Public Policy and Governance – Page 61

Send In The Robots

Along with all the other causes of social upheaval–political polarization, Russia’s increasingly unnerving nuclear threats, escalating climate change, global inflation…the list goes on…the displacement of millions of workers by automation is getting closer and closer. Maybe–as yesterday’s post suggested–this is just the start of a brave new economy. Or not.

It has always been a mystery to me why workers in and out of unions have focused all their attention and anger on off-shoring, the movement of factories to countries with lower labor costs and the ability to evade rules protecting the environment. That movement has clearly disadvantaged American workers, but it pales in comparison to the steady, seemingly inexorable march of the machines–a march they’ve basically ignored.

When I was young–admittedly a very long time ago–attendants pumped our gas. In offices, rows of secretaries typed documents for lawyers and managers, using carbon paper for the copies. Clerks checked people out at the grocery store, and we paid with cash we got from a teller, not an ATM. The list goes on. And on.

Most of us don’t think about those those clerks and secretaries, bank tellers and gas station attendants who have been replaced by automation, but that is actually what robotics looks like–not like Data or even R2D2.

Consider Flippy.

Flippy is the robot described at the link; it is making the French fries at White Castle .

The fryer station is hot and it’s dangerous. It’s frequently where workplace accidents occur. It’s also where the drive-through gets jammed up at night with people waiting on their loaded fries and chicken rings.

So Miso let Flippy keep his jaunty name but re-engineered him to start dipping fries. White Castle bought in, installing Flippy in a Merrillville, Ind., location and then several others around the country, with the aim of having 100 over the next few years. Jack in the Box execs zipped up to Pasadena for a demo.

Fries are just the beginning. Miso Robotics–the company that came up with Flippy– is developing a coffee forecaster-maker-pourer for Panera. It has also begun work on Sippy, a drink fulfillment robot that pours, seals and labels beverage orders; Sippy has already been ordered by Jack in the Box .

Then there’s Chippy, which will soon be frying and seasoning fresh tortilla chips at Chipotle.

The robots, with their articulated arms, multiple cameras and machine learning, excel at those mind-numbing tasks restaurant workers have to repeat again and again. And they aren’t sniffy about working the graveyard shift.

“We realized for a robotic solution to be a real solution for our customers, it had to have a really high customer return on investment. Which meant it had to take a meaningful amount of labor off the table,” Bell said.

As various companies test and perfect these automated substitutes for workers, it’s easy to see their appeal. Robots work 24/7, don’t need breaks, don’t shirk when the boss isn’t looking, don’t argue with (or sexually assault) co-workers, don’t get sick or require benefits.

They are also currently pricey–although as production ramps up, prices will undoubtedly come down.

But now — with restaurants facing a protracted labor shortage and robotic technology becoming both better and cheaper — restaurant brands are doing new math. How long before an initial technology investment pays off? How long will it take to train human employees to work alongside robot co-workers? And, ultimately, how many restaurant jobs will be permanently commandeered by robots?

It is that last question that will challenge policymakers. I’ve posted previously about the likely disruption when self-driving cars and trucks are safe enough to take to the roads. Millions of Americans currently make their living driving everything from big rigs to school buses to Amazon delivery vans to taxis, Ubers and Lyfts. It is highly unlikely that a significant number of those people will be able to retrain and find alternate employment.

Fast-food establishments currently face a different labor landscape, of course.

If robots are cheaper and more efficient, experts wonder, will the more than 3 million entry-level fast-food jobs be ceded to robots entirely in the future? For now, the thorny problem is there just aren’t enough humans who want to do the work.

According to the National Restaurant Association, 65 percent of restaurant owners still say finding enough workers is a central problem. In the Great Resignation, prospective hospitality workers were being lured back with the promise of fancy fitness club memberships and 401(k) plans.

Whatever happens to restaurants, automation won’t stop there.

In addition to earning our daily bread, most of us derive substantial meaning from our jobs. What will happen when those jobs are gone? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t have a clue.

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So Much For Sportsmanship

Speaking of election denialism…

Most of us remember youthful ball games with the whiny little kid who responded to losing by taking his ball and bat and going home. Most of us also remember parental lectures on what “good sportsmanship” means, and why fair play and graciousness in losing is so important.

It appears that the GOP has jettisoned those values, along with the precepts formerly associated with genuine Christianity. (Evidently, none of those ethical principles are consistent with the party’s growing devotion to QAnon…)

The Washington Post recently questioned a number of current GOP candidates for public office, and reported that at least a dozen Republican candidates running for governor and Senate simply refused to say whether they would accept negative results of their contests.

