A return? Maybe.

A friend of mine, who clearly has an outsized influence on me, suggested that I should start writing on the Gillette-Torvik blog again. I should do lots of things, of course. I do not do a lot of things I should do. Anyway, I guess my tweets were not particularly satisfying reading. I can understand that sentiment given that most of my tweets are simply using this gif in response to political statements with which I disagree.


via GIPHY

I know my using that gif is not witty. Nevertheless, I find using that gif deeply satisfying. Twitter brings out my worst self.

A Little Light

Well, a 19-year-old kid went to the Florida high school he used to attend and killed seventeen people by shooting them with an semi-automatic gun. CNN reports that this is the ninth-deadliest mass shooting is "modern" United States history (as this CNN article points out, we say "modern" because it's hard to get data on mass shootings before 1949). ABC News points out that six weeks in to 2018, there have been 18 shootings at a school in the United States. That averages out to three shootings a week! This needs to stop.

The news, like rust, never sleeps.

Since January 20, I have been trying to avoid the daily national news cycle because the national news frequently has the effect on me of creating a lot of anxiety and if I am going to worry about things I can't control, I would rather worry about things closer to home (which I also can't control but that is a separate issue).  This tweet by Dana Linzer explains why following the daily news cycle can be exhausting.

Will nitwits rule us all?

I moved to Minnesota during an election year. I was not particularly thrilled about the results of that particular election on either a nationwide or statewide level. Most of the candidates that I liked lost that year. But since I had not done much work on any candidates' election, I figured that I should not complain about the results given that I had not put any effort for my folks to win.

Calling it now.

Back in 2012, we ran a series of posts about Republicans candidates who were running for the GOP presidential nomination that had no shot at ever being elected president. You can read some of the posts here. I am embarrassed to note that we did not do a post regarding former Texas Governor Rick Perry.

The New York Times reports that Mr. Perry has announced he is once again running for president. Why would a guy who finished fifth in the Iowa Caucuses think he can win the GOP nomination (and general election) this time? Well, one of his aids says that Mr. Perry has "focused like a laser beam on the task of running for president in 2016 almost since he dropped out of the race." This laser-like focus has included "donning hipster-style black-rimmed eyeglasses and trading his cowboy boots for black loafers."

I am not entirely sure why putting on glasses makes on seem more presidential. A quick review of presidential portraits shows that our only glasses-wearing presidents were Woodrow Wilson and Harry S. Truman. Maybe Mr. Perry thinks that glasses will appeal to democratic voters of a certain age.

In any event, I do not believe that Mr. Perry will be able to convince voters to view him differently than they did in 2012. As a result I am calling it now. Rick Perry will not be elected President of the United States of America.

Bad at math

I have a friend who is a cement mason by trade. Like many construction jobs, in order to be a good cement mason you need to be competent at math. Since I am somewhat math challenged, my friend refers to my mathematical errors as "history major math." As I write this it occurs to me that this may be my friend's polite way of calling me "college boy," but I don't think so.  In any event, my point is that I am not good at math so take the analysis that follows with a grain of salt.

Some things never die.

Although the current heat wave in Minnesota is evidence to the contrary, summer is turning to fall. Among other things, this means a return to politics as usual in Washington. One of the first things we can expect is another batch of stories about the need to raise the debt ceiling. Matthew Ygelsias at Slate has a preview here.

A different time

The July 12 episode of the Planet Money Podcast presents what it calls a one-page plan to fix global warming. Basically, it describes how a carbon tax could limit carbon usage to acceptable levels. The episode was somewhat infuriating because it did not acknowledge until the very end of of the podcast that a carbon tax would work best if every country did it. To put it mildly, that seems unlikely.  This post is not about that unlikely event.

Are things going well for people who don't like big government?

David Weigel at Slate has a post today about how only 15 bills passed by the 113th Congress have been signed into law by President Obama. By comparison, Mr. Weigel notes that on  July 12, 2005, President George W. Bush signed 13 bills into law just on that day.

I'm just going to go ahead and call it.

The 2016 presidential election is more than three years away. Nevertheless, people are thinking about it.  For example, Dan Balz at the Washington Post has this piece about how New Jersey Governor Chris Christie would be a good Republican candidate for president. Among other things Governor Christie is known for publicly praising President Obama's response to Hurricane Sandy in the closing days of the 2012 election. Many Republicans feel this praise hurt Mitt Romney's chances to win the election.

