We Should Not Shame the Obese, But We Should Not Celebrate or Glorify Obesity Either

Bill Maher has been a political commentator that has fascinated me over the years. When I was younger, I did not care as much for Maher's comedic style or content. As I became older, I have come to appreciate Maher as a comedian. One reason is that as I became more libertarian, I better understood the nuances of this world and was able to understand where Maher was coming from. Another factor is that the mainstream Left has moved much more to the Left in the past decade. While Maher identifies more with the Left, he has on multiple occasions called out the Left for abandoning its more traditional roots (e.g., freedom of speech, tolerance) and buying into inane, crazy ideas that would have been considered extreme only a few years ago. 

What makes Maher special is that he is one of the only political commentators that self-identifies as a liberal and is willing to stand up to the crazier elements that exist within the U.S. Left. Maher's criticisms are those that I find myself agreeing with much more than I am disagreeing these days. Look no further than last week's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher where he lambasted the fat acceptance movement (see below). Maher did not hold any punches back. He said that body positivity is used to mean "I'm perfect the way I am because I'm me." He called it "Orwellian how often positivity is used to describe what is not healthy." Maher went as far to say that "If you are participating in this joyful celebration of gluttony that goes on now, you have blood on your hands, full stop."

 

I want to get into why Maher is right about the calamity that we face with the high amounts of obesity in this country. But first, I want to preface by saying that the obese should not be shamed. I would not simply argue that from a moral stance of human decency, but also as a public health stance. Shame is not an effective public health strategy. When was the last time you changed your mind on something because someone berated you and made you feel awful for existing? Don't all raise your hands at once. 

The truth is that shaming does not work (e.g., Ho et al., 2015; Costa and Kahn, 2013). Shaming did not get skeptical people to wear face masks in 2020 or get hesitant people to get the COVID vaccine in 2021. Shaming does not work as a strategy for smoking cessation or getting someone to stop drinking. Shaming did not work as a tactic during the heyday of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Shaming is more than merely ineffective. If anything, shaming can make things worse. The Canadian Medical Association Journal shows how shaming worsened health outcomes for HIV, obesity, and fetal alcohol syndrome (Duong, 2021). A study from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that shame makes smokers more likely to smoke (Cortland et al., 2020).

Why does shame prove to generally be ineffective in a public health context? To quote neurologist Caroline Leaf, "Shame is a very negative emotion that challenges a person's identity and tends to make people feel defensive or aggressive, or make them withdraw to protect themselves. Shame essentially tells someone they are bad, as opposed to making them feel that they may be doing something that will have negative consequences." That explains why more often than not, shaming people in a public health context leads them to hide or not disclose their behavior. Shame is not the way to go in terms of public health. It is not going to incentivize healthier behaviors. But what about obesity? The question on this topic is not whether shame should be used, but the debate has become whether we should normalize and make obesity an acceptable life choice on a societal level. 

Those who are activists for fat acceptance (see below), they think that stigmatizing fat is the problem. A 2021 article from Cosmopolitan tried to depict obesity as healthy, which is amusing considering that the satire website Babylon Bee satirized the idea a few months earlier. In spite of what fat acceptance activists would argue, my issues with obesity have nothing to do with fatphobia, thin privilege, or whichever term that the woke like to use to deflect criticism. As we will see shortly, obesity has significant, negative impacts on physical health. 

I can imagine a criticism along the lines of "the Body Mass Index (BMI) is not perfect, ergo obesity is not an issue." That argument is half-right: the BMI is not a perfect measurement. For example, muscle weighs more than fat. A wide receiver for a football team who is all muscle could be considered under the BMI. On the flip side, you can take it in the other extreme direction with unhealthy thinness, whether that is bulimia or anorexia. At the same time, the BMI is still a good proxy for metabolic health. 

The idea of "healthy at every size" is a myth. The truth of the matter is that there is a large evidence base showing that health issues are linked to obesity. There is a reason for that. A meta-analysis of 72 cohort studies from the BMJ showed that indices of central fatness (including BMI) are significantly associated with a higher all-cause mortality risk (Jayedi et al., 2020). And here is an older meta-analysis of 97 studies from Journal of the American Medical Association saying the same thing (Flegal et al., 2013). 

Maher is right to point out that one of the first things that you do when visiting the doctor is stepping on the scale and getting your weight checked. A list from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) shows how obesity elevates the risk for multiple diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, sleep apnea, metabolic syndrome, fatty liver disease, osteoarthritis, gallstones, cancer, and kidney disease. In 2019, the New York Times said that "poor diet is the leading cause of mortality in the United States."

If you need a more contemporary example, let us examine COVID and obesity. If you have a problem walking up a few stairs, imagine how an upper respiratory disease such as COVID could wreak havoc on your health. We do not have to imagine. The CDC says that obesity can triple your likelihood of being hospitalized from COVID and that the obese are 1.42 times more likely to have severe COVID if hospitalized. The British Medical Journal found that those who were physical active were much less likely to be hospitalized from COVID (Sallis et al., 2021). Obesity was second only to age as the largest factor in COVID morbidity, according to a 2022 study from The Lancet. If more people took care of their personal health, fewer would have died in this pandemic. 

You are probably wondering why I care about the topic of obesity. My political philosophy leads me to believe that as long as you are not hurting, harming, or directly affecting anyone with your personal decisions, I do not care what you do. That is the nonaggression axiom in a nutshell. If you want your diet to consist of McDonald's, Twinkies, and a whole array of processed foods, that is your dietary choice. If you want to be vegetarian or vegan, go for it. If you decide to drink raw milk or eat genetically modified foods, that is "your body, your choice." I have applied this philosophy to more than dietary choices. I believe that it applies to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, owning a firearm, marrying whichever consenting adult (or adults) you would like, selling your own organs for cash, and a whole host of choices. 

I care about this issue for two reasons. The first reason is just because I believe you have the freedom to do something does not mean I personally agree with certain life choices. I can believe that an adult can get married to whatever consenting adult they want, but I do not believe that polygamy is a good idea. The same goes for having children before getting married. Regular exercise, a sound diet, and good sleep are still three essential components of a healthy lifestyle. Keeping alcoholic consumption within moderation is healthier than binge drinking. Winston Churchill might have smoked multiple cigars a day and made it to his eighties, but daily cigar smoking is not a healthy habit. The less you smoke, the better. To quote Maher again, "No one pretended there was positivity in smoking. You're not a freedom fighter because you want to keep eating donuts." As already illustrated, being obese does not make for a healthy lifestyle. 

This leads to the second reason why I care. We have a major problem because fatness is not fitness. According to the CDC, 41.9 percent of Americans are obese and 73.6 percent are overweight. When a large portion of the population decides to partake in unhealthy decisions, those decisions lead to poorer health outcomes. Those poorer outcomes result in increased demand for healthcare services, as we see with a U.S. study (Cawley et al., 2021), as well as a Danish study showing that obese people have about double the healthcare costs that non-obese people have (Spanggaard et al., 2022). What happens when you drive up the demand for a good or service? The price of that good or service increases. That is the Law of Demand. In other words, the society-level perpetuation of obesity affects me because millions of obese people needing more healthcare services skyrockets the healthcare costs for me and every other American who decides to live healthily enough to not be obese. 

