I'm sick of America's rancorous win-lose politics. Everything is about one party winning and the other party losing. We need our representatives in government focused on winning for America not winning for their party and their donors.

To break the logjam and dysfunction, we need win-win policy ideas that allow multiple stakeholders to "win". I'm starting a twice-monthly newsletter to explore this approach, published on the first and third Saturday mornings of each month. The first edition will appear on February 5th.

I invite you to subscribe (free) here.

Trump is the most dangerous president we’ve had in at least a century, maybe for all time. He is tearing down the foundations of our country, following the recipe of fascists the world over to seize power, deploy government against his political enemies, enrich himself and his cronies, and destroy our system of checks and balances. This election is our best hope to avoid living in a dictatorship led by a Trump family dynasty enabled by sycophantic Republican leaders.

Does the prospect of a second Trump term and the further damage it will inflict on our country make you shudder? To dump Trump, you must vote for Biden. Voting for another candidate, or sitting out the election, either helps Trump win or helps him make good on his threats to not step down.

The Math 

I’m going to use 2016 presidential election numbers to illustrate the situation. For simplicity, I’ll round the numbers and ignore the Electoral College until later. 

Of the 136.7M votes cast for president in 2016, Trump received 62.9M votes and Clinton 65.8M. The remaining 8M votes went to third party and write-in candidates. The most popular of these candidates, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, received 4.5M votes. Johnson had no chance to win.

But had some of those 8M votes (almost 6% of all votes) been cast instead for Trump or Clinton, they could have changed the outcome of the popular vote, either giving Trump a popular vote victory or increasing Clinton’s popular vote victory (and possibly Electoral College outcome), or anything in between.

Wasted Votes

The votes for third-party candidates were wasted: Only two candidates had a chance to win; votes cast for other candidates played no role in choosing between the two people who could be president. None.

Why would 8M voters waste their votes? Obviously, the 8M people who voted this way don’t consider their vote wasted. It may have been wasted in terms of choosing who becomes president, but they had other goals for their vote. Here are some possibilities:

1. I like a third party or a third-party candidate and want to show my support, helping to ensure the party’s future ballot access and possibly qualifying for public campaign financing.

2. Republicans. Democrats. No difference. I’m fed up with both and want “real change.” My vote for a third-party candidate sends that message.

3. I would never vote for a Republican. But the Democratic candidate is no good either. I’m going to send a message to the Democratic Party.

4. I would never vote for a Democrat. But the Republican candidate is no good either. I’m going to send a message to the Republican Party.

Only the first reason holds water. While this would be a reasonable use of your vote normally, these are not normal times.  In this election, the only result of such a vote is to further enable Trump.  Given the possibly close vote between the two major parties, the risk of putting Trump back in the White House to further damage the country is just too great.  

The others reasons for third-party candidate votes are about sending a message. But there’s no way to tease apart the possible messages from the vote count. Whatever the voters’ intents, these messages are lost. A message sent but not heard makes no difference.  A wasted vote doesn’t even send a message.

Will Trump Peacefully Transfer Power?

Trump has refused to commit to accepting the result of the election. He’s laying the groundwork to claim that mail-in ballots are rigged. He and his enablers are suppressing voters across the country using techniques ranging from physical intimidation (asking armed goons to show up as “poll watchers” and “security guards”) to making voting as inconvenient as possible (e.g., Texas governor Abbott’s directive that there be only one ballot dropbox per county — look at a Texas map to see how ridiculous that is).

Only a Biden landslide will be enough to ensure that Trump doesn’t steal the election and refuse to peacefully transfer power.

But … the Electoral College

Winning means winning the Electoral College vote. If you don’t live in a swing state, it is unlikely that your presidential vote will directly affect the outcome. We know that some states are almost certainly going to vote Democratic and others are going to almost certainly vote Republican. If you live in such a state, your vote almost certainly won’t make a difference in the Electoral College count.

But other states are up for grabs. Currently, these are Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, Georgia, New Hampshire, Texas, Virginia, and part of [tooltips keyword=Nebraska content='Nebraska is not a winner-takes-all state: It allocates part of its Electoral College votes by congressional district.']. If you live in one of these states your vote directly matters in the Electoral College outcome.

Regardless of where you live, your vote will matter in helping to create the large Biden landslide that we need in order to increase the likelihood of a peaceful transfer of power.

A Personal Note

I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary. I’ve explained why elsewhere. So, it is no secret that I’m disappointed that Biden is the Democratic candidate. But he is. 

Initially, I supported Biden only because he is the alternative to Trump’s obscene presidency. As the campaign has evolved, I’ve been pleased that Biden has announced some sensible policy proposals. He generally doesn’t go after Warren’s “big, structural change,” but he does advocate incremental improvements in many areas.

If policies are important to you, check out https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/.

Summary

My message is simple: Trump and his enablers are taking us toward an authoritarian, oligarchic dictatorship. For our children’s and grandchildren’s sakes we must stop him.  For our own sakes, we must stop him. 

Electing Joe Biden by a landslide is the first step in stopping Trumpism. Vote for Biden to make that happen.

Why doesn’t some moderately sane Republican politician tell Donald Trump and his suck-up acolytes in the White House and the Senate — in fact, why doesn’t anyone tell the media pundits — that no vote gets counted if it is not from a registered voter?  

Every county in every state in the nation has a list of registered voters.  Every Board of Elections in every county in the nation follows the same process, though the procedures may differ.   No one gets to vote who is not registered.  No mail-in ballot is counted if it is not certified as being from a registered voter.  It does not matter how many ballots come in and from whom, only one from each registered voter is tallied.

The President makes the bogus claim, like so many of his others, that millions of fake ballots are being distributed and that will make it a rigged election.  This is just an attempt to suppress the vote and create an excuse for him to cry foul.  He will probably try to fire the FBI Director for testifying to Congress that there is no evidence of tampering with mail-in ballots.  It is not happening and it cannot happen in any way that affects the count.  Trump is the president, and though not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, he should know this.

While that moderately sane person is at it, she might remind everyone that states have until early December to tabulate the vote and certify the outcome before their electors gather on December 14.  No state should have any problem getting all the in-person and mail-in ballots counted in that time.  Good news, Florida: no hanging chads to screw up the election this time.

Registered voters will determine the outcome of this election.  Someone please tell the President the basic facts of “Elections 101.”  And, for heaven’s sake, let the talking heads tell us all.

Rev. Rollin Russell

I am not the first person to point out that our president is a virtual embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins. Anyone who endured a classical Christian education will remember having to memorize them, probably with vague and watered down examples.  They apparently originated with the “Desert Fathers” in the seventh century and they figure in stories from the “Canterbury Tales” as well as in Dante’s “Inferno.”  In all cases they serve as admonitions to avoid falling into their snares which would lead to sure damnation.

Here they are now, on display for us daily and graphically by Donald Trump.  

Pride: The president’s self-absorption, arrogance, self-aggrandizing egotism seem to lead him to believe the world revolves around him.  Hence, everything he does is for his own benefit.

Greed: I thought Mary Trump’s book title, Too Much and Never Enough referred to money.  Oh, well, it certainly could have.  Money may not be the root of all evil, but it is the tap root of the Trump tree.

Wrath: How many people has he fired or sued or tried to humiliate for some perceived grievance, especially when they are clearly right?

Envy: Our President all but salivates in envy of the autocratic power of his best international buddies, Putin, Kim, Erdogan and MBS, and even his current enemy, Xhi.

Lust:  Some may just roll their eyes at his sexual assaults, extra-marital hook-ups, hush money payoffs, his gross, infamous comments; but most know a lout when they see one.  

Gluttony:  Lavish living, gold faucets, dietary self indulgence, gold everything; that’s his trademark.   Again, too much and never enough.

Sloth: Too lazy to read his security briefings, too self absorbed to understand or accept scientific data regarding environmental degradation or the corona virus, he’d rather blow it off and play golf.

Donald Trump is the poster boy for the Seven Deadly Sins and he drags in his considerable wake all the hyper-religious zealots who should know better, but wink and nod and go along.

Donald Trump is the poster boy for the Seven Deadly Sins and he drags in his considerable wake all the hyper-religious zealots who should know better, but wink and nod and go along.  

Contrast our president’s character traits to the classical list of seven Cardinal Virtues: Charity, Temperance, Chastity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness and Humility.  We see in him the worst of humanity and, sadly, the worst in ourselves.

Rev. Rollin Russell

As businesses are pushing workers to return, helped by pressure from expiration of enhanced unemployment benefits, workers will get sick and neither be able to work nor to care for their children. And, customers will be afraid because of the sick workers, further driving business down. As more workers become ill, more customers will be afraid. Another downward cycle.

School, business, and health are inextricably linked. You can’t solve one problem without solving them all. This may sound hopeless, but it’s not. It is a national emergency that requires bold, direct action. First save America, then reopen.

Here's my proposal in a nutshell: Implement a strict nationwide lockdown to defeat the virus and support people's needs during the lockdown with large, direct payments.

The rest is detail. (But I hope you'll read it!)

Breaking the Downward Cycle

The solution is simple, but difficult. It will take courage, real patriotism (not just the flag-waving kind), and shared purpose across the land. Here are the steps:

1. Admit that we've bungled our response to COVID

Our nation’s political leaders must admit, at least to themselves and in their hearts, that we’ve bungled our response to COVID. The disease is spreading fast, many people are dying, many more are being damaged for life, our kids aren’t being educated, and our real economy (not the stock market) is failing. Our country is being diminished by the day and we can only solve it by working together and with urgency.

Good leaders have the courage to admit error and to change course. Voters can forgive making mistakes, but they won't forgive leaders who stick their heads in the sand while awaiting a magical solution.

2. Tell the truth going forward

All of our political leaders must tell the truth going forward. Our leaders must establish credibility, which is sorely lacking now. Credibility will encourage people to follow the “tough love” needed to get through this crisis together. Lack of credibility will even make people reluctant to accept good news, like an effective and safe vaccine, because we won’t know whether the good news is true or yet another lie.

3. Implement a nationwide lockdown

We know the drill. Only “essential” businesses, or businesses where work-from-home is possible, stay open. Define “essential” narrowly, based on what’s needed to keep people fed and housed. People generally stay at home. Require masks and social distancing elsewhere.

We started this in March, but didn’t follow through nationwide and reopened too quickly. But our experience this spring and the experience in other countries shows that a lockdown will stop or nearly stop the spread of the disease, saving many lives. Moreover, reducing transmission to a low-enough level is the only way to get schools open and the economy going again.

4. Implement a massive public relations campaign

This second lockdown can’t be half-hearted like the first one. Bombard the public with specific, consistent, insistent messaging through all channels. Political leaders of all persuasions need to get on board and lead by example. Everywhere. All the time. This is what patriotism is about: shared sacrifice in service to the nation. We’ll know this is happening when we see the talking heads on both CNN and Fox News giving the same recommendations to their viewers.

5. Define criteria for reopening

Define stringent criteria for when lockdown can be eased and when it must be strengthened. Listen to the epidemiologists. Intuition from politicians doesn’t pass muster in such a complex situation. We have people who know how to model transmission and can tell us when it is safe to reopen various sectors of our economy. Listen to them.

6. Sustain people

The direct impact of a lockdown on people already living paycheck-to-paycheck is devastating. To make a lockdown feasible, the federal government must sustain such people. This is a big topic, which I discuss next.

Sustaining People

Let’s keep in mind the goal — sustaining people — and ignore the side goals that have plagued previous COVID relief bills. We’re not trying to prop up large corporations, the stock market, or even the local pizzeria. Such goals might be laudable, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about how we keep people fed and housed.

Give Everyone Money

The simplest approach is to give everyone money. Yes, I said everyone. Why? Because determining who really needs support is complex, politically charged, and bureaucratic. Just look at the CARES Act Payroll Protection Program's (PPP) attempt to help small businesses: In practice, getting money required that a small business had the right kind of relationship with a bank and access to knowledgeable help from lawyers or accountants. The result was that many businesses that needed help didn't get it and many that didn't need help got it anyway. Making it simple helps make it fair.

Making it simple also eliminates the need to pay large fees to banks ⏤ PPP fees could exceed $24B.

So, let’s just bite the bullet and support everyone.

How Much Money?

Reasonable people will choose different subsidy amounts depending on their priorities. My priorities are that no one should go hungry for lack of money, people should not face eviction and homelessness, and our consumer-based economy should not totally collapse. Here’s my rationale.

Median personal income in the US was $33,700 per year in 2018. By definition, half of working-age individuals earn less than this and half earn more. Let's give each individual the median income, $2,800 per month, for the duration of the lockdown.

The lowest-earning half of individuals, those most likely to face hunger, eviction, and homelessness without help, would be better off than before, even if they lost their jobs. The lockdown would no longer throw them and their families into dire poverty. Some would even be able to accumulate some rainy-day savings or pay down high-interest debt.

The higher-earning half of individuals would be better off if they kept their jobs, but not if they lost their jobs.

What Would It Cost?

In December 2018, there were 206.7 million working-age people. So, this level of support would cost about $579B per month. Federal income tax revenue on these payments would offset some of the cost.

Can We Afford It?

Yes. As a comparison, the CARES Act is estimated to cost about $1.8 trillion, assuming that some federally-guaranteed loans are paid back, more if the loans are not repaid. If we can afford the CARES Act, we can afford to do this. A three-month lockdown would cost less than the CARES Act.

We could get into a political argument about whether it is good for the US to increase its deficit spending. For 40 years, Republican dogma has been that deficits cause inflation, yet when Republicans are in power they increase deficit spending, primarily to help corporations and the very wealthy, giving us many data points about deficit spending and inflation. There’s no evidence that deficit spending in the US causes inflation.

This is especially so now, when the Federal Reserve has been "printing money” by making huge bond purchases. These bond purchases prop up the economy by keeping interest rates at historic lows (around .5% for 10-year Treasuries). Most of that printed money is flowing into the stock market, not helping people. If we can “afford” to spend money for that purpose, we can afford to spend money to help people directly.

Can We Afford Not to Do It?

We must stop the pandemic. If we continue to let it fester, it will destroy our country, much like other plagues and cataclysmic events throughout time have destroyed past empires. Self-preservation demands that we take action and the only action we can take now is to follow public health recommendations for a lockdown.

But we can only implement a lockdown if we reduce its devastating impact on much of the populace. If we fail to help people through the lockdown, we will not be able to sustain it for long enough to defeat the pandemic, which will again send the economy into a tailspin.

Moreover, we have to keep services provided by local and state governments alive. Taxes, mostly sales and property taxes, fund these services. If people are not earning, they're not spending and paying sales taxes. If people are not able to pay their rent or their mortgages, they're not paying property taxes. Putting money in the hands of the populace not only keeps them fed and housed, but keeps critical services funded. (Further help to state and local governments may nevertheless be necessary.)

