 taught us that those voters didn’t care about S.B.8. Maybe Dobbs will play out differently, for some reason? But the evidence we have so far suggests that, no, abortion bans in other parts of the country don’t endanger Republican prospects in states where pro-choicers have an edge.
Meanwhile, in battleground states where pro-lifers have an edge—states like Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Iowa—any pro-choice backlash is at least somewhat likely to be outweighed by pro-life… frontlash? Is that a word?
Suppose I am completely, utterly wrong about all of the above. Suppose there’s a huge pro-choice backlash against Dobbs, despite the evidence so far, and it’s a big backlash. Democrats get a 5% swing, a bigger swing than any caused so far by covid, Afghanistan, or the inflation crisis.
So what? The national environment appears to favor Republicans by something like 9-12 points. Take 5 points off of that, and Republicans still have a good midterm, winning by 4 points, and taking control of both House and (likely) the Senate.
Suppose I’m wrong about that, too. Suppose the Democrats not only generate a vast pro-choice backlash ex nihilo, but also manage to defeat the huge political headwinds they’re facing from inflation and covid and so forth. They end up comfortably winning the midterm election, holding the House and even adding a seat in the Senate, like the Republicans after 9/11. This would be an extraordinary, historic performance in a midterm election.
Again, so what? That gets Dems to 51 Senate seats, but, with Manchin and Sinema around, they need a minimum of 52 to break the filibuster (probably more, if it comes down to it). Even if they do break the filibuster, they absolutely don’t have the votes for court-packing, and they’ll have to talk Sen. Bob Casey into voting for a federal abortion-rights law he opposes. They’ll then have to run the gamut of pro-lifers tying federal Democrats to every barbarian horror, from partial-birth abortion to selling baby parts. Even if an abortion-rights law does pass, it would likely be an unconstitutional violation of the Commerce Clause, and the current textualist Supreme Court is likely to strike it down.
So, even if Democrats win in 2022, their prospects for reinstating Roe v. Wade are vanishingly small.
Even if every single word above is somehow completely wrong, reinstating Roe (through legislation and/or court-packing) would still take a minimum of eighteen months after a favorable decision in Dobbs. (Assuming court-packing doesn’t dissolve the Union all by itself.) That’s a very long time for Americans to see what a pro-life America might look like—and to realize that the pro-choice movement’s lies about back-alley abortions and mothers’ safety have always been just that.
I think we should prepare for the reality: if the Right To Life wins in Dobbs, there’s very little the other side will be able to do about it.
I can’t overstate how lucky3 it is that Dobbs is coming down the barrel of a midterm election where the Republicans are out of power, but just barely out of power. I know it never feels “lucky” to lose a presidential election, like pro-lifers did in 2020, but if we assume that you have to lose some presidential elections, the 2020 loss was very well-timed.
There’s pretty much always a strong backlash against the president’s party in the midterms. We saw in 2018 the kind of midterm backlash President Trump received, even though things were actually going pretty good! Now imagine the backlash against Trump in a world with covid and inflation. I shudder to think what would happen in 2022 if the Republicans were the ones in the White House. 2022 could have turned into a real slaughterhouse for pro-life officials, especially if an anti-Dobbs backlash materialized. That could have set Democrats up to win not just the White House in 2024, but a filibuster-proof progressive majority to go with it.
Instead, Democrats are the ones facing the backlash. Abortion simply doesn’t matter enough to most Americans for their muddled opinions about Roe to overcome their frustration with inflation, school closures, and wokeism. That, combined with the Democrats’ current rural disadvantage, threatens to lock them out of power for perhaps the rest of the decade. Because pro-lifers lost in 2020 (barely), 2022 is the safest political moment for a case like Dobbs in at least twenty years.
While the potential costs to winning Dobbs are low, the potential benefits are very high. Consider:
The pro-life movement has scored many victories for a very long time by subjecting abortion procedures to various regulations, from informed consent rules to clinic safety laws to waiting periods. However, these victories all depended on the assumption that abortions took place in a medical clinic and were performed by doctors who feared losing their licenses. That assumption is starting to falter. The rise of at-home abortion-by-pill is making it more difficult to impose binding, enforceable rules that protect unborn children (or their mothers). To effectively protect against these kinds of abortion, the pro-life legal movement is going to need to be able to pass more robust laws, along the lines of what the gun-control movement has achieved. We can’t do that under Roe/Casey.4
While anti-abortion policy victories have been consistent for the past several decades (and have contributed to a slow, steady fall in the abortion rate), abortion attitudes have been pretty static. One of the few things that can actually reshape public polling on an issue is a Supreme Court ruling about it. People tend to underestimate this effect, but the law is a teacher. Support for same-sex marriage measurably jumped after Obergefell v. Hodges, especially among Republicans and Independents. I’m optimistic that a Supreme Court decree that abortion is not a human right will measurably increase the number of Americans who agree. At the start of this post, our pessimists argued that the Supreme Court shouldn’t rule against Roe/Casey until we’ve won enough hearts and minds. But there’s a decent case to be made that the best way for us to win hearts and minds is for the Supreme Court to rule against Roe/Casey!
In many states, we’ve hit something of a policy ceiling. Pro-lifers have implemented every protection for the unborn they can think of that doesn’t violate Roe/Casey. Pro-lifers are breathtakingly creative… but we are entering an era of diminishing returns, as long as Roe/Casey are on the books. We already have enough hearts and minds (and state legislative votes) to ban abortion across much of red America. The only thing standing in the way is the Supreme Court’s anti-constitutional abortion rulings. The time has come.
To my mind, the biggest reason so many Americans remains skeptical of abortion restrictions and abortion bans is because they can’t imagine a world without legal abortion. Or, worse, they can imagine a world without legal abortion, but the world they imagine the lurid lie the pro-abortion movement sold back in the 1970s. Many people sincerely believe the empirically false5 claim that “Banning abortions doesn’t stop abortions; it only stops safe abortions.”6
The next step in winning the fight for full personhood is demonstrating to the world that an abortion-free society is both possible and beautiful… that it’s good for babies and good for mothers. The Left will not make this easy. They will scour the pro-life states for Savitas while ignoring their own Gosnells. They will grill our legislators about popular rape exceptions while failing to notice their legislators’ enthusiasm for unpopular late-term abortions. We will only beat them by being better than them in every way, from political smarts to personal charity.
But, today, we can’t even try, because the Supreme Court won’t let any of our “laboratories of democracy” enact a democratic anti-abortion policy. Once Dobbs falls, that can change.
Naturally, the blue states that don’t recognize fetal personhood today will continue not recognizing personhood the day after Dobbs, even if we win. But, as President Lincoln once said about slavery:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
For fifty years, we in the United States have been all one thing: abortuaries. The fall of Roe/Casey would make us half-free (while the other half would languish in barbarism for a time). But this state of affairs could not, I think, persist forever. The Union has been all one thing. I think, eventually, it will become all the other. But that process cannot even begin until Roe/Casey are overturned.
That’s why, over the long term, the fall of Roe/Casey may well be the most consequential American policy change since the fall of Dred Scott… and why I am not really worried about any short-term political consequences.
Don’t be afraid of winning, gang. Cheer for a win. Pray for a win. (I’m way more scared of John Roberts than I am of the Democrats.) Yes, even if we win, we might then fail, like the Irish pro-life movement did after Amendment 8 passed. Yes, we are right to be scared of that. But we are smart, we are good, and we are many. We have the truth (and the One Who Is Truth) on our side. We love both mothers and their children, while the other side pretends to love only one, and truly loves neither.
All we need from Dobbs is what we’ve sought for fifty years: a chance to do the right thing.
If ten actual professional epidemiologists say one thing, and Zeynep says the opposite, trust Zeynep. History tells us that the epidemiologists will eventually admit they were wrong.
I won’t dwell on the irony that gun-controllers have been able to pass more robust restrictions on guns than pro-lifers have on abortion, even though gun control is expressly limited by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, while the only plausible reference to abortion in the Constitution is a passage in the Fourteenth Amendment that seems to protect unborn children.
Someday, I should write a full blog post about this, but, for now, this will have to do.
UPDATE 2:20 PM: that link apparently only works for me. The moderators of /r/science—showcasing that classic reddit spirit of fairness, open-mindedness, and free inquiry (/s /s /s /s /s)—appear to have shadowbanned me for writing this comment. Here is the full text of the now-invisible comment:
(PARENT POST: “Yeah, generally laws against abortions don’t lower the number of abortions, they just increase maternal mortality.”)
ME: Laws against abortion do lower the number of abortions, if you control for poverty.
Of course, the Guttmacher Institute, which both authors most of the studies on this and has a sizable financial and ideological stake in abortion access, does not typically control for poverty. Which leads to the publication of studies saying, “Hey, El Salvador banned abortion and they have a high maternal mortality rate, but Germany legalized abortion and they have a low maternal mortality rate!” Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.
But there’s a clear positive correlation between state-level abortion restrictions and lower total abortion numbers in the United States, the same thing played out in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism (a lovely natural experiment in the effects of abortion prohibition/liberalization in countries in similar economic straits), and the great first-world experiment in abortion prohibition — the Republic of Ireland, 1983-2018 — successfully combined extremely low maternal mortality with incredibly low abortion rates, even after accounting for “abortion tourism” to the U.K.. Even Guttmacher was forced to admit that the American Hyde Amendment (a restriction on federal abortion funding in Medicaid) goes a long way toward reducing the abortion rate.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. When the government bans something, whether it’s speeding or slavery or internet piracy or child pornography, you invariably get less of it. Sometimes only a little less, sometimes a lot less — depends on the severity of the penalty, the degree to which the law is enforced, and the ease of enforcing it. Yet our friends at the Alan Guttmacher Institute want us to believe that, for abortion and abortion alone, the vast police powers of the State have zero impact.
It’s absurd on its face, but it’s an incredibly convenient thing for people to believe, so Guttmacher gets its audience.
UPDATE [3 March 2022]: One of this blog’s readers reached out to the /r/science moderators to ask for an explanation of that shadowban. In response, the moderators un-shadowbanned it. So the link should work now. Thanks, Colin!
Even before you look at the empirical evidence, this is a pretty obviously insane claim. You will notice that laws banning rape do not stop 100% of rapes. Nevertheless, we have plenty of laws banning rape, because banning rape actually does greatly reduce the amount of rape that occurs! Laws against violence are good, actually!
This may be another example of Zeynep’s Law at work.
NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.
A few weeks ago, I advised you to Keep One Eye On Xi’an Province, where an extraordinarily tight lockdown by Chinese authorities (combined with some disturbing rumors) was raising my eyebrows:
The rumor is that Xi’an isn’t being locked down because of a covid outbreak. That’s a cover story, according to the rumor. What’s actually happening in Xi’an (says the rumor) is widespread human-to-human transmission of hemorrhagic fever. This is why the lockdown is more intense than an average Chinese covid lockdown, the rumor mill reports: China is actually trying to keep a new pandemic threat from breaking out.
…Two years ago today, I was reading stories about CCP apparatchiks shutting down “rumors” in Wuhan province—citizen journalism that all turned out to be true, and which I should have trusted more at the time. Their heavy-handed suppression of dissent in Xi’an—specifically Xi’an, too; I didn’t see stuff like this when Zhangjiajie locked down—raises an eyebrow, and feels chillingly familiar. The Chinese Communist Party is certainly hiding something.
