Desperation, Survival, Evolution & Elephant Tusks

  

I’ve traveled to the sub-Sahara, mostly in eastern and southern Africa, several times since the late 1970s. Every time I have gone back, there are fewer wild animals, more people and no shortage of poachers or conflicts. Cheetah were decimated by disease, but rhino and elephant were slaughtered by poachers or decimated in regional wars. Rhino for their precious horns used in Arab and Indian ceremonial dagger handles and as purported aphrodisiacs to the Chinese. Elephant for the valuable ivory tusks. It is sad compounded on sad. Watching elephant pay homage for dead former herd members, caressing their bones with extreme reverence, is an unforgettable sight. Seeing a full-time armed guard standing by a white rhino (now virtually extinct) is heartbreaking.

Nature seems to have stepped in with possible evolutionary solutions in some pockets where combat killed an ungodly number of animals, particularly elephant. Christina Larson, writing for the October 3rd Associated Press, examines the post-war evolutionary change in female elephant in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique: “A hefty set of tusks is usually an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, strip bark for food and joust with other elephants. But during episodes of intense ivory poaching, those big incisors become a liability… Now researchers have pinpointed how years of civil war and poaching in Mozambique have led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks.

“During the conflict from 1977 to 1992, fighters on both sides slaughtered elephants for ivory to finance war efforts. In the region that’s now Gorongosa National Park, around 90% of the elephants were killed… The survivors were likely to share a key characteristic: Half the females were naturally tuskless — they simply never developed tusks — while before the war, less than a fifth lacked tusks.

“As with eye color in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. Although tusklessness was once rare in African savannah elephants, it’s become more common — like a rare eye color becoming widespread.

“After the war, those tuskless surviving females passed on their genes with expected, as well as surprising, results. About half their daughters were tuskless. More perplexing, two-thirds of their offspring were female… The years of unrest ‘changed the trajectory of evolution in that population,’ said evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, based at Princeton University…

“Researchers in Mozambique, including biologists Dominique Goncalves and Joyce Poole, observed the national park ’s roughly 800 elephants over several years to create a catalog of mothers and offspring… ‘Female calves stay by their mothers, and so do males up to a certain age,’ said Poole, who is scientific director and co-founder of the nonprofit ElephantVoices.

“Poole had previously seen other cases of elephant populations with a disproportionately large number of tuskless females after intense poaching, including in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya… ‘I’ve been puzzling over why it’s the females who are tuskless for a very long time,’ said Poole, who is a co-author of the study…

“Most people think of evolution as something that proceeds slowly, but humans can hit the accelerator… ‘When we think about natural selection, we think about it happening over hundreds, or thousands, of years,’ said Samuel Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the research. ‘The fact that this dramatic selection for tusklessness happened over 15 years is one of the most astonishing findings.’

“Now the scientists are studying what more tuskless elephants means for the species and its savannah environment. Their preliminary analysis of fecal samples suggests the Gorongosa elephants are shifting their diet, without long incisors to peel bark from trees… ‘The tuskless females ate mostly grass, whereas the tusked animals ate more legumes and tough woody plants,’ said Robert Pringle, a co-author and biologist at Princeton University. ‘These changes will last for at least multiple elephant generations.’” The genetic differences are measurable.

Mankind’s devastation of this planet is staggering. The human population has pushed Malthusian limits… with at least double the scientifically sustainable number of people that the earth can hold. We tend to focus on climate change at the exclusion of so many other human excesses that are rewriting nature. But can nature fight back enough to save the planet and most of species on it?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as we kill off wildlife and productive land, are we also killing ourselves in a self-indulgent feast of earth’s dwindling resources?

The New American Right of Self-Offense

“I got a job to do — protect these people. That’s it.” 

AR-15-armed vigilante Erik Jordan outside Kenosha Courthouse after the Rittenhouse Acquittal.

"We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." 

Donald Trump to the crowd just before they attacked the Capitol on January 6th.

