Is Cancel Culture Fundamentally Religious?

There was a time, when the Catholic Church ruled Europe, through threat of excommunication.  As time passed, and Europe became more enlightened, the Catholic Church lost most of its power, and individual countries chose their own religions.  Within each country, the state religion (or "establishment") was legally enforced to different degrees.  Even in the most free countries, there were penalties for adhering to beliefs and values opposed to those of the established religion, including losing your job and not being eligible for employment.  In the least free countries, you would just be killed for adherence to beliefs opposed to the established religion.  Over time, culture continued to evolve, and many countries began to tolerate other religions, so long as they were not too loud.  Religions that were not the national establishment did not necessarily have to hide, but if they started proselyting or causing any sort of unrest, members would often still be slaughtered or at least imprisoned, and even if they were not causing problems, it was often hard for them to find employment.  Once immigration to the Americas become feasible, culture was allowed to progress again, as many anti-establishment people immigrated to the Americas in search of religious freedom.  Despite the religious freedom in the Americas though, there were still problems with religious tolerance.  Now that there was an option for people to practice their beliefs without the oppression of religious establishment, many of the religious groups developed their own forms of punishment and intolerance for outside beliefs.  The foundation of the U.S. government put a stop to religious cities, where the local government would discriminate against people who were not of the primary religion in the city.  Religious freedom was Constitutionally protected, and for the most part, all governments complied.  This did not end religious intolerance though.

In the U.S. until fairly recently, a lot of religions practiced "public shaming" and ostracism of members that did not adhere to the standards of the religion.  This still happens in some isolated religious communities, notably including some Amish communities.  There are also reports of public shaming and ostracism in some Jehovah's Witness congregations, though it is not clear how widespread this is.  For the most part though, public shaming and ostracism as a form of religious punishment has become very uncommon, as humanity and U.S. culture have become more civilized.

Unfortunately, it looks like the less religious left never got the memo, that public shaming and ostracism are uncivilized and completely inappropriate punishments.  In fact, public shaming as a punishment for actual crime was abolished in the U.S. in 1905.  The pillory was a device used to subject the victim to public shaming.  Most of the U.S. outlawed the use of the pillory in the mid-1800s, acknowledging that public shaming qualified as cruel and usual punishment.  Delaware continued using the pillory until 1901 and finally outlawed it in 1905.  A hundred years after every U.S. state acknowledged that public shaming was similar enough to torture to outlaw its use as judicial punishment for serious crimes, many people on the left decided it was appropriate to revive it for use against people who merely had different opinions from their own.

Let's be clear: Cancel Culture is a religion.  It is a religion that publicly shames and ostracizes people who violate its beliefs.  It is a religion that is lobbying the government to make it the established religion of the United States.  Because it is not a registered religion and does not have any specific beliefs regarding deity, it is easy to overlook this fact, but the fact is, Cancel Culture is a religious movement that uses practices generally agreed upon for almost a century as morally corrupt to punish people who disagree with its beliefs.  Cancel Culture is a religion stuck in the 1950s and earlier, that is intolerant of beliefs that are not its own, and that has taken the abominable practices of public shaming and ostracism outside of its own congregations.  Cancel Culture is not only like 1800s to mid-1900s religions that used these disgusting forms of punishments against their own members.  It has reverted to practices used by dominant religions before the founding of the U.S., that punished anyone in their territory with these torturous punishments who disagreed with their beliefs, regardless of membership.  Cancel Culture has reverted to cruel punishments used by corrupt and intolerant religions over 230 years ago.

How can civilization revert by over 200 years in only two decades?  Simple, and bunch of self righteous tyrants take it upon themselves to abuse the power they have gained through social media to trample democracy and punish those who are guilty only of disagreeing with them.

Commentary on Supreme Court Ruling Concering Religious Discrimination Against Religious Students Attending Religious Schools

This week, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that prohibiting the use of government funded scholarships and other financial from paying for attendance of a religiously oriented school is unconstitutional, on the grounds that it constitutes religious discrimination against students who are otherwise eligible for the scholarships.  A number of comments have been made regarding this ruling, both positive and negative, including commentary from the four dissenting justices.  I would like to add my own commentary both on the ruling and on some of the comments.


In my personal opinion, the Supreme Court ruling was correct.  There are three parts of the Constitution that address religious freedom.  These are generally referred to as the "establishment" clause, the "free exercise" clause, and the "no religious test" clause.  The establishment clause, contained in the First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."  This is mildly ambiguous, which is probably why it is so often misinterpreted.  The phrase "establishment of religion" is generally interpreted to mean any religious organization, however this is not how it was intended nor what it actually means in this context.  A brief review of the history of the period as well as some of the discussions on the Bill of Rights that occurred during its drafting reveals that the term "establishment of religion" was a reference to the concept of a state established religion.  Thus, the Anglican Church would be an "establishment of religion", but in England, where the Anglican Church is the state religion, the Catholic Church wouldn't be considered an "establishment of religion".  In the U.S., no establishments of religion exist, because the establishment clause prohibits the establishment of a state religion.  Further, this can be verified by the general use of the word "establishment" back when the Bill of Rights was written.  In modern times, "establishment" is often used to refer to buildings or organizations that are "established" by individuals.  When the Bill of Rights was drafted, "establishment" did not mean this.  It actually referred to a command or organization created or endorsed specifically by the government.  In the context of religion, "establishment" entirely on its own was understood to mean "a single dominant ecclesiastical institution (or religion, church, denomination, faith, sect, creed, or religious society) that enjoyed a government-preferred, government-sanctioned, government-financed, or government-protected status within a state, and which represented an indistinguishable union with the government and the preferred (or 'established') ecclesiastical institution."  (Source of quotation)  Further, "establishment" religions were at least partially run by the government, giving the government operational powers over the religion, including the power to define church doctrine and set church boundaries, the power to control the hiring and religious authority of clergy, the power to build church buildings, the power to fire clergy, and the power to control what rituals and such individual members of the establishment church were allowed to participate in.  Governments with establishment religions were also known at the time to exercise powers like requiring civilian attendance of church services, punish citizens who did not attend the establishment church or who openly professed beliefs opposed to those of the establishment church, deny those who were not members of the establishment church government jobs, and suppress dissident movements with fines, bans on the use of civil services, and in some cases imprisonment and even execution.  Most of the current Supreme Court Justices are trained as lawyers, not historians, and have little education in the history and intent of the Constitution that is absolutely critical to understanding it.  Instead, they interpret it as they please, without any regard for the actual meaning.  In this case in question, the establishment clause is not even relevant.  No state in the U.S. has an established religion, nor does the Federal government or any county or municipal government.  Allowing religious schools to accept and benefit from state funded scholarships would only constitute anything near an establishment of religion if it restricted the scholarships to one specific religion, and it wouldn't outright violate the establishment clause unless that religion was generally funded and controlled by the state.  (One could reasonably argue, however, that providing scholarships to students of one specific religion was a violation of the intent of the establishment clause, even if that religion wasn't officially owned and controlled by the state.  Though it does not explicitly say it, this clause is generally regarded as also meaning that the government may not favor one religion over another.)

Directly following the establishment clause is the free exercise clause, which reads, "[Congress shall make no law...], or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...".  This clause was intended to protect people from religious discrimination by governments.  The correct interpretation, based on historical records, is that the government cannot favor or disfavor people based on religion or religious beliefs.  It may not make behaviors illegal that are essential parts of the exercise of a particular set of religious beliefs, with the intent of discriminating against those who participate in those behaviors for religious reasons.  There is some ambiguity around this, highlighted very effectively by the outlawing of Mormon polygamy.  Specifically, courts ruled that the outlawing of polygamy was legal, on the grounds that it affected everyone not just Mormons.  The reality, however, is that this law was explicitly and deliberately passed with the express intent of discriminating against those of the Mormon faith.  Nearly all future rulings on laws infringing on religious exercise rights have either mandated religious exemptions from the law or upheld the law on the grounds that discrimination was not intended.  (Under modern legal precedent, the anti-polygamy law would have been shut down so hard.  It may be important to clarify here that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka Mormons, abandoned the practice of polygamy over a century ago and no longer practices nor endorses the practice.)  So, how is this relevant to the Supreme Court case?  It's a little complicated.  The first question is, how does prohibiting the use of scholarships to pay for attendance of a religious school violate the free exercise clause?  Taking the clause literally, it doesn't.  It doesn't prevent people from engaging in religious behavior in any meaningful way.  Yes, the scholarships might facilitate engagement in religious behavior, if attending a religious school is a mandatory practice of that religion, but denying the scholarship does not remove any existing ability to engage in religious exercise.  We know that the clause was intended to mean more than its literal interpretation though.  It was also intended to prohibit the government for favoring or disfavoring people on grounds of religion.  Knowing that many of the Founders of the U.S. were not particularly religious, it should be fairly obvious that this clause wasn't written assuming that 100% of people would have religious beliefs and thus was also intended to protect less religious people equally.  In that context, favoring or disfavoring any group on grounds of religious beliefs or lack thereof is a violation of this clause.  And that means that this clause protects religious and non-religious people equally and by extension it protects religious and non-religious schools equally.  The free exercise clause was actually included in the First Amendment expressly for the purpose of preventing the kind of religious discrimination that this case is about.

