I could see a Day Without Illegal Immigrants being useful to show people just how dependent we’ve become on illegal immigrants to do our various dirty jobs. But what will legal immigrants not showing up for work and anybody, legal or no, taking their kids out of school prove?

All I can see this doing is giving ammunition to the idiots who claim that immigrants come to America for the welfare benefits. Legal immigrants should be going to work and pointing out to their native-born coworkers exactly what isn’t being done and how shitty life is sans illegals.

But will the day even work then?

First off, illegals tend not to be too tuned in to the mass media and probably will show up to work anyway, because if they don’t, well, there’s another illegal just waiting to take their place. So anti-immigrant types will just scoff that it’s not even that big a deal.

Second, if there is much of an effect, anti-immigrant types will just point to all the jobs that could be going to Americans if only people weren’t greedy by hiring illegals below a “decent” wage.

My gut suspicion is that public rallies and protests only really matter to those who already agree on an issue. To the extent they have any effect, it’s to get those who can make reasonable, impassioned arguments for one side or another that may actually change minds.

If anything, expect public opinion polls Tuesday to tick back for enforcing immigration law as it stands rather than reforming it to something a little more humane and in line with reality.

George Clooney wants us to Save Darfur. He apparently discovered what the rest of the world has known for several years, that there is a systematic war between an Islamic government and the largely Christian peoples in the south of the Sudan. Now he wants us to…well, I’m not sure. I clicked over to his site, and apparently he wants us to send a note to Bush and Congress to do something.

OK, what?

It’s not like nobody’s doing anything. The UN has had peacekeeping forces in there at various points, and has been encouraging something approaching a peace process. The US and other countries have been providing aid–a woman I met at a party a few months back was going there to replace someone from USAID who had been killed.

This picture [hat tip: Hit & Run] suggests various people want to pick up our troops from Iraq, where we’re fighting an endless war with ill-defined goals and no criteria for ending our involvement, and move them to Darfur, where we’d be fighting an endless war with ill-defined goals and no criteria for ending our involvement.

Or does our criteria pop up when we get humiliated so badly they make a movie out of it? Yeah, this didn’t work out so well in Somalia, another Bush-family involvement. So why are progressives trying to take a page from Bush? On the theory that we did a lot of good in Somalia? Or just trying to assuage guilt for Rwanda, damn the consequences? Or just feeling “Injustice Bad–Progressive Hulk Smash!”?

Seriously, the less you’re like Bush, the better your policy will turn out. I’m not thrilled with what’s going on in Darfur, but it’s not like nothing is being done, nor is there an easy solution just waiting for the application of a few bombs or a couple of bucks.

Now, I await the neocon chickenhawks’ agreement with Clooney, given that this is a clear attempt for Muslims to gain control from non-Muslims, and thus aid the creation of a new Caliphate or something.

Rush Limbaugh arrested on drug charges. OK, sure, they’re prescription drug charges, but as Rush has cheerfully carried tankerloads of water for the insanely overreaching war on drugs, it’s hilarious to see him caught up in it. Also, prescription drugs can get you sent to jail for a long time…much more so if you’re a doctor who is defrauded by abusers like Limbaugh.

Let’s see, Iran is bad because Iran uses its oil money to support terrorism. Therefore, George W. Bush called for America to “Act Now To Reduce Dependence On Foreign Sources Of Energy.” But then yesterday, contradicting his criticisms of Clinton in 2000, Bush propped up dependence on foreign sources of energy by ceasing to resupply the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve.

So: weaken your military response when you’re fighting more wars than ever and contemplating still more, while strengthening your enemy’s hand by encouraging Americans to remain dependent on their products.

Explain to me again how he’s fighting terrorism?

Maybe he’s on to something, though. Senate Republicans claimed two years ago that invading the strategic reserve wouldn’t really do that much to pump prices, anyway–which gives one pause as to why Bush is bothering now.

Of course, the Republicans were scoffing at such claims because the Democrats, who presumably care about the environmental harm caused by excess consumption of gasoline and who also don’t want us to fund terrorists, were calling for the same damn thing. And now they’re criticizing Bush for not doing more to lower gas prices by going after “price gouging” oil companies, who apparently price things higher when demand exceeds supply. This despite Al Gore wanting to increase gas prices a while back with a tax…but that’s not gouging, when you raise prices to get more money despite no change in supply or demand. But no talk of gas taxes now.