“Based upon current information, we assess the greatest threat of lethal violence continues to emanate from lone offenders with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist ideologies and [domestic violent extremists] with personalized ideologies.” A June 2020 FBI, Department of Homeland Security and National Counterterrorism Center Bulletin to law enforcement & intelligence agencies.

It used to be our obsession – stories of the wild west in the 19th century. Gunslingers. Highway, railroad and bank robbers. Bounty hunters. Sheriffs, marshals and Texas Rangers with quickdraw skills and hair-trigger guns. Pinkertons. Private armies protecting rich ranchers. Movies. TV shows. Western art. Every man (and few women) had a rifle holster for their Winchester strapped to their horse, a six-shooter in their side-holster(s) and perhaps a shotgun or even a sawed-off rifle at the ready. There was short reprise of this violent era in the early part of the 20th century rising slightly after WWI, but by the 1920/30s, this violence returned, this time primarily relegated to the Mafia and a few bands of legendary Tommy-gun-wielding criminals. Ordinary people did not carry guns around except for hunting.

Decades later, when the Vietnam War ended, the demand for small arms that kept our nation’s gunmakers rolling in military profits slackened. These manufacturers suddenly found themselves hovering near (and sometimes crossing over into) bankruptcy. That’s when they approached the National Rifle Association to create a separate gunowner lobby, aimed at normalizing gun ownership for everyone and pressing courts and legislatures to lift restrictions on who could own and carry a gun and how lethal that weapon could be. Boy was the NRA successful! Until 2008, there really was no recognition of a uniform right for anyone to own or carry a gun. Then the NRA, aided by a Supreme Court Justice determined to rewrite the plain meaning of the Second Amendment, changed all that forever. See my November 8th How Time and a Highly Politicized Supreme Court Repealed and Replaced the Second Amendment  blog for the ugly details.

Today, all across the United States but particularly in red states, carrying a gun in public is old news. Increasingly, gun owners don’t even need a permit to carry a concealed pistol in some states. Morgan Lee, writing for the November 22nd Associated Press, explores the expanding gun permissiveness that is rapidly gaining national acceptance: “As Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted in two killings that he said were self-defense, armed civilians patrolled the streets near the Wisconsin courthouse with guns in plain view.

“In Georgia, testimony in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers showed that armed patrols were commonplace in the neighborhood where Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was chased down by three white men and shot.

“The two proceedings sent startling new signals about the boundaries of self-defense as more guns emerge from homes amid political and racial tensions and the advance of laws that ease permitting requirements and expand the allowable use of force… Across much of the nation, it has become increasingly acceptable for Americans to walk the streets with firearms, either carried openly or legally concealed. In places that still forbid such behavior, prohibitions on possessing guns in public could soon change if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a New York law.” See also, my Vigilante Justice an American Tradition November 20th blog. Republican Congressmen turned Rittenhouse – who openly showed his support for the right-wing Proud Boys militia – into a national hero. “They stand by Rittenhouse as a patriot who took a stand against lawlessness and exercised his 2nd Amendment rights…

“The Rittenhouse verdict arrived as many states are expanding self-defense laws and loosening the rules for carrying guns in public. Gun sales and gun violence have been on the rise… At the same time, six more states this year removed requirements to get a permit to carry guns in public, the largest number in any single year, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. In all, 30 states have enacted ‘stand your ground’ laws, which remove a requirement to retreat from confrontations before using deadly force…. Gun-rights advocates seeking greater access to weapons and robust self-defense provisions argue that armed confrontations will remain rare. 

“Discord over the right to carry guns in public places spilled over into state legislatures in the aftermath of a 2020 plot to storm the Michigan Capitol [see above photo], the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and other threats. States including Michigan and New Mexico this year banned guns at their capitols, and Montana and Utah shored up concealed-carry rights… At the Supreme Court, justices are weighing the biggest guns case in more than a decade, a dispute over whether New York’s gun permitting law violates the 2nd Amendment right to ‘keep and bear arms.’” Lee.  For the Arbery defendants, the video evidence and the failure to yell, “citizen’s arrest” were sufficiently and unavoidably damning so as to result in a murder conviction.

