JOHN HAS A LONG MOUSTACHE.

Are the maquis operating in western Russia?  "A goods train has derailed in the Russian border region of Bryansk, Russian officials say, in the second such incident in two days."  Note: not because of Norfolk Southern track maintenance!  "Regional governor Alexander Bogomaz said a locomotive and several carriages came off the tracks after an explosive device was detonated."  Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence?  "A similar incident happened on the Bryansk-Unecha line, much closer to the Ukrainian border, on Monday morning - on this occasion the locomotive and seven carriages caught fire."

GOVERNOR PRITZKER TRAILS BY 17,683.

From the beginning of this series, a year and a half ago, we noted, "The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas.  But  Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health."

As Outside the Beltway's James Joyner notes, "Long after most people returned to normal, public health agencies have given in."

In Illinois, that wasn't until the ukases, combined with corruption and punitive taxation, did a lot of damage.  Wirepoints contributor Mark Glennon submits an accounting.

You didn’t need to be an epidemiologist to see, early in the pandemic, that many things weren’t making sense. Much of Illinois’ Covid policy wasn’t responsive to the evidence, and some of the data just didn’t add up or match the science supposedly behind it.

At the national level there has been significant contrition and retrospective. The Center for Disease Control, as far back as August, admitted mistakes and announced a shake-up.  The Washington Post wrote at the time that America was not ready for another pandemic. “The action needed to turn the lessons from the nation’s covid-19 response into reality must be an urgent priority, they said. “Preparedness means having everything in place the day before it is needed, and no one knows when that will be.” Scientists who disagreed with the establishment still speak up often.

Not in Illinois, despite its own obvious mistakes. In an interview this week with Capitol News Illinois about his emergency order now coming to an end, Gov. J.B. Pritzker reflected on how he and the state handled the pandemic. He expressed nothing but pride and not a word about any errors. Nor has anybody in his administration or the Illinois Department of Public Health ever said a word about any mistakes or indicated that any review has been undertaken in hopes of doing better next time.

Pritzker didn’t even acknowledge what was perhaps the biggest health policy mistake in American history – extended school shut downs.

In other words, there is no accountability at all.

But mistakes were made, and many were huge. Some errors jumped out at us early, so at Wirepoints we began devoting significant attention to the pandemic and writing about the mistakes as we saw them. Every one of our criticisms was eventually validated.

[Follow the link for] a list of mistakes we published earlier that Illinois itself owns, though fault is shared with the federal government on some.

Dan Mitchell calls attention to the internal migration the corona tyrants might have provoked.  "Regarding [tax-motivated migration], there’s a must-read editorial in the Wall Street Journal about the ongoing exodus from fiscal hellholes such as Illinois, New York, and California."

Wirepoints have those receipts as well.  The people who had the means to leave took their disposable income with them.

On a percentage basis, Illinois ranked 5th-worst for out-migration, with a net loss of 0.85 percent of its population. Big states New York and California fared worse, with losses of 1.38 percent and 0.98 percent of their populations, respectively.

Illinois’ $10.9 billion [adjusted gross income] losses were topped only by California and New York, which lost $29.1 billion and $24.5 billion in AGI, respectively.

The state is residually inhabited by poorer people, and the open border policies of the Jarrett regency are likely to reinforce that phenomenon.

The Illinoisans who fled in 2020 earned, on average, $44,100 more than the residents Illinois gained from other states. Outgoing residents earned $118,000, while incoming residents made just $74,000. That’s the biggest gap since at least 2000, based on Wirepoints’ analysis of the IRS data.

A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.  With local, state, and federal governments in the United States changing the way they count infections (and they might be rethinking how they classify deaths) I'm not sure how valid any numbers, even from a service consistently used from month to month, is.

The latest report from Sweden counts 2,708,137 infections, an increase of 3,171 over last month, and 24,183 deaths, a change of 195 from the preceding report.

The latest report from Illinois continues to report 4,127,625 infections and 41,866 deaths, meaning no change in figures reported by Illinois or Federal agencies for Worldometers to compile.  That's as good a reason as any to discontinue these posts.

The most recent tally of vaccinations continues to report around 26.5 million doses of the various vaccines, initial course or the various boosters, or perhaps reformulations, administered as of today.  The state also has modified its count of the scary variants, with the XBB 1.5 Omicron variant dominating the chart.

As Illinois collected taxes on the available adjusted gross income the governor trailed by 17,878.

At the third anniversary of the onset of corona tyranny, the governor trailed by 17,788.

At Valentine's Day, the governor trailed by 17,728.

At the National Day of Service, the governor trailed by 18,068.

Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week has been growing only slowly.  The details from the end of 2022 to the beginning of this reckoning in 2020 are on page 2.

DECONSTRUCT THIS.

What happens when an area of academic inquiry is not critical, not race, not theory, and not scholarship?  Quillette contributor Julian Adorney expounds.

Critical Race Theory has a scholarship problem. Many of its most prominent academics impugn the motives of anyone who disagrees with them. They refuse to consider the possibility that critics might have something to add to the discussion.

In Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado (one of the founders of CRT) and Jean Stefancic characterize opposition to CRT this way: “As Thomas Kuhn has shown, paradigms resist change. It should come as no surprise, then, that critical race theory, which seeks to change the reigning paradigm of civil rights thought, has sparked stubborn resistance.” This characterization serves to dismiss their critics; rather than admitting that critics might have ideas worth grappling with, the authors write them off as simply resistant to improving our civil rights.

