Commenter Archive

Comments by Michael Drew in reply to Will*

On “On Parenting and Divorce

Divorce is bad for kids - yes, worse than the slow burn, if only because divorce finalizes the fact that there won’t be an improvement in that child’s intact family life. Continuing the marriage preserves the possibility of improvement by the father and mother - which is the entire point of the marriage in the first place. You’re not supposed to get into it thinking that you’ll find out if you’re good at it, and if you’re not then you get out. The whole idea of the institution is that the parties work to learn to become better at it.

BUT - I don’t believe the state telling and forcing people to stay in marriages (for the kids) is the way to advocate for this decision, if only because it is not a change that is going to occur in many states, and the discussion about doing so will only distract and alienate people from the message who need hear it.

Rather than the state telling people to stay in their marriages for the kids, I believe *I* should be the one to do it. And you should. That should be the message we all focus on telling one another and people we think need to hear it. This is a question of social responsibility and social norms, and really always was. Only-fault divorce fell promptly when people decided divorce (with kids) wasn’t such a bad idea and they wanted the social and legal freedom to do it. It’s all just a question of what we decide to do. The no-fault conversation is a big diversion of energy from the conversation that’s necessary for that shift in norms to occur.

Stay together for the kids. (Do whatever is right for you if no kids.) Yes, an unhappy marriage better for them than two homes or estrangement from a parent.

On “We Need A Grand Bargain On Ukraine and Israel

Just in case anyone was puzzled - the above was meant to be a separate, original comment on the article, not a reply to InMD. I was on my phone and didn't see that I had clicked reply rather than comment.

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Yes!

Remarkably thorough from CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-parole-migrants-us-expansion-biden/

A not-exquisitely-charitable take on what the administration is doing is using this authority at a scale it was not conceived for, in order to smooth migration into the country for people whose entry there is not a political consensus in favor of the policy argument for, in a way meant to ease the visible (and humanitarian, safety, and security) effects of such migration commonly described in media as "the border crisis."

That is... securing (legal because they deem it so by aggressive interpretation of the authority's domain) entry for large numbers of the migrants seeking it in a way that doesn't create the "border chaos" optic that is hard to sustain poltically.

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…The main sticking point is this question of “parole.” I encourage people to look into it.

Biden is doing things with this provision that no president has ever done. The basic demand is for Biden to just go back to governing immigration the way Obama or Clinton did. And older Democratic senators by and large understand this and know it’s not fruit loops.

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>> This isn’t them pushing for immigration policy to move rightward a bit in recognition that they control the house- it’s a demand for complete capitulation

That’s true! Biden has said - literally said! - he is looking to make significant concessions on the border to get a foreign wars package to move. That’s simply an overt announcement of desperation. When that’s the signal, you don’t go small.

>> They control the House, that is all, and they barely control that

I mean… they control the Senate in that they decide what doesn’t pass.

So as long as those other parties are fine with nothing passing, they don’t control the Senate. But then when they do need something to pass, the GOP does control the Senate.

They can leverage what the other sides needs to pass to get what they don’t *want* to pass.

Their immigration changes can pass. All that’s necessary is that a few Democrats and Chuck Schumer decide Ukraine and Israel aid are important enough.

There are easily 10 Democratic senators who don’t actually view the proposed changes as abhorrent in concept. They know the problems with asylum and parole. The changes may go further than they’re comfortable with but they acknowledge the basic need for the changes, and going further than you want on one thing to get something else is legislating.

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If Republicans take less than the substantial majority - 90% - of what they want on policy here - if they just take a little money and a few tweaks that the administration can work around - it is like saying they don’t really believe in what they want. It’s a concession on the merits of their principles. There’s not going to be some later time or more important issue that Democrats *will* accede to attaching fundamental immigration reform to. Republicans will have simply backed off their conceptual policy reforms and those will now be deemed unreasonable and off the table.

Immigration (asylum) needs to be fundamentally overhauled. This is the time.

You can say F that, but then you are saying F Ukraine. That’s the GOP’s position.

As to Israel, I am quite sure a bill to just do Israel aid could move if Biden were open to it.