Are the Arbery and Milwaukee police officer Derek “I Can't Breathe” Chauvin murder of George Floyd verdicts exceptions to the “be a vigilante” lesson of Rittenhouse? Or was the lesson, when shooting someone you do not like, to avoid CCTV cameras and folks with smart phones pointed at you. Don’t smirk, California residents, because even that liberal state has a provision for citizen’s arrest. But has murder with a “he-said, he-said” self-defense ploy just part of the escalation and legitimization of political violence reset the American norm?

As threats of violence against members of Congress (mostly who oppose Trump or his wishes) have tripled, clearly, anything goes. And for every left-of-center domestic extremist group, there are seven right-wing well-armed organizations pledged to violent vigil. Beware of the word “patriot.” “Stand back and stand by.” The wild, wild west is back… on a much bigger plain! 

I’m Peter Dekom, and if letting anyone go out with a high-powered weapon to shoot up folks that they believe might be breaking the law, right or wrong, is our goal, we are definitely headed there.

 

Stock Markets Plunge, Travelers Pause, Omicrom Proliferates

 “Travel bans don’t work… They end up stigmatizing a country. The countries that isolated this virus and reported it are now going to get penalized for being transparent. What is the implication for future variants if people get punished this way with travel restrictions? We have tests, we have tools, so it’s not as if we’re helpless the way we were back in January of 2020.” Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

UPDATED 11/28/21 3:40 PM

Until it got its “Omicrom” Greek letter designation from World Health Organization, coronavirus variant B.1.1.529 had lots of names, depending on your country. The above graphic, generated in Australia for example, gave that variant the temporary “Botswana” COVID variant name. WHO, however, called it a variant “of concern.” So far, we really do not know much about this miscreant, but fears “of more pandemic-induced economic turmoil caused stocks to tumble in Asia, Europe and the U.S. The Dow Jones industrial average briefly dropped more than 1,000 points. The S&P 500 index closed down 2.3%, its worst day since February. The price of oil plunged about 13%.” Associated Press, November 27th.

While Omicrom seems to be significantly more contagious, that’s about the only symptom we have been able to observe… so far. But a super-microscopic view of the variant shows it just has too many nasties to be ignored. “What it has is a cluster of several mutations, more mutations than we’ve seen in that spike protein part of the coronavirus, and the spike protein is important because that’s what our vaccines target,” [says Dr.] Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security…That’s how the virus enters ourselves.” Yahoo!Finance, November 27th. 

We do not know if or to what extent the existing vaccines are effective or whether those who have recovered from COVID have appropriate resistance to the variant. Is it more deadly than the predominant Delta variant? Will it take over as the most prevalent strain of the disease? We probably will not begin to get sufficient answers for a few weeks, at the earliest. But there is usually an instantaneous and uniform international response when such new variants are first identified: travel bans.

“In response to the variant’s discovery in southern Africa, the United States, Canada, Russia and a host of other countries joined the European Union in restricting travel for visitors from that region, where the variant is linked to a fresh surge of infections… The White House said the U.S. will restrict travel from South Africa and seven other countries in the region beginning Monday [11/29]. Biden issued a declaration later Friday [11/26] making the travel prohibition official, with exceptions for U.S. citizens and permanent residents and for several other categories, including spouses and other close family.

“Medical experts, including the WHO, warned against overreaction before the variant was thoroughly studied. But a jittery world feared the worst after the tenacious virus triggered a pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people around the globe… ‘We must move quickly and at the earliest possible moment,’ British Health Secretary Sajid Javid told lawmakers… Omicron has now been seen in travelers to Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel, as well as in southern Africa… There was no immediate indication whether the variant causes more severe disease. As with other variants, some infected people display no symptoms, South African experts said.” AP. And Southern African countries also repeat that travel bans just do not work.

What should we do? “Dr. Lakshman Swamy, an ICU physician at Boston Medical Center, said that while there are reasons for concern, it’s not time to panic yet… [He asked] Will it hurt and kill a lot of people? And will current vaccines work against it?.. ‘I think we have nowhere near the numbers to know that right now,’ Swamy said, but added that concerns over the effectiveness of the vaccines are valid. ‘There’s reason to worry because of the new mutations in the spike protein… but there’s no reason to assume our vaccines won’t offer significant protection there.’