However, there are lots of possible reasons why the CCP might be blacking out discussion of the Xi’an lockdown, and only one of them is “they’re hiding Ebola 2: Shaanxi Boogaloo.” The most obvious non-threatening explanation is that the CCP is just covering up its own corruption and incompetence. That’s CNN’s angle on it right now, and, hey, fair enough. I think the probability that the rumor of widespread person-to-person transmission of hemorrhagic fever in Xi’an is actually true is still less than 15%.
I’ve continued checking in on Xi’an for the past few weeks. It seems only fair that I share the good news: the Xi’an lockdown ended on Monday. The rumors about hemorrhagic fever have died down. American conspiracy theorists, including Dr. Robert Malone, have picked them up, but the actual rumor mill from China has stopped discussing it altogether, at least where I can see.
By this point in the Wuhan covid outbreak, we had significant leakage of cell phone videos showing that the “bat virus” was much more than the Chinese Communist Party was pretending, and we had Wuhan doctors risking their lives to tell the truth to the world. Xi’an has had its share of cell phone leaks and truth-tellers, but none of them are blowing a whistle on hemorrhagic fever. We’ve seen no hospital hallways crowded with patients bleeding from their orifices. Instead, Xi’ans truth-tellers are blowing the whistle on oppressive quarantine camps, near-starvation conditions under lockdown, and the cruelty and incompetence of CCP officials.
That, I think we can safely conclude, is what the Chinese Communists were covering up all along. It’s not Marburg. Just run-of-the-mill dictatorship stuff.
I still think we should pull out of the Olympics, but for purely moral reasons now. China seems medically safe.
This is how the vast majority of terrifying-but-credible rumors die: quietly. I’m glad I follow them, but most of the scary stuff turns out to be nothing. I just wish the rumors about human-to-human transmission of a deadly new virus had turned out false two years ago, too!
NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.
Trivia: Xi’an is about 500 miles northeast of Wuhan, but China is so truly vast they would be pretty close to each other on this map.
I started following the covid outbreak in Wuhan, China during the last week of December, 2019, and I was pretty sure it was going to break out of China by the first week of January, 2020. I was the first among my friends to start talking about covid… but I talked about it only privately—and too late. I was shy, because it was well-known that covid was a conspiracy theory, that conspicuously worrying about it was anti-Asian racism, and that the flu was a much bigger threat.
My first (private) Facebook post about covid was on January 27th, 2020. (I suggested calmly stocking up on water and dry goods, Just In Case.) By that time, we had known about human-to-human transmission for nearly two weeks.1 I should have called for border closures then. By the time January 27th rolled around, it was too late: covid began spreading freely in the Seattle area during the week of January 13th (though we would not realize that until March). But, still shy of being seen as a nut, I wouldn’t write publicly about covid until February 25th and my first actual blog about it was on March 5th. Sure, weeks ahead of the general panic—but still weeks behind the moment when decisive action could (should) have been taken. At the very least, I should have publicly defended the Trump Administration’s restrictions on Chinese travel (imposed January 31st) and demanded more. I’ve always felt a bit bad about that.
So this post is me erring on the side of sharing my thoughts early instead of sitting on them until I’m certain. It’s the first week of January again. I’ve been loosely following Xi’an since Christmas, when the Chinese city of 13 million entered hard lockdown.
This lockdown is really hard, dear reader. China hard. China routinely does lockdowns the likes of which the West can only dream (I mentioned some a couple weeks ago), but the Xi’an lockdown is a step beyond that.
That’s a “huh.” But not a big “huh.” I wrote just a couple weeks ago about how intense Chinese lockdown culture has been, as part of their public health theatrics about suppressing Delta and Omicron.
Then I started hearing the rumor. This is just a rumor, and I have absolutely no concrete evidence for it. No mainstream outlet has reported it even as “rumor”, at least to my knowledge. But, when you’re dealing with a dictatorship, it’s smart to keep your ears pricked up for rumors, and smart to remember that the media conglomerates have both legitimate difficulties investigating the rumors and incentives not to.
The rumor is that Xi’an isn’t being locked down because of a covid outbreak. That’s a cover story, according to the rumor. What’s actually happening in Xi’an (says the rumor) is widespread human-to-human transmission of hemorrhagic fever. This is why the lockdown is more intense than an average Chinese covid lockdown, the rumor mill reports: China is actually trying to keep a new pandemic threat from breaking out.
On the one hand, some viruses that cause hemorrhagic fever come with relatively mild disease. On the other hand, the scariest diseases you’ve ever heard of—Ebola, Marburg—are viral hemorrhagic fevers.
We do know that there’s some hemorrhagic fever in Xi’an, because, to the Chinese government’s credit, they admitted it. They also claim that there is no human-to-human transmission, and that this is just a seasonal outbreak of hantavirus (which is terrifying, but such outbreaks do happen in this part of China). Of course, we’d be idiots to take these reassurances at face value…
Mostly well-argued, @dumbass_emo.
…but we’d also be idiots if we completely dismissed this simple (and simplest) explanation for what’s going on in Xi’an just because the Chinese Communist Party reported it. The fact is, even in a dictatorship, the great majority of rumors are false. Most conspiracy theories, even the plausible ones, aren’t true. China says the extra-hard lockdown is because of the Olympics coming up. That doesn’t sound crazy to me!
Still, two “huhs” from me. I’ve started looking up “Xi’an” and “hemorrhagic” regularly on Twitter, just to see what’s new or leaking. Half the people talking about it are anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists. That is normal and expected when you are dealing with the fringe of Known Reality. Half the people talking about an imminent coronavirus pandemic in January 2020 were conspiracy theorists of various stripes, too.
Today’s piece of new information was unsettling, and led me to write this post:
Police in the northern Chinese city of Xi’an have arrested dozens of people for spreading “rumors” online after the authorities banned the city’s 13 million residents from posting negative reports from coronavirus lockdown. At the same time, a string of other arrests suggests growing public anger over restrictions that have left many without access to adequate food, daily necessities and urgent medical care.
Song Wentao, a high-ranking official with the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, was fired after posting critical comments about the harshness of Xi’an’s lockdown.
Meanwhile, the Xi’an branch of the Cyberspace Administration said it had jailed one social media user for 10 days and was currently investigating “multiple online violations linked to libel and rumor-mongering,” the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s law enforcement website Chang’an reported.
“The Xi’an Cyberspace Administration … is working with law enforcement … to intensively investigate and deal with online violations such as fabricating rumors, inciting regional discrimination and insulting others,” the report said, citing the case of a man surnamed Luo who was sentenced to 10 days’ administrative detention for “maliciously fabricating false information” and “libeling disease prevention personnel” in his friends group on social media.
Two years ago today, I was reading stories about CCP apparatchiks shutting down “rumors” in Wuhan province—citizen journalism that all turned out to be true, and which I should have trusted more at the time. Their heavy-handed suppression of dissent in Xi’an—specifically Xi’an, too; I didn’t see stuff like this when Zhangjiajie locked down—raises an eyebrow, and feels chillingly familiar. The Chinese Communist Party is certainly hiding something.
However, there are lots of possible reasons why the CCP might be blacking out discussion of the Xi’an lockdown, and only one of them is “they’re hiding Ebola 2: Shaanxi Boogaloo.” The most obvious non-threatening explanation is that the CCP is just covering up its own corruption and incompetence. That’s CNN’s angle on it right now, and, hey, fair enough.
I think the probability that the rumor of widespread person-to-person transmission of hemorrhagic fever in Xi’an is actually true is still less than 15%. We had stronger reasons to be afraid of the Chinese coronavirus2 by this time in 2020, and it’s likely that my decision to post about Xi’an so early is an overcorrection of my past errors. Most rumors peter out after a little while, and there’s probably nothing going on Xi’an that we in America need to worry about. You will probably get to watch this rumor peter out as well.
Still. Keep an eye on Xi’an. It’s never a bad idea to have your basement stocked up with food and water according to the Ready.gov guidelines. I’ve said that before and surely will again.
Also, it is probably a good time—yes, now—for President Biden to impose strict, enforced quarantines on all incoming travel from anywhere in China. If that is impossible or impractical, then, alternatively, we should suspend all passenger traffic between the U.S. and China until four weeks after Xi’an’s lockdown ends. In early pandemic control, you must act quickly and err on the side of overreaction, because, by the time you have enough information to know that you should have closed your borders in January, it’s already March and containment is impossible. And it’s not like we can trust the CCP’s reassurances that all is well. We tried that in 2020.
Well, I say “we.” But, of course, the Chinese knew about human-to-human transmission weeks before we did. And the World Health Organization, kowtowing to Chinese denials, refused to admit human-to-human transmission until January 21st.
The name “covid-19” would not be chosen until late January, so “Chinese coronavirus” was all we had. Though I still think “Kung Flu” was the funniest candidate.
NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.
It’s probably not entirely his fault he’s being sold this way in the West—which is a damning sign of our larger problem.
In America, you can sort the general population into five “levels” based on—what else?—their understanding of Hungarian presidential politics:
LEVEL 1: What? Huh? Why?!?
“James, you just were offline for a week because you had covid and now you want to tell me about a presidential election in Yugoslavia?!”
First, no, Hungary is just north of the collection of nations formerly known as Yugoslavia. It was never part of Yugoslavia itself, though it shares a border with modern-day Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia.
Other than that… yes.
LEVEL 2: Wait… That’s the One With the Bad Guy, Right?
“Yes, okay, I kinda remember this one. I read in the New York Times and The Atlantic and Vox that there’s this evil right-wing autocrat over there who’s seized power by rigging elections in his favor. He’s named Orbun… Orbin… or something?”
Nope!
I mean, yes, that is what’s been reported in the New York Times and The Atlantic and Vox, but it’s bullpucky. The allegations are so paper-thin, so obviously based on hypocrisy about measures which the Times, Atlantic, and Vox openly champion in other contexts, that all I really need to do to blow over that particular paper tiger is link this short satire by Cockburn and move on.
LEVEL 3: Hungary! Our Conservative Template for a Conservative Future!
“Oh, yeah, I saw Viktor Orbán’s interview on Tucker Carlson and then Gladden Pappin had that article over at Public Discourse—”
LEVEL 4: So, uh, What’d Parliament Look Like if We had 2018’s Results on 2010’s Map?
“…I’m just really trying to get my head around exactly how lopsided the Hungarian political environment is right now, which is tricky because I don’t know a single word of Hungarian and always have to copy-paste ‘Orbán’ because I can’t figure out how to type the fancy ‘a’.”
This is me.
LEVEL 5: An American Who Understands Hungarian Politics
“Hello, I am American Chargé d’Affaires Marc Dillard of the American embassy in Budapest and I would love nothing more than to explain Jobbik’s transition from a popular, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi party to the largest party in the anti-Orbán center-left coalition over the shockingly short period between 2015 and today.”
There may be other Americans who understand Hungarian politics—Hungarian immigrants, for example!—but they do not seem to write a lot of insiderish blogs about it. (If anyone knows an English-language Substack about Hungarian politics from someone who knows her stuff, that’d be an easy follow for me.)
All in all, I’d say 85% of Americans are on Level 1 (and that’s fine; you’re still beating plenty of Americans), 6% are Level 2, 4% are Level 3, 1% are Level 4, and some tiny fraction1 are Level 5.
I intend for everyone to understand this article. However, the headline probably only meant anything to you if you’re Level 4.
That Was The Intro. This Is The Article.
Hungary is having an election this year, and I’ve been very confused about it.
Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party are running for re-election. So far, so normal. Hungary has regularly scheduled, free and fair parliamentary elections. Orbán usually wins around half the vote, while his multiparty opposition splits the remaining vote several ways.2 The victory margins are so lopsided, and the opposition coming from so many contradictory directions (some left of Orbán, some right of him) that Fidesz ends up with firm control of Parliament… even before you factor in the benefits of Fidesz’s 2010 gerrymandering and its blatant extension of the franchise to Hungarian expatriates.3
This year, the multiparty opposition finally remembered, “oh, yeah, Duverger’s Law exists, we should probs get onboard with that,” so they buried the hatchet and held a single nationwide primary election to select a single candidate to oppose Orbán and maybe—just maybe—win an election for the first time since George W. Bush’s presidency.
Surprisingly, the opposition ended up picking Péter Márki-Zay, an ex-Carquest salesman who entered politics very recently (he first ran for public office in 2018) and whose sole experience has been serving as mayor of Hódmezővásárhely4 since winning that first race in 2018.
Hódmezővásárhely is a town of 44,000 people. So this is kind of like if the mayor of Edina, Minnesota (pop. 50,000) won the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.5
(The mayor of Edina is James B. Hovland and has been since forever. I used to live in Edina, and I didn’t even remember that. Sorry, Mr. Mayor.)
According to mainstream Western sources, Márki-Zay is a “longtime,” “small-town conservative,” and a “devout Catholic,” a “conservative rightwinger” with a “family-man image”. After the primary, the mainstream Western press reported only two differences between Márki-Zay and Orbán: Márki-Zay’s opposition to corruption, and Márki-Zay’s support for the European Union. Even some of the right-wing English press took these reports at face value.
This led to the strangest thing I’ve ever seen: progressive Western outlets openly cheerleading a self-proclaimed “conservative rightwinger” against an incumbent conservative rightwinger.
What If I Have It All Wrong?
I had always believed that the reason Viktor Orbán drew the ire of the Western press had nothing to do with “democracy in Hungary” or supposed “democratic backsliding.” Again, every trick in his playbook has been proposed, in earnest, by the editorial boards of the Times, the Atlantic, or Vox at some point in the past five years. I believed they just wanted to use these tricks to benefit the Left, and that they were only mad because Orbán had the gall to use them on behalf of the Right. (The same was true of Andrzej Duda in Poland to the north, who has a similarly undeserved reputation as a “democratic backslider” in Acela editorial rooms.)
I had always believed that the reason the “mainstream” Western press hated Orbán and Duda was simply that they have not bent the knee to current progressive dogmas about sexuality and abortion. According to my theory, attempts to delegitimize Duda arose in the West only and exactly when it became apparent that Duda would restrict abortion in Poland. Likewise, my theory was that Orbán was widely accepted as a legitimate leader (because he is one!) right up until he introduced a constitutional provision stating that marriage in Hungary is exclusively between one man and one woman.
But now the Western press was championing another conservative right-winger, Márki-Zay, against Orbán! This led me to something of a crisis of belief. Maybe The Atlantic and The Times really did care this much about corruption and process after all? Maybe I was being unfair to them, and overly generous to Orbán? After all, Orbán is clearly corrupt6—maybe the gerrymandering and media monopolization really was worse than what you see the Left trying every day in the U.S.? Maybe Márki-Zay could nudge Hungary back in the right direction, without overturning all of Fidesz’s good aspects? Maybe he’d turn out to be someone I could quietly cheer for from afar?
You Read The Title. You Know How This Turns Out.
Nah. Márki-Zay—and, more to the point, his Western cheerleaders—are fulla crap. For Western media progressives, it’s all about abolishing the nature of sex and revving up the abortion skull-grinders. Always has been, always will be. They would never (for any reason) support a candidate who wouldn’t advance these goals. They would not do it to oppose an actual autocrat, they would not do it in order to actually save democracy, and they have not done so here.
Gábor Tóka: Márki-Zay indeed has a very consistent self-presentation: he doesn’t stop mentioning that he is a Christian conservative, that he has seven children and is a devout Catholic, and so forth. However, this does not appear to be particularly relevant for his political line. He is certainly not a left-wing politician. I would say that he would be a Never Trump Republican in America.
On economics, he is very pro-market and very pro-business. He is for low taxes and likes the flat tax system introduced by Fidesz. He doesn’t like the downside of that system, which is an extremely high VAT and de facto an extremely digressive taxation of everything else but income. In other words, he is for lower taxes than they are now in Hungary, where the overall tax burden, especially on the less affluent part of the population, is just incredibly high. In almost any comparison, it appears virtually unprecedented how much tax burden is put on less affluent people in Hungary right now. He is certainly against that.
But in terms of social policies, he is not a terribly conservative person, I think, from what we have heard so far. First of all, he doesn’t want to impose a version of Sharia law: he probably is a devout Christian, but that’s a private matter for him. And he really believes in the American ideal of complete separation of church and state and that the Church law shouldn’t dictate secular law. He certainly understands that on issues of marriage, abortion rights and what not his views are probably in a very small minority in the country, and he wouldn’t want to impose those views on the public. He is happy to follow his convictions in his own life and let people live according to the laws that are produced by the democratic process, in which on these issues he is in the minority. He is even in favor of gay marriage legislation, if there is sufficient support for that in the legislature. I wouldn’t say he is genuinely conservative in terms of policies on social matters.
SOURCE for the above, confirmed by this source as well as this one. (Spoiler from the other links: he’s not just going to sit around and wait to see if the legislature wants to redefine marriage. He wants it.)
Let’s translate that lengthy passage from Middle Bugman to English:
Márki-Zay belongs to that peculiar sect of “conservative” Christianity which maintains that abortion is murder but that it would just be too sectarian and mean-spirited to protect the lives of their unborn brothers and sisters.7 This sect also thinks it is very important that young children be exposed to homosexual pornography in schools and propagandized on kid-oriented television programming. Hence Márki-Zay’s opposition to Orbán’s pretty sensible 2021 law banning both those things.8
I don’t know what that sect is called. It sure as Hell9 isn’t Catholicism. It’s unrecognizable as “conservative,” unless we think conservatism means nothing beyond tax cuts and balanced budgets. It certainly isn’t how “Never Trump Republicans” and their sympathizers (hello!) think about the world. Indeed, now that his campaign propaganda laundered to us through “mainstream” English sources has been fleshed out by a few actual facts, Márki-Zay looks a whole lot like an under-50 Joe Biden.
Oh, wait, sorry. Under-50 Joe Biden was actually pro-life and supported the Defense of Marriage Act. And somehow we still managed to avoid confusing Sen. Biden with a conservative!
Márki-Zay’s just a progressive running against a conservative. The press wants him to win because they like progressives and dislike conservatives. The Guardian tells me that he has openly vowed to lawlessly overthrow the democratically-passed Hungarian constitution if he takes power—a threat to democracy if ever I’ve heard one. I couldn’t vote for him, and neither should Hungary.
Hey, I’d take it with a smile.
Oh, and it should go without saying at this point, but, just to be clear: believe absolutely nothing you read in the English-language press about anything going on in Hungary unless it is (1) specific, (2) attributed, and (3) independently corroborated. I’ve been looking at this off and on for months, and I’m still not certain the few facts I have assembled are true.
Fidesz got 52% in 2010, 45% in 2014, 49% in 2018. In 2010, the second-place party got 19% (MSZP; the ex-communist party). In 2014, the second-place party got 26% (the new and then defunct Left Unity party). In 2018, the second-place party got 19% (Jobbik, the neo-Nazi-turned-center-left-what-the-heck party). All figures from Wikipedia.
The obvious parallel here is efforts by American Democrats to extend the franchise to non-citizens and/or sixteen-year-olds and/or convicted felons. That is, it’s morally justifiable given certain premises, but, at the same time, obviously politically motivated.
Yes I absolutely copy-pasted that. Whenever I try to pronounce it, it comes out sounding Klingon. How do you get two accent marks above the middle “o”?
That’s not quite fair, because Hungary’s a small country, with only 10 million people total, but the winner of the Hungarian election gets a seat at the U.N. and the power to declare war, so it’s still a pretty remarkable ascent for a small-town mayor.
Incidentally, Orbán’s failure to enforce the pro-unborn provisions of his new 2011 Constitution is one of the most obvious ways Orbán has led culture war at the expense of real progress.
Content that promotes LGBT redefinitions of family, marriage, gender, etc. are still permitted after the watershed, because Hungary remains a free country. Not that you’d know it from watching Eurocrat reactions.
…which means it’s really way past time for us to confront our hospital disaster.
NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.
It’s a huge cliche to open a covid article with a picture of covid, but I have denied myself this easy way out for over 18 months. This is my annual indulgence.
Take a look at your life, right now. Ask yourself: what measures are you taking to deal with covid? What measures is your state taking? How about the kids at your local public school? What are the rules in local stores? Have you been to a movie since the pandemic started? If a loved one is hospitalized, even dying, would you be allowed to visit? If you live in an old-person’s home, do you ever see your grandkids?
You should take stock now, because this is it. Whatever you’re doing right now, you should assume that’s how it’s going to be for the rest of your life. If you’re wearing a mask this December, you will never have a reason to take that mask off—not next year, not in ten years, not in fifty. If your school-aged kids are eating lunch socially distanced outdoors in winter coats today, then you can expect their school-aged kids will do the same in 2051—because we no longer have any power to change the basic facts.1
Here are those facts:
Covid is Forever
The covid pandemic will not “end,” ever. It will become a seasonal, endemic2 disease that kills some large number of people (mostly old, some young) every year. Like flu, but worse.
There is absolutely nothing you or anyone else can do about this fundamental fact. No human power can end the pandemic.
Indeed, we now know (for reasons I’ll discuss below) that we never had the power to end the pandemic. Once it arrived in the United States through our wide-open borders, the general contours of the outbreak were written in stone. It’s nobody’s fault. This. Was. Inevitable.
If you’re not convinced, here is a proof-by-contradiction. Curtis Yarvin, who (like me) has a deep personal fear of plague, sincerely argues that, no, actually we could have stopped covid if we wanted to, and still could. All we would have to do is:
Phase I: Two Weeks to Crush the Curve
Impose and enforce a mandatory, nationwide hard lockdown, in which no one in the country leaves their homes (except the military, which delivers supplies while avoiding infections within its own ranks).
All 337 million men, women, and childrenliving in the United States, citizen or not, must take a home covid test every day, verifying their negative test with an app on their smartphones. (The 15% of Americans without smartphones presumably have some alternative method.)
Anyone who tests positive is sent to a quarantine hotel, where they are isolated and treated for the disease. This is not optional. Staff at the hotel wears N95 respirators and are themselves quarantined.
Anyone who doesn’t submit a daily test result receives a visit from the military, which ensures that a test is carried out—at the point of a gun, if necessary.3
Phase One lasts two weeks… except in any areas where it the above four steps are not followed perfectly, in which case it continues until they are followed perfectly. Thus, in practice, this phase lasts two hundred thirty-five years.4
Phase II: Constant Vigilance
Any other nation on Earth that fails to positively prove that it is following these same guidelines, and succeeding, is quarantined. Any traveler from any of those nations is quarantined for two weeks upon arrival, with no contact with any residents. (This, naturally, requires completely effective border controls and fencing.)
All large public spaces (e.g. concert halls, schools, airports) are outfitted with technology that detects the airborne covid virus automatically. Any building where covid is detected is immediately locked down and all inhabitants are tested.
Any future outbreaks of covid result in swift contact tracing and mandatory quarantine.
If a large-scale outbreak occurs, return to hard lockdown.
Phase Two lasts until the Earth is destroyed by solar expansion five billion years from now.
