Eliminate NFP altogether. We’d get used to no tax deductions. We had charities long before they needed their 501c3 status. Doubt it’ll happen, as foundations would be livid.
No deductions for donors is one thing. Counting it as taxable gift income to charities is another. I am cool with receiving organizations not paying tax on cash donations, but only so long as they spend it within a year or two, not accumulate it into some giant endowment fund. They can still choose to accumulate if they think the reason is important enough to pay taxes on money retained after the deadline passes. One might make exception for money placed in escrow or trust with minimal discretion but designed to be paid out over time, for example, a four-year scholarship.
Notice I said cash. If you want to donate cars or art or whatever directly, you can, but whatever number recorded for the value of those gifts gets taxed as income. You have stuff and want to give to charity? Sell it yourself, pay your taxes, then give them the cash.
Richard Hanania had a great comment recently. "Conservative media and writers like Christopher Hitchens used to do glowing profiles of American soldiers who were motivated by the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq. Just a decade later, no American knows or cares whether Iraq is a democracy, and we don't even think of the country at all. It's quite sad."
I think that's one useful way to think about our intervention. Spending $2 trillion and thousands of American lives implies that this is something that is VERY important to our national interest or even to humanity as a whole. But I don't think anyone in America cares about Iraq and whether it is a democracy. I am reasonably well-versed in current events and geopolitics and I have no idea if it is a democracy. You could use that same logic for eg. Vietnam, Eastern Ukraine, etc. And I think you would still conclude that Taiwan and Israel are on one side of the equation and Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine are all on the other side.
I also think that campaign finance reform was a major mistake and that Citizens United was the wrong decision, but the first amendment issues are complicated.
The US derives immense advantage from being able to drop secret multi-billion dollar intelligence collection (and potentially operations-launching) platforms in """allied"""" countries and as close as possible to important targets. If you look at a map you can imagine various geographic scenarios and possible dead spaces and where the US might get locked out and where other major powers' spheres of influence are strong and thus effectively exclusionary to US intel, influence, interests, etc.
In general it's very hard to do analysis of various US moves without having some kind of special access to highly classified elements of the big picture.
understood - but i don't think we spent $2 trillion in Iraq so we could have a forward operating base there. Same Ukraine, Vietnam, etc. I totally agree on the value of having military bases around the world, but that's not what happened here - no need to access the classified documents, just doesn't track logically. Our most useful military installations are in allied nations - eg. Japan.
To put my cards on the table, Iraq was a complete fiasco start to finish*, and whatever benefits have have been or continue to be derived from that operation are simply nothing compared to the astronomical costs which were suffered among multiple salient dimensions of national power.
Nevertheless, sites in Japan, etc are the core US capability, but one assesses the value on the margin. Consider the part of the globe that comes into focus or goes dark if we do or don't have a presence at, say, Manas.
*The ugly finish seems to be coming up soon. The situation for US projection there is increasingly untenable and Iran seems poised to succeed at last by having never relented from keeping the pressure up and winning the waiting game by default. That's not such a hard call for them, after all, they live there. The Shiite Sphere strengthens.
I am in favor of having a forward military presence in many places around the world. No argument there. I am also in favor of using money to try to prevent China from further colonizing Africa and expanding its military presence there. I have written extensively about this topic, including:
I do think that isn't the lens with which we should decide on whether to spend trillions on a particular war. That is a different threshold and it is a higher one.
We can't out-money the Chinese. The US was much richer than the Soviets, and didn't need or buy much from them, but barely able to use a ton of money to prevent expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence all over and including in Africa. We have nothing at all like that advantage today over China's huge wealth and power and ability to get anything done in any of those countries for pennies on the dollar of what it costs America to do anything, even when we're giving it away. Also, we have made ourselves totally dependent on massive quantities of Chinese-produced goods.
I'm pretty close to aligning with EA but I don't necessarily disagree with your proposal about nonprofit donations. It's probably true that large donations are mostly worse in terms of their consequences than private sector investment, although I think that's not the case for e.g. donations to Givewell and might not be the case for catastrophic risk management donations (if there were an asteroid heading for the earth, investment in the private sector would not be the most beneficial way to spend our money).
I've said this before here, but I would be very curious to see a specific argument that stacks up the benefits from a marginal dollar of private sector investment as compared with something like Givewell's top charities.
It's impossible to make such an argument because different ways to weigh value (or which suffering you care more about) are philosophically irreconcilable. Absolutist Egalitarianism says one thing; The Market says a very different thing, traditional religions say all kinds of other things.
If you say that all human life, anywhere, anytime, any kind of person, has the same quality-age-and-whatever-adjusted value, say $100k per year, then the analysis comes out one way. If you say that the benefit of the marginal dollar of charitable allocation is the highest marginal amount of expected utility or productivity one can transform it into, then the analysis tells you to invest it with the risk-adjusted highest bidder. To put it in a cold-blooded way, if I can save my own life so cheaply with a mosquito net, and expect to earn enough to buy one, then I should be able to borrow to buy one for myself and my kids, because, after all, no one values our lives more than I do.
The point is, that there is no such thing as just generic "altruism", so there is no way to be more effectively altruistic. A criticism of EA is that they evade this controversy and phrase matters in a self-righteously smug or naive way as if they have arrived at the one true correct answer to this tricky moral question. But that's false. They have no such derived proof of moral correctness, and their equation is just one among many other equally valid possibilities. There are a variety of wildly and theoretically arbitrarily different conceptions of altruism, and so one has to specify the specific formula of one in particular in advance prior to any attempt to compare different approaches.
If EA is "pursue the quantifiable goals you've chosen with empirical rigor" then it's useful but not special. As SSC puts it, Bill Gates and others were already doing EA by that metric.
If its "use math to figure out which goals are the correct ones" then it falls into all the failure modes you note and is really smug and I can even see it making people worse at choosing goals due to hubris.
I think it is kind of special. There wouldn't be EA if "rigor for optimal allocation and expenditure of resources" had been as common and as consciously-pursued for charitable giving and philanthropies as it has been for finance or business. A lot of charitable work is perceived as being in the sacred realm and thus in pre-modernist perspective it is profane (ideologically, culturally, and instinctively) to try and measure quantity of good done, or even put charitable good and 'care' in the same conceptual category of things which can measured in numbers or valued in currency and traded for money. That's not to say this kind of thinking doesn't understand choices, consequences, and trade offs, but the whole decision process can deviate substantially from that typical for business.
Which is fine, except, it also lets a lot of secular charities become socially corrupted by deviation and distraction from the originally primary eleemosynary mission in ways that are hard to police without the kind of objective standard of numerical auditing we associate with business accounting.
What is special about EA is that it provides a kind of competition pressure and helps creates a normative environment in which donors start expecting charities to at least pay lip service to the need to spend money wisely and intelligently and focused externally and not just become cozy grift sinecures paid for either "donor-service" flattery, toadying, and status-boosting-advertising, lawfare-shyster-full-employment-act billable hours, or in some cases like the $PLC, outright fraud on the gullible elderly.
If you had to choose between Givewell and say the Ford Foundation or whatever Bezos' ex-wife is putting his money into, you'd pick EA, and to the extent its existence and prominence makes charities on average marginally more like Givewell than Ford, so far as that goes, that is special and worthy of our respect and esteem.
Let's just say Givewell = Mosquito Nets, which is what I see when I go on their webpage first.
I hate mosquito nets. They increase the population of Africa, and as you know I think increasing the population of Africa is TERRIBLE for long run utility. In other words, I think Givewell is worse than burning your money.
