Presidential candidate Donald Trump has proposed generating trillions of dollars for the US treasury by imposing 60% tariffs on   imports from China and 20% tariffs on all other imports.   His understanding -- or at least his sales pitch to the voters -- is that the tariff is free money paid by the exporting countries for the privilege of selling goods in the US.   In his imagining, the US income tax and corporate taxes can be reduced by the amount of revenue generated by these tariffs. He entertains the notion that he alone has discovered this free money mechanism that has been overlooked by the experts.    

Unfortunately, the import tariff is actually paid by consumers who buy the imported products.   For example, if a consumer buys a Chinese-manufactured washing machine at her local Home Depot, the purchase price she pays must cover all of the costs incurred to produce and transport the washer from its point of manufacture in China to the point of sale here.   

This economic principle is counterintuitive for many people, apparently including Mr. Trump. But, before election day, voters should understand this better than Mr. Trump!

Perhaps an example would help; let's follow the money -- and the washing machines. Imagine a container ship carrying fifty thousand containers, each of standard size:  40 feet long by 8 feet wide by 8.5 feet high.  One of those containers is sitting in the port of Shanghai loaded with 30 washing machines purchased by Home Depot. Each machine has a bar code, and, after the container is loaded, sealed and locked, the container itself is also assigned a bar code.  US Customs officials scan the codes, transmitting the record of the transaction to Home Depot, the US Government Customs Office, and the Chinese state-owned enterprise that built the washing machine. Next a  gigantic claw picks up the entire container and gently places it in the hold of the container ship bound for the port of Long Beach, California.   

US Customs Officials in Long Beach know the contents of the container and their wholesale price. Before Home Depot can take delivery of the container, it must pay the Trump 60% import tariff to the US Customs Office.   After that money transfer to the US Treasury is completed, another gigantic claw picks up the container and puts it on ground transportation, either a flatbed truck or freight rail car to be shipped to a terminal facility in a major city such as Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City where Home Depot will take delivery of the washing machines and distribute them to their "big box" retail stores.  From there consumers can buy the washing machines.

Every step in this process costs money:  from production back in China; the  shipping costs to move the container from Shanghai across the Pacific Ocean to Long Beach; the costs of transferring the container from ship to ground transportation to the Home Depot stores where the buyer must pay a price sufficient to covers all costs.

The import tariff is simply one of the many costs of doing business paid for by the consumer. The cost to the average American consumer of Trump's proposed import tariff is estimated to be $4,000 per year.

Joe Rogan is known as to be a highly intelligent, right-leaning podcaster who asks penetrating questions of all his guests.  Rogan's podcast regularly has an audience of a couple million listeners.  One would think this podcast would be the perfect place for Trump to reach voters.   In fact, Rogan’s October 25 episode with Trump has had over 7 million listeners thus far.

The October 26 issue of Huffington Post online covers Donald Trump's recent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.  The Post includes a video segment where Rogan asked Trump to elaborate on his very frequent assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.

“You’ve said over and over again that you were robbed in 2020.”  Trump immediately referred to his frequently asserted voter fraud in Wisconsin. Rogan asked for an example to which Trump replied that the election in Wisconsin had thousands of fraudulent votes due to invalid absentee ballots. 

Rogan pressed for evidence: "Are you going to present this...ever?"  No answer.  In other words, after four years of relentless repetitive assertion   of Wisconsin voter fraud sufficient to rob Trump of Wisconsin’s ten electoral college votes, Trump cannot muster a shred of evidence.

As the story in  the Huffington Post points out, an audit by the non-partisan Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau conducted in 2021 uncovered just eight ballots that were invalid because they lacked witness signatures, and three more that were invalid because they lacked voter signatures.  That's 11 invalid ballots out of 3.3 million Wisconsin votes cast in an election that Biden won by 20,682 votes. 

         Democratic Party Presidential nominee Kamala Harris has chosen Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota, to be her vice presidential running mate. This choice has prompted reflexive criticism of Walz' policies during his time as Governor of Minnesota.   Prominent among these are complaints about his policy to provide school breakfast and lunch for K - 12 schoolchildren, regardless of income. Another complaint is aimed at his declaration that Minnesota will be carbon neutral in electricity production by the year 2040. Still another is expanded voting convenience by adding voting places, days and hours plus drop boxes.  These government policies have earned Walz such labels as "tax and spend liberal," "socialist," "left-wing radical," and even "Marxist."

School Breakfast and Lunch

         Governor Walz used state funds to expand the school lunch program to include breakfast and lunch for all students.  He did this for two reasons: first, the non-poor were eating junk food that did not support their learning process; and secondly, if the meals were not provided to all kids, then those whose family incomes  were low enough to qualify for the federal lunch program would be identified as poor, inviting shaming and bullying. Walz removed the stigma by feeding all the students.