This plan is the baseline of what you would have to do to “end the pandemic.”5 Yarvin and I agree about that. Any efforts to “end the pandemic” that fall short of this are not public health, but mere public health theater.
So if a government official exhorts you to get a booster shot so “we can end the pandemic,” but isn’t calling for police to hold vaccine resisters down while vaccination squads forcibly inject them, she’s doing theatre, not health. If a colleague at work6 says he’s, “wearing a mask so we get to a day when we don’t have to wear masks anymore,” yet he sometimes leaves his house to buy groceries, then he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that his actions belie his words. If you want to end the pandemic… if you want to “get back to normal” in pre-pandemic terms… then you’re doing something like Yarvin’s plan. Period.
And, hey good news is, Yarvin’s plan eradicates covid in the United States in a matter of weeks.
The bad news is, Yarvin’s plan is politically and logistically impossible, it wouldn’t work even if it were possible, and, I’m sorry to say, it wouldn’t be worth it if it did.
Yarvin presents our failure to carry out his plan as a simple failure of state capacity. Locking everyone down for a few weeks is politically and logistically impossible, he contends, because we in the West are weak; we have placed public opinion, public accountability, and public rights ahead of the public good.7 Meanwhile, Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are unconstrained by the public or human “rights” and thus can do as they see fit. They can enact this approach to covid—and they have! China’s plan pretty closely resembles Yarvin’s. No other society in history—not Caesar’s Rome, not Stalin’s Russia—could have accomplished it, but China has pulled it off.8
As far as it goes, Yarvin’s right. China can do this and we can’t. It is politically and logistically possible to run the Yarvin Plan in a 21st-century techno-dictatorship, but not in a liberal society.
Is that a strike against liberal society?
Nah, not this time. China’s approach hasn’t restored normalcy. Substantial swaths of China still routinely plunge into lockdown as covid continues to circulate—slowly9 but surely. They do not have zero covid. They will never have zero covid. The dream of a two-week lockdown followed by permanent more-or-less freedom was perhaps a worthy hope in the face of OG covid. In the face of the more-transmissible Delta variant, it became a fantasy. And here comes Omicron, the most transmissible variant of all. China can slow it; they can’t stop it.
Because it cannot exterminate covid, China will eventually suffer covid casualties similar to ours, even if they maintain these protocols forever.10
Even if it had worked, and Chinese policy had saved millions of lives outright, would it have been worth it?
Nah. I’m going to insert a non-factual value judgment here: China’s system of government is bad. Sure, the West is a total clown show. But the CCP’s unchecked power inevitably corrupts it, because power is radioactive and rots your soul. Then the corrupt government uses their power for enormous evils that are not only cruel, but profoundly counterproductive. Sorry, Moldbug: all human governments are nests of perverts, clowns, thieves, and rascals; the only total-surveillance techno-dictatorship I wanna live in is not of this world. If the only way to save the millions of Americans who will die of covid is to change to a system of government that sees tens of millions of Americans dying in abortuaries, political prisons, or concentration camps, that’s not a worthwhile tradeoff. You don’t have to be Patrick Henry to see that.
But, I remind you: China’s approach didn’t work. It will never work. China has slowed covid, but, since it has failed to eradicate covid, all it has done is delayed the inevitable deaths that will eventually occur. So there’s no actual tradeoff here. Xi Jinping, like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, is engaged in public health theatre, not public health; he only performs the play a little differently because his audience is different.
Actually eradicating covid is impossible. It’s going to keep spreading, everywhere, forever.
Covid is Dangerous
…and, as it spreads, it’s going to kill people. I calculated your odds for you last week. I’ve since added obesity stats. Even if it doesn’t kill you, there are lots of ways covid can leave you permanently worse off. I got the flu—the real flu—only once, in Winter 2013, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to my body. I finally understood, deep down in my bones, how people could just die of a lame little viral infection. I’ve gotten the flu shot every year since.
Covid isn’t the worst disease ever, but it’s still about ten to fifteen times more dangerous than influenza. Influenza was already a top-20 cause of death in the United States, and has been for many years. So permanent super-flu is not great news!
Surely There’s Something We Can Do To End It!
Nope. Not one thing.
I’ll go through some of the things people sometimes think can end the pandemic. This section goes on for a while, but, as soon as you’re convinced the pandemic is forever, you can skip ahead to the next section (“Why It Matters”).
Herd Immunity: Won’t we all eventually get infected, develop natural immunity, and then covid will die off because there’s no one left to infect?
No.
It’s not just that covid has become so transmissible. Every time it becomes more transmissible, its herd immunity threshold rises. It started with OG covid at (we believed) around 60-70%. Delta’s was 80-90%. Omicron’s appears to reach herd immunity only after 90%+ of the population has immunity.
High thresholds make herd immunity a slow process with a large body count… but, in the end, you do get there. Several other diseases spread like covid does: chicken pox, measles, polio. Eventually, pretty much everyone caught all three diseases, and either died or developed long-term immunity. Herd immunity developed—even for hyper-infectious diseases like measles. The only people without herd immunity were children, who were naturally born without the antibodies—and so all these diseases became known as “childhood illnesses.”
No, the real problem is that covid evolves much faster than measles or chickenpox. When’s the last time you heard about a “variant of concern” for mumps? Instead, covid evolves at roughly the same pace as influenza and the common cold,11 which spit out several new variants every year. Those variants almost always have the ability to partially evade prior immunity, so someone who caught the flu in 2019 might be able to catch it again in 2020 and probably can by 2022. Every time we start to get anywhere close to herd immunity for flu, flu just evolves again and gets back to killin’.
Covid’s doing that.
Vaccine-induced immunity: Can’t vaccines help us get to the herd immunity threshold quickly, faster than covid can evolve away from them?
Good luck with that. You have roughly a six-month window to detect the next dominant variant, update the vaccine for that variant, release the update, inject >90% of the world population with it, and hope covid’s response is to die instead of evolving a little ahead of schedule.
If we had the power to do that, don’t you think we would have done it to influenza decades ago?
Notice that I haven’t even touched on the difficulty posed by people who refuse to get vaccinated, because active vaccine resistance no longer matters from an end-the-pandemic standpoint. Unvaccinated adults are (in my opinion) acting unwisely, even recklessly, but they are not prolonging the pandemic or otherwise causing harm to you (with one exception, which I’ll get to later).
There was a time in Spring 2021 when we thought vaccine resisters were prolonging the pandemic, because we thought the virus evolved slowly and that the herd immunity threshold was around 60-70%. Vaccine resisters were keeping the United States from getting to that point. That’s the rational basis for popular hostility to vaccine resisters.12
But, unbeknownst to us, Delta had already evolved by Spring 2021. Indeed, it had evolved before vaccines were even available to the public in the United States—and it evolved in India, a relatively poor nation of a billion souls, far from the vaccine headquarters of the world. Once Delta evolved (with its herd immunity threshold over 80% and modest vaccine evasion), it was game over; we lack the industrial capacity to defeat that, even if we had perfect public cooperation, everywhere in the world.13 It just took us six months to find out we’d lost.
Oh, and, just in case you had any lingering suspicions that some future vaccination program might end the pandemic anyway: while it’s clear that vaccines stop a lot of serious illness, they seem to be decreasingly good at stopping actual transmission. A vaccine that doesn’t stop the disease from spreading is not going to be able to end the pandemic. You end a pandemic by stopping the disease from spreading.
Vaccine-induced local immunity: Okay, maybe we can’t end the pandemic worldwide. But we can at least end the pandemic in our neighborhoods, right? It’s like the measles: it exists somewhere in the world, but can’t get a foothold in my world, because we are all vaccinated. Like… if everyone in my town is vaccinated, nobody can spread it—so, when somebody does pass it on, it must be the fault of the unvaccinated, right?
Alas, this isn’t true. We see too many outbreaks in areas with extremely high vaccination rates. Just one example, and then I’ll move on: Ireland has fully vaccinated more than 90% of its population over the age of 12. They just closed nightclubs, halved capacity at sporting events, re-imposed “household mixing” caps, and are considering lockdown; that’s all before Omicron starts hitting hard in coming weeks. Given high transmissibility, growing vaccine evasion, and rapid evolution, there appears to be no attainable threshold at which breakthrough cases alone can’t fuel a sizable epidemic all by themselves—at least, not without Yarvin-style military lockdowns.
Masks: But masks reduce transmission, right?
Alright, yeah, optimistically, the ill-fitting piece of cloth looped vaguely over your face-parts is significantly reducing the amount of covid you are taking in or (potentially) emitting. The evidence on this kind of mask is not great and never has been; many studies touted in support of “mask mandates,” like the well-regarded Bangladesh RCT, actually support surgical masks, not the cloth face coverings Americans now call “masks.”
Even when successful, effect sizes are not large (see the Bangladesh RCT). That suggests widespread use of effective masks can take some of the sharp edge off a wave, but can’t prevent it.
Meanwhile, you’re dealing with a domestic and global population that is exhausted, divided, and paranoid. Even if masks could, in theory, get things back to normal, there is no realistic possibility of sufficiently widespread compliance in most Western communities. I tepidly supported a mandate 18 months ago, but it was not visibly effective.
That doesn’t mean masks can’t provide individual protection. They can, especially if you wear a good mask! Right now, I’m just talking about whether masks can end the pandemic or “get us to a day when we don’t have to mask up anymore.” They can’t. If you’re masking today, you’ll be masking in 2149 when we discover the Charon mass relay.
Lockdowns: If everyone just stays home, they can’t spread the virus, and then the virus will die out!
I already wrote a lot about lockdowns. Scott Alexander has as well. As we saw in the Yarvin Plan, if you are going to make a serious run at ending the pandemic, you’re going to impose some very harsh lockdowns.
We are not doing serious things. We in the West are closing bars, cutting capacities at concerts, and, rarely. ordering everyone to stay home… except for “essential workers,” which turns out to be the ~30% of the population most likely to catch ‘rona and the least likely to have the personal support net and/or health insurance needed to deal with it.
As I explained in my article, such lockdowns not only can’t end the pandemic; they don’t even seem to have slowed it very much, despite the high costs. In 2021, lockdowns and gathering restrictions are a good example of public health theatre at the expense of public health.
Antivirals: When we get good antiviral treatments for covid, won’t the pandemic end because we’ll be able to cure people?
You don’t end a pandemic by treating the symptoms. The virus keeps spreading, forever.
That being said, effective antivirals like paxlovid and molnupiravir look promising. Bear in mind I said that about HCQ and ivermectin as well, and ended up disappointed. But both paxlovid and molnu have shown much more promise than earlier candidate treatments, so I’m feeling very good about these.
As such, antivirals are my main hope for, not ending the pandemic, but reducing the risk enough that the people in our society who are anxious about covid will finally feel able to relax. In many ways, that comes to the same thing. I don’t see how that can happen in 2022; we can expect roughly 1 billion worldwide cases of covid next year, and perhaps 50-100 million more in the United States, but, worldwide we will probably have only around 150 million total courses of antivirals available, between paxlovid and molnu. Production will grow, but not right away.
At the start of this post, I predicted that, in some areas, kids will still be masked and socially distancing in schools in 2050. There are three main forces that give me hope that might not come to pass. The first is viral evolution. The second is antivirals. The third is political embarrassment and exhaustion, which could drive social and policy change even without a change in the virus or the death toll—and this, I think, is most likely.