In a survey by The Washington Post of 19 of the most closely watched statewide races in the country, the contrast between Republican and Democratic candidates was stark. While seven GOP nominees committed to accepting the outcomes in their contests, 12 either refused to commit or declined to respond. On the Democratic side, 18 said they would accept the outcome and one did not respond to The Post’s survey.

Trump, of course, has continued to claim– without a scintilla of evidence– that his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 was rigged. Since he attacks fellow Republicans unwilling to agree, the article notes that he has made election denialism the price of admission in many GOP primaries, with the result that more than half of all Republican nominees for federal and statewide offices that administer elections “have embraced unproven claims that fraud tainted Biden’s win, according to a Washington Post tally.”

As I’ve repeatedly noted, one of them is running for Secretary of State here in Indiana.

In competitive races for governor or Senate in Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas, GOP candidates declined to say that they would accept this year’s result. All but two — incumbent senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Marco Rubio of Florida — have publicly embraced Trump’s false claims about 2020, according to a Post analysis.

Seven Republicans did pledge to accept the results. One of them was Colorado Senate contender Joe O’Dea.

O’Dea, who is behind in the polls as he attempts to unseat incumbent Colorado Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D), did not reference Trump by name, but used his response to offer notably sharp criticism of candidates who refuse to concede when they lose.
“There’s no polite way to put it. We have become a nation of poor sports and cry babies,” said O’Dea. “We’ll keep a close eye on things, but after the process is done and the votes are counted, I’ll absolutely accept the outcome. If the Senator is up for it, we can certify it over a beer. It’s time for America’s leaders to start acting like adults again. Loser buys.”

This growing unwillingness to accept the results of an election is no small thing.

Elections have been defined as a substitute for armed conflict–rather than taking to the streets, democratic polities choose “champions” (aka candidates) who take their arguments to the people. The people vote, and the loser accepts their verdict (usually biding his or her time until the next election cycle). Violence averted, governance continued.

That, of course, is the ideal. And there are plenty of reasons to criticize America’s current conduct of elections– gerrymandering, the greater weight given to rural votes, social media campaigns sowing disinformation, the outsized influence of money, and the widespread lack of civic literacy among the voting population. I do not mean to minimize the significance of those factors, or their ability to affect the results of electoral contests.

We definitely need to address the multiple defects in our electoral processes. We need to streamline registration and minimize state-level game-playing, and we clearly need to make it easier rather than harder to vote.

But none of those defects means that the result of a given election contest is “rigged.”

“If I win, it was a fair election. If I lose, it was rigged.” Heads I win, tails you lose is, as O’Dea put it, the position of a cry baby–the modern iteration of the poor sport who responded to a loss by taking his ball and bat and going home. It is also a position absolutely incompatible with a functioning democracy.

Those of us who support a candidate who loses can point to lots of reasons why voters supported the “wrong” candidate. But in the continued absence of provable fraud, our civic obligation is to suck it up and concede.

The Republican candidates who are telling us they will refuse to abide by results they don’t like are telling us who and what they are. Believe them.

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Abusing Immigrants

Republican hysteria about immigration at the southern border is both stupid and racist: Stupid, because most people who are in this country illegally have flown in and overstayed their visas, and racist because–hey!–it’s the GOP and those people at the southern border tend to be brown.

The GOP’s anti-immigrant fervor isn’t so different from the anti-immigrant hatred documented by Ken Burns in “America and the Holocaust”–only the targets have shifted. A little.

In light of DeSantis and Abott’s recent efforts to prove that “libtards” don’t understand the terrible threat posed by brown people trying to escape horrific situations, I thought I’d share some inconvenient things called “facts.”

I know facts are out of fashion these days, but it is instructive to look at the actual impact of immigration. As David Brooks wrote a few years back, “when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.”

So what are the facts—as opposed to the xenophobic fears? A couple of years ago, I did some research; this is what I found then.

Immigrants make up about 14% of the U.S. population; more than 43 million people. Together with their children, they are about 27% of us. Of the 43 million, approximately 11 million are undocumented.

What anti-immigrant activists like to call “chain migration” is actually family re-unification and it applies only to close relatives; of the people granted permanent residency in 2016, about two-thirds fell into that category.

Immigrants made up 17% of the U.S. workforce in 2014, and two-thirds of those were here legally. Collectively, they were 45% of domestic workers, 36% of manufacturing workers, and 33% of agricultural workers. Those percentages help to explain why state-level efforts to curb immigration have come back to bite them: in Alabama a few years ago, when the state passed a draconian new immigration law, crops rotted in the fields. Farmers couldn’t find native-born residents willing to do the work.

Right now, restaurants are desperate for waitstaff and kitchen help.

