Annoyances Ahead

A 43-year-old house, 54-year-old car, and 7-year-old laptop computer have something in common: they all have parts that are breaking down.

Last week the faucet was dripping (I couldn't let it go with water rationing on the horizon), the VW Bug wouldn't run because of a fuel-line and electrical issue, and the MacBook battery was totally kaput (it would shut down immediately if the power cord were disconnected).

Fixing these annoyances doesn't require a SpaceX scientist, but it doesn't help matters that the repair guy himself has parts that are giving him problems.

It should be a challenging week.

We are Marching

(WSJ photo)

Christian processions are commonplace....inside the walls of Catholic and Anglican churches; rarely are they seen on the streets of secular America. When Catholics marched down Sixth Avenue on Columbus Day

Confusion filled the faces of virtually everyone we passed. Phones came out to record us. More than one person stopped to ask questions.

Thanks to a police escort, we constantly kept moving. As people saw us coming, they crowded on corners. Some stayed there after we passed, wondering what they’d just seen.

Far from being a novelty, the Catholics' walk in the heart of Manhattan was in America's time-honored tradition of processions, parades, and marches to celebrate events, individuals, and groups.

the Democratic Republic was embodied in countless civic ceremonies during which frequent parades of various types were undertaken—marches by local militias, firefighters and trade bodies, election parades, funeral marches upon the death of a significant person or a president, parties at events considered worthy of celebration such as the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, regional or local anniversaries such as Admission Day in San Francisco or St. Patrick's Day in New York, national holidays such as July 4, the anniversary of the birth of George Washington or the parade for the Centennial of the Revolution, and so on.

So what functions did these parades fulfill? In the early decades of the nineteenth century, cities were inhabited by a heterogeneous population of newcomers largely of foreign origin—English, Irish, and German—who were in constant movement and whose social status was often uncertain. Marches, which proliferated in the period 1830–1840, enabled people to show and represent their diversity but also to publicly assign a place to each group. Residents marked their membership of particular trades, social, political or ethnic groups...

Today marches favoring or opposing political movements are much more common than religious processions, but perhaps the rarity of the latter will appeal to a younger generation looking for something new, then finding it something very old.

Related: in his homily today the priest said some of his younger acquaintances would ask if they could borrow his vestments for a Halloween costume. His too-kind response was that they were "sanctified," that is, set apart for God and were not to be used for profane purposes. But the interesting point to this story is that a younger person, despite his ignorance, might find the formal trappings of Christianity to be cool.

Maybe one or two people will stop to inquire what we're doing the next time we march around the block on Palm Sunday.

Inflation: Making Do With Less

At Costco Peanut M&M's crept to $12,50
over the past year, then Boom! $19.99 but
"marked down" to $15.99. C'mon, man!

Eighteen (18) months ago this humble chronicler saw the warning signs of inflation:

Now the Fed is buying corporate debt--even some risky pieces that pension funds won't touch--and the debt of state and local governments. It has crossed a line and can't go back. ("Why are you letting [State name] go bankrupt?")

Eventually the tidal wave of government debt and paper money will cause an inflation that will dwarf that of the 1970's. Thankfully, with a life expectancy of perhaps 20 years, I won't have to suffer through much of it.

Five (5) months ago a repeat of the 1970's seemed inevitable, though the experts resisted that conclusion:

The economy is warm if not hot, the Administration is proposing $trillions in additional spending, and the Federal Reserve is promising to keep rates low.

Now everyone sees it.

One bright spot: liquor prices are about the same,
and there is plentiful supply.

WSJ, 10/13: Accelerating Inflation Spreads Through the Economy

U.S. inflation accelerated last month and remained at its highest rate in over a decade, with price increases from pandemic-related labor and materials shortages rippling through the economy.

The Labor Department said last month’s consumer-price index, which measures what consumers pay for goods and services, rose by 5.4% from a year earlier, in unadjusted terms.

