Tag: Gaius Publius

The racial dimension of student debt

by Gaius Publius

As an interim addendum to our short series, “Killing a Predator — Cancelling Student Debt” — Part 1 here, Part 2 here
— consider the observation above by Marshall Steinbaum, one of the
co-authors (with Stephanie Kelton, Scott Fulwiler, and Catherine
Ruetschlin) of the Levy Institute paper on student debt cancellation we’ve been looking at. It comes from a more general piece
Steinbaum wrote for the Roosevelt Institute discussing his Levy
Institute paper. I’d like to focus here on just that observation.

Before we look at more of what Steinbaum wrote, please note three things about the charts above.

First, consider the differing degrees to which student debt subtracts from the wealth of young black households and white households. The takeaway from that should be: No, canceling student debt would not mainly benefit the rich. It actually disproportionately benefits black households when measured as a percentage of household wealth.

Second, look at the vertical scales of the two graphs, their Y-axes. The numbers are not the same.  The top charted point (peak of yellow line) for young white households is $80,000. The top charted point (peak of yellow line) for young black households is slightly more than $18,000. That’s a peak-to-peak wealth differential of greater than 4:1.

Worse, the actual wealth of these black households in 2016 is less than $4,000 (blue line, top chart), compared to more than $40,000 for white households in the same year (blue line, bottom chart). In other words, the 2016 wealth differential is more than 10:1.

Canceling all student debt would bring that differential down to “just” 5:1 — still shameful for a society like ours, but it shows what a great boon student debt cancellation would be for young black households.

Finally, note that from 2013 to 2016, white wealth for these households has recovered somewhat from the Wall Street–caused “great recession” while black wealth has recovered not at all. 

Now Steinbaum:

One thing that immediately becomes clear upon investigation of the student debt crisis is the extent to which it is a creature of this country’s legacy of racial discrimination, segregation, and economic disadvantage patterned by race. My prior research with Kavya Vaghul found that zip codes with higher population percentages of racial minorities had far higher delinquency rates, and that the correlation of delinquency with race was actually most extreme in middle-class neighborhoods. What this tells us is that student debt is intimately bound up with the route to financial stability for racial minorities.

In that work, we ascribe this pattern of disadvantage to four causes: segregation within higher education, which relegates minority students to the worst-performing institutions, discrimination in both credit and labor markets, and the underlying racial wealth gap that means black and Hispanic students have a much smaller cushion of family wealth to fall back on, both to finance higher education in the first place and also should any difficulty with debt repayment arise. The implication is that while higher education is commonly believed to be the route to economic and social mobility, especially by policy-makers, the racialized pattern of the student debt crisis demonstrates how structural barriers to opportunity stand in the way of individual efforts. Insisting that student debt is not a problem amounts to denying this reality.

Looking at the time series of median wealth for households headed by black and white people between the ages of 25 and 40 (what we refer to as “white households” and “black households”) in successive waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) [see charts above] reveals these racialized patterns. … By this measure, the racial wealth gap (the ratio of the median wealth of white households in that age range to the median wealth of black households in that age range) is approximately 12:1 in 2016, whereas in the absence of student debt, that ratio is 5:1.

Moreover, while overall net household wealth levels for the non-rich increased between the 2013 and 2016 waves of the SCF for the first time since the Great Recession did violence to middle-class wealth, rising student debt weighed in the other direction—especially for black households. The time trend from these charts is clear: Student debt is increasingly burdening everyone, but that burden disproportionately weighs on black households.

Steinbaum refers to another study to explain why this is the case (emphasis mine):

A 2016 paper by Judith Scott-Clayton and Jing Li offers clues, since it tracks the debt loads of black and white graduates with four-year undergraduate degrees. They find that immediately upon graduating, black graduates have about $7,400 more in student debt than their white counterparts. Four years after graduating, that gap increases to $25,000. The crucial difference is simply that white graduates are likely to find a job and start paying down their debt, more-or-less as the system is designed, but black graduates are not—they carry higher balances, go to graduate school (especially at for-profit institutions) and thus accumulate more debt, and subsequently earn no better than whites with undergraduate degrees.

What this suggests is that any given educational credential is less valuable to blacks in a discriminatory labor market (probably because they attended less well-regarded institutions with weaker networks of post-graduate opportunity, and also because even assuming they did attend the same institutions as their white counterparts, outcomes for black graduates in the labor market are mediated by racial discrimination). … The assumption that debt-financed educational credentialization represents constructive wealth-building and social mobility thus reflects a failure to comprehend the landscape of race-based economic exclusion.

The interaction of student debt with “race-based economic exclusion” provides a powerful argument for student debt cancellation all on its own. Something to keep in mind as this idea enters public discourse.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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Killing a parasite, part 2 — How to implement student debt cancellation

by Gaius Publius

This is the second part in a short series, “Killing a Parasite — Canceling Student Debt.”

In Part 1, we made the case that the institutionalized and growing student debt crisis is not fed by predatory activity on creditors, but by parasitic activity. Predators kill, eat, and move on. Parasites disable, then live off the energy system of the disabled host for as long as they can keep the host alive. The argument there was simple: “Viruses are a form of parasite. So are credit card companies.”

An especially pernicious form of “loan parasite” includes institutions preying financially on students, who incur their debt without current income to pay it, yet need a college degree to effectively compete in the post-graduation job market. Because at one point the federal government guaranteed many or most student loans in the U.S., private lenders eagerly extended credit to anyone who asked for it. No-risk lending is a no-brainer in the financial world.

These practices put a flood of money into the higher education system, money which continually drives up the price of higher education, even in public colleges and universities. Institutions charge what students can afford to pay, and since students were paying with government-backed loans — and today are paying with government-originated loans (see below) — they become a mere pass-through from lenders to college and university administrations.

Thus the more money this “program” makes available, the higher the tuitions charged by the receiving institutions. (It’s really a racket in the classic sense, since students are coerced by the ever-increasing need for “credentialization” in an ever-deteriorating full-time labor market. Again, see below.)

A great deal of the new money that colleges and universities acquire ends up in the hands of the administrators themselves via growth in their number and growth in their salaries. At the top, many college presidents are paid like corporate CEOs, whom they consider themselves to resemble.

Paul Campos, writing in the New York Times, first identifies the “cover story,” the comfortable myth, that’s used to explain the booming cost of college (my emphasis throughout):

Once upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.

He then shows that the truth is almost exactly opposite:

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher.

In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education.

If car prices had gone up as fast as tuition over the same period, he writes, “the average new car would cost more than $80,000.”

Where is this money going? Among other places, into the pockets of the administrator class. Campos notes that “an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.”

To see the effect on the salaries of college presidents, the industry’s CEO class, see the charts at the top.

Part 1 in this series looked at the Why question — Why should all student loans be canceled? — and answered it in economic terms, since ending student loan debt would benefit not just the students affected, but the economy as a whole. It also answered the Why question in moral terms: Ending the practice of parasitism, humans preying on humans, is a good thing in itself.