         Expanding the school nutrition program also enabled schools to achieve "economies of scale:"   Once the equipment and staff are in place to serve, say,  a third of the kids who are on federal lunch, the extra cost of serving the rest of the kids is fairly small. The capital equipment is already in place, the staff is hired, and additional supplies can be ordered likely with quantity discounts.    The school provides certain supplies and textbooks and computer-aided instruction, why not nutrition-aided instruction?   The benefits of school meals are public goods; as they say in Minnesota,  'each student learns better when they all learn better.'

 Carbon-neutral by 2040

         The root cause of the greenhouse emissions problem is called an economic "externality," i.e., a bi-product of buyer-seller exchange activity where  neither the buyer nor the seller face incentives to control -- or even monitor --  the costs of their actions.   The external cost of production is borne by the public rather than by the buyers and sellers of the electricity.     It is well understood in economics that regulation is needed to control externalities.    Unregulated markets will overproduce and underprice goods like electricity when they are generated with fuels that emit an external cost.   

         It is ridiculous to affix the pejorative "socialist" label to controls on emissions.    This is recognized by the self-described pro-market "conservative"   Climate Leadership Council that proposes a tax on carbon emissions and a tariff on imports from countries that fail to control their emissions.  (For more on carbon regulation:  https://shepherdexpress.com/news/issue-of-the-month/how-will-the-carbon-tax-slow-climate-chaos/)

 Voting rights

         Walz has proposed to make voting more convenient by adding polling places and expanding voting days and hours at those polling places, plus drop boxes for added convenience. It is ridiculous to affix "Socialism" to efforts to reduce the time cost of voting and to assure that the votes will be counted. In fact, it is just the opposite: when you impose high time costs on some people relative to others, representation is shifted to those with relative ease in voting.    Non-representative government redirects government resources, financed by tax dollars, toward those who have a voting advantage.  If it is socialism, it is socialism for the rich.  (For more on Socialism for the Rich see an earlier essay in Econ4Voters:  https://www.grassrootsnorthshore.com/20230824_mt). 

          Many   prominent Republican party members have  made  vicious statements about how unfit -- even dangerous -- Trump would be if re-elected. Then they flip to say they will vote for him!    

         Case in point: Bill Barr, one of the Attorneys General during Trump's presidential term, resigned rather than support Trump's assertions that the 2020 election was stolen. In fact, he has testified under oath that before resigning he had told Trump that his assertion of voter fraud was "bullshit."  More recently, Barr has asserted that Trump is a "consummate narcissist," and that voting for Trump in 2024 is "like playing Russian Roulette;" that Trump would return chaos to the White House; it would be a "horror show." 

         Still, he claims he would vote for the "republican ticket" in 2024. Why? To avoid the "Progressive Agenda."   

The Reigning Flip-flop Champ: Chris Sununu

          But, high atop this year's flip/flop leaderboard  is New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu who chose to flip on national television when he appeared  on the ABC Sunday show This Week, with George Stephanopoulos.  Stephanopoulos summarized  a long list of  past statements that Sununu had made to describe Trump as  unfit for office:  he has been continually lying about the election;  he is incapable of a coherent thought once he looks  away from the teleprompter;  he took classified  government documents and would not return them when ordered to do so; he was convicted of business fraud in the State of New York; played a major role in calling for the insurrection of January 6th, 2021;  and refused to call   off that insurrection when lives of members of Congress were in danger and his own vice president was being threatened with hanging.

           Sununu agreed with Stephanopoulos that he had made this incredibly damning list of statements but nonetheless would vote for Trump.  What would motivate such a prominent individual to hold such contradictory positions?

 Personal Incentives to Flip

          In addition to a strong incentive to maintain opportunities within the party, as well as social connections with colleagues, at clubs, and at dinner-party circuits, there are monetary rewards to flip-flopping.  This is no accident; the plan to discourage strays and to welcome back those who repent is spelled out well in the Powell Memo of 1971, written by Virginia business attorney Lewis Powell (https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/1/).  (Powell was later appointed by President Nixon to the US Supreme Court.)   

         The Powell memo laid out a strategy to maintain the party loyalty of prominent republican office holders long after the end of their terms.  The plan includes a continuance of financial and prestigious rewards, including  paid positions on boards of corporations and think tanks, endowed positions on  university faculties and think tanks, lucrative speaking fees offered by conservative  speakers bureaus and book deals with conservative publishing companies, ghost-co-authored to reduce the burden of writing.  This array of awards awaits the flip-flopper; the alternative is oblivion back in the home district running the aluminum siding company.   The plan was to harness the interests of the donor class; the money they save through lower taxes and less regulation of businesses greatly outweighs the cost to them of financing the Powell plan.  

 How to explain to the public

         Of course, it is best not to state in public the personal rewards of  flipping; better to pretend it’s for the good of the nation!   Accordingly, this preference for the "Republican ticket" and against the "progressive agenda"  exploits the long-held common misconception that the economy performs better when a Republican, rather than a Democrat, holds the White House/administrative branch.  

            As if on cue, a new paper (April 2, 2024) is circulating by Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute.  Bivens has undertaken the huge task of assembling government data on the economic performance, using standard categories of comparison, for each administration going back to 'Give'em Hell Harry.' 