There is no other choice if we want to save America.

What About the Politics?

The political issue is whether Congress is willing to spend money to directly help people as opposed to the usual indirect approach of funneling money to banks and well-connected large corporations, and hoping it trickles down. The CARES Act shows that there is some hope for the more direct approach: About a quarter of CARES Act money went directly to people (see a breakdown here), so there's some willingness to spend money to help people.

But, the news is not all good. Republicans in Congress are now worrying out loud that enhanced unemployment benefits cause recipients to be lazy and not want to work. Even if their worry were justified (there's evidence that it is not), so what? When the lockdown is over, people will need to return to work.

Importantly, we need to recognize that during the lockdown we want most people to stay at home, not showing up at work while possibly infected because they need money to pay the rent and feed their family. That's why generous, direct funding of households is essential.

We Ignore Need for Corporations So Why Not for People?

Congress (both parties) seems happy to send huge amounts of money to large corporations that don't really need it. Why would we do that but at the same time only help people who "need" it?

One rationale politicians use is to preserve jobs. But large corporations have access to private sources of funding. Corporate borrowing is as cheap as it has ever been. Besides, it would be good if some corporations restructure through bankruptcy: Maybe corporate leaders would learn to keep adequate cash reserves rather than spending too much of their earnings on stock buybacks.

Importantly, the absence of strong opposition to the CARES Act's Economic Impact Payments to most households ($1200 per adult earning $99,000 or less, $500 per child), regardless of income level under $99,000 or employment status, gives hope that members of Congress could be comfortable that their electorate would perceive this proposed program as fair.

What About Businesses?

Businesses only survive if they have products or services to sell that attract customers with money to spend. Consumers drive large parts of our economy. Ensuring that consumers have money to spend will help most of our businesses. And, ultimately, no subsidy will help businesses that don't have customers willing and able to buy. One way to support local businesses during the lockdown is for households who don't need their whole subsidy to give money to support local businesses that are important to them. This seems preferable than the bureaucracy-heavy PPP approach.

There will still be people who believe in the (discredited) trickledown theory of economics, that the best way to help others is to give money to corporations and the wealthy. Such people, especially those in high-income households who will receive but not need the subsidy, should put their money where their mouth is by donating their household subsidy to their favorite businesses or corporations.

Will Essential Workers Be Willing to Work?

Since everyone will be receiving a subsidy payment, why would anyone want to work in an "essential" job? There are several reasons. First, employees will know that they'll need employment post-lockdown, which might provide incentive to keep working. Second, and more importantly, essential businesses that need more employees during the lockdown will raise wages to attract them. Individuals will balance extra earnings against risk, with workers in different risk categories possibly making different decisions.

Likewise, essential businesses will make varying decisions about how they operate during the lockdown. Some may cut back products and services that they provide to avoid needing to hire more workers; others may raise wages to attract more workers so they can maintain their usual services. Among those that raise wages, some may raise prices to maintain or increase profits, while others will absorb the temporarily increased labor costs as a way to endear customers to them post-lockdown.

What About the Financial System?

In the 2007 recession, banks were pummeled by inadequate capital with which to withstand the deluge of loan defaults. Supposedly, they're in better shape now, but we shouldn't count on them having adequate capital to withstand massive defaults. This proposal puts money into the hands of people with credit card and mortgage debt, which will reduce the risk of bank failures or the need for federal government bank rescues.

Summary

This is a two-step proposal to save America: (1) Defeat the virus by a serious lockdown and (2) help people through it by giving them plenty of money to meet their needs (and possibly more) during the lockdown.

It gives money directly to the people and it gives every working-age person the same amount regardless of whether or not they "need" it. This keeps the program simple, free of excessive bureaucracy, and fair. It costs a lot but delivers a lot. It puts decision-making about what businesses to support in the hands of the people who know best, not in the hands of lobbyists and campaign contributors. Both Democrats and Republicans should like parts of it.

In 1973, Robert Ringer wrote his best-selling book, Winning Through Intimidation. I doubt that Donald Trump read the book – he does not read much – but he is the poster boy for the book’s title, if not its contents. Intimidation was his modus operandi throughout his business career and is the hallmark of his disastrous presidency.

Trump’s hotels, resorts, golf courses and casinos are all rife with documented tales of strong arm tactics to get what he wanted and nasty threats whenever he was challenged. He stiffed contractors and workers on his construction projects then dared them to take him to court. No one who knew his history or were aware of his serial bankruptcies wanted to deal with him. His extra-curricular sexual affairs featured lavish parties and secret trysts, followed by angry denials, hush money pay-offs, and bizarre cover-ups.  In business he was a pariah and in his social life, a lout.

In the Republican nominating scramble he ridiculed, belittled and bullied his way past his stunned opponents and won the hearts of thousands by his brash behavior and outrageous promises. ”When I am president we will win so much you will get tired of winning.” He assumed he would always win in any dispute or negotiation. After all, he would control the largest military, the most robust economy in the world, and the Justice Department, so how could he not win?

Kim Jung Un presented something of a problem and Trump led with his go-to tactic, threats and insults: “Little Rocket Man.”  It didn’t work. Then he tried flattery, compliments and vague promises, even what seemed to him like irresistible inducements. Hey, lots of beautiful beach front properties there that would be perfect for golf resorts. That didn’t work either. So, he lied: “He sent me such a beautiful letter.” Kim just nodded and kept testing his rockets and working on his nuclear weapons.

Surely, he could intimidate the new, inexperienced president of Ukraine. Zelensky needed weapons and support. The Russians had taken Crimea in violation of every international law and were occupying eastern Ukraine. We had promised the weapons and could give him support, “but we need a favor, though.” It was a perfect phone call. We should all just get over it; that’s the way it’s done. We had the power and Ukraine had the need. How could we not win? All Zelensky had to do was just say he was opening an investigation. Perfect call.  

Trump did not get what he wanted, but he did get away with it by suppression of evidence and obstruction of witnesses, all with the help of his own private Attorney General, and with a little help from his friends in the Senate.

The COVID-19 virus was something Trump could not intimidate. He could lie about it and deny its effects, which he did repeatedly. That’s not even a strategy, just an ingrained, natural reflex. He could not bully Dr. Anthony Fauci, diminutive in stature though he is, and that seemed to frustrate the president even more. He tried to shut him down by stopping the daily briefings. But Americans could not get enough of Fauci’s facts and information in the midst of the pandemic, and he kept being featured on TV. A frustrated Trump could not even call that fake news.

Then a Minneapolis policeman held his knee on the neck of a hand-cuffed and prone George Floyd for eight minutes plus, and all hell broke loose. The president unleashed a deluge of angry tweets: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He wanted to “dominate the battle space” by calling in all manner of police and military. He threatened protesters with “the most vicious dogs” and heavily armed military. Our strong-man president apparently knows no other response than intimidation.

Tragically, governing and leading through intimidation is antithetical to every word of the Constitution and to the "liberty and justice for all” that is the heart of the American dream. 

Rev. Rollin Russell

How could he ever have imagined the phenomenal results? It was like winning the lottery every day for three years running. He did not have to invest much or really risk anything. When Vladimir Putin put his thumb on the scale of the 2016 Presidential election it only cost the time of some of the army’s cyber warfare hot shots and intelligence service tricksters. It was a million to one long shot, but they managed to flip just enough votes in three states to win for an Electoral College victory for Donald Trump. What a weird institution, the Electoral College: totally designed for tampering.

Over the Russian Financial Barrel

Putin knew he had Trump over the very large Russian financial barrel. How many billions did he owe to Russian banks and oligarchs? How many times had they bailed him out of his dismal business fiascoes? Plus, Trump was desperate, salivating, to build a hotel in Moscow. Egotistical narcissists are the easiest to manipulate and, true to form, once in office The Donald was a very responsive puppet on Vladimir’s very tight strings. He did a total reversal on American policy toward Russia in everything from the annexation of Crimea to removing sanctions for that take-over.

But that was just a start. What he did to the U. S. government warms the cockles of a dictator’s heart. Trump hollowed out the Justice Department and put a sycophant in as Attorney General. William Barr, in turn, stopped all meaningful investigations into Russia’s meddling and turned the process around to prosecute the investigators. Trump hollowed out the State Department, fired anyone with extensive knowledge and experience and replaced them, if at all, with not-even-marginally qualified toadies.

According to Vladimir’s Script

He turned the corporations loose by erasing clean water and air regulations and silencing or firing the scientists whose research demanded them. Wow, great economy. He followed the Dictator playbook by attacking America’s heralded free press as purveyors of fake news and threw red meat to his racist and xenophobic devotees by becoming a master of conspiracies and dark innuendos. Long festering social and cultural divisions were exploited, and the nation was at war with itself. The list could go on and on. Vladimir could not have scripted it better.

The President was impeached by the Congressional House of Representatives, but escaped conviction because he had so successfully intimidated Republican Senators, whose names will live in infamy. But before he could take a much undeserved victory lap, news of a deadly virus started making headlines. It is a threat that not even Putin could have anticipated, but he had in place the very American President to make matters worse. Trump’s arrogance, laziness, ignorance and insatiable need for adulation are tailor made to make this crisis into a national catastrophe.

Who Benefits?

It is always wise to pause and ask, who benefits? Some pharmaceutical corporations and others who manufacture medical supplies will. Perhaps Democratic Party candidates will win in November and inherit the mess that Trump leaves behind, though that is more like a booby prize. Think about trying to restore sound government and a working economy given the massive national debt that has been accumulated through tax cuts for the wealthy and massive expenditures to try to keep the country afloat in the wake of the gross mismanagement of the pandemic. Imagine doing so while the Republicans who created the debt are loudly carping about deficits and the necessity of cutting programs.

No, the biggest beneficiary is Vladimir Putin. It is far beyond his wildest dreams. He gets a weak and divided America and the dream of world ascendency he has always craved. It is the most extraordinary of unintended consequences.

Rev. Rollin Russell

“The buck stops . . . where?” Harry Truman, where are you when we need you? Ever since you were president we have been naïve enough to assume that when it comes to our federal government and accountability for its actions, inactions, blunders and failures, the buck stops with the person in the oval office. Silly us!

Debacle & Scandal

We lived through the Watergate debacle, with its cover-ups, obfuscations, protestations of innocence and a Friday night massacre. A secret audio tape brought it all crashing down when the courts demanded that the tape be handed over to Congress. We then watched a number of the President’s men go to prison, and the President flashed a smile and a victory sign as he helicoptered off into oblivion. Thank heaven for the Congress and the persistence of its leaders, we sighed, and for the courts which saw that the evidence was not suppressed.

The Iran-Contra scandal was even more convoluted and somewhat bizarre, and we were blind-sided when it all came tumbling out. We knew that Nixon was tricky, but we had assumed that Reagan was at least honest. Not so much, as it turned out. Unlike some of his enablers who went to prison (there were eleven convictions), he escaped indictment and the Teflon President rode off into the sunset and is still lionized by his party. He had plausible deniability! All those who were convicted and whose sentences were upheld were subsequently pardoned by Reagan’s successor and former VP. Well, at least that was behind us. Another sigh of relief.

Getting Away With It

But, alas, there is nothing new under the sun, except perhaps the seeming ability now to get away with egregious malfeasance and illegality. Our current President escaped the Mueller Investigation, despite ten indictable acts of obstruction of justice. The courts did, in fact indict and convict a half dozen of his enablers and co-conspirators in those clear crimes and more in his other charges of conspiracy with a foreign government. But the entire process was short circuited by his Attorney General as both proclaimed “No collusion, no obstruction.” Plausible deniability strikes again, assisted by a thumb on the scales of justice.

For his Act II, President Bone Spurs was impeached by the House of Representatives but acquitted by the US Senate. His only defense against the overwhelming truth of extortion and abuse of office was the plausible deniability of his guilt presented ad nauseum by his Republican defenders. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Act III features daily briefings on the COVID-19 crisis and his protestations of innocence: “Who could have imagined . . .?” and “Navarro put a memo on my desk in January? I didn’t see it.” “The warning was in an intelligence briefing in December? No one told me.” “We inherited a broken system.” “Our testing is the best in the world.” He is working overtime to create plausible deniability for his gross negligence.

The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

Of course, covering up one’s guilt is not a trait only of Republican Presidents. Bill Clinton worked hard on his plausible deniability without much success. But he was attempting to hide illicit sex with an intern: reprehensible, but not on the same scale. Indeed, we have all been guilty of hiding the most embarrassing parts of our personal histories. But, we have a right to expect accountability of our leaders, particularly of the President, and especially when lives and the whole fabric of society are at stake. In such circumstances, when truth and integrity really matter, the buck must land on the desk in the Oval Office. In the present situation, plausible deniability is the last refuge of scoundrels.

Rev. Rollin Russell

People with Great Responsibility Must be Worthy

When a person is entrusted with a position or task of great responsibility, we want to be assured that she or he is worthy. When lawyers are admitted to the bar in the state where they intend to practice it is not only because they passed the bar exam. It is assumed by their colleagues that they have the character and ability to respect the law and will represent future clients with integrity. Physicians not only must complete their extensive educational requirements; they must be judged to be faithful to the Hippocratic Oath that is the ethical standard of their calling.

Our teachers and professors have likewise received basic higher education and deeper study in the areas of their expertise. Beyond their academic degrees they are expected to honor their calling by teaching with integrity and respect for their students. We have similar expectations for religious clergy who serve our churches, synagogues and mosques. Indeed, one historic ordination liturgy in the Christian tradition concludes with the assembled congregation saying in unison, “She/He is worthy.”

Who Do We Trust?

One of the painfully disturbing issues in our culture now is the question of who is trustworthy.  The President repeatedly charges that the mainstream media produces “fake news.” The media, in turn, catalogues the thousands of times that the President tells and repeats falsehoods. The populace has been forced to decide who can be trusted, and in regard to the nation’s domestic and foreign policies, that is a very crucial question. In a pandemic, when lives are at risk, we need trustworthy leadership and trustworthy news.

The fact that half or more of the American people find the President untrustworthy is a disaster for everyone. It makes the President defensive and his characteristic defense is offense.  So, he scorns, belittles and attacks those whom he perceives as enemies. The press, which in principle is committed to non-partisan, fact-based reporting, understandably resents the attacks, and its ire shows. The President’s supporters take up the cry of “fake news” and malign and threaten members of the media whose views they scorn, while the President’s detractors are determined to exact retribution.

Opinion leaders on both sides of this divide decry the devastating results of this seemingly intractable division in our country. Some seek a middle ground and plead for unity, while others demand dominance, on one hand, or vengeance on the other. The current situation is untenable.

What Makes a Person Trustworthy?

