Out of Control
Gun Control
After last week’s horrific shooting in Uvalde, Texas the gun control debate is once again front and center in American politics. One side - Republicans and the right wing - believes any attempt at gun control is un-American and won’t consider it. The other side - Democrats - talks about the need for gun control and proposes mild measures that go nowhere. I didn’t include the ‘left’ such as it exists in America, because they’re written off as politically naïve when they suggest strong gun laws. Some left-leaning states have passed more restrictive gun control measures, but the Supreme Court will soon strike those down.
Gun control, such as it exists in America, is essentially a dead issue while Republicans hold veto power over the legislative process and make rules from the bench. However, it’s worth pointing out that gun control does work, and that many other places have done it with great success.
This Scientific American editorial rebuts common arguments against gun control:
The science is abundantly clear: More guns do not stop crime. Guns kill more children each year than auto accidents. More children die by gunfire in a year than on-duty police officers and active military members. Guns are a public health crisis, just like COVID, and in this, we are failing our children, over and over again.
Despite the gun lobby’s best efforts to prevent the CDC and other government agencies from studying gun violence, data from all over the world undermines the argument that guns keep us safe, or are in any way tied to freedom. For children, they do the exact opposite:
A study comparing gun deaths the U.S. to other high-income countries in Europe and Asia tells us that our homicide rate in teens and young adults is 49 times higher. Our firearm suicide rate is eight times higher. The U.S. has more guns than any of the countries in the comparison.
49 times! As a nation we die from guns at 25 times the rate of other high-income countries. Our suicide rate is 8 times higher. Accidental deaths from guns 6 times. Most human beings killed by guns in high-income countries are in the US - 90% of women and 91% of young children.
It is an American problem, and it’s even worse in states with weak gun laws:
As we previously reported, in 2015, assaults with a firearm were 6.8 times more common in states that had the most guns, compared to the least. More than a dozen studies have revealed that if you had a gun at home, you were twice as likely to be killed as someone who didn’t. Research from the Harvard School of Public Health tells us that states with higher gun ownership levels have higher rates of homicide. Data even tells us that where gun shops or gun dealers open for business, killings go up.
The mere presence of a gun shop increases violent crime. Guns are cheap, easy to obtain, and deadly. The Uvalde shooter was able to go to a gun store and obtain multiple guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition right after he turned 18. In response, the governor said it is a cornerstone right in Texas to buy rifles. While tragedies like mass school shootings are terrible and make headlines, overall gun deaths and injuries in America - accidents, suicides, shootings - are all off the charts for a rich country, and we’re still talking about the issue as if it isn’t a uniquely American problem.
I have traveled to two countries with interesting gun control stories - Albania and Serbia. Albania, where I went to attend a soccer match last month, had a civil war in 1997. Fun fact - a series of Ponzi schemes contributed to the collapse. Albanians looted 839 million rounds of ammo, 16 million explosives, and over half a million firearms from military depots. The murder rate skyrocketed for a few years after the war. Since then, Albania has passed gun control legislation and - critically - created social programs to stabilize living conditions for its people. Albania has a population twice the size of Philadelphia. In 2020, 41 people were killed by guns in Albania. Philadelphia had 444 gun murders, nearly 90% of total homicides in the city. One American city has ten times the deadly shootings of a country once called ‘deadlier’ than the US.
Serbia went through a bloody civil war after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Like Albania, millions of guns entered civilian hands and black markets. Once a more stable government was established, however, Serbia enacted strict gun laws that banned automatic and semiautomatic guns, with permits requiring background checks and safety training. That, combined with socialized medicine and other anti-poverty programs, led to a sharp decrease in gun violence and death - today, most gun deaths in Serbia are from suicide. Serbia has a population of around 7 million people and 18 were killed with guns in 2017. Chicago, a city of 2.7 million, had 600 gun murders in the same year.
I share these stories to illustrate that the US isn’t just much more violent than high-income countries, it’s far more deadly than lower-income societies Americans may view as ‘dangerous’. I was safer walking the streets of Tirana than I am taking the train a few stops north from my home in Philadelphia, statistically speaking.
The US - in its current political situation - is not going to meaningfully restrict guns or gun ownership, and the courts appear ready to take away the rights of states and cities to keep their citizens safe from guns. Like many aspects of American life, it doesn’t have to be this way, and it isn’t this way anywhere else. The people insisting it can’t be changed are lying through their teeth.