In general I think for-profit businesses do the most good in the world, and one of the best things you can do is just re-invest your money to achieve ROI.
To the extent that one does do charity I would focus on things for your family and community. Paying smart people to have more children might be the most effective altruist thing anyone could do, and in the case of many EAs (who are generally smart) making an effort to have more children would be the most effective use of their time and resources for long run utility.
But there is no Give Well for "locate people with 130+ IQs and offer them huge financial incentives to breed more". Or you could fund research into new IVF methods, etc.
But let's put all that on the side. Can't people just do simple charity. Look, over Thanksgiving we went to Longwood Gardens. We've been doing this a long time and love it. It brings a lot of beauty into the world. It makes people happy. It supports the arts and has a college to train people in landscaping and botany and other fields. Certainly "gilded age magnate builds himself giant mansion for his own satisfaction that later becomes charitable foundation that sells $30 tickets to look at pretty flowers" would fail the EA test. But I think it brings something unique and beautiful and useful into the world that wouldn't happen under normal circumstances, and unlike bednets I don't think it actively harms the world. I would say the same about all the gilded age charity that the same family engaged in )schools, museums, hospitals, old school charity).
I mean sure, don't give you money to some sham charity harping about the latest leftist Current Thing. But I'm not sold on "bed nets!!!!!!!!" either.
The irony is that saving African lives today may be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for stabilizing the population of that continent. Birth rates go down as people become sure that their children will survive to adulthood. They also seem to go down when people see opportunities expanding for themselves and their children. But high birth rates tend to go along with stagnant incomes. New opportunities are hard to come by when most people are just trying to feed a large number of children.
No, they don't go along. There are plenty of places in Europe and Latin America with stagnant incomes and rock bottom birth rates. It isn't income, growth rates, or survivability. The kids are coming from Afghanistan, Niger, Hasidic Jews, and the Amish. These days almost all their kids survive to adulthood, they still keep having lots of them. The common threads are obvious.
You know the joke about the drunk who lost his keys half a block away but is looking for them under the street lamp because that's where the light it? There is the "socially acceptable answers" version of street lamp light too. People keep proposing all the easily falsifiable explanations because the real explanations and their implications are too dark to contemplate.
Africa has been stagnantely poor for a long time and birthrates remain elevated. The economies consist almost entirely of digging shit out of the ground to sell to the west, and natural resource stocks get divided amongst population. Given the rock bottom genetic content of the continent, I think this may be one place where we are literally discussing Malthus as the only constraint on population. Africa will be 2.5B people in 2050 according to the UN, which already assumes birthrates will fall. Even optimistic UN projections show it will be 4.8 billion in 2100.
These people are going to swarm over the West like locusts and destroy it.
There's too much potential discussion to continue way down here. I'll just add two final notes which is are my personal views. First, eradicating infections or finding good cures for bad diseases are sui generis as temporal discontinuities in the capacity of these achievements to produce tremendous benefits for humanity at large over long time horizons and to eliminate risks that persist so long as an infection remains endemic that we are just a few random mutations or changes in circumstances away from Black Death-level global catastrophe. I live where there used to be malaria cases, it's easy to imagine how it might reestablish itself here, and an evolutionary Black Swan upgrading it into even more devastating super-malaria is by no means beyond the realm of possibility. Bed nets are not eradication but can contribute, and I'm willing to strongly discount the value of pretty much all potentially countervailing considerations as small change compared to the value of big and fast reductions in huge risks.
That's part of my second view, which is that existential risks to humanity at large are also sui-generis. An example could be the effort to prevent extinction-level asteroid impacts by greatly enhancing our capability for early detection and either destruction or maneuver away from a collision path with the Earth (or moon, which could end up killing us all too). Interestingly, maybe depressingly, this particular effort and many others analagous to it have never been popular causes attracting lots of large donations.
"But if you don’t put up any barriers to individuals buying elections, you end up with a two-party system where the two parties are George Soros and Peter Thiel."
I think this is wrong, in the sense that it solves an entirely theoretical problem ("buying elections") by implementing cumbersome and onerous procedures that can stifle democracy.
It's worth recalling that "campaign finance reform" started as a reaction to the 1968 presidential candidacy of Gene McCarthy, who was able to mount a campaign that threatened the preferred Democratic nominee thanks to contributions from a couple of donors who thought he had something worth listening to. The resulting rules consist of innumerable traps for the unwary, forcing all potential candidates to start their organization with a legal team that can sort through all the requirements. This is probably not a great difficulty for serious presidential candidates, who will need significant campaign organizations in any event, but can be prohibitive for self-starting candidates for lower office. These rules also empower an unaccountable bureaucracy that can target disfavored candidates - the 1996 senatorial campaign of Al Salvi should serve as a cautionary tale.
The thing to remember is what the politicians use the contributions for, which is marketing. There are limits to giving in cash and giving in kind for everything else BUT the one thing politicians want to use those gifts for - good coverage for them and attacks on their opponents. How much is it with to a competitor in a Democratic primary to have the New York Times on their side? A fortune, one the owners of the Times can donate indirectly in the form of press which campaign finance limitation law prohibits them and all other wealthy entities from giving in cash.
So, duh, rich people will just buy politically influential marketing properties as 'vanity press' and care little about profits because of the untaxed value they derive from this capacity to influence by giving unlimited support.
There is no good way to measure or assess the value of any of that from any outlet or 'influencer' and no way to regulate it which wouldn't run afoul of the first amendment. It is obscene to pretend we have a system of universally limited contributions when this giant loophole exception has so prominent a role in our politics.
Misses the mark. Soros and his kind can structure bequests to their vehicles while the Red Cross wastes money trying to come a dollar under your tax limits.
Better end the corporate tax entirely for example. And let's expose government TOTAL take from economy, direct and indirect. Such clarity lets voters curb pols and bureaucrats more effectively.
"If you don’t put up any barriers to individuals buying elections, you end up with a two-party system where the two parties are George Soros and Peter Thiel"
Do you, though? Evidence for that seems very weak.
"My goal is to expand the for-profit sector and shrink the non-profit sector." I'll second that. But your suggested way to accomplish this, while (I presume) not meant seriously, makes you sound cranky.
The Vietnam War against communism was significantly weakened in the 1956 election where the US refused to allow an evil but victorious WW II General Ho Chi Minh to become the elected leader. Evil popular leaders are a real problem for democracy, in theory and practice.
By the 1973 Peace Accords, with Henry the K getting a Nobel for, S. Vietnam was on it's way to be an Asian Tiger like South Korea. Look at NYT articles about Saigon in 1974, before the Democrats won in Congress and, as the N. Viet commies attacked, with USSR support, those Dems refused to allow Pres. Ford to send US planes or troops back to save the corrupt yet slowly getting more competent S. Viet army. Fighting then to maintain a S. Vietnam similar to S. Korea is what we should have done -- and NOT allowed the 25% civilian massacre of the Cambodian Killing Fields. The US didn't do a great job at nation building.
I remain outraged at Dems accepting commie takeover and genocide - including many Dem supporting Jewish Holocaust survivors. Tho in 1976, that genocide barely registered for me, and at the time I was upset at Ford pardoning Nixon as well as him ... falling down getting off planes. (My only Dem vote was for Jimmy Carter).
The evil Saddam should have been deposed in the 1992 Desert Storm campaign, rather than allowed to "win" by fighting against the US and surviving. From that point on, he violated his agreements so often there were 16 UNSC resolutions condemning his actions. The US being bad at nation building was a reasonable reason to leave Saddam in power, so as to avoid the kind of post-Gaddafi chaos in
Libya.