This piece looks at the How question — How should ending student loans be implemented? A future installment, the last, will address the What Next and What If We Don’t questions. (Hint: Extreme parasitism is not a stable system, and the social consequences of extreme human suffering aren’t limited to the ballot box.)

The federal government is the largest originator of student loans

A little background before we get to the implementation. The largest originator and owner of student loans is now the U.S. government:

The Federal Student Aid (FSA) loan portfolio balances were $896 billion at the end of 2012. The FSA managed $473 billion under the Federal Direct Student Loan Program at the end of 2012. New loans originated under the program during 2012 totaled $106.7 billion. Loan portfolio balances managed by the FSA for the Federal Family Education Loan Program are slowly and steadily shrinking as new loans offered to students by the U.S. Department of Education originate under the FDSL program. Most of the growth in FDSL loan portfolio balances can be attributed to new loan originations, while being the sole government program for student loans. Another contributor to the rapid escalation in loan balances is due to the cost of higher education increasing rapidly, faster than inflation. Students are spending and borrowing more to finance their higher-priced, higher education.

As of the 2015 GAO audit, the total of the Federal Student Aid loan portfolio was one trillion dollars. [Footnotes removed]

By comparison, note that the aggregate national student loan total, including both public and privately originated loans, is close to $1.5 trillion.

The percentage of private loans is actually much smaller that these numbers imply. According to a new paper by Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum, “The vast majority of [student] debt originates from federal lending, with the private student loan market accounting for just
7.6 percent ($99.7 million) of all student debt.” (More from this paper below.)

Also note that the government-guaranteed loan program, in which private lenders were the source of the money, was eliminated only recently, in 2010:

Following the passage of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, the Federal Direct Loan Program is the sole government-backed loan program in the United States. Guaranteed loans—loans originated and funded by private lenders but guaranteed by the government—were eliminated because of a perception that they benefited private student loan companies at the expense of taxpayers, but did not help reduce costs for students.

So the loan guarantee program became a loan origination program. This makes the U.S. government today the major parasite driving the student loan crisis, though $100 million in private student debt is still a sizable prize for private lenders.

This also puts the U.S. government in a unique and powerful position — it can, if it wishes, solve this problem by its own action alone.

How to end the student loan crisis

Part 1 of this series argued the benefits of a “debt jubilee” on all student loans in the U.S. The paper cited above also argues those benefits (see the Executive Summary). The mechanics of this cancellation, ways it can be implemented, are as follows. Note in the second bulleted paragraph how private loan debt would be handled (emphasis mine):

• The current portfolio of student loans held by the ED would be cancelled or, equivalently, borrowers would simply be allowed to stop making payments and any principal due on a given date would be cancelled at that time (that is, the loan would effectively be cancelled in stages as payments come due). As of the second quarter of 2016, the ED’s outstanding loans totaled $986.19 billion.

• The federal government would either purchase and then cancel, or, equivalently, take over the payments on student debt currently held by the private sector. As with the ED’s loans, if the government purchases the privately held loans it can choose to cancel them immediately or as borrowers’ payments come due. The government-guaranteed loans are $266.69 billion, while nonguaranteed privately issued loans are $101.58 billion, both as of the second quarter of 2016. Having the government assume these payments or purchase and cancel the loans is preferable to cancellation by private investors. The latter would require the private sector to write down nearly $370 billion in both assets and equity, which could be highly destabilizing (or worse) for the affected sectors.

Section II of the paper works out the effects of the various choices presented above. Note again that the effect on the national debt derives solely from the loan servicing amounts (interest payments), which are either lost to the government in the case of canceled government loans, or paid by the government in the case of privately issued loans. Canceling the outstanding loans balances themselves has no effect at all on the amount of federal debt.

But wouldn’t this disproportionately benefit the rich?

One of the chief objections to this proposal is that it’s regressive, that it would disproportionately benefit the rich. The authors address this concern:

The Distributional Consequences of Student Debt, Student Debt Cancellation, and Debt-Free College

…[T]he main controversy over student debt generally and debt cancellation in particular has not been its macroeconomic impact, but rather the implications for people in different income and wealth quantiles and the impact on inequality. The controversy arises from the factual observation that among borrowers, those with the largest amount of debt outstanding tend to have the highest incomes, and those who spend the most on college (and who therefore—so the story goes—have the most to gain from the option of free college) come from the highest-earning families….

This objection, overly simple and therefore easy to “sell,” fails to take into account the wholesale changes that have occurred in both the student loan population and the U.S. labor market.

The widespread criticism of ambitious policies to address the student debt crisis, based on their supposedly regressive impact, is overdrawn. In some cases, it misinterprets the evidence about who is most burdened by student debt and who would benefit most from relief. In this section, we consider the evidence about the distribution of debt and debt burdens in the population and the evolution of those distributions over time. Our main point is that, while the largest loan balances are indeed held by comparatively high-earning households, the extent to which student debt is held by the rich has diminished significantly. Moreover, the argument that the distribution of the burden of student debt has not, in fact, changed very much, even as the total amount of debt outstanding has increased dramatically, fails to consider the significant changes in the population of people with any student debt at all. These issues of interpretation extend beyond accurately assessing the distributional impact of the policies we model—they point to larger problems with the assumptions behind existing higher education, student debt, and labor market policies. The student debt crisis is one of several linked manifestations of those problems. Others are wage stagnation, underemployment, and increasing inequality of household wealth.

Student debt was once disproportionately associated with graduate school and with relatively well-off households, in part because it was possible to graduate from community college or a four-year public institution with little or no debt, and in even larger part because many people did not need to obtain any higher education credentials in order to access the labor market. What has happened in recent decades, and especially since the mid-2000s, is a vast expansion of student borrowing, such that the preponderant share of younger cohorts newly entering the labor market carry student debt. This expansion is due in part to much higher tuition, mostly thanks to state-level cutbacks in funding for higher education, and in part because it is simply far more difficult to access the labor market now without higher education credentials. And that “credentialization,” in turn, is due to the underperformance of the labor market since 2000 and especially since the financial crisis and the Great Recession that began in 2008. Since 2000, the most important federal labor market policy has been the extension of student debt and the encouragement of a larger share of the population to obtain debt-financed higher education credentials, on the theory that underemployment and stagnant wages were caused by a “skills gap” that could be remedied through debt-financed higher education. The most obvious and acute effect of that policy was the growth of the high-priced for-profit higher education sector, but it was also evident in rising enrollment across all types of institutions, even as tuition rose. The “skills gap” was a false diagnosis of the labor market’s problems, and hence the prescription of more debt-financed credentials not only failed to solve the problem, it also created its own problem in the form of unsustainable debt.

The bottom line is this: Student debt today is killing a generation in a way it didn’t before. This is new and not a function of loans to students born of wealthy parents. It’s a societal and generational problem, actually a multi-generational one, that hurts us all. The economic harm done to an entire generation of Americans is not captured by the objection that this is somehow a “regressive” proposal.

As the authors note, there’s more in that section of the paper in support of these claims.