Here is some food for thought on the economic costs. A report from Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International shows the global impact of obesity. Some economic costs in the RTI report include increased absenteeism, reduced productivity while at work, early retirement. This RTI report, by the way, found that obesity-attributable diseases killed cause five million deaths and 160 million disability-adjusted life years globally. In its report, the World Bank adds the costs of significantly increased mortality, increased disabilities, and reduced length of disability-free healthy living across the life cycle. The Milken Institute found in its 2020 study that in 2016, chronic diseases driven by obesity in the U.S. cost $480.7 billion in direct health care costs and $1.24 trillion in indirect costs due to loss of economic productivity. This total cost of $1.7 trillion was the equivalent of 9 percent of the U.S. GDP. 

Bill Maher is right in that there is an unfortunate trend of "rewriting science to fit ideology or just to fit what you want reality to be." We have seen it with anti-vaxxers, lockdown lovers, and those who despise genetically modified food, to name a few. We should not ignore overwhelming evidence about the economic and health costs of obesity simply because it is inconvenient or difficult to hear. It does not do anyone any favors to sugar-coat the truth (or food for that matter). 

Up until a few years ago, it was indisputable that obesity came with considerable health and economic costs. Yet fat celebration is what we get for a society that indulges in self-entitlement, feeling good for its own sake, emotional fragility, and thinking that life should be a piece of cake. Guess what? Life has always been a struggle. As Maher pointed out, cake was delicious in 1969 and yet people somehow had better impulse control. It takes time and effort to go and exercise. It takes discipline to follow a diet or exercise regiment. It takes impulse control to not eat compulsively, smoke, or drink too much alcohol. The whole premise behind personal development is that you are not fine just the way you are and there is always room for self-improvement. It should not matter if there is more processed food or if more people sit at a desk for eight hours at work. Anything worthwhile in life takes time, patience, effort, and discipline. Healthy habits, discipline, self-control, and prudence used to be considered values, but not in a country where self-gratification is more important than self-improvement. 

Framing it in terms of discrimination and social justice while telling people they are "fine just the way they are" does not help the obese. When you tell people they are "fine just the way they are" and those people buy into fat acceptance, they are 85 percent less likely to lose weight, according to research from the Obesity Society (Muttarak, 2018). Rather than embolden the obese to live happier, healthier lives, the cognitive dissonance behind fat positivity makes matters worse. 

Maher was spot-on by saying that we have reached the point where acceptance became enabling. I remember watching Family Guy in 2005 when it satirized the fat positivity movement with the episode The Fat Guy Strangler (see clip above). Times are so upside-down that satire has become reality less than twenty years after the release of that episode. There was a time when we used to at least try to be fit and healthy and society praised those who succeeded. To paraphrase Maher, our society has devolved to the point where letting yourself is a point of pride and improving upon yourself (in this case, with fitness) is being vilified. 

What we should be doing is being respectful of obese individuals while encouraging them to make necessary life changes to be healthier. One should find a healthy self-acceptance that does not glorify obesity or shame fitness. Yet multiple industries, including food, health, and clothing, have a cash cow by making more money off of people who are obese. The media is not catastrophizing it when it should be. Obesity has many negative implications for public health and the economy at large, plain and simple. We should act more healthily like our lives depend on it because in terms of longevity and quality of life, our lives do depend on it. To quote Maher one last time, when we as a society are "lying about it and making excuses, it is psychologically telling ourselves that letting ourselves go is the best we can do." A society that propagates the lie that "all shapes are healthy" does so at its own peril. 

Is the U.S. Economy in a Recession as of Summer 2022? Probably.

This past week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the gross domestic product (GDP), which is a frequently used measure for economic growth, declined 0.9 percent in the second quarter of 2022. In the first quarter of 2022, the GDP decreased by 1.6 percent. According to the BEA, the reasons for the decline in real GDP include decreases in private inventory investment, residential fixed investment, federal government spending, state and local government spendings and nonresidential fixed investment that were partly offset by increases in exports and imports." Why does this bit of economic news matter? Because two quarters of negative GDP growth is a widely regarded rule of thumb to indicate that the economy is in a recession. 

In response to the news about the GDP, the Biden administration flatly denied in a press release last Thursday that we are in a recession. I could understand why Biden would want to make such a claim. There is a decidedly political element to such a reaction. The United States is in an election cycle with about three months until the midterm elections. Things have not been going great since Biden entered the White House. Even the Biden administration's overreacting to COVID notwithstanding, inflation started rising to a 40-year high shortly after Biden entered the White House (more on that later). There is a war going on in Ukraine. Crime has been rising across the country. There is a baby formula shortage that has not abated. Now there is concern over monkeypox. There is no shortage of issues and challenges that face the White House. One of the last things Democrats want to deal with right now is the "r-word." It would also explain why the Republicans are all too keen to declare this a recession. So are we in a recession or not? 

We want an answer now because politics are driving us to answer the question. Even so, the answer to that is trickier than one might think. Since 1948, an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has been dubbed the arbiter of declaring when a recession takes place. NBER looks at more than whether there are two quarters of GDP decline. With the GDP itself, it also looks at the depth and diffusion of the economic downturn. As for other metrics, NBER also takes into account such factors as employment, personal income, and industrial production. GDP should be a metric, but not the only one. 

The incompleteness of the GDP is a concept I understand. In 2014, I criticized the GDP as a metric. Although I said it was still the best single metric we had, I did point out its obvious limits. The GDP is an imperfect but still widely used measure. NBER waits a bit longer to collect more data before declaring a recession, which means if it declares a recession, it most probably will not happen before the elections. Even so, every time since 1948 that there has been two quarters of GDP decline, NBER has declared a recession. Also, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985 includes a clause that defines a recession as two quarters of declining GDP. The reason I bring this Act up is because it is not an academic debate or an argument over semantics. This Act is important because the recession clause has been used subsequently in other legislation to enact measures that determine policy during a recession. If that were not enough, Biden's economic adviser Jared Bernstein admitted in 2019 that a recession includes two quarters of GDP decline, as did the Washington Post in 2015. 

The response to the pandemic, which included unprecedentedly expansionary monetary and fiscal policy, created such unusual economic conditions that wading through macroeconomic indicators can be a challenge. Plus, macroeconomics has many moving parts with multiple indicators (see AIER's Leading Indicators Index to give you an idea). Nevertheless, I want to give it a go at looking at some main macroeconomic indicators beyond the GDP. 

Let's start with job growth since it was a point that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen brought up. Job growth has averaged at around 400,000 jobs for the past year, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data (see below; figures are in thousands). For Yellen, a recession is a "broad-based weakness in the economy," which is not something that would take place if job growth were at the rate it is. Yellen does have a point in the sense that recessions typically perpetuate unemployment. As unemployment rises, demand and output decrease. With more unemployed people and fewer jobs, that would mean less work and money to spend. 