Reasonable, but a mistake - had the US occupied Iraq in 1992, with some chaos & problems but with more Iraqis alive willing to help rebuild, it's likely the Middle East would be better. Not necessarily more peaceful, tho possibly.
In the later invasion to get rid of Saddam, we tried to do nation building, instead of leaving (a mess). How many readers can, without googling, mention when the last Iraq election was? It's not clear that Iraq is a failure; merely not a clear success.
Maybe a 3 state solutions would have been better there? Shite, Sunni Arabs; plus Kurdistan (25 million Kurds remain the largest "nation" without a state).
What should have been done Iraq? remains very very relevant for Israel today - what should be done in Gaza?
Islamic peace with Israel can only come when the Gaza leaders view Israel as the strong horse.
Israelis should continuing to fight until Hamas surrenders, or is absent/ runs away from Gaza; that's the most likely way to dominate Gaza. Only an Israeli occupied Gaza will be a non-Jew killing Gaza.
Arnold's reduction of contributions to non-profits is great.
(update) Along with Iraq issues was this good one from Jonah:
"In the case of Vietnam, the governments we tried to stand up were just not good enough to be worth all the blood and treasure we spent on them."
Just a few reminders: The Vietnamese, North and South, lost about 1 million dead each - out of a total population of about 40 million - out of the belief that their respective national visions were worth dying for. To be fair, the northerners were subjects of a dictatorship, but the southerners certainly weren't. And whenever war came to a southern town or city the populace voted with their feet for the nearest South-held territory, even though in some cases they could reach the North and essentially escape the war with a 1-2 day walk. No one ever fled *toward* the Communists.
I would be less dismissive of the southern governments we "tried to stand up."
As far as I can tell from digging up one of his opinion pieces, Goldberg reasons backward from his dislike of Trump to the position that "reasonable reformers ... propose a national compact by which states agree to direct their electors to vote in accordance with the national popular vote." So like all the electors vote in unison?
But the EC in his view must be retained because to get rid of it openly would be messy and it has the potential to be the needed "mediating process designed to filter out demagogues or the unfit."
The reason he gives for disliking Trump is that he failed to move "beyond the coalition that elected [him]" to "at least [pretend] to lead the whole country ... Trump went a different way, effectively putting his thumb in the eye of the majority that didn’t vote for him."
Then he nods, but only nods, at urban areas getting to decide the presidency every time. But I guess in his cosmopolitan view urbanites would only ever pick urbane demagogues, so that's alright.
The thing is, Trump governed pretty moderately as far as I can recall. He did at least one thing I absolutely hated, revoking the recently-established national monument status of Bears Ears. But I certainly can't argue that being anti-environment, anti-wilderness (which monument status isn't, anyway) is not the straight-down-the-middle position in America, and will only become more irrelevant as the left lets in all its preferred utterly indifferent, purely materialist newcomers.
He didn't do a war and for some reason nobody else really started one. He talked the right talk on immigration and suppressed it somewhat. Again, Goldberg is not actually conservative so in some recess of his mind he may mean, as the left would, that Trump thus "stuck a finger in the eye" of all those people who didn't vote for him *because they haven't even gotten here yet or if they have, we haven't allowed them all to "vote" yet*.
He appointed a couple vaguely conservative people to the SC? - which perhaps dismays Goldberg. I doubt Trump had thoughts of abortion in mind particularly - there is no reason to think he is anything other than pro-abortion.
No doubt this is nitpicking but Trump didn't end Bears Ears National Monument. He drastically reduced it in size from Obama's 2016 2,112 square miles (1,351, 849 acres) to 315 square miles (201,876 acres). Biden quickly undid that.
And I'm so glad he did, especially as his other moves in the NPS/federal monument space have been so stupid. It was the best thing Obama did, and a very banana republic move by Trump to undo it. A president should not undo another president's legacy in this petty way. The two George Bushes made the Everglades their focus, as I recall. I doubt it occurred to Obama that he should roll that back.
Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve were established well before either Bush was president. What you may be thinking of is the several billion dollar project to try to get the Everglades more like it was before draining and damming (e.g., the Tamiami Highway). This involves the state of Florida and various federal agencies. Lots of negotiation went into it. Obama's environmentalist supporters do not want to roll it back.
I also just vaguely remembered Bush 2's other legacy initiative was preserving a coral reef in the Gulf - I think? I'm not going to google that, I would just like to think it was true.
Bush 2 created 4 National Monuments in the Pacific that were basically water and sea floor, with some reefs, atolls, islands, and seamounts. Two are gigantic. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument is 583,000 square miles. Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument is 495,000 square miles. By comparison, Texas is a little under 270,000 square miles.
I'm sorry, my comment must have been very unclear if it prompted you to tell me that the Bushes didn't establish the Everglades NP ;-) ...
I would wager very few Americans wanted Bears Ears rolled back. This was a dumb move to court a few extremists who would sell the national parks if they could, in order to make some sort of point in their minds. They do not seem to want to preserve one single aspect of the country they were born into.
‘Like’ as means of appreciating the opportunity to chip in. How about the proposition that our fearless leaders and their corporate puppet master pals consider the ultimate status of their immortal souls before pressing us members of the great unwashed into service for their ‘ideals’ - you know, the high-minded principles Dick Cheney leaned on? Maybe some of the revisionism would run thusly: a nice, thorny defensive perimeter around Saigon (and one up north around Da Nang, one of the great Asian ports) that would make any attempt by the VC and NVA too costly to bother with? It would’ve probably saved the lives of thousands of GI conscripts and the irony of us trading for products made with cheap Vietnamese labor decades down the road. Iraq? Simply stay out and preserve the ardent patriotism of our now volunteer armed forces for better uses, should the need arise; count a plus for the blunted Islamic extremism as a result. (And hundreds of thousands of innocent lives preserved as a nifty side bonus.) The Electoral College? Make it, on a state-by-state basis, reflective of the vote in individual congressional districts instead of winner-take-all. Two states -Maine and Nebraska - already do this. If every district was as valuable as every other electoral politics and campaigning would be fundamentally shifted toward more genuine representation, an obvious improvement over what we have now, no? The non-profit stuff I grant you - am on board, particularly after having witnessed the way that ‘sector’ has grown in recent times - kinda like a tapeworm.
"In Maine however, for elections beginning in 1988, the statewide winner is guaranteed two electors, but the other two are distributed based on the winners in each of the state’s two congressional districts."
So in 2016, Clinton won the state, but only 1 of 2 districts for 3-1 against Trump. First time split.
"In Nebraska, two are awarded based on the winner of the statewide popular vote while the other three are allocated to the victor in each congressional district." Split for Trump 4-1 against Biden in 2020.
It would be much better for Dem dominated states, who want to abolish or reduce the EC, to follow these examples. State winner gets both Senator votes, and each district winner counts.
Of course, if Rep states stayed winner take all, and Dem states allowed splitting, the Reps would win a close election. Which is why it's unlikely to happen unless there is more popular demand for it. In general, there are far more 50-60% Rep voting districts, where there are fewer big city districts which are 70-90% Dem.
The country is BOTH people and land. The EC does a better job of balancing these "fairly".
Thanks for the details, Tom. Ideally, it would be adopted universally and simultaneously. Of course that would require an unlikely level of bipartisan cooperation (you just read my bid for understatement of the year), not to mention a surge in democratic idealism across the board replacing the cynical gamesmanship we're now immersed in, so I'm not holding my breath. But if no one ever brings up an alternative the chances of it gaining traction remain zero, right?