The need for debt-free public higher education

It’s clear that this proposal, in my view necessary, must also be accompanied by the Sanders campaign proposal of debt-free public colleges and universities. The arguments for Sanders’ proposal, on its own merits, were well explored during the campaign.

A major objection to Sanders’ idea was again that it would mainly benefit the rich — an argument that ignores, disingenuously I think, the fact that the very wealthy do not send their children to public colleges and universities. Harvard University would not become tuition-free under Sanders’ proposal.

But in the context of the current proposal for cancellation of all student debt, there’s another reason for instituting debt-free public colleges and universities: moral hazard. Briefly, canceling debt without removing the reasons debt is incurred in the first place encourages reckless borrowing in the expectation of future cancellation.

The authors address the problem this way:

The primary theoretical criticism of debt cancellation plans focuses on the reaccumulation of debt following the cancellation, in particular the potential for problems of moral hazard to arise. From this perspective, debt relief today could change the incentives of future student debtors who may increase borrowing with the expectation that the loans will be forgiven, causing an even faster accumulation of debt and increasing the negative consequences at the household, local, and macroeconomic levels. The perverse incentives for unsustainable borrowing in this scenario are the result of inappropriate policy institutions that absolve borrowers of their debts while perpetuating the necessity of increasing debt. In order to avoid problems of moral hazard, any restructuring of student debt—including our debt cancellation proposal—should be accompanied by strong and appropriate policies that enforce the consequences of borrowing and address the market failures that lead to undesirable social costs. In combination with debt cancellation, publicly funded free or debt-free college would provide the institutional reform.

In combination with a program like the one Sanders proposed during the campaign — free public colleges and universities — student debt cancellation would indeed and effectively address the current student debt crisis. The two proposals are a necessary pair and should be implemented together.

Finally, the “fairness” question

Which brings us to the last of the objections. In effect, it comes down to this: “I paid for my college degree with my hard work and sacrifice. I paid off all my loans, and believe me it was tough. But I did it. So why should others get a break that I didn’t get?”

The problem here is what one writer described as “status quo bias,” an emotional preference in which the “current baseline (or status quo) is taken as a reference point, and any change from that baseline is perceived as a loss.”

but there’s another bias as well, which could be called “retributional bias.” This situation is similar to any in which an originally beneficial policy was first rescinded and then reinstated. Public education was largely free prior to the Reagan era, and with the GI Bill, millions paid next to nothing to attend. As the paper’s authors point out, the largest loan balances were associated with post-graduate work.

But higher education policies changed under and after Reagan, reaching crisis proportions today. Should people trapped in debt by the blatant injustices of the post-Reagan world be allowed to veto, in the name of “fairness,” the repeal of those injustices?

The essence of this objection is, “It’s not fair that I was born at the wrong time.” This has been described as being “trapped by history.” Is it unfair that many be so trapped? Of course it is. But the perp in that unfairness is not the next generation to also be shackled, but the times themselves, the politicians who ruled them, and voters who kept them in power.

To therefore perpetuate that unfairness — to make, in effect, this generation suffer “because I had to” — is more than just unfair to them. It’s cruel.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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Killing a parasite — Canceling student debt (part 1)

by Gaius Publius

In the world of parasites, the job of the parasite is to benefit from the harm it does to the host, but not to kill the host, at least not until the parasite is done with it:

In biology, parasitism is a relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or in another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson has characterised parasites as “predators that eat prey in units of less than one”….

Unlike predators, parasites, with the exception of parasitoids [examples: wasps that lay eggs in paralyzed spiders, or the beast in Alien], typically do not kill their host, are generally much smaller than their host, and often live in or on their host for an extended period. Parasitism is a type of consumer-resource interaction. [Footnotes removed]

Parasites are not the same as predators. Predators kill, eat, and move on. Parasites disable, then live off the energy system of the disabled host for as long as they can keep the host alive.

Viruses are a form of parasite. So are credit card companies.

Loan companies as parasites

The parasite first disables the host’s ability to reject the parasite, then derives its own energy (that which sustains it) by robbing the host’s energy system. It attempts to do this for as long as possible. Loan companies whose “business plan” — survival strategy — is to prolong the loan, and at the maximum sustainable rate, are by definition parasites.

But there is a scale of parasitism among loan companies. The least parasitic are mortgage companies, in that mortgages typically don’t destroy incomes; they just feed off them. When the host goes into bankruptcy (usually for other reasons, such as illness, divorce or job change), the host (the home-owner) is abandoned, but mortgage company parasites don’t typically cause these bankruptcies by themselves.

In addition, if a host wants to repay her debt and free herself from the parasite, she is allowed to do so, though typically, hosts usually seek a new parasite, either by necessity or because of cultural pressure.

At the less gentle end of the parasitic spectrum are payday lenders and loan sharks, who actually disable the host’s income capability by extracting so much money that the host almost certainly goes bankrupt, often first drawing on the resources of others and transferring those resources to the parasite as well before they do.

Payday lenders thrive in an environment rich in new hosts, since so many of their former ones become useless. In contrast, most mortgaged homeowners (hosts of mortgage banks) don’t go bankrupt — just some of them.

Student debt parasites feed on especially vulnerable hosts

Not far up the parasitic scale from payday lenders and loan sharks are owners and beneficiaries of student debt, i.e. the lending companies.

First, as the chart above shows, there’s a large and growing population of prospects in the student loan world. New hosts, it seems, are everywhere.

Second, the loan amounts are extraordinarily large and extraordinarily long-lived (my emphasis throughout):

The average debt load for students who graduated in the class of 2016 was around $30,000, and the average rises every year.

But some students graduate with far more debt than that, especially those who pursue graduate degrees or professional degrees. Nearly 17 percent of those who borrow for education costs will graduate owing more than $50,000, according to the recent study by the Brookings Institution. That is a much higher rate than in 2000, when five percent of new graduates owed that much money.

Today, many of those who graduate with more than $50,000 in debt aren’t the students who are pursuing highly-lucrative careers, such as becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but undergraduate students and their parents. On the other hand, more people who are pursuing a professional degree are graduating with well over $100,000 in student loans.

While a student debt load of $30,000 doesn’t sound large compared to mortgage debt, remember that these hosts almost never have a source of income when they incur the debt. In contrast, home loan applicants generally have to prove income prior to acquiring the debt.

For high-debt graduates — greater than $50,000, greater than $100,000 — the situation is much worse. The debt burden can hobble their entire lives. I’ve met men and women in their thirties whose most common complaint is, “I will never get out of debt, and I will never get a job in my profession.” I’ve met high-tech workers in high-mortgage-cost regions of the country with incomes greater than $150,000 per year, student loan repayments of nearly $2,000 per month, more than one child, and no way to break even on a month-to-month basis.

All of these people are one bad-luck accident away from bankruptcy — which means good-bye to the next good job for more than a decade afterward.

