Cubs win!

It would take a heart of stone for Cubs fans to not get choked up at the video of Kris Bryant weeping on hearing that he was traded just before this year's trading deadline. Seeing all of Rizzo, Baez and Bryant homer in their first games with their new teams makes it that much harder to take.

I think I understand why fans are upset, and even angry. I think it's fine to be upset and sad. Anger, I can't get behind.

Anger is the right response for situations resulting from human action. I get angry when I think of civil asset forfeiture, crony tax credits, government prohibitions on low-cost housing, attempted coups, innocent people kept in prison, hapless government agencies killing thousands... things that, in theory, could be fixed or prevented by people behaving differently or by correcting faulty institutional incentives. If there isn't a plausible set of alternative outcomes, though, anger doesn't make sense. It's like being angry because graduation means you are leaving your school friends behind - it just is. 

The John Baker Day Massacre doesn't have obvious plausible preferable alternative outcomes.

Background

All of Baez, Bryant and Rizzo - the "core" of the 2016 World Series winners - have the ability to become free agents at the end of the season. If they were on the Cubs at the end of the season, the Cubs could have made "qualifying offers" for a one-year contract. The players have the choice of accepting the qualifying offers or selling their services to other teams for whatever they can get. Qualifying offers are typically rejected. 

If the player signs with another team, the team giving up the player gets a compensatory draft pick at the somewhere after the first round of amateur draft. After the first few picks of the first round, draft picks are lottery tickets. 

When the 11-game losing streak put the Cubs out of any reasonable hope for the playoffs, management faced a choice - playing out two meaningless months with The Core, or trading them to contending teams by the deadline to get a better return than they would get from the amateur draft in the winter.

What about extensions?

Some fans, including one passionate one who I greatly respect on Facebook, argue that somehow the wealthy Ricketts family should have just met whatever demands the players made for extensions, because they have the money. 

I think, though, that on reflection, that there is some amount of player compensation that is beyond what makes sense. The team has to pay 26 roster players, plus injured players, plus 180 minor league players (they don't get paid enough, but that's another discussion), plus scouts, coaches, and the rest of the machinery that puts the teams on the field. Unlike most teams, they also own the ballpark and have to keep it running. Nobody can pay all the players all they want. You can demand that owners lose money on their teams, but you can't expect them to go along. 

Also, the players have a say. Bryant has always been headed for free agency. Rizzo broke off talks this spring. The players finally get to see what they get get in the open market - and that's good! They've earned it. To keep them from that might well have required offers so extravagant that they would crowd out spending on other players. It's clear from this year that these three wouldn't have gotten the Cubs back in contention by themselves.

But Ricketts have bottomless money!

But the Cubs, like all the teams, have to deal with a "luxury tax" that works as a soft salary cap. The penalties for habitually exceeding the cap are steep enough that even the free-spending Yankees and Angels don't do it.

Also, it's not all the Ricketts' money to spend. They took on minority partners to finance stadium improvements (they didn't shake down the state or city, like some teams I could name). They have legal obligations to manage the business responsibly. There are limits to the losses they can inflict on the co-owners, if not themselves.

 But they mostly just got a bunch of no-name minor leaguers for our heroes!

The Cubs gave up two months of our favorite players in a lost season. In return, they have elevated the farm system to an arguably top-ten group. Initial evaluations of the players acquired are positive (here and here, for example.)

Farm systems don't play in the World Series, but that's how teams that are consistently good (ugh, Cardinals) get and stay that way. It hurts to see Bryant raking for the Giants, but in 2022, and especially afterwards, we are likely to appreciate it. Not all of the seeds planted on the farm will blossom, but it helps a lot to have a lot of good ones growing.

But why end it now?

It's been over for awhile. The offense famously "broke" in 2018, and it never really got fixed. In 2016, it seemed like they effortlessly scored somehow almost every inning. Since 2018, it seems like a battle to score at all. 

But we fans wanted them to stay! 

"We?" 

Kenneth Arrow says that there is no "will of the people" that can make any sense. That is also true of fan bases. While many Cubs fans wanted to keep the band together and finds any alternative intolerable, there are other views. I am in the other views camp. It was painful to watch our heroes strive to no effect. They were going to be gone anyway. If the current team can't win, I want new players coming up. I want management to have the whole world of free agents available, not just three of them.