“The important caveat, though, is making sure everyone is vaccinated. Currently, 59.1% of those eligible in the U.S. are fully vaccinated while 69.7% have received at least one dose, as of Nov. 24. And, all three vaccines available in the country are now offering booster doses specifically tailored to the Delta variant.” Yahoo!Finance. A day after these announcements, countries – like Israel – were locking down, and cases of the variant were popping up all over the globe. Speaking on a morning talk show, US COVID Czar, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that while we all must be prepared for whatever might come, it is too soon to talk about lockdowns here in the United States.

But the tens of millions of American vaccine skeptics coupled with misguided and clearly inaccurate statements from prominent American politicians from the Trump side of medical expertise, leave the field ripe for any powerful new variant to be realized and to spread right here in the United States. For those who believe that eliminating vaccine mandates and distancing restrictions are the only way for our economy fully to recover, just take a cold, hard, sobering and emotionally honest look at how our stock markets – our most reliable “business confidence real time” measurement – reacted at the news of the new variant. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and our efforts to contain the coronavirus and return as close to normalcy as we can are completely reliant on skeptics reversing their vaccine and mask resistance until the disease is fully and consistently curable without lingering aftereffects.

The Other CO2 Nasty

 

It’s no secret that methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are the mainstay of greenhouse gasses. Whether the result of burning fossil fuels or the release of methane trapped in melting permafrost (tundra), the surfeit of these emissions since the Industrial Revolution is mankind’s toxic “gift”: climate change, that lovely global warming wreaking so much havoc all over this planet. But the excess flood of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which used to be absorbed so much more by the chlorophyl green of plant life, has other nasties that most people do not know. The slow poisoning of our oceans by increasing seawater’s relative acidity.

“‘Ocean acidification refers to the whole suite of chemical changes that happen in the ocean when you start decreasing pH in ocean waters,’ says Dr. Catherine V. Davis, Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies Gaylord Donnelley Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences… Davis explains that as you add carbon dioxide to a liquid, it will decrease the pH and start to form acids.

“‘Think about the difference between carbonated water and tap water,’ Davis says. ‘The carbonated water has carbon dioxide in it and forms acid, which gives you that tingling sensation on your tongue. A similar thing is happening in the ocean, with obviously some larger scale changes associated.’” Yale Sustainability, September 21st.

Our Environmental Protection Agency explains the impact of increased ocean acidity on sea life: “By releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, humans are rapidly altering the chemistry of the ocean and affecting marine life. The acidity of the ocean has increased by about 25% since before the Industrial Revolution, greater than any other time within the last two million years. Given the speed at which humans are altering ocean chemistry, marine plants and animals may not have time to adapt or migrate as they did in the past to cope with changes to ocean chemistry over the history of the Earth.  

“As a consequence of acidification, marine life face a two-fold challenge: decreased carbonate availability and increased acidity. Laboratory studies suggest changing ocean chemistry will 1) harm life forms that rely on carbonate-based shells and skeletons, 2) harm organisms sensitive to acidity and 3) harm organisms higher up the food chain that feed on these sensitive organisms. However, we do not yet know exactly how ecosystems will be impacted.”

Want a little more detail: “Dr. Ellen Thomas, Senior Research Scientist in the [Yale University] Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, further explains that the ocean is not turning into acid, per say. Instead, it is just becoming less basic… ‘Remember the pH scale from elementary school,’ Thomas says. ‘There is a number seven in the middle. Everything lower than 7 is acid, and everything higher than 7 up to 14 is basic. Before human activity, the ocean was 8.2 on that logarithmic scale, and we have now moved down by one pH unit to 8.1. The ocean is still basic, as it is still to the right of that value seven, but it has moved towards this direction of more acid – which is very serious.’” Yale Sustainability.