A not so well known fact about Florida is the paucity of non-profits. It may have been a factor with regard to the pandemic response in various ways and probably has some significance to migration flows into and out of Florida as well. Lots of people have dreams of living near Disney World or the beach and even move to Florida and then are unable to find gainful employment at the level commensurate to their education. "Still, as of 2000 Florida had only eleven of the nation's four hundred largest nonprofit charities/philanthropic institutions. In contrast, Atlanta alone boasts eleven such organizations." - Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.
"As of 2000"? That's info was dated even when Land of Sunshine came out, and that was 15 years ago. Florida has changed tremendously during that time*, with population growth of 40%(!) and about a doubling of the state's GDP.
At any rate, the number doesn't mean much. A lot of the largest charities are "largest because oldest", and were founded in long-established centers of wealth, and many tend to have a lot of interaction with / wish to influence the national government and so like to have their HQ or at least a major branch nearby**. But Florida is new and far.
Consider some of the biggest: Salvation Army (1865), United Way (1887), Catholic Charities (1910) and Good360 (1983) are -all- in "Rich Men North of Richmond" Alexandria, Virginia. Goodwill (1902) is a whole 25 miles away in Rockville, Maryland, the Red Cross (1881) is in DC.
*As a personal anecdote, I dealt with four companies (atoms, not bits) in New England which have in the past twenty years all moved to Florida. Florida is simply not able to compete with that region's world-class performance in its number one sector of "chasing away people, money, and people with money." Florida probably doesn't have the capacity to host more big philanthropies because it employs too many people in its second largest industry after tourism - driving empty U-Haul trucks back to New Jersey.
**Two other non-Florida cities are worth mentioning as 'legacy' examples which prove the point about the dated-ness of those numbers. Feeding America and the YMCA are from Chicago which are like a number of other institutions founded there back when it was actually the "Second City", a term nobody even remembers anymore, with good reason.
Mormino's comparison to the special case of Atlanta is particularly misleading, as Atlanta had been the transportation-logistics hub and money-capital of the South since the Civil War while, but its role as such has diminished substantially in recent decades. It was also simultaneously at the heart of mid-20th-Centurty American bible-belt Christian religiosity combined with the quasi-hippie-commune do-gooder naivety, experimental energy, and motivation that were just in the air in lots of places at that time in world history. But in that region, that kind of religiosity and spirit is today nothing remotely close to what it was 40 or 50 years ago. Habitat for Humanity is a good example of an organization which emerged in Atlanta from just such a combination of circumstances, and which is now a zombie, increasingly woke-captured shell of its former self. Another Atlanta wrinkle that would have distorted the 2000 numbers is that it hosts The American Cancer Society, which was founded in NYC, but moved in 1989 because it wanted to do what all those other charities above did and move closer to USG. And it would have ended up in Alexandria like the rest too, however, it just so happened that because of a quirk of history, the particular part of the USG that the ACS thought at the time it would most need to interact with was the CDC, the predecessor to which had been established in Atlanta during World War II - something that would have never happened later on.
The Office of Malaria Control in War Areas was set up in 1942 just as US mobilization was ramping up dramatically, because Malaria was still endemic to the South*** as it had been for 300 years, not yet having been eradicated. But most new training base capacity was rapidly built in the malaria-prone Southland because of mild winters and plenty of cheap land. Washington itself was too busy and crowded with other war efforts. Colonel Groves had not yet finished building the Pentagon, though it only took him 16 months (!) to complete the world's biggest office building, which is how you get to go on to be military leader of Manhattan Project.
So they decided to put the anti-malaria office close to the malaria and the troops at risk of catching it, in the biggest city with the best transportation hub. When the "re-tailoring USG to fit its new role as global empire" spirit was in full swing after the war, the idea for an all-disease center seemed obvious, and they were going to bring it back to DC. But Atlanta heavyweights CocaCola and Emory University kept it Atlanta by sweeting the pot and gifting the land for the HQ to the federal government.
***Mussolini had nearly finished getting rid of it in Italy years before through eliminating mosquito habitat and intense building of land-drainage works, but in a tactic observed as recently as the Ukraine-Russia war, the fleeing Nazis destroyed some of these to flood large areas and make the mud impassable to American armor but perfect breeding grounds for mosquito larvae.
Much more effective was DDT, the insecticidal use of which was discovered by Swiss Chemist Paul Muller on the eve of war in 1939, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948, just 14 years before Carson's effective "Silent Spring" propaganda would have made such an award impossible, itself just 10 years before the US ban. DDT is how Malaria was eradicated in the South, in large part due to help from the Rockefeller Foundation which invested enormous resources into discovering the optimal strategies for employment in the US and abroad, and which by doing so, it's at least plausible it saved more people from malaria per dollar spent than any EA effort can lay claim to today.
I agree on the dating of the data, but if you want to understand the present as best you can the past is what got you to the present. The two best books I have found on attempting this with Florida, where I will likely die, are the one previous listed and another on Florida government and they are both 20 plus years out of date. Even if you keep adding more people the underlying structure hasn't changed that much. Florida is not uniquely hostile to non-profits, but if everywhere is moving in the same bad direction sometimes it is better to start from the lowest base.
Given how terrible and evil most governments (especially in the third world) are, we can't really use the "these guys are bad" metric for determining when the US should intervene. After all, the people we end up supporting can (and often are) bad too, or turn out that way eventually.
There probably is some value in deterring outside aggression if the aggressor is a clear threat to our interests (and I think of communism as very bad). I can see the argument that we should defend Vietnam the way we defended Korea. But that was a conventional war fought against another army and ended with a secure border zone. Vietnam was never that, it was a guerrilla civil war. There are a lot of parallels between Iraq War I and War II between Korea and Vietnam.
I've always considered the GOPs inability to move on from Iraq as a big reason that Trump broke though in 2016. He was the only one against it. The rest appear to have learned nothing from that.
Was he really against it? I’m not aware of his ever having opposed it but I could be wrong. Unless there is something on the public record of his position I wouldn’t take him at his word. He has been known to speak falsehoods on more than one (million) occasions.
I'm speaking of his position during the 2016 primaries. I don't know what his opinion was in 2003 or whatever.
In 2016, long after everyone should have known what a disaster Iraq was, Trump was the only one actually admitting to it. He did so during the primary debates and it showed a lot of contrast with the rest.
Trump did follow through on his campaign policies on both foreign policy (no wars) and abortion (Roe v Wade). We can debate how effective he was on immigration or trade, but he certainly did things.
Compared to many politicians, I would say he followed through on his campaign promises. Or at least attempted to.
For sure. The folly of the Iraq War was, for Republicans, that which cannot be discussed, to borrow from Arnold's post from a couple days ago. Trump earned himself a lot of street cred for being willing to say what everyone else was already thinking.
I see very little evidence that the 2023 edition of Jonah Goldberg "goes against the crowd". That might have been true of the one who correctly diagnosed back in 2008 that "liberal fascism" would take over the Democrat party but not the more recent versions.
Limiting charitable contributions as recommended can only increase the bureaucratic power of said regulators, and subsequently the reliance on approval of nanny-state regulators.
Vietnam was a campaign of the Cold War. The Soviets paid to equip three armies that they couldn’t afford, and got _nothing_ for it. The fall of Saigon was a pyrrhic victory.
The USA took a lot of damage, but it was not as easy to point out.
Eliminate NFP altogether. We’d get used to no tax deductions. We had charities long before they needed their 501c3 status. Doubt it’ll happen, as foundations would be livid.
We had charities before there was income tax.