So: lower gasoline prices encourage consumption and make us dependent on a major source of terrorist funding as well as harming the environment. So Republicans and Democrats are in favor!

It’s just another normal day here in Bizarro World!

So the price of oil hits its highest (non-inflation-corrected) price ever, China’s demand continues to grow, there’s almost no spare production capacity, seasonal demand for refined gasoline is rising, EPA-mandated transition from winter to summer formulations are occurring, and refineries haven’t yet recovered fully from Katrina and various environmentally-based roadblocks to increasing production and capacity.

So Senator Charles “Chucky Gets Lucky” Schumer calls for a price-fixing investigation into whether refineries are deliberately holding back to cause gasoline to rise a few percent. I mean, if you ignore all the legitimate reasons, there must be a conspiracy to raise gas prices.

You know, if you’re a moron.

Therefore, he is a moron.

QED.

Jason lobs a volley across the bow of the good ship Progressive:

[W]hy should it be a progressive cause to simplify the tax code? Because every dollar that is spent on help deciphering the tax code is, in effect, payment of a hidden tax. Call it the Complexity Tax — and it falls heaviest on those at the bottom of the income scale, since they can least afford to shell out $50 on a copy of TurboTax.

He spares time for a few pot shots at “conservatives”–or rather a small, tiny, disenfranchised subset of conservatives and we proud, happy few libertarians who keep the torch of economic liberty from being completely snuffed out in the current bullshitstorm–because if progressives aren’t careful, these “bozos” will get there first and have their filthy way with Lady Liberty:

Conservatives have already sussed this [frustration with the current tax system] out, and are pushing alternatives like the “flat tax” and the so-called “FairTax” — both of which lighten the burden on the rich and increase the burden on the poor. In doing so, they’re following the time-honored GOP tradition of bait and switch, using people’s frustration with the complex tax code to try and convince them to accept a regressive system that would fall hardest on those who can least afford it.

He then closes with a cris de coeur for progressives to repent, lest they lose, well, progressivity:

It’s possible to envision a tax system that is both simple and progressive, with taxpayers falling into a few broad tax brackets based on their gross income, and with many, many fewer deductions. It can be done. But will we do it? Do progressives have it in them to stand up for the little guy?

My friend Oscar takes him to task for his comments on flat taxen:

Isn’t having separate tax brackets what got us into this overly complicated tax mess? And New Zealand has found that having a complicated tax code doesn’t really gain them more “Fairness”. I’m sure you’ve already seen this but it’s worth a read:

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3860731

Pa! Pshaw! Fiddlesticks! Quoth Jason:

No. Having a zillion deductions is what got us into this mess. Determining whether or not you qualify for deductions is where you get into the weeds — gotta have rules for each and every one of them. (Not to mention that industries and interests love to get deductions written in to benefit themselves.)

And now what started as a comment (the above repeated here for Ginger, who doesn’t like to follow links) has become a post unto itself:

And why do we have a zillion deductions?

To quote Steven Landsburg:

Most of economics can be summarized in four words: ‘People respond to incentives.’ The rest is just commentary.

I’m still puzzled why, especially after seeing research such as that in the piece Oscar linked to, progressives insist on calling flat taxes “regressive”. They are neither progressive nor regressive–they are flat. Social security taxes, to which progressives cleave as to life itself, are regressive. VAT and sales taxes are regressive, because poorer people spend more of their income–yet many progressives find those more palatable (though some because they are under the fiction that corporations pay for VAT taxes, not consumers–corporations and businesses never, ever pay taxes. They just collect them from the consumer in higher prices and pass them along to the government, minus a management fee.)

Actually, all income-based flat taxes are progressive. The usual straw man of a flat tax is a family of 12 making $10,000 a year will pay $2000 in a 25% flat tax scheme. But every income-based flat tax provides a basic exemption, generally up to the poverty level. So if the poverty level is, say $18,000 a year, and a family of 4 lives off $20,000 a year, they will pay not $5,000 but $500 in tax at a 25% flat tax rate.

In other words, the total income tax on them is actually 2.5%.

Now let’s say you’re COO of a hip technology company, and you make $150,000* a year and are taxed at that scheme. You’ll pay $33,000 in taxes…an effective rate of 22%.