In a chapter titled “Critiques and Responses to Criticism,” Delgado and Stefancic list only two criticisms of CRT that come from outside the movement. One questions CRT’s univariate analysis, and the other questions CRT’s assumption that minorities cannot succeed in light of the success in America of Jews and Asians. Each of these two criticisms—the sum total of all of the external critiques that Delgado and Stefancic would admit to or grapple with—elicited a paltry one-paragraph response. The first response asserted that the critic in question had performed an “unsympathetic reading” of CRT texts. The second said that CRT wasn’t racist against Jews and Asians (no, really).

It's the "unsympathetic readings" that might do more to help a scholar focus his thinking.  Critical Studies are not, in any form, scholarship.  Too many people, though, are so easily intimidated when their motives are questioned or when they're Kafka-trapped, to properly push back.

This kind of blatant dismissal of critics might play well on Twitter, but it’s unbecoming for actual scholars. So why do Crits do this? The biggest reason is that the whole ideology is founded on a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” As Jacob Mackey, assistant professor of Classics at Occidental College, puts it, CRT is “dedicated to seeing hidden, ulterior, or unconscious motives as drivers of affairs.” This is an ideology founded on the idea that racism is systemic, that it lives in every interaction, and that it’s perpetuated by almost every member of the dominant race. That makes Crits inherently skeptical of the motives of anyone who disagrees with them. Or, as Mackey puts it, CRT “posits similar [hidden, ulterior, or unconscious] motives to individuals.”

The easiest place to see this is in Crits’ skepticism of the motives of whites. For Crits, all whites are oppressors. As Delgado and Stefancic put it, “racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained.” As such, “no white member of society seems quite so innocent.”

Catch that "hermeneutics," a term that alludes to Biblical scholarship?  It follows, doesn't it: all have sinned, and all have fallen short of the Glory of Woke.  The worst sins?  Failure to confess the sins, or perhaps, apostasy?

Some Crits have even published papers explaining why criticisms of CRT by people with privilege can be safely ignored. In an article published in the feminist journal Hypatia, Alison Bailey, a professor at Illinois State University, coins the term “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback” to invalidate criticism of Crits’ ideas. What is “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback?” Essentially, it’s “a form of worldview protection: a willful resistance to knowing that occurs predictably in discussions that threaten a social group’s epistemic home terrain.” It manifests as “barriers made of opinions and prejudices, which are fortified by anger, shame, guilt, indifference, arrogance, jealously [sic], pride, and sometimes silence.” Essentially, privileged people object to CRT because it threatens their privilege.

It’s true that people can often get defensive when their worldviews are challenged, but for Crits like Bailey, this defensiveness only ever goes one way. Privileged people who disagree with CRT are defensive and argue from self-interest, but Crits themselves (privileged or not) would never do something so base.

But what about minorities who happen to disagree with the tenets of CRT? What about folks like John McWhorter and Wilfred Reilly and Coleman Hughes among others? Here, too, Crits manage to dismiss any criticism by impugning the critics’ motives.

If these people showed up prosetylizing at your door, you could plead something going on in the kitchen and excuse them, but doing so in the common room or doing diversity brainwashing is another matter.

The tragedy of all of this is that CRT does have some good ideas. Racism does exist in the United States. Some laws do have a racist component, especially in the criminal justice system. Intersectionality can be a useful tool to help understand certain forms of disadvantage. But too many Crits don’t see themselves as scholars searching for the truth. Instead, they see themselves as the anointed ones, in full ownership of the truth and chosen to dispense their wisdom from on high. Until they’re willing to grapple with the many sincere criticisms of their theory, their contributions to reducing racism will be limited. It’s hard to contribute to a good-faith discussion about how to solve a societal problem when your most prominent scholars won’t even admit to the existence of said discussion.

No, no more than the Cardinal Archbishop of years ago would.

LET'S GO, BRANDON.

Chicago, where they now make Only Small Plans.  "Johnson’s biggest challenge in delivering inaugural address: avoid Lightfoot’s mistake."  What mistake was that?  "Lightfoot denounced the City Council as corrupt, then turned around and shamed all 50 members, who were seated behind her, into joining the cheering crowd in a standing ovation for reform."  It did not get any better from there.

This morning, the incoming mayor mentioned a number of problems he was already working on, including "disinvestment."  He did not offer any explanations for that phenomenon.  We can offer a few, but we're not going to.

Us normal people can’t help the cities and their moron populations because they don’t want to help themselves. We tried compassion. Now let’s try compression. Let’s squeeze them until they pop, like the pimple on America’s rear end that they are.

The Colonel is on a roll this morning, and I don't mean a pączek!

Our job as conservatives is not to fix the blue cities for the sake of their inhabitants. Those dummies should suffer the consequences of their actions. Let them dodge bum spoor on the sidewalks, let them walk in fear of the unhoused who would be housed in asylums or dungeons in a civilized metropolis. Our job is to contain the infected blue cities, to keep their poison from spreading to the rest of the country. And one way to do that is to mercilessly use them as an example of what all of America would be like if the Lori Lightfoots of the Democrat Party got their way. Make no mistake – they want to impose the same foul chaos on the rest of us, but the good news is that normal people are still disgusted and repelled by the dystopian dysfunction. The dogma that created failed cities should be the cautionary example we cite endlessly and tirelessly as the alternative to our Republican freedom, security, and prosperity agenda.