So, what makes a person trustworthy? The standards of our medical, legal, educational and ministerial professions reveal the answers to that critical question. We expect persons who attain important positions of responsibility to have a deep and broad knowledge of the systems and tasks in their charge. We expect them to interact with others in those systems with respect for their particular responsibilities, with integrity and honesty, and with respect for them as persons. We expect them to represent to the public the best and most honorable values of their organization, institution or profession. We further expect to hold them accountable for their decisions and actions, and there are structures of accountability in each profession to insure such appropriate behavior. Indeed, merchants, artisans, social workers and businesspersons are held to similar and equivalent standards.

America needs a President who is trustworthy and accountable. Unity will be elusive until that is the case.

Rev. Rollin Russell

In previous posts (here and here), I’ve described by experiences with my Model 3. After driving it over 9,000 miles, I still love the car. In this post, I focus on what Tesla brands as both Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability. All Model 3s include some features, but you must buy the $7,000 “Full Self-Driving Capability” option, to get the most interesting features.

The Sales Pitch

Tesla’s online ordering system gives this concise description:

The Big Questions

I’m going to examine the features one at a time, trying to answer three big questions for each feature:

1. Does it work?

2. Is it useful in real life?

3. Is it safe?

I can only give you my impressions based on my particular experiences. My answers are weakest when it comes to safety because only data drawn from hundreds of millions of miles driven by many drivers in many cars on many roads can give a complete picture. But, I will explain situations where I’ve felt threatened by some action the car took and other situations where the car might very well have prevented an accident.

Survey Data

Bloomberg News published in November 2019 the results of surveying 5,000 Model 3 owners about Autopilot safety. This is worth reading, giving a much broader range of opinion than I can give. Over 90% of survey respondents feel that Autopilot makes them safer. But this survey, too, is just anecdote and opinion, not conclusive data.

Accident Data

Tesla releases quarterly high-level accident data aggregated across all of its cars on the road, not just Model 3. The 4Q19 data showed one accident per 3.07 million miles driven while Autopilot was engaged compared to one accident per 2.10 million miles driven while Autopilot was not engaged. Even without Autopilot, late-model Tesla cars have active safety features that are still relatively rare among cars on the road. Tesla reports that National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration shows one accident per 479,000 miles driven.

There are two implications Tesla probably hopes we draw from this data:

• Active safety features included in all late-model Tesla cars reduce accidents.

• Driving a Tesla with Autopilot engaged is even safer.

I find both plausible, but Tesla hasn’t presented detailed enough data to be certain.

As we go through various self-driving capabilities, I’ll give examples when my Tesla made me less safe and examples when it made me safer. The balance matters and there’s not enough data to understand that balance.

Traffic-Aware Cruise Control

What is It?

The idea is simple: You tell the car how fast you want to go and it does it, slowing down or stopping if there’s a slower-moving or stopped car, bike, or person in your lane.

To simplify the process, the car knows the speed limit in most areas, as illustrated in the screen capture. (It is usually correct, but it is clearly getting the speed limit from the nav system not by reading signs.) You can set an offset to the speed limit and whenever you turn on cruise control, it will set the speed to the higher of your current speed, or the speed limit plus offset. For example, I’ve set my offset to 4, so in a 45 mph zone, cruise control will keep the car at 49 mph, unless, of course, a vehicle in front of me is going more slowly.

If the vehicle in front stops, the Tesla stops. When the vehicle in front resumes, the Tesla resumes, generally smoothly and appropriately.

Does it Work? Is it Useful?

Absolutely. I use the cruise control much of the time I’m driving. Stop-and-go traffic is not so bad when the cruise control is doing the stopping and going. Similarly, it is great to prevent speeding past bottom-of-the-hill, hidden-around-the-bend radar traps.

More importantly, cruise control saves you from panic stops (or worse) when your attention wanders, and it reacts quicker than you can to sudden stops in front of you. Several times, I’ve started to stomp on the brake, only to realize that cruise control has already started braking.

Is it Safe?

As I explained earlier, only extensive data can answer this question conclusively. But, I believe I am safer driving with cruise control than without it because it reacts more quickly than I can and its attention never wanders.

Unexpected Braking

That said, it has one flaw that could be a safety hazard and is certainly disconcerting: Occasionally, the car will brake hard in situations in which no human driver would do so, setting up the possibility of a tailgater ramming into the Tesla’s rear end. I’ve seen this behavior in three situations:

• Another car crosses in front of me sufficiently far away that a human driver would not brake for it. It seems that the cruise control does not “understand” that the car that appears to be an obstacle will be long gone before I get there.

• A car in front of me slows and moves into a right-hand-turn lane. Often the cruise control will brake for this car even though I know that it will be in the turn lane before I get there.

• Traveling at speed on an interstate highway, the car will occasionally brake hard for no apparent reason. This is disconcerting and possibly dangerous. It seems to happen when cresting a hill and there’s one of those big, green, interstate highway signs across the road at the top of the hill. A human knows that the sign is way above the roadway, but I can understand that it doesn’t look that way from just below the top of the hill.

When the car brakes for no good reason like this, it does respond to the accelerator so it is easy to correct, hopefully before it causes a problem.

Remember To Brake for Lights and Stop Signs

One very real danger is that you must remember to brake for red lights and stop signs. The car doesn’t do it on its own. Of course, if there’s a car in front of you, it stopping will stop you. After driving for a while in stop-and-go traffic with cruise control, it is easy to become complacent about lights because most of the time there will be a car in front.

Interestingly, Tesla is working on that. A software update about two months ago added “visualization” of traffic lights and their current color. Although Tesla didn't say so, this is clearly a step toward delivering the first item on their “delivering later this year” list in the online ordering page shown above.

Autosteer

What is It?

Autosteer is true to its name: it steers the car, staying in your lane. Combined with cruise control, the car handles some of the most mundane aspects of driving.

Tesla warns that you are responsible for driving and that you must be attentive when using Autosteer. If the car detects that you are inattentive — it expects you to make small movements of the steering wheel — it first puts a gentle reminder to make small motions of the steering wheel, then flashes part of the screen blue, and eventually makes a piercing sound that will wake you from your slumber. If it has to do this often enough, it prohibits you from using Autosteer for a while.

Does it Work? Is it Useful?

It works well. My experience even on roads with faded lane markings has been good. The one exception is during heavy rain, when it sometimes warns of poor weather and shuts off. It occasionally warns that a particular camera is blocked, which seems to happen either from rain or when it is blinded by the sun.

Autosteer works, but is unhelpful on local roads.

It is more useful for highway driving. In particular, it reduces tedium on long drives helping me to drive longer without fatigue.

If you also purchase full self-driving capabilities, Autosteer becomes much more useful on the highway. I’ll talk about that below.

Is it Safe?

I haven’t had any really bad experiences with Autosteer. At first, it seemed to drive too far right in the lane. Then I discovered that it drives centered in the lane and I always drive left of center, something I never realized about my own driving.

Of course, if Autosteer does something you don’t like, you can take control just by starting to steer. You’ll feel a little resistance at first, but then there’s a bell sound and Autosteer shuts off and you’re steering as usual.

In one particular situation, Autosteer sometimes does something disconcerting, if not unsafe: When traveling in the right lane of a highway just past an entrance ramp coming in from the right, the car will sometimes pull to the right, toward the curved lane marking from the entrance ramp, as indicated by the green arrow. I’ve never felt in danger from this, but I have several times overridden Autosteer in this situation. Of course, I don’t know what would have happened had I not taken control.

Autopark

What is it?

Purchasing the “full self-driving capability” adds automated parking: Pull up to a parallel or a perpendicular (not angled) parking spot, the car indicates the space on the screen, you touch it, put the car in reverse, and it does the rest.

Does it Work? Is it Useful?

Autopark works reasonably well. Sometimes it is finicky about when it detects a parking spot, requiring that you drive slowly enough and at the right distance from a potential parking place.

If I tell it to park, usually it can do it. A few times, I felt like it was going to hit either a curb or an adjacent car and I stopped it by pressing the brake. I don’t know whether it would have stopped, adjusted, and succeeded, or whether it would have hit something. I wasn’t willing to take the risk!

People, including me, are impressed when they see the car autopark. But it isn’t particularly useful because (manual) parking is quite easy given the excellent back camera with lines showing where the car is headed. I rarely use autopark because I can park faster myself with little effort and no risk.

Is it Safe?

While autopark is underway you are sitting in the driver’s seat presumably paying attention. You can stop it instantly by stepping on the brake. As I said, there have been a few times when I stopped autopark. Even if I had let it continue, it is a very low speed maneuver and only property would have been damaged.

Summon

What Is it?

Purchasing the “full self-driving capability” also adds two kinds of summoning, in which you use your phone to direct the car to move on its own out of a parking place.

The simplest capability is plain old “summon.” As the accompanying screen from the Tesla mobile app indicates, you can direct the car to move in the forward or reverse direction. The car will pull straight forward or back straight back, until you release the button or it detects an obstacle. This is useful when trying to get in or out of a very tight parking spot, one of those situations where you'd ordinarily have to contort your body to get in or out of the car.

The more advanced “smart summon” can navigate parking lots to come get you. This is ideal, for example, when it is raining and you realize that your umbrella is in the car. Simply press “smart summon” and the car drives to wherever you’re waiting.

Does it Work? Is it Useful?

Summon works and is useful in limited circumstances. Other than demonstrating the capability to friends, I’ve used it once in the six months I’ve owned the car, but if you park frequently in lots with narrow spaces you may find it more useful.

Smart summon works sometimes. The safety requirement to keep the car in sight at all times makes it unusable in multi-story parking garages where you’d really like to avoid the elevator or climbing multiple flights of stairs. In other situations, it seems to work well in some parking lots and not in others. Some Tesla owners have discovered that smart summon works best if the lot is mapped in OpenStreetMaps. Indeed, some owners are adding or improving maps for parking lots they use to improve smart summon.

Smart summon is currently a parlor trick. I’ve tried it a few times when it would have been useful, but it didn’t work well enough or the lot was too crowded for me to feel safe using it. Being somewhat cynical, I’m guessing that Telsa released smart summon in its present state primarily to recognize revenue for all the sales they made of “full self-driving capability”. Otherwise, I can’t understand why they wouldn’t call smart summon a beta capability.

Is it Safe?

Simple summon seems very low risk: You’re standing near the car and if you release the directional button on your phone the car stops essentially instantly. So, if it hits something, you’re not paying attention.

Smart summon is different. The car could be as much as 200 feet away from you in a parking lot busy with other cars and pedestrians. You’re supposed to have the car within sight at all times. There is a mode that requires you to keep a button pressed on your phone for the car to keep moving; I set that mode.

So, an attentive user should be able to stop the car in time to avoid an accident, but I worry that another (human) driver might round a corner too quickly for either car to be able to stop, causing an accident. More importantly, I worry that an absentminded pedestrian could walk in the way of the moving car. Of course, it should stop, but I have no experience to build confidence in the safety.

Auto Lane Change

What Is It?

When Autosteer is active, Auto Lane Change will move your car into an adjacent lane. You use the turn signal to request the lane change. The car decides when it is safe to change lanes and executes the move, including appropriate speed change to smoothly merge into the lane, all automatically.

Does it Work? Is it Useful?

It works well and is incredibly useful, especially on the highway. When I first got the car, the lane changes were unnaturally sudden with uncomfortable acceleration. But a software update a few months after purchase fixed all of that.

I have used auto lane change extensively during several long trips, including high-traffic stretches of multi-lane interstate highway. It works so well that I feel it lowers my stress level and reduces fatigue.

Is it Safe?

Again, I can’t give you statistics, but my experience has been very good. I’ve deliberately requested unsafe lane changes and the car waited until there was a suitable opening before moving.

Several times, during a lane change, the car moved suddenly back into the original lane. In each case, another fast-moving car weaving in and out of lanes was moving toward my destination and the car corrected even before I realized what was happening. In fact, the danger is that I, not yet realizing what was happening, would take back control of the car, thus defeating the car’s defensive move.

Complacency is another potential danger. Auto lane change works so well that it would be easy to fall out of the habit of checking the blind spot, etc.

Navigate on Autopilot

What is It?

Navigate on Autopilot, which Tesla labels a beta feature, is about as close as it gets to automated driving. It is aimed at long-distance driving: You tell the nav system your destination, then once you’ve reached a highway on-ramp, it will drive to the appropriate highway off-ramp, based on your destination, along the way suggesting (or doing) lane changes based on both traffic flow and navigation.

Does it Work? Is it Useful?

I’ll answer the second question first: It is useful. I use it for most of my highway driving. But it doesn’t all work, at least not reliably. But parts of it work well.

Lane Changes for Traffic Flow

The part that works well is the combination of autosteer, traffic-aware cruise control, and auto lane change, together with suggested lane changes based on traffic flow. Basically, this means that while you’re traveling on the highway, the car is driving itself, passing other cars when necessary (you can specify what that means), and moving out of the passing lane when other cars are approaching from behind at speed. You can choose whether to allow the car to make lane changes completely on its own, or whether it suggests a lane change and you confirm using the turn signal. I do the latter.

Often, the car will suggest a lane change to pass before I even recognize that I’m overtaking the car in front of me. This is nice because it avoids driving up to another car’s rear and then passing.

Lane Changes for Following the Route

The car also suggests (or makes, depending on setting) lane changes necessary to stay on the route. For example, this happens when an interstate splits with one branch continuing on the same highway and another branch merging onto a second highway. Sometimes this works fine; other times it suggests unnecessary or even incorrect lane changes; other times it fails to suggest necessary lane changes. And the system seems oblivious to lanes closed due to construction or accident.

Based on your destination, the car will also automatically take the appropriate highway exit ramp. In my experience, this is hit and miss. Sometimes it does it and sometimes not, which makes this feature pretty useless because I don’t know of any way to predetermine which it will be in each particular situation.

Is it Safe?

Navigate on Autopilot is really an integration of other capabilities I’ve already discussed with the nav system. To the extent that those other capabilities are safe, so is Navigate on Autopilot.

The new danger is that it all works well enough that one has to fight complacency. It is easy to let one’s attention wander and then to be surprised by a situation that the car can’t necessarily handle, like a blocked lane. As I’ve described above, the Tesla does give a series of escalating warnings if it doesn’t detect you applying a small amount of torque on the steering wheel.

Summary

It’s Awesome

Autopilot and “full self-driving capability” are awesome new capabilities in a car. But they’re not game-changers — yet. They make it easier to take long trips and I’m willing to believe that I’m overall safer when using them than I would be driving myself. Tesla should supply data for an independent, expert analysis of the safety tradeoffs.

As a techie, it is also tremendous fun to try these new capabilities and think about how hard it is to automate driving in real life. And to see the step-by-step progress that Tesla is making through frequent software upgrades.