I understand that the future is unknowable and virtually anything can happen. But unless every other Republican politician dies between now and 2016, I do not believe there is any chance that Governor Christie will be the GOP nominee for President. During the primaries, Republican voters will select a candidate, any candidate who has not publicly supported President Obama before they vote for Governor Christie.

Penny Pritzker is Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams

President Obama has nominated Penny Pritzker to be Secretary of Commerce. She has a reported net worth of $1.85 billions dollars. That's billion, with a B. Her wealth is mainly inherited, as she is a member of the famous Pritzkers of Chicago, who made their fortunes in the hotel industry—specifically Hyatt Hotels.

But Ms. Pritzker is not merely an heiress. She makes tons of money on her own. In fact, she makes so much money that, in filings with Congress, she accidentally understated her income over the last decade by 80,000,000 dollars. To be clear, she didn't understate her net worth; she understated her income. The mistake was chalked up to "a clerical error," and she has corrected it.

So, how did Ms. Pritzker make all this money? Basically, it looks like she got paid a fortune for managing the fortune:

Documents released last week show Pritzker received $32.2 million for a decade’s worth of consulting on the restructuring of domestic trusts. The filings released yesterday show she earned at least $80 million for that work, according to Bloomberg’s compilation of the data. The revised total is in addition to the amount reported last week, according to Anderson.

Pritzker, whose family founded Hyatt Hotels Corp, ... disclosed last week that she earned $54 million in consulting fees last year for a similar restructuring of trusts based in the Bahamas, also over 10 years. The Bahamas’ income wasn’t changed in the amended disclosure document.

* * * 

“Ms. Pritzker was engaged by the U.S. trustee of trusts for the extended Pritzker family for advice on restructuring trust investments for the purpose of dividing assets along individual family lines,” Anderson said. They included investments in Hyatt, Marmon Holdings Inc., Union Tank Car Co. and non-hotel real estate investments including the Hyatt Center office tower in Chicago, she said.

So, if I'm reading this right, Pritzker has "earned" about $165,000,000 over the past decade for "managing various trusts." [CENSORED.]

About the only controversy regarding Ms. Pritzker's nomination is that her family owned bank failed back in 2001. She testified that "ya know, I feel very badly about that." But she asserts she had no management role in the bank so bears no responsibility. Honestly, what could she have done? She was too busy earning $31 per second (every second of every day of every year for a decade) managing those pesky trusts.

Umbrella Umbrage

A few days ago, Mr. Gillette posted about a sort of strange photograph taken of a Marine holding an umbrella for President Obama during an outdoor press conference. Mr. Gillette mused:

[T]he first thing I thought when I saw the picture was, why do they use a member of

the United States Marine Corps to hold an umbrella over the President?  I'm reasonably confident that the President himself doesn't decide who holds an umbrella for him.  I wonder how it was determined that umbrellas should be held by members of the Marines?

It turns out, however, that the President does indeed choose his own umbrelladiers. The Washington Post reports:

Slogging through a drizzly Rose Garden news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President Obama took a break to ask for some rain protection.

“I am going to go ahead and ask folks, why don’t we get a couple of Marines — they’re going to look good next to us — just because I’ve got a change of suits but I don’t know about our prime minister,” he said as two Marines appeared at the lecterns with umbrellas. “There we go. That’s good.” He gestured to the soggy press corps, adding, “You guys I’m sorry about.”

According to the Post, conservatives are unhappy about the President's little joke. For example, Lou Dobbs tweeted:

Obama expects our troops to hold damn umbrellas rather than go inside: It's disrespectful, inconsiderate, classless.
— Lou Dobbs (@loudobbsnews) May 17, 2013

There also appears to have been a breach of protocol because apparently male Marines are not allowed to carry umbrellas. That said, title 10 of the U.S. Code also states that Marines are to "perform such other duties as the President may direct." So perhaps the conscription into umbrella duty was an appropriate exercise of executive power after all.

The Gillette-Torvik Blog will continue to cover this breaking story, which I've code-named "Umbroglio."

A Triumph of Reason

With news that House Republicans have decided to cave on the "debt ceiling" brinkmanship (at least for now—but in reality forever), the Gillette-Torvik Blog's position on the Trillion-Dollar Platinum Coin has been utterly vindicated in every particular.