Now that I’ve demolished the “flat taxes aren’t progressive” argument, let me tell you why neither conservatives nor progressives — not even a libertarian government — will give you tax simplification of any stripe.

Incentives.

Right now, Jason and I pay a lot more in taxes than, say Oscar–at least on overall household income. That’s because Oscar is married and we’re not. Sure, he pays more on his individual salary, but that’s because his wife the rocket surgeon has a salary that pushes them collectively into a higher tax bracket. If Oscar made as much when he was single as they do together now, he would have paid a LOT more in taxes on that income. The so-called “marriage penalty” is actually a subsidy.

So, are you going to be the progressive who comes out against marriage? I thought not.

Another break Oscar gets is a subsidy on his housing. He is a homeowner, while Jason and I are renting slobs. Homeowners get to deduct the interest on their houses. Tax simplification would mean eliminating that deduction.

So you’re against home ownership now? You know, you’re going to tell the majority of likely voters that you’re going to overnight make their homes–overpriced to begin with and over-leveraged to the hilt and then some–more expensive to own?

I didn’t think so, either. And those are just two of the zillions of worthy goals you’ll have to argue against in your quest.

The problem is that progressives and conservatives love to tinker with society, and it’s so easy to do so through the tax code. After all, any economist will tell you that the surest way to piss off a customer is to raise prices on them while holding them the same for another customer. If you want to encourage more of one type of customer and discourage another, you have to introduce discriminatory pricing–but how can you do it without pissing off your customers/voters?

By raising all prices and offering a discount. Then people say, “Well, OK, I’m not getting the discount rate, but I’m not being charged extra.”

If you want to affect behavior, you have to offer incentives. It’s death now for a politician to offer handouts directly (with the exception of pork, which is only to their own district/state) to an entire class of people, but a break on their taxes? Well, what a nice guy!

For the politician, the incentives work the other way. How can you achieve your social goals while staying in power? Spend money. How can you raise more money while not getting voted out? Identify key constituencies, give them a break, and raise taxes otherwise.

This is why I think a libertarian government would last only about three months longer than the GOP did before betraying all the principles they claimed to hold and playing the DC power game–it’s just too easy, and the rewards are just too great.

Without a post-communist-transition-sized fiscal crisis, you will not see dramatic tax simplification in this country. Period.

* I have no idea how much Jason makes.

The frequent accusations against the Bush administration have led some to invoke Godwin’s law–he who first uses the Nazi comparison loses the argument–against the opposition. But in the modern drug war, sometimes it’s not even a subtle comparison:

Government lawyers tried to remove and confiscate the gold dental work known as “grills” or “grillz” from the mouths of two men facing drug charges.

Note–these weren’t men convicted and fined and claiming poverty while carrying around several thousand dollars of gold in their mouths. These were men who were merely charged and awaiting trial.

Remember when Jason invited me to fact-check Frontline‘s ass? Turns out we don’t need an anthill to do it. We just need to link to some old media online. The Willamette Week took on The Oregonian‘s series that Frontline repeated, and the bottom line?

In its effort to convince the world of the threats posed by meth, The Oregonian has sacrificed accuracy. According to an analysis of the paper’s reporting, a review of drug-use data and conversations with addiction experts, The Oregonian has relied on bad statistics and a rhetoric of crisis, ultimately misleading its readers into believing they face a far greater scourge than the facts support.

Check out the unverified statistics with no source, the misuse of data, and omissions of facts that would severely undercut the theme of crisis engendered by The Oregonian.

To reply with my own sentence in a style fit for The Oregonian: One reporter in one local paper may have single-handedly diverted national drug policy down a blind alley, leaving real victims suffering in silence.

So when I expressed skepticism over this piece on the meth “epidemic” on Frontline (in reality a video version of a series by The Oregonian), my friend Jason invited me to “fact-check Frontline’s ass” if I so desired. So I finally watched it online, rather than just reacting to the claims on its accompanying website.