The EPA tells us which organisms are impacted the most: “Many ocean plants and animals build shells and skeletons out of two chemicals that exist in seawater, calcium and carbonate. Organisms combine calcium and carbonate to form hard shells and skeletons out of the mineral calcium carbonate. Therefore, the plants and animals that use calcium carbonate for structure and protection are called calcifying organisms. Increased acidity slows the growth of calcium carbonate structures, and under severe conditions, can dissolve structures faster than they form…

“Just like humans, marine organisms require optimal conditions inside. their bodies to stay healthy. If the acidity of seawater is beyond the optimum range for that organism, its body must use more energy to maintain healthy body fluid chemistry. Organisms can often compensate when faced with increased acidity, but this comes at the expense of using energy to grow critical body parts like muscle or shell. For example, scientists have found that mussels, sea urchins, and crabs start to dissolve their protective shells to counter elevated acidity in their body fluids. So even if an organism can adjust to survive increasing acidity its overall health can be impaired.

“Many marine fish and invertebrates have complex life cycles. They spend their early lives as larvae while they develop and disperse to distant areas on ocean currents. Larvae are very small, which makes them especially vulnerable to increased acidity. For example, sea urchin and oyster larvae will not develop properly when acidity is increased. In another example, fish larvae lose their ability to smell and avoid predators. The vulnerability of larvae means that while organisms may be able to reproduce, their offspring may not reach adulthood.”  

We can see and feel the force of hurricanes, the devastation of wildfires, the damage of desertification in some areas with storm surges and flooding in others. All exacerbated by climate change. But what we cannot readily see is the undersea damage to marine life that just might lead to irreversible extinction of so many species. We are killing ourselves as well.

I’m Peter Dekom, and that climate change “red alert” to humanity is so much more than most people realize.

Little or No Chance

 For individuals who have been convicted of a crime and served their sentences, society is still deeply unwelcoming. Good luck finding a decent job, although recent labor shortages may have opened a small crack in the door for a few, especially in the area of fighting wildfires. The ability to live a normal life is, however, otherwise almost universally severely impaired. What got someone into prison is a long forgotten contributing factor. It’s particularly difficult for someone from a gang-infested neighborhood, punctuated by terrible public schools and peer pressure to reach for easy money and often from a single parent family. According to a report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics released on August 26th, based on a 10-year study, the resulting recidivism rates are still staggering:

• About 66% of prisoners released across 24 states in 2008 were arrested within 3 years, and 82% were arrested within 10 years.

• The annual arrest percentage among prisoners released in 2008 declined from 43% in Year 1 to 22% in Year 10. 

• About 61% of prisoners released in 2008 returned to prison within 10 years for a parole or probation violation or a new sentence.

• Sixteen percent of prisoners released in 2008 were arrested within 10 years outside of the state that released them.

Hard numbers. And while most criminal activity fell during the pandemic, murder rates increased by a terrifying 30%. Alabama is even using $400 million of federal pandemic subsidies to build and improve their prison system. The cost of incarcerating inmates is equally staggering, and in January of 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative told us that the aggregated annual direct cost of $82 billion woefully understates the true cost of incarceration by a whopping $100 billion:

“The cost of imprisonment — including who benefits and who pays — is a major part of the national discussion around criminal justice policy. But prisons and jails are just one piece of the criminal justice system and the amount of media and policy attention that the various players get is not necessarily proportional to their influence… In this first-of-its-kind report, we find that the system of mass incarceration costs the government and families of justice-involved people at least $182 billion every year.” That the United States represents just 4% of the world’s population yet accounts for 25% of the earth’s prison inmates tell you we are definitely doing something wrong, probably well beyond our dramatic legally sanctioned lack of gun control.

To make matters worse, the general practice of releasing an inmate, sometimes to a halfway house, with little more than the standard $200 and a bus or train ticket, certainly makes recovery to a normal life that much more difficult, especially for inmates with no solid family support on the “outside.” Writing for the September 28th FastCompany.com, Kristin Toussaint explains a new program that is intended to help get a better fresh start:

“In California, a law allows prosecutors to recommend incarcerated people for release if that person received a particularly excessive sentence, or has shown that they’ve rehabilitated themselves while in prison. Now, 50 people who are released under that law will be part of a test: What happens if they also get direct cash assistance—$2,750 spread out over three payments—in order to set them up for success as they re-enter society.