No deductions for donors is one thing. Counting it as taxable gift income to charities is another. I am cool with receiving organizations not paying tax on cash donations, but only so long as they spend it within a year or two, not accumulate it into some giant endowment fund. They can still choose to accumulate if they think the reason is important enough to pay taxes on money retained after the deadline passes. One might make exception for money placed in escrow or trust with minimal discretion but designed to be paid out over time, for example, a four-year scholarship.
Notice I said cash. If you want to donate cars or art or whatever directly, you can, but whatever number recorded for the value of those gifts gets taxed as income. You have stuff and want to give to charity? Sell it yourself, pay your taxes, then give them the cash.
Richard Hanania had a great comment recently. "Conservative media and writers like Christopher Hitchens used to do glowing profiles of American soldiers who were motivated by the idea of bringing democracy to Iraq. Just a decade later, no American knows or cares whether Iraq is a democracy, and we don't even think of the country at all. It's quite sad."
I think that's one useful way to think about our intervention. Spending $2 trillion and thousands of American lives implies that this is something that is VERY important to our national interest or even to humanity as a whole. But I don't think anyone in America cares about Iraq and whether it is a democracy. I am reasonably well-versed in current events and geopolitics and I have no idea if it is a democracy. You could use that same logic for eg. Vietnam, Eastern Ukraine, etc. And I think you would still conclude that Taiwan and Israel are on one side of the equation and Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine are all on the other side.
I also think that campaign finance reform was a major mistake and that Citizens United was the wrong decision, but the first amendment issues are complicated.
The US derives immense advantage from being able to drop secret multi-billion dollar intelligence collection (and potentially operations-launching) platforms in """allied"""" countries and as close as possible to important targets. If you look at a map you can imagine various geographic scenarios and possible dead spaces and where the US might get locked out and where other major powers' spheres of influence are strong and thus effectively exclusionary to US intel, influence, interests, etc.
In general it's very hard to do analysis of various US moves without having some kind of special access to highly classified elements of the big picture.
understood - but i don't think we spent $2 trillion in Iraq so we could have a forward operating base there. Same Ukraine, Vietnam, etc. I totally agree on the value of having military bases around the world, but that's not what happened here - no need to access the classified documents, just doesn't track logically. Our most useful military installations are in allied nations - eg. Japan.
To put my cards on the table, Iraq was a complete fiasco start to finish*, and whatever benefits have have been or continue to be derived from that operation are simply nothing compared to the astronomical costs which were suffered among multiple salient dimensions of national power.
Nevertheless, sites in Japan, etc are the core US capability, but one assesses the value on the margin. Consider the part of the globe that comes into focus or goes dark if we do or don't have a presence at, say, Manas.
*The ugly finish seems to be coming up soon. The situation for US projection there is increasingly untenable and Iran seems poised to succeed at last by having never relented from keeping the pressure up and winning the waiting game by default. That's not such a hard call for them, after all, they live there. The Shiite Sphere strengthens.
I am in favor of having a forward military presence in many places around the world. No argument there. I am also in favor of using money to try to prevent China from further colonizing Africa and expanding its military presence there. I have written extensively about this topic, including:
https://open.substack.com/pub/leebressler/p/the-chinese-colonization-of-africa?r=8516r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/leebressler/p/the-relationship-with-china?r=8516r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/leebressler/p/chinas-belt-and-road-initiative?r=8516r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I do think that isn't the lens with which we should decide on whether to spend trillions on a particular war. That is a different threshold and it is a higher one.
Lee
We can't out-money the Chinese. The US was much richer than the Soviets, and didn't need or buy much from them, but barely able to use a ton of money to prevent expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence all over and including in Africa. We have nothing at all like that advantage today over China's huge wealth and power and ability to get anything done in any of those countries for pennies on the dollar of what it costs America to do anything, even when we're giving it away. Also, we have made ourselves totally dependent on massive quantities of Chinese-produced goods.
Africa is theirs if they want it.
I'm pretty close to aligning with EA but I don't necessarily disagree with your proposal about nonprofit donations. It's probably true that large donations are mostly worse in terms of their consequences than private sector investment, although I think that's not the case for e.g. donations to Givewell and might not be the case for catastrophic risk management donations (if there were an asteroid heading for the earth, investment in the private sector would not be the most beneficial way to spend our money).
I've said this before here, but I would be very curious to see a specific argument that stacks up the benefits from a marginal dollar of private sector investment as compared with something like Givewell's top charities.
It's impossible to make such an argument because different ways to weigh value (or which suffering you care more about) are philosophically irreconcilable. Absolutist Egalitarianism says one thing; The Market says a very different thing, traditional religions say all kinds of other things.
If you say that all human life, anywhere, anytime, any kind of person, has the same quality-age-and-whatever-adjusted value, say $100k per year, then the analysis comes out one way. If you say that the benefit of the marginal dollar of charitable allocation is the highest marginal amount of expected utility or productivity one can transform it into, then the analysis tells you to invest it with the risk-adjusted highest bidder. To put it in a cold-blooded way, if I can save my own life so cheaply with a mosquito net, and expect to earn enough to buy one, then I should be able to borrow to buy one for myself and my kids, because, after all, no one values our lives more than I do.
The point is, that there is no such thing as just generic "altruism", so there is no way to be more effectively altruistic. A criticism of EA is that they evade this controversy and phrase matters in a self-righteously smug or naive way as if they have arrived at the one true correct answer to this tricky moral question. But that's false. They have no such derived proof of moral correctness, and their equation is just one among many other equally valid possibilities. There are a variety of wildly and theoretically arbitrarily different conceptions of altruism, and so one has to specify the specific formula of one in particular in advance prior to any attempt to compare different approaches.
If EA is "pursue the quantifiable goals you've chosen with empirical rigor" then it's useful but not special. As SSC puts it, Bill Gates and others were already doing EA by that metric.
If its "use math to figure out which goals are the correct ones" then it falls into all the failure modes you note and is really smug and I can even see it making people worse at choosing goals due to hubris.
I think it is kind of special. There wouldn't be EA if "rigor for optimal allocation and expenditure of resources" had been as common and as consciously-pursued for charitable giving and philanthropies as it has been for finance or business. A lot of charitable work is perceived as being in the sacred realm and thus in pre-modernist perspective it is profane (ideologically, culturally, and instinctively) to try and measure quantity of good done, or even put charitable good and 'care' in the same conceptual category of things which can measured in numbers or valued in currency and traded for money. That's not to say this kind of thinking doesn't understand choices, consequences, and trade offs, but the whole decision process can deviate substantially from that typical for business.
Which is fine, except, it also lets a lot of secular charities become socially corrupted by deviation and distraction from the originally primary eleemosynary mission in ways that are hard to police without the kind of objective standard of numerical auditing we associate with business accounting.
What is special about EA is that it provides a kind of competition pressure and helps creates a normative environment in which donors start expecting charities to at least pay lip service to the need to spend money wisely and intelligently and focused externally and not just become cozy grift sinecures paid for either "donor-service" flattery, toadying, and status-boosting-advertising, lawfare-shyster-full-employment-act billable hours, or in some cases like the $PLC, outright fraud on the gullible elderly.
If you had to choose between Givewell and say the Ford Foundation or whatever Bezos' ex-wife is putting his money into, you'd pick EA, and to the extent its existence and prominence makes charities on average marginally more like Givewell than Ford, so far as that goes, that is special and worthy of our respect and esteem.
Let's just say Givewell = Mosquito Nets, which is what I see when I go on their webpage first.
I hate mosquito nets. They increase the population of Africa, and as you know I think increasing the population of Africa is TERRIBLE for long run utility. In other words, I think Givewell is worse than burning your money.
In general I think for-profit businesses do the most good in the world, and one of the best things you can do is just re-invest your money to achieve ROI.