It’s Fraught

Still, it is early days for a lot of this capability. I paid $6,000 extra for many features that either don’t work well or aren’t very useful in practice. But I knew this going into that purchase: I chose to buy into the future of the car as the software evolves. I won’t know for several years whether or not that was a good decision. But I’m encouraged by the pace of improvement coming with software updates. What I can’t tell is whether the fundamental system design is in place to let Tesla eventually turn my car into a really self-driving car.

Trust is the Key Issue

You’re driving at 60 mph well behind the car in front of you and you see red brake lights go on. Yet, the Tesla isn’t slowing down. What do you do? You could apply the brakes and begin to slow, or you could trust that traffic-aware cruise control will brake when it is really necessary.

You're traveling at speed in the right lane of a highway and you see a big truck barreling down the entrance ramp. Do you trust that either the truck will yield appropriately, or that the car will slow or increase speed appropriately, or change lanes to avoid a potential problem? (I’ve never seen the car change lanes anticipating traffic merging in from an on-ramp.)

There are tons of examples like this. Over time, one learns what one feels comfortable trusting and what one wants to control completely manually. So, I’ve learned to trust that traffic-aware cruise control is going to brake whenever necessary; unfortunately, it also occasionally brakes unnecessarily, sometimes requiring me to override it. I’ve learned to trust that auto lane change will safely change lanes. But I set the car so that I must confirm a lane change proposed by navigate on autopilot because it makes too many mistakes (not dangerous ones, but inconvenient ones).

Yes, Tesla repeatedly states that human drivers are responsible for the safe operation of the car. But in real life, all of the autopilot and self-driving features are useless if one doesn’t trust them, to some degree, to work.

Software Updates

Software updates complicate the trust equation. I’ve been impressed with the new features and the fixes that have been delivered by software updates. But, as we all know from the software world in which we live, updates can also break things, sometimes things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the supposed new feature or fix. It’s no big deal if is something in the entertainment system, but is is a very big deal if, after an update, traffic-aware cruise control no longer stops in time or auto lane change now will change lanes when there’s a car in the way. So, whenever there’s an update, I drive especially attentively until I rebuild my confidence.

Complacency is also a Problem

As airplanes became increasingly automated in the 1980’s, pilot complacency was recognized as a real problem. We are going through that again with automation of driving: Tesla’s automation is good enough that it takes real effort for a driver to stay focused and be ready to intervene effectively if need be. I’ve certainly experienced this myself.

Until automation can fully automate driving, careful attention must be paid to the human factors issues of a combined man-machine driving experience. Tesla has paid attention to it and I hope that they continue to do so, even as that might dilute their automation marketing message.

When Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote her classic book on the stages of grief in 1969, she was analyzing the experience of persons who receive a diagnosis of terminal illness or those who experience the pain of the death of a loved one.  The five stages of grief that she describes can also provide insight into our current experience as we ponder the ravages of COVID-19.

Denial

A person with a fatal diagnosis may exclaim, “That can’t be true; I feel fine!”  Just so, our president declared, “It’s a hoax,” and “There are only 15 cases and they will go away soon.”  He and most Americans continued to meet, greet and interact as though nothing was amiss for weeks after the cases began to climb and public health experts issued dire warnings.  Congressmen even urged people to take the family out for dinner, and students thronged the usual spring break beaches and pubs even as schools closed and major political and athletic events were cancelled.  

Anger

Denial turns into anger in many terminally ill patients, “This is so unfair.”  It is the “Curse God and die” lament of Job’s angry wife.  Similarly, our president protests that it’s a foreign virus, the Chinese virus, and his staff goes snarky, calling it the “kung-flu.”  When questioned about the government’s slow response and his own false and misleading comments he whines, “It’s not our fault; everything we have done is perfect; the media has made it up to hurt me and my presidency.”  The media continues to press, “How did this happen; who is to blame; whose statements can we trust?”  Many people seethe as they anticipate the draining of their finances, the collapse of their businesses, the loss of jobs and their futures.

Bargaining

The terminal patient may plead, “Let me live till my grandson graduates,” or “If I get through this I will change the way I live.”  It is a grasping for straws, hoping that a miracle will make it all OK, or that through technology or genius a stunning solution will be revealed.  If a new (or old) treatment is found to be effective: “Wow, it worked on six people in an early trial.  It’s a game changer!”  At its most crass, we see that a corporation in Germany is way ahead in developing a vaccine, so our president wants to buy the company and get exclusive rights to the vaccine. Meanwhile, the Congress argues, negotiates and tries to make deals to help the segments of society that each faction cares about the most.

Depression

The grieving person may then fall into a sense of hopelessness and despair: “It’s as good as over, why even try to do anything,” or, “I can’t go on without my wife.”  We are a long way from that danger as a society, though some persons may well sink to that depth as the cases mount, the death toll rises and their fear along with it.  Especially when a loved one or we ourselves receive a dread diagnosis, any one of us will find our inner faith, courage, and resilience stretched to the breaking point.  This is a particularly difficult time for many because the normal resources for spiritual, mental and moral support are shut down and unavailable.  Religious groups, caring organizations and support groups are finding unique ways to reach out and provide solace and comfort, but their resources are stretched in unprecedented ways as well.

Acceptance

A dying patient or a loved one may finally reach the point of acceptance and resignation, of “Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be.”  That moment will probably never come for us as a society.  A vaccine and effective treatments will be developed and we will see light at the end of this dreadful tunnel.  In the meantime, however, a disciplined acceptance of the current state of affairs, of the uncertainty regarding how long it will take to come out of this tunnel and of the restrictions that have been imposed is very important.  If we let the current state of affairs exacerbate our frustration and anger we will only make ourselves and others more miserable.  

Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous prayer can help us all at this time: “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Rev. Rollin Russell

I’m voting for Elizabeth Warren. I’m explaining my thinking in the hope that it might help you think through your decision (even if you decide I’m wrong).

The “We Must Beat Trump” Electability Argument

Like many people, my priority is saving the country from another devastating Trump term.

The Only Way to Beat Trump Is ...

Some friends have passionately urged me to vote for Sanders because he’s the “real deal” in terms of driving change: He’ll fire up both new, young voters and older people who were too discouraged to bother voting in 2016. The only way to beat Trump, they say, is to get those people to vote.

Other friends have urged me to vote for KB3 (Klobuchar, Biden, Bloomberg, or Buttigieg) as the candidate most likely to beat Trump because KB3 can attract crossover Republicans who are disgusted with Trump but won’t vote for a lefty like SW (Sanders or Warren). The only way to beat Trump, they say, is to attract crossover Republicans and independents.

Others have said that a KB3 nominee will make them sit out the election, or maybe even vote for Trump because they want to send a message to the Democratic Party that more corporate-connected, centrist candidates and policies are unacceptable.

And still others say that if SW is the Democratic nominee, they and many others will vote for Trump rather than for a “socialist.”

KB3 it must be if we’re to beat Trump.

I’m Not Convinced

These arguments sound plausible. Pundits and journalists make them. There are no doubt voters in each of these categories. But, how many voters fall into each category? Will SW scare away more centrists and crossover voters than they’ll attract in left-leaning voters? Will KB3 draw in centrists and crossover voters, but lose left-leaning voters who stay home on Election Day?

There’s no convincing evidence that answers these questions. We learned in 2016 that polls aren’t necessarily reliable in this age, not even polls taken close to the election. And talking to friends is even worse because we tend to be friends with people like ourselves.

I conclude this:

Electability is unknowable.

Electability is, therefore, a lousy criterion for choosing a nominee. I’m going to vote for the candidate who I think is best for the country. You should too!

SW or KB3?

The first decision we all have to make is SW or KB3.

We have a ton of problems in the country to solve. We all know them: health care; climate change; the dire economic plight of many at a time of surging overall wealth; the decline of public, affordable, high-quality educational opportunities; the ascendency of lawless, authoritarian oligarchy; infrastructure decline; endless war; racism and white supremacy; attacks on our personal freedoms in the name of religion; a corrupt political system where money dominates and voter suppression is rampant; a tax system that not only doesn’t trickle down but flows up; gun violence; and more.

Both SW and KB3 want to tackle these problems. The difference is in how: KB3 want to make incremental changes within our existing systems; SW want to make big changes — what Warren calls “big structural change” and Sanders calls “political revolution.” This choice in approach is our fundamental choice. So let’s talk about the two approaches to change. We’ll then return later to the SW vs. KB3 decision.

Incremental Change

Benefits

There are important benefits to incremental change.

It is easier to implement than bigger changes. People feel less threatened by it. For example, people who currently have great health care feel much less threatened by the idea of adding a “public option” to Obamacare than the idea of overhauling our medical system with some variant of “Medicare for All”.

Powerful companies also feel less threatened by incremental change because they are confident that they can protect their businesses through using campaign contributions and lobbying to shape the regulations to their favor. (We see this, for example, in the rules that prevent Medicare from negotiating drug prices.)

Another important benefit of incremental change is the ability to experiment: Make a small change, see what happens, learn and adjust, repeat. And, when a mistake is made, the negative impact can be small enough that people are willing to try something else.

The relative stability delivered by incremental change is also important to both people and businesses because it makes long-term planning and decision making possible.

If a company makes a large investment in a factory to build something that we then outlaw or discourage, they have a big problem. And they’ll fight hard against any such change. We’re seeing that now in the energy industry: A power company that invests to build a gas-fired power plant based on a 40-year life expectancy is going to fight hard against renewable energy sources that would prove their investment a mistake.

Likewise, an individual that buys a home that is only affordable because of the tax subsidies provided for homebuyers is going to be very unhappy if we change the rules to remove those subsidies.

Drawbacks

The biggest drawback of incremental change is that it risks “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Ask those people at Kodak who kept improving film and film cameras. Of course, Kodak employees weren’t idiots and they even worked on digital photography technology. But because the company’s management was focused on maintaining their existing business, Kodak couldn’t make the switchover and they now just sputter along a small shadow of themselves. (I’m not picking on Kodak. This behavior is widespread and well understood in the business world, where it is called the “innovator’s dilemma.”)

Look at how incremental change has played out in health care. We all know that our health care system spends spends twice as much as other advanced countries do while delivering inferior results overall and bankrupting many individuals. We’ve been tinkering with how we provide healthcare for almost a century, but the result has been that we continue to have an ever increasingly expensive system that is as much about delivering profit to large insurance and healthcare companies as it is about taking care of people.

We’ve made incremental changes to how we pay for health care. We have introduced employer-provided private insurance (subsidized by hefty tax breaks), Medicare for older and disabled people, Flexible Spending Accounts, high-deductible insurance with Health Savings Accounts, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, a parallel medical system for veterans, supposedly not-for-profit hospitals that actually generate enormous profits, etc.

Nobody would design such a crazy quilt system. We got to it by a bunch of incremental changes over many years. Is the system going to collapse? Well, no, but it is consuming an increasingly large part of our economy while at the same time hurting many of our citizens. It is hard to imagine how further incremental changes will solve the problems in healthcare.

Again, I don’t mean to pick on health care. It is just one example where incremental change has failed.

Another example is our tax system. People and companies are subject to an enormously convoluted, complex tax system that delivers huge tax breaks to the wealthy and well-connected, but is a substantial burden to most poorer people. The Federal income tax system is so chockablock with tax breaks that a parallel tax system, called the Alternative Minimum Tax, was introduced to make sure that wealthy people pay at least some minimum amount of tax.

Again, nobody would design a tax system like the one we’ve arrived though incremental change over decades.

Big, Structural Change

Whatever you call it, making big changes quickly is disruptive. There will be winners and losers. The people and corporations that believe they will be losers will fight very, very hard to prevent changes or, at very least, blunt the impact of those changes on them.

Generally, support for the changes will be more diffuse than the opposition. Take the health care example. If we try to make big changes, powerful players in the healthcare industry will fight hard against them.

On the other hand, among the many citizens who are happy with their healthcare — call them the happy campers— some will oppose big change and some will recognize that because there are many other citizens with inadequate healthcare, change is necessary. Even among the happy campers who will go along with big changes, few will fight hard for it.

That leaves the people with inadequate healthcare to fight for big change. But they are mostly people without the resources to fight effectively for what would help them.

Bottom line: Building support for big change is very difficult because there will be strong, focused opposition and weaker, diffused support.

Benefits

Nevertheless, big changes can have a huge positive impact. For example: FDR’s New Deal pulled us out of deep recession (helped, to be sure, by World War II industrialization), introduced many worker’s rights, including the work week and minimum wages, provided economic security for many through Social Security and banking reforms, and introduced regulation of the securities industry. More recently, introducing Medicare in the 60’s kept many elderly out of poverty from healthcare costs.

All of these programs encountered fierce opposition at the time they were proposed and passed. And opposition to some continues even to this day. But they have all made a positive difference in the lives of many people.

Drawbacks

Of course, not only is big change hard to achieve, it can go awry. By its very nature, making big changes that affect many people and companies can have unintended side effects. Moreover, the opposition, working legislatively and through the courts, might succeed in changing or dismantling important parts of new programs, further complicating successful implementation.

Never Waste a Good Crisis

Machiavelli evidently first said, “Never waste the opportunity offered by a good crisis.” Winston Churchill popularized Machiavelli by saying “Never let a good crisis go to waste”.

FDR introduced the New Deal in response to the crisis of a deep recession that had people out of work, starving in the streets, and hopeless. People’s savings were wiped out. The crisis made it possible for him to succeed with big change.

Big change usually fails in the face of the strong focused opposition of those threatened by it. But in a crisis situation, the dynamics can change: People who would ordinarily sit on the sidelines become motivated to support change.

That’s where we find ourselves now: There are a lot of angry people.

Tens of millions of people are sufficiently disgruntled about their economic situation to support a populist on the right like Donald Trump, who blames “the politically correct” elite and the other — other races, other nations, the elite, the immigrant, etc. — for the problems of “the people.”

And, there are tens of millions of similarly disgruntled people who support a populist on the left like SW, who blame the wealthy and the “corrupt political establishment” for the problems of “the people.”

History would suggest that something must change, and quickly, or the situation will degenerate into violent revolution, with the outcome uncertain, but with our American democratic “experiment” in real danger.

So, we have maybe not a current crisis, but a series of looming crises. Is this enough to motivate people to accept big change? Or will we have to wait until we have economically-motivated violence, or climate-motivated violence, or racially-motivated violence, or a crisis of nationalism?

SW or KB3 Revisited

No one can predict with certainty whether our looming crises are enough to get people to accept big change. But, it is clear that continuing along our current trajectory is going to lead to an increasingly authoritarian, oligarchic government that will consolidate its power and suppress opposition. Our chance to change the country’s trajectory is to offer a better alternative before it is too late.