“The cash payments are part of a pilot program from For The People—a nonprofit that works with prosecutors to resentence and release people under the state’s prosecutor-initiated resentencing law—and The Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), a nonprofit that provides employment training and other services to those just coming home from prison.

“The idea is that this kind of cash assistance can help make sure newly released people have money in their pockets for everyday needs, but it could also ‘build confidence among prosecutors and judiciary to say, ‘Yeah, we will release this person, now that we know they have services and money, we feel more comfortable making that release,'’ says Center for Employment Opportunities CEO Sam Schaeffer. ‘That to us is a really exciting idea, how cash assistance could really help accelerate the depopulation of prisons and jails.’

“When someone is released from prison, they may get assistance when it comes to finding housing or figuring out transportation, but all the other expenses that come with reentering society—a cell phone so they can be reached for job interviews, or nice clothes for those interviews—are left to them.  While there is already the concept of ‘gate money,’ some cash for recently released people so they can get a bus pass or pay for a cab to work, that often totals just around $200—a number that Hillary Blout, founder and executive director of For The People, who also wrote that prosecutor-initiated resentencing law, says hasn’t been updated since the ’70s, and is often woefully inadequate. This pilot program gives people $2,750, an amount that Blout says has allowed one person to get a car (the program has already delivered cash to about five people), so he could get himself to job interviews.” This certainly is an interesting test program to keep tabs on.

California has banned “for profit prisons” in the state, but a federal court has already ruled that this limitation does not apply to federal incarceration, including federal undocumented immigrant detention facilities. The Biden administration is attempting to follow California’s path, however. There are other corrective measures afoot: decriminalizing marijuana possession (resulting in early releases and expungement of associated convictions from the record), shifting addiction out of prison programs and more realistic sentences (like eliminating the hard “three strikes” laws) as part of a serious reform of our criminal justice system. But the real fixes reside within society, where the criminal temptations and racial inequities begin.

I’m Peter Dekom, and since we have developed a criminal justice system that seems to have failed on every measurable level, we truly need a ground-up reexamination of the entire system.

Affordable Childcare… in the United States

 

We certainly do not have remotely the childcare we need. There is just an American aversion to general and necessary governmental benefits. Consistent with the “American war on socialism” – where “socialism” is mis-defined as anything that helps those in the middle and the bottom of the economic ladder at the expense of the rich – the United States is the only developed country that lacks universal healthcare and access to affordable childcare. As the issue is being debated in Congress, the notion of federally mandated paid leave for medical and family necessities, often offshoots of childcare, was deleted from the House version of the Build Back Better bill under pressure from Democratic Senator (WVa) Joe Manchin. There is some pressure among Senate Democrats to restore some lesser version as the bill faces Senate review. Maybe.

Let me be clear, “socialism” simply means – where the government owns and controls the bulk of the assets of production: factories, farms, sometimes housing as well as other sources of wealth building. Even though the “social” root word is used in “social programs,” these citizen benefits are not hallmark of “socialism.” If you applied the mis-definition of “socialism,” you would wind up eliminating public education, Medicare and minimum wage policies. 

Further, the notion that all government spending creates destructive deficits is another mythology that needs to die hard and forever. When you hire lots of soldiers, which may indeed be a necessity, that spending is different from investing in improving American productivity and competitiveness. Hiring military personnel is a cost, one that does not carry an internal rate of return. It’s a similar difference between a consumer buying a car versus buying stock. Making a highway smoother and more traffic efficient makes moving goods less expensive, using less fossil fuel in the process. Faster movement of goods requires fewer trucker man-hours, less wear and tear on trucks and lower consumption of diesel fuel. In short, money is saved. But it’s not just concrete, steel and copper wiring that make a productivity difference.