I mean, when their own coalition fractures.  That was a week ago, and the beat goes on.  Sun-Times editorialists finding "ultra-MAGA" types in Woodlawn??  The new mayor's base is worked up, they were rallying again last weekend.

One local wardswoman proclaimed that the border crisis was not South Shore’s crisis while others demanded to know why they weren’t informed of the resettlements.

But if that wasn’t peak irony, we reached it on Friday after residents held a large protest rally in which one speaker cited what sounds awful like “replacement theory” as a reason the illegal immigrants shouldn’t be allowed in their neighborhood.

There is a tribal element to the city's ongoing gang warfare. It's unusual, though, for anyone to call attention in the way Englewood, South Shore, and Woodlawn residents are.

What makes this scene all the more ironic is that South Shore, Chicago, voted for Joe Biden by over 94 percent. That means they actively chose to support the border policies that are wreaking havoc on the nation right now. Will they vote differently next time? Will any lessons be learned? Probably not, which underscores the hypocrisy we see from the left. Democrats are all about sowing. They aren’t so into the reaping.

The only way to change that dynamic is for the left to have to actually suffer the consequences of what they vote for. It’s not just up to Texas border towns to bear the burden of illegal immigration. South Shore residents wanted this. They voted for this. Given that, I don’t think asking them to take on 500 illegal immigrants is too much to ask. In fact, that’s minuscule compared to what towns in border states are dealing with.

They might have put Disinvestment Brandon over the top in the mayoral runoff as well.

Why, though, shouldn't traditional Democrat voters on the south side have the same aesthetic preferences as the lakefront liberals or the inhabitants of Winnetka, Chappaqua, or the Vineyard?

A new USA Today poll has found that an overwhelming majority of Democrats are in favor of welcoming immigrants from Central and South America into other people's neighborhoods.

The study showed that Democrats are very pro-immigration as long as the immigration is to areas very far away from themselves.

"We found that 92% of liberal Americans are 'strongly in favor' of as many immigrants as possible moving into the country, as long as they never have to see them or deal with them in person," said the study's lead researcher, Dr. Henry Bollickson. "When we posed the question of whether immigrants should be welcomed with open arms into other people's areas, Democrats were strongly in favor of that idea. But when we posed the question of whether immigrants should be welcomed into one's own city, neighborhood, or home, the number of Democrats in favor of that idea went down dramatically."

"This just goes to show that Democrats are some of the most loving and welcoming people, as long as other people are doing the, you know, loving and welcoming."

At publishing time, sources had also confirmed that a majority of Democrats are in favor of raising taxes to pay for social programs, as long as the taxes are paid by other people.

Cold Spring Shops never lacks for material.

THE BIG SPIN.

Major Garrett and David Becker's The Big Truth:  Upholding Democracy in the Age of THE BIG LIE pretty well tells readers what their message is and what their priors are.  Let me open Book Review N^o. 3 by expressing general agreement with their central message, about the 2020 presidential election, which is that Donald Trump failed to turn out sufficient voters, while Democrats (and, I will argue, their media enablers) turned out enough voters to reverse the electoral votes of enough swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) to secure the presidency for Joe Biden.  Put simply, a few of the Hillary voters who sat 2016 out turned out for Dementia Joe while a few of the reluctant Trump voters of 2016 stayed home or thought the Democrats to offer the lesser evil.

That noted, why do I use such a provocative title to introduce the review?

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We are living through a profoundly unserious moment.  Unserious people seek to con us.  "They cannot competently run power grids, or municipal water systems or trash pickup; they cannot competently maintain, let alone repair, the ‘roads and bridges’ they are always pratting about; they cannot competently run or maintain the public housing they increasingly want people to live in, or the public transportation systems that they want people to rely on."  The spectacle, no better: "The painfully obvious reality of our political dispensation — an increasingly despotic managerial state sugar-coated with soothing rhetoric about Our Democracy™ — drives home the point about oligarchs filling the vacuum."  Our economy is headed for disaster.  Liberals are trying to drive down the standard of living for all Americans.  Is Nancy Pelosi Still Representing San Francisco in Congress?

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

ESCHEW EDITORIALIZING.

That used to be the responsibility of the reporter.

How a reporter feels about that information is not relevant to the news story. This is also important for communicators who write news stories or news releases about their organizations to share with news media. They should avoid being overly promotional in their writing.

To avoid editorializing, a writer should present only facts and limit or eliminate most adjectives, except in direct quotes. For example, instead of writing, “He was sad,” describe what the person did that made you think he was sad. Instead of writing, “He was sad,” you could write, “He placed his head in his hands and wept.” Present what you see and hear; let the reader make the connection that the person was sad. How do you know something is “interesting,” “impressive,” “tragic,” or “avoidable”? That is your opinion. Just present the facts. Leave the value judgment to your readers. Journalists often go by the adage, “Show, don’t tell.”

Editorializing can be avoided by attributing any information that is not a fact or is not common knowledge.

Academic writing used to respect similar conventions.

Academic writing aims to convey information in an impartial way. The goal is to base arguments on the evidence under consideration, not the author’s preconceptions. All claims should be supported with relevant evidence, not just asserted.

To avoid bias, it’s important to represent the work of other researchers and the results of your own research fairly and accurately.

It might be that achieving perfection is impossible, but in pursuing it the writer might achieve excellence.

These days, though, does the impossibility mean the writer might not even bother?