For that reason, we must elect SW and not KB3. A government led by KB3 will make incremental improvements, which would be good, but probably not enough to show Trump supporters that there’s a better way than right-wing authoritarian government.

S or W?

So, do we choose S or W? There are two sets of considerations: pragmatic and policy.

Policy

Let me start with the policy questions. Warren has deeply thoughtful policy positions. I don’t agree with all of them. I particularly question whether a wealth tax is practical. But her economic advisers at least have reasonable answers to my concerns in their book.

I have been impressed by Warren’s change on Medicare for All. She heard feedback and she responded. Some on the left are angry about this and she lost a lot of support. That’s misguided: Adapting to feedback while sticking to one’s principles is part of good change management when attempting to do something big.

Warren has worked most of her professional life on policies that affect the economic well-being of people. She has an incredibly deep understanding of how economic policy affects real people. And, with her work to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Board, she has shown that she can translate policy positions into implemented policies.

Sanders, too, has strong policy positions. I don’t find them as compelling and thoughtful as Warren’s, but that doesn’t particularly bother me. What I find disturbing is his dogmatism. He hasn’t shown any flexibility or give and take. Pure idealism might be inspiring, but it is not a practical way to get change accepted.

Pragmatics

Health and Age

Let’s start with the obvious: Sanders will be 79 on Inauguration Day and 87 by the end of his two terms. As much as I’d like to ignore age, people in their 80s often experience significant cognitive decline and lower energy levels. We know from the Reagan experience that those around a President can and will hide such health issues. Sanders has not been as forthcoming post-heart-attack about his medical situation as I’d like. His age and condition is a big risk, although he certainly shows enormous stamina and energy on the campaign trail.

Warren is almost eight years younger than Sanders. Still not an ideal age to become President, but she’d finish her presidency at about the same age as he’d start his, and she doesn’t have any known health issue.

Capitalism

Warren is a full-throated capitalist. She has made this clear. She wants capitalism with guardrails and appropriate regulation. She has shown in her career the ability to craft suitable regulations and create regulatory mechanism. That’s good.

Sanders is a “democratic socialist.” I know what that means and I’m fine with it. But this is a powerful attack vector from Trump and the GOP. I read many of the emails they send to supporters and I can tell you that they hurl “SOCIALISM” at Democrats at every turn. If Sanders is the nominee, this will be a huge problem, which no amount of explaining will solve.

Even without GOP attacks, people recognize that despite the many flaws in our particular version, capitalism has delivered enormous wealth (unevenly) to this country. Any confusion in their minds about “democratic socialism” will be a problem.

Debating Trump

The Democratic nominee will have to debate Trump repeatedly. Sanders has shown a phenomenal ability to deflect and stay on message during the Democratic debates this year and in 2016. It is very powerful. But he hasn’t shown the ability to take on someone like Trump.

Nor has Warren, but her attacks on Bloomberg in the most recent debate show promise that she’d be able to handle Trump. She would certainly rip him to shreds over his lies about the economy. She is without equal debating economic issues.

Anti-Semitism

(As a Jew, writing this paragraph gives me great pain.) Sanders is Jewish. His Judaism might not be an important part of his life, but we can be sure that the Trump campaign will incite anti-Semitic innuendo and code words, just as they incite racial hatred. In a close election, this could matter. A lot.

Leadership & Collegiality

Warren has shown that she can get stuff done at high levels of the Federal government. Her work creating the CFPB was exemplary and she worked both sides of the aisle to do it. How many other lawmakers can boast of creating an effective Federal agency.

Dogmatism

This is pretty squishy, but ... Sanders comes across to me as unyieldingly dogmatic. This may be part of his populist appeal, but I think it will get in the way of actually governing. Warren has strong views, which she states clearly, but she doesn’t have the dogmatism.

Summary

On the surface, KB3 is attractive. After all, can’t we all get along? But, eight years of KB3 would only make incremental progress on our country’s most important problems. KB3 would be dramatically better than another Trump term and if that’s who the Democratic Party nominates, that’s who I’ll support.

But I strongly prefer SW, particularly Warren. I give Sanders tremendous credit for changing the conversation in American politics and for building a coalition of supporters.

Sanders is like Moses reaching the Promised Land. He kept the people together and got them there, but he’s not the right leader to takes us into it. That leader is Warren.

Since my last post about my Tesla Model 3 experiences, I’ve driven it another 2,700 miles and have taken two long trips. Here are new things that I’ve learned.

Losing Charge Overnight

We drove to Manhattan and stayed for two weeks. Yes, I know that it is crazy to take a car into Manhattan, but we needed to transport a bunch of stuff and people, including bringing our newborn granddaughter home from the hospital. Stupid as bringing a car to Manhattan was, we learned some things.

We charged the car at the 47th Street supercharger upon arriving in Manhattan, planning to not have to charge during our stay in Manhattan. (The supercharger is in a commercial parking garage, which charges for an hour of parking, plus you still pay the supercharger fees.)

Plummeting Charge

The manual says that the car will lose about 1% of charge daily when unused, which was fine for our stay. We were surprised when we took the car out of the garage and it was down 4 or 5% per day. A quick check of the mileage ruled out any joyrides by the garage attendants.

So much for charging when we entered Manhattan and then not having to bother about it. I tried turning off Sentry Mode from the app, but it only helped a little. Partway through our stay I had to go back to the supercharger. Not good.

This was also concerning because we often leave a car at the airport while we’re gone for a few weeks.

Testing at Home

When we returned home, I left the car unplugged for several nights in my garage to test the battery drain. Surprise: no problem.

The Culprit

So, I set up an appointment at the Tesla Service Center. They tested the battery and said it was fine. They also looked at the car’s logs for our time in Manhattan and suggested that the culprit was the new Summon feature. Huh?

Summon was delivered as an update a few weeks before our trip. I tried it out and decided it was a nice parlor trick but not good enough to be genuinely useful. I demonstrated it to some out-of-town visitors and they were suitably wowed. And, to be slightly cynical, perhaps it was enough to let Tesla recognize some revenue for delivering “self driving”.

But what did this have to do with my battery drain? Turns out that Summon has a Standby mode, where it leaves the car ready to respond quickly to a summon. The service center tech suggested I turn standby off. He also suggested that I turn sentry mode off from the car not the app.

So, why didn’t my test at home show battery drain? By default, both Standby mode for Summon and Sentry Mode are off at your home location.

Please, Tesla

Problem solved. But I sure wish that when Tesla introduces a new feature that affects important but unrelated aspects of the car‘s behavior it makes that very clear. Would have saved me a lot of time and a little angst.

Taking a Long Day Trip

For reasons I won’t bore you with, my wife and I needed to drive from Chapel Hill, NC to St. Petersburg, FL in a day, stay overnight, pick up some stuff early the next morning, then drive to Atlanta for Christmas-eve dinner and Christmas day with relatives, then return to Chapel Hill the next day.

Google Maps says that the trip to St. Petersburg takes 10.5 hours. So, we figured that a trip in a gasoline-fueled car would take maybe 13 hours with traffic, rest breaks, and food stops. We knew it would take longer in the Tesla, so we set out from Chapel Hill at 6 am with the car charged to 100%.

Slow Down!

The trip planner had us making our first charging stop at Santee, SC, arriving at the supercharger with single-digit charge percentage. It was disconcerting when the car started warning that if we drove over 65 mph we would not reach the supercharger.

We manually replanned to make an earlier charging stop at Florence, SC to avoid the annoyance of driving below the speed limit on a busy road.

Waiting in Line

Our next charging stop was at the Savannah, GA supercharger, which is in the airport parking garage. Two of the supercharger stalls were broken and the rest were all occupied, including one where the charging was complete.

Got to meet some friendly Tesla drivers, which was great. But it was an hour before we got a stall.

The “line” was informal and there were actually two of them in different lanes. Everyone was friendly, but we did need to have some discussion about who had arrived first. There was an attendant — not clear if he worked for the garage or for Tesla — who helped organize the line. He told me that the evening before there were 13 cars waiting to charge. Not good!

This was our first experience having to wait to charge.

Eating

There’s no avoiding the extra time it takes to charge. One of the most effective ways to reduce overall travel time is to eat while charging. Bringing food in the car, or getting takeout somewhere near the charger, or having a restaurant choice in walking distance of the charger lets you overlap eating and charging. On a long trip, this can make a big difference.

But it takes planning. The information to do this planning is available, but not conveniently. This could be improved.

Please, Tesla

Of course, Tesla needs to make sure that all stalls are working and to rapidly expand the supercharger network as the Tesla Model 3 becomes popular.

Tesla could also take some shorter-term steps that would help:

1. Have an automated check in process when arriving at fully-utilized superchargers that sequences the waiting cars and directs drivers to an available stall when it is that car’s turn.

2. Propose adjustments to the charging plan based on current and historical usage patterns at particular superchargers to avoid sending more cars to already overloaded superchargers. This could be done much like the nav system does to go around traffic jams.

3. Provide full information in the nav system about food possibilities at all superchargers.

4. Allow more user input to the nav system when developing the plan:

   • Set a minimum charge level with which we’re comfortable (e.g, I want to charge before I get below 10%);

   • Set a minimum charge level at the destination (e.g., I know I need to drive first thing in the morning and want at least 30% charge);

   • Manually specify a charger to include in the plan because there’s a good place to eat nearby and the time will be appropriate.

5. Support trip planning on the phone app. This would make it easier to plan ahead.

We Made It!

We arrived St. Petersburg at 11 pm. It would be a long day regardless, but a few better planning tools would have helped us a lot.

The Bottom Line

I love driving the Tesla Model 3. For the altruistic environmental impact reasons I discussed in my first post, I’m willing to put up with somewhat longer trips. But I’d also like to see Tesla take some further steps to minimize the inconvenience of taking long trips in an EV.

I bought a Tesla Model 3 electric vehicle (EV) about two months ago. Tesla is undeniably cool, but is an electric car practical today and is it plausible that the hype about electric, self-driving cars will come true sometime soon? This post gives my initial impressions after putting about 4,000 miles on it, including a two-day 700-mile trip and a two-day 500-mile trip.

My Motivation

The official party line

Greenhouse gases from transportation contribute about 29% of all US greenhouse gas emissions. Eliminating car emissions would help. A lot.

Yes, I know that most power plants emit greenhouse gases. Even so, burning fossil fuels in power plants generally produces less emissions than burning gasoline or diesel in internal combustion engines (ICE). Charging EVs partially from renewable sources, like rooftop solar, or grid-delivered renewable sources like hydroelectric, solar farms, and wind farms, makes the picture even better.

Making big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is going to take progress on multiple fronts simultaneously. We have to accelerate replacing ICE vehicles at the same time that we make progress on replacing fossil-fuel fired power plants with renewable sources.

It’s a chicken and egg situation. To get people to buy EVs, they have to become better and cheaper, with rapid charging infrastructure readily available everywhere. I want to help make the market, even if, from an individual perspective, it would be sensible to wait for the technology to mature and prices to drop further.

The other reason

My wife would tell you that the Tesla is my new toy. She’s right! I like technology and computers. The Tesla is more a computer on wheels than a car with computers inside.

Disclosure

I believe enough in Tesla’s vision that I’ve long owned shares in the company. I’ve stuck with it through lots of volatility as the company has made bone-headed decisions like buying Solar City, has overpromised and underdelivered in a number of ways, and has run afoul of various issues with the SEC. It has been a very profitable investment.

Now that I’ve experienced owning one of their products, I’m more convinced than ever that Tesla could disrupt the transportation industry. So, I continue to own Tesla stock. It is only a few percent of my investment portfolio, not enough to influence what I write, but I’m letting you know nevertheless.

The Car

Cost

You might have read that the Model 3 is a $35,000 car. For a long while, you couldn’t actually buy the base configuration. Maybe you can now; I’m not sure.

Mine is the long-range, all-wheel drive version (+$12,900), with premium interior (+$1,000), 19-inch wheels (+$1,500), metallic paint (+$1,000) and full self-driving capability (+$6,000). The latter is more a bet on the future than a reality today.

In practice, you’ll also want to buy a Wall Connector ($500) — Tesla’s name for a charger — and pay an electrician to run a 60-amp, 220V circuit for it.

While neither the least- nor the most-expensive configuration, at $58,690 delivered (not including the charger), it is, by far, the most expensive car I’ve ever purchased.

Driving Experience

It is also the most phenomenal car I’ve ever driven. The quiet, effortless acceleration, whether from a standstill or at highway speeds, is astounding. Even its partial acceleration is forceful enough to be uncomfortable. I can’t imagine why anyone other than a racer would want the high-performance Model 3.

Beyond sheer performance, it handles wonderfully and is a pleasure to drive. The regenerative braking takes some getting used to, but after a week or so it is completely natural and I rarely need to use the brake pedal other than to come to a complete standstill.

It’s All About the Software

It also takes getting used to the complete lack of a dashboard — all information is displayed on its computer screen — and most “buttons” and “knobs” are menu items on the screen.

Want to open the glovebox? There’s a button on the screen. At first, I thought that this was ridiculous. But once I learned about valet mode, which restricts the car’s speed and acceleration, it made sense: Valet mode also prevents access to the glovebox and frunk (front trunk). It is all controlled by the software.

This is a theme. The car is, at its core, software that controls a mechanical platform. Software updates, which are delivered via WiFi in your garage or the car’s built-in cellular connection, change the car in significant ways. There have been six updates since I’ve owned my car.

These updates have delivered changes ranging from the silly (new games that one can play on the screen while parked), to the more useful (like new streaming music and entertainment options), to new features (like “come to me” — under some circumstances the car can drive itself to you from where it is parked), to improvements in its “autopilot” system, to still more power. The most recent update improved regenerative braking so that it is more effective at very low speeds, improved the autopilot system to recognize construction cones, and added a setting to have the navigation system automatically direct you to the location of the next appointment on your calendar (the car can optionally synchronize with your phone’s calendar).

Of course, software updates, being what they are, can cause changes that people don’t like. I haven’t experienced such undesirable updates, but I know others who have.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that, as a car, the Tesla Model 3 is phenomenal. Although all modern cars have computers embedded in them, Tesla takes this to a new level, where the computer and software control are central to the experience, not hidden away in the innards. People who are uncomfortable with computers probably won’t like it, at least not at first. But the iPhone generation will find it compelling, as do I.

Purchase Experience

As if to signal the new experience awaiting the buyer, the purchasing experience is new too. I bought the car entirely online.

Ordering

Tesla has struggled with how to sell the car. Many states have laws that help car dealerships and prohibit direct sales by auto manufacturers. The details don’t matter here (although they certainly are an example of regulations to protect influential businesses not consumers).

