The Upside of a Pandemic

While the rest of the world wrestles with the oppression that is “Working from Home”, here at my dacha in Outer Whitelandia, there has been very little change in the routine. I’ve worked from home for years and Her Imperial Majesty started in earnest back in November. She, actually, is more productive, now that she doesn’t have to commute two hours in each direction. And she’s happier: we can catch Jeopardy every night, either just before or just after supper. Das Kinder, coasting through the last bits of her senior year of high school, is doing distance learning like a champ. She never leaves the comforts of her salon and completes her work in half the time it normally takes in class. If she never sees high school again, well, that’s okay with her.

Now, those in retail and the restaurant trades have my heart, and I do carry-out every other day at least once, making sure to stop in as many places as possible in order to spread the cash around so everybody gets some. And my hats off to first responders and to grocery workers and to truck drivers, without who’s labor, most of us would starve.

We’ll  get through this, sooner rather than later. At least that’s my call (bet on 20 April 2020 for things to get sort of back to normal). And when everything is said and done, America and Americans will pull through like champs.

The political ramifications are legion, the forced divestiture from China, chief among them. But alas, that will be the subject of another column for another day. What I’m really focused on today is one the favorite topics of this blog: the law of unintended consequences. It is this author’s belief that many very good things will come out of this pandemic.

Prediction: Those forced to telecommute will like it.

When 9/11 happened, I was one of the few people in the US with high speed internet via cable modem in my house. When my wife had to evacuate out of The City (and my flight to Toronto was cancelled), she brought home with her a cd with a hi-def image of Tiger Woods, slated to be used for a Buick ad. It was 600 meg. With FedEx grounded, we had to come up with a better way to get the image to the print house or miss the insertions – all the big color glossies plus Golf Digest. Thanks to a wee bit of cleverness and a background in Internet connectivity, I used WS-FTP to upload the image. Twenty-six minutes later, Buick’s campaign for the Rendezvous was saved! And Her Imperial Majesty was officially the hero.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Dave, what does this self serving bit of self-aggrandizement have to do with telecommuting?

Ahh, grasshopper the truth is all around you. Twenty years ago the infrastucture wasn’t in place for telecommuting. If somebody wanted to work, they had to go to work in order to do it. Today, large swaths of the work force can do as Her Imperial majesty is doing right now: sitting at the dining room table with a Mac and a 22 inch monitor, moving pixels and files with the touch of a mouse.

So what’s the point? Simple. Once people start telecommuting, a significant percentage will like new normal and not go back to the old normal.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, the are a lot of upsides.

Possible outcomes (positive):

1.     Traffic congestion lessens. Fewer people going to work means fewer people driving to work.

2.     Pollution from commuters declines significantly. Less cars = less pollution.

3.     Ditto greenhouse gases.

4.     Productivity increases as more work is done during the time normally consumed by commuting.

5.     Fewer people on the roads mean fewer traffic accidents / injuries / fatalities.

6.     Uptick in revenues for local retail and hospitality businesses as people who would have commuted stay local. 

7.     More family time for those who want it.

Possible outcomes (negative);

1.     Commercial rents decline as less office space is needed.

2.     Decline in public transit riders on commuter rail. i.e. MTA, etc.

3.     Decline in retail and hospitality in metro centers to where people used to commute.

While these are not the only positive outcomes that can come from this pandemic, these are some of the obvious ones. Just something to think about.

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And remember: wash your hands. Learn from Alton Brown.

Affording the Wall: There is a way Donald Trump can make Mexico pay for the wall and there’s nothing the Mexican government can do to stop him

By C. David Pugh

03 March 2016 (Raleigh) – After winning seven of the eleven Super Tuesday Primaries, Donald Trump (R-New York) is the pre-eminent favorite to win the Republican Party Primary battle and become the party’s nominee for President in the fall.

This is not news.

The always controversial Mr. Trump has based a good bit of his appeal on his approach to immigration which can be summed up in seven words: build a wall on the Mexican border. Moreover, he also said he’ll “make them [The Mexican Government] pay for it”.

Naturally, the Mexican Government scoffed at the idea. As recently as Thursday March 3^rd, the Mexican Finance Minister, Luis Videgaray rejected the proposal,stating:

"Under no circumstance will Mexico pay for the wall that Mr. Trump is proposing," he said. "Building a wall between Mexico and the United States is a terrible idea. It is an idea based on ignorance and has no foundation in the reality of North American integration."

Too bad for Mr. Videgaray. Should Mr. Trump become president, he can, with a little help from a Republican controlled Congress, pay for it with cash left over. How? Simply, tax remittances from Mexican nationals working in the US which are sent to Mexico.

The Dirty Little Secret in Mexico / American relations is that Mexican immigrants send billions of dollars a year to relatives south of the border. In 2013, the latest figures available, it was estimated that some $22 Billion USD went to Mexico. Taxing remittances at a 50% tax rate would yield something like $11 billion USD.

And $11 billion will buy an awful lot of fencing.

But a significant tax on remittance would do something else: disincentify those who come here to work just so they can send money back home. If half of what they send ends up in Federal coffers instead of loved ones hands, they may not come here in the first place.

To point out how just important $22 billion is to the Mexican economy, consider this fact: PEMEX, Mexico’s state owned petroleum monopoly generates a tick less than $70 billion in tax revenues to the government. About 30% of the Mexican budget is funding by PEMEX. Doing the math finds that remittances constitute something like 10% of that number.