Student loan parasites also feed on the economy as a whole

But student loan parasites don’t just eat and diminish the host — they eat and diminish the economy as a whole. It’s an axiom in economics that aggregate debt repayment subtracts from GDP, a measure of overall economic production. In practical terms, a dollar spent repaying a debt to a lender is a dollar that doesn’t buy bread, purchase services like health care, or build a factory.

As a nation’s private debt burden increases, private sector demand and spending falls. In the extreme, if everyone in a country decided or were forced to pay all debts at once, the overall economy would collapse. (The same would happen if everyone in an economy went on a savings spree.)

This is what today’s high levels of student debt are doing to our economy. Writes Eric Levitz at New York magazine:

In America today, 44 million people collectively carry $1.4 trillion in student debt. That giant pile of financial obligations isn’t just a burden on individual borrowers, but on the nation’s entire economy. The astronomical rise in the cost of college tuition — combined with the stagnation of entry-level wages for college graduates — has depressed
the purchasing power of a broad, and growing, part of the labor force. Many of these workers are struggling to keep their heads above water; 11 percent of aggregate student loan debt is now more than 90 days past due, or delinquent. Others are unable to invest in a home, vehicle, or start a family (and engage in all the myriad acts of consumption that go with that).

Note that number: U.S. aggregate student debt has reached almost $1.5 trillion. 

A Debt Jubilee to rejuvenate the economy

The obvious solution to this problem has been practiced since ancient times — a debt jubilee in which all student debts are cancelled. Keep in mind that the U/S. government owns or controls 90% of all student debt in this country:

Thus, if the government were to forgive all the student debt it owns (which makes up more than 90 percent of all outstanding student debt), and bought out all private holders of such debt, a surge in consumer demand — and thus, employment and economic growth — would ensue.

According to the Levy Institute paper [here], authored by economists Scott Fullwiler, Stephanie Kelton, Catherine Ruetschlin, and Marshall Steinbaum, canceling all student debt would increase GDP by between $86 billion and $108 billion per year, over the next decade. This would add between 1.2 and 1.5 million jobs to the economy, and reduce the unemployment rate by between 0.22 and 0.36 percent.

Note that the ancient concept of “debt jubilee” doesn’t necessarily apply to all debt, just unproductive debt.

Economist Michael Hudson writes this about debt jubilees in Sumerian and Babylonian times:

The Bronze Age core economies coped with the debt problem simply by canceling society’s unproductive debts when they grew too large. However, the Sumerians and Babylonians only annulled consumer barley-debts; they left commercial silver-debts intact. … This implicit distinction between productive and unproductive debt represents a third way in which Babylonian economics may be deemed more sophisticated than modern economics (in addition to the afore-mentioned focus on the destabilizing role of debts multiplying at compound interest, and the phenomenon of wealth addiction.)

Note his mention of the socially “destabilizing role of debts multiplying at compound interest,” as well as the (similarly destabilizing) role of “wealth addiction.” Our society is hobbled by both.

Student loan debt is by definition unproductive debt — a debt owed to parasites, in other words. There is no question that cancelling it would free both hosts — the millions of graduates themselves (and those who failed to graduate), and the larger economy as well.

A moral question and an economic question

It’s certainly true that the economy as a whole would benefit from student debt cancellation. As noted, aggregate student debt is at or near $1.5 trillion, and rising.

We also know that even Repubicans believe that an injection of $1.5 trillion into the economy would do a world of good. According to one Fox News defender of the recent $1.5 trillion tax cut bill, “Democrats have now become born-again deficit hawks, painting an additional $1.5 trillion added to the deficit over the next 10 years from this tax plan as causing certain harm. But they fail to take into account economic growth that would be created by tax cuts”.

It’s true that tax cuts have a stimulus effect, but not much of one. Making the Bush tax cuts permanent, for example, had a “fiscal multiplier” (stimulus effect) of 0.26. By contrast, a one-time increase in food stamps would have a multiplier of 1.73.

Quite a difference. A one-time reduction of student loan debt of $1.5 trillion would immediately pour hundreds and in some cases, thousands per month per indebted household into the productive economy — enriching not Wall Street this time, but Main Street.

Everyone in the country would benefit, offering an answer to the economic question “How do we improve the lives of all Americans?”

But a massive student loan cancellation would also help answer a moral question: “How do we free ourselves from the financial parasites who take money for themselves that others have earned?”

Freeing a host from parasites is indeed a moral task, especially when humans are the hosts. If you doubt you have a moral response to parasites, consider the “tongue-eating louse” (pictured below).

This parasite destroys the tongue of its host, replaces the tongue so the fish thinks nothing is amiss, then slowly drains the fish as the fish feeds itself.

If you owe student debt yourself, especially great amounts of it, something similar is happening to you — a large percentage of your income is going each month to people who do nothing but move money around. The only difference between you and the fish above is — you know something’s amiss.

Next steps: Answering the “How?” and “What Next?” questions

This answers the Why question of student debt cancellation — the moral job of freeing a host (us and our children) from parasites, the economic job of growing the productive economy so all can have better lives. I’ll answer the How question — what does implementation look like? — and the What Next question in another installment.

I’ll also answer the “What If We Don’t?” question. Here’s a hint: Extreme parasitism is not a stable system. When hosts become aware of their parasites, they fight back.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

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On the Cape Town, South Africa water crisis

by Gaius Publius

Not long ago I wrote about the extreme water shortage in Cape Town, South Africa. Things are so dry there, and the dams so low, that originally it looked like the city would have to shut off their water taps by April 29, which they’re calling “Day Zero.” Seriously.

Perhaps you’ve heard about this crisis from other sources, though coverage of climate news has been sparse these days. Hopefully this will bring you up to date.

Via the (Rupert Murdoch-owned) National Geographic:

How Cape Town Is Coping With Its Worst Drought on Record

Editor’s Note: On Monday, February 5, Cape Town officials announced that the city had gotten “a slight reprieve” and that “Day Zero” had been pushed back to May 11. The reason: Fruit growers and other agricultural operations in the region have used up their annual water allocation, making more water available for the city. “There has not been any significant decline in urban usage,” deputy mayor Ian Neilson stressed in a statement. With a heat wave forecast to increase evaporation from reservoirs, he said, Capetonians must reduce consumption “to prevent the remaining water supplies running out before the arrival of winter rains.”

A few things to note about this:

• The “growers … have used up their annual allotment.” This means that the agricultural industry there is SOL until the rains start. Translate that to a California context. 

• Urban usage has not declined. The obvious reason is that it’s harder to enforce urban water rationing than agricultural rationing. There seems to be an “I’ll get mine if I can” attitude among city dwellers. The social tensions have started. 

• Reservoirs are dangerously low due to the drought, and since it’s their summer (while we have winter) the heat is causing water evaporation. As of the most recent reports, reservoirs are at just 30% capacity or less, with the last 10% unusable.

• The end of the crisis will come with the “arrival of winter rains,” hopefully soon after Day Zero. That means around June or so, since their winter is our summer.

More from the report, first on how water rationing will work after the taps are — yes, literally — turned off by the city: “By late spring, four million people in the city of Cape Town—one of Africa’s most affluent metropolises—may have to stand in line surrounded by armed guards to collect rations of the region’s most precious commodity: drinking water.”

