Gridlock - Driving, Vouchers, Migrants, and Politicians
Driving
We have talked about cars, and the ways Americans are uniquely dangerous behind the wheel. It is true that our cars are bigger and we drive faster than Europeans or Asians, but why are our roads more dangerous than, say, Canada, which loves big trucks?
One answer may be: our brains. For the nine years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, traffic deaths across the country were trending downwards. Then, all hell broke loose:
From 2020 to 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has since calculated, the number of crashes in the United States soared 16 percent, to more than six million, or roughly 16,500 wrecks a day. The fatality figures were somehow even worse: In 2021, 42,939 Americans died in car crashes, the highest toll in a decade and a half.
There are two periods in American history with large spikes in car fatalities - the early 20th century, when cars were first mass produced and untrained drivers flooded the streets, and the 1950's and 60's, when America built its labyrinthine highway system and fell in love with fast cars like the Mustang and Corvette.
Both these spikes were cultural and behavioral - driving, and driving fast, became obsessions, and safety was an afterthought. So, how does any of this correlate to the pandemic?
Our vibes are off, in a big way:
According to the report, titled “Stress in America,” just 34 percent of American adults have confidence in the direction the country is going, while a third of respondents said they had too much anxiety in their lives to think about the future at all.
Americans are stressed, anxious, and prone to anger because we've just lived through three pretty awful years. Over a million dead, racial inequality, political instability, wars, and the general financial precarity of a significant portion of the populace channeled through the wheel of a car, on poorly maintained roads, with little enforcement of driving laws.
Surveys indicate that American drivers perceive a notable increase in aggressive and reckless driving. Experiencing external aggression makes aggressive responses more likely, according to one behavioral study:
Another scenario involved a left-hand turn across a busy intersection. For every few seconds that the driver failed to make the turn, a car would crawl up behind the driver and commence honking. The longer the wait, the more cars, the more cacophony. And yet the turn was a hard one — the windows of opportunity were short. You either gave in to the pressure of the cars behind you and behaved recklessly, or you waited. Few participants waited very long. “Frustrating events in the driving environment may instigate drivers to drive aggressively even if they may be nonaggressive by nature,” the study’s authors concluded.
Notably, in that study, people who reported less stress in their daily lives also drove less aggressively. America is the most stressed-out nation that drives the most and spends a lot of that time surrounded by anxious motorists:
Traffic is up across the country, as is the duration of our average one-way commutes, which recently topped 27 minutes, the longest in our history.
There isn't any one factor behind the increase in car fatalities - like many uniquely American problems it is a mix of anger, reckless speed, drug and alcohol abuse, distractions from devices and in-car screens, and a failure of society at large to take steps to combat it.
It is a solvable problem, in some societies at least. The French government installed speed cameras and increased fines for speeding and deaths have decreased steadily over decades. Canada revokes licenses for impaired driving and impounds cars. Cities in Europe are capping speed limits and turning more of their streets over to bikes and pedestrians.
Unfortunately, in many of the most deadly places in America (Florida!) we're going backwards. Eight states have banned speed cameras entirely, and others heavily restrict their use. Few places are interested in narrowing streets or closing lanes - our solution to increased traffic is always more, bigger roads. Which means more anxious drivers in bigger cars, driving too fast, not paying attention, prone to snap at any moment.
Vouchers
So-called 'school choice' advocates have waged a decades-long battle against public schools, primarily through the promotion of vouchers as a way for parents to use money earmarked for public education to send their kids to private or religious schools.
All at once, the voucher lobby won major victories in ten states that adopted universal or near-universal voucher programs since 2020. This flew so far beneath the radar it escaped my notice, but now that early data is coming in, the program's effects are far from surprising:
But since Arizona became the first state to allow any family to use public funding for private school or home schooling, students who had already opted out of public schools have been among the biggest beneficiaries. Data from a few other states that have since enacted similar programs show the same trend.