For example, when you upgrade the quality of education, making higher quality accessible for free or more affordable, the resulting upgrade to the work force increases the value of labor, their earning power (which is taxed) and national competitiveness… closer to the cutting edge to the America we all knew. We have some of the highest tuition, reflected by the highest level of student debt (inflation corrected), in our nation’s history. That debt level is slamming our rising generations, already facing housing inflation, just as they begin their careers.

Because of the increase in productivity, the multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure bills, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will not add more than $160 billion (probably a lot less if productivity goals are reached) to our deficit, while the 2017 corporate tax cut has generated a true trillion dollar per year deficit without the promised increase in higher paying jobs. One of the most hotly contested aspects of the infrastructure bills is still childcare support. The October 6th New York Times tells us that “Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care, compared with $500 in the U.S.” A tax credit does not do the trick.

Yet childcare costs in the United States are so high that they often eat up all or most of the extra income generated by a single parent or when a spouse elects to enter the workforce. Thus, millions of productive workers are resigning from jobs and staying home – rather than adding to the nation’s workforce productivity – to care for younger children. Jobs just go begging. Kathleen Davis, writing for the November 22nd FastCompany.com, explains: 

“The childcare crisis in America isn’t new. Parents in the U.S. have always known that childcare—especially from birth to Kindergarten—is expensive, hard to find, and a frequent source of stress… The average cost of full-time childcare is higher than in-state college tuition in more than 30 states, which means that childcare often costs more than many parents make. The pandemic has also made childcare more difficult to find as many childcare centers (one in four by some estimates) have gone out of business in the last two years.

“Parents have always juggled finding care for their school-age kids for the summer months, or school breaks, or even just the three hours between the end of the school day and the end of the workday. It’s always been a precarious balancing act, and those with less money and fewer resources struggle the most… But until the pandemic hit, it was viewed by many as a personal problem. Once schools shut down and childcare centers shuttered, our unsustainable childcare system finally became an urgent part of national conversation. Now, as we navigate what the future will look like, we have the opportunity to rethink and rebuild this broken system…

“With labor shortages across industries, [Wendy Chun-Hoon, director of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor] laid out how a lack of childcare impacted mothers’ workforce participation. ‘It’s still 2.8 million women who are not back in the labor force. Over a million fewer moms with kids who are under 13, are employed now as opposed to pre-pandemic,’ said Chun-Hoon.

“[Elliot Haspel, an education policy expert and author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix it.] agreed. ‘Childcare truly is infrastructure. It is the sort of industry that underpins every other industry. Women with children under age six made up 10% of the workforce before the pandemic, but accounted for 22% of the jobs during the crisis,’ he explained. ‘The ability to find quality childcare is likely to be a determining factor for employment. We know that the lack of childcare is holding the economy back, and a lot of that’s happening because the childcare industry itself is in crisis.’

“Private sector solutions such as onsite daycare aren’t enough, both Chun-Hoon and Haspel agreed. Quality childcare is difficult and expensive to set up—and even if it’s put into place it only serves a small number of people and a small portion of needs. Also care, Haspel argues, shouldn’t be a job-linked benefit… Both agree that public funding is the best solution, and that true care infrastructure goes well beyond childcare for kids under five years old.”

“The cause of the crisis within the childcare industry, Haspel says, is decades of underinvestment. The real cost of care is so high that childcare can’t easily raise wages to compete with other industries, which means there are fewer spots for children, since centers have to keep a low child-to-teacher ratio. Fewer spots means parents are left without options and can’t work themselves. ‘We have to start by stabilizing the childcare industry with public funding before we do just about anything else,’ he says.” Davis. 

The plummeting of US investment in fixing and upgrading infrastructure, funding needed social programs, began in the 1970s, as the Vietnam War deficits caused Congress to kick that infrastructure can down the road. Even if these new infrastructure bills pass (and part one has), we will still be trillions of dollars short of what we really need to bring us up to where we should be. Even in hard building, the America Society of Civil Engineers believes it would take $6 trillion of investment over the next decade to fix the problem, $4 trillion plus more than what Congress has passed and is considering. And that’s without addressing the social engineering we so desperately need.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it so strange for the United States to have become an outlier among richer nations in its willingness to invest in itself.