On “Was It Lawful For Daniel Penny To Kill Jordan Neely?

Nothing will be stipulated at trial since generally you want to keep homicide convictions off your record at essentially all costs. No one will be in a conceding mood.

There will be no certainty about anything *he* was or wasn’t trained to believe until it is established by proof he was taught X (if they go down that road - if he is charged). Appealing to “what the Marines teach” won’t do it. Maybe something went awry in his case. They will have to show that *he* was taught *that*.

If they even go down this road.

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If a jury found that Penny meant to kill Neely—that he felt the man loosen in his grip and kept squeezing to finish the job, that would be second degree murder. If instead a jury found that he knew about the risks of chokeholds, and used them anyway, killing Neely, he’d be guilty of criminally negligent homicide, or manslaughter in the second degree.

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There’s no evidence that Penny set out that day to hurt someone. Neely was acting erratically. Penny acted in the spur of the moment, and other passengers assisted, without knowing that the intervention would be deadly.

It seems like you’re excluding the possibilities here that Penny didn’t understand the deadliness of a chokehold, and that the other riders who participated in restraining Neely did know.

There has been some discussion of Penny’s military service as creating a presumption that he understood the potential lethality of a chokehold. Is that a consideration you are operating from in not mentioning the possibility that he did not understand the level of force implied in applying a chokehold for at least 90 seconds? Will individual knowledge of that fact by Penny have to be demonstrated at trial, or will it be deemed something a reasonable person must be held liable for understanding (like presumably is the case for shooting someone)? If knowledge has to be shown, will and should Penny’s military service be used as evidence of that knowledge? If so, would you acknowledge the potential social volatility of effectively using someone’s service to the nation against him by having it establish a potentially decisive negative presumption of intent or cognizance of the potential effect of his act in a trial for a notorious homicide?

On “GOP Elites Should Blame Themselves for Trump’s Popularity

Very helpful piece. There's been a lot of back and forth on the endorsements mini-tempest in the last week with predictable maximizing and minimizing of the story in the respective quarters. This is the best summary that I've seen of who's done what on endorsements so far and with what significance. Thanks for the write-up.

On “I Agree With Donald Trump (For Once)

I wasn’t trying to be optimistic (from your point of view) on trade re: DeSantis. The point of the paragraph devoted to that was indeed to give an exception in the area of international trade to my general assessment that a DeSantis presidency would generally
mean an attempt to get back to traditional Republican philosophies - but to explain that by an assessment that the political winds are now blowing in the opposite direction from free trade more broadly than just the emanations from Donald Trump’s orifices (and administration). Donald Trump almost certainly took the protectionist turn further in actual policy than almost any other president would have done in those years, but in contrast to almost all other areas where Trump changed the direction of Republican thinking while he was in office, I offer no guarantee that Ron DeSantis would steer back away from the new trade barriers Donald Trump erected which Joe Biden has largely left in place.

For all that, nevertheless you may be correct that I am even still too sanguine on the point.

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I’m not 100% sure of much. But I’m fairly comfortable saying I can.

First of all - the proposal comes six months after the stunting. Doesn’t seem like he felt too pressed to promptly follow up his media episode with any really ground-breaking policy agenda to seriously stem the flow of migrants seeking entry without individual pre-approval.

And the proposal…

increasing penalties for human smuggling, strengthening statutes for the detention of illegal aliens, requiring universal use of E-Verify, enhancing penalties for document falsification, and prohibiting the issuance by local governments of ID cards to people who are not lawfully in the country

…doesn’t strike me as clearly rising even to but certainly not beyond the normal panoply of enforcement measures usually proposed by traditional pro-immigration (reform) GOP members of Congress during episodes of ostensible negotiation with Democrats toward a comprehensive immigration reform deal that would result in legislative prescription (enforcement of which entirely depends on Executive disposition) of a subset of such measures in exchange for legal status for some number of immigrants already in the country.

Such negotiations are what that language is meant to point to, since few of those provisions have practical meaning if enacted merely as Florida state laws rather than federal policy.

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I appreciate the clear recognition of how great a departure Donald Trump was on policy from standard Republican Party doctrines, but think you’re writing off Ron DeSantis as a vehicle for restoration unfairly or at least prematurely here.