To the extent that one does do charity I would focus on things for your family and community. Paying smart people to have more children might be the most effective altruist thing anyone could do, and in the case of many EAs (who are generally smart) making an effort to have more children would be the most effective use of their time and resources for long run utility.
But there is no Give Well for "locate people with 130+ IQs and offer them huge financial incentives to breed more". Or you could fund research into new IVF methods, etc.
But let's put all that on the side. Can't people just do simple charity. Look, over Thanksgiving we went to Longwood Gardens. We've been doing this a long time and love it. It brings a lot of beauty into the world. It makes people happy. It supports the arts and has a college to train people in landscaping and botany and other fields. Certainly "gilded age magnate builds himself giant mansion for his own satisfaction that later becomes charitable foundation that sells $30 tickets to look at pretty flowers" would fail the EA test. But I think it brings something unique and beautiful and useful into the world that wouldn't happen under normal circumstances, and unlike bednets I don't think it actively harms the world. I would say the same about all the gilded age charity that the same family engaged in )schools, museums, hospitals, old school charity).
I mean sure, don't give you money to some sham charity harping about the latest leftist Current Thing. But I'm not sold on "bed nets!!!!!!!!" either.
The irony is that saving African lives today may be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for stabilizing the population of that continent. Birth rates go down as people become sure that their children will survive to adulthood. They also seem to go down when people see opportunities expanding for themselves and their children. But high birth rates tend to go along with stagnant incomes. New opportunities are hard to come by when most people are just trying to feed a large number of children.
No, they don't go along. There are plenty of places in Europe and Latin America with stagnant incomes and rock bottom birth rates. It isn't income, growth rates, or survivability. The kids are coming from Afghanistan, Niger, Hasidic Jews, and the Amish. These days almost all their kids survive to adulthood, they still keep having lots of them. The common threads are obvious.
You know the joke about the drunk who lost his keys half a block away but is looking for them under the street lamp because that's where the light it? There is the "socially acceptable answers" version of street lamp light too. People keep proposing all the easily falsifiable explanations because the real explanations and their implications are too dark to contemplate.
Africa has been stagnantely poor for a long time and birthrates remain elevated. The economies consist almost entirely of digging shit out of the ground to sell to the west, and natural resource stocks get divided amongst population. Given the rock bottom genetic content of the continent, I think this may be one place where we are literally discussing Malthus as the only constraint on population. Africa will be 2.5B people in 2050 according to the UN, which already assumes birthrates will fall. Even optimistic UN projections show it will be 4.8 billion in 2100.
These people are going to swarm over the West like locusts and destroy it.
There's too much potential discussion to continue way down here. I'll just add two final notes which is are my personal views. First, eradicating infections or finding good cures for bad diseases are sui generis as temporal discontinuities in the capacity of these achievements to produce tremendous benefits for humanity at large over long time horizons and to eliminate risks that persist so long as an infection remains endemic that we are just a few random mutations or changes in circumstances away from Black Death-level global catastrophe. I live where there used to be malaria cases, it's easy to imagine how it might reestablish itself here, and an evolutionary Black Swan upgrading it into even more devastating super-malaria is by no means beyond the realm of possibility. Bed nets are not eradication but can contribute, and I'm willing to strongly discount the value of pretty much all potentially countervailing considerations as small change compared to the value of big and fast reductions in huge risks.
That's part of my second view, which is that existential risks to humanity at large are also sui-generis. An example could be the effort to prevent extinction-level asteroid impacts by greatly enhancing our capability for early detection and either destruction or maneuver away from a collision path with the Earth (or moon, which could end up killing us all too). Interestingly, maybe depressingly, this particular effort and many others analagous to it have never been popular causes attracting lots of large donations.
"But if you don’t put up any barriers to individuals buying elections, you end up with a two-party system where the two parties are George Soros and Peter Thiel."
I think this is wrong, in the sense that it solves an entirely theoretical problem ("buying elections") by implementing cumbersome and onerous procedures that can stifle democracy.
It's worth recalling that "campaign finance reform" started as a reaction to the 1968 presidential candidacy of Gene McCarthy, who was able to mount a campaign that threatened the preferred Democratic nominee thanks to contributions from a couple of donors who thought he had something worth listening to. The resulting rules consist of innumerable traps for the unwary, forcing all potential candidates to start their organization with a legal team that can sort through all the requirements. This is probably not a great difficulty for serious presidential candidates, who will need significant campaign organizations in any event, but can be prohibitive for self-starting candidates for lower office. These rules also empower an unaccountable bureaucracy that can target disfavored candidates - the 1996 senatorial campaign of Al Salvi should serve as a cautionary tale.
The thing to remember is what the politicians use the contributions for, which is marketing. There are limits to giving in cash and giving in kind for everything else BUT the one thing politicians want to use those gifts for - good coverage for them and attacks on their opponents. How much is it with to a competitor in a Democratic primary to have the New York Times on their side? A fortune, one the owners of the Times can donate indirectly in the form of press which campaign finance limitation law prohibits them and all other wealthy entities from giving in cash.
So, duh, rich people will just buy politically influential marketing properties as 'vanity press' and care little about profits because of the untaxed value they derive from this capacity to influence by giving unlimited support.
There is no good way to measure or assess the value of any of that from any outlet or 'influencer' and no way to regulate it which wouldn't run afoul of the first amendment. It is obscene to pretend we have a system of universally limited contributions when this giant loophole exception has so prominent a role in our politics.
Misses the mark. Soros and his kind can structure bequests to their vehicles while the Red Cross wastes money trying to come a dollar under your tax limits.
Better end the corporate tax entirely for example. And let's expose government TOTAL take from economy, direct and indirect. Such clarity lets voters curb pols and bureaucrats more effectively.
"If you don’t put up any barriers to individuals buying elections, you end up with a two-party system where the two parties are George Soros and Peter Thiel"
Do you, though? Evidence for that seems very weak.
"My goal is to expand the for-profit sector and shrink the non-profit sector." I'll second that. But your suggested way to accomplish this, while (I presume) not meant seriously, makes you sound cranky.
The Vietnam War against communism was significantly weakened in the 1956 election where the US refused to allow an evil but victorious WW II General Ho Chi Minh to become the elected leader. Evil popular leaders are a real problem for democracy, in theory and practice.
By the 1973 Peace Accords, with Henry the K getting a Nobel for, S. Vietnam was on it's way to be an Asian Tiger like South Korea. Look at NYT articles about Saigon in 1974, before the Democrats won in Congress and, as the N. Viet commies attacked, with USSR support, those Dems refused to allow Pres. Ford to send US planes or troops back to save the corrupt yet slowly getting more competent S. Viet army. Fighting then to maintain a S. Vietnam similar to S. Korea is what we should have done -- and NOT allowed the 25% civilian massacre of the Cambodian Killing Fields. The US didn't do a great job at nation building.
I remain outraged at Dems accepting commie takeover and genocide - including many Dem supporting Jewish Holocaust survivors. Tho in 1976, that genocide barely registered for me, and at the time I was upset at Ford pardoning Nixon as well as him ... falling down getting off planes. (My only Dem vote was for Jimmy Carter).
The evil Saddam should have been deposed in the 1992 Desert Storm campaign, rather than allowed to "win" by fighting against the US and surviving. From that point on, he violated his agreements so often there were 16 UNSC resolutions condemning his actions. The US being bad at nation building was a reasonable reason to leave Saddam in power, so as to avoid the kind of post-Gaddafi chaos in
Libya.