There is one more religious rights clause in the Constitution, the "No Religious Test" clause.  Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution says, "... ; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."  This clause is intended to prevent the religious establishment practice of restricting public office holders to members of the state religion.  This clause is actually obsolete at this point, as the establishment clause of the First Amendment covers this and is more broad.  As part of the establishment issue, which is irrelevant to the Supreme Court case in question, this clause is also completely irrelevant.

Before continuing on to quotes regarding the case, it is worth noting that the establishment clause may not be completely irrelevant here, despite what I said.  We've discussed the fact that the establishment clause is not about maintaining some broad distance between the government and religious organizations but is rather about prohibiting a specific state religion either officially or unofficially.  It is not about keeping the state from ever doing anything that could benefit religious organizations.  There is some ambiguity, however, in what even constitutes religion in this context.  For example, are Atheism and Agnosticism religions in this context?  Defining religion is generally difficult, but a commonly held definition is a belief or connected set of beliefs regarding the existence of a supreme power.  Ideally though, we would consider the definition generally accepted by the Founders, as that would give the most accurate interpretation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  We can start with the known fact that many of the Founders were not considered "religious".  Most notably, Thomas Jefferson was not even considered Christian, but contrary to popular belief now days, he did actually believe some sort of God existed, but he wasn't overly attached to overt signs of worship.  People of that time period generally agreed that Jefferson acknowledged the existence of a God but was otherwise Agnostic.  Agnosticism is a form of irreligiousness.  Agnostics generally don't care whether God exists or not.  Agnostics are not Atheists, because Atheists explicitly believe that God does not exist.  Most modern Agnostics do not believe in God, but they also do not disbelieve.  Atheists disbelieve.  It turns out this is a critical distinction that is not generally appreciated by native English speakers who typically do not understand the difference between passive and active negatives.  Disbelief is a positive belief against some idea, while merely not believing is more like having no opinion or position.  The reason this distinction is so important is that positive belief defines religious belief, which neutral lack of belief does not.  And that makes Atheism a religion but Agnosticism not.  However, in the relevant historical context none of that matters.  The evidence suggests that they didn't define religion in this way but rather regarded any person's personal opinions on things as that person's religion, which would make Agnosticism and Atheism apply, and this also extends to secularism.  If we interpret the establishment clause with this understanding of religion, we will immediately see that it is fairly likely the Founders would have viewed excluding religious schools while allowing secular schools to participate as a real establishment of religion, where that religion is secularism, and a quick look at government control and influence on science and secular organizations in general will easily support the idea that we are about half way to the establishment of scientific secularism as the state mandated religion.  (The reason we are not already there is things like religious exemptions for things like mandatory vaccination.)  The point here is, if we really consider the history and intent of the establishment clause, there is actually some evidence that it is relevant here, in ways that further support the Supreme Court's ruling.



Let's start with the majority opinion.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "A state need not subsidize private education. But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious."  This is completely in line with the correct interpretation of the three religion clauses in the Constitution.  What is concerning is that most Supreme Court rulings don't even cite the Constitution, though this one actually does, which is a breath of fresh air.  Let's note though, none of the Supreme Court Justices are actually familiar enough with the historical context of the Constitution to have any business interpreting it.  U.S. judges are generally trained as lawyers, not as historians, however for the Supreme Court, which is tasked with interpreting the Constitution, this is completely inappropriate.  Supreme Court nominees should be automatically rejected by the Senate if they don't have significant education in Constitutional history, including history of Europe around the time the Constitution was drafted and ratified.  Contrary to past comments made by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other Justices, interpretation does not mean taking language and updating its meaning to fit current circumstances.  Any educated interpreter will tell you that interpretation is purely about expressing intent, even to the point that if something like a joke, compliment, or insult does not translate literally, the interpreter will just tell the other person that the comment was a joke, complement, or insult and to respond appropriately.  The fact is the Constitution is a living document.  It was designed to be updated as needed.  If it has not been updated to mean what a particular Justice thinks it should mean, it is the responsibility of Congress and the people to update it, not the responsibility of the Supreme Court to interpret it differently from how it was intended.  This was a deliberate check and balance included in the system, and Supreme Court interpretations that are not what was intended is a usurpation of legislative power exclusively given to Congress, not the Supreme Court.

The majority opinion also included this text, "Montana’s no-aid provision bars religious schools from public benefits solely because of the religious character of the schools. The provision also bars parents who wish to send their children to a religious school from those same benefits, again solely because of the religious character of the school."  In my personal opinion, this wasn't so much discrimination against public schools as discrimination against individuals.  The schools are not barred from public benefits.  The students are barred from spending public benefits on education from religious schools.  This isn't about discrimination against schools.  It is about religious discrimination against individuals.  It is worth noting here that Montana's no-aid provision actually doesn't apply.  Scholarships are not aid for schools and should not be regarded as such.  They are aid for individuals, which ends up being paid to whatever schools those individuals choose to attend.  The wording of this provision is this, "The legislature, counties, cities, towns, school districts, and public corporations shall not make any direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies, or any grant of lands or other property for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, ..."  Again, the scholarships are not aid to schools, thus thus law does not apply, and the Montana supreme court was entirely out of line in its ruling.  Montana needs to replace its supreme court with justices of sufficient competence to tell the difference between aid to individuals and aid to organizations.  On top of that, even if this provision did prohibit public money from ever making its way to religious organizations, it would be unenforceable.  Does the state of Montana pay wages to religious employees that pay some portion of those wages as a tithe to their churches?  The way the Montana supreme court ruled on this issue, it would be illegal for the state to pay wages to religious employees, and note that this includes elected officials, and that would constitute a religious test for public office which is explicitly unconstitutional.  Thus, the Montana supreme court ruling actually does constitute an unconstitutional religious test for public office, though admittedly very indirectly.  The law itself, however, does not actually prohibit state scholarships as aid to students to be used as tuition for religious schools.  It is not the U.S. Supreme Court's job to interpret state laws though, so instead it was forced to consider a much deeper question, which revealed that Montana's law is just straight up unconstitutional, not just misinterpreted.

The four dissenting Justices had their own opinion of the case.  Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, "The majority’s approach and its conclusion in this case, I fear, risk the kind of entanglement and conflict that the (Constitution’s) religion clauses are intended to prevent."  Notice that Breyer admits that what is important here is the intent of the Constitution, not the "modernized" interpretation of activist Justices who want to change the law without the consent of the people.  Also note that Breyer is totally wrong.  Again, Breyer is clearly no Constitutional historian and thus has no clue at all what the actual intent of those clauses was.  He is pulling intent out of his [donkey], instead of consulting with historical records to determine what the actual intent was.  There is also a problem here of building a hedge around the law.  He has not said that this ruling is unconstitutional or otherwise wrong.  He says he fears it will lead to actual violations of the Constitution.  If you know much about Jewish history, you will know that they also had a problem with building hedges around the law that lead to rather extreme oppression in some cases.  If something illegal happens, we can deal with it when it happens.  We don't need to engage in blatant religious discrimination, to reduce the risk that other kinds of religious discrimination could happen.  Of course, none of that is really relevant to Breyer's argument, because the risks he is speaking of don't actually conflict with the Constitution's religious clauses, and he is merely echoing the concerns of other historically uneducated Justices who were and are in no way qualified to be interpreting the Constitution.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed the opinion that the state supreme court's ruling and order to dismantle the scholarship program was sufficient resolution to the problem, because it eliminated the program that produced the legal ambiguity.  We've already discussed Ginsburg's incorrect definition of "interpret" designed to let the Supreme Court usurp legislative power with neither the consent nor the representation of the people.  She clearly does not understand he job, and this highlights that again.  The job of the Supreme Court is the interpret the law, not to give opinions on how states try to resolve their legal problems.  This is about the Constitution and a specific state law.  The state supreme court ruled that the state law was Constitutional, and it ruled that a particular interpretation of the law was valid.  The consequent order to dismantle the scholarship program was completely irrelevant to the case, and Ginsburg was wasting the Court's time bringing it up.  The conservative Justices and some of the other liberal Justices understood this clearly enough to continue the case, ultimately collectively rule mostly correctly, and write opinions that did not waste space on this completely irrelevant information.  (Justice Elena Kagan joined Ginsburg's worthless position.)