MAKE KALININGRAD KÖNIGSBERG AGAIN!

Last fall, it was all in fun.

The Czechs were tweaking the Russians at the time.

Now come some cheeky Czechs also cracking wise.  "A petition is now circulating to pry Kaliningrad from Russia’s hands, with one Russian news site reportedly taking the suggestion seriously."

For now it's all in fun, but is poking a hungry bear wise?  "'After a successful referendum, 97.9% of Kaliningrad residents decided to merge with the Czech Republic and rename Kaliningrad to Královec,' the account tweeted."

The Poles didn't even bother with a referendum.  "The city once known as Königsberg is now Krolewiec, at least in Polish government documents."  Outside the Beltway's James Joyner doesn't see anything of import here.  "Renaming a city in another country, though, just seems silly—almost as silly as the Russians caring what the Poles call Kaliningrad."  Will the Czechs accept the Polish spelling, or insist on their own?

TODAY'S REQUIRED READING.

The Right Coast recommends Lockdown Harms and the Silence of Economists.

As professional economists, we have watched the response of much of the economics profession to COVID-era lockdowns with considerable surprise. Given the evident and predictable harms of lockdowns to health and economic well-being, we expected economists to raise the alarm when lockdowns were first imposed. If there is any special knowledge that economists possess, it is that for every good thing, there is a cost. This fact is burned into economists’ minds in the form of the unofficial motto of the economics profession that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

From the depths of our souls, economists believe that the law of unintended consequences applies to every social policy, especially a social policy as all-encompassing and intrusive as lockdown. We economists believe that there are trade-offs in everything, and it is our particular job to point them out even when the whole world is yelling at the top of its voice to be quiet about them. It may still be a good idea to adopt some policy because the benefits are worth the cost, but we should go in with our eyes open about both.

There are no solutions, only tradeoffs: "We've been considering the tradeoff between risking mass contagion and risking mass deprivation."  I lost patience with "two weeks to slow the spread" after two weeks.  The editorial notes silence on the part of people with bigger platforms than mine.

That lockdown would, in principle, impose overwhelming costs on the population at large is not surprising. The scope of human activity touched by lockdown is overwhelming. Lockdowns closed schools and playgrounds, shuttered businesses, and barred international travel. Lockdowns told children they could not visit their friends, put masks on toddlers, and dismissed university students from campus. They forced elderly people to die alone and prevented families from gathering to honour their elders’ passing. Lockdowns cancelled screening and even treatment for cancer patients and made sure that diabetics skipped their check-ups and regular exercise. For the world’s poor, lockdown ended the ability of many to feed their families.

Economists, who study and write about these phenomena for a living, had a special responsibility to raise the alarm. And though some did speak, most either stayed silent or actively promoted lockdown. Economists had one job—notice costs. On COVID, the profession failed.

Their failure might have been understandable.

There are personal reasons for this docility that are easy to understand. First, when public health officials first imposed lockdowns, the intellectual zeitgeist was actively hostile to any suggestion that there might be costs to pay. The lazy formulation that lockdowns pitted lives versus dollars took hold of the public mind. This provided lockdown proponents with an easy way to dismiss economists whose inclination was to point out costs. Given the catastrophic toll in human life that epidemiological modellers projected, any mention whatsoever about pecuniary harm from lockdown was morally crass. The moral zeal with which lockdown proponents pushed this idea undoubtedly played an important role in side-lining economists. No one wants to be cast as a heartless Scrooge, and economists have a particular aversion to the part. The charge was unfair given the costs in lives that the lockdowns have imposed, but no matter.

Second, economists belong to the laptop class. We work for universities, banks, governments, consulting agencies, corporations, think tanks, and other elite institutions. Relative to much of the rest of society, the lockdowns posed much less harm on us and maybe even kept some of us safe from COVID. Narrowly speaking, lockdowns personally benefited many economists, which may have coloured our views about them.

Yes, and economists' reputations might rest in part on extrapolation models, despite their record of failure on the coronavirus and on the climate.  Your success as a public intellectual depends on your ability to ask the right questions.  The editorial suggests economists failed to ask those questions when it came to the corona tyranny.

Our supposition of economists’ sense of duty to the world’s poorest was well justified. For decades economists have fiercely defended the global economic system on the grounds that it has helped lift more than a billion people out of extreme poverty and increase life expectancy everywhere. The global economy has some significant flaws—vast inequality and climate change are often noted. But the worldwide network of trade has an essential role in facilitating economic development that brings sustained improvements to the lives of the world’s poorest, economists have argued.

The expected rush to quantify the global collateral damage from rich countries’ lockdowns never materialized. With few exceptions, economists most decidedly did not lean into quantifying lockdown harms either in developing countries or rich countries.

There's a William Allen reference to tyranny, poverty, and embracing dumb economics that is germane to the editorial. "When economists turn a blind eye to the pains in our society, as they have in the past year, governments lose crucial indicators needed to design balanced policies."

There is still work to be done.

For economics, the failure to document the collateral damage from lockdowns is fundamental. The very purpose of economics is to provide an understanding of the pains and successes in society. Economists’ role is to synthesize the facts and trade-offs and point out how policy assessments depend on our values as well. When economists turn a blind eye to the pains in our society, as they have in the past year, governments lose crucial indicators needed to design balanced policies.