Was it worth breaking our hearts?

If the Cubs are contenders in 2023 and later, most of us will get over it.

My thoughts?

Rizzo, Bryant, and Baez get to chase rings. Meanwhile, the Cubs give us something to hope for. Cubs ownership needs a good team to get cash out of its big investment in Wrigleyville real estate (and unlike some teams I could name, they did it without shaking down the taxpayers). Jed wants to prove that he's more than Robin to Theo Epstein's Batman. There will be much salary room available for free agents. I think there are a lot of reasons to hope. 

Go Cubs!

Affordable Housing

Years ago a Des Moines Business Record reporter was interviewing me about low-income housing tax credits. If you know my tax policy views, you know how I feel about them. The poor reporter was disturbed. "You are for affordable housing, aren't you?" Yes, just not tax credits. They aren't the same thing.

Low housing income tax credits are a push-on-the-string approach that gives allocations of tax credits to developers, often insider politicians, who agree to set aside some portion of their units to low-income tenants.

There is a way to increase the stock of affordable housing without the Rube Goldberg LIHTC system. It's to let people build them. Zoning, code restrictions and other limitations on development are key causes of high housing costs. If you doubt it, consider one modest attempt to build apartments in super-expensive San Francisco.

So Des Moines, home of a number of LIHTC properties, proposes to simplify things by... making it more expensive to build new houses. And the reason for doing so is astonishing. From the Des Moines Business Record (my emphasis):

Des Moines is in the midst of updating its zoning code, which provides development guidelines for its industrial, commercial and residential districts. The proposed code spells out the types of materials that can be used in various types of developments, including housing. It also sets minimum square footage requirements for different styles of houses and mandates that new houses have basements and garages.

City officials have said the new requirements will provide Des Moines higher valuations that will generate more in property tax revenue to help pay for city services provided to both existing areas and new development areas. About 40% of the property in Des Moines is tax-exempt, so the city must look for ways to create valuation that generates property tax revenue, officials say.

Give them credit for bald honesty. They want to prevent construction of houses that people can afford just to jack up tax revenue. Oh, and to increase the discretionary power of city officials:

In addition, city officials say homebuilders can ask for variances from city staff, the Plan and Zoning Commission and the City Council if the houses they want to construct don’t comply with the proposed city code.

Because government by special favor is the funnest kind.

But we don't want contractors building shacks? According to one realtor, there are 60 houses under construction right now that would fail the proposed new building code.

So for some Des Moines politicians, "affordable housing" means insider tax credits and political favoritism -- but not new construction.

Governor's press conference praises construction of newest great pyramids

Gov. Terry Branstad announced Wednesday that MidAmerican Pyramids will make a $1.9 billion investment in Iowa burial shrine projects that will be the biggest single burial of taxpayer cash ever in the state.

"As wasteful spending goes, so does Iowa's necropolis economy," said Branstad, who spoke enthusiastically about the plans. He added, "Remember, once they make this investment it will be here for the next 4000 or 5000 years."

Mid-American Pyramids project in Wadsworth, IL.  

Flickr image via Chuck.falzone.

MidAmerican officials said no sites have been selected yet, but they hinted that the sites would be in the cities of the dead in northwest Iowa and south of Interstate 80.

Branstad, speaking at a late afternoon news conference, said MidAmerican will add up to 1,050 royal burial spaces, consisting of up to 656 pyramids, in Iowa by year-end 2015.

Greg Anubis, chairman, president and CEO of MidAmerican Embalmed Royalty Holdings Company, thanked the Governor for supporting eternal hospitality to America's pharoanic class, adding "Iowa's congressional delegation created the opportunity for this investment through their willingness to forcibly extract funds from taxpayers to build homes for their mortal remains in Iowa. None of this would ever be possible without lavish federal funding."

Lt. Gov. Kim. Reynolds said in a prepared statement, "In addition to helping boost our state and local economies, the expansion will create approximately 460 pyramid slave overseer jobs over a two-year period and an estimated 48 permanent tomb sentry jobs."

Supporters of the project dismissed objections that the pyramids are a waste of money, diverting resources from more efficient ways to inter dead politicians, saying "you must hate jobs."