Justice Roberts also wrote, "Any establishment clause objection to the scholarship program here is particularly unavailing because the government support makes its way to religious schools only as a result of Montanans independently choosing to spend their scholarships at such schools."  Aside from the fact that the establishment clause would only apply if the law was attempting to establish a state religion, Roberts was perfectly correct here.  As I have said before, the scholarships were given to students, not to religious organizations.  The choice of the student to spend the money on education from a religious school is no different from a government employee choosing to donate a portion of wages to his or her church.  If the Montana supreme court ruling was allowed to stand, that would justify religious testing as a condition of holding public office, to prevent government paid wages of elected officials from being donated to their churches as tithes or other donations.  Breyer was concerned that this ruling would make it easier for states to violate a false interpretation of the establishment clause.  However any ruling upholding the ruling would have straight up made it illegal for religious people to hold public office in Montana (and many other states with similar laws), because paying them wages would likely end up supporting religious organizations.

A number of advocacy groups were unhappy with the ruling on the grounds that the ruling was a violation of longstanding funding rules.  It's nice to see that the current Supreme Court is more interested in upholding the Constitution and protecting Constitutional rights than adhering to "longstanding funding rules" that were clearly unconstitutional.  The only failure here is the travesty that unconstitutional rules were upheld for long enough to called "longstanding".

Maggie Siddiqi, the director of the ironically named Center for American Progress said, "Today’s ruling erodes the constitutional separation of church and state that has long prevented government from funding the exercise of religion. This is a clear violation of the religious freedom of all taxpayers, who may now be compelled to support religious schools with traditions they do not follow."  The irony in the name, is of course, the word "progress", when the director of the organization is clearly more interested in regression of the progress in religious freedom that is one of the cornerstones of the U.S..  That aside, this quote is also proof that Siddiqi, someone who professes to be a protector of Constitutional rights, is just as uneducated in Constitutional history as the entire Supreme Court.  No where in the Constitution is separation of church as state mentioned.  The establishment clause forbids the government from establishing a state religion, not from providing scholarships to individuals who want to attend religious schools.  There is no separation of church and state issue, and there is no establishment issue here.  What there is, is egregious religious discrimination, justified by gross misinterpretations of the Constitution, due to lack of education.  This is not a violation of religious freedom for taxpayers, anymore than spending government money on providing abortions and birth control to women is a violation of religious freedom for taxpayers who are opposed to those things.  (Note that the Center for American Progress advocates in favor of Medcaid and other U.S. healthcare programs using taxpayer money to pay for elective abortions, despite the fact that a significant number of Americans are religiously opposed to most elective abortions.)

Holly Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, pointed out that religious organizations often benefit from being treated differently, and she suggests that this opens the doors to government having greater influence in employment decisions within religious organizations.  Honestly, this sounds to me more like a threat than a legitimate concern.  It sounds like a threat to push for fewer accommodations and exemptions for religious organizations.  This, of course, would be a massive violation of the establishment clause.  Recall one of the hallmarks of establishments of religions is state influence in hiring and firing decisions.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued this statement, "This decision means that religious persons and organizations can, like everyone else, participate in government programs that are open to all. This is good news, not only for people of faith, but for our country, by ensuring the rights of faith-based organizations’ freedom to serve, the court is also promoting the common good."  And interesting historical fact is that most Islamic countries were not forced on pain of death to accept Islam.  The Islamic jihads/violent expansion that lead to the ubiquity of Islam in the Middle East, Western Asia, and parts of Northern Africa weren't blood baths of infidels who wouldn't convert.  They were merely wars for territory and control.  The conversion of the indigenous populations occurred over many generations.  The method used to encourage conversion was simple, non-violent government discrimination against all undesirable religions.  Infidels (non-Muslims) had fewer rights and were not allowed to hold government office (textbook establishment of religion).  That's it.  Infidels were denied access to certain kinds of government aid and services.  In some countries, they were denied access to education.  In some, businesses owned by infidels were denied access to government contracts and were limited in who they were allowed to serve.  They basically made it inconvenient to not be Muslim.  Within less than a generation, more than half of the populations in most of these countries had converted to Islam, not because they actually believed, but because non-Muslims were second class citizens, without access to a lot of protections and benefits that all Muslims enjoyed.  Within three generations, very few non-Muslims remained.  Now days, very few Zoroastrians (the original dominant religion in many modern Islamic countries captured during the early violent expansion) remain, though as religious freedom is slowly increasing, Zoroastrianism is seeing a revival.  Anyhow, the point is, mild religious discrimination of the sort perpetrated by Montana can have a huge impact on religion.  This strategy has been used in the past, most notably by Islam but also by Catholicism in parts of South America, to change or establish a dominant religion in a region, but it can also be used to discourage religion and establish a form of secularism as the dominant religion, which is exactly how it was being used by Montana's government and other governments in the U.S., in the (ironic) name of religious freedom.

Obviously many religious organizations are quite pleased with this ruling, as it prohibits state and Federal governments from discriminating against religious individuals on grounds that treating them the same as others might benefit religious organizations.  Sadly, even they don't understand the real Constitutional reason Montana's behavior was illegal, nor do they understand that upholding such laws would technically require states to discriminate even more against religious people, potentially even to the point of denying people who would spend government wages on donations to religious organizations any form of government employment to the point of requiring religious tests even for elected officials.  This was actually a much more significant case than perhaps anyone realizes, as precedent from this case could have ended up supporting far more oppressive religious discrimination.

When Idealism Outweighs Need and Practicality

President Trump recently signed an executive order urging state CPS agencies to partner with any adoption and foster care agencies that are willing, regardless of faith based discrimination those agencies may engage in.  This flies in the face of organizations defending (or perhaps attempting to establish) LGBTQ rights, which have been lobbying for the prohibition of government partnerships with faith based adoption organizations that discriminate based on their beliefs.  Their argument is that faith based organizations often hinder adoption more than they help.  According to Donald Trump though, there are currently 400,000 children in the U.S. waiting for adoption or foster care, and the prohibition in some states of government partnership with faith based adoption agencies is a significant part of the problem.

There are a few things that are important to understand, before moving on to the critical question.  The one that should be most obvious is that government prohibitions against partnerships between CPS and faith based child placement agencies does reduce resources for child placement.  While partnerships would require the states to provide some funding for those agencies, that is not their only source of income.  Thus, by refusing to work with them, states are actually refusing to use existing resources that are at their disposal.  Second, states refusing to work with faith based agencies has not increased the number of purely secular agencies significantly.  This is not a matter of faith based agencies competing with secular agencies.  Partnering with faith base agencies in addition to secular agencies will not actually hinder adoption more than it will help, because all of the existing secular options will still exist.  It would be trivial for state Health and Welfare departments to add a page to their web sites listing all partner agencies, along with any restrictions those agencies have.  (Even many secular agencies only serve married couples, based on a large body of research showing that children with married parents have significantly better mental and emotional health than children with single or cohabitating but unmarried parents.)  In short, religious child placement agencies cannot prevent people from going to secular agencies, and they have no power to interfere with placements made by those agencies.  The claim that faith based agencies often hinder adoption more than helping is actually completely false.  They may not adopt children to LGBTQ or single parents, but they still have a net positive rate of adoption, and they do not hinder adoptions arbitrated by secular agencies.

The critical question all of this brings up is this: Is it appropriate to put idealism ahead of need and practicality?  The fact is that state prohibitions against partnerships with faith based placement agencies significantly reduce the rate at which children can be placed.  The fact is, state prohibitions against partnerships with faith based placement agencies is putting an ideal of fairness for LGBTQ people ahead of the well being of children.  What is more important, that governments do not provide even the slightest amount of funding to people who base their services on their faith or giving these 400,000 children homes?  Does the want of LGBTQ people to be treated exactly the same as everyone else, even down to the most trivial details, outweigh the need of these children to have stable homes with good parents?

Perhaps it is time for U.S. liberals to start thinking about how their social justice crusade is actually affecting other people.  They have raised a huge stink about Trump enforcing Obama's immigration policy, resulting in the detention of 100,000 illegal immigrant children, but minor inconvenience to a tiny portion of the population is enough for them to ignore 400,000 American children who are in a very similar boat.  President Donald Trump may not be perfect, but at least he actually cares about our children.

How screwed up is a nation that will endorse religious discrimination that causes serious harm to enormous numbers of children, to allow a minority of around 4% of the population to feel affirmation?

The Healthier Plant Based Diet

Plants are a great source of nutrients.  We should eat plant based diets, because otherwise we will be unhealthy.  Actually though, how to plants compare, as a source of nutrition?  The answer is: Badly. 