Thankfully, that is not the situation we have. While job openings have slightly dropped (BLS), there are still about two job openings for each unemployed person in the U.S. The main issue with using unemployment as a predictor is because those sorts of job losses happen mid-recession (i.e., unemployment is a lagging indicator). Plus, we should also consider that there have been recessions that have had growing or stabilized payroll employment numbers, including December 2007 to March 2008; January to April 1980; November 1973 to October 1974; and December 1969 to April 1970. 

At the same time, job growth in this scenario can be masking labor market issues, a point I made when criticizing the official unemployment rate. One issue is with respect to the labor force participation rate. If a larger percentage of the population has given up on looking for a job and left the labor market, then how reliable is the official unemployment rate if it is not capturing these individuals? As data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) shows, the labor force participation rate continues to remain below pre-pandemic levels, even as jobs are more plentiful. 

In addition to the labor force participation rate, the labor market shows signs of weakness because real wages are dropping (FRED). What could explain the job growth and wage declines is that employees are willing to take lower wages in order to not become unemployed. A nominal increase in wages does not do much if inflation is eating away at purchasing power. Speaking of which....

At least in U.S. terms, inflation has been off the charts. The United States has experienced 8.6 percent inflation over year in May 2022 (BLS), a rate that we have not seen since the 1970s. Even when you remove food and energy from the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the numbers are far from flattering. To combat the high inflation, the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates. Part of raising interest rates is that it makes borrowing money more expensive. As such, a potential downside of raising the interest rates too quickly is the increased likelihood of a recession. 

I have to wonder about some consumption and production metrics. On the one hand, durable goods orders is a good indicator of whether the manufacturing sector is doing well. Based on FRED data, durable goods orders are still increasing. 

On the other hand, consumer sentiment is sinking. The University of Michigan Survey of Consumers has been measuring consumer sentiment since the 1960s. As you can see below (grey indicates recessionary period), a downward trend in consumer sentiment commonly indicates that we are heading into a recession. The reason for this is not because of clairvoyance but because having a large sample size to determine how consumers feel like spending provides a good proxy for economic conditions. 

The Left-leaning Economic Policy Institute brings up a point about consumption that could mitigate the Consumer Sentiment Index. Per EPI's argument, a better metric than GDP would be domestic demand growth (also known as final sales to domestic producers). This metric measures spending from consumers, businesses, and the government that filters out inventory volatility. By this metric, only the second quarter was an issue because there was a plateau in Q2 (FRED). My reply to that argument is that as is illustrated by the data below, this metric does not do a good job of acting as a leading indicator of a recession. 

If you feel like sidestepping the argument above, how about taking a look at the yield curve? A yield curve is a comparison of interest rates for short-term and long-term debt instruments, normally bonds. There are times when the short-term rates rise above long-term ones. However, if that temporary blip turns into a curve that is known as an inversion, that is taken as a signal that the economy is not doing well. As I pointed out in 2018 in my primer on yield curves, an inverted yield curve has predicted every recession in the past 60 years. What makes an inverted yield curve scary is its predictive power. And guess what? As the New York Times points out, we are in the middle of an inverted yield curve right now. 

The last metric I want to cover is the Leading Economic Index (LEI). The LEI is created by the nonprofit association called The Conference Board, who mainly serves Fortune 500 clients. The LEI takes into account multiple factors, including GDP, unemployment, yield curve, manufacturing, retail, stock prices, and unemployment claims. A rising LEI score indicates the economy is faring well, whereas a falling score indicates worsening conditions. According to its latest LEI press release, the LEI is going downward, which indicates that the economy is getting worse. 

While some of the indicators deliver a mixed picture, there are enough macroeconomic trends that are worrisome. We are certainly in a stage of economic decline, no question about that. Whether it ends up technically being a recession, even if brief and shallow, is something that time will be able to tell. What I find most problematic is that there are three strong indicators that are signaling a recession: declining GDP, a decrease in consumer sentiment, and an inverted yield curve. These indicators make me inclined to think we are most likely either in a recession or that we are well on our way to being in a recession. 

Regardless of the ink being spilled over the quibbling of the definition of "recession," you don't need a thermometer to know that it's hot outside, much like you don't need an advanced degree in economics or public policy to know that there is something awry with the economy. A CNN poll a couple of weeks ago found that 64 percent of Americans believe we are in a recession, which included 56 percent of Democrats. Whether you call it a recession or not, what matters is that Americans are hurting financially and they know it. Unless the Biden administration can come up with some actual policy solutions instead of partaking in semantic sophistry, the state of the economy is going to be on many voters' minds and not in a way favorable to the powers that be. 

Why We Need More Than a Holiday From Sales Tax Holidays

Although the summer equinox started a little over a month ago, the summer break is already winding down. Students are gearing up for the academic year. Part of that gearing up is having the parents buy school supplies and backpacks. In an attempt to boost consumer spending, state governments have implemented what are referred to as sales tax holidays (see below). We already see such states as Florida and Tennessee are implementing sales tax holidays this summer for school supplies. 

A sales tax holiday is a "limited-time period where a state allows sales tax to be waived or reduced on categories of items." State tax holidays typically last a few days, but can last longer. These temporary sales tax exemptions are not limited to school supplies. States have enacted sales tax holidays for such goods as computers, clothing, groceries, and sporting goods. This year, more states are looking to expand these tax-free periods due to inflation and large state budget surpluses. While sales tax holidays are a great political gimmick, they do not make for great tax policy. 

Much of what makes a sales tax holiday ineffective is the temporary nature of the exemption. The assumption made by proponents is that the tax holiday boosts additional sales. As a report from the Federal Reserve Bank suggests, what happens is that the sales tax holiday only shifts the timing of the purchases instead of increasing overall purchases (Aladangady et al., 2017). Since sales tax holidays primarily shift purchases, as opposed to increasing them, they do very little to increase economic growth. This makes sense since sales tax holidays are usually offered when demand is at its highest and most inelastic, thereby doing little to shift overall demand curves. 

The temporary nature also means time-based discrimination. Why should a purchase during one small window of time be time-exempt while the same product during the rest of the year is taxable? Also, what is a consumer to do if they cannot purchase that weekend? Some are working or on vacation. Others could be in between paychecks during the sales tax holiday, especially if the holiday is only a few days. A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago shows that those who benefitted the most were those with incomes over $70,000 because they had the financial stability and resources to time their purchases (McGranahan and Marwell, 2010). 

Time is not the only form of discrimination. Sales tax holidays are generally arbitrary on the items that they produce. Aside from creating economic distortion and reducing market efficiency, these holidays also complicate inventory management and taxation. For the exemption to be successful, retailers need to comply with the tax code to if they are to be at all successful. The tax code should be as simple as possible. However, it takes a lot of paperwork and man-hours to wade through red tape for an exemption that typically lasts for a few days. 

This red tape and complication in the tax code creates more opportunity for tax evasion. Mentioning tax evasion is notable because one of the advantages of using a consumption tax is that a sales tax is easy to track, measure, and tax (Fritts, 2020). It ends up being complicated to make so many adjustments for such a short period that many businesses (small businesses in particular) do not want to deal with the compliance or adjusting cash registers. 

Finally, some retailers might exploit the tax holiday by increasing their prices. This would reduce the benefit of the sales tax holiday to the consumers (e.g., Hawkins et al., 2003), which is one of the main reasons for such a tax holiday. 