Despite the hateful rhetoric from the GOP, most Americans today consider immigration a good thing: in 2016, Gallup found 72% of Americans viewed immigrants favorably, and as many as 84% supported a path to citizenship for undocumented persons who met certain requirements. Another poll showed that 76% of Republicans supported a path to citizenship. (It’s worth noting that such support was higher than the 62% who supported a border wall.)

What about the repeated claims that immigrants are a drain on the economy? The data unequivocally shows otherwise. As the Atlantic and several other sources have reported, undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars into Social Security for benefits they will never receive. These are people working on faked social security cards; employers deduct the social security payments and send them to the government, but because the numbers aren’t connected to actual accounts, the worker can never access the contributions. The Social Security system has grown increasingly—and dangerously– reliant on that revenue; in 2010, the system’s chief actuary estimated that undocumented immigrants had contributed roughly 12 billion dollars to the program.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that approximately half of undocumented workers pay income taxes, and all of them pay sales and property taxes. In 2010, those state and local taxes amounted to approximately 10.6 billion dollars.

The most significant impact of immigration by far has been on innovation and economic growth. The Partnership for a New American Economy issued a research report in 2010: the key findings included the fact that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, companies founded by immigrants and their children employ more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generate is greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

On economic grounds alone, then, we should welcome immigrants. But not only do we threaten undocumented persons, we make it incredibly difficult to come here legally. If there is one fact that everyone admits, it is the need to reform a totally dysfunctional and inhumane immigration system. Based upon logic and the national interest, it’s hard to understand why Congress has been unwilling or unable to craft reasonable legislation.

Of course, logic and the national interest have been missing from Washington for some time. Compassion went with them.

Bigotry, however, continues to thrive.

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This Is Encouraging

Regular readers of this blog are aware that I favor a UBI–a universal basic income. I’m certainly familiar with the arguments against it, and even more aware of the “devil in the details” that can make or break most policies. What I find encouraging is the slow but steady spread of pilot programs testing the concept.

The New York Times article at the link reports that at least twenty U.S. cities are currently conducting pilot programs meant to test the idea.

More than 48 guaranteed income programs have been started in cities nationwide since 2020, according to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a network of leaders supporting such efforts at the local, state and federal levels. Some efforts are publicly funded, and others have nongovernmental support. Jack Dorsey, the former chief executive of Twitter, donated $18 million to help the initiative.

At its essence, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a stipend that would be sent to every U.S. adult citizen, with no strings attached– no requirement to work, or to spend the money on certain items and not others. It’s a cash grant sufficient to insure basic sustenance. (A number of proponents advocate $1000 per month).

Andy Stern, former President of the Service Employee’s International Union, points out that a UBI is simple to administer, treats all people equally, rewards hard work and entrepreneurship, and trusts the poor to make their own decisions about what to do with their money. “Because it only offers a floor, people are encouraged to make additional income through their own efforts… Welfare, on the other hand, discourages people from working because, if your income increases, you lose benefits.”

With a UBI, in contrast to welfare, there’s no phase-out, no marriage penalties, no people falsifying information–and no costly bureaucracy. My more extended arguments for a UBI can be accessed here and here.

For obvious reasons, the programs described in the Times article focus on impoverished Americans, rather than testing universal payments.

Damon Jones, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, who has studied such programs, noted that unrestricted cash — including stimulus payments — was used broadly by the federal government to stem the economic devastation of Covid-19.

“Policymakers were surprisingly open to this idea following the onset of the pandemic,” Mr. Jones said. Now the emergency aid programs have largely lapsed, ending what for some was a lifeline.

A number of conservatives argue against a UBI, asserting that it would dis-incentivize work and/or that it would make more sense to reform programs already in place–something easier said than done. But support for a universal income has not been limited to progressives. Milton Friedman famously proposed a “negative income tax,” and F.A. Hayek, the libertarian economist, wrote “There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all, protection against severe deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income, or a floor below which nobody need descend.”

More recently, In 2016, Samuel Hammond of the libertarian Niskanen Center wrote about the “ideal” features of a UBI: its unconditional structure avoids creating poverty traps; it sets a minimum income floor, which raises worker bargaining power without wage or price controls; it decouples benefits from a particular workplace or jurisdiction; since it’s cash, it respects a diversity of needs and values; and it simplifies and streamlines bureaucracy, eliminating rent seeking and other sources of inefficiency.

One of the earliest of the pilot programs was in Stockton, California, and analysis of its results confirmed several of Hammond’s points.

Preliminary research from a pair of college professors, based on the first year of Stockton’s two-year program, found that giving families $500 each month reduced those households’ income fluctuations, enabling recipients to find full-time employment.