Meat has a lot of nutrients.  Plants are actually a pretty poor source of protein.  It is true that most plants have some protein, but "some" is not generally very much, and protein is not just one thing.  Protein is a bunch of things.  Proteins are made from amino acids.  Different organisms require different amino acids to build the proteins they need.  Some can synthesize their own amino acids, but most omnivores (including humans) can only create a handful of the amino acids they need, and the rest they have to get from their diets.  Most plants do not contain even close to all of the amino acids humans must consume to remain healthy.  New vegetarians and vegans often find themselves getting sick fairly quickly after eliminating meat from their diets.  The most common cause of this is deficiencies in certain amino acids.  It is possible to obtain all necessary amino acids from plant sources though.  Beans, eaten with rice is the easiest way of covering all bases, which is why oriental cultures that eat much less meat than Americans do not tend to have health issues from this.  They eat soy beans and rice as major parts of their diets.  Meat is more dense in protein though, meaning less of it needs to be consumed to get enough of all necessary amino acids.  Most vegetarians and vegans do not want to eat beans and rice as part of every single meal.  This means they must find other sources of necessary amino acids.  This makes these dietary lifestyles quite complicated, at least initially, because to get sufficient quantities of all necessary amino acids in a meat free diet, one must know what combinations of plants must be eaten to maintain health.  This can be a lot of work, but it is possible, with sufficient dedication.  Protein is probably the most commonly cited place where meat free diets tend to be deficient, but it is hardly the only one.

Protein is not the only place where meat is a superior source of nutrition.  In fact, meat is also fairly rich in most vitamins and minerals.  There are a few holes.  Meat does not contain vitamin C, which is why sailors eating exclusively pork would get scurvy.  It also tends to have little or no vitamin A and vitamin D.  Meats tend to be fairly high in B vitamins especially.  Other vitamins vary with the type of meat.  A serving of meat at each meal is not sufficient for ideal health, but it will at least provide enough nutrition to survive, if you also have a source of vitamin C and get enough sunlight to cover your vitamin D needs.  In fact, multiple culture have survived on almost exclusively meat for at least 6 months at a time and sometimes for longer during famines.  The same is not true of plants.  Most plants have a much narrower nutrient profile.  To get the same nutrients one would from eating a piece of meat requires eating multiple different plants, and this time beans and rice will not cover it.  Herbs used for seasoning tend to be very high in a very narrow range of nutrients, so seasoning food with multiple herbs can help, but again, to cover all bases requires access to a much wider variety of foods, and it requires research and math to ensure proper nutrition.  Meat also has a broad range of essential mineral micronutrients that can be hard to find in plant food sources.  Perhaps the most well known of these is iron.  Iron can be found in some plants, but the quantity is much lower than in meat and thus requires consuming significantly more of the plants.  Sulfur is another micronutrient vegans are often deficient in.  Meat is an excellent source of sulfur.  Plants tend to contain significantly less.  Even high sulfur plant foods, like beans and cabbage, only have a small fraction of the sulfur content of meat.  As with everything else, the successful vegetarian or vegan will need to track micronutrient intake and eat fairly large quantities of some plants to maintain the ideal intake of micronutrients.

On a vegan diet, it can even be hard to maintain a good intake of fat.  We have already discussed protein.  Macronutrients tend to be the first place would-be vegans and vegetarians fail.  On a plant based diet, it is generally easy to consume enough carbohydrates.  As we discussed before, protein can be difficult.  The last macronutrient, fat, is also often a challenge for vegans.  Most fruits, vegetables, and grains are very low in fat content.  There are some really good plant based sources of fat, but they tend to be more expensive.  Fruits like avocado are a common source of fat for vegans and vegetarians.  Olives also contain a decent amount of fat, and olive oil can be a good addition to vegan meals.  One of the best sources of both protein and fat for vegans and vegetarians is nuts.  Nuts have some protein, though they do not cover amino acids anywhere near as well as meat.  Nuts have plenty of fat, and they do quite well in mineral micronutrients.  They actually work better as a complement to meat, as they cover most of the nutrients meat tends to be lower on, but they can be very valuable in a vegan diet.  Fats are an essential macronutrient, not as a source of energy but as a solvent for certain vitamins that cannot be absorbed by the body unless they are dissolved in fat.  Fats are also a very good source of energy as well, but the real value of fats is in allowing the body to absorb other essential nutrients.  A diet too low in fat may manifest as vitamin deficiencies, which can make the problem hard to diagnose.  Consuming more fat soluble vitamins will not help, if fat intake is too low.

The biggest failure with the vegan diet may be the high carbohydrate content of plants though.  The human body can get by with fairly low protein intake, so long as all essential amino acids are accounted for.  Excess protein is just turned into energy.  It also does not take a lot of fat to carry enough of the fat soluble nutrients.  Excess fat is turned into energy or stored.  Carbohydrates are actually a non-essential nutrient.  Both protein and fat can be consumed for energy, but they are both also essential in their own rights, outside of their context as energy sources.  Carbohydrates have no such alternate context.  They are only useful as a source of energy, a role which can be played by both protein and fat.  Carbohydrates are more immediately accessible as energy, but this is not necessarily a good thing.  Experimentation with low carb and keto diets has shown that for most people, it is possible to better develop the ability of the body to rapidly convert fat into energy.  Most people who reduce or eliminate carbohydrates in their diets eventually return to normal function, once the body adapts to the new diet.  It turns out that human reliance on carbohydrates is an environmental adaptation, and the body can just as easily adapt to diets that provide energy mostly as fat.  This does not work so well with protein, however, as breaking down protein into energy can create toxic levels of certain byproducts, when protein is the primary source of energy.  Even then though, the evidence suggests that at least some people can adapt even to this.  Most keto diets, however, rely on a combination of fat and protein to avoid toxic ketoacidosis.  Vegan and vegetarian diets tend to go in the opposite direction though, with a glut of carbs and potential deficiency in fat and protein.  In the long run this can cause type 2 diabetes.  The reason we do not see more diabetic vegans is that the high carb intake is countered by high fiber intake, which slows the uptake of carbs and tends to prevent or reduce blood sugar spikes.  It is not clear, however, whether there may be additional problems caused by very high carb intake, despite the mitigating effects of fiber.  One thing that is known is that the brain favors ketones as its energy source over glucose.  Glucose is the primary source of energy provided by carbs.  Ketones are produced when fats and proteins are broken down to create glucose.  It is unknown exactly what the long term effect of keeping the brain on glucose as a fairly exclusive energy source, rather than allowing it to run off of ketones a bit more, but it is very unlikely the effects are beneficial to anyone.  It is possible that brain functions may be hindered when ketones are not available as an energy source for the brain, but there is not sufficient research on this to prove anything yet.

Overall, meat is generally an excellent source of a well balanced diet.  It certainly takes a lot less tracking and math to stay healthy, with meat as a significant part of the diet.  Vegan and vegetarian diets are not fundamentally more healthy than a diet that includes meat, and in fact, fundamentally they are less healthy.  One reason most vegans and vegetarians are healthier is because they actually make sure they get the nutrition they need.  If the average person who eats meat regularly did the same, that person would very likely be at least as healthy as most vegans and vegetarians.  Another reason most vegans and vegetarians are healthier is survivor bias.  Many people try vegan and vegetarian diets.  A lot of those people get sick on those diets and quit.  Those who remain are people who are better suited to those diets.  If we accounted for all of the people who got sick on vegan or vegetarian diets, we would probably find that those diets are not significantly healthier than diets that include meats.  The fact is, successful vegans and vegetarians are mostly people who are naturally more able or adapted to handle those kind of diets.  If only especially healthy people can be successful vegans or vegetarians, then of course vegans and vegetarians are healthier on average!  The fact however, is the meat is the healthier food, because one serving of one kind of meat can cover the same nutrition as many servings of multiple kinds of plants.  Replacing meat in one's diet with plants is hard, because meat is so nutritious and plants are not.  Meat does not need to be a major part of a healthy diet, but the role of plants in most human diets is to cover the occasional deficiencies in meat and to provide some fiber to keep the gastrointestinal tract going.  This does mean that a healthy diet should include more plants than meats, because plants have limited enough nutrition that it takes a lot to cover those holes.  Eliminating meat entirely, however, does not make a person significantly more healthy.  The work required to maintain a balanced diet so you do not die from malnutrition is what makes vegetarians and vegans healthier, as well as the fact that to survive a meat free diet, they also must be naturally more healthy and resilient.  In the end, the fact is, meat is healthier food than plants, even if it is not perfect.