Sales tax holidays do not increase purchases, promote economic growth, or provide relief to consumers, especially those from low-income households. The fact that you need a tax holiday in the first place implies that the current sales tax structure is too burdensome. Sales tax holidays are first and foremost a distraction from the fact that sales tax holidays do nothing to provide long-term relief. It must be bad when tax policy think-tanks both on the Left and the Right cannot stand sales tax holidays. If politicians want to make a true difference, they should work on making a more competitive tax system that works for consumers and producers alike. 

Should Sweden and Finland Be Joining NATO? Here Are 9 Arguments Against the Proposal

Much like Switzerland, Sweden developed a reputation for neutrality that dated back to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Sweden was able to maintain its neutrality through the gruesomeness of both World Wars and the Cold War. It looks like its tradition of neutrality is coming to an end. The war between Russia and Ukraine has Sweden rattled enough that Sweden, along with its neighbor Finland, has petitioned to join the military alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). A couple weeks ago on June 28, Turkey lifted its veto to the Nordic nations' bids to NATO, which led to a memorandum being signed between Turkey and the Nordic nations of Sweden and Finland. 

Before filing its petition on May 18, Sweden and Finland have been security partners to NATO. In 1994, they joined NATO's Partnership for Peace. They also contributed personnel to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Balkans. In 2014, Sweden and Finland were designated as Enhanced Opportunity Partners. This is about as close as one can be to NATO without actually being in NATO. 

Bringing in Finland would expand NATO's border with Russia by an extra 800 miles. The ascension of these two countries would expand NATO's presence in the Baltic Sea and Arctic Circle. Sweden and Finland have military assets to contribute, as we see below. Given that Sweden and Finland are already part of the European Union, it seems to make sense to have these two nations make their security commitments align with the West, as well. Both countries ascending at the same time could lower risk in comparison to submitting bids separately. As intuitive as it might seem, is it really the right choice?   

1. In spite of the war in Ukraine, the geopolitical dynamic between Russia and the Nordic nations has not fundamentally changed. Russia has made no threat against Finland or Sweden. There are no major disputes between the countries. Ukraine notwithstanding, post-Soviet conflicts that Russia was involved in entailed at least some form of a casus belli. Neither Sweden nor Finland have had a major military dispute with Russia since the Continuation War of 1941-1944 (also known as the Second Soviet-Finnish War). Plus, Russia is fighting a war in Ukraine and has been losing forces without near-term replacements. Factor in Russia's military engagements with the economic sanctions and one can see that given current geopolitics, the likelihood of war between Russia and the Nordic states is quite low. 

2. Russia's invasion of Ukraine does not warrant NATO protection. You would think Russia would have been granted a swift victory, especially given its troop size and military might. As of July 3, Russia has only managed to invade the eastern portion of Ukraine (see below). If anything, Russia's lack of progress in the Russo-Ukrainian War signals that the Russian military has been dealing with its own deficiencies, ranging from intelligence, personnel, and training to corruption and low troop morale. Russia does not have the geopolitical clout, the land, or military might that it once had in the Soviet era. Russia's subpar performance combined with the economic sanctions that will most likely weaken Russia in the medium-term and the cost Russia is paying for the Russo-Ukrainian War should put Swedish and Finnish minds at ease. 

3. Sweden and Finland joining NATO could create more geopolitical problems in the medium-term. Right now, Moscow does not hold any grudges against Stockholm or Helsinki.  However, it is possible that the Russo-Ukrainian War does not go well. Russia could set its sight on Finland prior to Finland's ascension to NATO. Why? Not only to gain domestic support of the Putin regime, but also as a preventative measure to make sure it does not join NATO. 

Another factor to consider is that post-Soviet Russia has instigated wars over three instances of potential NATO expansion: Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and Ukraine (2022). If Finland joins NATO, it would more than double the land border between Russia and NATO alliance members. Such a move would serve to give fodder to Putin's theory that the Western powers are closing in on him. Russia's ambassador to Finland, Pavel Kuznetsov, already said that Moscow would respond with retaliatory countermeasures in the event that Finland joins NATO. Deputy Chairman of Russia Security Council Dmitry Medvedev similarly said that Finland joining NATO would double the land border of the NATO alliance with Russia, which would mean refortifying Russia's borders. 

Why give Putin a pretext for escalation and reinforce Moscow's security fears when the status quo has brought stability in the Baltic region for more than half a century? If Moscow were to act similarly in Latin America, or Mexico more specifically, it would be reasonable to assume that the United States would respond in an escalatory fashion. Sweden and Finland should not be allowed entry to NATO for the same reason that Ukraine was not allowed: for fear of escalation with Russia, nuclear or otherwise.  

Bringing Sweden and Finland into the fold of NATO adds two more triggers to Article 5 of NATO, which is the Article that stipulates the collective defense of the alliance. It is true that Sweden and Finland would receive protection under Article 5 if they become members of NATO. It is a double-edged sword because they could also become potential targets, provided that Russia and NATO perceive one another in adversarial terms. Swedish and Finnish military capabilities would become part of the calculus of Russian targeting and strike prioritization in the event of a conflict between Russia and NATO. Conversely, if Russia attacked Poland or another Baltic country, Sweden and Finland would be obligated by Article 5 to help out in a conflict that does not directly affect their national security.  

4. There is doubt as to whether Sweden and Finland could contribute to collective defense. This is not to say that Sweden or Finland do not have military capabilities because they do. The Swedish island of Gotland could help NATO secure the Baltic region. Finland's military has 23,000 active military personnel and an extra 238,000 reservists it could muster up within a month. Finland's main weakness in its military is its lack of missile defense. Sweden's major source of national defense is its navy. While these countries have capabilities to defend their own borders, I have to wonder whether these resources would be adequate to "contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area" (per Article 10 of NATO) and help NATO beyond the context of their own borders. 

Historically, the modern states of Sweden and Finland have been much more focused on defending their own borders than collective defense. What's more is that the two nations have not spent much of their respective GDPs on military expenditures (see World Bank data below). According to World Bank data, neither Sweden nor Finland meet the NATO criterion of spending at least 2 percent of GDP on military expenditures, although increased spending suggests they could reach that minimum. 

Also, Sweden had to reinstate its conscription in 2017, which could signal a weakness in its military readiness. Since Finland shares a border with Russia, its military has prepared its reservists have greater readiness. As another point to consider, Sweden and Finland are cozier with China than the U.S. government cares for, which would make it more difficult for Sweden or Finland to contribute anything significant to collective security policy as it pertains to eastern Asia. Overall, these factors suggest that Sweden and Finland would not provide much beyond territorial defense of their respective countries to the NATO alliance.  

5. Even if Russia were to attack, it would not mean that Finland or Sweden would be hung out to dry without NATO membership. As we have seen with Ukraine, the Western powers are willing to give arms and resources in the event of war, even without NATO membership. Also, Sweden and Finland are part of the European Union. The European Union provides mutual defense under the Treaty of Lisbon. Sweden and Finland can receive military aid without having to join NATO. Refusing entry to NATO would not be leaving Sweden and Finland in the lurch, but rather maintaining a status quo that has been working for decades. 