Perhaps the acquiescence of many economists in the corona tyranny is a consequence of the discipline's too easy acceptance of the Welfare Economics Paradigm. "The lockdown consensus can be seen as the natural end result of modern economists’ strong technocratic bent."

Where Maynard Keynes would prefer economists to be competent in the way of dentists, these writers suggest economists are better suited to be gardeners rather than engineers.  There's much more in the essay that will reward careful study.

ALL STAR WRESTLING ON CHANNEL 18.

There was a political townhall on CNN last night.  All the Excessively Earnest People have been holding forth on What It All Means.

They missed it.  How many times do I have to tell you? "The Sunday 'public affairs' shows are pro wrestling for nerds."  So, too, with last night's bout.

Kaitlan Collins in her white pantsuit is in the role of the hero, or perhaps the job chick, making reference to those State of the Union shows where the Democrat women were so dressed.  Donald Trump was supposed to be the heel, but a heel can have a following, just ask Black Jack Lanza or the late Nick Bockwickle.  The job chick even got to pull a foreign object out of her ... whatever, which she did every time an audience participant got to ask a question and then she changed the subject.

 

Former President Trump to Kaitlan Collins:

"You're a nasty person, I'll tell ya..." pic.twitter.com/6rkLCfbsPQ

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 11, 2023

Who was supposed to make the headliner look good but ultimately lose?

SOME SOUL WITH YOUR GEMÜTLICHKEIT.

Ebony's DeAnna Taylor tours Milwaukee.  " From dozens of murals to a bustling food scene and more—here’s how we spent 48-hours in Milwaukee, Wisconsin."  Their base for touring, the Pfister Hotel.  Not afraid of any ghosts, are they?  Then, a change of pace for the morning.

Morning: If you’re like us, coffee is key to getting the most out of our day. Head downstairs to the Café at the Pfister for your caffeine fix and a freshly baked-in-house pastry. For something a little more hearty, we suggest checking out Mi Casa Su Cafe, a Black-owned eatery in the Halyard neighborhood. Pro Tip: the shrimp and grits are often raved about, but the omelets really stole the show.

After breakfast at Mi Casa, walk just a few steps down the block to spend some time at Honeybee Sage Wellness & Apothecary. This unique shop—also Black woman-owned—offers dozens of tea blends, zero proof cocktails and more. We were truly blown away at the shop’s ability to take non-alcoholic beverages and recreate them into some of our favorite boozy drinks. Standouts were: the Wisconsin New Fashioned, the Day Dreamer, and the Blooming Cactus.

There's a lot more at the link, much of it well off the beaten tourist paths.

AMTRAK, THIS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

Another weekend of train cancellations.

Early-season forest fires in Alberta temporarily shut down Canadian National’s main line between Jasper and Edmonton over the weekend, forcing VIA Rail Canada to turn the westbound and eastbound Canadians at those locations and bus passengers between them.

Meanwhile, a variety of issues inflicted significant delays on Amtrak long-distance trains. This included an 8-hour delay west of Whitefish, Mont., for the westbound Empire Builder that left Chicago on Friday, May 5, resulting in the cancellation of the Sunday, May 7, eastbound train from the Pacific Northwest to St. Paul, Minn., and Monday’s westbound Builder beyond the Twin Cities to Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Sunday's westbound Builder was cancelled after some cars derailed in the north throat of Chicago's Union Station, and the hits kept coming from there.

According to the Amtrak Alerts Twitter feed, track obstructions and freight train interference were the main reason for the Zephyr and Builder delays, while mechanical issues departing their originating terminals hurt the Starlight and Lake Shore.

In addition, both eastbound and westbound Southwest Chiefs were each delayed 2 hours Saturday by signal issues between Lamy and Las Vegas, N.M., on a BNSF-owned line in which they are the only trains operating.

From the comments: "Service is not priority # 1. CYA comes first."  So it often is with government work.

DEMENTIA JOE'S IMAGINARY SAVINGS.

Dear reader, I just knocked a million dollars off my debt!

How did I do that?

Simple.  I didn't spend a million dollars on a sailing yacht!

I'm being outrageous to make a point, but it's one that Our Political Masters have trouble grasping.  "'As a matter of fact, my first two years in office I’ve lowered the deficit by a record $1.7 trillion. Lowered the deficit — the debt,' the president had said."  I suppose we should be grateful the federal government didn't buy a massive fleet of sailing yachts.

It's a common conjuring trick in Washington, compare some sort of estimate of future spending with actual spending, and claim to have been fiscally responsible.  It's also spin so egregious that Washington Post's Glen Kessler has had enough.  "Readers may recall that during Donald Trump’s presidency, we established a new category, the Bottomless Pinocchio, to account for false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda."  And a lot of hypothetical yachts not bought.

Kessler noted first that the $1.7 trillion number was obtained by subtracting the deficit in fiscal year 2022 ($1.375 trillion) from the deficit in fiscal year 2020 ($3.132 trillion).

And so the deficit did drop by $1.7 trillion in two years. The problem is that the president had very little to do with this drop.

“The Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper, in February 2021 already estimated the budget deficit would fall dramatically in fiscal 2021 and 2022 because emergency pandemic spending would lapse,” Kessler wrote.

“The combined 2021 and 2022 budget deficits were projected by the CBO in 2021 to be $3.31 trillion. In November, the CBO said the combined deficits were in fact $4.15 trillion,” he added.

That's right, Dementia Joe actually borrowed more money, and added more to the national debt, than he had hoped to.