Poor American Spending Logic

When people get on the subject of welfare and basic income, I hear a lot of complaints about how poor people tend to be bad with money.  There are a handful of complaints that are so common they are practically cliche.  One is the complaint that poor people use food stamps to buy lobster or other expensive foods.  Another is that poor people use food stamps to buy a lot of soda and junk food.  People like to complain about how poor people do not put money into savings or investments.  I also frequently hear complaints about poor people not working full-time jobs.  Of course, there is also the complaint about poor people having seemingly expensive possessions.  These complaints seem to come from conservatives more often than liberals, but I hear them pretty regularly from liberals too and sometimes even from progressives.  The fact, however, is that poor people generally are not bad with money.  In fact, in my experience poor people are better with money on average than middle class and wealthy people!

The food stamp complaints are both pretty easy to explain.  Food stamps are a program intended to supplement the food budget of a family, so they can afford more healthy food.  For some, more healthy may mean the difference between not enough and enough, but often it just means topping off the food budget to allow the purchase of fresh vegetables and other healthier foods.  Unfortunately, most poor people do not need more food.  What they need is money to pay for insurance, a new set of clothing, some money to help cover rent, some money to pay for utilities, some money to pay for car repairs, some money to cover home repairs, and some money to pay for repair or replacement of essential appliances.  When a family gets food stamps, that family typically starts spending less "real money" on food, to reduce other financial burdens that food stamps do not cover.  The quality and quantity of food purchased may remain the same.  Further, most poor people do not have terrible diets to begin with.  Studies have found that poor people tend to have very similar food purchasing habits to middle class people, whether they are on food stamps or not.  On top of that, food is the single easiest kind of welfare to get.  There are soup kitchens, food banks, food drives, and religious food charities in most places in the U.S., where poor people can get enough food to stay healthy, and these sources tend to provide far healthier food than most people choose to purchase.  Thus, even studies on what people buy with food stamps tend to underestimate the health value of the food they are actually eating, because those studies do not account for the fresh produce and other much healthier foods poor families are getting from various charities.  Very few families get exactly the right amount of food stamp money.  Many get significantly less than they need, relying heavily on food banks and religious charities for fruits and vegetables and other healthier foods, while using the food stamps to purchase everything else from the store.  Others get more than they need, especially after accounting for other sources of free food.  These families face a few options.  They can spend all of the food stamps on the cheaper products they would normally buy, getting more than they can eat and either collecting more and more food until there is no room left for anymore and they have to start throwing away some of it, they can just not spend all of it and collect more and more unused food stamp money that the state will eventually seize once they no longer qualify for food stamps, or they can buy more expensive foods, so they maintain the same amount of food purchased while still spending all of their benefits.  There is no financial benefit to saving the money or buying and later throwing out surplus, thus the wisest decision they can make is to buy more expensive food.  Likewise, if those who are not getting enough are buying more calorie rich foods, typically considered junk food, to ensure they are getting enough to eat, that is also the wisest choice they could make.  Yes, junk food does not have all of the necessary vitamins and minerals, but humans can survive much longer with vitamin deficiencies but eating enough calories than they can getting enough vitamins but not enough calories.  The fact is, whether they are buying lobster and filet mignon or soda and potato chips with food stamps, poor people are actually making the best financial decisions given the resources available to them and the limitations imposed on those resources.

The reason poor people do not save or invest has nothing to do with capacity.  It is easy to look at the budget of a poor person and find places where he or she could save money.  Further, poor people are not choosing not to save due to stupidity, poor financial skills, or lack of financial knowledge.  Poor people do not save money because it is illegal.  The fact is, to qualify for welfare, you may not have cash or assets worth more than some threshold.  A family that saves money will easily amass enough to exceed that threshold.  If that money is in investments or a bank account, Department of Health and Welfare investigators will discover it and deny welfare.  This denial of welfare will force poor people to draw from investments and savings to pay the bills until they are practically gone.  At this point, they can qualify for welfare, giving them enough income to save again, until they exceed the thresholds.  This leaves them with only two options.  They can live on a more frugal budget, forgoing wants and less important needs while they are on welfare, so they can save money, and then live on that same frugal budget once they no longer qualify until their savings and investments are gone, in an infinite cycle, or they can just not save, living on a higher budget with welfare indefinitely.  In the first case, they live on a smaller budget and never amass significant savings, and in the second case they live on a larger budget and never amass significant savings.  Again, the wiser financial decision here is exactly what they are doing: Not saving and not investing.  Of course, they could just take the money out in cash and stuff it in a mattress, but it would be against the law not to report that money, and if it was ever discovered, they would never qualify for welfare again, and they might be required to pay back all welfare benefits they have ever received.  In other words, the only option poor people have for saving or investing is illegal.  Again, poor people are making the wisest financial choice available to them, and any poor handling of money is being done by fairly wealthy elected representatives, not by the poor people themselves.

Poor people choosing not to work full-time jobs is actually a fairly well understood phenomenon, and anyone complaining about this as an instance of poor people handling money poorly is either stupid, ignorant, or deliberately spreading lies to encourage discrimination and prejudice against the poor.  Most U.S. welfare programs have hard cutoffs where benefits are reduced or withdrawn entirely once a certain income level is reached.  A person working 20 hours a week near a threshold will be in a hard position, where increasing hours or pay will cross a threshold, reducing welfare benefits by far more than the earned income increase.  In this situation, the best financial decision is to refuse additional hours, promotions, and raises.  This is the poster child for the "welfare trap", though is it hardly the only place where people get trapped in the U.S. welfare system.  For some reason, despite how well known this is, U.S. lawmakers have such poor financial skills that they are incapable of implementing any of the numerous viable solutions to the problem.

Poor people in the U.S. often have fairly valuable possessions, or at least, they have possessions that others view as valuable.  The most cliche complaint I have heard about this is women shopping at Walmart, who pay for their groceries with food stamps while talking on an iPhone. This reveals some profound prejudice against poor people.  For example, this betrays an assumption that everyone on food stamps has always been on food stamps.  A great many Americans are on food stamps at any given time, but a significant portion of those are people who have recently lost jobs and are either looking for a new job or becoming more educated to qualify for higher paying jobs.  Perhaps that woman bought the iPhone six months ago, when she or her husband had a high paying, full-time job, but then that job was lost a few weeks ago, leaving her with an iPhone but having to rely on welfare for food.  Even if she was on food stamps when the phone was purchased though, the ability to afford an iPhone while on an income low enough to qualify for food stamps is impressive!  How does a poor person afford an expensive smart phone on such a small budget?  By careful spending and saving!  That woman at Walmart, checking out with food stamps while talking on her iPhone is very clear evidence that poor people are good at managing money!  If she was bad with money, how would she have been able to afford a phone worth half a month to a month of rent?  The last thing we should be doing is punishing poor people for good money management, and if they can afford expensive electronic devices, they are clearly managing their money well.  What else can they be expected to do with the surplus money they have as a result of wise financial decisions, when they are not allowed to save it?

The evidence is clear: Poor people are better with money than the lawmakers writing and passing the bills that give those poor people welfare.  The financial decisions middle and upper class people decry as evidence of poor money management are actually the best financial decisions poor people can make, within the context of the artificial welfare economy they have been stuck in.

When considering the financial skills of the American poor, it is critical to understand that they are not operating under the same economic conditions that free Americans are.  They are not allowed to save significant amounts of money.  Their spending choices are heavily restricted.  They are punished when they earn too much.  When we judge them based on the economic conditions of the wealthy, who are free to spend and save as they like, poor American spending logic may seem to make no sense and even be incredibly unwise.  When judged on the economic conditions they actually live in, however, most poor Americans are using very wise spending logic.  The average middle class American lives paycheck-to-paycheck on several times the budget the average poor American does.  If poor Americans are able to afford luxuries like iPhones and lobster, that strongly suggests that poor Americans have far far better money management skills than any other income class!

What Good is a Federal Job Guarantee: Another Basic Income Plug

What good is a Federal job guarantee, when states are putting their entire populations under quarantine?

This article has a dual purpose.  One purpose is to call on Bernie Sanders to drop his Federal Job Guarantee agenda, an ill advised program that can only ever delay but never solve the problem of declining numbers of jobs as more and more jobs are automated, in favor of a Universal Basic Income, which he once believed was a noble long term goal.  Of course, Sanders is never going to read this.  This blog does not have a very large number of followers, and last time I checked, it was not getting a whole lot of traffic.  The other purpose is to review the pros and cons of a basic income once again, with the addition of some things I have not discussed in the past, because no one was ready to listen.