Tesla’s website makes it simple to configure your car and place the order. I was comfortable ordering online without a test drive because of Tesla’s return policy: You can return the car for a full refund within 7 days or 1,000 miles. Indeed, whoever got a 7-day test drive before?

The website handles financing and trade-ins too. I didn’t finance, so I can’t report on that part of the experience. But I did trade in my old car. The website asks for make, model, and VIN number, asks you to certify that is in working order, then they get back to you with an offer a few days later. As a reasonableness test, I also got an offer from CarMax. I accepted Tesla’s better offer.

Delivery

Tesla promised two-week delivery. It took just under a month. There were a few communications glitches, like receiving an email telling me when to pick up my car when it wasn’t really available yet. And, the website could have been clearer about the timetable for providing insurance information.

Once pickup was really scheduled, everything went smoothly, but the experience was bare bones: We signed the papers while standing next to a chair-less desk in a garage-like setting, and the introduction to the car was, to put it generously, scattered and haphazard. On the other hand, the Tesla app they tell you to install on your phone has excellent video introductions.

Range Anxiety

When friends learn that I bought a Tesla, the first question they ask is “how far can you drive it?” Indeed, this was the first question my wife asked when we were considering the purchase. Tesla’s answer for the “long range” model I bought is 310 miles. They’ve recently increased it to 325 miles.

As with ICE cars the real answer is “it depends.” There are many factors, including speed, how fast you accelerate, outside temperature, using the heat or A/C, and more.

But range per se is not the real issue. The real issue is where are you going to charge the car, how long does it take, and does this make it too inconvenient to travel where you want to go.

I want to be clear: Compared to the availability of gas stations and the time to fill a car’s gas tank, taking a long trip in an EV will take more planning with more and longer stops than the same trip in an ICE vehicle.

Whether this matters to you depends a lot on your travel pattern. I can only speak to my experience thus far.

Local Travel is Anxiety-Free

I live in a house with a garage. I had a Tesla Wall Connector (charger) installed in the garage and charge the car every night I’m home to 90% of capacity, which is what Tesla recommends to maximize battery longevity. It takes me about 15 seconds to plug the charger cable into the car at night and another 15 seconds to remove it in the morning.

Since time-of-day electricity rates are available where I live, I set the car to charge during off-peak hours, which lowers the cost of the energy I use by almost two-thirds. It is an impressively smooth process. I spend less time dealing with charging than I did at gas stations with my ICE car.

For me, local travel is anxiety-free. Your experience would probably be different if you live in an apartment complex or urban area.

Trips Away from Home Require Planning

As I said before, I’ve taken two two-day trips. I’ve done these trips many times in an ICE car, with no planning whatsoever. With the Tesla, I have to think about it.

At one-level, planning is easy: Enter your destination into the nav system and it will plan a route, including charging stops and an estimate of battery charge state at the destination. I’ve been impressed with its accuracy (more on that later).

Superchargers are Key

Tesla’s extensive network of superchargers makes long trips reasonable. Superchargers can pump a lot of energy into the car rapidly. Whereas my home charger can fully charge the car overnight, some superchargers can do it in well less than an hour.

Superchargers are sprinkled along major highways and other locations. Some are located in mall parking lots, so there are, for example, eating options while charging. Some are located in parking lots of gas station convenience stores like Wawa. Others are located at highway rest stops.

Once charging starts, the charging cable is locked to the car and you can leave the car. So, if there’s someplace to eat or shop you can do that. Sort of.

The problem is that when charging is complete, you’re expected to move your car to make room for others. If the charging station is busy, a 50 cents per minute idle fee kicks in if you don’t move your car within 5 minutes of charge completion. The fee rises to a dollar per minute if the charging station is full. These fees are steep, so you really have to move your car.

The Tesla app on your phone notifies you when charging is near complete and when it is complete, so it is possible to do something else and still avoid the idle charge.

Better Planning is Needed

There are two big problems though.

The least important problem is that there’s no way to specify that you’d prefer to stop at a charger with good eating options while you’re charging. If eating and charging have to be done separately the trip takes longer. Tesla’s website does have information about the amenities available at each supercharger location, but that information is not integrated into the nav system’s planner. You can plan manually, but that is without benefit of the car’s knowledge of your battery’s charge level and accurate predictions of energy usage based on driving and weather conditions.

The more important problem is that the nav system doesn’t plan trips with multiple destinations, or, alternatively, allow you to specify a desired charge level at the destination. I’ll explain why this is important using an example from my 700-mile trip.

Our trip originated in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We were going to a funeral in Baltimore on a Friday morning. On Thursday, we drove to my sister’s house in Northern Virginia and stayed overnight, intending to drive to the funeral Friday morning, about an hour and a half drive.

We set out from Chapel Hill with my sister’s address in the nav system. It had us make two short charging stops on the way to my sister’s house. No problem.

But how much charge would we have when we arrived at her house? Not enough to feel comfortable about making it to the funeral and then to the meal after the funeral.

If I had been able to specify a desired charge level when arriving at my sister’s house, the nav system could have planned a charge at a supercharger close to her house on the way there and we wouldn’t have had this problem.

So, early Friday morning I used the Tesla app to find the closest supercharger and told my sister I was heading out to charge up the car. When I told her where it was, she said that was crazy because I’d get caught in terrible rush hour traffic and might not make it to the funeral in time. Not a good solution.

Destination Chargers

I then looked at Tesla’s list of what they call destination chargers. These are chargers located at destinations like hotels. There was one at a hotel about 3 miles from my sister’s house. They charged me $15 to get into their garage and use the charger for an hour. The charger, unfortunately, delivered even less power than my home charger. After an hour of charging it only added a few percent of charge: Expensive and inadequate for what I needed.

It would have been fine for an overnight charge if I was staying at the hotel. Or would it? This hotel had hundreds of rooms but only two chargers. There’s no way to reserve a charger. So, it is a crapshoot whether a charger will be available to use overnight. You can’t necessarily depend on destination chargers.

We Made It!

Well, we went to the funeral and then to the meal afterward. By the time we arrived for the meal, the battery indicator was yellow instead of green. When I parked, the car shut sentry mode, which uses the car’s sensors as part of an alarm system, to preserve battery. This was disconcerting.

Since I knew that there was a supercharger about ten miles away I wasn’t really worried about running out of charge. But that supercharger was off the route for our trip home. Going to it would have probably added 45 minutes to an already-long drive through what I knew would be heavy traffic.

After the meal, I put our home into the nav system as the destination. To my surprise, the plan had us going to a supercharger about thirty miles away but on our route home. The plan said we’d arrive at the charger with 7% charge. I was thinking that we should go to the closer supercharger instead, but my wife said that we should go for it since the charge predictions had been accurate so far.

We arrived at the Laurel, Maryland supercharger with 6% charge, the battery indicator now red. We charged up and headed home!

Dealing with Range Anxiety

I don’t really have range anxiety. I bought the car knowing that I’d have to think about charging way more than I ever had to think about finding a gas station. And, I’m now convinced that the supercharger concept works to make long-distance travel reasonable.

But I’m also convinced that the nav system’s planning capability needs to be improved to consider how the charging plan meshes with one’s real-life plan. A simple approach would be to allow the driver to specify charge level goals at destinations.

Perhaps a better approach would be to use information about one’s real-life plan to influence the charging plan. Or maybe there could be away to edit the charging plan the nav system proposes.

Whatever approach is taken would require careful design to avoid too much complexity. The nav system already has a loose integration with one’s phone’s calendar — this might be an avenue for doing something better.

Self-Driving

As I’ve said above, the Model 3 is a phenomenal car.

Beyond being a car, Tesla and others are hyping self-driving. Today, the Model 3 has what I’d call nascent self-driving capabilities. It can do a few things quite well, but it is far from being able to drive itself in general situations.

One of the most interesting aspects of Tesla’s software front-and-center approach is that the car’s capability is constantly evolving. Indeed, the updates my car has received so far have made noticeable improvements in “self driving.”

I’ll discuss Tesla’s self-driving capability in a future blog post.

I’ve seen many articles about how Wall Street is attacking progressives, especially progressive Democratic candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Both have responded in pretty much the same way: If Wall Street doesn’t like us we must be doing something right. And, send money.

Come to Dinner

Last week, my wife and I experienced firsthand a less public but more insidious version of the attack. We’ve been Fidelity Investments customers for more than a decade and have a trusted relationship with one of their client advisors. He periodically invites us to a customer dinner at a local country club featuring a speaker. This year’s topic was billed in the invitation email as

An Evening with Bruce Johnstone
Economic uncertainty with politics and market volatility. Will free market principles be offset by politics and trade wars? How might we change the culture in DC to reduce uncertainty and improve confidence?

Sounded interesting. Johnstone was one of the most successful equity income fund managers in the 70s and 80s and now has the title “Managing Director & Senior Marketing Investment Strategist” at Fidelity. Hard to know what this means, but the food is good, the price (free) was right, and we’ve learned some things at previous dinners.

Well, the food was good. But the talk was a rambling screed of Republican talking points and explicit attacks on Elizabeth Warren, all couched as investment advice. (To be fair, Johnstone did say that legal immigration is good for the country and the economy.) If there had been data or evidence or compelling logic I would have patiently and thoughtfully listened. But, no, it was all just talking points backed by innuendo.

I won’t bore you with all of it, but there are a few egregious examples that are worth discussing.

Socialism leads to Venezuela and Cuba

Johnstone said that socialism leads to Venezuela and Cuba. I’ve been to Cuba and it’s economic situation is indeed awful. And, I have no doubt that Venezuela’s economy is awful too.

But Johnstone wants you to connect the dots, with no evidence, that

1. Venezuela and Cuba failed because they are socialist.

2. Electing a progressive Presidential candidate will make the US socialist, eliminating capitalism and the power of free markets.

These are both ridiculous: Venezuela and Cuba failed because they are corrupt, they are dictatorships, with leaders for life, centralized planning, and little free market. Cuba also suffers from the decades-long US embargo (which they call “the blockade”). And, neither Sanders nor Warren advocates converting our economy to socialism.

What they do advocate is government funding of services like health care and education, which many people consider basic human rights in a wealthy country like ours. And, they advocate changing our tax policies that allow a very tiny minority of our people to own the vast majority of our nation’s wealth.

Deregulate Everything

Johnstone said that regulations cause uncertainty, which stifles economic growth. So we should deregulate.

To support this, he showed a graph of the number of pages published in the Federal Register each year. I don’t have his chart, but this data is widely available and often cited. He pointed out how regulations are decreasing under the Trump administration and how good that is.

This thinking is flawed:

1. Pages published in the Federal Register may add regulations or may remove regulations. Page count reflects activity, not what that activity accomplishes.

2. Many companies benefit from regulations that inhibit their competitors, subsidize their products, or that provide legal protections (e.g., my product met government safety standards so I’m not liable that it injured you.)

3. Regulations can protect society from runaway focus on short-term profit at the expense of harm to society and to the economy. We’ve been to this party, for example, with the latest recession.

4. If the issue for companies is, as Johnstone said, uncertainty, deregulation will be just as harmful as regulation.

Elizabeth Warren is Bad for the Economy & The Country

Juxtaposed with his socialism screed, Johnstone showed this cover from the October 26th issue of The Economist, implying that electing her would lead to Venezuela and Cuba. What he didn’t do is actually discuss what the cover article said. Here are a few quotes:

• “But as remarkable as Ms Warren’s story is the sheer scope of her ambition to remake American capitalism. She has an admirably detailed plan to transform a system she believes is corrupt and fails ordinary people.”

• “Plenty of her ideas are good. She is right to try to limit giant firms’ efforts to influence politics and gobble up rivals.”

• “But at its heart, her plan reveals a systematic reliance on regulation and protectionism. As it stands, it is not the answer to America’s problems.”

• “Some Republican and Wall Street critics claim that Ms Warren is a socialist. She is not. She does not support the public ownership of firms or political control of the flow of credit. Instead she favours regulations that force the private sector to pass her test of what it is to be fair.”

• “However, if the entire Warren plan were enacted, America’s freewheeling system would suffer a severe shock.”

So, The Economist has some issues with Warren’s platform but is quite balanced in their analysis. She wants to “remake American capitalism” — what she calls “big structural change” — but she most definitely doesn’t want to lead us to Socialism and Venezuela/Cuba.

You’d never know that from what Johnstone said and implied.

Taxing the Wealthy Stifles Innovation

Yeah, Bill Gates said this recently. And other billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg are piling on. But where’s the evidence? This country had plenty of innovation in the 50s and 60s when taxes on the wealthy were very high.

Are we really to believe that Bill Gates decided to build Microsoft because tax rates on billionaires were low? Of course not. He was a brilliant “kid” who also turned out to be a successful businessman who built a huge business using a combination of good product and technology decisions and monopolistic business practices.

Did Mark Zuckerberg analyze tax rates on billionaires in his dormitory at Harvard when he started what became Facebook? Like Gates, Zuckerberg built Facebook through a combination of good product and technology decisions and monopolistic business practices.

It is hard to imagine that high taxes on billionaires would have stopped Gates or Zuckerberg. Just like the high taxes of the 50s and 60s didn’t stop an earlier generation of innovators at IBM from revolutionizing computing through a combination of good product and technology decisions and monopolistic business practices.

Stay Tuned

This attack on progressive candidates by industry and extremely wealthy people is going to ramp up as these groups feel that their dominance is threatened. We’re already hearing billionaires whine about potential tax increases. And Amazon spent over $1.5 million on the 2019 Seattle City Council race — a drop in the bucket for Amazon but a big deal in a city council race.

It is important to question the unsubstantiated claims and innuendo that are being made in these attacks.

The 2017 corporate tax cuts and the tax break on repatriation of profits from foreign subsidiaries were supposed to increase investment and create jobs. As most economists predicted, corporate profits have soared but few companies have increased investment or created jobs.

Why? One reason is that money has been cheap since the recession. Any reasonably healthy corporation has been able to borrow cheaply. So when the tax cut came along, corporations didn’t have much pent-up desire to make investments. If they had had something they wanted to invest in, they would have already done so.

A CEO’s (Mythical) Conversation with Himself

So what should I do with all this newfound money? Let’s see, maybe we could raise our workers' wages. Nah, why do that? Hmm, most of my pay depends on our stock's price. I need our stock price to be above the strike price of my options or they're worth nothing. And, since I own a lot of stock, the higher the better.

The fastest, most reliable way to raise the stock price is to buy back our own shares. And I'll be a hero to the shareholders and board, so they'll give me a big bonus this year, too. Wow, this is great.

Share Buybacks Soar

The 2017 corporate tax cuts didn’t start share buybacks; they just whipped them into a frenzy.