Parents of kids already in private or religious schools are happily grabbing state cash they don't need:
In Florida, among more than 120,000 students newly enrolled in expanded school choice programs, 69% were already in private school, according to data from September. In Iowa, among an initial batch of 17,000 students approved for its Education Savings Account, 60% came from private schools.
Who could have predicted that the same parents capable of sending their kids to private school would also be all over new laws gifting them thousands of dollars for the privilege. And, with widespread adoption by mostly affluent families, those thousands add up fast:
The Arizona Department of Education projects it will spend $780 million on ESAs this year.
Is that a lot? Well:
Arizona is facing a $400 million budget shortfall this year due to weaker-than-expected tax revenue.
Ahhhh, right. In addition to universal vouchers, many Republican governors are tearing new holes in state budgets via tax cuts. Which means, of course, cuts to public education, social services, things of that nature.
You could call this a bait-and-switch, but that implies the people passing these laws are hiding their true intent. The school choice movement has a explicit goal of crippling public education so badly it will only be suitable for the poor and immigrants. It is racial and class segregation rebranded as freedom of choice, a modern Jim Crow, and now it's siphoning off critical funds from public schools and giving the bulk to the parents of the kids who need it the least.
Migrants
If you are a Republican governor, you might give speeches decrying the waves of migrants surging across the border (even if you don't live anywhere near it). This has become so common it fades to background noise, you expect it of a right-wing politician in Arizona or West Virginia or Iowa.
Maybe not so much from the mayor of New York City, though?
In November, Mayor Eric Adams said the sky was falling on city finances because of soaring costs for caring for asylum seekers and ordered agencies to cut their budgets. Among the slated casualties were a class of new police recruits, Sunday library hours and street corner trash collections.
Adams claimed the migrants being bussed in by Texas and Florida (also not on a border) were going to cost the city a billion and a half dollars, and used it as an excuse to close libraries and cut trash services. The NYPD - who overspent their overtime 'budget' by hundreds of millions last year with no consequences - were miraculously saved by Saint Adams at the last minute.
Then, Adams announced there was no crisis after all, and restored funding to everything. So, uh, what? The mayor's office fudged the budget numbers in a way that made them look unusually bad:
The key decision in November that made the forecast so dire was to not update projections for either tax revenues or spending. That resulted in a whopping $7 billion gap to be closed for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
So the mayor - who is under increasing legal scrutiny for accepting illegal campaign donations - manufactured a crisis that he could solve, and did little to disguise it. And, at the center of it all, was the demonization of migrants, a cause célèbre among both sides of the aisle these days.
Right now, the Biden White House is attempting to score political points by touting a draconian bill it crafted with Republican Senators that would place dramatic new restrictions on the border. Sure, Republicans won't vote for it because Trump told them not to, but the fact we're an angry old racist's whim away from further codifying the de facto dehumanization at our southern border indicates how far right the window has moved on the border crisis.
Not that any of this has dulled the vivid fever dreams of the far right. The media credulously reported on "God's Army", alleged to be thousands of MAGAs strong, rolling coal down to Texas in their lifted trucks and RVs.
When the actual few hundred of them arrived, outrage proved difficult to muster:
Convoy-goer Misty Gregory told MSNBC: “It’s not what I expected, but then again I don’t know what I expected. I can tell you it’s not as bad as what I thought, so that’s kind of eye-opening in itself.”
As much as politicians continue to make hay out of the immigration crisis they themselves eagerly perpetuate, their Boschian descriptions of conditions in the brave Border Towns are as flimsy as one of Eric Adams's budgets.
Politicians
At the federal level, American politics has slowed to a permanent, dysfunctional crawl. One of our two political parties has embraced intransigence and active sabotage as a platform, dedicating their energy to propping up their next would-be dictator. The system, to hear the unelected lawyers who run our country tell it, is working as intended, and we couldn't possibly change the rules to punish lawmakers for not actually making laws, or obstructing them.