         In the summary of the paper, Economic performance is stronger when Democrats hold the White House (https://www.epi.org/publication/econ-performance-pres-admin/), Bivens states: "The economy performs much better during Democratic presidential administrations than during Republican ones.  

 Since 1949, there has been a Democratic advantage in the average performance of key macroeconomic indicators measuring economic health, including: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth; Job growth; Unemployment rate; Growth in inflation-adjusted wages; Growth of market-based incomes per capita; Inflation; Interest rates. This Democratic advantage is across the board in all variables we measure but strongest in private-sector outcomes—notably, business investment, job growth, and the growth of market-based incomes."

         Bivens anticipates a complaint:   inclusion of data all the way back to Harry Truman's first elected term in 1949 would dilute the data from the purported dynamism of the Reagan Revolution. The Gospel according to Reaganomics is that those policies  produced economic performance superior to both prior Democratic and Republican administrations. Therefore, Bivens provides  a second pair of charts which differs from the first by omitting the years 1949 - 1980, i.e., omitting the data from Republicans Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, as well as Democrats Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter.  (See all four charts in the Appendix below.)

         The incredible result is that for both pairs of charts the economic performance in each category is superior for Democrats as compared to  Republicans.  Household income growth (adjusted for inflation) was faster on average during Democratic administrations, and the Democratic advantage shows up for every income decile.

         These results are not a trade-off where Democrats better serve certain income categories while the Republicans better serve others: Democrats perform better for all income deciles, even after taxes and transfers are accounted for. This applies even to the "one percenters," i.e., the top ten percent of the top decile.  Result:  The second pair of charts show no change in the overall result: in each of the categories income earners still do better when Democrats hold the White House.   

         The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore closed one of the largest ports in the world, with important implications for world trade and for rubber tire vehicle traffic in the Baltimore area.  For example, it is both an import platform for car and farm equipment parts headed for assembly plants in the Midwest, and a platform for coal exports to Europe, particularly vital while Putin uses Russian energy as leverage.         

         The bridge itself was one of three ways to drive through the Baltimore area for the high-volume traffic from Washington DC to New York City and on up to Boston.  On a typical weekday, the bridge carried 34,000 cars and trucks that must now be jammed onto the other two arteries.   

         The initial cost estimate of the disaster is 15 million dollars per day in lost economic activity plus three billion to replace the bridge.  Although the ship owner will likely be liable to contribute to cost recovery eventually, settling such a claim will take years.  Therefore,   President Biden announced that he will direct the federal government to immediately commit to covering all costs, including salary replacement for the estimated 8,000 port workers who are temporarily without work.

         Some entity has to bear the cost in the interim pending settlement with the ship owner.  The federal government has a comparative advantage in paying up front and attempting future reimbursement. But how will it get the money for immediate spending? Answer: where it gets all its money: taxes and borrowing.  The loss of those two productive assets -- the bridge and the port -- made the country poorer.  The borrowing enables recovery of that loss. 

         But why the federal government? Why not states or private entities?  First, the shutdown of the Baltimore harbor has national implications.   The federal government can recognize those national benefits and costs and spread the costs of the bridge collapse across each citizen. Essentially, through its taxing authority, the federal government is the insurer of last resort. In this role of insurer, the federal government has another advantage: lower interest rates.  The cost of the bridge is massive,  only the federal government can borrow such sums at reasonable interest rates and terms. Since the federal government has taxing authority that states do not have, and has never been in default on its debt, the citizens/taxpayers have earned this advantage. On behalf of those citizens, the government uses the resulting cost advantage when paying the costs of accidents and natural disasters such as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, pandemics, as well as  the Key Bridge collapse.

         In its customary reflex against federal spending, the congressional "Freedom Caucus" responded to Biden's recovery plan by pointing out that the government is already $34 trillion in debt, 120 percent of national income.    They propose that rather than borrow, adding to debt, the government should find ways to cut  somewhere else in the budget.  But is extracting money from previously enacted legislation really better than borrowing?

            Does that debt balance -- 34 Trillion dollars in debt due to past borrowing -- change the decision to borrow or cut other spending?    Actually, the debt is a "sunk cost."  Future borrowing decisions should depend on a comparison of the additional future benefit net of the additional future cost of the additional borrowing.

         In other words, the decision to borrow extra money does not depend on total borrowing done in the past.  The decision to borrow for additional investments depends on a comparison of additional liabilities to additional asset values obtained by that borrowing.    The bridge and port are assets.  They will be enjoyed for years to come, and passed on to future generations, with value  many multiples of the costs to restore them after this accident.     

         In the Wisconsin gerrymandering case, Rebecca Clarke v. Wisconsin Election Commission, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the current map of state assembly and state senate district boundaries violates the constitution because it contains a large number of districts that are not "contiguous."  That is, some districts contain parts disconnected from other parts.      