You may remember that in Part One of the 94-Part Series I contended that the Platinum Coin was both "illegal and ill-advised." The "illegal" part was vindicated a week ago when the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve went public with a statement that neither believes "the law can or should be used" to produce the Trillion Dollar Coin.

And now the "ill-advised" part of my post is vindicated as well. As Reader(s)™ will recall, I argued that if Obama used the Trillion Dollar Coin option, it would destroy his own very strong position against the debt-ceiling brinkmanship. Instead, I advised Obama to "fight this battle from the high ground and on the merits"—where it could not be lost.

Sure enough, this was the winning strategy, as should have been obvious to anyone with a brain. And yet many smart people—including Paul Krugman, Josh Barro, and Matt Yglesias—essentially freaked out and made fools of themselves in this affair. Krugman infamously accused the Obama people of being "hopeless negotiators" when they ruled out the Platinum Coin.

Thank goodness these people aren't actually in charge of anything. But when that glorious day comes and the Gillette-Torvik Blog is in charge, you all can rest easy.

This is Part 7 in The Gillette-Torvik Blog's 94-Part Series on the Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin idea. 

The Platinum Coin is a Terrible Idea

Now that we've averted the Fiscal Cliff, the country's next looming catastrophe is the "Debt Ceiling." This is the law that limits the amount the federal government can borrow. In about two months, we will hit the ceiling unless Congress acts to raise it, in which case the President will have to stop paying people the government owes money to. This would be calamitous. Republicans says they will demand spending cuts in exchange for any rise in the Debt Ceiling; Obama says he won't negotiate on this issue, because Congress needs simply to grant him the ministerial authority to create the debt necessary to pay for the spending that Congress has already appropriated.

One clever idea that's been going around is that the President can short-circuit this whole crisis by having the Secretary of the Treasury order the minting a platinum coin with a $1 trillion face value. That coin could then be deposited with the Federal Reserve, which would credit the Treasury's account with the $1 trillion, which the President could use to pay the country's creditors.

This method of using coinage to raise revenue is called coin seigniorage. The Treasury's ability to mint coins is generally circumscribed by the fact that only certain denominations and types of coin are allowed. Specifically, 31 U.S.C. 5112 states:

On Probabilities, College Basketball, and Elections

As Mr. Gillette alludes to in his programming note, Nate Silver—the author of the fivethirtyeight blog—has become quite famous for his election prognostications. He's also become quite controversial.

The controversy stems from his model's assessment that Barack Obama has about an 80% chance of being reelected next Tuesday. Many pundits, particularly Republican ones, think this is crazy (or worse). They point to the fact that national polls have been tied or given Mitt Romney a narrow lead for weeks and say the race is as best a tossup.

Silver's defenders—and Silver himself—respond with some variation of, "the math is the math." They point to the state level polls, which Silver's model relies heavily on, and which currently show Obama with a small but clear and sustained lead in enough swing states to take the Electoral College with relative ease.

In a way, both sides of this argument are right. I think Silver's model's estimate of an 80% probability of Obama winning is highly plausible. But I also think it's fair to label that a "tossup."

To understand why, you need to understand that Silver comes from the world of sports. In particular, he's among the line of people applying "advanced stats" to baseball and other sports to yield stunning new insights: Bill James; sabermetrics; "Moneyball"; kenpom.com; etc.

Let's talk about Ken Pomeroy. His superb website (kenpom.com) has for many years been applying advanced, tempo-free statistics to college basketball. His model allows him to create a "win probability" for every game of every season. This win probability largely tracks the Vegas betting odds. It's pretty amazing.

But here's the thing—it turns out that teams with an 80% win probability lose all the time. Not every time, of course, or even most of the time. But they lose with almost clockwork regularity. In fact, they lose about two out of every ten games.

Here's a painful example from last season. Wisconsin versus Marquette, at the Kohl Center, on December 3rd. Wisconsin came into the game 6-1, having utterly destroyed some inferior competition (e.g., an 85-31 victory over Kennesaw State) and having just lost, on the road, by 3 points to preseason #1 North Carolina. Marquette was undefeated but untested. There was cause for worry, as they had just narrowly scraped out a 59-57 win over lowly Norfolk State.