WaPo, 10/15: Uncomfortable inflation is here, and it’s changing the economy

News this week that U.S. inflation is running at a 13-year high of 5.4 percent confirmed what many Americans already know as they juggle their budgets: Food, energy and shelter costs are all rising rapidly, adding to the strain Americans were already dealing with from the higher costs of hard-to-find goods such as cars, dishwashers and washing machines...

Workers are demanding pay increases because they can see their wages aren’t buying as much with so many everyday necessities costing more, including rent. That leads companies to hike prices more, then workers turn around and demand another pay raise. Economists call this phenomenon a “wage-price spiral.”

The evidence is especially noticeable in the items we buy weekly. Where I shop, prices for beef and gasoline are more than 50% higher than in 2019.

I don't drive much these days, and I've learned more chicken and pork recipes. Like the 1970's, we're making do with less.

Giants vs. Dodgers Game 5: Good But Not Great

A checked swing ends the season (USAToday)

Everyone knew that the Giants-Dodgers season-long rivalry had to come down to the deciding game of the 5-game series.

As contests go, it was good, but not great, and not because the result let down this home town fan: the Dodgers won 2-1. They will go on to face the Atlanta Braves for the National League Championship, the winner going to the World Series.

IMHO, a "good" game is close throughout, thereby heightening the suspense of each pitch. Moreover, both teams should play well and not lose the game because of a fielding mistake, e.g., a dropped fly ball with the bases loaded. (Actually this time the lone error by the Dodger's third baseman in the bottom of the 9th inning raised the excitement because it increased the Giants' chances of winning or tying the game.)

A great game should have a number of spectacular fielding or base-running plays. Home runs can aid the enjoyment, but not for me are the 9-8 bashfests where the pitchers can't do anything right. The game ended, not with a spectacular play at home plate, but just the opposite of excitement: a checked swing that was ruled strike three by the first-base umpire.

It was a desultory end to an unexpectedly glorious season.

We are spoiled by a culture that bombards us with narratives every day; life is often not that exciting, and the results often disappoint.

Nobel Economists: They Opened Their Eyes

(From nobelprize.org)

Economics has been nicknamed the "dismal science", but this year's Nobel Prize winners have not only published insightful studies with real-world policy implications but also have injected creativity into a profession which seemed to have been destined to a future of endless number-crunching. [bold added]

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded Monday to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens of Stanford University.

The prize committee cited Mr. Card’s “empirical contributions to labor economics” and praised Messrs. Angrist and Imbens for “their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.” Messrs. Card and Angrist have contributed by running “natural experiments” in economics, and Messrs. Angrist and Imbens have contributed to the theoretical basis for these experiments.

Natural experiments have led economists to conclude that an additional year of education substantially raises one’s lifetime income, that small increases in the minimum wage don’t have much effect on employment, and that Medicaid has little effect on people’s physical health.

Why do natural experiments matter? One of the toughest problems in economic research is figuring out whether a relationship between two variables is causal or coincidental. So, for example, economists find that the lifetime earnings of people who go to school for 12 years are higher than those of people who go to school for 11 years. But what if those who stay in school longer are more motivated or smarter than those who are in for only 11 years? Then the earnings of the more-schooled would be higher even if schooling per se doesn’t add much to earnings. What one would ideally like is to compare the earnings of people whose motivations and intelligence don’t differ.

Enter compulsory schooling. In 1991, Mr. Angrist and the late Alan Krueger noted that under compulsory-schooling laws, students born in the first quarter of the calendar year would be able to leave school earlier than students born in the fourth quarter. Sure enough, they found, those born in the fourth quarter had an average of 0.15 year more in school. And the earnings of those in the fourth quarter were 1.4% higher than the earnings of those born in the first quarter. Extrapolate that to a full-year difference in schooling, and you can conclude that one extra year of schooling raises earnings by about 9%.

Messrs. Card and Krueger conducted a famous natural experiment by studying employment at fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before and after New Jersey raised the minimum wage while Pennsylvania didn’t. Contrary to what one might expect, employment in New Jersey’s fast-food restaurants rose slightly relative to employment in Pennsylvania’s.