6. Defending Sweden and Finland would not be so easy. Neither Sweden nor Finland have a direct land route from continental Europe. Everything coming from NATO allies would need to be deployed by airlift. Russia's war with Ukraine has illustrated that Russia has the ability to neutralize air deployments. Sweden and Finland would be in range of Russia's ground missile, anti-ship, and surface-to-air systems. Furthermore, the Russo-Finnish border could be a challenge to defend given the terrain. While Finland could be a great launching site for attacks, the double-edged nature of this geographical relation means that it is vulnerable to Russian attacks. This is not to say that the task of defending the Nordic nations is impossible, but it would require considerable resources and coordination to make it work for NATO. The actual cost might be higher than the projected cost (see Point #8). 

7. The larger the alliance, the more territory that NATO would have to defend in the event of a war. If the member countries proportionately contributed, that would be one thing. The issue is that the United States does the heavy lifting. The United States is de facto the primary source for providing security guarantees for 29 nations. Given NATO's history, it is reasonable to assume that the United States will be on the hook for Sweden's and Finland's security commitments, much like it has with other NATO allies. It is dubious that the Nordic nations would share the burdens of the military costs. Sweden has not even been admitted to NATO and it has already asked the Pentagon for naval assistance. 

8. Much like with Ukraine, defending Sweden and Finland is not of vital geopolitical importance to the United States. I say this as someone who is almost half-Swedish and has an affinity for the Nordic region. Yes, there are multiple countries within the NATO alliance system. However, in practice, it would be the U.S. military that would disproportionately spend on Finnish and Swedish defense. Europe should bear more responsibility in preserving peace in Europe, but European powers have been content on letting the United States shoulder much of that burden. 

As such, it makes sense to ask how adding Sweden and Finland would benefit U.S. interests. What is the exact threat that Finland or Sweden face? We already know that a Russian attack on these two nations is unlikely (Point #1). We know that Sweden and Finland would not be left to fend for themselves in the unlikely event of war (Point #4). What is the measurable benefit of adding Sweden and Finland to NATO? The United States arguably has more vital security interests, especially in Indo-Pacific Asia. 

9. Since the United States would be paying for a large portion of the bill for the ascension of Finland and Sweden to NATO, we should ask what the cost of ascension would be. A 2021 analysis from Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) asks what NATO enlargement would look like and what it would cost. According to CSIS, it would cost as much as $11.6 billion upfront and $1.8 billion annually after that (CSIS, p. 93, 104). In 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) spent $741.7 billion. If the United States were responsible for half of that $1.8 billion, it would mean a 0.1 percent increase of the DoD's budget. 

Conversely, the United States has a debt-to-GDP ratio of over 100 percent, something the country has not seen since World War II. National debt issues will continue to haunt the United States for years to come, especially since there is no sign of government spending slowing down. The United States should be shrinking its military obligations in light of the long-term insolvency that such an expanded role costs. We should not add the defense of Sweden and Finland to the list of unnecessary military expenditures, especially since it would not improve the geopolitical situation for anyone. 

[As a side note, the United States should examine how much they support Europe vis-à-vis NATO. A professor at MIT found that having European nations be more responsible for its regional security could save the United States up to $80 billion annually (Rosen, 2021).]

Conclusion

Yes, there is instability in Eastern Europe that we have not seen in decades. How Russia will act in the upcoming months is a wild card, especially with the Russo-Ukrainian War. I can understand how Finns and Swedes could feel a heightened sense of concern. At the same time, Russia's actions in Ukraine do not justify an expansion of NATO by allowing Sweden and Finland to enter. Forgetting the fiscal costs for a moment, allowing for these ascensions to pass has the real potential to exacerbate geopolitics in central and eastern Europe. 

NATO membership for the Swedish and Finnish nations is superfluous at best and injurious at worst. Perhaps ascension to NATO could result in a deterrent effect. I'm not going to hold my breath because history and international political theory (specifically that of balance of power theory) have me think that an escalatory effect is much more likely. In any case, I hope that events do not reach to such a level where we have to read about this in future history books.

Robert Reich Continues to Lie About the Negative Effects of the Minimum Wage

With abortion and gun control dominating the news cycle, I wanted to take some time to cover another controversial topic: minimum wage. This past July 1, we saw multiple jurisdictions increase their minimum wage, including the state of Minnesota and the City of Los Angeles, as well as the City of Chicago and the greater Cook County. It sounds like a great victory for the working class. The minimum wage argument goes something like this: "If you wage the minimum wage to a living wage, it helps out workers. The workers are more productive, which in turn helps out employers. It's a win-win." 

American author and political commentator Robert Reich made that argument about a week ago in his piece entitled "4 Myths About Raising The Minimum Wage." For Reich, we should raise the minimum wage to $15 because "it is insult to American workers and it's bad for the economy." Reich attempts to debunk four talking points in the minimum wage debate to make it seem as if you can raise the minimum wage without any consequences. The problem is that Reich is flat-out wrong. I have actually called him out before on his minimum wage information in 2015 and in 2014. I ended up spending my Fourth of July weekend writing this piece and calling him out once more. He addressed four points, and I will respond to his analysis in kind. 

1. If businesses have to raise wages, they'll have to cut employees' hours or jobs all together. Reich takes with this argument by saying that "treating workers is worth the price." He then argues that increases in the minimum wage do not reduce the overall number of jobs. Minimum wage increases are increase in labor costs. As we will see throughout this piece today, companies have to account for the increase in expenses. 

Even if we were to forget standard microeconomic theory about price floors for a moment, Reich's fantasy does not play out in reality. When Seattle raised its minimum wage to $15, there was both a decline in hours worked and overall number of jobs. A 2019 review from the Cato Institute on the minimum wage similarly found that cutting employee hours is one way that employers compensate for the minimum wage hikes (Clemens, 2019). 

Not only is there a reduction in hours, but also an overall reduction in jobs. A report from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the impact of federal and state minimum wage hikes since 1992. This report also found that there has decidedly been a negative impact on employment (Neumark et al., 2021). 

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which is the gold standard for legislative analysis, has analyzed the effects of a federal minimum wage hike on more than one occasion. What does the CBO find? Among other negative effects, there would be a significant loss in jobs if the minimum wage were raised to $15. The last time the CBO looked into the possibility raising the minimum wage to $15, the CBO found that it would reduce employment by 1.4 million workers. While some workers would have a higher wage and be lifted out of poverty (900,000 according to the CBO), another 1.4 million would be unemployed. While a wage less than $15 can be an issue depending on where in the United States one lives, the last time I checked, $0 per hour is an even less livable wage.  

2. Small businesses won't be able to afford the higher wages and will be put out of business. Reich argues that a higher minimum wage attracts better workers, leads to better worker productivity, and improve retention of workers. I criticized Reich's turnover argument in 2015 by pointing out that the reason that turnout is lower is because the minimum wage hike disincentivizes hiring more workers. 

But let's get back to the main point. Small businesses have less resources to pay for higher wages, especially now after everything that came as a result of the pandemic. Given the wage structures, they do not have the same economies of scale that larger businesses have. It would explain why the average wage for those working for an employer with less than 100 employees is half of what it is for those working for an employee with over 1,000 employees. 