But even in those three hopeful scenarios, the pandemic is here to stay. Covid is forever. I wish that were not true. I wish the sacrifices we made had done more good. I go back and re-read some of my early (relatively optimistic) covid posts and it makes me sad… but, alas, facts don’t care about my feelings.
Why It Matters
The permanence of the pandemic is an important fact. We cannot set realistic goals until we stop setting impossible ones. We also cannot start assigning credit and blame to the right people until we understand what our goals and methods actually are.
Public Health™14 is not going to help you figure this stuff out, which is why I wrote ten thousand words about the covid endgame and, presumably, part of why you’re reading them. Public Health™ has known for some time that covid is not going away, that their recommended maskings and boosters and lockdowns will never end, but Public Health™, as far as I can tell, is either
(a) completely okay with that or
(b) simply incapable of resisting internal pressure and groupthink to start talking seriously about the endgame.
It’s hard to tell, given the degree of duplicity and stupidity in Public Health™ messaging. Also, their apparent complicity in (accidentally) creating the pandemic, and their certain complicity in its early spread. But, from what I’ve read, I think it’s more (a) than (b). The average voice in Public Health™ now thinks that our real mistake was not masking and social distancing before the pandemic, because lots of people died of flu—and, as anyone engaged with Public Health Twitter knows, they are quite happy to label anyone who disagrees with their (quite radical!) non-scientific value judgments as anti-science, anti-vaxx, and anti-grandmas.15
On that note: please stop shaming people for making different value judgments.
Also, please stop shaming people just for catching covid-19. Stop thinking it’s their fault, or your fault, or Biden’s fault, or Trump’s fault, or anyone’s fault when someone’s test comes back positive.16 I have had several conversations with people who recently caught covid, but made sure to mention that they were double-vaxxed in every conversation they had about it, every email they sent—as if they had to be absolved of the sin of catching a highly contagious virus! Widespread infection is, and always was, inevitable.
Even if someone was irresponsible, that irresponsibility did not prolong the pandemic! It did not harm others! Such a person deserves your pity, not your contempt! I absolve you all!
Indeed, in general, please stop thinking that someone else’s vaccination is going to reduce the risk to your family in some meaningful way, and (therefore) someone refusing to vaccinate is harming you. It’s not true.
(Unless you are a health care worker. I’m getting there!)
The Omicron Non-Emergency
The coming months seem likely to be a challenge. There’s a lot we don’t know about Omicron, but we know that it’s coming. Maybe it’s less lethal, maybe a lot less lethal, we just don’t know.
Right now, our best guess is that Omicron is going to hit pretty hard. And, better yet, it’s going to hit right in the middle of flu season and the first-ever Delta Winter. The oracular Zvi thinks Omicron is going to overwhelm our hospital capacity, and, unlike those unreliable computer models, Zvi has a good track record of predicting, week-to-week, where the pandemic is heading next. There are going to be a lot of cases. Even if Omicron does turn out to be less lethal, so many cases will still (likely) mean a lot of deaths.
Yikes!
…and that’s normal now. That’s what I’m trying to drive home here: this never ends. Omicron is not “okay.” But it is also not an exception. It is not an emergency. It is the next stage in what will likely become a stable annual cycle. We are not waiting on a vaccine, like we were last year. Gandalf is not coming over the hills with the Rohirrim at the dawn of the third day. We should expect every winter to look something like this for the rest of our lives.
How Do You Want To Live?
Since covid is going to be like this forever, it’s time to ask yourself: how do you want to live?
Covid is dangerous.
If you are young, your odds of dying of it (detailed here) are small, but not trivial. There are additional risks as well. These risks justify prudent preventative measures, akin to wearing a seatbelt or installing a smoke alarm. A small investment of time, effort, money, and comfort is worthwhile if it significantly reduces a small risk.
If you are old, your odds of dying of covid are not small; they are moderate, in some cases high. On the other hand, if you’re old, your odds of dying of everything is moderate. Old people die of falling over in the parlor all the time, and old people are about a hundred times more likely to die of influenza than young people.17 Old people are also about a hundred times more likely to die of covid than young people. So, even if you’re old, it’s not entirely clear to me that your relative risk of dying from covid is higher than it is for young people, and I’m not sure how much more heavily you should defend yourself against it.
My advice:
If you are an adult, get vaccinated. Then, get boosted. Then, get your annual covid shot, just like the annual flu shot, for the rest of your life. (Flu shots have always been a good idea, but the covid shot has a vastly better cost/benefit ratio that makes it head-and-shoulders more valuable than the flu shot.)
If you are willing and don’t find it heinously uncomfortable, wear a mask. Don’t wear a public health theatre mask. Get a real mask that will actually keep out the virus: go buy an N95 or a KF94 or whatever the highest-quality publicly-available mask is where you live. Wear this in public spaces for the rest of your life. (If you find masks uncomfortable, then this probably isn’t a modest investment of time, effort, money, and comfort, and you shouldn’t do this one.)
If practical and affordable, improve the ventilation in your home. It’s a big help! If you live in an old-person’s home, consider how well-ventilated your building is, and, if practical and affordable, move to a better-ventilated one.
Then… live your life. Don’t harbor anger at other people who make different choices in this regard. They aren’t harming you. They are not prolonging the pandemic. The pandemic will never end, and you cannot escape exposure, so the only people who will bear the consequences of their imprudence is they themselves.
(There is one—fairly large—exception to this, and we’re almost there.)
All other regulations, especially legal regulations (capacity limits, mask mandates), only make sense if they are intended to be permanent features of our society going forward. They should be sold to the public on that basis, and the public should make its decision—through elections, in the case of laws; and through patronage, in the case of stores.18 Selling covid regulations as mere “emergency” measures is no longer intellectually honest. Maybe the grandmas at St. Frideswyde’s Home for the Aged (who have survived two years without hugging their grandkids) will be fine with a policy of never being allowed to hug their grandkids ever again. But let’s tell them that’s the policy, then see what they decide. Right now, we’re lying to ‘em.
And then, finally, life can get back to the new normal. I expect actors will come out and mingle with audiences after a theatrical performance again—although maybe they’ll be masked. I expect Sesame Street will keep encouraging vaccines, but with slightly less preachy writing. I expect schools will start advertising their disease-resistant ventilation systems as enthusiastically as they advertise their worthless technology investments.
And, of course, I expect everyone to die by the age of 44 because our hospital collapsed and there are no doctors anymore.
The Hospital Crisis
A few sections ago, I mentioned that the oracular Zvi thinks Omicron is going to overwhelm our hospital system. Zvi is usually right, but this is provably wrong. Omicron can’t overwhelm our hospital system.
It’s already overwhelmed. It’s past overwhelmed. It’s on fire.
If you live in Minnesota, and maybe even if you don’t, you’re aware of the full-page letter our hospital execs printed in the Pioneer Press the other day, entitled, “We’re heartbroken. We’re overwhelmed.”:
Now, maybe your first thought is, “Bah, more propaganda from Public Health™!” And fair enough! The thought crossed my mind as well.
But there has been a slow, steady rumble from the hospitals for many months. I wrote about this… *checks the timestamp*… geeze, last fall, even before the big winter wave Minnesota experienced in December 2020-February 2021. And not a single person I know in the hospital- or hospital-adjacent world has told me in the months since that any of it has gotten better. In fact, they say, to a man, that it’s only gotten worse.
They tell me the same thing this chart is telling me: that, in the middle of a pretty massive overall employment boom and a global pandemic, health care employment has somehow gone down—and, the more the pandemic affects day-to-day work, the more employment has gone down… just when the need for more workers has gone way up.
Never believe what you read just because it’s in the papers (remember Gell-Mann Amnesia), but, this time, I believe what I read in the papers because it’s what I’m hearing from my few connections to the world of medicine. Here’s one of my friends, commenting directly on a recent article here at De Civ:
[L]et me offer a single perspective from my own trench right now. It’s a tiny 25 bed rural critical access hospital. Normal times and even for much of covid era they have had maybe 14 inpatients with 1-2 being ICU level. They have maybe a couple of deaths a month for inpatients. Maybe one person a month brought in for coroner’s autopsy who died at home.
The new normal now is a completely full hospital, all four vents in use with no way to get others from anywhere else, all bipaps etc are in use also. Half of the ER is now plastic cordoned off for a covid ICU (the ER nurses call it Camp Covid) that is also full with patients waiting on beds in the hallway for someone to die or actually get transferred out – not likely, unless they hit the jackpot and call a receiving facility right when they’ve had someone die there, there’s no where to transfer any sick patients in the entire states of MI, WI, or MN right now…. They were trying Chicago for someone recently but the family told them to stop trying and they just accepted this would be goodbye up here. There are now multiple deaths a week and every few days there are a couple deaths in a day. That’s a *lot* for this area and tiny hospital. The coroner is here a lot for people who are brought in found dead at home (we do postmortem covid PCR), she’s covering two counties (other coroner quit) and she has to drive all over the place every day now, a full time job in itself. This isn’t what she signed up for by campaigning to be elected coroner a few years ago. This isn’t what any of the staff up here signed up for, and not what any of them want. They don’t want to be the hollow eyed and fried people I now see every day, while I’m knowing that my contract ends next week and I get to leave, with a huge sigh of relief, while they have their whole lives here… These patients are their local friends, neighbors, shop owners, mechanics – they know them, all of them, and yet our staff are so burned out that they no longer even know who died on the floor today, they can’t care that much anymore. It’s no longer shocking to lose patients. Staff were already hard to find, now qualified staff is basically impossible to hire here as they really are limited to local/regional people, people don’t relocate for jobs in rural community hospitals (there are a smattering of us travelers, but they can’t find any more of us now either). A bunch of people here have quit just in the last two weeks, burned out, and it didn’t have anything to do with the vaccine mandate. We did lose a few people to that too, and as much as I sympathize with the mandate it really REALLY has harmed us and the patients in this area to lose even those couple of skilled staff over it…
People who don’t need to die are dying. Not just of covid, not just the unvaccinated, but people simply dying of things that we should be able to care for, and that we could still care for until about a month ago. The standard of care, the quality of care, *is not there*. God forbid you get sick or in a car wreck in these days.
This is just my experience in this one corner of the country over these past 3 months. But even if covid drops off drastically and we get over it in the community, the effects of losing so many staff and the drain on resources for long term care of these extant covid patients is going to be with this community long into the spring, best case scenario. And I am confident that this impact will be across the country, with excess death rates due to many causes being markedly higher than pre-covid, pre-delta.
I noted this morning a letter to the editor in today’s NYT, from an ER doctor also in Michigan and every single sentence he wrote resonated. He understands. The second epidemic is worse than the first – it is the onslaught of non-covid people we could have, should have, saved, but for the first pandemic. Now we can’t. It’s draining and despair inducing. We signed up to help save lives. Instead we have this. How long do we keep at this? How long can we?
Anyway. I’m kind of raw and rambling right now, I’m sitting in the hospital parking lot writing this on my phone after another exhausting shift. This is my life for another week, then as a traveler I get the privilege to choose to not take another contract for a month or so. I will have some time to rest, off the front lines, and then hopefully be ready to face another contract. For most people they don’t get this kind of option, it’s either keep going or quit. My daily prayers will be with these people up here in the UP I am leaving behind in the trench. Please, please, pray for them too.
(Please do pray for them, if you are a praying person.)
I don’t even have to hear about the strain anymore. I’m starting to see it for myself.