Economist Alex Tabarrok discusses why the approach used to answer the minimum-wage question was so brilliant:

The obvious way to estimate the effect of the minimum wage is to look at the difference in employment in fast food restaurants before and after the law went into effect. But other things are changing through time so circa 1992 the standard approach was to “control for” other variables by also including in the statistical analysis factors such as the state of the economy. Include enough control variables, so the reasoning went, and you would uncover the true effect of the minimum wage. Card and Krueger did something different, they turned to a control group.

Pennsylvania didn’t pass a minimum wage law in 1992 but it’s close to New Jersey so Card and Kruger reasoned that whatever other factors were affecting New Jersey fast food restaurants would very likely also influence Pennsylvania fast food restaurants. The state of the economy, for example, would likely have a similar effect on demand for fast food in NJ as in PA as would say the weather. In fact, the argument extends to just about any other factor that one might imagine including demographics, changes in tastes and changes in supply costs. The standard approach circa 1992 of “controlling for” other variables requires, at the very least, that we know what other variables are important. But by using a control group, we don’t need to know what the other variables are only that whatever they are they are likely to influence NJ and PA fast food restaurants similarly. Put differently NJ and PA are similar so what happened in PA is a good estimate of what would have happened in NJ had NJ not passed the minimum wage.

Thus Card and Kruger estimated the effect of the minimum wage in New Jersey by calculating the difference in employment in NJ before and after the law and then subtracting the difference in employment in PA before and after the law. Hence the term difference in differences. By subtracting the PA difference (i.e. what would have happened in NJ if the law had not been passed) from the NJ difference (what actually happened) we are left with the effect of the minimum wage. Brilliant!

Indentifying control variables is tricky, as Prof. Tabarrok points out, and the more control variables one has the more statistical noise is created, and the less powerful the results. With a control group, researchers need not be concerned with control variables.

The Nobel winners aren't superhuman, however. The minimum-wage study likely wasn't error-free:

Unfortunately, Messrs. Card and Krueger’s data weren’t so great—they gathered it by phoning restaurants.

Nevertheless, once the idea was originated, the data could be obtained and analyzed.

At the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence, Professors Card, Angrist, and Imbens, and the late Alan Krueger, have given us hope that human ingenuity is not dead:

Card and Krueger revealed to economists that there were natural experiments with plausible treatment and control groups all around us, if only we had the creativity to see them. The last thirty years of empirical economics has been the result of economists opening their eyes to the natural experiments all around them.

When We Said It, Some of Us Really Meant It

Over the decades the subject matter has changed. Initially we talked about our companies, spouses, and travels.

Later, as certain members of our class achieved lift-off (allusion to William Shatner, who showed that frontiers are not the province of the young), the conversation shifted away from worldly success to children, aging parents, and those who were not present this weekend, or sadly, forever.

I've only gone to a few reunions of my high-school or university classes--the big ones ending in "0" and the 25th--but the passage of time, catalyzed by the coronavirus, brought a change in perspective.

The average age of our graduating class is in the mid-70's, so despite its being a "minor" reunion year, I signed up for the Saturday night dinner. Who knows when, or if, I might see any of them again?

Psychologists say that a normal human response to our mortality is laughter. There was a lot of laughter this evening, and when we parted with a "let's have dinner (or lunch) again," some of us really meant it.

Flu and Covid: We Can Handle the Truth

AP, October 6, 2020:

President Donald Trump is back to making false comparisons between COVID-19 and the flu, contradicting science and even himself.

TRUMP: “Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!” — tweet Tuesday.

October 11, 2021, Honolulu Star-Advertiser:

As COVID-19 continues to dictate public life and government policy in Hawaii, influenza and pneumonia have quietly killed at least 859 people over the past 12 months, exceeding the coronavirus death toll for the entire pandemic.

Former President Trump was in the habit of making sweeping declarative statements that weren't true at all times and places. However, politicians, tech gatekeepers, and the media frequently took an extreme opposite tack: there was absolutely no truth in what he said.

Give us the nuance, people, you're supposedly the smart ones. We can handle the truth!