A paper from the National Bureau for Economic Research found that minimum wage increases created greater financial stress for smaller businesses, including "lower bank credit, higher loan defaults, lower employment, a lower entry and a higher exit rate for small businesses" (Chava et al., 2019). As another example, a paper from Harvard economists shows that raising the minimum wage by $1 resulted in a 14 percent increased likelihood that a mid-level restaurant would exit the market (Luca and Luca, 2018). Is it any wonder that such large companies as Walmart and Amazon support $15/hour minimum wages? They have the capacity to better pay for such wages while driving their competitors out of the respective market. 

3. If the wage is raised, prices for everything will skyrocket and lead to widespread inflation. With the inflation being the highest it has been in over forty years, it is understandable that inflation has become a topic of interest in U.S. politics. I would surmise that there are various contributing factors to this current bout of inflation, although some are more so than others. Even looking at other inflationary periods, I would not put minimum wage at the top of the list as a contributor to inflation, especially if the minimum wage increase is small. After all, minimum wage increases are more likely to be indexed to inflation projections, thereby minimizing impact on overall consumer prices (MacDonald and Nillson, 2017). At the same time, there are inflationary pressures, even if they are modest, as a result of artificially increasing wages for minimum wage workers. 

As previously mentioned, employers are trying to find ways to compensate for the increase in the price of labor that minimum wage laws cause. One of those possible ways is by increasing consumer prices. A Hungarian case study showed that the consumers bore the majority of the minimum wage increase through higher consumer prices (Harasztosi and Lindner, 2019). A research paper led by an economist from the Federal Reserve Bank found a similar response to the minimum wage increases, this time in the U.S. fast food industry. Essentially, fast food prices increased about twice as fast as the minimum wage (Aaronson et al., 2007). Two economists at the University of California at Berkeley who are minimum wage proponents even admitted that passing on the minimum wage increase to the customers is a phenomenon (Allegretto and Reich, 2017). 

While increasing consumer prices is shown to be an implemented strategy, there is a limit to how much increasing consumer prices can be used as a business strategy.  If the price increases are too high, demand and eventually overall revenue would drop. That is the law of demand for you! That explains why employers find other ways in addition to increasing consumer prices to deal with the minimum wage increases. While Reich is technically correct to say that prices will not skyrocket, he is still engaging in exaggerated language to deflect that there are still upward pressures on consumer prices as a result of minimum wage laws. 

4. Most minimum wage workers are teenagers making some extra money on the side; they don't need a wage increase. Reich starts off by talking about teenagers and then goes into the red herring commonly used by minimum wage proponents that minimum wage is not livable. As I pointed out in my criticism of Reich's arguments in 2015, if we strictly look at teenagers and look at the 15-19 age bracket, then yes, there is a small percentage of minimum wage workers in that age demographic. At the same time, this is misleading in terms of what a typical minimum wage worker looks like. 

If we use Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, we see a very different picture than the one that minimum wage proponents paint of a single mother working three full-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. I have done this with 2014 data, but I am going to use 2021 BLS data since they are the most recent data from BLS to show that the typical minimum wage worker is far from what minimum wage proponents purport. 

• Age: In terms of age, 44.3 percent of minimum wage workers are 25 or less, although they represent one-fifth of hourly wage workers (BLS, Table 1). 
• Education: 85 percent of minimum wage workers have a high school degree or less. Let's look at those with college degrees in contrast. College degree holders account for 37.2 percent of the overall population (Pew Research), but 14.7 percent of minimum wage workers (BLS, Table 6). Another demographic statistic to remind us that completing a college degree generally helps people with their professional development and earning power. 
• Full- and part-time status. 52.0 percent of minimum wage workers work part-time (BLS, Table 1). 8.9 percent of minimum wage workers work over 40 hours, whereas 5.1 percent work greater than 50 hours (BLS, Table 9).  
• Percent Working at Federal Minimum Wage. There are fewer hourly workers working for minimum wage or less than there used to be. In 1979, 13.4 percent of hourly workers, or 6.9 million workers, worked for minimum wage or less. The percentage and raw number have decreased to the point that in 2021, 1.4 percent of hourly workers, or 1.5 million workers, are making minimum wage or less (BLS, Table 10). 

Conclusion

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is what I think of when I read arguments such as those coming from Reich. Every policy enacted has a tradeoff. Reich would prefer to think that we can simply raise wages without there being any consequences whatsoever as long as one feels as if they can claim moral superiority. The world does not work that way. If laws increase the cost of hiring a worker, employers will find a way to work around that cost increase. We explored reducing work hours, cutting jobs, or increasing consumer prices. There are other ways as well, including automation, scaling back workers' benefits, reducing the quality of the work environment, or playing around with work schedules (e.g., Clemens, 2021; Lordan and Neumark, 2017). 

There is a reason why economics is referred to as the "dismal science"; it points out the reality that we have a limited supply of goods and services, also known as scarcity. Economics is supposed to help us figure out how to best allocate that limited supply. Unfortunately for Reich, a $15 federal minimum wage would harm many of the people that he would like to help.

"Think of the Children," COVID Edition: Lockdowns, School Closures, and Mask Mandates Negatively Impacted Children

Children have been used as political pawns on numerous occasions. Think of how much the argument "think of the children" has been used to push a political agenda. The Religious Right used it to incorrectly argue that same-sex couples are incapable of raising children. It has been used to advance universal preschool and bans on violent video games. It is an argument that does not die because of the emotions that children can invoke invoke in voters. Look at the recent news cycle. The mass shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas has revitalized the call for more gun control. Those who are upset of the overturning of Roe v. Wade criticize the other side for not caring about children once they are out of the womb. This argument, of course, erroneously assumes that the only way to care about people is if you are in favor of government largesse, but I digress. 

When it comes to public health policy related to the pandemic, it becomes more and more clear over time that there was little to no foresight, cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment, or empirical evidence involved with the response to COVID in most countries. As much as COVID policy impacted adults, I really wish that politicians, especially those on the Left in the United States, thought of the children and the policy implications before proceeding because children got walloped as a result of poorly planned COVID health measures. 

It was evident from the beginning that children were not at high risk for COVID. In June 2021, the New York Times posted death rates based on CDC data (see below). They show that children are less likely to die from COVID than they are other causes of death, including drowning, car accidents, and homicide. 

If that were not enough, we can compare COVID deaths to the deaths from a previous pandemic: the H1N1 flu. From April 2009 to April 2010, there were 19.5 million infections and 1,282 deaths for those aged 0-17 (Shrestha et al., 2011). This would make the H1N1 mortality rate for children to be 0.0066 percent. What about COVID? According to CDC data, there were an estimated 25.8 million infections and 645 deaths between February 2020 and September 2021. This would make the COVID infection fatality rate for children 0-17 (as opposed to case fatality rate) to be 0.0025 percent. This would mean that COVID is about 62 percent less lethal than H1N1 for children aged 0-17 years. In 2022, the Lancet published an article showing that COVID has been much less deadly for children than it has been for older demographics, especially those over 75 years of age. 