Reasonable, but a mistake - had the US occupied Iraq in 1992, with some chaos & problems but with more Iraqis alive willing to help rebuild, it's likely the Middle East would be better. Not necessarily more peaceful, tho possibly.
In the later invasion to get rid of Saddam, we tried to do nation building, instead of leaving (a mess). How many readers can, without googling, mention when the last Iraq election was? It's not clear that Iraq is a failure; merely not a clear success.
Maybe a 3 state solutions would have been better there? Shite, Sunni Arabs; plus Kurdistan (25 million Kurds remain the largest "nation" without a state).
What should have been done Iraq? remains very very relevant for Israel today - what should be done in Gaza?
Islamic peace with Israel can only come when the Gaza leaders view Israel as the strong horse.
Israelis should continuing to fight until Hamas surrenders, or is absent/ runs away from Gaza; that's the most likely way to dominate Gaza. Only an Israeli occupied Gaza will be a non-Jew killing Gaza.
Arnold's reduction of contributions to non-profits is great.
(update) Along with Iraq issues was this good one from Jonah:
"The shah of Iran gets a bad rap. "
"In the case of Vietnam, the governments we tried to stand up were just not good enough to be worth all the blood and treasure we spent on them."
Just a few reminders: The Vietnamese, North and South, lost about 1 million dead each - out of a total population of about 40 million - out of the belief that their respective national visions were worth dying for. To be fair, the northerners were subjects of a dictatorship, but the southerners certainly weren't. And whenever war came to a southern town or city the populace voted with their feet for the nearest South-held territory, even though in some cases they could reach the North and essentially escape the war with a 1-2 day walk. No one ever fled *toward* the Communists.
I would be less dismissive of the southern governments we "tried to stand up."
Ken
As far as I can tell from digging up one of his opinion pieces, Goldberg reasons backward from his dislike of Trump to the position that "reasonable reformers ... propose a national compact by which states agree to direct their electors to vote in accordance with the national popular vote." So like all the electors vote in unison?
But the EC in his view must be retained because to get rid of it openly would be messy and it has the potential to be the needed "mediating process designed to filter out demagogues or the unfit."
The reason he gives for disliking Trump is that he failed to move "beyond the coalition that elected [him]" to "at least [pretend] to lead the whole country ... Trump went a different way, effectively putting his thumb in the eye of the majority that didn’t vote for him."
Then he nods, but only nods, at urban areas getting to decide the presidency every time. But I guess in his cosmopolitan view urbanites would only ever pick urbane demagogues, so that's alright.
The thing is, Trump governed pretty moderately as far as I can recall. He did at least one thing I absolutely hated, revoking the recently-established national monument status of Bears Ears. But I certainly can't argue that being anti-environment, anti-wilderness (which monument status isn't, anyway) is not the straight-down-the-middle position in America, and will only become more irrelevant as the left lets in all its preferred utterly indifferent, purely materialist newcomers.
He didn't do a war and for some reason nobody else really started one. He talked the right talk on immigration and suppressed it somewhat. Again, Goldberg is not actually conservative so in some recess of his mind he may mean, as the left would, that Trump thus "stuck a finger in the eye" of all those people who didn't vote for him *because they haven't even gotten here yet or if they have, we haven't allowed them all to "vote" yet*.
He appointed a couple vaguely conservative people to the SC? - which perhaps dismays Goldberg. I doubt Trump had thoughts of abortion in mind particularly - there is no reason to think he is anything other than pro-abortion.
That backward reasoning is unsatisfactory.
No doubt this is nitpicking but Trump didn't end Bears Ears National Monument. He drastically reduced it in size from Obama's 2016 2,112 square miles (1,351, 849 acres) to 315 square miles (201,876 acres). Biden quickly undid that.
And I'm so glad he did, especially as his other moves in the NPS/federal monument space have been so stupid. It was the best thing Obama did, and a very banana republic move by Trump to undo it. A president should not undo another president's legacy in this petty way. The two George Bushes made the Everglades their focus, as I recall. I doubt it occurred to Obama that he should roll that back.
Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve were established well before either Bush was president. What you may be thinking of is the several billion dollar project to try to get the Everglades more like it was before draining and damming (e.g., the Tamiami Highway). This involves the state of Florida and various federal agencies. Lots of negotiation went into it. Obama's environmentalist supporters do not want to roll it back.
I also just vaguely remembered Bush 2's other legacy initiative was preserving a coral reef in the Gulf - I think? I'm not going to google that, I would just like to think it was true.
Bush 2 created 4 National Monuments in the Pacific that were basically water and sea floor, with some reefs, atolls, islands, and seamounts. Two are gigantic. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument is 583,000 square miles. Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument is 495,000 square miles. By comparison, Texas is a little under 270,000 square miles.
I was thinking of Flower Garden Banks Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf - Bush 1 designated after a 20 year effort by conservationists.
I'm sorry, my comment must have been very unclear if it prompted you to tell me that the Bushes didn't establish the Everglades NP ;-) ...
I would wager very few Americans wanted Bears Ears rolled back. This was a dumb move to court a few extremists who would sell the national parks if they could, in order to make some sort of point in their minds. They do not seem to want to preserve one single aspect of the country they were born into.
‘Like’ as means of appreciating the opportunity to chip in. How about the proposition that our fearless leaders and their corporate puppet master pals consider the ultimate status of their immortal souls before pressing us members of the great unwashed into service for their ‘ideals’ - you know, the high-minded principles Dick Cheney leaned on? Maybe some of the revisionism would run thusly: a nice, thorny defensive perimeter around Saigon (and one up north around Da Nang, one of the great Asian ports) that would make any attempt by the VC and NVA too costly to bother with? It would’ve probably saved the lives of thousands of GI conscripts and the irony of us trading for products made with cheap Vietnamese labor decades down the road. Iraq? Simply stay out and preserve the ardent patriotism of our now volunteer armed forces for better uses, should the need arise; count a plus for the blunted Islamic extremism as a result. (And hundreds of thousands of innocent lives preserved as a nifty side bonus.) The Electoral College? Make it, on a state-by-state basis, reflective of the vote in individual congressional districts instead of winner-take-all. Two states -Maine and Nebraska - already do this. If every district was as valuable as every other electoral politics and campaigning would be fundamentally shifted toward more genuine representation, an obvious improvement over what we have now, no? The non-profit stuff I grant you - am on board, particularly after having witnessed the way that ‘sector’ has grown in recent times - kinda like a tapeworm.
"In Maine however, for elections beginning in 1988, the statewide winner is guaranteed two electors, but the other two are distributed based on the winners in each of the state’s two congressional districts."
So in 2016, Clinton won the state, but only 1 of 2 districts for 3-1 against Trump. First time split.
"In Nebraska, two are awarded based on the winner of the statewide popular vote while the other three are allocated to the victor in each congressional district." Split for Trump 4-1 against Biden in 2020.
It would be much better for Dem dominated states, who want to abolish or reduce the EC, to follow these examples. State winner gets both Senator votes, and each district winner counts.
Of course, if Rep states stayed winner take all, and Dem states allowed splitting, the Reps would win a close election. Which is why it's unlikely to happen unless there is more popular demand for it. In general, there are far more 50-60% Rep voting districts, where there are fewer big city districts which are 70-90% Dem.
The country is BOTH people and land. The EC does a better job of balancing these "fairly".
Thanks for the details, Tom. Ideally, it would be adopted universally and simultaneously. Of course that would require an unlikely level of bipartisan cooperation (you just read my bid for understatement of the year), not to mention a surge in democratic idealism across the board replacing the cynical gamesmanship we're now immersed in, so I'm not holding my breath. But if no one ever brings up an alternative the chances of it gaining traction remain zero, right?