Five years in prison, $50,000 fine

The ban on compensation for human transplants goes back to 1983 legislation, according to the preface of When Altruism Isn't Enough. It was apparently a reaction to a doctor-entrepreneur who planned to bring poor folks to the U.S. for paid kidney donations. Strangely, it didn't really hit home to me before that compensated donation was more than merely frowned on, but is punishable be a stretch in federal prison. If compensated donation will ever occur, Congress will have to act -- if the book makes its case, Congress will be undoing their own damage. They're better at the damaging than the undoing.

When Altruism Isn't Enough: book review

So the rant blog re-emerges for a slow-motion book review. I am beginning When Altruism Isn't Enough: The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors.

Why? I'm on the Board of Directors of Iowa Donor Network, the agency that collects and distributes donated organs in Iowa. IDN succeeds in obtaining donations about 50 times each year. It's surprising how few deaths yield transplantable organs, and it's disheartening how many of those go to waste because the decedent hasn't registered advance consent with the donor registry, and the family declines donation. Every consent declined creates a second death -- the person who dies while waiting for a transplanted organ.

There are 424 names on the Iowa list for organ transplant. That means at least a four-year average wait for a transplant. Many patients die on the list, and those who make it to transplant do so only after a long spell of expensive and debilitating dialysis. The national numbers are worse.

I'm sympathetic to the idea of compensated organ donation, especially for live kidney donors. If compensating the families of dead folks will improve consent rates, wonderful. But compensation for live kidney donors has the biggest potential to save lives. For obvious reasons (everyone has an extra), kidneys are the only organ where current technology allows folks to donate and live. While there are live donations, they are relatively rare.

There are potential objections to compensated donation. The ones that come to mind:

- It's too dangerous for the live donor.
- It's not the most effective treatment.
- It's not cost effective.
- It's just wrong somehow.

I don't have patience for the fourth one. It's a strange morality that outlaws taking money for saving a life. Nobody (I hope) says its wrong for a surgeon to make a living doing transplants, or the hospital. Why is the donor the only person cut out of the deal?

As I read the book, I'll see how the book addresses the other potential objections. As I will do this in my own time, and I'm in the middle of tax season, I can't promise that I will do this quickly. I hope that blogging my thoughts will help me read the book carefully and critically. If it proves useful to others, even better.

An Evening at the Caucus

Our caucus was held in our nine-year old's school cafeteria. It was reasonably well-organized. I helped count the votes, and we were out before the neighboring caucus, held in the school gym, had even finished their count.

Mitt Romney was the big winner in my precinct, taking 74 out of 245 votes, or 31.4%. McCain was second with 59 votes, or 24%, and Huckabee was third with 55 votes, for 22.4%. Thompson 25, Paul at 16, and Guiliani with 15 votes rounded out the field. Oh, and Duncan Hunter, with 1.

Still, it's a dumb way to pick a president. But I'm not (next to last place) bitter!

Some pictures...

Inside the Fairmeadows School cafeteria, where West Des Moines Precint 114 Republicans caucused. Another precinct caucused in the gym.



This one was taken at about 7:05, with people still signing up:



Here my wife registers as a Republican so she can participate. She feels guilty. I'll try to help her from straying back to the dark side.



I volunteered to help count, as the "Guiliani representative." Mostly I just wanted to see how it came out. Here's my tally sheet. I Twittered it even before it was announced in the room.



The Caucus Chairman phoned in the results, punching the totals in on his cell phone. Here he listens to it played back before he makes it final:



It sounds like Huckabee and Obama are winning. Fortunately, the rest of the country usually ignores Iowa. Please...

#114 Republican results
HUK 55, ROM 74, MCC 59, THO 25, RUDY15, PAUL 16, HUNTER 1 caucus count

Now they're passing out ballots - I will be a counter.

I don't know why they bother with the speeches. If you are motivated to squander your evening here, you know who you're voting for. 241 people

Now we're listening to speakers from of the candidates. My wife had to register republican to vote here, and it pains her greatly.

Liveblogging my caucus. I'm firing up the long dormant blog to liveblog my caucus. Our precinct, West Des Moines 114, has a big turnout and st

Who says Des Moines Register editorials aren't influential?

The Des Moines Register has declared bottled water an environmental menace. I responded to their stirring cry by immediately making a trip to Sam's Club:



They'll take my bottled water when they peel my cold, dead, well-hydrated fingers from it.

I'm not the only one moved by the Register's eloquence.