Stepping back in time, William Lazonick, writing in Harvard Business Review​1, shows that from 2003 through 2012, the 449 companies that were in the S&P 500 index that whole time used 54% of their earnings — a total of $2.4 trillion — to buy back their own stock. As Lazonick goes on to explain:

Why are such massive resources being devoted to stock repurchases? Corporate executives give several reasons ... none of them has close to the explanatory power of this simple truth: Stock-based instruments make up the majority of their pay, and in the short term buybacks drive up stock prices. In 2012 the 500 highest-paid executives ... received, on average, $30.3 million each; 42% of their compensation came from stock options and 41% from stock awards. By increasing the demand for a company’s shares, open-market buybacks automatically lift its stock price, even if only temporarily, and can enable the company to hit quarterly earnings per share (EPS) targets.

As a result, the very people we rely on to make investments in the productive capabilities that will increase our shared prosperity are instead devoting most of their companies’ profits to uses that will increase their own prosperity—with unsurprising results. Even when adjusted for inflation, the compensation of top U.S. executives has doubled or tripled since the first half of the 1990s, when it was already widely viewed as excessive.

Share buybacks soared after the tax cut became effective in 1Q18, rising to a record $823.2 billion for the year ending March 2019, up 43.1% year-over-year​2. On a calendar year basis, 2018 share buybacks were up 55% over 2017. Share buybacks reached new record highs in every quarter of 2018. In 2019, the buyback frenzy is abating, but remains at record levels.

Dividends Are Up Too

You might think that maybe share buybacks are up so much because companies cut back on returning money to shareholders via dividends. Nope! In 2018, dividends among the S&P 500 were up almost 9% over 2017.

Total Yield is Way Up

Another way to look at the effect of the tax cut it to look at the total return to shareholders of share buybacks and dividends combined. Total yield among the S&P 500 in 2017 was 4.12%, jumping to 6.01% in 2018, a whopping 46% increase.

Business Investment Increased a Little

The increase in share buybacks and dividends after the tax cuts doesn’t necessarily imply that business investment didn’t increase too. It did.

According to the Federal Reserve​3, gross private domestic investment, which is a measure of investment by private businesses, went from $3.37 trillion in 2017 to $3.63 trillion in 2018, an increase of just under 8%. (Note that these Federal Reserve numbers include all businesses, not just those in the S&P 500.)

Putting It In Perspective

To put it in perspective, combined return to S&P 500 shareholders from share buybacks and dividend increases increased by 46% from 2017 to 2018, while overall business investment increased less than 8%.

It is also helpful to look at buybacks and dividends among the S&P 500 as a percentage of after-tax earnings. In 2017, buybacks were 55% of earnings and dividends were 45% of earnings. In 2018, buybacks climbed to 72% of earnings and dividends fell to 41% of earnings. Interestingly, in 2018, S&P 500 corporations returned more than they earned to shareholders.

Also observe that these corporations spent more on buybacks than on dividends. Why? Well, first, there’s the effect of buybacks on executive compensation. Second, buybacks deliver wealth to shareholders as capital gains, which, for domestic investors, have significant tax advantages compared with dividends, and, for foreign investors, are untaxed by the US.

What a great deal: The administration gave corporations huge tax breaks arguing that, contrary to economists’ predictions, the tax breaks would increase investment, creating more jobs and wage growth in the future, which, in turn, would lead to increased tax revenues. None of this happened. The economists were right!

The Supply-Side Argument is Wrong

We’ve seen repeatedly that in real life this supply-side argument is wrong. It was wrong when Reagan cut taxes, it was wrong when Bush cut taxes, and it is wrong now.

This might seem counterintuitive, but it is not hard to understand: When taxes are low, company executives take wealth out of their companies and deliver it to themselves and other shareholders, losing little to taxes. Higher taxes discourage taking wealth out of the company because more of the company’s wealth will go to paying taxes.

With higher taxes, the best way to retain corporate wealth is to plow it back into the company, as capital investments, increased R&D, or improved worker pay. Such investments lead to longer-term corporate growth, including more jobs. And, increases in worker pay translate into increased consumer demand, helping further to boost the economy.

Bottom Line

The 2017 corporate tax cuts primarily delivered more wealth to the already wealthy and led to little investment in the future of our economy. Instead, they caused the Federal deficit to soar as tax revenues fell while neither boosting the economy nor accomplishing anything of value for the country’s future.

Not smart.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tony Wikrent and Ava Nackman for helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

In a New York Times Op-Ed yesterday, Thomas Edsall noted that Trump is on a path to surpass Obama’s record collection of small donations — those under $200. What is Trump's appeal to small donors?

Confession

First, I confess: When Trump announced that he was holding a rally in Greenville, NC, I requested tickets, not to go, but to help disappoint his obsession with crowd sizes.

Now I’m punished by regular emails from his campaign. Like the many emails I get from Democratic candidates, Trump’s emails ask for money. Some offer exciting chances to "discuss our Campaign Strategy for the rest of the year with you over breakfast”. At least Elizabeth Warren wants to buy me a beer, not just pancakes.

He’s even "told my team I wanted to bring someone who has been by my side from the very beginning, and I couldn’t think of anyone more LOYAL or supportive than Lee, from North Carolina.” If he can’t think of anyone more LOYAL than me, he’s in trouble. (Let’s hope.)

Small-donor Appeal

For reasons I’ll explain, the Trump campaign probably thinks I’m a potential small donor. So, to understand their approach to small donors, let’s look at one of those emails:

Here’s the first part of the email, with my handwritten annotations in red.

Starting at the bottom, the campaign knows that I’ve never contributed, so I’m likely to be a small donor. The email immediately tries to connect to me as a good Christian among the many “forgotten” people in our country. I’m supposedly one of the people who’s been screwed by the Washington elite who have gotten rich off the government while I haven’t. That message is quite explicit.

Then it gets more subtle: Don’t worry, with our “Beautiful WALL” we’re taking care of keeping out those other people who threaten you. And we’ve made America respected again, which, of course, means that you’re respected again.

But now it is up to you: become part of a “select group of donors”. In fact, "don’t share this offer”: You’re that special.

After some buttons to contribute various amounts, the email finishes with appeals to my patriotism:

I especially love the PS. Next time he’s at the “office” he’s going to be looking for my name. Give me a break.

As progressives we share common values and a vision of a just and equitable world articulated as the progressive freedom vision. The “essential freedoms” that flow from our shared values require advocating relentlessly for specific policies, and advocating for candidates who support and champion these policies. This post focuses on federal tax policy for individuals. We suggest several levels of policy change, labeled progress, ambitious, and full.

Federal tax policies exacerbate the large and growing disparities in wealth in our country and play an important role in determining whether people have the Life & Human Dignity and Economic Opportunity essential freedoms.

Progress: Eliminate the Social Security wage base cap

Social Security aims to provide basic economic security for our senior citizens and disabled citizens of any age. It is funded by a 12.4% (2019) tax on wages, split equally between employer and employee (self-employed workers pay the entire tax). Only wages up to the wage base cap of $132,900 (2019, inflation adjusted annually) are taxed.

Social Security is unsustainable and will become more so as the baby boomer generation fully retires. Payments have been reduced repeatedly and further reductions are being threatened. The alternative is an increase in tax revenues. Eliminating the wage base cap would increase tax revenue by about 13%, while impacting only the 5% highest earners.

Progress: Effective tax enforcement

Tax evasion is big​1. In a 2016 report​2, the IRS estimated the gross tax gap — “the amount of true (Federal) tax liability that is not paid voluntarily and timely” — to be around 18%. This doesn’t sound like much, but the lost tax revenue is nearly three quarters of the size of the annual Federal budget deficit (before the Trump tax cuts).

Ambitious: Eliminate preferential treatment of investment income

When an asset like stock or a house is purchased, held for more than a year, and then sold for a profit, the profit is taxed at a lower rate than wages or interest. Most stock dividends are also taxed at a lower rate.

These breaks cost more than $200B annually (2013 data)​3. Moreover, preferential tax treatment of investment income is an important cause of income and wealth inequality in the US.

Ambitious: Subject all personal income to Social Security tax

Wages are less than half of all earnings; the rest comes from investments, including interest, dividends, and capital gains. If Social Security taxes applied to all income, Social Security would instantly be sustainable with no need to reduce benefits, and the overall Social Security tax rate could be lowered substantially. This would help lower-income and many middle-income workers, and would reduce the large preferential treatment our tax system gives to investment income. 

Ambitious: Subsidize housing fairly

The tax code subsidizes home ownership through tax breaks. These subsidies only help people wealthy enough to be able to purchase a home. One can debate whether or not to subsidize housing, but if we do, we should subsidize it in a way that applies to everyone, not just to people who earn enough to own their own homes. 

Full: Fundamental tax reform focused on major simplification and fairness

Our tax code is enormously complicated. It might seem that this is just a full-employment program for accountants and tax attorneys, but many tax breaks for the wealthy are hidden from the public’s understanding through this complexity. The whole tax code needs to be replaced with something much simpler, with fewer opportunities for tax breaks and tax evasion. 

Explanatory Notes

Eliminate Social Security Base Wage Cap

Regressive Tax

The wage base cap makes Social Security a regressive tax: Workers earning more than the base wage cap pay at a lower rate than everyone else. For example, a full-time minimum-wage worker in North Carolina earns $15,080 annually and pays 12.4% (including the employer’s portion). In contrast, a worker earning $1M per year is only taxed 12.4% of the $132,900 base wage cap, which is only 1.6% of the worker’s earnings. Eliminating the base wage cap would make the Social Security payroll tax a fairer flat tax instead of an unfair regressive tax.

Sustainability

Doing so would also improve the system’s solvency. Let’s look at a back-of-the-envelope calculation to get an idea of what eliminating the base wage cap would do. In 2017, the Social Security Trust Fund collected $873.6B from the payroll tax​4 and there were 165.4M workers earning wages​5. Approximately 95% of workers earn less than the base wage cap. Eliminating the base wage cap would affect only the 5% highest-earning wage earners and would raise the revenue from the payroll tax to about $990B, an approximately 13% increase. This change would improve Social Security’s long-range sustainability, but would not, alone, eliminate the long-term shortfall.

Increasing revenue from the payroll tax is one approach to improving sustainability. The other approach is reducing benefits. Over the years, benefit reductions have been implemented by partially subjecting Social Security payments to income taxes, by increases in the “full retirement age,” and by changes in the way that cost-of-living adjustments are computed.

Many proposals to “fix” Social Security have been made. Analyzing those proposals is complex because there are many variables to model — payroll tax rate, base wage cap, how benefits are determined, and how benefits are taxed — and many assumptions that must be made and analyzed — worker demographics over many decades, lifespans during retirement, inflation over decades, etc. A brief synopsis of current bills is available here and a conservative but thoughtful analysis of one of the bills, The Social Security 2100 Act, is available here.

Effective tax enforcement

As detailed in ProPublica’s report “How the IRS Was Gutted,” Congressional Republicans have been working for years to defund the IRS, especially the enforcement division​6. Even though evasion is highest among high-income households, audits of the top 1% of taxpayers have declined from 8% in 2011 to 2.5% in 2017, while audits of the bottom 36% of taxpayers have declined far less steeply, from 1.2% to .7%. 

Lax enforcement exacerbates unfairness in the tax system because it shifts tax burden from people who evade to people who obey the law.

Eliminate preferential treatment of investment income

The key tax breaks for investment income are:

• Much lower tax rate on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends than on wage income. These breaks cost $161B annually and 93% of the benefit flows to people in the top 20% of income (68% flows to people in the top 1% of income).

• Step-up in basis: An heir of an appreciated asset does not need to pay capital gains tax on the decedent’s long-term capital gain on that asset. This is a powerful way for wealthy investors to pass along untaxed wealth to heirs. This break costs $43B annually and 65% of the benefit flows to people in the top 20% of income.

• Tax is only paid when an asset is sold, allowing large gains to accumulate for years without being taxed. This allows an investor to keep more money invested over time, and aids significantly in wealth accumulation for investors compared to wage earners.

Estimates of cost and distribution are from the Congressional Budget Office​3.

Subject all personal income to Social Social Security tax

Total 2017 personal income was $16.8T​7, more than twice the total wage income. Taxing all personal income for Social Security would therefore more than double funding for the Social Security system. Since such a large funding increase is not necessary, the tax rate could be reduced without affecting benefits.

Additionally, since most investment income is earned by high-income and high-wealth individuals, taxing all income would shift some of the burden of supporting our elderly population to those who currently pay very little of that burden.

Subsidize housing fairly

The tax code subsidizes home ownership in three major ways: 

• Mortgage interest is tax deductible

• Property tax is deductible,

• $500K of long-term capital gain on the sale of a married couple’s primary residence is not taxed; this benefit can be used repeatedly, subject to a few benign conditions.

Overall, about 64% of households own their own homes​8. Not surprisingly, more higher-income households than lower-income households own homes: Home ownership is over 78% for households with family income at or above the median income and 50% for households with family income less than the median income. So, tax breaks for home ownership disproprotionately  help higher-income households.

Moreover, tax breaks delivered as deductions are more valuable the higher one’s marginal tax bracket, further tilting the benefit of these subsidies toward higher earners.

Purpose

I call myself a progressive and I’m active in a local group that calls itself the Progressive Democrats of Orange County (NC). People sometimes ask me: What do progressives believe? Here's my answer.

Shared Values

We are a diverse group with varying experiences, desires, and hot-button issues. What we share is the desire for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as articulated in our country’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence. In a word, we all want freedom to pursue what is important to us as individuals, families, and community members​1.

Capitalism has delivered unparalleled prosperity for some in the United States; it has also led to large and increasing disparities in opportunity and well-being for others. Other western democracies have shown that capitalism tempered by suitable regulation and social contracts can deliver more broad-based prosperity than does the US’s increasingly winner-take-all version.

We are progressives in that we want sustained progress in improving the human condition for all members of our society, which strengthens our democracy and our freedoms.

As progressives, we believe that government has a crucial role in achieving this progress. This belief is in contrast to the GOP’s 40-year love affair with both Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand and the mantra of small government. Over the years, government investments in medical research, science, and technology have created the major drivers of today’s economy and have improved our health and longevity. Government protections have forced industry to reduce air and water pollution that harms human health. Longstanding government programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have reduced poverty among the aged and disabled, and among persons with limited incomes, including children and pregnant women.

Alarmingly, our current government is backsliding and actively attacking progressive policies and protections. We want to reverse this trend and return to a proper appreciation of our government’s role in nurturing capitalism while at the same time ensuring individual liberties and economic opportunity for all U.S. citizens.

We want to go beyond restoring past success to further improving the human condition. This is The Progressive Freedom vision for a modern world.