Considering their relative performances and Wisconsin's significant home court advantage, Pomeroy's computer gave Wisconsin an 83.2% chance of winning. Yet Marquette led almost the entire game, opened up a double-digit lead at half-time, and won going away, 61-54. In other words, the 83.2% favorite got whipped.

(I would link to the Pomeroy data, but it's behind a paywall. I encourage you to pay the $20 to get access to it.)

This is important because Nate Silver's model is fundamentally similar to Ken Pomeroy's model. Neither is predicting what is actually going to happen. Rather, both use historical data to spit out a probability that something will happen in the future. And if you follow Ken Pomeroy's model closely, you will know that an 80% favorite is not really a very "big" favorite. Because you will have experienced your favorite team losing as an 80% favorite many times. Indeed, last year Wisconsin lost twice to Iowa, games in which Pomeroy's computer said it had a 98.3 and 81.9 percent chance of winning. Given those percentages, Wisconsin had a 99.7% chance of winning at least one of those games. (This is hard to swallow, given that Wisconsin would have won a share of the Big Ten title if had managed to win just one of those games.)

There is a psychological difficulty in taking this concept of win probabilities and transferring it to elections. In sports, there are often dozens of games going on every single day—particularly in college basketball. So the "probability" aspect of Pomeroy's model makes some intuitive sense because you can watch it play out in front of your eyes over the dozens of results. But there is only one presidential election at a time. So it is not very intuitive to think of the result probabilistically. You have to start thinking about multiple universes, or something.

Anyhow, here's my conclusion based on my experience as a college basketball fan: Obama is the favorite, but he's a precarious and narrow one. His team better show up on game day.

Did Richard Milhous Nixon win the popular vote in 1960?

A fascinating blog post by Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics says yes, although the real answer is that the question is incoherent because of the way Alabama voted for its electors.

Meanwhile, according to Nate Silver there is currently a 5.4% chance that Mitt Romney will win the popular vote but lose the election this time around (see "scenario analysis" in right sidebar at link).

And Ross Douthat wonders whether, in such an event, the Electoral College could survive.

I wonder, on the other hand, whether the Electoral College could ever be killed.

For Mr. May

My debate analysis, in picture form:

On Voting

People are always asking me: "Bart, how should I decide who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election?" In the future I will refer these people to this blog post.

My advice is simple, but surprisingly controversial: "You should vote for the candidate that you actually want to become president." This is controversial, it turns out, because it seems to give people license to vote for a candidate other than a Republican or a Democrat.

Bipartisanship at its finest?

President Obama and Mitt Romney agree on something.  Is this a sign that the age of reflexive oppositional politics is over?  Or perhaps this agreement is evidence that Governor Romney is not a true conservative.  Tune into your local talk radio station to find out.  Or better yet, don't.

A Special Place in Hell

I have lived in Chicago for about two-and-a-half years. One general conclusion I've come to is that I don't like Chicago politics. I'm a bit of prig in that I don't like open corruption.

Yesterday, one Chicago politician—Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle—got in hot water for an "inflammatory" remark she made about dead Illinois-native Ronald Reagan. She said that Ronald Reagan deserves a "special place in hell" for his role in "making drug use political."  The remarks came in the context of discussing Chicago's new (suspiciously sane) policy of decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Ms. Preckwinkle may be my new hero.

Now, I don't have any particular animus toward President Reagan. Every president in my conscious lifetime (which starts in 1980 with Mr. Reagan's defeat of Jimmy Carter) has cynically prosecuted the War on Drugs for political purposes. Each one of these men—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Georege W. Bush, and Barack Obama—has allowed and encouraged the senseless imprisonment of thousands and thousands of (mostly, but not all) men for the sole purpose of consolidating political power. Their actions are despicable, and if I believed in hell I would like to think that each of them would share a special place there (in due course) for their sins.

I'm reminded of this story I read yesterday about another famous dead Illinois politician: President Abraham Lincoln. The story concerns President Lincoln's decision to commute the death sentences of hundreds of Sioux who had been found guilty of "murder and other outrages" and sentenced to hang after a bloody uprising in Minnesota during the Civil War. Although atrocities had been committed, it was clear that many innocent men had been swept up in the retaliatory proceedings. Lincoln had no political constituency clamoring for justice on behalf of the Sioux. On the contrary, it was pointed out to him that the politically savvy move would be to simply let the unjust death sentences stand. Lincoln sensibly responded, "I could not hang men for votes."

Compare and contrast.