Happy Columbus Day

In 2020 Columbus, OH took down
its Columbus statue (npr)

In 2021 the controversy over Columbus Day has died down; apparently people who like to argue about such things have turned their attention to other matters. But I have no doubt that they'll be back to rile everyone.

ICYMI, even the notion that Columbus "discovered America" has been attacked as one of the sources of the Doctrine of Discovery, which was used by Christian nations to justify the colonization of the world.

I'm not an ardent defender of Columbus Day. He was not a brilliant man--he mistook the New World for India after all--but his actions did affect the course of human history. Much of the good and evil that occurred after 1492 has been laid at Columbus' feet, though he was just a guy trying to make a real to pay back Queen Isabella.

Columbus and the Europeans who followed him were no saints, but the Indigenous Peoples whom they conquered were not noble savages, which ironically is also a Western concept.

From 2019's post:

Following the modern tendency of viewing the deeds of historical figures and cultures through the prism of today's morality, we eagerly await critical academic analysis of Indigenous People's practices, such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and polygyny (one man, two or more wives).

And it's not well-publicized that the Indians of the 19th century embraced the Southern States' practice of owning African slaves:

“The Five Civilized Tribes [Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole] were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.”

Take Christopher Columbus down from his pedestal if you insist, but don't replace him with others who committed reprehensible deeds.

Fleet Week, 2021

Fleet Week, 2006: Coit Tower, the Blue Angels and Alcatraz

When the Blue Angels flew by in the 2000's, all work stopped in the office and we would rush to look out the big windows in the 22nd-floor conference room. Towards the end of my tenure the anti-carbon, anti-military voices were growing louder, and it was a reasonable prediction that Fleet Week's days in San Francisco were numbered.

A Navy parachutist, the U.S. flag, and applause.
This is San Francisco, too. (Chron photo)

Last year's coronavirus-induced cancellation had a silver lining: San Franciscans discovered that Fleet Week is one activity that they really missed when it was gone.

Lewis Loeven, executive director of the San Francisco Fleet Week Association, which organizes the celebration, said he was pleasantly surprised that this year’s throngs appeared similar in size to pre-pandemic years, with tickets for premium viewing of the air show close to selling out each day.

Before the pandemic-driven suspension last year, Loeven said, Fleet Week would draw upward of 1 million people to stroll along the Marina and Embarcadero, watch the Blue Angels from the Marina Green, and tour Navy and Coast Guard ships in the bay. The wildly popular ship tours this year drew steady streams of visitors, he said, indicating numbers could match those of pre-pandemic years. By 10 a.m. Sunday, dozens of people were lined up at Pier 35 waiting to tour the missile destroyer Michael Monsoor.

The Beleagured Service

Your humble blogger is appalled by the size and scope of government. Originally this reaction was based on venerable philosophical arguments, i.e., people grow dependent and passive, they cannot think or do anything for themselves, they rely on someone to come to their rescue, etc. But now that we live in a society where there are more safety nets than our grandparents ever dreamed of, the bigger problem is obvious: government simply cannot deliver the functions that it has been tasked to perform.

Case in point: the Internal Revenue Service.

Fun fact: the top half of the IRS logo is the "IRS Eagle",
which I initially thought was an image of a forlorn
taxpayer dropping a return into a mailbox.

This past March, although it was at the time twelve months since it had been filed, we decided not to panic over the IRS' delay in processing Mom's 2019 tax return. The coronavirus had shuttered the IRS' processing centers, and weekly checking of the app showed that the Service had received the paperwork.

In a letter dated September 15, 2021, the IRS stated that it had received the 2019 4th-quarter estimated tax payment on February 3, 2020. The check cleared Mom's bank on February 5, 2020, and it took the IRS 19 months to post it to her account. (Private companies get written up by auditors if receipts aren't posted immediately; standards are different for government agencies.)

Mom will be getting her 2019 refund sometime in November, 2021. According to the letter

If you don't owe other taxes, penalties, interest, or legal obligations we're required to collect, we'll send you a refund of your overpayment within six to eight weeks.