Essential Freedoms

As progressives we recognize essential freedoms that extend the freedoms guaranteed in the United States Constitution. We believe in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “four essential human freedoms,” which he set forth in his 1941 State of the Union speech​2: 

… The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want … everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear … anywhere in the world.

As progressives we recognize what President Barack Obama called “universal values​3​”: 

[t]he liberty of knowing that your leader is accountable to you, and that you won’t be locked up for disagreeing with them; the opportunity to get an education and to be able to work with dignity; the freedom to practice your faith without fear or restriction.

We believe that the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, FDR’s aspirational four freedoms, and President Obama’s “universal values” are a strong foundation for our modern world. More specifically, as progressives, we work to achieve policies that implement these essential freedoms:

Human Dignity

Human dignity requires that everyone must have:

• A decent, safe, place to live and work.

• Enough food to eat. 

• Quality medical care, including preventative, reproductive, and mental health care.

• Control of one’s own body.

• Clean air, clean water, and a stable climate.

Economic Opportunity

The strength of capitalism is that it is an economic system that provides both individual opportunity and increased prosperity by allowing individuals to strive to achieve what is important to them. But economic opportunity for all requires that everyone must have:

• Access to quality education that enables everyone to fully develop their interests, skills, and talents.

• A level playing field for all workers. The power of large corporations must be balanced by laws that protect the right of workers to negotiate collectively, that prohibit employers suppressing competition for labor, and that prohibit discrimination in the workplace.

• A simple, fair income tax system that taxes investment gains as much or more than working people’s wages, and that does not provide special tax breaks for wealthy and middle-income people.

• Access to affordable child care and elder care. Without such access, it is impossible to pursue economic success.

Opportunity, and a chance at prosperity for all, requires public investment in scientific research, infrastructure, and a legal and regulatory framework that works for everyone, not just corporations.

Political Opportunity

To achieve Lincoln’s resolve that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth​4” we must ensure that:

• All citizens can vote without artificial obstacles like onerous registration and identification requirements, inconvenient polling places and hours, and intimidation tactics.

• Everyone’s vote counts equally; no one's vote is diminished by gerrymandering.

• Our representatives represent all of us, not just the rich, with the power of money in politics diminished by effective campaign finance and lobbying laws.

Personal Freedom

We all want the freedom to make our own choices in the most intimate matters of our lives:

• Government at all levels must neither encourage nor discourage faith, nor may it treat any faith preferentially.

• One’s faith beliefs may not be imposed on others by government action, nor may faith or lack of faith be used as a criterion to discriminate in business or public life, nor may religious views exempt anyone from otherwise applicable antidiscrimination laws.

• Laws will be based on scientific evidence, not religious dogma.

• We are each free to choose whom we love, regardless of gender identity or race. Governments at all levels must respect our choices and provide the same level of support to all such unions.

Peace

To achieve FDR’s freedom from fear, we must work toward peace:

• Recognize the humanity of all people and seek cooperation among nations.

• Maintain an effective military defense capability, without directing the wealth of our nation towards an ever-growing military budget and a new arms race.

Summary

We have briefly described essential freedoms beyond those guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution that are necessary to achieve the kind of freedom that is important to us as progressives. Together, we can make a just and equitable world a reality! 

Acknowledgements: I’d like to acknowledge Ava Nackman, who made major improvements in my first draft, and Kathy Kaufman, Marguerite Most, Felix Peng, and Rebecca Cerese, who made many suggestions that improved it. I’ve also gotten helpful feedback from Jimmy Holcomb. Of course, all the stuff you dislike is my fault, not their’s!

As I’ve written before, partisan gerrymandering is stealing democracy from voters. If you don’t think it is a big deal, take a look at my two-page gerrymandering “fact sheet”. Both Democrats and Republicans do it. In fact, last month the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U. S. ___ (2019), which involves partisan gerrymandering by Democrats in Maryland and partisan gerrymandering by Republicans in North Carolina. 

Democrats in Maryland drew districts to ensure that 7 of 8 Congressional seats would be held by Democrats; Republicans in North Carolina drew districts to ensure that 10 of 13 Congressional seats would be held by Republicans. In both cases, there was strong evidence that the partisan gerrymandering was intentional. In both cases, a lower Federal court threw out the gerrymandered maps. The parties in power — Democrats in Maryland and Republicans in North Carolina — appealed to the US Supreme Court. The two cases were combined into one case, and the Supreme Court overturned the lower court rulings.

I was deeply disappointed by the Court’s decision. Partisan gerrymandering is corroding democracy and needs to be eliminated, so I wanted to understand the ruling more deeply. I’ve never before read a Supreme Court decision, but I decided to give it a try. The document, available here, is 72 pages in total, comprising 5 pages of unofficial syllabus, 34 pages of the Court’s opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, and 33 pages of the dissent, written by Justice Kagan. It was easier to read and understand than I expected. You might want to give it a try.

The big question is where do we go from here? I’ll get to that, but let me start by summarizing the ruling and the dissent.

The Ruling

The bottom line, in Justice Roberts’s own words (opinion, p. 35), is this: 

“Excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust. But the fact that such gerrymandering is “incompatible  with democratic principles,” ... does not mean that the solution lies with the federal judiciary. We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”

So, partisan gerrymandering is bad, but we’re not going to do anything about it. Which begs the question: Why not? 

The key issue, again in Justice Roberts’s own words (opinion, p. 7, emphasis his), is “whether such claims are claims of legal right, resolvable according to legal principles, or political questions that must find their resolution elsewhere.” He offers several arguments.

The Framer’s Knew About Gerrymandering

First, the Framers knew about gerrymandering and chose to let state legislatures deal with matters of districting, subject to checks and balances by Congress. Yes, the Court has intervened when districting plans violate the one-person one-vote rule or when districting has discriminated based on race, but prohibiting partisan interests in districting would go against the Framers’ intent.

It’s Hard and It’s Okay

Besides, prohibiting partisanship in districting is hard. It is not simple math like recognizing violations of one-person one-vote. How do we decide how much partisanship in districting is too much? If there aren’t clear criteria, the Court is engaging in politics, not making decisions based on law.

Furthermore, since the Constitution doesn’t require proportional representation, arguments based on lopsided outcomes like North Carolina’s 10 Republican and 3 Democratic Congresspersons resulting from an an almost even Republican/Democratic statewide vote split are irrelevant.

That leaves an appeal to “fairness,” but what does fairness mean? One person’s idea of fairness is another person’s idea of bias. This is too squishy and there are no legal standards for fairness. Besides, even if we could precisely define fairness, how much unfairness is acceptable? Is being a little unfair okay?

And, none of this matters because (opinion, p. 23) “securing partisan advantage” is a “permissible intent” even when that intent “predominates.”

We’ve Never Done This Before

Finally, we’ve never done this before (opinion, p. 31): 

“What the appellees and dissent seek is an unprecedented expansion of judicial power. We have never struck down a partisan gerrymander as unconstitutional—despite various requests over the  past 45  years. The expansion of judicial authority would not be into just  any area of controversy, but into one of the most intensely partisan aspects of American political life. ... Consideration of the impact of today’s  ruling on democratic principles cannot ignore the effect of the unelected and politically unaccountable branch of the Federal Government assuming such an extraordinary and unprecedented role.”

In other words, we’re conservatives.

Dissent

I must admit that, because I lean liberal, I expected the conservative majority opinion to be ridiculous. And it is. Justice Kagan’s prefatory remarks in the dissent (p. 1) summarizes the situation perfectly:

“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.

And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. ... These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences.
...
And checking them is not beyond the courts. The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country, including those below, have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims. ... In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong.
...
After dutifully reciting each case’s facts, the majority leaves them forever behind, instead immersing itself in everything that could conceivably go amiss if courts be- came involved.”

After her opening salvo, Justice Kagan lays out the facts of the two cases and states (dissent, p. 8) that “[t]he majority disputes none of what I have said (or will say) about how gerrymanders undermine democracy.” 

What the majority does dispute is whether the courts can do anything about it. The majority basically says that gerrymandering has been with us forever, yeah, it sucks, but it is impossible to fix it, so leave the problem to the politicians.

Gerrymandering Has Been Around Forever

Yes, gerrymandering has been with us forever. But the world has changed: the advent of big data and powerful computers has fundamentally altered the nature of gerrymandering, making it possible to create district maps that are “far more effective and durable than before, insulating politicians against all but the most titanic shifts in the political tides” (dissent, p. 10). Modern technology has made moot the appeal to the Framers’ understanding of gerrymandering as an argument against action.

Can’t Fix It

Moreover, lower federal courts across the country have already solved the arguments about what constitutes fairness and the difficulty of establishing clear standards. 

The key idea is to continue to allow each state’s legislators to define its own notion of fairness — things like proportional representation, compactness of districts, respect for natural boundaries, etc. — apart from partisan gain. Thus, legislative process determines what is “fair,” as it should be. The question then to be asked is whether considerations of partisan gain are diluting the value of votes.

To determine this, one applies a three-part “test” to determine whether the plaintiff challenging the district map has a case:

1. Intent:  The plaintiff must prove that the “predominant purpose in drawing a district’s lines was to entrench [their party] in power by diluting the votes of citizens favoring its rival.” (dissent, p. 16).

2. Effect: Did the maps have the intended effect of diluting the votes of opponents of the party in power?

3. Causation: Is there a “legitimate, non-partisan justification” (dissent, p. 16) for the maps as drawn? 

The most difficult part of the test is intent. The method proposed by multiple experts and adopted by the lower courts is based on some interesting statistical analysis: Start with the non-partisan criteria that a state defines for its districts. Then computer-generate many (thousands) maps that meet the state’s criteria but are otherwise randomly chosen. Look at how precinct-level vote counts from past elections would have translated into votes for Democrats and Republicans with each of the generated maps. Then line up the maps from most favorable to Republicans to most favorable to Democrats and determine how far the map in contention is from the median map. If the contended map is far to one side or the other, it is extremely unlikely to have occurred without partisan intent. Actual numbers and statistics can be applied.

The cool thing about this approach is that each state’s own criteria determine what is “fair”. The three-part test only measures “just what it should: the extent to which the pursuit of partisan advantage — by the legislators at this moment — has distorted the State’s districting decisions.” (dissent, p. 25).

Leave it to the Politicians

The majority contends that the way to fix gerrymandering is for the politicians to fix it. In fact, they point to the dozens of bills introduced to reign in gerrymandering. Justice Kagan nails the problem with that thinking (dissent, p. 30, emphasis hers): “... what all these bills have in common is that they are not laws. The politicians who benefit from partisan gerrymandering are unlikely to change partisan gerrymandering. And because those politicians maintain themselves in office through partisan gerrymandering, the chances for legislative reform are slight.”

What Now?

The Court’s decision takes the matter out of the hands of the Federal judiciary for many years to come. But gerrymandering is so corrosive to democracy that we must make progress in other ways. This will require action on multiple fronts, much of it underway in various places.

State Constitutional Amendments

The Supreme Court’s failure to act doesn’t preclude state-level action. 

Indeed, in 2000, Arizona adopted a constitutional amendment that removed redistricting from the hands of the state legislature and put it in the hands of an Independent Redistricting Commission. This amendment was challenged in the US Supreme Court but upheld. A new commission is appointed decennially to accomplish redistricting based on new census data. Two commissions have created maps and a third commission will be appointed in 2021. There have been legal challenges to the commission’s work, but the commission has prevailed.

And, in 2010, Florida adopted two constitutional amendments on redistricting. Here’s a key clause: “No apportionment plan or district shall be drawn with the intent to favor or disfavor a political party or an incumbent ...” Politicians in the legislature still draw the district maps, but without intent of favoritism. In this case, the party in power (GOP) didn’t comply and the League of Women Voters sued. A trial court ruled that the districts drawn in 2012 violated the amendment and ordered the districts to be redrawn. This was appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, which agreed with the trial court that the amendment had been violated, but overturned the remedy of starting from scratch on the redistricting, instead requiring certain districts to be redrawn. 

Voters pushed the Arizona and Florida constitutional amendments: Voters bypassed the politicians in power to get the amendments on the ballot and then passed the amendments. 

Eighteen states allow voter-initiated constitutional amendments. In these states, amending the state constitution is a viable option for defeating (or reducing) gerrymandering.

Challenges in State Courts

Some state constitutions already contain language that could be interpreted to prohibit extreme gerrymanders. In those cases, suit can be brought in state courts alleging violation of the state constitution. The US Supreme Court’s ruling has no bearing on such suits.

The poster child for this approach is Pennsylvania, where Article I, Section 5 of the Pennsylvania Constitution is “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.”  The League of Women Voters brought suit alleging that the state’s 2011 districting plan violated this clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled in 2018 that

“This adjudication was based upon the uncontradicted evidentiary record developed in the Commonwealth Court, wherein the Petitioners established that the 2011 Plan was a partisan gerrymander and that this gerrymander was extreme and durable. It was designed to dilute the votes of those who in prior elections voted for the party not in power in order to give the party in power a lasting electoral advantage. … On this record, it is clear that the 2011 Plan violates Article I, Section 5, since a diluted vote is not an equal vote.”

The Court established a deadline for the legislature to submit a suitable map for the Court’s approval. When the legislature failed to do so, the Court established its own remedial map based on inputs received from various parties. The US Supreme Court has already rejected a challenge to the Court-drawn districts.

A similar effort is underway in North Carolina, where Common Cause has filed suit in state courts alleging that the state legislative district maps violate the North Carolina Constitution. The case was heard on July 15th, 2019.  A decision is pending.

Many state constitutions contain language to ensure some notion of equal representation and Pennsylvania has shown that this can be a path to remedy extreme partisan gerrymandering. Hopefully, the ruling in the North Carolina case will add weight to this approach.

Independent Commissions

Arizona has shown that independent commissions are a viable way to improve districting. The Arizona commissions were established by voter-initiated constitutional amendment, which is not feasible in most states. 

Other states have adopted independent commissions through voter-initiated referenda and voter-initiated constitutional amendments. Currently, in addition to Arizona, Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Montana, and Washington use independent commissions. There is considerable variation across the states in how the commissioners are selected and the rules under which the commissions act. 

Raising Awareness

Ultimately, defeating gerrymandering requires getting more and more voters aware of how they,  as individual voters, and we, as a representative democracy, are being severely harmed by partisan gerrymandering. People who are not politically active often are not aware of just how significant gerrymandering is in letting politicians remain in power  despite voters wanting change.

Summary

There’s no arguing that the Supreme Court’s decision wasn’t a big setback for our democracy. It means that probably for a generation we’re unlikely to see a country-wide solution for extreme partisan gerrymandering.

But as a few states have shown, it is possible to make progress state-by-state. All of us who care about democracy need to help engage and educate our friends and colleagues, and to support organizations like Common Cause and the League of Women Voters who are carrying on the fight.