A case I’m intimately familiar with: 68-year-old female with a tumor on the vocal cord. Biopsy takes longer than you might expect—the hospital is busy—but eventually results come back: malignant throat cancer. Only shot is to remove it, post-haste. Goes in for scheduled surgery, which goes well. During recovery, while breathing through a tracheotomy tube, there’s a complication; patient has a breathing emergency and nearly dies at the hospital. Nevertheless, patient recovers. Patient is sent home just two days later, still unable to speak, still breathing through a tube, with a stern warning to patient’s spouse to closely monitor the trach tube for further breathing problems. On the third night home, patient suffers an episode at 2 AM, stops breathing, wakes spouse before losing consciousness. Although an ambulance is called immediately, patient has yet to regain consciousness, and is not considered likely to do so, ever again. (Your prayers for this patient would also be very much appreciated.)
In ordinary time, do you think this patient would have been sent home, breathing through a tube that has already proved risky to the patient? I certainly don’t. The hospital will never admit it—can’t, legally, I think—but I think they sent the patient home early because they needed the bed. That particular hospital is being crushed by covid patients, just like every other hospital. They probably really did need the bed. And when you need a bed, but all the beds are full… you triage. The people who definitely need the hospital bed get it. The people who only might need the bed get sent on their way, with fingers crossed. Covid is killing people who don’t even have covid. “The standard of care is not there.”
The hospital system is not on the brink. The health care system has been showing worrying signs of burnout for years; it was on the brink in 2018. The pandemic pushed it over the brink. It’s now halfway down the waterfall.
And, because the pandemic will never end, this will never, ever get better.
Who Can Judge You
As I’ve said, for the most part, your choices are your own. What you do in this pandemic affects only you, perhaps those closest to you—because the pandemic is going to rage on and expose everyone regardless. No one else is in a position to judge you for those personal choices, except maybe your priest. You aren’t hurting anyone when you choose to refuse vaccination.
…except for nurses, doctors, and everyone else who will have to treat you, if and when you catch a serious case of the ‘rona and have to go the hospital. Your case will take up one of their beds, taxing their capacity just a little bit further beyond what they can actually handle, making their lives just a little bit more unbearable in what has become an unendurably dark time for many of them.
They can’t be mad at you for leaving your house and living a normal life again. Covid is normal now, and we have to learn how to live a normal life with it. But, if there was something you could have done with only a small investment of time, money, and effort, something that would have reduced your odds of hospitalization—not eliminated it, just modestly reduced it!—and you refused to do that thing… well, then, your choice ended up hurting all those medical pros, and they have every right to be angry with you.
(Also, anyone in the hospital who gets kicked out too early because you needed their bed, especially if then they suffer complications. They get to be mad, too. Also, their families.)
Someday, that won’t be the case. Hospitals must, eventually, staff up to the point where they can handle the new, heightened baseline. At that point, the occasional patient taking up a spare bed because of a mistaken decision won’t be putting the whole system under strain.
But, right now, that’s exactly what we do when we refuse to take prudent precautions against covid. So get vaccinated—if not for yourself, then for the sake of my nurse-friends.
If everyone gets a vaccine,19 that should reduce the covid-related hospitalization load by roughly 72%. That would be a pretty big help. Your nurses would be very grateful. The quality of care in hospitals would improve for everyone.
Even then, though… our hospitals didn’t have a lot of slack to begin with. Hospitals have always been busy in winter, thanks to flu season. Consider: if we had simply added a second flu to the annual winter playlist, that would have doubled the pressure our hospitals already feel in winter times, requiring a permanent capacity increase. Instead, we’re adding covid, which is like adding ten to fifteen flus all at once. That means our sustainable hospital capacity, which may have been just enough in 2019, is far short of what it needs to be today and for the remainder of the 21st century. That’s true even if everyone gets vaccinated.
Forget the Pandemic; Fix the Hospitals
This seems obvious to me, but nobody on my experts list is talking about this, and I don’t understand why.
I am not a health care sector expert. I haven’t been inside a hospital since 2018. I am not foolish enough to offer specific prescriptions. But it seems to me, from my reading and listening, that there are two key problems:
There are not enough personnel, leading to decreased morale.
Morale is critically low, leading to fewer personnel.
(I don’t hear much about equipment shortfalls, like actual beds or ventilators. Masks, sometimes. But mostly what I’m hearing is that we are asking hospital labor to do too much.)
Like I said, I can’t speak in particulars about the medical sector. I suggest going and asking the front-line medical pros (and those who recently burned out) what they need. And then—this is important—give it to them.
But I offer a few generalities that seem safe:
The Long Run
The medical sector has seemed overstretched and understaffed for quite a while. That’s odd, since medicine is a sector where there’s extremely high demand and enormous amounts of money sloshing through the pipes. Economics 101 tells us that you should only see labor shortages in sectors like that if there’s a short-term shock. Over the long-term, people should meet the demand in order to make a lot of money. Yet it seemed like that wasn’t happening in health care.
When you have a labor shortage in a sector that seems like it should be thriving, Economics 101 readily offers two explanations that can cause the free market to malfunction: monopoly and regulation. Both of these forces can suppress wages below the natural “market-clearing” price, causing fewer people to enter the field than are necessary, and, ultimately, creating a labor shortage. Both problems appear to be rampant in the health care system, in enough ways to fill a book. (Or two!)
Briefly, it seems that health care systems have become increasingly consolidated in the hands of just a few firms (often private equity firms), which then turn a profit by “cutting the fat” and trimming short-term costs to a minimum—at a cost to short-term service and long-term resilience. This often makes economic sense: private equity only needs to wring the cash out of a firm before discarding its empty corpse. It is genuinely baffling to me why the key enabler of private equity, the Leveraged Buyout (LBO), which encourages this exact thing, has not been outlawed. But I digress.
The “fat-trimming” usually means a depleted, overstretched labor force survives as best it can until it either burns out naturally, or it gets kicked over the edge by an economic shock that any business that bothered to invest in its own future would have weathered just fine. Then you end up with CVS employees weeping their way through the day until they quit and then suddenly you can’t get covid tests processed anymore, and nobody on the outside quite understands why.
Meanwhile, highly consolidated firms naturally create more internal policies and impose more record-keeping in order to ensure all the hospitals in their system are running to a similar standard. This is a form of (private) regulation. Combined with an already-toxic brew of government regulations on everything that happens in hospitals, plus government-influenced price floors and ceilings defined through its Medicare/caid payment schedules, the omnipresent free-rider problem where uninsured people with no money get hospital care on the hospital’s dime, and the hellaciously opaque relationship between medical providers, insurers, and actual prices… and what you get is lots of price distortions. You also get a lot of physicians complaining that they joined medicine to help people, and now they instead spend the majority of their time filling out paperwork and government-mandated electronic health record coding.
I don’t know how to fix this. But they’re long-term problems that need solving. Perhaps one could fix it all through some comprehensive, bipartisan health care reform bill that sails through Congress because of the urgency of the… okay, okay, stop laughing, sorry I mentioned it. In theory, though, it should be possible for a determined, well-informed Congressional committee to work with the FTC and other executive agencies to solve some of these problems in piecemeal, consensus bills. This is actually possible, and it happens; the key is that you keep anyone outside of Congress from ever hearing about it, politicizing the issue, and starting a political food fight. Like the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2021, but for hospitals.
The bigger problem is, you can’t solve “hospital monopolization” or “medical sector overregulation” in less than two years, and we can’t exactly wait until 2024 while our hospitals burn down. Even when we do solve those problems, we won’t be able to train a new generation of doctors and nurses in a week. We need stopgaps to keep things running until then.
The Short Run
The lowest-hanging fruit is obvious: if we’re low on medical professionals, pay them more. This is exactly what Economics 101 calls for, and, mark my words, it does wonders for morale.
Then keep them: announceretention bonuses for all employees today, and then, for any of them who are still working in August 2022, pay them. Offer even larger retention bonuses for those still working in August 2024.
We may not be able to train up a new supply of doctors and nurses overnight, but how about we bring some back from the bench? Pull the retirees out of retirement, get the burnouts back from burnout city. How? Well, I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but maybe pay them. Right now, we need them more than they need us. That means they get to set the price of their labor, and we should probably pay it.
Add staff until hospital pros are working human hours and aren’t “hollow-eyed and fried” from the sheer weight of the burdens they carry.
I realize that money alone may not be enough to solve the labor shortage (although, if doesn’t get you most of the way there, you aren’t paying them enough). We are in a period of widespread labor shortfalls and rapid wage growth, placing hospitals in a singularly unenviable position as they look for new recruits. Other improvements are possible, and should be encouraged where possible.
For example, it is my (very limited) understanding that a lot of covid patient monitoring and care is relatively straightforward. Would it be possible to turn a high-school graduate into a specialized “covid nurse” in, say, a two-week training course, freeing up other nurses to care for other patients? How about a member of the U.S. military? Obviously I’d rather have an R.N. caring for me, too… but we’re fresh out of R.N.’s, that’s the whole point, and I’d rather have some gangly 18-year-old who just learned CPR watching me than nobody at all. I don’t know whether this can be done,20 but, if it can, maybe now’s the time?
Meanwhile, how many immigration rules stand in the way of our acquiring a corps of experienced doctors and nurses from other countries? Surely there are some medical professionals waiting in the very, very long line for a U.S. green card. Maybe now’s a good time to let them skip to the front of the line?
And, y’know, other stuff, too. Listen to nurses. NPR tells me that simple, inexpensive things like buying a working copy machine can work wonders—although be careful not to forget that you also need to pay them.
I’m out of my depth, so I’ll stop. Yet you can see, I’m sure, that, even though the pandemic will never end and needed hospital capacity will never fall back to the pre-pandemic baseline, there are things we can actually do to help medical professionals.
So maybe we should do those things, instead of… y’know, everything else we’re doing? *gestures vaguely at Twitter*
The government must be smart here. If it just gives a trillion dollars to hospitals, it will all disappear into the medical-administration complex. I naively suggest a stimulus check, akin to what we did last year for all Americans, but targeted solely at front-line health-care workers. Let the government pay each of them an extra, say, $20,000/year (payable monthly while working in the industry) for the next two years, while Congress and the industry adapt to the new normal. I could be doing my math wrong, but I think that would “only” cost a couple hundred billion dollars—much less than Build Back Better or the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Of course, there are lots of details to work out. But these details can be worked out. The only alternatives appear to be our current plan—public health theatre until the hospitals all collapse—or the Yarvin Plan. By comparison, “Reinforce the hospitals,” seems pretty easy, doesn’t it?
Covid is never leaving the hospitals, just as it is never leaving the rest of us. Once we internalize that fact, we can finally start making healthy long-term decisions and investments, both in the hospitals and in other parts of our lives. Covid is never going away—which means, in every important sense, covid is already over.
Now it’s time to decide what our post-covid society looks like.
We no longer have the power to change the basic facts. However, the virus still has some power to change the facts. The virus could evolve to be much less lethal, for example. It is possible, even, that Omicron is a first step in that process. I am optimistic about this!
Nonetheless, so far, even the most optimistic projections I’ve seen say that Omicron is still one-third as deadly as Delta. (For comparison, the nation’s most lethal pre-covid infectious disease—influenza—is only one-tenth to one-fifteenth as lethal as Delta. So, even if we’re lucky, Omicron will still be two to five times deadlier than the flu.)
So we probably need more evolutions to change the fundamental facts of the pandemic. That’s not something we can count on happening soon—or ever. Which is why I think it’s time to assume that, whatever safety measures you’re taking now, that’s what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life. Maybe covid evolves to be no-worse-than-flu in a decade instead of a generation, maybe antiviral miracle drugs make it a non-issue in five instead of ten, and then you can come back and taunt me for being too pessimistic.