In some places, though, such change is possible. Oregon's Republicans were using absenteeism to block the passage of popular legislation - the state requires two-thirds presence to convene a session - so voters changed the constitution to bar anyone with more than 10 unexcused absences from running for re-election. That...didn't fix the problem:
Still, 10 lawmakers, including Tim Knopp, the Senate minority leader, repeatedly boycotted legislative work last year to stall legislation on abortion, transgender issues, drug policy and guns. The walkouts lasted weeks, delaying action on hundreds of bills.
The lawmakers involved in the boycotts included nine of the Senate’s 12 Republicans and an independent who was a former Republican.
And now six of them have been struck from the ballot, as promised! Passing laws governing the conduct of the ruling elite and then having them actually enforced? In this economy?
Anyhow, Oregonians can look forward to more Republican intransigence until the next election:
Mr. Knopp has suggested that even a ruling against the Republican lawmakers would leave them with a certain amount of sway in this year’s session. Lawmakers who cannot run for re-election, he told reporters this week, would have no reason to show up unless they are offered incentives — raising the specter of another de facto boycott.
It is perfectly on brand for the GOP that their response to reaping the consequences of their own actions is to threaten to do the thing they've been doing all along and refuse to do their jobs.
More Politicians
I wrote the above section on Wednesday, and a day later this news broke:
Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has been named a target in a federal investigation into whether his government plotted a military takeover of the country, police officials told The Washington Post on Thursday, and has been given 24 hours to surrender his passport.
Bolsonaro proooooobably did a (successful) coup the first time around, having his rival Lula imprisoned so he couldn't run for office. Once Lula was released from jail and people realized what a terrible president Bolso was - he was most effective at getting COVID-19 - he tried a second (unsuccessful) coup, much in the vein of his best American pal.
But! Unlike in this country where our highest court is poised to say that a president and his political party trying to toss the results of an election is not a coup, or insurrection, or anything of that nature and fine, actually, Brazil has decided it's a good idea to investigate and prosecute the people who tried to do the coup.
There's a joke that the US is Brazil with more money, which is harder to laugh at when they're making us look foolish by embracing such fundamental concepts of democracy as 'the people who try to steal power should not get a second try.'
Short Cons
NY Times - "“What they’re doing is clear evidence of exploitation and using I.P. that they don’t have licenses to,” said Mr. Southen, referring to A.I. companies’ use of intellectual property."
HeatMap - "Just how much electricity does cryptocurrency mining use? It could be over 2% of all electricity in the United States, according to a preliminary estimate released by the Energy Information Administration."
ATL Press Collective - "A sweeping state bill expanding the cash bail system and criminalizing charitable bail organizations passed in the Georgia Senate by a 30-17 margin Thursday."
Fortune - "The Wall Street Journal reported on a different reason for this charity’s popularity, especially with Northern California tech luminaries: privacy and the biggest possible tax break. The foundation offers “donor-advised funds” that allow figures like [Reed] Hastings to both donate and advise specifically on how the donation will be used."
ABC News - "Special counsel Jack Smith's team has questioned several witnesses about a closet and a so-called "hidden room" inside former President Donald Trump's residence at Mar-a-Lago that the FBI didn't check while searching the estate in August 2022, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News."
WIRED - "Over the past two years, a collection of people with direct and indirect links to that company have been working to keep it that way, using a campaign of legal threats to silence publishers and anyone else reporting on Appin Technology’s alleged hacking past."
The Guardian - "Meta’s oversight board has found that a Facebook video wrongfully suggesting that the US president, Joe Biden, is a paedophile does not violate the company’s current rules while deeming those rules “incoherent” and too narrowly focused on AI-generated content."
Government Executive - "A funding and staffing surge at the Internal Revenue Service could lead to as much as $850 billion in new revenue over the next decade, according to a revised estimate by the Biden administration, which said its previous projections left out key drivers of improved tax collection."
NY Times - "For years, Rybolovlev has accused Bouvier of defrauding him in that and dozens of other transactions by posing as an art adviser negotiating sales on Rybolovlev’s behalf, when, in fact, he was secretly acting as an art dealer and often increasing the prices by tens of millions of dollars. Bouvier denies this."
Know someone thinking of staging a coup? Send them HERE.