What good is a Federal job guarantee, when states are putting their entire populations under quarantine?  U.S. culture has changed substantially just over the last few weeks as something that was unthinkable only a month ago has actually happened.  As such it is time to discuss Universal Basic Income in a context that people would have laughed at a month ago.  There are a lot of proven benefits a basic income can bring.  One of those is acting as a financial safety net for people who lose their jobs or are otherwise unable to work for more than a week or two.  Financial advisors recommend that people save around six months worth of wages, to cover unexpected situations of this nature, but few people do.  Most middle class and wealthy people, who are actually able to afford to do this, make poor financial decisions that make saving impossible.  Poor people do not get paid enough to afford to save, despite the fact that most of them are forced to make wiser financial decisions by high prices on housing and other things.  Further, how can anyone expect individuals to save significant amounts of money when economists are telling businesses and individuals to spend, spend, spend!  The fact is, the U.S. economy is built on a fundamental assumption that nothing bad can ever happen and the way things are now is how they are always going to be.  Business experts recommend businesses to take on all available debt that they can spend on things that will bring in more profits than the interest on the debt.  Individuals are recommended by financial advisors to go into debt on homes, so long as they can afford the mortgage payments.  Banks and real estate agents conspire to get home buyers to spend the maximum amount they can afford on a home.  The problem with all of this is that the recommendation to businesses is based on the assumption that the profits a business can make in the future will always be equal to or larger than the profits that business can make now.  What happens if profits drop below the cost of interest?  The recommendation to and pressure on individuals to buy homes that are barely within the limits of their budgets assumes that those individuals will continue to have the same or greater income until the debt is paid off.  Again, what happens if a job is lost or an injury makes an income earner unable to bring in wages for even a few months?  What happens if a global pandemic of a fairly mild diseases causes mass panic and most people are quarantined by government mandate, many unable to work, for a few weeks or even months?

Up to now, the impact of poor financial advice to businesses and individuals has been largely ignored, because it is easy to ignore when only a small percentage of the population is affected by these tragic events at a time.  We can deliberately ignore the injustice of people losing jobs when businesses fail due to following incredibly poor financial advice, because it is only a few businesses here and there, and society can pick up the slack.  We can ignore the incredible harm unexpected loss of income brings, because again, it only happens to a very small percentage of the population at a time.  This makes it easy for law makers to ignore the fact that programs like a Federal Job Guarantee cannot help people with major disabilities, people who are not suited to the kind of work the government is offering, and people who's time is more valuable to society as a whole doing domestic work like raising children and caring for old and disabled people.  It is also easy to ignore the fact that the government can never truly guarantee jobs.  Consider a Federal Job Guarantee program now.  Just last week, 3.3 million Americans (that's 10% of the population) filed for unemployment.  How fast could a well funded, very robust Federal Job Guarantee program find work for 3.3 million people?  It would probably take over a year to place everyone, and it would cost far more than the $2 trillion being spent on "economic stimulus" to create enough government projects to employ that many people.  That 3.3 million is just the tip of the iceberg.  In another recent article, the math demonstrates that a Federal Job Guarantee would already cost around $10 trillion, without this additional 3.3 million people.  Another 3.3 million workers would increase the cost by another $500 billion.  What else could we do with $10 trillion a year?  Oh right, give every single American man, woman, and child $30,303 a year, no strings attached!  The cost of a Federal Job Guarantee capable of providing all of the jobs we "need" could instead be used to fund a ludicrous Universal Basic Income, averaging $76,363 per U.S. household (2.52 people per U.S. household, on average).  On top of all of that, most of the government projects the Federal Job Guarantee would provide labor for would be closed down right now, due to stay-at-home orders and quarantines.  A Federal Job Guarantee cannot provide the kind of jobs people need, when they have to stay at home.

A basic income is not bound to people being able to leave their homes.  A simple basic income, providing an average of $2,500 per U.S. household per month ($30,000 per year) would only cost $3.8 trillion.  We can do better though.  A basic income of $1,000 per adult per month and $500 per child per month (the most recent version of Yang's Freedom Dividend plan) would only cost around $3.3 trillion a year.  Perhaps a future article will demonstrate how this can be reduced to less than $500 billion with a simple recovery tax that guarantees everyone gets to keep some of the basic income at the same time as recovering part of it from people who have enough other income that they do not need it.

Universal Basic Income has a lot of serious benefits.  Among them are significantly lower crimes rates, rearrangement of jobs that significantly increases economic productivity, the creation of many new businesses, the creation of new jobs, the potential to lower or eliminate minimum wage for a freer market without oppressively low wages, elimination of poverty, easier access to higher education, lower drug use, economic stimulus, greater economic freedom, and a financial safety net in hard times.  And now, we add to that, an extension of the financial safety net, a financial safety net even during broad reaching events that affect everyone.  A Federal Job Guarantee can provide some of these benefits for a portion of the population, most of the time, but the idea that it is even a guarantee is wrong.  A basic income can serve everyone all of the time.  A Federal Job Guarantee can easily be overwhelmed by a fairly mild but highly contagious disease in less than a week.

What about the cons?  If the government gives people free money, they will just quit working, won't they?  Nope.  Many will quit their current jobs and get new ones.  This will be more like shuffling than anything else though.  A great many U.S. workers are stuck in jobs they do not like and are not good at.  A basic income will allow them to quit those jobs, opening their positions for people who do want them and are good at them.  The result will be a shuffling around of jobs that ultimately makes people happier and more productive.  Some will not return to work, but most of those will either start new businesses or move to more economically valuable unpaid work, like caring for dependents.  The evidence of this is strong, from a number of basic income experiments.  The evidence also shows that currently unemployed people are more likely to work when they have a basic income, if work is available, and if it is not, they are more likely to pursue education to become qualified in work that is available.  The fact is, the biggest con of a basic income is the cost, and in the long run the economic improvement and lower law enforcement and judicial costs associated with less crime will end up covering most or even all of that.  In addition, the cost of a basic income can be easily mitigated with a progressive recovery tax designed to recover most (but not all) of the basic income from those who already have high incomes.  In short, a well designed basic income program can actually provide a net gain in the long run.

The main point here is that basic income is a well tested and proven idea, and our current situation has made it very clear that our current welfare is insufficient and a Federal Job Guarantee would be an equally poor substitute.  With a basic income, the $2 trillion stimulus package would be largely unnecessary.  Yes, a Federal Job Guarantee with as-needed stimulus packages might be able to accomplish the same thing for the majority of those in need, but a system that requires massive government borrowing every time there is some minor global disaster is a poorly designed a system.  A well designed system would have been able to handle the economic and financial issues of the current situation without any additional action from Congress.  The fact that a stimulus package is deemed necessary is evidence of the weakness and fragility of our economy, including the labor portion.  Our current welfare system has utterly failed to handle the situation.  A Federal Job Guarantee would fail just as dramatically if not significantly more dramatically.  A basic income, however, would already be here, helping the people meet their needs, without any additional government intervention.  A basic income is the enlightened solution to our current problem and many future problems we are bound to encounter.  The only true weakness it has is that it cannot be implemented any faster than the recently passed stimulus bill.  Had we concerned ourselves just a little bit more with future, instead of deluding ourselves into believing we were too big and powerful to fall, perhaps we would already have one.  It is not too late to start though.  Yes, we will suffer for our refusal to look beyond the current moment, but we will recover, and with a basic income we will recover faster and be more resilient in the future.

The Real Math Behind a Federal Job Guarantee

The estimated cost of a Federal Job Guarantee is $543 billion a year.  This number makes a lot of assumptions though, most of which are invalid, and it ignores substantial additional costs.

The current Federal Job Guarantee proposals promise to provide a job for anyone who wants one, at $15 an hour up to 40 hours a week.  The above estimate assumes 81% of unemployed people want full-time work and 19% want part-time work, but basing the budget on the assumption that these will stay the same forever is unwise.  Also, it really does not make a huge difference, once you add in other factors.

An estimated 5.9 million people actively seeking jobs were unemployed last year.  Full-time, at $15 an hour, their wages would cost $184 billion a year.  That is not a whole lot, compared to the ~$800 billion we are spending on other non-medical welfare.  That ignores 400,000 who were recently considered unemployed but have quit looking, call "discouraged workers" by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Include those, and you get a net wage cost of $197 billion.  What about the claim that there are 95 million U.S. adults who could be working but are not?  It turns out a lot of these people do not want jobs.  Over 44 million are retired people.  Most of the remainder are going to college or caring for children or elderly relatives.  A small portion either just do not want to work or are not working for unknown reasons.  It turns out that around 7.9 million able bodied adults in the U.S. are not working either because they cannot find work or because they are just not motivated to work.  A $15 guaranteed wage might be able to convince all 7.9 million to work though, at a wage cost of $246 billion a year.  What about the rest of the 95 million people though?  Would some of them be convinced to work as well, by this?  Many college students do work part-time or even full-time in addition to school, but it is generally difficult for college students to find flexible jobs that can accommodate their class schedules.  Many retired people work part-time for the medical benefits and for a little extra spending money.  Even some people who take care of family members find time to work around that care, when flexible jobs are available.  No Federal job program could reasonably be considered a job guarantee, if it did not do everything it could to work with people who need specialized or flexible schedules.  It would be unreasonable to expect that a Federal Job Guarantee offering $15 an hour would not be taken advantage of by a significant portion of the 87 million people who are not working, because they are doing other, more important things that few employers are willing to accommodate.  What if this demographic takes advantage of the Federal Job Guarantee for an average of 15 hours a week?  (Many retirees will just go for 10, but many will take 20 to 30 hours, if schedules are sufficiently flexible.)  Now we are looking at a $1.27 trillion program, just for wages.