         Although contiguity was the key constitutional issue, the additional motivation for the lawsuit was to change those legislative district boundaries that systematically lead to   non-representative government: the ratio of legislative seats held by the different political parties is wildly out of proportion to the ratio of voter preferences for candidates from those parties.   Over the past four election cycles, for example, the voters expressed a preference for Democrats by over 50%,  but Democratic party candidates held a mere 36% of the Assembly seats, and had no chance of gaining a majority of seats in the state legislature.  Ideally, the district boundaries of the 99 assembly seats  and the 33 state senate seats would be neutral, i.e.,  directly reflecting the statewide party make-up of the voting electorate.  With neutral district boundaries, elections would be determined by  candidate  quality, voter policy preferences, and the energy and commitment of the supporters.     

 Now for the Hard Part:  Choosing the Map

            The court offered the parties to the lawsuit  the opportunity to submit remedial  maps that cure the contiguity  problem.    The court will sift through submitted maps while bearing in mind this key sentence that appears within the majority opinion:    "We do not have free license to enact maps that privilege one political party over another."     Accordingly,  the task is to choose the map with minimum -- ideally zero -- "privilege" of one political party over another.  

Outside Expertise and Technical Requirements

          For technical assistance, the court has appointed two experienced consultants:  Dr. Bernard Grofman of the University of California at Irvine, and Dr. Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie-Mellon University.     They list seven technical requirements for map proposals:  districts must have  nearly equal population; have minimal splitting of existing political subdivisions, such as county and city lines;   display complete contiguity; have acceptable compactness;  comply with federal law of equal protection and voting rights;  consider communities of interest; and address political neutrality. 

         The consultants  require that proposed maps be submitted to DavesRedistricting.org, a website established to add transparency to the redistricting process.   DavesRedistricting.org  provides a place to compare maps both visually and with numerical scores for each of the criteria listed by the consultants.      

 Demystifying Modern Map-making

          The high-tech methodology being used by the mapmakers and the consultants can be puzzling. That puzzlement can be alleviated somewhat by reading the Amicus Brief submitted on November 8, 2023 by Professor Matthew Petering of the UW-Milwaukee College of Engineering. In that brief, Petering described a complex computer algorithm he designed to create a map that optimizes the seven criteria.  

         Because Petering  is not a party to the lawsuit, his maps are not being considered by the court or its consultants. Nonetheless,  he submitted a map to DavesReedistricting.org so it could be scored and displayed alongside  the six maps submitted by the parties.  In turn, Urban Milwaukee's Bruce Thompson has  greatly simplified the job of comparing the seven maps by reducing the numerical scores to colored bar charts.  

Data

         As Dr. Petering explains, his  algorithms must be programmed    using voting data from recent statewide elections in Wisconsin, i.e., data not affected by the gerrymandering.  Petering has also shown that because Democratic voters are more clustered in urbanized areas than the more widely-dispersed Republican voters, the algorithms must use ward-level election data from recent statewide elections to get a fair map. be programmed with data on  voter residential patterns.  (Of course, data on individual voters is not used and is not available.)   This use of data is in agreement with the opinions expressed by Judge Adelman and Fred Kessler, two learned scholars of the problems of map making (see Further Readings below). 

          To illustrate numerically the importance of using ward-level data, Petering provides maps with and without using that data from recent statewide elections.  To compare the results,  he plugged both maps into the DavesRedistricting.org scoring system.  With that data, the DavesRedistricting.org estimates that Petering’s map provides Democrats with 51 seats in the Assembly, proportional to their statewide share of votes.  Without the data, that drops well below their proportional share to about 43  seats with a very low likelihood of a legislative majority, a result that locks in the partisan privilege the Republicans have enjoyed.  In other words, the use of election data to make maps does not introduce partisan bias; it is the failure to use that  data that results in partisan bias. 

 "Natural Gerrymandering" Debunked

         It is a statistical fact that Dem voters live in a more concentrated residential pattern than Republican voters.  This has led to a plausible but wrong notion called  "Natural Gerrymandering"  i.e.,  because of the greater concentration of Democrats, partisan privilege cannot be eliminated.    If true, this hypothesis implies that Democratic Party  policies and proposals will forever be in the minority. Dr. Petering has debunked this defeatist notion in the best way possible: counter example. He produced a map with proportional representation, the equivalent of zero partisan privilege.  As the bar graphs in Bruce Thompson's article so vividly show,  Petering's map is better on minimizing partisan privilege than any  map under consideration by the court.  His maps earn especially strong scores of 99 and 100 (100 is best) for proportionality in the Assembly and Senate, respectively,   indicating  virtually no privilege FOR EITHER PARTY.  Although for  procedural reasons his map cannot be included among those considered by the court, Petering's achievement shows that  neither the Court nor its consultants should accept incomplete solutions of the partisan privilege problem.

Further reading   

 "Political Fairness in Redistricting: What Wisconsin’s Experience Teaches," The University of Memphis Law Review, Vol 49, 2019, Judge Lynn Adelman

 "How to Draw Fair Maps in Wisconsin," Capitol Times, Nov 14, 2020. Fred Kessler, former legislator and re-districting expert.