Imagine if American nationals sent the equivalent of 10% of the US Federal budget back to the states every year. For 2016, that figure would be $352.5 Billion USD.

The ripple effects of such a move would be immense. For example, it’s axiomatic when they leave, the US labor pool will shrink and wages will need to rise. That’s an iron clad law of economics.

So I’m sure those industries and employers who pay these people are right to be horrified that the Federal Government will actually incentify these people to go home. And the Mexican Government is right to be horrified that Mr. Trump wants to build a wall with money used to mollify their impoverished citizenry. I’m sure they don’t want unemployed millions to return home with time on their hands (and perhaps revolution in their hearts).

The Progressive Left needs a permanent underclass as constituents, both as the foundation of their powerbase and the underpinning of the sense of moral superiority. The Rockefeller Republican class needs cheap labor to mow their lawns and clean their houses. Everybody else that works – or who wants to work again – see Mr. Trump’s Wall for what it is: a mechanism to shrink the workforce and raise wages. And if he can build it with Mexican money, so much the better.

Egypt and The Prezzy

Staring at the wreckage of American foreign policy in Egypt is an almost gleeful experience. The Muslim Brotherhood was nothing more than a politically correct gang of thugs which secured a politically correct patron in Pres. Barack Obama.

I’m sure I view this differently than the vast, unwashed monkey mass that Rush Limbaugh affectionately refers to as the “low information voter”. I’ve worked for both Israelis and Palestinians and probably view both through jaundiced eye since 9/11. Seeing things as they are means more to me than being polite to people who view the world through the distorting lens of television and blow dried universe it presents.

I wrote this in 2002, mostly in an attempt to straighten out my own feelings about the catastrophe that happened on that sunny morn in September:

July 5th [2002] -- … I was actually talking to my boss on the phone when the first plane hit. He was stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge when I told him about a commercial jet colliding with the WTC. He said he could see the smoke. I went into historical Dave mode, explaining that this wasn't the first time a plane had hit a tall building in New York City; the first time it happened, a B-24 hit the Empire State on the 72nd floor in 1947. My boss, an Israeli, was impressed with my knowledge, but didn't think it was an accident. He said to me: "what to do want to bet the pilot was named Mohammed?"

Then, the second plane hit.

At the time, I standing in my living room watching CNBC and waiting for a limo that was supposed to take me to La Guardia for a flight to Toronto to meet with a company whose name I no longer remember. Needless to say, I didn’t make it.

In my experience, limited as it may be, the Middle East is less about religion and more about tribal affiliation. This bit from today’s Debka – an Israeli news site – is probably more illustrative than any gibberish I could spew out. Here are power grafs:

By means of the successful military putsch in Cairo, Saudi King Abdullah had his revenge for the toppling of his friend Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, for which he has never forgiven President Obama whom he held responsible.

The Saudi-Gulf intervention in Egypt’s change of government also ushers in a new stage of the Arab Revolt for the Middle East. For the first time, a group of traditionally pro-US conservative Arab governments has struck out on its own to fill the leadership vacuum left by the Obama administration’s unwillingness to pursue direct initiatives in the savage Syrian civil war or forcibly preempt Iran’s drive for a nuclear bomb.

You can read the whole thing here: 

The underlying truth that the Israelis are publishing of course doesn’t sync with the noise being propagated by the Anglo-American news machine, which howls about this being a coup against a properly constituted democracy. And it might be.

But there is another and more profound truth to be uncovered in the spectacular crash of the Muslim Brotherhood-led Egyptian government; one that might be a little easier to explain.

To say that Hosni Mubarak was a doddering old fool that ran Egypt like a family business is to be a Master of the Obvious™. The desire to impose a “more enlightened” regime has been the goal of worldwide progressives everywhere. That’s certainly one of the reason President Obama embraced The Muslim Brotherhood: it is a “people’s movement” and we all know how that can run a thrill up the leg of any progressive.

The truth, however, is quite a bit uglier. Images of actual Africans filtering out of Egypt paint an altogether unflattering portrait of our first African American President. They call The Prezzy out on the carpet like any other American Imperialist President:

Ah, but hope springs eternal, at least for some. The Progressive Dream for the Middle East of a People’s Republic united against the Evil Capitalists in Tel Aviv seems to have imploded again and this time the bad guys aren’t wearing yarmulkes. Instead, it was the tribe with Petro-dollars dispatching an uppity neighbor whose only export seems to be terrorism.

And who can blame them? They have the biggest house on the block, with a nice yard and an easy lifestyle. Then, all of sudden, the next door neighbors go from being quiet gun freaks who mind their own business to a gang of religious crackpots, out to proselytize the world.

Of course, the offended neighbors would act; who wouldn’t? And of course they would hold responsible the numbskull that purchased the property and allowed the nutcases move in.

All of which bring me bring me back to a post 9-11 worldview. If The Prezzy and his gang of politically correct thugs can’t seem to wrap their collective brains around what actually happening on the ground, we can expect more attacks like the one in Bengazi (remember Bengazi?) And for the most part, they’d be deserved. An arrogant superpower than meddles in the affairs of stable governments however onerous, deserves blowback. From the view of realpolitik – the only view to which I subscribe – the Egyptian counter revolution was perfectly predictable and in the end, infinitely preferable to another puppet dictatorship, however politically correct.