As mentioned above, the initial estimate also ignores substantial additional costs.  The wage cost of a Federal Job Guarantee is very likely to be at least $1 trillion a year.  What about administration though?  Someone has to manage hiring, job placement, human resources, project logistics, acquisition, and a ton of other things.  This is not like running a company.  This is like running a hundred or a thousand companies, and it will require administrative management capable of running that many companies.  We are talking administrative costs on the order of another $1 trillion a year.  To be clear, this is a low ball estimate.  The Federal government currently spends $800 billion a year on non-medical welfare.  Somewhere between $500 billion and $600 billion of that is going into administrative costs, and that is mostly just paying people to check work verifications, look up tax records, and check bank accounts, to make sure applicants actually meet the requirements.  The actual administrative costs for a Federal Job Guarantee would probably be several trillion.

Another major cost of a Federal job guarantee is going to be materials.  The intent for the Federal Job Guarantee programs suggested is to provide jobs where people will work on government infrastructure projects.  The low hanging fruit here is maintaining and expanding the interstate highway system.  Other suggestions include the construction of a transcontinental bullet train system, ecological restoration (ie, cleaning up Federal parks and highways), care giving (nursing home jobs), and "community development projects" (whatever local governments want, probably including creating new parks, building new government and community buildings, and "beautification" projects).  None of these are free, and most require a lot of materials.  Obviously roads and bullet train systems are going to cost far more in materials than labor, especially at only $15 an hour for labor.  Ecological restoration will vary dramatically.  Mere highway cleanup will incur transportation cost and cost for garbage bags and dumping.  If the effort also includes removing vehicle by products from nearby soil, the non-labor cost could skyrocket.  Care giving often appears to be a very labor intensive job, and while it is, labor is still not the biggest expense.  The expenses also include food, medication, and shelter, which can easily outstrip a $15 an hour wage.  This is especially true for nursing homes where there may be only one caregiver for up to 5 or 10 people.  Community development projects will also almost certainly cost more in materials and such than in wages.  Again, let's lowball this and say the average materials cost comes out to about the same as wages, for another $1 trillion.

We cannot just hire as many as 30 million people, tell them what projects they are on, and expect them to complete them.  Each project is going it need its own project planners, which will likely expect a number of experts working together.  In addition, each project will likely need a few highly trained people on-site as well as supervisors to manage the unskilled laborers.  These people are not going to be getting paid only $15 an hour, and some will demand compensation far greater.  Road repair crews tend to have between 5 and 10 people.  At least one of those is trained well enough in road construction and repaid to instruct the others.  Road construction crews can be a bit bigger, but with modern equipment, they do not need to be much bigger.  Construction crews typically also need additional people trained and experienced in the use of the heavier equipment.  We are looking at 10% to 20% of laborers on road infrastructure projects being well trained, with wages running at least $20 an hour.  Supervisors for bullet train systems will cost far more than even that, and they will also require some engineers to manage the construction and to assemble the electrical components, who will have to paid more than five times what the "job guarantee" people are getting.  Clean up crews could have much less supervision, but other ecological restoration projects will require supervisors and managers with far more training and far larger salaries (on the order of two to four times what the "job guarantee" employees are being paid).  Care facilities generally require a number of trained CNAs to be on staff, who may cost as much as $25 an hour, and government run facilities are likely to require at least one (and as many as four, if full shift coverage is required) registered nurse or certified nurse practitioner on staff, with a salary between $60,000 and $120,000 (two to four times what the "job guarantee" people are getting paid).  Community development projects will vary dramatically.  Building construction will require foremen, contracting services, and trained specialists.  Electrical and plumbing cannot legally be done by anyone who is not licensed to do those.  While jobs like insulating do not generally require licenses, it is still going to be necessary to have experienced supervisors to make sure the work meets building code requirements.  Beautification projects will require landscape architects (1.5 to 4 times the cost), horticulturalists (1.5 to 2 times the cost), and other trained and experienced people to manage the work.  Most of this is just the on site stuff, as well.  There will also need to be significant office management to manage budgets and to work with on site experts and supervisors to make sure everything is following the plans and to adapt to unforeseen events.  All of these additional supervisors, managers, and experts are in addition to the people working under the job guarantee program.  This is probably going to cost around another $1 trillion.

So far, the cost is already up to $4 trillion, and this is a lowball.  This estimate also does not include a large number of fairly small costs that will likely add up to something on the order of at least another trillion dollars, nor does it take into account the cost of benefits.  Current proposals also include healthcare benefits as part of the package, and those are unlikely to scale much with work hours.  This means that retired people who only work 10 hours a week, so they can get the healthcare coverage are going to cost the same for that coverage as full-time workers, and they are more likely to need to use it, making them a greater cost for healthcare benefits than full-time workers.  On top of that, the $15 wage and healthcare benefits will likely draw far more people to the program than just what we have considered above.  Currently, 54 million workers are being paid less than $15 an hour, and at least several million more making up to $18 an hour or more working part time do not have healthcare benefits.  That is another $2 trillion or more just in wages and benefits the government will end up spending on the program, as well as similar amounts each for administration, materials, and managements.  The reality is that the minimum cost for a Federal Job Guarantee program will almost certainly be more than $4 trillion, and it could easily cost as much as $15 trillion or more.

A Federal Job Guarantee can hardly guarantee anyone a job, and the price tag is not some measly $500 billion.  The math suggests a cost somewhere around $10 trillion, and even a $15 minimum wage to remove incentive for lower paid people to switch would not be enough, because $15 an hour jobs do not generally include healthcare benefits.  Federal welfare programs do not cost only what beneficiaries get.  They typically cost several times that, and a Federal Job Guarantee is no different.  Again, the math shows a net cost between $4 trillion and $15 trillion, with the most likely cost being around $9 trillion and $10 trillion.  A Federal Job Guarantee is a bad idea.

Next Level Trolling

Trolls are often considered the scum of the internet.  They deliberately incite arguments and other hostile communications.  They argue just to argue.  They make the internet a worse place, for their own personal amusement.  Only, this is not universally true.  Not all trolls make it their goal to incite hostilities so they can sit back and watch the world burn.  The trolls described above are merely the common, vulgar trolls.  While the vulgar troll is certainly the most common kind of troll, there is another level of troll that is more sophisticated, that trolls for a purpose other than personal entertainment.

The most common purpose of trolling is to cause contention for personal entertainment, but trolling can have a higher purpose.  Trolling can be used to extract information.  It can be used to learn people's motivations and how they think.  It can be used to find out the sources of their information and the biases that they use to support their opinions and beliefs.  It can be used to drag false beliefs into the light, and it can even be used to teach.  Higher level trolls do not use their powers for personal entertainment, though it can be entertaining.  They use their powers to help others and to learn more about people.