I think you can count on him to seek to cut taxes, cut entitlements, cut spending on services like education, pursue deregulation/privatization (including in education), pursue bipartisan immigration reform meanwhile being fairly accommodating of undocumented or exigent migrants (his interior-removal stunts being actually an example of accommodation not rejection of illegal/irregular (asylum-seeking) migrants), to aggressively pursue whatever federal restrictions on abortion the conservative legal establishment of his era seems constitutional, and to start or continue approximately the normal number of wars for a Republican president of the vintage you pine for - not fewer - and not to seek to make major changes to our role as international guarantor of security for the Western/liberal international order.

I will admit that under both parties the status of the international free trade regime is currently in question, and I can’t claim that I have confidence that DeSantis is committed to steering the party back toward minimizing barriers. But - that is only in keeping with a growing consensus that free trade is a vulnerable paradigm in a world in which China is a dominant industrial actor. The elite policy circles of both parties recognize this problem. It’s not so much that the Republican Party has changed views on trade due to Donald Trump as that the effects of integrating into the global trade regime are coming into focus and the whole policy earldom is taking a step back to (re?)assess.

I think you can count on Ron DeSantis to try to deliver a very normal Republican presidency. To the extent it departs from what you would like a Republican presidency to consist of, I think it’s because you have memories of past Republican presidencies that depart from the reality of what they were.

On “From the New York Times: Biden to Cancel $10,000 in Student Loan Debt for Borrowers Earning Less Than $125,000

I think… most. That’s what they do.

Another thing they do is take out a lot of student loans.

Another thing they do is celebrate for very-short term reasons. But I suspect their celebrations will die down quickly when they sober up and realize they’re not getting any more money than they’ve seen for the last 30 months from this announcement, and that they will soon be seeing a lot less money than they’ve been seeing for 30 months because of it.

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In the short term what happens with student loan policy is with certainty going to be deflationary over the next year or so.

Compared to a new baseline that’s established sometime down the road, the effects of the cancellation component of this policy might be inflationary. I don’t know how to pick out what the new baseline should be, though, nor how to identify what part of the inflation that’s happening in that environment is due to the ongoing effects that people have had this amount of debt cancelled.

I don’t know that there’s any baseline to choose that makes the most sense here.

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Thanks North!

Jason Furman is at some pains to argue essentially that ending the pause is essentially not a policy change, and “inflationary” re: cancellation has to be measured from the baseline of what would happen to prices in 2023 & 2024 if payments resumed but there wasn’t cancellation. Which… the cancellations will definitely mitigate the deflationary effect of resuming payments. So compared to that baseline… inflationary.

But arguing for that baseline seems like moralistic pleading to me. What’s actrgoing to happen from the policy announcements made this week is that a ton of money is going to be diverted from spenders to the government, and we know whether that’s inflationary or deflationary. That’s how I see it anyway.

https://twitter.com/jasonfurman/status/1562830721252614144?s=21&t=c6Y5OptBxDXovLakGAIQfQ

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The key point is the payment resumption and the disposable income expectation (therefore spending attitudes) it creates.

As Jaybird points out we have the common "Tweet/headline/actual article" disconnect in claims... for the clicks... here. (I'm not sure if we're supposed to think Stiglitz writes his own tweets but I think... he doesn't.0

The claim that appears is actually, adding emphasis of my own, "the new student-loan policy may even reduce inflation."

I take yesterday's announcement as a statement of a broad new single "student-loan policy." One policy made up of many policies. That's... how policy works, that's what it is.

As others have pointed out, there are several significant components to this policy. The income-based repayment changes Kazzy explains are very significant. But from a macroeconomic perspective one aspect of the policy swamps all the others and it's this: in January for the first time since early Covid *most everyone with student loans will resume making payments of some size after 30 months spent establishing a baseline of having to make no such payments at all*. That's a change That is a huge subtraction of consumer liquidity from the economy starting the first of the year. Huge in macro and huge as a part of people's budgets.