Shoulda stuck with the website. Here are the sum total of factual claims related to the extent of methamphetamine drug abuse:

• “A million different types of records” were collected by The Oregonian, and turned into maps to show the spread of the drug’s usage over time from west to east.
• Meth “addicts” commit 85% of property crime in Oregon
• “One puff off a pipe can keep you high all day”
• 50% of children in foster care in Oregon “there because of meth”
• # of people in programs rise and fall in unison across states
• “Changes how brain operates”
• “Most addictive drug there is”
• Change in purity correlates with changes in usage
• pseudoephedrine used as stimulant by people (I don’t personally find any stimulant effect, and many people claim that it puts them to sleep, but the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”)
• In Western states, 50% of prison inmates are “meth addicts”
• “As many addicts as Heroin and Cocaine combined” (UN claim)
• “In America alone, there are 1.5 million addicts and rising”
• America counts for the majority of world consumption of pseudoephedrine

It’s tough to fact-check somebody when they don’t provide the source for their numbers. Interestingly, I found one fact contested by their own website.

There are 1.4 million meth users in America, and the number is rising.

I’m prepared to be generous and overlook the inflation of the number by 100,000. But are they “users” or “addicts”? The two are very different. Nicotine is usually referred to as the most addictive drug, and even it does not have a 100% addiction rate. If the 1.4 million number refers to true addicts, the number of users is higher. If the number just includes “regular users”, whether or not they can be classified addicts, then we’re talking about less than 1/250th of the population. Cocaine, by contrast, was considered used by 3.7 million Americans (users, not addicts) in 1999. Even if 1.4 million of them switched exclusively from cocaine to methamphetamine use, cocaine has more users.

Why is this language important? Conflating two different things and fluffing over facts is a frequent tactic in a piece designed to appeal to emotions while hiding logical flaws. In other words, it’s a hallmark of a scare piece, not serious journalism.

Consider their claims of worldwide usage: if America is the primary consumer of pseudoephedrine, the remaining unregulated precursor chemical (and the primary claim of the documentary is that pharmaceutical companies have caused the meth “epidemic” by resisting efforts to regulate ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the latter of which they have prevented being as heavily regulated), how can there be so many more addicts outside the US than inside? Why is usage so much heavier outside the country? Why are we not hearing reports of meth destroying, say, France or Bolivia?

Frontline’s website, in the only acknowledgment of skepticism of drug warrior claims in the piece (there are none on the televised piece) links to this Slate piece which makes many of the same points, and then dismisses it by saying that meth is worse on communities. The data they cite to support this claim? Self-reports by police agencies saying what is their “worst problem”. No hard numbers on arrests, no counter-criticism of the data Slate provides, just a hand-waving and counting subjective impressions to make them look like hard data. 50% of people guessing arriving at one answer does not constitute evidence of a problem, but evidence of a mentality about a problem.

There are more facts to check that I’ll try to get to later, but I have a life, and the central claim looks dubious already. So here are some non-fact-checking things I noticed:

The vast majority of production in the piece is blamed on foreigners. Indians, Canadians, Mexicans, and “immigrants” are all mentioned specifically, either as suppliers of ephedrine, as workers in “superlabs,” or as part of a cartel to import it. Domestic labs are mentioned but not explicitly identified as such, and the focus is clearly not on them any time major suppliers are mentioned.

The word “profit” is attached like a leech to each mention of a drug company, but the word “budget” is never attached to the various local and federal government agencies pushing for greater regulation and resources to “fight” the “epidemic” of meth abuse. I wouldn’t ever want to suggest that as overall rates of drug abuse and crime fall, these agencies need a new “crack baby” or “hepped up Negro on Marijuana” with which to scare the middle class into funding SWAT teams and ever-bigger budgets. I’d like to directly state it.

If overall rates of drug use are declining, then the meth “epidemic” isn’t an epidemic at all, it’s a slight shift in drug use from one form to another in a declining market. The next time you want to throw around a term like “epidemic”, consider what a horror a real epidemic is: 1 in 5 people on the island of Reunion is sick from “Chikungunya” fever as I type. That is an epidemic.

Once again, all hail Sploid, for it has a summary of news about the Intoonfada. It turns out that a newspaper in Egypt published these cartoons in October. The timing is suspicious, and I’m beginning to have more sympathy for the government conspiracy theory.

The good part for Muslims is that you may be able to partially blame your governments. The bad thing for Muslims is that, if so, you fell for it, which still doesn’t say good things about your tolerance level. It also says you ought ask yourself, to quote a religious text you’re supposed to respect:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest
not the beam that is in thine own eye?