As a personal example, I once trolled in the Google comments, in a thread discussing the health implications of GMO foods.  If you are familiar with my articles, you may be aware that I wrote a few articles on GMOs a while back, and if you have read them, you will also be aware that I am strongly pro-GMO, because GMOs are important for increasing crop yield and nutrient content of foods, which are going to grow in importance as Earth's human population continues to grow.  In this thread, there were a handful of anti-GMO people spreading lies and misconceptions about GMO foods, but there were also a lot of legitimately curious people who wanted to learn more.  Due to the loud anti-GMO people, it was impossible to engage with those who wanted to learn.  Thus the trolling began.  I started by engaging the anti-GMO.  I expressed my opinion that GMOs are generally harmless and that the FDA already does a good job of making sure all GMOs going into human food are tested rather excessively for safety.  This was, of course, met with many examples of places that GMOs had caused harm to people, the most prominent of which was a case where GMO baby formula harmed many babies.  I responded by demanding sources for these claims.  Before that, I Googled each of the claims and verified that they were all false.  They were lies made up by poorly educated anti-GMO authors to demonize GMOs, since there are actually no cases of GMOs harming humans.  I did not want to call the anti-GMO people out on this though.  I was fishing deeper, for bigger fish.  Merely asking for sources verifying claims was enough to send most of the anti-GMO crowd into hiding.  Only one person was brave enough (or foolish enough, perhaps) to respond.  This person began making additional claims of instances where GMOs had caused harm, none of which were verifiable.  After each claim, I demanded sources.  At one point, I specifically said that I wanted sources who are well educated in genetic engineering and well researched on the impact of GMOs on human health.  I specifically said I was not interested in journalists or fanatics who do not know the science.  After many demands for sources, this person finally gave me a name and the title of a book.  I instantly looked up the author on Wikipedia.  He was a journalist who mostly writes about oil economics, who was hired by an anti-GMO activist group to write a book attacking GMOs.  His credentials were a degree in journalism with some classes in economics.  He had no background in genetics or health.  He was exactly the kind of crummy source I had explicitly stated could not be considered a reliable source, and I immediately pointed this out.  I explained that the incredibly low quality of the source made anything the author wrote on GMOs suspect, and at this point I also pointed out that I could find no evidence supporting any of the claims of harm caused by GMOs.  The final anti-GMO commenter never responded again, but some of the people who actually wanted to learn more about GMOs did start to respond.  I went through the comments looking for specific concerns about GMOs, and then I wrote a couple of blog articles (the ones I referenced before) answering those questions and clearing up a lot of misconceptions about GMOs.  The final comment I left in that thread contained the links to those articles, for anyone interested in learning more about genetic engineering and GMOs.  Without the trolling, it would have been very difficult to identify specific, legitimate concerns people had.  The trolling allowed me to identify and push out of the conversation those who were more interested in arguing than learning.  Trolling was a critical element of providing a potentially very valuable public service.

I have also used trolling to shut down argumentative people (vulgar trolls) in discussions on religion, by leading them into a trap, where they made some absurd and invalid argument in an attempt to discredit a religion.  I have a friend who was trying to tie a person in a martial arts forum who was slandering his practice group on Facebook to a person in real life who had been badly beaten by members of my friend's group during sparing.  My friend used expert trolling skills to make the other guy angry enough to accidentally reveal bits and pieces of information that ultimately verified it was the same person.  I have used milder trolling just to see how people would respond to something, to learn more about how they think.

Vulgar internet trolls, who are just trying to entertain themselves, can be pretty annoying and can cause all sorts of problems and contention, but trolling does not have to be used for evil.  Trolling can even be used for noble pursuits, like shutting down vulgar trolls and learning what kind of information people need and want so you can provide it.  Trolling can even be part of a valuable public service.

Children Aren't Important?

I keep seeing this come up, and I do not understand why there is not more public outcry over it.  It started with Trump's tax reform.  Now, Trump's tax reform helped a lot of people.  It increased refunds for a lot of lower income working Americans.  Unfortunately, however, it also neglected children.  In a sense, it counted adults as worth more, reducing the total amount of refund for lower income working families with more children than average.  (We saw more than a 10% decrease in our refunds, despite getting a little more back from the EITC.)  After Trump it was Yang, with a Freedom Dividend plan that would have given adults a basic income worth around half of a living wage but just plain did not even count children as people.  Now we have plans for an economic stimulus package with a relief element for individuals, and yet again, children are being treated as unimportant.

Trump suggested an initial relief check for all American adults, with some kind of cutoff to avoid giving a lot of money to people who do not need it.  This is not a bad idea, except for the fact that children are rapidly increasing in value in the U.S. (as fertility rate decreases), and this plan straight up neglects children.  Of course, others immediately pointed this out, and Trump agreed with plans that provide smaller amounts for children.  Now, I am not complaining about the fact that the amount for children is smaller in some of these plans.  Household dynamics work fine this way, as the biggest cost for most families is rent or mortgage payments, and this scales much slower with family size than other necessities.  But now Mitt Romney has proposed a plan to the Senate that has reverted back to this adults-only thing.  Is it just Republicans or wealthy politicians, or do Americans in general consider children to be unimportant?  This is ironic, given how much resources state and Federal governments put into oppressing parents for even the most trivial things that might be disadvantageous for their children.

There are a number of potential excuses for denying children disaster relief when it is being provided to adults, but they are all wrong.  The first is that the relief given to parents will help their children.  This is not untrue, but unless everyone has the same number of children, it is overly simplistic and punishes larger families while rewarding single people and couples without children.  Punishing larger families right now is a really bad idea, and it happens to be the next topic of discussion.

The second excuse is that counting children will reward larger families for having more children.  I have two responses to this.  The first is, that is straight up false.  I heard the same argument when I lived in Alaska.  I once overheard some of my coworkers complaining that certain Russian families had large numbers of children, so they would get more money from the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend.  The largest payout I have ever seen from that is around $2,000 per person, and it pays out once a year.  (It has hovered around $1,600 the last two years.)  No offense to my coworkers, but anyone who thinks children cost less than $2,000 a year to provide for either has not had to provide for children or is in serious need of remedial math.  Even at the maximum payout, children do not turn a profit from the Alaska PFD.  (Note that I was one of 7 children, in my teens, living there.  My parents made enough to live comfortably but nothing more, and the PFD definitely did not cover all of the costs of 7 children, let alone turn a profit.)  The $500 per child suggested by some is only a quarter of that.  It would take more than $500 a month for most Americans to profit off of children*.  My second response is, is it wrong to reward parents for having more children?  Raising children is expensive, and it takes a lot of work.  If we wanted to be completely fair (especially to women), we would be paying at least $30k a year to stay-at-home moms with one child.  That is the long term babysitter average wage though, which only covers 40 hours a week.  Moms are more like nannies than babysitters, doing household chores, teaching children basic skills, and so on, on top of supervising and caring for children.  If we assume 14 hour days (children are recommended to sleep from 10 to 14 hours a day, depending on age), that comes out to $125k a year (average pay is $19/hr in the U.S.), if we do time and a half for overtime, with overtime being only anything over 40 hours a week.  (No, you can't pay babysitters or nannies salary.  They are non-exempt employees and thus must be paid hourly wages that comply with overtime laws.)  A nanny might be expected to care for one to three children at that pay.  $500 a kid, as a one or two time payment, is not actually a reward.  It is not even fair wages for services rendered!  And even if it somehow was profitable, encouraging people to have more children is not a bad thing right now.  The U.S. fertility rate is currently lower than 1.8 (average children per woman, in a lifetime).  The replacement rate is 2.1.  That means Americans are not having children at a high enough rate to sustain our own population.  Those panicked about overpopulation might see this as a good thing, but people who understand the economic impact of a declining population do not.  To maintain a healthy economy in the long term, it is important to maintain at least the replacement rate, and while immigration can help make up the difference, it is not a good long term solution, especially when Americans want stricter immigration regulation.  Not only is rewarding people for having more children not a bad thing, it is actually something we are going to have to do anyway, if we want to avoid long term economic decline.  The fact is, parents with large families should be treated as heroes for doing their part to slow the long term decline of the U.S. economy.  We should be happy to make children profitable for them, and they at least deserve some help with the costs of raising children, if not fair wages for the work.

(* I say most, because it might work in the lowest cost-of-living regions, for parents who are already covering a lot of needs through government welfare programs.  In this case though, it is not the $500 a month that is turning a profit but the $500 a month combined with the other welfare.  The $500 a month will never cover more than 100% of the costs of a child on its own.)

Now, I have never heard anyone argue that children are not as important as adults, as an excuse for only providing a basic income or disaster relief for adults and not children, but actions speak louder than words.  Clearly, Mitt Romney considers children to be worthless in comparison to adults.  The current House bill being crafted for relief does include children, but it also puts a cap on larger families.  A maximum of four children can be counted.  Families with more than four children, the true heroes, are out of luck.  Their children are counted at a value of four fifths or less of an adult each.  My value, as a teen with six siblings, would have been only 57% that of an adult.  Even a Democratic House somehow cannot manage to consider children as important as adults.  Yes, the House bill does pay out equal amounts for adults and children, but with a maximum family limit, it is still treating children as lower value, second class citizens.  It would be better to give children half the payout of adults, without a family cap.  (And yes, this would actually result in a smaller payout for my own family.  But at least it would treat children as equal, instead of devaluing children in larger families.)

The fact is, children are not just important.  They are critical.  We often hear the cliche that children are our future, a rather blatant statement of the obvious, but we do not seem to understand the extent of it.  Number are important.  Shrinking populations are populations in economic decline.  And immigration is not a long term solution, because they do not contribute significantly to an increase in the percentage of children.  The fact is, children need relief too.  If we cannot value our children enough to ensure their well being during this crisis, perhaps we deserve mass death and economic collapse.