Stand in line surrounded by armed guards to get your daily ration of water? Yes, that’s what water rationing in a city-wide emergency looks like. 

The city is prepping 200 emergency water stations outside groceries and other gathering spots. Each would have to serve almost 20,000 residents. Cape Town officials are making plans to store emergency water at military installations, and say using taps to fill pools, water gardens, or wash cars is now illegal. Just this week, authorities stepped up water-theft patrols at natural springs where fights broke out, according to local press reports. They’re being asked to crack down on “unscrupulous traders” who have driven up the price of bottled water.

The amount of rationing will be extreme. In early January, the city asked residents (note, asked) to use just 50 liters of water per day (which, the article notes, is less than one-sixth of what the average American uses). Day Zero will make those restrictions mandatory and reduce the quota to 25 liters per day (“less than typically used in four minutes of showering”).

About those social tensions, city officials are also worried about it. Writes Helen Zille, former Cape Town mayor and premier of South Africa’s Western Cape province, “The question that dominates my waking hours now is: When Day Zero arrives, how do we make water accessible and prevent anarchy?”

The National Geographic article makes that point again: “For months, citizens have been urged to consume less, but more than half of residents ignored those volunteer restrictions.”

Says David Olivier, a research fellow at the Global Change Institute at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand, “The fundamental problem is the kind of lifestyle we’re living. There’s almost a sense of entitlement that we have a right to consume as much as we want. The attitude and reaction of most posts on social media is indignation. It’s ‘we pay our taxes’ and therefore we should be as comfortable as possible.”

“A sense of entitlement.” Sound familiar?

Finally, many major cities are in roughly the same shape as Cape Town, are staring down the barrel of the same gun (emphasis added):

[M]any of the 21 million residents of Mexico City only have running water part of the day, while one in five get just a few hours from their taps a week. Several major cities in India don’t have enough. Water managers in Melbourne, Australia, reported last summer that they could run out of water in little more than a decade. Jakarta is running so dry that the city is sinking faster than seas are rising, as residents suck up groundwater from below the surface.

Much like Cape Town’s fiasco, reservoirs in Sao Paulo, Brazil, dropped so low in 2015 that pipes drew in mud, emergency water trucks were looted, and the flow of water to taps in many homes was cut to just a few hours twice a week. Only last-minute rains prevented Brazilian authorities from having to close taps completely.

“Sao Paulo was down to less than 20 days of water supply,” says Betsy Otto, director of the global water program at the World Resources Institute. “What we’re starting to see are the confluence of a lot of factors that might be underappreciated, ignored, or changing. Brought together, though, they create the perfect storm.”

The cities listed above are not the only ones in danger. Go here and look for an American city. Then go back through the list and count the world capitals.

Is it an emergency yet? Is this impetus enough? Is it time yet for people to take matters into their own hands and act?

Tick tick tick says the world-historical clock on the wall. Tick tick tick.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

 

2017 breaks climate records despite lack of “El Niño boost”

by Gaius Publius

This is an update on the coming climate train wreck. The
numbers are in for 2017, not just the global temperature itself (see
graph above), but also the clearly climate-related damage that was done —
the fires, hurricanes and other extreme-weather events. 2017 ranks in
the top five hottest years on record, and broke the record for climate-related damage.

About global temperature in 2017, look at the chart above and note three things.

With no El Niño, 2017 was still the 2nd hottest year on record

First, the two most recent “super El Niño” events, in 1997-98 and 2015-16, clearly represented peaks or spikes in global warming, while the intervening years hung close to the 12-month and 132-month running means.

Not so in 2017. Despite the lack of El Niño conditions in 2017, the year still placed second on the list of the hottest years ever recorded. Dr. James Hansen:

Global surface temperature in 2017 was the second highest in the period of instrumental measurements in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. Relative to average temperature for 1880-1920, which we take as an appropriate estimate of “pre-industrial” temperature, 2017 was +1.17°C (~2.1°F) warmer than in the 1880-1920 base period. The high 2017 temperature, unlike the record 2016 temperature, was obtained without any boost from tropical El Niño warming.

This should be concerning to everyone, for the reason explained below.

(By the way, note that the statement above covers only “global surface temperature” and not oceanic warming as well, especially deep oceanic warming. The entire planet is being heated by our use of fossil fuel, not just the surface.)

The rate of global warming may be accelerating

Second, this data means we may be entering a period of accelerated warming. I think most people assume that global warming and its effects will be linear, will proceed along a roughly straight line that allows us to calculate how much we can delay in dealing with it. Not so.

I’ve argued for some time that linearity is not guaranteed, is in fact highly unlikely, and that the chief cause of global warming, the injection of CO2 into the atmosphere, seems already to have accelerated. In a piece earlier last year, “Atmospheric CO2 Jumps +4 ppm in June Compared to June 2015“, I wrote:

Consider a simple calculation. Most governments that try to show they are interested in ending man-made CO2 emissions have “exit rates” — rates at which humans go to zero emissions — which nonetheless have us increasing emissions as late as 2050. The underlying assumption is that if we start the count at 400 ppm in 2014 (per the monthly chart at the above), then add +2.11 ppm per year, we don’t get to 450 ppm for roughly 20-25 years (allowing for modest acceleration in the growth rate). But if atmospheric CO2 growth suddenly zooms to +4 ppm/year starting with this year’s 406 ppm, we’re at 450 ppm in 11 years.

As I noted then, eleven years from now is 2027, and 450 ppm is game-over — partly because global warming will have shot well past +2°C, producing enough social, political, economic and military chaos to make a global solution impossible; and partly because if we haven’t stopped Exxon et al before then, we never will, and the process will go to termination.

Here’s what “the process will go to termination” means: Humans won’t stop adding atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gasses until we’re pre-industrial again — or worse.

“Pre-industrial or worse” is not what we want for our species. “We” in the previous sentence includes only the non-sociopaths among us — those of us not in charge of U.S. and global energy policy.

Global warming has already reached +1.2–1.4 degrees above Pre-Industrial, depending on how “Pre-Industrial” is defined

Third, note again Hansen’s comment that “Relative to average temperature for 1880-1920, which we take as an
appropriate estimate of “pre-industrial” temperature, 2017 was +1.17°C (~2.1°F) warmer than in the 1880-1920 base period.” If you look at the chart above, you’ll see that the 2015-2016 high was roughly +1.2°C above what Hansen defines as “pre-industrial temperature.”

If global warming is accelerating along with global CO2 emissions, and the most recent peak was warming of +1.2°C, the aspirational Paris target of halting global warming at +1.5°C is impossible, despite this bit of (desperate) optimism:

IPCC 1.5°C report: A clarion call for EU action on climate

A leaked draft of the IPCC’s forthcoming report on keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius gives reason to hope that the target is attainable. But only if urgent action is taken immediately, warns Dr Bert Metz.

At this point, all optimism should be desperate, and that desperation should drive emergency action, something I and others have written many time about.