That "transformative legislation?"  Worse money after bad.

“Moreover, going forward, Biden has enacted legislation that will require the federal government to borrow even more, such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill ($370 billion in additional deficits over 10 years), health and disability benefits for veterans exposed to toxic substances ($280 billion), the CHIPS Act for semiconductor manufacturing expansion in the United States ($80 billion) and student loan debt relief and repayment pauses ($750 billion),” Kessler explained.

More money, more problems …

Kessler concluded the fact-check by awarding the president his second Bottomless Pinocchio.

“In his battle with congressional Republicans, who claim they are concerned about rising deficits, through sleight of hand, the president repeatedly has claimed he achieved historic deficit reduction because of his policies,” he wrote.

“Budget numbers often make people’s eyes glaze over and so, from a communications perspective, it’s easy to manipulate the math. But the numbers don’t lie. The president earns his second Bottomless Pinocchio,” he added.

Then the fun really begins.  The federal government borrows money to build roads and bridges that states and localities will be on the hook to repair.

SOONER OR LATER YOU RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLES' MONEY.

If a country has secure borders, a sanctuary city can engage in cheap virtue signalling. "Declaring yourself a sanctuary city costs nothing, as long as you have a national government that is protecting its borders. Let the national government change its policies, and all of a sudden, accusing state governors who are bearing the brunt of the illegal crossings as 'racist' doesn't do anything for the material or moral condition of the people who request transportation to Chicago."  There wasn't any room in the inn in January, and there wasn't any money, and the border state governors continue to call the sanctuary cities' bluffs.  "Ballooning cost of insuring undocumented immigrants complicating state budget negotiations."

The $49.6 billion budget Gov. J.B. Pritzker introduced in February estimated the cost of a program that provides state-funded health insurance to adult immigrants who are in the country without legal permission at $220 million.

Just three months later, that estimate has grown fivefold, swelling to $1.1 billion and threatening to blow a hole in the Democratic governor’s proposal for the budget year that begins July 1, the first of his second term.

Provided? By whom?

At the same time, revenue flowing to the state appears to be slowing, putting further pressure on Pritzker and the Democratic-controlled legislature as they try to assemble a spending plan that continues the financial progress made during the past four years. The General Assembly’s spring session is scheduled to adjourn May 19.

Illinois created a program in 2020 that provides Medicaid-style coverage to immigrants 65 and older who are in the country without legal permission or who have green cards but haven’t completed a five-year waiting period and are therefore ineligible for the traditional health insurance program for the poor, which is jointly funded by the federal government. The program has been expanded twice, now covering those 42 and older.

Even as enrollment has far outstripped expectations, some Democratic lawmakers are pushing to further expand coverage, opening the program to people 19 and older, which the Pritzker administration estimates would cost an additional $380 million in the first year.

Catch that passive formulation,  "appears to be slowing?"  There's no more printed money coming from the Jarrett regency, and the state's tax policies put productive people behind domestic, and now immigrant, public charges.  Now batting, reality.  "The financial pressure is exposing tensions between Democrats’ open-arms stance on immigration and the limited resources available in a state that has only recently begun to stabilize its chronically shaky finances."  Heck, the Combine and its enablers in regime media can't even throw the race card any more.

Advocates who’ve backed the program and are seeking further expansion question the accuracy of the state’s cost estimates and are pushing back on what they see as anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly among Republican lawmakers.

Pritzker, who has signed the health care program expansions into law and trumpeted them in news releases, now appears to be distancing himself from the effort, which a spokeswoman described as “a legislative initiative that relied on independent outside cost projections.”

“Every balanced budget that has passed is negotiated with the General Assembly and includes priorities the governor lays out in his budget address and the priorities of lawmakers in the General Assembly,” Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in an email. “As the program was implemented and real costs were calculated it became clear the program was going to cost much more than what the advocates had predicted.”

The state's tax take is falling, and as surely as Lori Lightfoot will say something rude, it's likely that Springfield politicians will look for ways to raise taxes.

The governor’s office wouldn’t say how it proposes to address the exploding costs of the immigrant health care program, or whether options such as closing enrollment in the program or raising taxes to pay for it are on the table.

“The administration is working with the General Assembly to discuss the path forward for this legislative initiative,” Abudayyeh said.

As for the proposed expansion of the program, Pritzker’s “focus remains on investing in priorities he outlined during his budget address,” she said.

The popularity of the program, despite some shortcomings, among a population that has few other options for health care coverage perhaps shouldn’t have been a surprise.

When the program was introduced for those 65 and older in 2020, the budget for the entire year was spent in the first month, according to a briefing the Department of Healthcare and Family Services gave lawmakers earlier this spring.

That's the same year the governor shut the state down, and made it harder for productive people to pay their own way, let alone pay for all the dependents the Democrats enable.  Now there isn't any more money printing in Washington, and big chunks of the disposable income Illinois used to tax is being earned elsewhere.  The wishful thinking goes on all the same.

[Healthy Illinois's Tovia] Siegel also noted that the state appears to be leaving federal money on the table by not getting reimbursement for qualifying emergency health services provided to immigrants without documents. Indeed, Healthcare and Family Services Director Theresa Eagleson told the Senate committee that the department believes it will be able to recover about $100 million or more in federal cash to help with next year’s outlay on the state’s health care program for undocumented immigrants.

It's still other peoples' money, and it still will run out.