We are so grateful!

I had held off as long as I could but finally mailed Mom's 2020 return because the October 15, 2021 extension deadline was imminent.

Millions of taxpayers were affected by 2019 processing delays, and the backup has affected 2020. The IRS had its worst-performing season last year.

“Paper returns have piled up — there are 5.5 million Form 1040s and over 4 million business returns that have been opened but not processed. The goal is that by year-end, the paper returns will be processed. However, there are an additional 4 million returns anticipated by mid-October,” he said...

And it’s more than just having the money to hire additional personnel, he suggested: “Even if they had the money and had the people willing to work, they couldn’t just snap their fingers and put 50, 100 or 500 people to work manning the phone lines. It takes at least 12 to 18 weeks to train someone to answer and assist callers. They have to understand the systems, and be able to understand and interpret what’s going on.”

In some cases they need to have people with better knowledge or information to help on practitioner lines, [tax chair of CPA Practitioners Stephen] Mankowski observed. “But in a lot of cases, it’s easier to explain the issues to a practitioner than it is to taxpayers,” he said. “There’s a lot of training that is necessary to have someone able to assist all levels of taxpayers."

The IRS cannot perform its basic functions correctly, yet every year Congress keeps loading new laws and new requirements on the beleagured Service. It makes one wonder if those who advocate that government provide more goods and services have actually managed any organizations--public or private--that do so.

Tesla Departs

The exodus of talented people and first-class companies from California continues.

Headline: Tesla to Move Headquarters From California to Texas, Elon Musk Says

Tesla is following in the footsteps of companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. —a descendant of what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started in a Palo Alto, Calif., garage—and Oracle Corp. , which moved their corporate headquarters to Texas earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Tech companies were among the earliest to send employees home at the start of the pandemic, and a number of prominent players in the industry have allowed their employees to work remotely on a permanent basis. That shift has prompted many Silicon Valley employees and startup CEOs to relocate to other parts of the country for cheaper housing, less traffic and a better quality of living.

Mr. Musk nodded to some of those challenges, saying of the Bay Area, “It’s tough for people to afford houses, and a lot of people have to come in from far away.”

Comments:

1) Moving the corporate headquarters of a large public company is expensive because of the legal and financial complexity and goes beyond the obvious cost of relocating highly-paid staff and acquiring real estate. That Oracle, HP, and Tesla have chosen to bite the bullet, IMHO, says more about the undesirability of California than the appeal of Texas.

2) Losing an innovative company is an especially severe blow, because its new ventures usually originate close to the headquarters and stay there during the startup phase. Furthermore, because of its roadblocks to business, California is very unlikely to be considered as a location for expansion.

3) The future economic effects of losing a corporate headquarters are huge. Legal, accounting, banking, consulting, human resources, electronic data processing, and other services will all be purchased in Texas instead of California. Taxable "intangible" income (interest, dividends, royalties, licenses) attributable to the corporation will no longer be taxed by California.

4) Silicon Valley may still be the place to start a business because of the cross-fertilization of tech and venture capital know-how, but the examples of Tesla, HP, and Oracle show that the business should move out of California as soon as practicable.

5) Despite the devastation of its dining, travel, agriculture, retail and other high-touch industries, California has weathered the coronavirus' storm well, IMHO, because of the presence of high-market-cap companies in the Bay Area. The loss of Tesla alone is not fatal, but cracks have appeared in the foundation, I fear the collapse will be sudden, and I hope I'm wrong.

Elitism in the Defense of the Giants is No Vice

Grammar needs work--elitist, much? (pinterest image)

We take a break from debt-ceiling histrionics--apparently there's an agreement to postpone the reckoning day for almost two months--to talk about news that's equally important--The Giants will meet the Dodgers in playoff baseball: [bold added]

The Dodgers beat the Cardinals 3-1 on Wednesday night to earn the right to fly to San Francisco and face the winningest team in the majors. Game 1 of this rivalry revelry is Friday night, and history’s in the making at Oracle Park...