The fact that children were less likely to suffer and die from COVID makes the costs that children had to undergo more unconscionable. The benefit of COVID policy to children was therefore less than it was for adults. Let us examine how these policies affected children specifically. 

Lockdowns

I first expressed my concerns about lockdown in March 2020. I detailed in May 2020 a list of potential problems, ranging from economy to physical health to mental to not doing much to save lives. As the data come in, we have seen that lockdowns actually caused greater excess death while coming with social costs, which puts a dent into the argument that we needed lockdowns and school closures to protect the elderly or teachers. What were the costs of lockdown to children? 

The United Nation's International Children's Emergency Fund, better known as UNICEF, released a report in October 2021 answering this very question. The results were unflattering for lockdowns. Children experienced higher rates of anxiety and depression. Those who were exposed to pre-existing childhood abuse and neglect experienced higher levels of stress. There is also concern of higher risk of trauma, suicide, loss of family and friends, violence, loneliness, isolation, and sleep deprivation. A longitudinal study from Cambridge University confirms these adverse impacts by showing that children's mental health deteriorated substantially as a result of lockdown (Bignardi et al., 2020). A February 2022 analysis from the British Broadcasting Network (BBC) found a 77 percent increase in self-harm and suicidal ideation as a result of lockdowns. Harvard University has acknowledged the effects that the lockdowns had on the mental health of children. 

If that were not enough, a UNICEF technical note from September 2020 estimated that lockdowns attributed to the 150 million children that were pushed into poverty as a result of everything that has happened. Given how millions of families were teetering on the financial edge prior to the pandemic, it makes sense how shutting down large swathes of the economy and depriving people of their employment had effects for their children, including in health, education, and social development. One peer-reviewed study looked at how the lockdowns reduced the access to housing, nutrition, sanitation, and health services (Cardona et al., 2022). Their global estimate is that 253,500 to 1,157,000 children under five died as a result of the economic downturn in which lockdowns played a major role. 

School Closures

It was not only businesses that ended up shutting down during the pandemic, but also schools. In 2020, the CDC Director Robert Redfield pointed out that it was not their recommendation to close schools, but it happened throughout much of the United States. The Chief Medical Officer of the United Kingdom also said that it was worse for children to miss school than it is to get COVID. I covered the topic of school closures in July 2020 and illustrated how the costs of school closure exceeded the benefits, but I think the topic is worth revisiting. School closures were part of the overall lockdown policy, but school closures came with their own specific costs. 

One major cost was in terms of academic delay. As this 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on pandemic learning illustrates, 52 percent of teachers had more students start the 2020-21 school year behind compared to a pre-pandemic year. 45 percent of teachers had at least half of their students end the academic year behind. The impact of school closures disproportionately impacted vulnerable students, including those who were high-poverty, English learners, or in special education. To quote UNESCO, "School closures carry high social and economic costs for people across communities. Their impact however is particularly severe for the most vulnerable and marginalized boys and girls and their families." 

None of this gets into the challenges facing teachers (including burnout) or how school closures increased childcare obligations for millions of parents. The increased childcare obligations becomes increasingly apparent for parents who work in the healthcare sector and need to be attentive to help fight COVID and other ailments. With all the trauma from the lockdowns, it is no wonder that academic achievement fell behind. These academic and social-economic delays are not merely short-term. They are going to have a ripple effect years out into the future. Here are a few studies:

• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that the loss of three months is the equivalent of losing 2.5 to 4 percent of one's life income (Hanushek and Woessmann, 2020, p. 9). 
• A joint report from UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank put the estimate at $17 trillion in lifetime earning in present value, which 14 percent of today's GDP (2021, p. 5). 
• Consulting firm McKinsey calculated that by 2040, the economic impact of these learning delays could lead to annual losses of $1.6 trillion, or 0.9 percent of the global GDP. 
• One study from JAMA found that it is not about economic impact or a diminishment of wages, but a matter of diminished life expectancy for our current children (Christakis et al., 2020). Their decision analytical model calculated that missed instruction during 2020 caused an estimated 13.8 million years of life lost in the United States. 
• A report from the United Kingdom's Office for Standards in Education shows how the restrictions resulted in the delay of babies' physical development, babies struggling to crawl and communicate, infants having issues in facial recognition, and a regression in children's independence. No doubt that the impact will be more pronounced as these infants get older and develop.  
• A May 2022 World Bank report found that children experienced a learning loss the average of 0.17 of a standard deviation, or a half a year's worth (Patrinos et al., 2022). One of the authors in this paper also found that a half year's loss in education translates into future earnings being 4 to 5 percent lower (Patrinos and Psacharopoulos, 2018). 
• A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that 10.1 of the 14.2 percentage point decline in passing rates for mathematics courses was due to school closures (Halloran et al., 2021).

Face Masks

Face masks have been politically contentious since the beginning of the pandemic in no small part due to their symbolism. I have written on face masks a number of times, most recently in a two-part analysis (see here and here). The long and short is that face masks did very little to nothing to mitigate the spread of COVID. Maybe masking children was different, especially given all the hullabaloo with masking children at schools. Alas, it was not any different. Arguably, it is less effective given how COVID is much less likely to adversely affect children in the first place. 

The Left-of-Center The Atlantic called children wearing masks "an intervention that provides little discernible benefit" in which we do not have evidence that they work. A preprint report with The Lancet replicated the CDC's methodology using a more robust and longitudinal data set. Their multivariate regression analysis demonstrates that there is not a relationship between school masking and pediatric COVID cases (Chandra and Høeg, 2022). A study from the United Kingdom government similarly found that face coverings in education settings found no statistically significant impact on COVID transmission.

Not only do I want to hammer the point that face masks did nothing statistically significant to protect children, I have to wonder if there was any harm done by face masks in the process. 

• A German-wide study that used a database of over 25,000 German parents (Schwartz et al., 2021), a study that admittedly has methodological limits, pointed out a number of concerns for children wearing masks, including irritability, headaches, difficulty concentrating, less happiness, more reluctance to attend schools, malaise, impaired learning, and drowsiness. The "still face experiment" shows us that children need facial expressions. The lack thereof causes emotional distress (e.g., Weinberg et al., 2008).
• A case study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology examined the effects of prolonged mask usage on healthcare workers in New York City (Rosner, 2020). Some of the causes of concern include headaches, acne, skin breakdown, and impaired cognition. 
• A preprint study from Italy (Martellucci et al., 2022) expresses concern about what happens when people inhale their own carbon dioxide and have a reduction in blood oxygen saturation as a result.  
• It is not only the physical aspects of wearing face masks that bother me. In my previous piece on the topic of face masks, I cover the social and emotional costs of face masks. Since children are more impressionable and are in their formative stages of development, the social and emotional costs for face masks are more pronounced with children. I worry that face masks keep children trapped in fear and anxiety, adversely affect how they perceive themselves (e.g., "there must be something intrinsically wrong with me"), make it difficult to communicate, sullies or deprives human interactions that are vital for development, and dehumanizes others by making people more suspicious of others (e.g., "they are vectors of disease, not human beings"). Given what we know about child development, it is not exactly a stretch to find that face masks negatively impacted children of having a normal, emotionally healthy childhood. 