SHAKING OUT THAT SUBOPTIMAL CAPACITY.

The wolf comes for DePaul.

DePaul faces a budget gap of $56 million for the upcoming fiscal year.

Now the Chicago institution is moving forward with a plan to fix its budget projections—including measures that will likely include shedding employees and programs.

The wolf that came for the state-supported universities howls at DePaul. "But the austerity in state universities that accompanied the shakeout of the unionized oligopoly industries that paid the taxes was an opportunity to raise admission standards and downsize the student body concomitantly with the faculty. That is not what happened. Just pick any month of my posts and read about it."

Given its historically strong enrollment, large alumni base and endowment of over $825 million, DePaul will likely rebound and does not appear at risk of closing or merging, as many other Catholic colleges have. But its struggles raise a question: What does it mean for Catholic higher education if one of the largest and most well-known institutions is facing such a severe budget gap?

I never lacked for opportunities to gripe, because the poobahs of the state universities doubled down on access-assessment-remediation-retention.  So too will it be for DePaul.

Experts and insiders suggest that the market challenges that have driven other institutions out of business are on DePaul’s doorstep, leaving leaders looking for a way to plug the $56 million budget gap and employees anxious about what the future holds.

DePaul president Robert Manuel noted the budget challenges in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

“Like almost every higher education institution across the country, DePaul is working to design a budget that enables us to deliver a quality and impactful education that best serves our students. Grounding ourselves in our Catholic, Vincentian mission is critical to our continued relevance as an institution of higher education and guides us in these difficult financial decisions,” Manuel wrote.

DePaul attributed the budget gap to a number of factors: changing enrollment demographics nationwide, including a decrease in graduate school enrollment; the discontinuation of coronavirus relief funds from the federal government; rising operational costs driven by inflation; and increases in need-based and merit-based financial aid.

The article focuses on a number of challenges facing universities organized in the Catholic tradition. It appears to me, though, that the Church of Diversity and Inclusion is the cause of the troubles.

In a statement, DePaul also pointed to its commitment to first-generation students, noting that they make up about one-third of the undergraduate population. Low-income students also form a sizable portion of enrollments, with nearly 5,000 students—almost a quarter of the study body—receiving Pell Grants for the 2021–22 academic year, according to the latest available data.

Now, as DePaul seeks to ensure continued access to underserved students, it is moving forward with a plan to offer incentives to employees willing to depart voluntarily and to eliminate unfilled positions. It is also reviewing “teaching considerations based on enrollment and class scheduling to reduce redundant sections and vacant lines,” the statement noted, hinting at cuts ahead.

Note: it's not that students are staying away because the university's speech policies are redolent of the Spanish Inquisition (I know, I know, the Jesuit institutions in the area are Loyola and Marquette); rather it's that this talk about "access to underserved students" that helps U.S. News sell those guides; and reducing section offerings might not be the best way to serve students whose lives might be chaotic.

KEEP ENABLING ADVERSE SELECTION. YOU'LL GET MORE OF IT.

First mortgage servicing fees, then credit card late fees, why not student loans too?  "Biden's Student Loan Plan Could Cost Twice as Much as Projected."  That's not the usual low-ball estimates of how much money will go into a boondoggle, whether it's a war or medical care or the interstate highways.  It's called adverse selection, and I sometimes fear Democrats pray for more of it.

A new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that Biden's so-called income-driven repayment plan will cost at least $230 billion over 10 years—with an additional $45 billion in costs likely coming if the Supreme Court invalidates the White House's student loan forgiveness scheme. That means the final tab could be more than twice the $138 billion price tag attached to the proposal by the Department of Education, which is overseeing the program's rollout.

Under current law, federal student loan payments are capped at 10 percent of an individual's "discretionary income," which the Department of Education defines as income that exceeds 150 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. In practice, that means a single borrower with no children starts making payments on income that exceeds $20,400.

Biden wants to lower that threshold to 5 percent for undergraduate loans and impose a new limit of 10 percent for loans put toward a graduate degree. Biden's plan would also wipe away outstanding student debt after 10 years of payments for those who borrowed $12,000 or less—and a maximum payment period of 20 years no matter how much was borrowed.

But if you cap monthly payments at a lower level and also shorten the allowable repayment time, there will be a lot of loans that never get paid back in full. That cost ultimately falls on the taxpayers, and that's what the dueling estimates from the CBO and the Department of Education are all about.

There might be a "cloud of uncertainty" over the extent to which people who might otherwise think twice about attending college will see in less restrictive loan conditions an incentive to give it a shot.

The CBO points out that the Department of Education did not account for the "behavioral effects" of the new policy—in other words, it did not include estimates for how many additional students would take out loans if the repayment method was altered.

The CBO, however, did. It found that reducing what student loan borrowers will eventually have to pay back unsurprisingly caused more students to take out loans—including loans that they would be unable to pay off in full. Overall, the annual volume of student loans would increase by about 12 percent, the CBO estimated, with both undergraduate and graduate students seeking more loans.

"Students who would be expected to take out federal loans would borrow more," Leah Koestner, a CBO budget analyst concluded in a presentation on Wednesday. And "some students who would not be expected to borrow under current law would take out loans."

Undoubtedly, though, the Jarrett regency will point to the increased college enrollments as a positive, and use the expense of the loan forgiveness as yet another reason to accuse productive people of not paying enough taxes.

Eventually they will run out of productive people to tax.

CREDIT FOR YOUR EXPLANATION.