It’ll be the first Giants-Dodgers postseason series since 1889 when the Giants played in New York and the Dodgers were in Brooklyn and known as the Bridegrooms, a best-of-11 series in which the Giants’ John Ward was that century’s Mr. October. You can look it up.

Fast forward 132 years, and baseball’s two premier teams will meet in a best-of-five Division Series to determine bragging rights not only in 2021 but in the latest chapter of the game’s greatest rivalry, with apologies to Yankees-Red Sox.

"Brooklyn Bridegrooms"--be careful, autofill assumes you're typing "Brooklyn Bridge"--is not the most ridiculous name that preceded the Dodgers monicker. In fact the entire history of the club's names, much like Elizabeth Taylor's, is a subject for hilarity.

The Dodgers were originally founded in 1883 as the Brooklyn Atlantics, taking the name of a defunct team that had played in Brooklyn before them. The team joined the American Association in 1884 and won the AA championship in 1889 before joining the National League in 1890. They promptly won the NL Championship their first year in the League. The team was known alternatively as the Bridegrooms, Grooms, Superbas, Robins, and Trolley Dodgers before officially becoming the Dodgers in the 1930s.

The New York Giants were first known as the Gothams, a centuries-old respectable name for the Big Apple, and unlike the Dodgers, had no past or trolleys to run away from. (People run towards San Francisco cable cars.)

The Dodgers, with their huge Southern California fan base showering the team with riches, are loaded with All-Stars and future Hall-of-Famers, but we know where you came from, Grooms, Superbas, and Trolley Dodgers.

Los Angeles is not in the same ballpark as San Francisco, and we're not just talking baseball.

The Ultimate Example

I still believe that eventually President Biden, Speaker
Pelosi, and Majority Leader Schumer will do the right thing.

The Wall Street Journal opinion page sheds a little more light on the process of budget reconciliation . [bold added]

The parliamentarian has already said that Democrats can use reconciliation to raise the debt limit, so why won’t they do it? As it happens, Mr. Biden gave that game away when he was asked Monday why Democrats aren’t using reconciliation.

“There is a process” that “would require literally up to hundreds of votes,” Mr. Biden explained. “It’s unlimited number of votes having nothing directly to do with the debt limit; it could be everything from Ethiopia to anything else that has nothing to do with the debt limit. And it’s fraught with all kinds of potential danger for a miscalculation, and it would have to happen twice.”

In other words, Mr. Biden admits that Democrats could raise the limit via reconciliation, but then they’d also have to take difficult votes on many issues on the Senate floor. Some of those votes might be unpopular. Mr. Biden is admitting that the reason is political—that Democrats want Republicans to spare them from having to take those tough votes.

Republicans have been hinting (actually some have been shouting) that President Biden is out-of-touch and even senile. From the above quote he doesn't sound senile to me. His handlers should let him speak more--I like this truthful Joe.

But back to the issue at hand: the editorial does communicate more information about Democrats and Republicans' respective motivations and the what of budget reconciliation ("difficult votes on many issues"). Just why these votes have to be taken through this still-mystifying procedure is not something that has been explained clearly to John or Jane Q. Public.

It's often been lamented that nothing works in Washington, and if these inside-the-Beltway rules crash the U.S. dollar and the world's financial system, the American people will view this as the ultimate example of dysfunctional government.

If you thought Donald Trump was bad, wait till you see what comes next.

Washington Works in Mysterious Ways

I freely admit my bias against having more Federal spending increases and changes to the tax code:

Full disclosure: the SALT limitation costs your humble blogger thousands of dollars in additional Federal taxes per year, yet I wish all of the politicians would go home for the rest of 2021 and not try to "help" us by spending any more money or tinkering with four-year-old tax changes that we haven't even figured out yet.

However, these preferences are nothing compared to the importance of not defaulting on national debt payments.

(From Peter G Peterson Fdn)

If Republican votes are necessary to raise the debt ceiling, they should vote to do it, then get on with the usual politics over taxes and spending.

But Republican votes are unnecessary: according to a procedure known as budget reconciliation, the Democrats by themselves can authorize an increase to the national debt.

[Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.)] emphasized that Democrats could raise the debt ceiling on their own by reopening the reconciliation process, which would allow them to move a bill through the 50-50 Senate with just a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes required of most legislation. “This is the path they will need to take,” Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. Biden, in remarks at the White House, said the U.S. “is a nation that pays its bills and always has.” He called on Republicans to “get out of the way” and let Democrats quickly raise the debt limit. Asked whether he could guarantee that the U.S. would be able to raise the debt ceiling before the deadline, he put the onus on Republicans: “No, I can’t. That’s up to Mitch McConnell.”

Democratic leaders have said trying to address the debt limit through a process tied to the budget known as reconciliation would be risky and time-consuming.

This is why politics is so mystifying to us plebeians. The House webpage states that reconciliation is "a fast-track process" that requires a simple majority in the Senate and does not allow Senators to filibuster. That sounds much less risky and time-consuming.

It's also hard to see why the President called on Republicans to "get out of the way" when Democrats can push them aside with impunity in budget reconciliation.

Raising the debt ceiling is the right thing to do, the vast majority of Americans including most Republicans, would agree. Just do it, Democrats, quit wasting time over a non-issue. Your supporters in the media will see that you get the credit, and the public will follow along.

A Win, A Loss, and A Controversy Ended

Yesterday the San Francisco professional sports teams dominated the local headlines with a win, a loss, and a controversy ended.

Giant architects: President of Baseball Operations
Farhan Zaidi and Manager Gabe Kapler (Chron photo)

The Win: Giants outlast Dodgers in historic NL West race, fitting finish to stunning season

The Giants got their franchise-record 107th win and wildly celebrated the clinching of their first division title in nine years, and the Dodgers — the defending World Series champs and winners of a mere 106 games — got nothing but a participation trophy as the team with the most wins ever not to finish in first place.

The Giants were expected to finish third in the division, perhaps a "tad" above .500 (an 81-81 record). Instead, they posted the best record in the history of the New York/San Francisco Giants franchise, and the fourth-most wins in the post-War era, behind the 2001 Mariners (116), the 1998 Yankees (114), and the 1954 Indians (111).

Trey Lance (SJ Mercury photo)

The Loss: 49ers' Lance shaky in relief after Garoppolo injured in loss to Seahawks

this was the most pressing question after the 49ers’ 28-21 loss to the Seahawks on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium: When can Jimmy Garoppolo get back on the field?

Garoppolo was sidelined for the second half with a calf injury he sustained early in the first quarter and [Trey] Lance’s work off the bench didn’t suggest he’d steal the starting job while Garoppolo rehabs.

Injuries to running backs and key defensive players had already eroded expectations for the Niners as a Super Bowl contender. The injury to starting quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo made fans even gloomier.

The excitement over #3 draft pick Trey Lance had been over his raw talent and long-term future, not about his ability to be a starter in the NFL today. With a 2-2 record and rookie Lance at the helm, the 49ers outlook isn't pretty, but there's still a chance for a miracle; look at the Giants.

Andrew Wiggins (USA Today phoo)

Controversy Ended: Warriors' Andrew Wiggins reverses course, gets vaccinated to play home games

In an unexpected reversal, Warriors starting small forward Andrew Wiggins got vaccinated against the coronavirus and will be allowed to play home games at Chase Center...

Under San Francisco’s indoor vaccination policy, which goes into effect Oct. 13, Wiggins could not play home games if he remained unvaccinated. The Warriors’ home opener is Oct. 21 against the Clippers, and Golden State plays nine of its first 12 games at Chase Center.

Wiggins would have forfeited more than $350,000 per game he missed.

Compelling individuals to be jabbed is an issue far beyond basketball, but the celebrity status of NBA unvaccinated players made the topic highly visible. It came to a head over the weekend when Warriors (vaccinated) teammate Draymond Green stood up for Wiggins' right to make his own vaccination decision. None of the societal issues has gone away because of Andrew Wiggins' change of heart, but for the Warriors at least, it's one less worry.