"Ranking the 7 Proposed Legislative  Maps" by Bruce Thompson, Urban Milwaukee, Jan 17,  2024.

District Solutions LLC  www.districtsolutions.net, Amicus Briefs of Matthew  Petering, Clerk of Wisconsin Supreme Court 11-08-23 and 01-22-24.

          Ever since the district boundaries for the assembly and state Senate districts were devised in 2011,   Wisconsin Democrats have been complaining about the unfairness of the district boundaries and their influence on the makeup of the state assembly and senate.   Prior to that republicans complained about the reverse unfairness imposed by Democrats.  Clearly, the state needs a fair procedure;      Step one is an examination of key terms.  

Influence of District Boundaries

         The district boundaries have great influence over not one but two outcomes.  First, they influence the competitiveness within a district, and can even be crafted to make a district "safe" for a candidate of the favored party.  Second,  they influence the statewide array of wins and losses, which determines how many seats each party wins within the 99 seats of the  Assembly and the 33 seats in the State Senate.  Shifts in district boundaries can influence which party will gain a majority in the Assembly or the Senate or both. In turn,  majority status provides access to the tools of legislative power, i.e., committee assignments, the flow of legislation, as well as whether to open or close a legislative session and to permanently "table" legislation. The majority can also determine what can go on the advisory ballots so the voters can express a more direct opinion.  

         In the current case,  the legislature seat count is far less than proportional to the Democratic vote count in statewide elections.  The Democrats hold 36% of the Assembly seats while in state-wide elections -- i.e., those that cannot be gerrymandered  -- the voters expressed a preference for Democrats by over 50%. 

         Non-representative government has led to unrepresentative policy:  Post-Dobbs reversion to the antiquated 1849 state law on reproductive rights; blocking a referendum to let the voters express their preferences on reproductive law as did the voters in Kansas and Ohio; reducing state funding per student in the UW system to 46th in the nation,   including refusal to fund the much-needed Engineering building for the UW-Madison campus; and continuing to  reject federal money for railroads and Medicaid,  thereby costing Wisconsin taxpayers billions.

Standard requirements of fairness

          Modern design of district boundaries must meet a complex array of requirements.  The districts must have roughly the same population;  they must be compact (not stretched out like a salamander);  they must be contiguous;  and they must adhere to the requirements of the federal voting rights act.  To simultaneously meet all these requirements requires use of computer algorithms.  Fortunately, there are experts in the design and use of these algorithms at Duke, Princeton, and University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee where Professor Matthew Petering has established District Solutions LLC to house his efforts to create fair maps through his FASTMAP algorithm.

Tools of Gerrymandering.  Packing and Cracking

          Fair maps would reverse the anti-representative effect of gerrymandering. Therefore, to understand fair maps requires understanding the two key tools of gerrymandering:   packing and cracking.  Both of these strategies involve shifting district boundaries that affect the margin of victory within a district, and consequently affect the proportion of legislative seats for each party.      

         Packing refers to opportunistically shifting some district boundaries to corral an excess of Democratic voters, ensuring that within that district the Democratic candidate will win far more votes than needed to win that seat, thereby "wasting" the unnecessary votes.  Cracking refers to shifting some Democratic voters into districts where Republican candidates typically win by large margins.  The idea here is to subtract Dem votes from a district to convert it from a win to a loss and to spend those votes for the Democratic candidate in a district the Republican is expected to win, making sure that the shifted votes are not enough for the Dem to win there. Instead, the Republican candidate still wins, albeit by a smaller margin, "wasting" fewer Republican votes and more Democratic votes.   

Achieving  Proportionality

         First, a simple definition of proportionality. Proportionality in the design of district boundaries yields a party a 50-50 chance of the same proportion of seats in the Assembly and State Senate as that party's proportion in statewide elections. Under this definition of fairness, a party with, say, 30 percent of the state-wide vote should have a fifty-fifty chance at 30 percent of the seats.  Or, as in the present case, since the Democrats typically earn around 51 -54 percent of the state-wide vote, they should have a fifty-fifty chance of that proportion of the legislative seats.

           Second,   algorithms can construct maps on the basis of the usual requirements plus proportional representation. Its maps project a fair outcome with Democrats having a 50-50 chance of earning a majority in either chamber, or both, in proportion to the statewide vote.  Moreover,  the algorithm can rate other maps on the basis of the proportionality standard, as well as any of the other necessary requirements.  For instance,  the District Solutions algorithm analyzed the map proposed by the Wisconsin Senate Democrats in November 2021 and projects that map would provide the Democrats with just a 1.7% chance of winning a majority in the Assembly and an 18.9% chance of a majority in the state Senate.