The challenge of determining harm of face masks is not simply because it is a more subtle public health measure than lockdowns or school closures. It is that the evidence base for "face masks and children" is quite limited and not strong, which is why I hesitate to say anything conclusive about actual harm caused by face masks to children. Even so, everything in life has tradeoffs and that at least some of the aforementioned issues are quite plausible given the nature of face masks and children. Furthermore, given the lack of evidence that masks do anything significant to help people generally or children specifically when it comes to COVID, we should be safe rather than sorry and not force face masks on children. 

Conclusion

The more evidence that we come across, the more evident it becomes that the toll COVID policy exacted on children was tremendous. Children had to deal with greater anxiety, depression, and overall stress, as well as lower quality of life, physical health, academic achievement, and life expectancy. This did not need to happen, especially since children are 99.999 percent likely to survive COVID if contracted. The moral failing for how children were treated as a result of subpar and poorly-executed COVID policy cannot be overstated. It is going to take years to reverse the damage COVID policies inflicted upon children. My hope is that we learn for the next time and actually follow the science instead of peddling fear and being needlessly strict to no avail.

Supreme Court Ruling in Bruen Case Reaffirms the Importance of Concealed Carry

As if the recent mass shootings did not do enough to bring gun control back to the news cycle, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) added fuel to the fire. Back in 2007, SCOTUS ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment established a right to bear arms in the name of self-defense within the home. 

However, state governments that wanted to find workarounds with the Heller case did so. This is where the state of New York comes in. New York state created a law in which those who wanted to carry a concealed handgun in public need to show a special need ("proper cause") to defend themselves. This past week, SCOTUS ruled in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (see ruling here) that this New York state-level handgun law is unconstitutional. According to this ruling, the Second Amendment protects a broad right "to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense." This ruling is the first major case for gun rights that SCOTUS has heard in over a decade. 

This ruling might be limited in its scope. It may very well be restricted to concealed-carry licenses, as opposed to any and all public possession. Even so, it is a win for gun rights. The first point I would bring up is that this case affirms freedom. If the right to life is meant to be an inherent one, then the right to self-defense is part of that inherent right. Not only does my religion of Judaism allow for self-defense, but our modern-day, secular concept of self-defense was influenced by such political philosophers as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.  The Second Amendment was meant to protect the right to self-defense, and it is nice to see SCOTUS confirm the protection of that right more broadly. 

But let's look at this from a consequentialist point and see what the public policy implications are. The justification of defensive gun usage (DGU) is not something that is merely a concoction of the imagination of the Far Right. As I covered last November after the Kyle Rittenhouse case, DGU is quite common. The exact number of DGUs is in dispute. A 2013 study commissioned by the CDC put the range between 500,000 and 3 million. Another study from Georgetown University put the number at around 1.67 million instances of DGU (English, 2021). Even if you assume that 10 percent of DGU saved a life, that number would still exceed the 39,707 U.S. firearm deaths.   

There are those out there who would argue that concealed carry in the public sphere would have terrible public policy implications. For those who are against it, allowing for trigger-happy, impulsive individuals would make it akin to the lawlessness of the Wild West. Does that conception play out in reality based on the evidence? 

There are some empirical aspects of the gun control/gun rights debate that are more clear-cut. For example, I can tell you that we have tried assault weapon bans on the federal and state levels. Assault weapons bans do not work in lowering homicide rates. A similar argument can be made for high-capacity magazine bans and the bump stock ban. Waiting periods are shown to be effective for lowering gun suicides (not for gun homicides), which goes to show that I do not oppose actual common-sense gun laws. It is that I would be more inclined to some common-sense regulations if you can at least show they are effective in what they are meant to do without significant erosion to the right to self-defense. 

As for concealed carry laws, what makes the concealed carry debate interesting is that the evidence base is mixed. I am not going to go through the entire academic literature on this topic, but pick some representative studies to show you how mixed it is. One study from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that right-to-carry laws (RTC) increases violent crime (Donohue et al., 2017). A study from the Journal of the American College of Surgeons found that "there was no significant association between shifts from restrictive to nonrestrictive carry legislation on violent crime and public health indicators" (Hamill et al., 2019). Although it is more dated of a study, the National Academies of Science could not find a causal link between RTC laws and crime rates (Wellford et al., 2004). 

To get through the ambiguity, I would go with an organization such as Rand Corporation both because of its reputation and because it is one of the few think-tanks that does not have an explicit ideological leaning. What did Rand come up with? Rand Corporation found that the evidence is limited in terms of proving that concealed-carry laws might increase violent crime. This is more telling because, as Rand Corporation points out, we have more evidence on RTC laws than we do on any other gun policy. If we have a large enough evidence base but it is still inconclusive about whether RTC laws lower crime, it would suggest that RTC does not have a major impact on violent crime.  

There is some intuition as to why those who are carrying would not be a major driver of crime. Those carrying concealed carry licenses are less likely to commit crimes since these licenses in most states require a background check and fingerprinting. This intuition bolsters what I brought up in 2018, which is that there is a lack of correlation between gun ownership and homicide. It very well could be that this lack of correlation is due to the deaths caused by the trigger-happy are neutralized by the ones using guns for legitimate DGU, thereby creating a more net neutral effect on homicide rates.  

I have a couple of additional points to make on the previously mentioned intuition. One, the number of concealed-carry licensees has increased 304 percent between 2007 and 2019 (Lott, 2019) while violent crime has decreased from 1993 to 2019 (Pew Research). If RTC were that terrible, you would see a rise in gun homicides or violent crime as a result of more people carrying handguns vis-à-vis RTC laws. Two, as the Heritage Foundation illustrated in 2019, concealed-carry licensees accounted for 0.7 percent of firearm homicides while accounting for 5.5 percent of the overall population, thereby indicating that they are not a major contributor to gun homicides. 

As the Supreme Court reaffirmed in the Bruen case, we are talking about a right as inalienable as the right to self-defense. To quote Justice Clarence Thomas from the Bruen ruling, "We know of no other constitutional rights that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need." At the same time, I do not believe that the Second Amendment should be a free-for-all in owning whatever sort of weapons you want. After the Charlottesville attack, I made the point that a violation of the "fighting words doctrine" to incite violence with one's speech is an exception and curtailing of freedom of speech. Yes, I very much believe in freedom of speech, but there are some notable and exigent exceptions. 

I believe the same goes for the Second Amendment. The right of self-defense to be paramount to the ideals of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. I also think there are some limits on what one should own. For example, I think most people would think that we do not need nuclear weapons for self-defense. As for fully automatic weapons, it is more debatable than nuclear weapons, but most people would agree that fully automatic weapons are not necessary. 

My point is that there can be some actual common-sense gun regulations that could help minimize violent crime while still preserving the right to self-defense. Calling a policy "common-sense" while it is not shown to keep the public safer is not common sense at all. Given the evidence we have for RTC laws, that would seem to be the case here. If the government is going to pass a gun law that is actually common sense, the burden of proof goes to the government to show that RTC increases crime, not to a subset of gun owners that are shown to overall be law-abiding.