Researchers, for example, found that 28 percent of recipients had full-time employment when the program started in February 2019; a year later, the figure was 40 percent.

In one case, a participant had been studying to get his real estate license for more than a year — a pathway to more consistent, higher-paying work — but could not find time to study while piecing together an income doing gig jobs. The money from the pilot program, researchers found, gave him the time to study and get his license.

California–unsurprisingly–has most of the pilot programs currently underway, and the Times reports that Governor Newsom is an advocate of the UBI.

As I’ve previously noted, pilot projects to date have debunked predictions that poor folks would spend the money on drugs and liquor. Instead, most has gone for items like food, medicine, diapers and education.

It will be interesting to see the results of these current pilot programs–and assuming they continue to be positive, even more interesting to see how the nay-sayers respond.

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Speaking Of Democracy…

I’ll begin this post with an admission. Back when I was Indianapolis’ Corporation Counsel–and that was way back, 1977-80–I thought citizen referenda were a bad idea. After all, America is a republic, meaning that ours is a representative form of democracy. (For those of you who are fond of pontificating that we’re a republic not a democracy, I hate to tell you this, but representative democracy is still a democracy. We just elect people to make decisions and cast votes on our behalf.)

The theory is that the folks we elect will have time to fully investigate issues and form thoughtful and educated opinions, after which they will cast informed votes. Referenda, I thought then, would be won or lost based upon the “passions of the mob” that so worried the nation’s founders.

You have probably already seen the contemporary flaw in that reasoning.

Unfortunately, we Americans no longer choose thoughtful, measured and educated people to make our laws. Those mob “passions” have translated into the nomination and election of far too many people we wouldn’t trust to choose our brand of toilet paper. Hence my change of opinion about referenda–a change of heart confirmed not just by the recent election in Kansas, but by the recognition that referenda are statewide, and unlike legislative chambers, cannot be gerrymandered.

That inability to game the system is probably why Republicans are currently opposed to them.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions this year backing proposed ballot initiatives to expand voting access, ensure abortion rights and legalize recreational marijuana in Arizona, Arkansas and Michigan.

Yet voters might not get a say because Republican officials or judges have blocked the proposals from the November elections, citing flawed wording, procedural shortcomings or insufficient petition signatures.

At the same time, Republican lawmakers in Arkansas and Arizona have placed constitutional amendments on the ballot proposing to make it harder to approve citizen initiatives in the future.

The Republican pushback against the initiative process is part of a several-year trend that gained steam as Democratic-aligned groups have increasingly used petitions to force public votes on issues that Republican-led legislatures have opposed. In reliably Republican Missouri, for example, voters have approved initiatives to expand Medicaid, raise the minimum wage and legalize medical marijuana. An initiative seeking to allow recreational pot is facing a court challenge from an anti-drug activist aiming to knock it off the November ballot.

About half the states allow citizen initiatives. (Indiana is not one of them–we have to go hat in hand to the General Assembly and beg for permission to hold a local referendum. It took Indianapolis three sessions to get approval for our referendum on public transit.) The states that do allow these initiatives require a significant number of signatures by registered voters on a petition, and further require designated officials to certify the authenticity of those signatures and confirm that the ballot wording is clear.

Opponents of the process argue that campaigns by well-heeled “special interests” can influence the results. That argument would be more persuasive if it didn’t also describe the problem with today’s legislative processes, where the influence-peddling is rampant and far less transparent.

Republicans who fear the results of an actual, non-gerrymandered vote have resorted to truly petty arguments to keep these initiatives off the ballot.

In Michigan this past week, two Republican members of the bipartisan Board of State Canvassers blocked initiatives to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and expand opportunities for voting. Each measure had significantly more than the required 425,000 signatures. But GOP board members said the voting measure had unclear wording and the abortion measure was flawed because of spacing problems that scrunched some words together…

In Arizona, the primarily Republican-appointed Supreme Court recently blocked a proposed constitutional amendment that would have extended early voting and limited lobbyist gifts to lawmakers. The measure also would have specifically prohibited the Legislature from overturning the results of presidential elections, which some Republicans had explored after then- President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020….

Arizona Republicans have spent the past decade enacting laws making it more difficult to get citizen initiatives on the ballot. State laws now require petition sheets to be precisely printed and ban the use of a copy machine to create new ones. Other laws require paid circulators to include their registration number on each petition sheet, get it notarized and check a box saying they were paid.

The assault on (small-d) democratic decision-making by Red state legislators could hardly be clearer. Fortunately, in Michigan, the state’s Supreme Court reversed the decision, and the issue will be on the November ballot.

When President Biden asserted that the upcoming midterm election is– above all– about saving democracy, he wasn’t exaggerating.

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