         Third, two learned scholars of the problem of fair maps, Judge Lynn Adelman and Fred Kessler,   have opined that any construction of fair maps must include the use of data on where voters live. (see Further Readings below). Why?  Democratic voters are more clustered in cities than the more widely dispersed Republican voters. Consequently, if the algorithm is not provided residency data, it will operate as if voters had random locations and would perform its task of overlaying district boundaries only according to the other requirements of fairness. District Solutions LLC provides quantitative demonstration of the political and legal conclusion of Kessler and Adelman: Without residency data, readily available from recent state-wide elections, the algorithm cannot be calibrated to construct maps that produce proportional representation for voters of both parties. 

          To highlight the importance of using residency data,  District Solutions has used its algorithm to estimate results obtainable without using the data.  They show that, despite winning roughly 53% of the statewide vote, the most likely outcome for Democratic voters would be to win about 45% of the seats with very low likelihood of a majority in either chamber. While that is better than the current allocation of 36% of seats, it falls well short of "fair."

In other words, the use of voter data is not partisan; it is the failure to use voter data that results in partisan bias.  Proceeding without such data would yield maps biased in favor of Republicans and would preserve most of the imbalance now built into the current array of maps, as we see in neighboring Iowa (see Thompson in the "Further Readings" below).

FURTHER READING:  

"Political Fairness in Redistricting: What Wisconsin’s Experience Teaches," The University of Memphis Law Review, Vol 49, 2019, Judge Lynn Adelman

 "How to Draw Fair Maps in Wisconsin," Capitol Times, Nov 14, 2020. Fred Kessler, former legislator and re-districting expert.

"Why That 'Iowa Redistricting Plan Was Unfair" by Bruce Thompson, Urban Milwaukee, Oct 4, 2023.)

District Solutions LLC  www.districtsolutions.net, Amicus Brief of Matthew          Petering, Clerk of Wisconsin Supreme Court 11-08-23

          The Republican Party has declared war on voting by college students.   One of the latest to enlist is former Wisconsin

Governor Scott Walker, who declared that the overwhelming victory by Janet Protasiewicz in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election was due to the brainwashing of young college students by "campus radicals." UW students did indeed vote overwhelmingly for "Judge Janet," particularly at the Madison, Milwaukee, and Green Bay campuses. Walker is now determined to "undo years of liberal indoctrination."  To achieve this he has announced a new donor-financed initiative:  "I am leading a new effort at Young America Foundation to counter the impact of radicals on campus..."

Indoctrination? Really?

         This allegation of youthful gullibility should be more closely examined.  A few policy issues of acute interest to young people generally (not just those in college) point to more likely reasons why young voters are repelled by Republican policy positions.   

Guns

         It can hardly be chalked up to indoctrination that today's college students -- the generation that practiced "active shooter drills" in school, some having survived the real thing -- have concluded that the Republicans are doing nothing about guns.   Like most Americans, they are frustrated by the inaction, especially since Justice Scalia's 2008 interpretation of the Second Amendment reaffirmed that gun ownership is a regulated right: red-flag laws, waiting periods before purchase, background checks, restrictions on ownership of certain types of weapons,  are indeed constitutional.   Republicans have had plenty of opportunity to diverge from the NRA position to endorse at minimum red-flag laws and background checks.  

Abortion

         Nor does it require indoctrination to conclude that the Republicans are caving in to religious organizations on abortion restrictions. In furtherance of this unpopular policy, unrepresentative gerrymandered state legislatures impose strict regulations on abortion and other reproductive medical decisions,  endanger women in medical emergencies, restrict interstate travel for less-restricted care,  and attempt to ban a proven drug for treatment of miscarriages that also can induce abortions. 

 Voting Rights

         It does not require indoctrination for students to understand the Republican strategy to suppress their vote.   Republican strategist Cleta Mitchell was caught on tape speaking at a Republican strategy session outlining a comprehensive plan to suppress voting by those unlikely to vote for Republican candidates.  The plan includes limiting voting days and hours, eliminating on-campus voting places, denying the use of student ID as proof of voter eligibility, and keeping off the ballot any referendum whose likely outcome would be to demonstrate the unpopularity of Republican policy positions.  

         As if to justify suppressing the college vote, Mitchell  described college students as lazy, coddled by the convenience of on-campus voting:  "They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”  The alternative would be to register and vote near the family home, dozens if not hundreds of miles away.    Of course, hers is a mischaracterization of modern students who work very hard just to qualify for admission to college and then proceed to take challenging coursework that encapsulates thousands of years of learning.    Most students are also compelled to earn money during their college days to pay today's greater student share of the cost.  Besides, the 26th Amendment to the Constitution (1971) that enabled 18-year-olds to vote did not specify greater inconvenience to exercise that right. 

            Certainly, increased time and travel costs will suppress the vote. Together with gerrymandering, high time costs are part of the overall strategy to solidify minority rule.   By contrast,  representative government requires allocating voting resources -- polling places, days and hours, voting machines, secure drop boxes, mail-ballot procedures, and, yes, on-campus voting --  so that all eligible demographics, including college students, experience roughly the same time and resource cost of voting.     