My biology-inclined friends are emphatic on this: covid will become endemic, but it is not currently endemic. It grinds their gears to hear people (like me, on Facebook, last week, whoops) calling covid “endemic,” today, because a disease can’t be said to be endemic until it has both arrived at a normal “background” level of cases and we humans have ascertained what that level is. We don’t yet have a clear idea what covid’s “background” number is going to be, and we’re unlikely to find out in the next few months. We just know it’s going to be around forever.
Even assuming perfect cooperation, you will notice this step requires a true and correct registry of all persons living in the United States. Yarvin also notices this. In an odd but quite possibly deliberate inversion of George Orwell’s “if there is hope, it lies with the proles,” Yarvin observes that the problem with the lumpenproletariat is that the state can’t “see” them well enough to control them, and he proposes correcting this oversight at once. Reader, I merely report, I do not judge.
I would add, and Yarvin would certainly agree, that you would also mandate vaccination during the hard lockdown. Anyone who does not receive a vaccine by the end of the lockdown is seized and forcibly injected (and remains in lockdown until fully vaccinated). Again, I do not judge, I merely report what would you would have to do to end the pandemic by human effort.
With apologies to a work friend of mine, who said this to another colleague right after a Zoom meeting today, where I overheard him and immediately thought, “Oh, you’re going in the blog post, my friend.”
Yarvin calls it the salus populi; Catholic integralists call it the common good, but the point is that, in this school of thought, human flourishing trumps human rights. More on this here.
At least, we think covid is spreading slowly in China. That’s what the stats say. But we should interpret all official Chinese statistics about coronavirus as minimums, not maximums. The Chinese Communist Party has a proven record of deceiving the world about covid. Indeed, its deceit about the severity of the outbreak in Wuhan arguably allowed the disease to breach containment in the first place. And it continues to deceive and stonewall about the most likely origin of covid-19: an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Calling it the “Chinese coronavirus” is politically charged but much, much fairer than calling the 1918 pandemic the “Spanish flu.”
I guess if they slowed it down enough they could simply outlive covid’s epidemic cycle. Keynes said, “In the long run, we’re all dead,” and, if the Chinese policy allows a bunch of 85-year-olds to catch covid in 2024 instead of 2021… hey, a lot of those 85-year-olds will die off in the meantime anyway, of other causes! I suppose that we could count that as a qualified win for the Chinese containment policy.
Of course, in the United States, anti-vaccine-resister sentiment was also driven by a stereotype of vaccine resisters as red-state rural Trump-lovers. Many blue-state urban #resistance types loathe such people already, and were delighted to have a new excuse to be outraged at their social inferiors. And many vaccine resisters became vaccine resisters largely out of resentment of these critics, who generally belong to a higher social class. (I know some of you doubt this, but I know some vaccine resisters for whom this is true.) American class warfare is constant and unceasing, it’s just invisible because it isn’t actually about income.
For what it’s worth, almost all of this hatred was misdirected.
Blue-staters failed to recognize how badly the actual vacccine resisters in the United States failed to fit their stereotype. A large portion of U.S. vaccine resisters are urban people of color and cautious, disengaged people across the political spectrum. Their skepticism is not some weird artifact of American exceptionalism or whatever; vaccine resistance is the position of a surprisingly stable minority throughout most of the world. Some people mistakenly thought Omicron emerged in South Africa because “vaccine equity” hadn’t sent enough vaccines to the “global South.” But, no, actually, South Africa had plenty of vaccines, so many they were sending vaccines back. What South Africa ran out of was people willing to take the vaccine.
Meanwhile, red-state vaccine resisters who became the face of their movement failed to recognize how many of their own red-state, Trump-voting peers wanted them to get vaccinated, too—many Trump voters even supported mandatory vaccination. Guys, you not only don’t represent the “silent majority” (the majority of Americans are fully vaccinated); you don’t even represent the majority in your own communities.
To be clear, we emphatically do not have anything resembling perfect public cooperation in most places in the world. If you think the U.S. anti-vaxxers are a tough nut to crack, just wait ‘til you meet the Cameroon anti-vaxxers!
Think of Public Health™ not as the academic field of public health alone (which seems to be no more corrupt than the rest of academia) but as a complex, like the Military-Industrial Complex. Lots of good public health science happens, but ideologically-aligned journalists and (to a lesser extent) politicians play a big role in deciding which parts of the field become recognized components of Public Health™. So do several large non-profit organizations and international agencies. Thus, Public Health™ is not just the academic field; it’s the scientific and policy consensus that results from interactions between that academic field and Power, inevitably corrupting both.
“I’d better cite this claim by linking to an example of a prominent member of Public Health™ shaming someone for having a different value judgment.”
“Oh, but that’s going to take forever! You know you spend more time looking up citations for your blogletter’s claims than you do writing the actual blogletter! That’s why the Daily Dobbs Updates are so fun — you skip the cites!”
“Yeah, but having the cites is what makes the blogletter valuable. It ties you to the mast of the truth and keeps you from going beyond what you can show evidence for.”
“But it’s soooo time-consuming and this blogletter is soooo late and I have soooo much Christmas shopping to do! It can take twenty minutes to find good evidence of even the most trivial claims!”
“Deal with it. The readers are paying you now. You owe ‘em.”
I then started looking for my cite. Decided to open Dr. Angela Rasmussen’s Twitter, since she is both a very prominent voice in Public Health™—she was on my own experts list before The Treason—and because she has a track record of abusing her scientific platform to make value judgments—e.g. why she was removed from my experts list after The Treason.
Reader, I swear, this was the very first tweet on her timeline at the time. The cite took 30 seconds. *chef’s kiss*
It’s Xi Jinping’s fault. First, for (likely) funding the creation of the virus, second for (likely) allowing it to escape from the lab where it was (likely) created, and third and most damnably for lying to China and to the world about it until it was too late to contain. Blame Xi and his enablers. They really should have named Omicron after him.
We’re all trying to point fingers at each other for causing or prolonging the pandemic through insufficient vaccination or destructive mask theatre or for bungling the tests back in February 2020. I think we do this because we would much rather hate each other than some obscure foreign outfit like the CCP. Yet, the clear reality is that, once covid reached our shores and penetrated our flimsy quarantines, none of us were responsible. The game was over by mid-February 2020, before most of us realized we were playing. After that, there was literally nothing literally any of us could do at literally any time to prevent more or less this scenario from playing out on more or less the same time table. So stop hating each other!
In leaving private regulations in the hands of the free market, there’s a real risk that we are going to end up permanently enshrining one of the ugliest features of the pandemic: mask privilege. Upper-class workers are technically bound by mask mandates but have many workarounds: working from home, exploiting the food loophole, or just ignoring the rules. Lower-class workers are actually bound by mask mandates, and lack the privilege to ignore it. Which leads to a lot of pictures like those from the 2021 Met Gala: wealthy unmasked guests catered to by masked peons. Many such cases. But I’m not convinced having the government step in and mandate against mandates is a better solution, especially not in the health care sector.
…which, realistically, isn’t going to happen. Even the MMR vaccine, mandated by practically every school system in the Union, only has about 92% uptake. You now know whether you, personally, are allowed to be angry about this, or whether you must resign yourself to sadness.
Even if it’s possible, I imagine the nurse’s union might not be happy about the idea of a second tier of lower-paid psuedo-nurses in the hospitals, even temporarily. This could be an example of monopolization from the other direction.
NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.
In last week’s article, What Are Your Covid Odds?, I calculated your odds of surviving covid based on your age.
In the comments, someone asked, “How are these odds affected by conditions such as obesity?” This is a question I hear routinely, often as the first premise in an argument that young people don’t really have to concern themselves about covid as long as they have no comorbidities. This is not an unreasonable argument at first impression, so let’s explore it.
For comorbidities that affect only a relatively small slice of the population, there’s a pretty easy way of doing this—a shortcut. First, you look up something called the odds ratio for covid mortality with your condition. “Odds ratio for covid mortality” is a fancy scientific way of saying “this is how much more likely you are to die of covid if you have this condition.” Once you have your odds ratio, you just take the official De Civ odds of dying for your age group (see last week’s post!) and multiply them by the odds ratio.
For example, say you’re 30 years old and pregnant. There aren’t very many pregnant people at any given moment, even within that age group, so it’s safe to take the shortcut. According to one study1, the odds ratio for covid mortality while pregnant is ~1.84. So if you get covid while you’re pregnant, all else being equal, you’re 1.84 times more likely to die of covid than if you weren’t pregnant. According to our chart, your odds of dying of covid at your age in general are 1 in 1,771. Pregnancy increases your odds of death to 1 in 963.
But obesity is far more common, and thus (along with age) one of the most significant drivers of the total death toll in the American covid epidemic. An odds ratio for obesity is not that hard to come by: 1.36. The problem here is that a whole lot of Americans, in every age group, are obese. So many, in fact, that the obese people (and their deaths) make up a pretty substantial part of the death rate overall. In order to make judgments about the overall odds for obese people, we can’t take the shortcut and multiply the overall odds by 1.36. Instead, we have to explicitly calculate the odds for non-obese people, then multiply that by 1.36. How?
Boring Caveats
Well, first, we have to find out how many obese people there are in each age group. The CDC website was able to help me out with that a little bit, but their age groups for obesity did not match their age groups for covid, so I ended up having to fudge the obesity rates for each age group a bit.
Then, we have to find out how many obese people got infected with covid. For the purposes of this calculation, I assumed that obese people catch covid at the same rate as non-obese people. This is probably not quite true, but it is basically impossible to be sure how much more likely obese people are to catch the ‘rona in the first place. You’d have to disentangle their higher positive test rate from the facts that obese people get more severe cases; that we are less likely to test people who have less severe cases; and that, even when we do test people with few or no symptoms, they are more likely to have a false negative test result. So I’m satisfied enough with my assumption for tonight, even though it, too, as a bit of a fudge.
Once we have per-age-group obesity rates and obese vs. non-obese estimated case counts, it’s just algebra.
I’ll spare you the details. They are in my Google Sheet. Here’s my scratch paper, which I certainly did NOT clean up for you to read:
“Just algebra” took me over an hour. It’s been a long time since 8th grade.
Many stupid errors later, I finally got results that both looked correct and checked out against the 1.36 odds ratio I’d started with. Hopefully they’re also right? Feel free to Reinhart & Rogoff me in the comments if not.
Because of the fudging I described above, I rounded these obese/non-obese odds to the nearest 10. (The overall odds are still precise, so no rounding there.)
Results & Discussion
All in all? Being not-obese provides some protection against covid. But not a ton.
I’m 32. The overall odds for my age group are 1 in 1,771. Last week, I wrote about how I would take prudent2 precautions against a 1-in-1,771 chance of dying, and I explained that I thought most people would do the same thing for most similarly unlikely causes of death, like house fires or choking.3 Only when my odds start to slide below about 1 in 10,000 do I start to feel like there’s no real point.
I’m not obese, so my actual odds of death, taking that into account, are more like 1 in 2,030. I’m pleased by anything that lowers my odds of death. But, guess what? I would still take precautions against a 1-in-2000 chance of death! That’s still right in the sweet spot between house fires and choking!
Before we leave, I want to make note of something another commenter noted last week: covid can do a lot to you besides kill you. It can leave you with other serious injuries like myocarditis or reduced lung function. It’s not clear to me that Long Covid is more prevalent than, say, Long Lyme, but it certainly does appear to be A Thing of some kind. Furthermore, simply being hospitalized right now creates problems for others, because hospitals are stretched well beyond their capacity right now, and that lack of capacity is literally killing people who need hospital care and can’t get it—including people I know. I’m writing a big messy post about this stuff, but it’s slow going, and I keep getting sidetracked by stats.