I was notorious for instilling in economics students that any good answer to an essay question began with "it depends" with credit for identifying the essential elements influencing the outcome.

Pepperdine economist Gary Galles now suggests that the same caveat applies to multiple choice questions.  At least, I think that's where he's going.

Again, the initial answer to what should be done in an uncertain world is “it depends.” Then, done right, it opens up the most interesting part of the analysis — what it depends on and how important the various considerations are.

Alternatively, think of the demand and supply curves not as typically shown in economics textbooks — well-defined and known — but as relationships surrounded by clouds of indeterminacy. At the time real-world producers must decide their price and output plans, they do not, in fact, know what the demand curve will be, a typically unnoticed-but-false assumption snuck in by drawing a specific, implicitly assumed-to-be-known, demand curve at the beginning of the analysis.

Without such a well-defined demand curve, known in advance, a producer cannot actually know how much total revenue will change for an additional unit of output (the marginal revenue, which microeconomics books assume producers will adjust output until it equals marginal cost). With uncertainty, marginal cost can’t be known in advance, either. Many unanticipated things could change it, from disasters to health problems for workers to accidents to hacking attacks to changes in government policy. As a result, the neat MR = MC equation of economics principles texts can no longer tell a producer what to do in order to successfully maximize his profits, as Armen Alchian pointed out long ago in his “Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory.” And I can still remember what he said to my graduate school class in summarizing this point: “I have been an economist long enough to recognize that ‘I don’t know’ is an intellectually respectable answer.”

So that might be, and yet the blackboard models of supply and demand, and producer behavior under price-searching conditions capture enough of the essential elements to grasp big chunks of reality, if not all of the nuances.  "Yes, that sometimes requires the presenter to defer some questions to take up later (I would caution new students to be careful about sailing outside the breakwater without a life jacket, or suggest that some topics were better tackled over a cup of coffee), but that's the way in which learning is emergent."

PLAYING FOR LEASTER AGAIN?

It's been a few years since we used that reference to describe the pennant race in the National League's Central Division.  "The teams in contention for the National League's at-large playoff berth appear to be playing for leaster. The Milwaukee Brewers, despite having a terrible May, June, July, and beginning of August, are no worse than four games out of the wild card, with current frontrunner Cincinnati in their division."

Here we are again, in a similar position, with a team of promising new players in a division nobody seems terribly interested in winning.

And just like that, an 18-9 start to the season has morphed into an 18-15 record.

Luckily for the Brewers, the NL Central-leading Pittsburgh Pirates are also on a six-game losing streak and the last-place St. Louis Cardinals have dropped eight straight to fall to 10-24 on the season.

Neither the Cubs nor the Reds have been particularly scintillating of late, although they're crowding the Pirates and the Crew.

Cardinal fans can expect as much sympathy from me about their pitching woes as I expect from Bear fans should the new Packer quarterback not be up to the standards we've seen in the past quarter century.

THE MESSAGING IS ALSO IMPORTANT.

Robertas Bakula laments, "If only there were Ayn Rand…"

We'd believe you, if perhaps you didn't shout so much.

“Near total lack of empirical lived experience with socialism’s manifest defects,” [Duke's Michael "Kids Prefer Cheese"] Munger points out, contributes to the rising interest in socialism. Imagine if that same thinker, having suffered socialism herself, could convey the horrific experience of living (or more precisely, slowly dying) under socialism to those who, hopefully, would never have to? She could, say, write a novel, a tool humanity invented to immortalize stories and experiences.

I don't know, maybe introducing youngsters to The Theory of Moral Sentiments or Anarchy, State, and Utopia might get the work done without the fireworks, or, to build on the preceding post, alienating the people who might otherwise be won over.

GAINS FROM TRADE IMPLIES A VALUE PROPOSITION.

It's Sunday, so let me open today's sermon with an observation from British economist Edwin Cannan, who deconstructed the price-gouging rhetoric of a century ago with "Have we not all heard the preacher abuse his congregation because it is so small?"  That's an easy enough trap to fall into, particularly when the pews are full for Christmas, Easter, or the middle of a long drought.  Chicago's Cardinal Archbishop had a message last Christmas Eve that offered a value proposition.  "The point of going to church is to be there for the neighbor who has hit a rough patch, in order that those neighbors will be there when it's your turn to hit a rough patch."

In business or politics, you're unlikely to produce either shareholder value or electoral pluralities by running down potential customers or prospective constituents.

Take Bud Light.  (Please?)

Years from now, business schools will teach the case of Bud Light as a cautionary tale. Suggested course titles: How to Destroy Your Brand Without Really Trying, or Five Ways to Lose Customers by Picking ‘Influencers’. The question will be whether Bud Light still exists when universities and colleges try to analyze the disaster that Anheuser-Busch wrought with its market-leading and culturally popular product.

First, they alienated their traditional “fratty” customer base by partnering with transgender “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney in hopes of scoring some free social-media boosts, while their marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid publicly insulted customers by painting them as unsophisticated rubes. That got their customers inspired to drink anything but Bud Light and fueled conservative attacks on the whole A-B and InBev catalog of beverages.

Now, because Anheuser-Busch has abandoned its attempt to woo the transgender crowd, activists and leaders on the Left are demanding their own Bud Boycott.

I've long held a skeptical view of light beer and its marketing efforts, particularly at Super Bowl time.  It's a Prussian thing with me.  Deal with it.