          Since just about every public policy issue of our age has an important economic component, surely upcoming debates will feature differing opinions about how to organize the economic interests of 330 million people. Office seekers will take sides on key questions, such as when government should be involved in the production and distribution of certain goods and services, versus when private markets be relied upon.  This is a good time to review some basic economic concepts and demand that office seekers understand them.

            Any such review could begin by examining a  core teaching of economics: that competition among profit-seekers leads to the betterment of society as a whole, even though it is profit, not serving the larger society, that motivates the decision-makers in the market.    It is this belief in “free markets” that forms the basis for much of public policy, the rebuttable presumption that markets are superior to government in the production and distribution of goods, services and assets. But it is in the rebutting that the conflict lies: when the pre-conditions for competition do not exist,   markets will not self-regulate for the public good. Without keener knowledge of how markets work, politicians can’t propose efficient regulations, including when to leave markets alone to self-regulate.  

  Exceptions to Free Market Efficiency

 Initiated by Adam Smith,  a large body of knowledge has been developed to describe the circumstances under which market allocations driven by profit-seekers are superior to government programs and when they are not. Examples of the latter include:

 Monopoly power: some of our most important services are sold to us by public utility monopolies - distribution of electricity, natural gas, water, cable TV, internet connectivity, sewer services.  Although the competitive process cannot work for these incredibly important goods and services, the properties of the market can be used to guide their regulation.  For example, the price of these services is usually regulated to provide the same sort of competitive rate of return on investment that one would find in a competitive market.  

 Patents: the government grants inventors temporary protection from competition so that, during that temporary period, monopoly profits are the reward for inventive and creative activity. When that period is over, the secret behind the invention is supposed to become public knowledge so that competitive markets can bring the benefit of the invention to consumers at prices that better reflect costs.  When this doesn't work, as in the case of insulin, the government can step in and regulate the price. For example, President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act includes a $35 per month price cap on insulin.

 Information asymmetries: when buyers or sellers can be taken advantage of because they are acting with different information about the safety, durability, or performance characteristics of a product, regulation is required to bring markets to the level of efficiency a free citizenry expects. For example, the Food and Drug Administration tests food for safety and drugs for efficacy, tasks well beyond the expertise of consumers. 

Risk Spreading: primarily this is done through insurance, mostly through private insurance companies who charge a premium to pool the premiums of a very large number of people. This pool enables the insurer to write checks for those who suffer insured-against events -- car accidents, home fires, burglary -- out of the money gained by the premiums of those who have better luck.   The premiums of the accident-prone are higher than the premiums of those without a record of problems. Hence, lousy drivers pay higher premiums than safer drivers, and sick people pay higher premiums than healthy people. The Affordable Care Act is a regulatory response to this latter example: the perversion of pricing the sick out of access to the medical care they need to get healthier.

  Public goods: goods that the unregulated market cannot allocate well because profit-seeking firms cannot expect to earn a profit by providing the efficient amount of them. Examples range from public parks to police and fire protection to national defense, and they are paid for with taxes. Also included are public infrastructure assets that enable the private market to work more efficiently but which the market will not produce for itself.  Included in this category are streets, roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, water and sewer systems, harbors and airports, and many others.

   External costs: These are costs not paid for by the buyers or sellers in a market exchange, and there is no market-driven incentive to control them; they require regulation. Pollution is an example; the market actively encourages pollution because it reduces costs to the polluter. To address climate change while growing the economy, the power of the market to produce wealth must be harnessed and redirected to produce wealth with fewer emissions of greenhouse gases.  The tools for doing this include taxes on those activities that produce emissions, emission quotas or bans, or subsidies for those producers whose activity results in fewer emissions.

Moderation of the Business cycle:  A key role of government policy is to manage total spending so as to keep the economy running at full employment without inflation. During recessions, for example, the spending of the nation’s consumers and business investors is too small to employ all those who want to work. Government spending can fight a recession with investments that build and maintain government-owned productive assets -- streets, roads, broadband, police stations, ports, communication satellites, etc. -- and employ people in the process.  Society can use these long-lived productive assets for many decades.  Of course, government should avoid spending on goods that produce little of lasting value, such as weapons systems that the Pentagon does not want or “bridges to nowhere.” 

 Using Prices in the Public Sector:    the public sector can achieve greater efficiency by implementing some free-market principles. Chief among these is to use prices when enabling people to use public assets such as highways and airport landing rights. For example, gasoline taxes require road users to pay for the roads.  Similarly, carbon taxes can be used to require carbon emitters to pay for their harm to the environment. Both of these taxes use the price system in the same way price is used in private-sector markets: to organize incentives and to require people to pay for what they use.  

Epilog:  The country needs its office-seekers to compete in the marketplace of ideas, especially about economics.  Our politicians should be conversant in the basic ideas of economics, starting with those illustrated here. Voters should root out and replace members of state legislatures and Congress who are ignorant of these principles in economics to help ensure that public policy best serves the majority of our citizens.