One could argue, in fact, that we’re actually much closer to +1.5°C global warming than even Hansen or the IPCC recognizes. It’s all a matter of where you measure from in calculating the “pre-industrial” baseline.

• Dr. Hansen puts the baseline as the “average temperature for 1880-1920” and gets present warming of +1.2°C at the 2014-2016 peak.

• The IPCC, according to the link above, puts “global average temperatures” at “just 1 degree Celsius (°C) above pre-industrial levels” — noticeably lower than Hansen’s number. 

• Dr. Michael Mann (quoted here), like Dr. Hansen, gets a higher number with what he considers an even more appropriate baseline:

It has been widely reported that 2015 will be the first year where temperatures climbed to 1C above the pre-industrial. That might make it seem like we’ve got quite a ways to go until we breach the 2C limit. But the claim is wrong. We exceeded 1C warming more than a decade ago. The problem is that here, and elsewhere, an inappropriate baseline has been invoked for defining the “pre-industrial.” The warming was measured relative to the average over the latter half of the 19th century (1850-1900). In other words, the base year implicitly used to define “pre-industrial” conditions is 1875, the mid-point of that interval. Yet the industrial revolution and the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations associated with it, began more than a century earlier. …

[U]sing the more appropriate 1750-1850 pre-industrial baseline, we see that the Northern Hemisphere average temperature (gray squiggly curve [in Figure 3 at the link]) has already warmed nearly 1.2C [as of 2013; Figure 3 was published in 2014]. Temperatures have exceeded 1C above pre-industrial levels for most of the past decade. [emphasis added]

Dr. Mann’s current warming number, using this baseline, would be +1.3°C or a little higher.

• I took a less cautious look at determining the baseline (here) and found “the global temperature low at about 1900–1910 … is a good proxy for the pre-industrial temperature low pointed out in the chart [at the link]. We can take the temperature in that later period (1900 or so) to be nearly the same as
the “pre-Industrial low.“

This gives a present global warming number of approximately +1.4°C.

None of these numbers is good if the health of the many, not profit for the few, is one’s primary concern.

A watershed

However you consider the situation — non-El Niño spikes in temperature; accelerating CO2 emissions and very possibly warming as well; or the uncertain definition of the “pre-industrial baseline” (a somewhat politicized discussion in the case of the hyper-cautious IPCC) — no matter what lens one looks through, we’re clearly at a watershed.

Or two watersheds. The first, a watershed of events. The second, a watershed in public awareness of how immediate the consequences are. The first watershed is undeniably in front of us; it’s in the data itself.

The second is a prediction. In my estimation, people are much more aware — today — of global warming than any in the corporatized media gives them credit for. That awareness, unreported for now, will come bursting though sooner than expected, with undeniable, and non-linear, consequences.

(A version of this piece appeared at DownWithTyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP
 

Setting a national precedent, Maryland passes fracking ban; GOP governor to sign it

by Gaius Publius

The action moves to the states. The first good news was this — California introduces (again) single-payer health insurance, this time in a climate that increases its chance of passing. Read more about that here.

Now more good news from Maryland — the nation’s first state-wide fracking ban in a state with proven reserves has cleared the last hurdle. With support from the GOP governor (you read that right), it will become law.

Fracking will be forbidden anywhere in Maryland, because, well, people don’t want it.

Needless to say, like the singe-payer news from California, this has national implications. Here’s Mike Tidwell and Denise Robbins of Chesapeake Climate Action Network with the announcement (my emphasis below):

Maryland Fracking Ban To Become Law, With Nationwide Implications

Senate passes bill with GOP governor support, following six years of grassroots resistance across the state of Maryland

ANNAPOLIS – With game-changing support from Republican Governor Larry Hogan, the Maryland state Senate Monday night gave final approval to a bill to forever ban the practice of fracking in Maryland. This move culminates years of protests against fracking for gas from landowners, health leaders, and environmentalists. It also sets a nationally significant precedent as other states grapple with the dangerous drilling method.

Maryland will now become the first state in America with proven gas reserves to ban fracking by legislative action. New York has banned the drilling process via executive order. Vermont has a statutory ban but the state has no frackable gas reserves at present.

The Maryland ban is sending political waves across the East Coast and the nation. From Virginia (where leaders have imposed or proposed local bans at the county and municipal level) to the state of Florida (which is looking to follow Maryland’s statewide ban), the “keep-it-in-the-ground” movement is gaining new bipartisan steam even as President Donald Trump recklessly works to approve disastrous pipelines like Keystone XL.

“Let the news go forth to Congress and the White House: fracking can never been done safely,” said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. “The Republican governor closest to DC – Larry Hogan of Maryland – has joined scientists and health leaders in agreeing that fracking must be banned. This is a win for Marylanders and for citizens nationwide as we move away from violent fossil fuels and toward sustainable wind and solar power.”

With Senate passage late Monday night, the Maryland bill will now be sent to Gov. Hogan’s desk in the next few days for signing.

The push to ban fracking in Maryland began six years ago as gas companies swarmed into western Maryland to tap the Marcellus Shale basin. This is the same pool of gas that has been widely fracked in Pennsylvania and West Virginia with negative consequences. But then-Governor Martin O’Malley (D) imposed a temporary moratorium before any drilling occurred. Over the years, the movement for a permanent ban came to include farmers, doctors, students, faith leaders, environmental groups, and others – constituting the largest statewide grassroots movement ever seen in Maryland on an energy issue. Former member of the House of Delegates Heather Mizeur was a leading figure in sparking the statewide ban effort. With time, multiple counties and cities in the state banned fracking locally and public polling consistently showed growing support for a statewide ban. Finally, earlier this month, with overwhelming support among Democratic lawmakers, even the previously pro-fracking Republican governor saw the wisdom of a ban.

The Chesapeake Climate Action Network has been honored to play a leading role in this campaign along with our friends in the Don’t Frack Maryland Coalition, including Food and Water Watch, Citizen Shale, Engage Mountain Maryland, the Sierra Club, the Maryland League of Conservation Voters, Physicians for Social Responsibility and many others.

The Maryland fracking ban bill also could not have succeeded without the extraordinary leadership of Kumar Barve (D-Montgomery County) and David Fraser-Hildago (D-Montgomery County) in the Maryland House of Delegates. The same must be said of Bobby Zirkin (D-Baltimore County) and Paul G. Pinsky (D-Prince George’s County) in the Maryland Senate. But Senator Zirkin, more than any other legislator, fought tirelessly for the fracking ban and refused to compromise on the road to this historic victory.

It took six long, hard years to make this happen, but in the end, it succeeded. The fracking ban pushes the right button at the right time. With sufficient effort, states can indeed defy the money that buys all governments and enact what people want.

The states can defy the nation

Now that the national, federal government is seen as the enemy, states can defy the nation without a single guilty backward glance. If single-payer health insurance passes in California, the pressure on other large states — and regions of states — will be immense.