Meanwhile, in these more statistical posts, I focus on death rates, because death rates are a very easy, measurable statistic, and because death rates are how we compare between different diseases and various other health threats, like car accidents and war. (Flu can leave you with compromised lungs, too, but we never talk about that, either!) I can give you odds of you dying of covid. I can’t give you odds of you catching covid and experiencing profound suffering. Trust me, I would if I could!
The problem (the problem the big messy post is all about) is that there aren’t very many things you can do to reduce those odds.
A commenter cast some doubt on the data source I used to get the lifetime odds for dying of a house fire or choking. Looking at his objections, I think he’s right to be suspicious: how can you have lifetime odds of dying of lung cancer at only 1 in 6 when 1 in 4 of annual American deaths are caused by heart disease?
But if you go with easier-to-grok annual rates of death, it only strengthens my argument: your odds of dying in a fire annually are only 1 in 93,408, an order of magnitude lower than my data source. And yet you still have a smoke detector! So I suggest you get a vaccine for this thing that is many times more likely to end your life, if you haven’t already. It won’t guarantee you live, but it will help.
I dashed this off in a few minutes after [whatever happened today] in Dobbs v. Jackson and/or Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (different Jacksons, mind!). Didn’t really check for typos, certainly didn’t bother with many links. That might beis a theme of my Dobbs coverage this year.
This Daily Dobbs upDate is not only not about Dobbs; it’s not even about abortion!
In case you missed it
I wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson just two days ago (and, if you haven’t read that, you might want to do so). The very short version is that the Supreme Court had previously said that no state can ban pre-viability abortions. So Texas passed a law that effectively bans heartbeat abortions (which are very much pre-viability), and then Texas very carefully and cleverly crafted the law into a really bizarre structure in order to evade judicial review—or at least to make judicial review astronomically expensive and risky for any abortionists who want to give it a try. The Supreme Court caught Texas out on just one mistake in SB.8, ruling in favor of Texas abortion clinics on that one point (by an 8-1 vote). That will allow a lower court to subject at least part of SB.8 to judicial review.
But, in the future, Texas could fix their mistake. Or another state could implement the same law without the mistake. It’s not even clear the mistake will disable the law. Which means Texas has given everyone the roadmap to suppress rights—not just fake ones, like the “right” to abortion, but real ones, like the right to free speech. And the judicial branch, under current law, has no powers to respond. What then?
The Court divided 5-4 on the much bigger question: if a state conspires to violate the constitutional rights of citizens1, and uses legal trickery to keep their law out of the courts, can the judicial branch rise to the defense of the Constitution by giving itself the additional power needed to combat the threat to the Constitution?
Four justices said, “Yes. The judicial branch is supreme in the exposition of the Constitution,” and any powers it does not already have are automatically given it when the need to defend the Constitution arises. When the Court fails to show the necessary “courage” by asserting even more power, it places “the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system” at risk (Roberts, p4) (according to this view).
Five justices said, “No. The judicial branch is limited to the powers expressly assigned it by the Constitution and by the lawful statutes of Congress.” If someone figures out a way to violate the constitutional rights of citizens without triggering judicial review, okay. The judiciary is cut out of the circle, at least until Congress decides to expand the power of the judicial branch. The judiciary is limited to the cases the democratic-republican process has deigned to assign to it, no matter what.
This 5-4 split decision was presented, in almost all major news reports on the case, as a 5-4 divide over abortion and conservatism vs. progressivism. Nobody mentioned Cooper v. Aaron in the Associated Press story. But, really, this case has become defined by a divide over judicial equality vs. judicial supremacy.
Late yesterday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California was the first governor of another state to take advantage of the Texas roadmap. He proposed a new state law that would ban the sale of so-called assault weapons and “ghost guns” (guns assembled at home, from parts purchased online, thus with no serial registration number/background check), and he used the same basic framework as Texas: instead of having the state government enforce this law, he’s proposing to have the law enforced by private citizens in lawsuits where the deck is stacked against the defendants, making it very costly for gun-makers to litigate.
On the one hand, I see this as a positive development. It is absolutely true that the Supreme Court blessed a roadmap to suppress or chill constitutional rights in Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson. It’s rational for the other side to do the same thing, and might start to get some bipartisan momentum going to Do Something about it before it gets completely out of hand.
Many conservatives don’t seem to understand that this does, indeed, have every chance of getting completely out of hand. The top comment on Breitbart’s story about the California proposal says, “I don’t recall abortion being mentioned in any of the Constitution. However, your rights under the 2nd Amendment are plain and clear.” This was his argument that the California law will be struck down, even though the Texas law was upheld. (It’s followed by a zillion comments agreeing.)
But how clearly the rights at issue are written in the Constitution is completely irrelevant in this case. The Supreme Court’s decision Friday had nothing to do with the abortion right or with any other constitutional right, written or unwritten, real or fake. It had to do with the power of judicial review itself. And if a state has the power to evade judicial review, it has that power for everything, not just for whatever dumb fake rights ex-Justice Blackmun made up. This template works against everything from abortion to homeschooling. The sooner conservatives realize just how far-reaching Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson could end up being, the sooner they’ll start cooperating with efforts to address it.
So, on the whole, progressives using SB.8’s template to thwart the judicial branch and advance their policy goals is a positive development. It would be especially salutary for this California case to go swiftly before the Supreme Court, so that (assuming California crafts its law correctly) five-justice majority can show they weren’t just being writing special rules for SB.8 because they like abortion bans. That’d build some of that institutional credibility Johnny Roberts is always throwing away.
On the other hand, Newsom’s proposal seems like an actually incredibly stupid way to go about it?
I’ll start with the little things.
Newsom’s proposal only targets manufacturers, sellers, and distributors. This is way more limited than SB.8, which targets anyone who “aids and abets” a heartbeat abortion. That could be an abortion clinic, but it could be a clinic receptionist, a friend who helps pay for the abortion, or the Lyft driver who drops the mother off at the clinic. SB.8 targeted a huge swath of people, most of whom do not have deep pockets, which is why it was so legally terrifying. Newsom’s proposal singles out the exact subset of the gun industry that is most likely to be both able and willing to soldier through extensive litigation. I get that he had to do this because politics—going after all assault weapon owners would be unpopular, even in California—but it drastically weakens his ability to actually limit assault rifles or ghost guns.
The other little thing is the old conservative complaint about assault-weapon bans: what, exactly, is an “assault weapon”? Turns out it’s quite hard to define this beyond “guns that look scary.” I won’t reiterate that old saw here, though,
The big shortcoming in Newsom’s proposal, it seems to me, is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Newsom is using this newfound evasive power to ban assault rifles and ghost guns? He can very probably just ban both directly, no shenanigans needed! Assault weapon bans of various stripes have been repeatedly upheld in various federal courts, and I’m unaware of any precedent that says you can’t make a ghost gun. I’m aware that Newsom lost a case in district court a few months ago, when a pro-gun federal judge told Newsom he couldn’t ban the popular AR-15 rifle… but that decision seems unlikely to survive on appeal. So why does Newsom need the whole fancy Texas framework? He could just pass a traditional law banning assault rifles and ghost guns, to be enforced by the attorney general, and—as long as he’s willing to be patient while the court case winds through the system—it would very probably work!
Instead, Newsom should have swung for the fences. This mechanism for evading judicial review covers everything, not just a few controversial ideas in the Bill of Rights. Newsom should propose a law that uses the Texas template to ban all private gun ownership, leaving the ban to be policed by individual citizens suing in civil court. Then Newsom should ban Mormons and white people2 from voting for any office in the state of California, again using the Texas template. My interpretation of the current state of the law is that (if he crafts these laws well), the federal courts can’t do much to stop him.
But, in the crucial passage of his majority opinion on Whole Women’s Health, Justice Gorsuch explains that pre-enforcement challenges in federal court aren’t the only game in town. There are other remedies:
The truth is, many paths exist to vindicate the supremacy of federal law in this area. …[E]veryone acknowledges that otherpre-enforcement challenges may be possible in state court as well. In fact, 14 such state-court cases already seek to vindicate both federal and state constitutional claims against S. B. 8—and they have met with some success at the summary judgment stage.
Separately, any individual sued under S. B. 8 may pursue state and federal constitutional arguments in his or her defense. Still further viable avenues to contest the law’s compliance with the Federal Constitution also may be possible; we do not prejudge the possibility.
[…]
The truth is, too, that unlike the petitioners before us, those seeking to challenge the constitutionality of state laws are not always able to pick and choose the timing and preferred forum for their arguments. This Court has never recognized an unqualified right to pre-enforcement review of constitutional claims in federal court. In fact, general federal question jurisdiction did not even exist for much of this Nation’s history. And pre-enforcement review under the statutory regime the petitioners invoke was not prominent until the mid- 20th century. To this day, many federal constitutional rights are as a practical matter asserted typically as defenses to state-law claims, not in federal pre-enforcement cases like this one. See, e.g., Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U. S. 443 (2011) (First Amendment used as a defense to a state tort suit).
Finally, Justice Sotomayor contends that S. B. 8 “chills” the exercise of federal constitutional rights. If nothing else, she says, this fact warrants allowing further relief in this case. Here again, however, it turns out that the Court has already and often confronted—and rejected—this very line of thinking. As our cases explain, the “chilling effect” associated with a potentially unconstitutional law being “ ‘on the books’ ” is insufficient to “justify federal intervention” in a pre-enforcement suit. See Younger v. Harris (1971). Instead, this Court has always required proof of a more concrete injury and compliance with traditional rules of equitable practice. The Court has consistently applied these requirements whether the challenged law in question is said to chill the free exercise of religion, the freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, or any other right. The petitioners are not entitled to a special exemption.
Maybe so, Justice Sotomayor replies, but what if other States pass legislation similar to S. B. 8? Doesn’t that possibility justify throwing aside our traditional rules? It does not.…To the extent Justice Sotomayor seems to wish even more tools existed to combat this type of law, Congress is free to provide them. …But one thing this Court may never do is disregard the traditional limits on the jurisdiction of federal courts just to see a favored result win the day. At the end of that road is a world in which “[t]he division of power” among the branches of Government “could exist no longer, and the other departments would be swallowed up by the judiciary.”
[Most citations omitted. —De Civ]
Ultimately, we are going to see how these evasive laws play out. Newsom’s stunt seems to confirm that they are going to be used against constitutional rights of all sorts (real and made-up alike) in both red and blue states. They can efficiently effectively eviscerate the Bill of Rights and, especially, the Fourteenth Amendment. But, if we as a country decide we don’t want to balkanize into fifty mini-nations, if we actually like the Fourteenth Amendment and incorporation doctrine…
…then Congress can act. Congress controls the Supreme Court’s docket. Congress controls the Supreme Court’s writs and injunctions. Congress controls the Supreme Court’s discretionary authority. So Congress can fix this. The Supreme Court doesn’t feel it can punch a hole in Ex Parte Young to knock down an unconstitutional law, and I think that they’re right about that… but Congress can.
And the sooner Congress recognizes the bipartisan threat posed by the Texas model, the better they’ll be able to deal with it. So that’s why I think Newsom’s move today is a positive development.
UPDATE 22 December 2021: I had a mistaken understanding of what “ghost guns” are, and updated my description of them accordingly.