No matter what goodies we find for debtors tucked away in the order, none of it can make that subtractive number go neutral or positive - because all of it is just adjustments to the terms on which nearly everyone who has student loans is going to go from owing zero dollars a month going back to before this inflation was a twinkle in Jerome Powell's eyes. Not to say this inflation is 100% an effect of Covid, but *all* of the context for it, the creation of conditions that caused it, occurred while these student loan payments were paused. The baseline is entirely what it has been for 30 months... no payments. And now payments are set to start, with forgiveness setting the terms for it. In some cases reducing the new payments to $0... but not in very many cases. And in many cases at the top end, not reducing it at all (even in many cases where the $10,000 is lopped off the principal).

You could say that Biden... or some president... had to do this eventually, so the baseline shouldn't be the world of paused student loan payments. It's... probably true that he had to do it eventually? However if so, why hasn't there been a successful lawsuit to force him to like there was one to force him to end the eviction moratorium? In any case Biden likely had effective discretion over when to throw the switch on this big money vacuum cleaner he had in his back pocket for at least another year or so.

But even if Biden having to do it means it shouldn't be the baseline, that's more a legal/ethical/responsibility truth than an economic one. Economically, the baseline that's been established as the context for this inflation just simply is the world of paused loans.

The $10,000 forgiveness for some debtors is one part of a broad "new student-loan policy" that is matched with several other reforms but most significantly from an inflationary perspective a an action to go from calling due no payments at all from any American student loan debtors for the last two and half years, to returning to calling due essentially the same payments as in 2019 from those with the biggest debt loads, payments adjusted a bit or considerably downward for many (but again, still going from a baseline of nothing to now having to pay something significant out of the same household budget), and eliminating payments for a few. (Which, again, is just a status-quo household budget situation from a student loan perspective from December to January for those households. No one comes out ahead of where they've been from a disposable-income-net-student-loan-payment perspective of where they've been for the last 30 months from this.)

One other point: I imagine some are asking... what about September, October, November, and December when presumably a lot of the forgiveness will be happening?

First of all, policy like this generally just doesn't operate on that time scale. These changes are meant to define student loan policy for the rest of this administration, at least. If they're inflationary over 3-6 months, that's just some of the friction of making federal policy.

Second, though, I question how much forgiveness will formally occur before the end of the year. Bureaucratic sloth and so forth. (For that matter I don't even know if any of these forgiveness actions are even authorized to occur before many weeks pass.)

Third, even if some forgiveness began this month, inflation is an expectations game. Whatever happens, the vast majority of sed debtors have been told their payments are going to go from $0 a month as they have been for years, to some hundred(s) right after the holidays. How would it affect your spending if you were told that between now and Christmas your paycheck would stay what it has been for more than two years, but right after that it's going to go down $100/check - or $200/check? Would you go on an extraordinarily exuberant back-to-school spending spree that particular fall? Maybe you would (I might), but almost certainly most people wouldn't.

But lastly and above all: *for the next four months all student loan payments remain paused, i.e. $0*. Any forgiveness that happens in that doesn't put a single additional dollar in anyone's pocket for the rest of the year. No one's loan payment is becoming negative so they start getting money from this. Everyone stays at zero. Then at the first(ish) of the year, in the best (worst?) cases, some people who would have had student loans going forward now will have none. So their payments will become... $0. Which is what it is now and has been for two and a half years. No one will start to see more money drop into their accounts than they have been seeing for 30 months as a result of this policy. So where can significant inflation come from?

That's how Stiglitz can say that "[the new student-loan policy] inflationary impact will be minuscule."

And many more people with student debt than those who would have had payments resume but instead will have their loans entirely forgiven, causing their payments to become $0 when they had previously been $0, will see payments resume: they will go from the current universal $0/mo baseline to seeing scores or hundreds of dollars go to the government that had previously been going into their checking account.

That is how Stiglitz can say that "the new student-loan policy may even reduce inflation."

On “Here Comes the Groom(ing)

You said that argument amounted to concern about political indoctrination, but as you state it there it has nothing to do with political indoctrination. Yes, parents are *also* concerned about political indoctrination in schools, but that’s not their concern here. Here it is about fear that social-emotional interventions are being done without parents’ consent into individual students’ lives meant to change the trajectory of their identity formation in ways extremely foreign to those parents worldviews and beliefs about socialization and human nature.