Imagine, for example, a New England single-payer plan that encompasses not just Vermont, which was too small to make single-payer work properly, but Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Imagine a single-payer plan for the Pacific Northwest — Oregon and Washington (and perhaps, since they desperately need it, Idaho). It’s easy to imagine regional plans sprouting like flowers from the rich dark dung of the national Trumpcare, Ryancare defeat.

Just as marijuana legalization has now reached critical mass in the states — Beauregard Sessions and Mike Pence will start a new civil war if they go all draconian in opposing it — single-payer will approach critical mass if the California legislature passes it.

So too with fracking. It’s undeniably hated by people who have to endure it. Hatred of fracking in New York upstate counties is part of why Zephyr Teachout did so well in her bid for the New York state governorship.

Now hatred of fracking has cleared the last hurdle in Maryland, and the nation’s first state-wide ban that bites into industry revenue will become law. A few more victories like this and we may have methane — the falsely sold “bridge fuel”* — in our rear-view mirror as well.

Onward.

GP

* About “bridge fuel,” as I wrote here: “If it’s a ‘bridge fuel,’ will investors be told that the methane
facilities they’re investing in will be torn down in ten years to make
way for the fuel that methane is a bridge fuel to? If so, why not just invest in that? Or is the “bridge fuel” talk just talk?”

Answer: In the pitch to investors, of course it’s just talk. Like all infrastructure investors, they’re being sold a 30-year amortization and cash flow plan.

The real reason Trump didn’t want to shake hands with Merkel…

by Gaius Publius

As a joke, a phantasm, this meme is very good. But the emotional content it catches in the Trump-Merkel body language rings true. This is a boy. Too bad his handlers are very much men, and very dangerous men at that.

The breaking American state, the state that breaks other countries to its will, is breaking itself under stress of rule by the “deconstructing” Trump cadre.

Orderly rebellion, or rolling civil war? We’re headed for one or the other, perhaps even both.

GP

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A modern Dust Bowl would be just as devastating as the original (or, What kind of emergency will it take?)

by Gaius Publius

I’m presenting this for a different reason than the obvious one. It’s not actually a shock-people-into-climate-awareness piece. That’s just the set-up. What’s my actual point? Read on (or click here to jump to it).

A recent study at the University of Chicago took a look at the drought (actually, droughts plural) during the legendary and destructive Dust Bowl of the 1930s and applied those conditions to U.S. agriculture today. They expected to find U.S. farming systems to be much more resilient.

They didn’t. A modern Dust Bowl would have the same destructive force on U.S. food production (and the economy) as the original one did.

From Phys.org (my emphasis):

Dust Bowl would devastate today’s crops, study finds

A drought on the scale of the legendary Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s would have similarly destructive effects on U.S. agriculture today, despite technological and agricultural advances, a new study finds. Additionally, warming temperatures could lead to crop losses at the scale of the Dust Bowl, even in normal precipitation years by the mid-21st century, UChicago scientists conclude.

The study, published Dec. 12 in Nature Plants, simulated the effect of extreme weather from the Dust Bowl era on today’s maize, soy and wheat crops. Authors Michael Glotter and Joshua Elliott of the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at the Computation Institute, examined whether modern agricultural innovations would protect against history repeating itself under similar conditions.

“We expected to find the system much more resilient because 30 percent of production is now irrigated in the United States, and because we’ve abandoned corn production in more severely drought-stricken places such as Oklahoma and west Texas,” said Elliott, a fellow and research scientist at the center and the Computation Institute. “But we found the opposite: The system was just as sensitive to drought and heat as it was in the 1930s.”

The severe damage of the Dust Bowl was actually caused by three distinct droughts in quick succession, occurring in 1930-31, 1933-34 and 1936. From 1933 to 1939, wheat yields declined by double-digit percentages, reaching a peak loss of 32 percent in 1933. The economic and societal consequences were vast, eroding land value throughout the Great Plains states and displacing millions of people.

In the eight decades since that crisis, agricultural practices have changed dramatically. But many technological and geographical shifts were intended to optimize average yield instead of resilience to severe weather, leaving many staple crops vulnerable to seasons of unusually low precipitation and/or high temperatures.

As a result, when the researchers simulated the effects of the 1936 drought upon today’s agriculture, they still observed roughly 40 percent losses in maize and soy yield, while wheat crops declined by 30 percent. The harm would be 50 percent worse than the 2012 drought, which caused nearly $100 billion of damage to the U.S. economy.

There’s more in the piece, but you get the point. Note the idea above that these effects won’t be felt until “the mid-21st century” — in other words, after the current crop of citizens is dead. Don’t believe it. Everything’s happening way faster than anyone is willing to predict. If this tragedy is allowed to occur, most of us will see it.

But is it the right kind of emergency?

At this point, I usually ask, “Is it an emergency yet?” (That’s still a valid question, since it doesn’t look like we’re stopping our carbon emissions any time soon, and under President Trump, we’ll accelerate the already deadly pace.)

This time, though, I’d like to offer a different thought, something related to the “Easter Island solution” I sometimes propose. That solution goes like this:

You’re a villager on Easter Island. People are cutting down trees right and left, and many are getting worried.

At some point, the number of worried villagers reaches critical mass, and they go as a group to the island chief and say, “Look, we have to stop cutting trees, like now.” The chief, who’s also the CEO of a wood products company, checks his bottom line and orders the cutting to continue.

Do the villagers walk away? Or do they depose the chief?

There’s always a choice …

What would it take for enough of our nation’s “villagers” to get upset enough to “depose the chief” this time, just like they did during the Great Depression? Would regional devastation (with, of course, no lives lost; we always stipulate that) — something like a Haiyan-style hurricane sweeping through Florida, for example — wake people up nationally… get us to react as a nation? Or would we treat a Florida storm, no matter how severe, as a Florida problem with a Beltway (FEMA) solution?

In other words, what would actually wake up (freak out) this nation as a nation, to create a national mandate for radical change and radical solutions to the climate problem? What would it take for the nation to rise up and, yes, “depose the chief” — in the earlier case, President Hoover; in the latter case, President Trump? Because it will certainly take a national mandate to create the national Congress and a committed-to-an-emergency-solution the situation requires.

(And yes, I’m ignoring for now the timing, though that’s important. If you’re going to freak out effectively, best to freak out before there’s nothing but air beneath you.)

I’ve pondered this question for a while, and I offer it as an exercise to you as well. What kind of emergency will do the job nationally?

In the 1930s, of course, it was the Dust Bowl, more so perhaps than the factory closures, bank closures and the mortgage foreclosures, though those were national events as well. It’s now the 21st century. Factory closures and the mortgage foreclosures have panicked the nation into trying Donald Trump on for size — but not with respect to climate. We’re still at ground zero, implementing “business as usual” policies on the climate issue, just as President Hoover did during the economic crisis of the 30s.

But a permanent 30-to-40 percent drop in U.S. crop yield — what would that do? Would it get the nation’s attention? It would certainly get mine, no matter where in the U.S. I lived. After all, we’re all the market for food, more or less daily.