            Joe Biden is finally touting his accomplishments: record-breaking job "creation," a drastic reduction in the annual deficit,  a long streak in reducing the inflation rate, and heavy investment in infrastructure.  Finally, billboards are going up at federally funded infrastructure projects around the country, explaining to passersby that these much-needed construction repair and replacement projects supporting local and state economies are due to the bi-partisan infrastructure bill promoted by President Biden.   In other words, voters are finally being alerted to how Bidenomics is benefiting them personally.  

Backlash Litany

            Much of what has become known as "Bidenomics" involves direct involvement of the government in the workings of the economy.  This has prompted Republican pundits and politicians to bemoan the expansion of government, reflexively using the standard litany: wasteful government spending, tax and spend liberalism, and, when they're really lathered up, "Socialism."   And yet they are first in line when the ribbon cuttings are in their state!

            Because this reflexive litany, particularly the socialist label, is so prevalent in republican discourse, we can infer that it must earn substantial acceptance in focus groups.  Actually, however, Bidenomics is pro-capitalism.  Modern capitalism requires an efficient public sector.  Bidenomics invests in public sector projects designed to aid the functioning of the private market system; these are investments the private market won’t make on its own.    

 Consider a few examples of how Bidenomics complements the market.       

             Streets, roads, and bridges.    Transportation networks complement the market system by enabling the movement of goods, services, and people.  Society has chosen in nearly every case to have these transportation elements provided by government.  Moreover, unlike market goods that typically are financed with revenue from prices buyers pay, these transportation elements are paid for by taxes.    Unlike President Trump, who kept promising -- but not delivering -- "infrastructure week," President Biden has begun to deliver an infrastructure decade.

            Broadband internet service.  The result of providing Internet by private firms was predictable: putting people in rural areas as well as poor people in urban areas at a great disadvantage in business competition and educational achievement. In rural areas there are typically great distances between people; the market "cost-recovery" price would have to be very high to stretch the service to them.  Although urban citizens live more compactly, for many affordability is still a problem.  

            Under Bidenomics, serving all these people becomes a public responsibility.  The largest asset the nation has is the talent of its people, and internet access is crucial to the development of that talent. 

            Wind and solar energy.  The "free market model" developed over 250 years beginning with Adam Smith makes it clear that competitive firms have an incentive to reduce the cost of production and distribution of their products by emitting greenhouse gases.   A competitive free market will not control emissions;  just the opposite.  The quality of the atmosphere is a public good; preserving it becomes a public responsibility.

            Those same principles of economics suggest two ways to address the emissions problem, either by taxing emissions to reduce their profitability or by subsidizing substitute cleaner forms of energy.   The first option meets with public hostility, so Bidenomics addresses the emissions problem by subsidizing the installation of wind and solar energy sources in order to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels.  

            Battery Technology.  One part of the Bidenomics project is to subsidize US firms to speed up the discovery and rapid development of battery technology.  The policy aim is to permit a motorist to charge the EV battery in a matter of minutes and to get a much longer range between charges. Why won't the free market produce batteries for the increasingly popular electric vehicles, or "EVs?"   A couple of reasons. First is the emergency nature of the effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by fifty percent by 2030.  Secondly, some of the rare earth metals necessary to make batteries come from unstable and hostile parts of the world. Consequently, what is needed is an effort the scale and scope of the Manhattan Project.    There will be plenty of work for the firms in a competitive marketplace once the battery discoveries are made available.  

            On shoring and "Friend shoring" of MicroChips.   Most modern appliances and heavy equipment -- washing machines, refrigerators, new cars, and farm equipment -- are controlled by microchips.   The Peoples Republic of China is capable of providing all the chips to meet the US Industry and military needs and do it at lower costs than other trading partners.   However, as was demonstrated during the pandemic, microchips from China are vulnerable to cut-off.  Such cutoffs would recur in a new pandemic, and certainly if hostilities broke out.   As free-market principles demonstrate, we cannot leave such strategic matters up to the free market.   Consequently, part of Bidenomics includes expanding the manufacturing of chips within the United States.

            $35 Price cap on insulin.  Insulin is a lifesaving drug for diabetics. Despite being invented over 100 years ago, contemporary variants of insulin are patented, providing producers with protection from competition.  Before Bidenomics, the price of insulin was very high, often $1000 a month, well above what's necessary for a fair rate of return.  Diabetic patients clearly do not enjoy the benefits of a free market, competitive ideal.  Instead, a government-imposed price ceiling of $35 per month can produce the ideal outcome when the monopolized market mechanism will not. 

Bidenomics is Pro Market

            The United States economy has always been an interrelationship between the public and private sectors. As the free-market principles of economics demonstrate, one cannot rely on free markets when the preconditions for efficiency do not exist. Much of the public debate is over how economic responsibilities are divided between the two sectors.

            As the above examples show, Bidenomics blends the powerful forces of the market with government investment in the provision of physical and social infrastructure, as well as regulations that redirect these market forces to the common good.  This happens best when the public sector is directed by representative government, while the private sector is directed by the price system.