The Police
Despite the alarming statistics above, America is enjoying a relatively low-crime moment - murders and violent crime are up a little since 2019, but property crimes are down. The overall crime rate is well below what it was in 1990. Over the same period, police budgets have continued to steadily grow across the country. What are Americans getting for their money? Not much:
According to the most recent data published by the FBI, the rates at which police forces are solving crimes have plunged to historic lows. In the case of murders and violent crime, clearance rates have dipped to just 50 percent, a startling decline from the 1980s, when police cleared 70 percent of all homicides.
It’s not just murder. Manslaughter is down to 69 percent clearance from 90 percent forty years ago. Clearances in assault and rape cases have dropped to 47 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Nonviolent property crimes like burglary (which involves illegally entering a property), theft (which involves taking property from another person), and motor vehicle theft are getting solved at a microscopic 14 percent, 15 percent, and 12 percent, respectively.
While those figures are shocking on their own, clearance rates are easily manipulated by police - they track arrests in cases, not actual convictions. Conviction rates are even lower.
We have talked before about the general incompetence of US police forces. In Uvalde, it was on display for everyone to see. Uvalde is a town of 16,000 that has a city police force, a school police force for some reason, and a heavily geared SWAT team. Police spending makes up 40% of the city’s budget. And yet, despite local police, sheriffs, and Federal Marshals (?) on the scene of the school massacre, no member of law enforcement entered the building for over an hour.
One reason cited for poor clearance rates among the police is a lack of community trust. Another is the increasing rate at which police kill civilians. Prior of Uvalde, pro-police advocates probably thought it was in a cop’s job description to put themselves in harm’s way to protect society’s most vulnerable. With that myth shattered, it may be possible to have a more sober discussion about what role policing should really play in the country. Maybe.
Texas
The debate over gun rights in Texas spilled over into high finance four years ago when some banks backed away from financing gun companies after the Parkland shooting. Texas passed a law saying banks had to write them letters insisting they wouldn’t discriminate against gun companies in order to do business with the state, and they lined up to do so:
In a letter sent to the Texas attorney general this month, JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, signaled its willingness to continue working with the firearm industry.
[…]
Citigroup, which since early 2018 has restricted certain types of firearm and ammunition sales by retailers in its credit and debit card systems, filed a similar letter with the Texas attorney general in October.
It seems ridiculous that the country’s largest banks are doing this. It seems less ridiculous when you consider how much they make issuing those bonds for Texas:
Texas is one of the biggest bond issuers in the country, and Wall Street has long made lucrative — and relatively risk-free — fees underwriting municipal bonds. With $50 billion in annual borrowing, Texas generated $315 million in fees last year alone for financial firms, according to data from Bloomberg.
That’s a lot of fees! But why is Texas borrowing these vast sums of money, and why are banks making 9 figures off one state? To puzzle it out, I spent some time reading budget documents, which I would not recommend to anyone.
It is not easy to make sense of a state’s financial documents - and each state reports its finances differently depending on how it chooses to categorize income (revenues) and spending. But, according to the Urban Institute, Texas takes in significantly less than the national average, and spends less per citizen:
Texas’s combined state and local general revenues were $253.8 billion in FY 2019, or $8,756 per capita. National per capita general revenues were $10,563.
[…]
…Texas’s combined state and local direct general expenditures were $250.7 billion in FY 2019 or $8,650 per capita. National per capita direct general expenditures were $10,161.
To put it in perspective, California spends twice as much in its state budget despite only having a third more residents. Part of the problem is that Texas has no state income taxes, so it is forced to make up revenue shortfalls with property and sales taxes, which aren’t adequate:
Simple per-capita spending doesn’t really tell the whole story, because where Texas spends that money is important - this NASBO report digs into the specifics. Compared to national averages, Texas spends a lot more money on higher education (think college sports) and transportation (roads) than other states. It spends so little on public assistance it rounds down to zero compared to a meager 1.2% national average. Texas spent $49 million dollars on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and other cash assistance for the poor in 2020, putting it on par with states like Nebraska (one tenth the population). There’s plenty of money - almost $4 billion a year - in the budget for jails and prisons, making it the second-highest spending state behind California.
Poor and middle class Texans make less than the average American, and receive little in the way of state services. So what about the debt? Because Texas brings in less tax revenues than most states and spends a lot of it on colleges and roads, it issues lots of municipal bonds to fill holes in its budget. Unlike a standard loan, muni bonds have additional fees on top of the cost of lending:
In this study, we find the average issuance costs for bonds in our sample is 1 percent of principal value.