I didn’t give evidence to justify the concern because I’m not making the argument that they’re right. I’m clarifying the nature of the concern at issue here against your mischaracterization of it.

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…But it’s not the case that all that is going on everywhere is that when the topic of transsexualism comes up, or a student comes to staff and says that they don’t feel that they fit in the gender that society has assigned to them for whatever reason, teachers simply make generalized social statements about trans people being deserving of love.

We all know that.

The surgery or treatments that has people alarmed wouldn’t have to take place while the student was minor for the preparation that takes place to reasonably be concerning to parents of certain viewpoints, so that fact that you inform us that sometimes it does only underscores that their reasons for concern (again, given their viewpoint which differs so widely from yours) have basis in reality.

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I never suggested that any particular other people/parents do see it the way they see it.

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Don’t those parents count? Aren’t their concerns valid?

How do they not? How are they not being treated as valid?

They can go and be heard at school board meetings and they can write their legislators. They can tell their kids to video teachers who are failing to teach LGBT equality in age-appropriate ways (rather than *doing so* - in age-inappropriate ways), and then they can put that on the internet.

Does the fact that parents who feel differently than they do are being heard mean that they themselves aren't being heard? No. It never can. That is a childish viewpoint.

In the end there will be policy, and the policy may be very bad from the perspective of some stakeholders. But we are adult enough to understand that that outcome, which is almost always part of any policy creation process, is never sufficient to establish that those stakeholders were actually not given the opportunity to be heard and for their views to be validated even when they don't govern.

All parents' views matter and are valid. Not all will equally influence policy. And very different views will do so more in California relative to what ones do in Florida (just to pick two states).

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I think it goes far beyond being the conservative opinion.

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The concern is not political indoctrination of students.

The concern is that psychological preparation of public school students is being done, without parental consent, that is meant or can lead to the eventual chemical or physical mutilation of their sex organs. This occurring in school environments where more common forms of staff sexual assault against students are also a frequent reality. Some view such an outcome as sexual abuse. And the issue is psychological preparation for that abuse.

I agree and agreed when I previously commented on this that this is a faulty application of the term "grooming." However, I don't believe it is a crazy, surpassingly outrageous, or beyond-the-pale viewpoint on the matter.

On “Words Have Meanings, Part Ten Thousand

I’ve encountered it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a neologistic usage as I describe it.

Here is an entry for “grooming” currently posted on an online Psychology Dictionary Professional Reference:

“ GROOMING
By N., Sam M.S. - 97
the term for the basic function of caring for yourself by cleaning and maintaining your hair, body and appearance standards. Animals groom by picking insects of themselves.”

https://psychologydictionary.org/grooming/

So… I dunno. But I will take your word for it.

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I know, but we’re saying let’s not do that. (I’m more okay with it than you perhaps, but I can be persuaded.)

The question is whether the until-last-week-or-so-existing use of “grooming” in the sexual predation context was a “word that [strictly] meant something [which is very specifically fixed]” like cancer does when referring to actual cancer, or more like the metaphorical extension of the meaning of “cancer”
as in “cancer on society.”

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Is grooming in this sense now a real professional term for this disgusting process of gaining a child’s trust for the purpose of assaulting them? Or is the use of this term for that more colloquial and metaphorical?

Rape is rape. Cancer is cancer. Those are not metaphors and not colloquial.

As far as I knew until a few years ago, grooming was combing your hair, or possibly preparing a protege in your profession for success. It had an entirely positive connotation. The negative meaning we are discussing here was a new metaphorical extension of a “word that means something.”

If I am wrong about that, if this was always a terms as fixed and literal as rock meaning rock just in a context I was not aware of, then fair enough. I learned something today. But if it is a new metaphorical extension of the meaning of a word that meant some(one)thing, then that is a process of rapid chant that is underway. Such processes aren’t complete when one part of society decides t t are. They mostly just aren’t ever complete once the pace of meanings and forms in language becoming unfixed picks up.

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