A not so well known fact about Florida is the paucity of non-profits. It may have been a factor with regard to the pandemic response in various ways and probably has some significance to migration flows into and out of Florida as well. Lots of people have dreams of living near Disney World or the beach and even move to Florida and then are unable to find gainful employment at the level commensurate to their education. "Still, as of 2000 Florida had only eleven of the nation's four hundred largest nonprofit charities/philanthropic institutions. In contrast, Atlanta alone boasts eleven such organizations." - Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.
"As of 2000"? That's info was dated even when Land of Sunshine came out, and that was 15 years ago. Florida has changed tremendously during that time*, with population growth of 40%(!) and about a doubling of the state's GDP.
At any rate, the number doesn't mean much. A lot of the largest charities are "largest because oldest", and were founded in long-established centers of wealth, and many tend to have a lot of interaction with / wish to influence the national government and so like to have their HQ or at least a major branch nearby**. But Florida is new and far.
Consider some of the biggest: Salvation Army (1865), United Way (1887), Catholic Charities (1910) and Good360 (1983) are -all- in "Rich Men North of Richmond" Alexandria, Virginia. Goodwill (1902) is a whole 25 miles away in Rockville, Maryland, the Red Cross (1881) is in DC.
*As a personal anecdote, I dealt with four companies (atoms, not bits) in New England which have in the past twenty years all moved to Florida. Florida is simply not able to compete with that region's world-class performance in its number one sector of "chasing away people, money, and people with money." Florida probably doesn't have the capacity to host more big philanthropies because it employs too many people in its second largest industry after tourism - driving empty U-Haul trucks back to New Jersey.
**Two other non-Florida cities are worth mentioning as 'legacy' examples which prove the point about the dated-ness of those numbers. Feeding America and the YMCA are from Chicago which are like a number of other institutions founded there back when it was actually the "Second City", a term nobody even remembers anymore, with good reason.
Mormino's comparison to the special case of Atlanta is particularly misleading, as Atlanta had been the transportation-logistics hub and money-capital of the South since the Civil War while, but its role as such has diminished substantially in recent decades. It was also simultaneously at the heart of mid-20th-Centurty American bible-belt Christian religiosity combined with the quasi-hippie-commune do-gooder naivety, experimental energy, and motivation that were just in the air in lots of places at that time in world history. But in that region, that kind of religiosity and spirit is today nothing remotely close to what it was 40 or 50 years ago. Habitat for Humanity is a good example of an organization which emerged in Atlanta from just such a combination of circumstances, and which is now a zombie, increasingly woke-captured shell of its former self. Another Atlanta wrinkle that would have distorted the 2000 numbers is that it hosts The American Cancer Society, which was founded in NYC, but moved in 1989 because it wanted to do what all those other charities above did and move closer to USG. And it would have ended up in Alexandria like the rest too, however, it just so happened that because of a quirk of history, the particular part of the USG that the ACS thought at the time it would most need to interact with was the CDC, the predecessor to which had been established in Atlanta during World War II - something that would have never happened later on.
The Office of Malaria Control in War Areas was set up in 1942 just as US mobilization was ramping up dramatically, because Malaria was still endemic to the South*** as it had been for 300 years, not yet having been eradicated. But most new training base capacity was rapidly built in the malaria-prone Southland because of mild winters and plenty of cheap land. Washington itself was too busy and crowded with other war efforts. Colonel Groves had not yet finished building the Pentagon, though it only took him 16 months (!) to complete the world's biggest office building, which is how you get to go on to be military leader of Manhattan Project.
So they decided to put the anti-malaria office close to the malaria and the troops at risk of catching it, in the biggest city with the best transportation hub. When the "re-tailoring USG to fit its new role as global empire" spirit was in full swing after the war, the idea for an all-disease center seemed obvious, and they were going to bring it back to DC. But Atlanta heavyweights CocaCola and Emory University kept it Atlanta by sweeting the pot and gifting the land for the HQ to the federal government.
***Mussolini had nearly finished getting rid of it in Italy years before through eliminating mosquito habitat and intense building of land-drainage works, but in a tactic observed as recently as the Ukraine-Russia war, the fleeing Nazis destroyed some of these to flood large areas and make the mud impassable to American armor but perfect breeding grounds for mosquito larvae.
Much more effective was DDT, the insecticidal use of which was discovered by Swiss Chemist Paul Muller on the eve of war in 1939, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948, just 14 years before Carson's effective "Silent Spring" propaganda would have made such an award impossible, itself just 10 years before the US ban. DDT is how Malaria was eradicated in the South, in large part due to help from the Rockefeller Foundation which invested enormous resources into discovering the optimal strategies for employment in the US and abroad, and which by doing so, it's at least plausible it saved more people from malaria per dollar spent than any EA effort can lay claim to today.
I agree on the dating of the data, but if you want to understand the present as best you can the past is what got you to the present. The two best books I have found on attempting this with Florida, where I will likely die, are the one previous listed and another on Florida government and they are both 20 plus years out of date. Even if you keep adding more people the underlying structure hasn't changed that much. Florida is not uniquely hostile to non-profits, but if everywhere is moving in the same bad direction sometimes it is better to start from the lowest base.
Given how terrible and evil most governments (especially in the third world) are, we can't really use the "these guys are bad" metric for determining when the US should intervene. After all, the people we end up supporting can (and often are) bad too, or turn out that way eventually.
There probably is some value in deterring outside aggression if the aggressor is a clear threat to our interests (and I think of communism as very bad). I can see the argument that we should defend Vietnam the way we defended Korea. But that was a conventional war fought against another army and ended with a secure border zone. Vietnam was never that, it was a guerrilla civil war. There are a lot of parallels between Iraq War I and War II between Korea and Vietnam.
I've always considered the GOPs inability to move on from Iraq as a big reason that Trump broke though in 2016. He was the only one against it. The rest appear to have learned nothing from that.
Was he really against it? I’m not aware of his ever having opposed it but I could be wrong. Unless there is something on the public record of his position I wouldn’t take him at his word. He has been known to speak falsehoods on more than one (million) occasions.
I'm speaking of his position during the 2016 primaries. I don't know what his opinion was in 2003 or whatever.
In 2016, long after everyone should have known what a disaster Iraq was, Trump was the only one actually admitting to it. He did so during the primary debates and it showed a lot of contrast with the rest.
Yes, I think that’s true. I believe there is a recording somewhere of him supporting the war at the time.
Of course most people don’t really care about his actual positions, eg abortion, but only his posturing after the fact.
Trump did follow through on his campaign policies on both foreign policy (no wars) and abortion (Roe v Wade). We can debate how effective he was on immigration or trade, but he certainly did things.
Compared to many politicians, I would say he followed through on his campaign promises. Or at least attempted to.
For sure. The folly of the Iraq War was, for Republicans, that which cannot be discussed, to borrow from Arnold's post from a couple days ago. Trump earned himself a lot of street cred for being willing to say what everyone else was already thinking.
I see very little evidence that the 2023 edition of Jonah Goldberg "goes against the crowd". That might have been true of the one who correctly diagnosed back in 2008 that "liberal fascism" would take over the Democrat party but not the more recent versions.
Limiting charitable contributions as recommended can only increase the bureaucratic power of said regulators, and subsequently the reliance on approval of nanny-state regulators.
Vietnam was a campaign of the Cold War. The Soviets paid to equip three armies that they couldn’t afford, and got _nothing_ for it. The fall of Saigon was a pyrrhic victory.
The USA took a lot of damage, but it was not as easy to point out.