[…]
One percent may not seem like a significant figure. However, 1 percent of 2012’s total issuance is $3.8 billion.
Essentially, banks and lawyers charge states a fee to issue municipal bonds on their behalf. Rating agencies charge to rate the bonds investment grade so they can be sold to institutional investors. Insurance companies often join the party, charging to insure the debt. Basically, states like Texas hand hundreds of millions of dollars a year to banks, lawyers, and other finance companies, while spending a fraction of that money on services for their citizens.
If you’re a friend of Rick Perry or a natural gas company that gouged Texans during a winter storm, money from municipal bonds will rain down from the heavens. If you live in Texas and depend on the state for any form of assistance - other than college sports - you’re getting a miniscule return on your investment.
It’s easy to pick on Texas, but many states do the same thing - in New York, Cuomo showered his political allies with state cash for years. California is running a massive budget surplus - thanks in part to taxes on the rich - and nearly a quarter of state spending will be done via bonds. Texas is a lesson in what can happen when a state decides to use access to cheap money to enrich its wealthiest citizens and ignore its poor, but wider state reliance on the financial system diverts billions a year away from improving lives and into bank coffers.
Plastic
If you are like me, you put plastic bottles into a recycling bin once a week and leave it out at the curb. You may mix those plastics in with paper, cardboard, and aluminum. While your heart is in the right place, the bad news is that plastic is difficult and expensive to recycle, and we probably should just stop doing it:
Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.
That is bad! One problem is that there are many kinds of plastic, and some can contain toxic chemicals, making the sorting process next to impossible:
They all include different chemical additives and colorants that cannot be recycled together, making it impossible to sort the trillions of pieces of plastics into separate types for processing.
[…]
Just one fast-food meal can involve many different types of single-use plastic, including PET#1, HDPE#2, LDPE#4, PP#5, and PS#6 cups, lids, clamshells, trays, bags, and cutlery, which cannot be recycled together.
[…]
Unlike metal and glass, plastics are not inert. Plastic products can include toxic additives and absorb chemicals, and are generally collected in curbside bins filled with possibly dangerous materials such as plastic pesticide containers.
Plastic is also flammable, and reprocessing it can be dangerous to nearby air quality, or lead to fires. Unlike paper, metal, or glass - which can be effectively recycled - plastic recycling is a bad prospect for all those involved.
Plastics are mostly made with fossil fuels, and take a very long time to biodegrade, so overall they are terrible for the environment. The problem is that petrochemical companies know this, and are using the recycling canard to distract from their dirty business:
Despite this stark failure, the plastics industry has waged a decades-long campaign to perpetuate the myth that the material is recyclable.
[…]
In 2018, Dow Chemical claimed that the Renewlogy chemical-recycling plant in Salt Lake City was able to reprocess mixed plastic waste from Boise, Idaho, households through the “Hefty EnergyBag” program and turn it into diesel fuel. As Reuters exposed in a 2021 investigation, however, all the different types of plastic waste contaminated the pyrolysis process. Today, Boise burns its mixed plastic waste in cement kilns, resulting in climate-warming carbon emissions. This well-documented Renewlogy failure has not stopped the plastics industry from continuing to claim that chemical recycling works for “mixed plastics.”
There are lots of ways to solve this problem - companies can stop using single-use plastics in so many products and types of packaging. We can switch to reusable or biodegradable food trays and containers. What we should not do is continue to believe plastics are recyclable and waste valuable resources trying to do so. Leave everything else in your blue bin, but don’t bother with the plastics.
Short Cons
AP - “Hundreds of thousands of students who attended the for-profit Corinthian Colleges chain will automatically get their federal student loans canceled, the Biden administration announced Wednesday, a move that aims to bring closure to one of the most notorious cases of fraud in American higher education.”
Bloomberg - “DWS has faced regulatory probes in the US and Germany after its former chief sustainability officer, Desiree Fixler, alleged last year that the company inflated its ESG credentials.”
VICE - “Managers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island illegally threatened employees with loss of benefits and withholding or reducing wages if they voted to unionize over a period of about a year prior to the union vote in April, which the union ultimately won, according to a new complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board.”
NY Times - “The F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team is investigating the authenticity of 25 paintings that the Orlando Museum of Art says were created by Basquiat and are on exhibit there, according to a federal subpoena and several people with knowledge about the situation.”
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