Consider the alternative

Before you ask, “But hey, isn’t that cruel, that kind of thinking?” please consider the alternative. On the one hand, this generation wakes up — admittedly in a panic, but that’s not bad — and suddenly does the most it can do as fast as it can do it to fix the climate problem. Which means the climate problem has a chance to more or less stay fixed — admittedly with some loss in global livability, but not a total loss — for a thousand years.

Or … this generation lives in relative comfort (it hopes) for another ten years or so, and then the long, crushing, angry, deadly march back to the Stone Age begins, in full view of everyone in the world.

The making of stone tools began more than three million years ago. Before that our ancestors, those in our species line, hunted and lived using found objects only.

The Stone Age ended with the smelting of ore, about 6000 years ago at the earliest. That’s the span of time — more than three million years — our ancestors lived using stone tools only. Three million years in the Stone Age. It’s so long that it’s divided into parts, and its parts are divided into parts.

If human civilization devolves to the Stone Age again — and we survive without an extinction event — we  could be there, chipping stone, having forgotten everything we think we call “knowledge” today, for a very long time.

So when we’re weighing our preferred event sequences — a timely, uncomfortable-but-head-clearing “climate event” today … vs. at most ten years of comfort (meaning, no one acts in any effective way), then a rapid, deadly collapse and millions of years living as stone-tool, skin-wearing animals, hunters and scavengers, smelling like the great unwashed, for millennia … let’s consider what we’re actually choosing, which outcome we’d actually find preferable.

Me, I’d much prefer that people figure it out today (not tomorrow, today) and act like it’s already urgent, with no painful nudging needed. If I had to guess, though, I don’t think that’s in the cards. Yet we do need a wake-up moment, relatively soon. Do you have a better pick for what would do it?

Just a thought.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

Baby steps…

by Gaius Publius

Slowly but surely, the courts are dealing with the militarized police state. ArsTechnica:

Divided federal appeals court rules you have the right to film the police

Filming cops, 2-1 court rules, ensures that they “are not abusing their power.”

A divided federal appeals court is ruling for the First Amendment, saying the public has a right to film the police. But the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, in upholding the bulk of a lower court’s decision against an activist who was conducting what he called a “First Amendment audit” outside a Texas police station, noted that this right is not absolute and is not applicable everywhere.

The facts of the dispute are simple. Phillip Turner was 25 in September 2015 when he decided to go outside the Fort Worth police department to test officers’ knowledge of the right to film the police. While filming, he was arrested for failing to identify himself to the police. Officers handcuffed and briefly held Turner before releasing him without charges. Turner sued, alleging violations of his Fourth Amendment right against unlawful arrest and detention and his First Amendment right of speech.

The 2-1 decision Thursday by Judge Jacques Wiener is among a slew of rulings on the topic, and it provides fresh legal backing for the so-called YouTube society where people are constantly using their mobile phones to film themselves and the police. The American Civil Liberties Union says, “there is a widespread, continuing pattern of law enforcement officers ordering people to stop taking photographs or video in public places and harassing, detaining and arresting those who fail to comply.”

Just in time for certain-to-appear spring and summer conflicts in Beauregard Sessions’ America.

Be carefully, though, as you wield those dangerous digital lenses. There’s a lot of yes-but in the article, including this one:

The Supreme Court still has not ruled on the issue.

Hmm.

GP

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Get ready for a two-thirds cut to EPA personnel

by Gaius Publius

We’ve already seen several indications that EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, will be stripped of its mission — protecting the environment, including the climatic environment — and turned into a profit protection agency instead. At best, as I noted here, EPA would be reduced to a kind of janitor for the fossil fuel giants, “sweeping up after the energy industry’s mess-making” as the toxic wastes, perhaps exponentially, increase.

We certainly know that Trump’s new head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has sued the agency many times to prevent it from doing its legally mandated job. For example, from as late as 2015, via TulsaWorld (my emphasis):

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt sues EPA — again

He says the Clean Water rule is illegal and burdensome.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt filed another lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday, this time over the definition of water.

Pruitt’s lawsuit, filed in Tulsa federal court, claims that a new rule promulgated June 29 illegally redefined the “waters of the United States” in a move that he described as executive overreach and flatly contrary to the will of Congress.

Pruitt claims that the EPA’s broad redefinition of long-standing regulatory jurisdiction places virtually all land and water under an untenable regulatory burden, according to a statement released by his office.

“Respect for private property rights have allowed our nation to thrive, but with the recently finalized rule, farmers, ranchers, developers, industry and individual property owners will now be subject to the unpredictable, unsound, and often byzantine regulatory regime of the EPA,” Pruitt said in the statement. “I, and many other local, state and national leaders across the country, made clear to the EPA our concerns and opposition to redefining the ‘Waters of the U.S.’

And:

This marks the second lawsuit in as many weeks Pruitt has filed against the EPA in Tulsa federal court. Last week, he asked a federal judge to halt the EPA’s plan to enact new rules designed to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Pruitt is also a party to several previous lawsuits challenging the EPA’s regulatory limits.

We’re also due to find even more about Scott Pruitt now that literally thousands of emails from his time as Oklahoma Attorney General are starting (thanks to court orders) to be released and analyzed. 

Now that Pruitt is the nation’s EPA Administrator, the nation will soon find itself swimming in waste. But via Joe Davidson in a the little-noticed piece at the Post’s “Federal Insider” a few weeks ago, we learn that even worse may be in the works. Davidson writes:

Trump transition leader’s goal is two-thirds cut in EPA employees

The red lights are flashing at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The words of Myron Ebell, the former head of President Trump’s EPA transition team, warn employees of a perilous future. Ebell wants the agency to go on a severe diet.

It’s one that would leave many federal employees with hunger pains, and jobless, too.

Ebell has suggested cutting the EPA workforce to 5,000, about a two-thirds reduction, over the next four years. The agency’s budget of $8.1 billion would be sliced in half under his prescription, which he emphasized is his own and not necessarily Trump’s.

“My own personal view is that the EPA would be better served if it were a much leaner organization that had substantial cuts,” he said in an interview. Ebell is director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a small-government think tank where he pushes the notion of “global warming alarmism” and against the science that says it’s a crisis. He acknowledges cutting 10,000 staffers might not be realistic, yet he sees that as an “aspirational goal. … You’re not going to get Congress to make significant cuts unless you ask for significant cuts.”

The argument, as always, is too much “regulatory overreach”…

One reason he favors such drastic cuts is that what he [Ebell] calls the EPA’s “regulatory overreach” would be much harder “if the agency is a lot smaller.”

…to which one critic of this proposal replied, “slashing staffing makes sense only if a safe environment is no longer important.”

I guess for Trump and his wrecking crew, a safe environment (for us) is no longer important.

Get ready to go swimming in waste — and please don’t blame Trump voters. We all got us to where we are, and we all have to work to get us all out again. Needless to say, for the resistance to have the largest good effect — and there are several bad ones — it must be as broad as possible.

This really is a crucial point; more on that in a bit.

(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)

GP

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