Two Ways To "Help" The Middle Class

A recurrent theme here is that there are two ways of looking at the world.   One arena where those two visions play out is the current competition by politicians to demonstrate that they will "help" the middle class.  Nearly all politicians claim to make "helping" the middle class a priority, but there are two completely different ways of going about it.  One proposed method of "help" is government handouts; the other is facilitating increased self-sufficiency.

There are inevitably some things about this discussion that are not completely intuitive.  Here in my business of commercial litigation -- that is, the fight over who gets the money -- it is taken totally as a given that getting more money is always better and getting less is always worse; that the quantity of money that you gain or lose is the measure of how much better or worse off you are; and that the source of the money doesn't really matter -- you could earn it from a job, or have a good trade in the stock market, or it could fall from the sky, and it's all equivalent.  But I would argue that the principle that it's always better to get more money from whatever source actually does not apply in all circumstances.  For example, suppose that I could somehow supply my children with so much money that they could have everything they possibly want in life without ever having to work -- would that be a good thing for them?  And would it really be better for them than having to work and earn their own way?  I think this would be the worst possible thing for them.  Maybe that's because I think that the thing that makes life worth living is figuring out how to achieve individual and family self-sufficiency in a complex world.  I've known multiple people in my life who got too much money from their parents and found themselves lost and adrift, and quite unhappy.

So where do government handouts fit into this picture?  The political Left completely follows the principle that we use in litigation -- more money is always better, and the fact that the money comes from the government as handouts and obviates the need for the recipients to figure out how to live independently is of no consequence.  Values like hard work, self-sufficiency and, for that matter, freedom, get weighed at zero.  I could give lots of examples, but let's take a few.

The food stamp program (aka SNAP) is a frequent subject of commentary, perhaps because it is a regular target of budget cutters.  It didn't become a target of budget cutters randomly, but rather because it has exploded in size and cost totally out of proportion to any ability to explain that from underlying economic conditions.  According to data compiled here by the Food Research and Action Center, the number of food stamp recipients was 17.2 million in January 2001 (last month of the Clinton administration), 32.2 million in January 2009 (last month of the GW Bush administration) and -- after six years of supposed economic "recovery" -- 46.3 million in December 2014 (last data provided).  Here is what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (left-wing think tank) had to say in January 2015 about a proposal to reduce that 46.3 million by about 1 million:

Roughly 1 million of the nation’s poorest people will be cut off SNAP (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) over the course of 2016, due to the return in many areas of a three-month limit on SNAP benefits for unemployed adults aged 18-50 who aren’t disabled or raising minor children. . . .  The loss of this food assistance, which averages approximately $150 to $200 per person per month for this group, will likely cause serious hardship among many.

No mention of any value placed on loss of self-sufficiency by people who have no reason why they can't take care of themselves.  And that CBPP comment is actually tame compared to a September 2013 article in the New York Daily News reacting to a then-proposed 5% cut in the food stamp program (then at more than 48 million recipients), which within a span of a few sentences used all of the following descriptors: "heartless" "devastating," "sheer meanness," "repugnant," "hunger crisis," "repulsive," "cruel," and "disastrous."

Or consider the dozens of amicus briefs filed in support of the government in the King v. Burwell Obamacare litigation.  The question there is whether the federal government can provide healthcare premium subsidies to people on the federally-established exchanges -- or to put it another way, whether permanent government hand-outs to millions of not-poor citizens (if they were poor they would be getting Medicaid) on balance help those people (because more money is always better) or hurt them (by taking away self-sufficiency).  As far as I can see all of those who support the government, and for that matter the government itself, see the Obamacare subsidies as a dollar-for-dollar gain for the recipients, with no value at all placed on independence or freedom.

An alternative way to help the middle class is to enable and facilitate private sector technological development that has the effect of increasing incomes and reducing costs throughout the economy and making the people richer.  Exhibit A is the "fracking" revolution for oil and gas, which has suddenly led to the price of oil dropping by more than half in the last several months.  Just that alone makes every American who consumes energy (all of us) a couple of percent richer -- and a couple of percent better able to lead independent lives.

Reaction on the Left?  Ban it!  And thus we have the Obama administration in the last few days coming out with restrictions on fracking on federal lands.  This is not a complete ban, and only applies to federal lands, but the regulations appear clearly intended to hobble fracking to the maximum extent that the administration can get away with right now.  And how did environmental groups react?  With outrage, of course -- according to the Washington Times here.  They want fracking outright banned immediately and everywhere.  I guess then we can all live off federal hand-outs while we freeze in the dark. 

Washington Budgetspeak From The New York Times

On Tuesday Republicans in Congress released a budget resolution covering the next ten years through 2024, and on Wednesday, right on cue, the New York Times went apoplectic.  Wednesday's print edition contains both a "news" article by Jonathan Weisman on page A16 ("Republicans Propose Budget With Deep Cuts") and an unsigned editorial on the Editorial Page ("The House Budget Disaster").   I'll quote some of the main passages, and then, here is the one-question quiz that you will be asked to take after reading them:  Does the budget resolution propose that federal spending will increase or decrease over the period in question?  As fair warning, I will advise you that neither the article nor the editorial mentions any actual numbers as to the amounts of spending proposed, either in the aggregate or on any particular program.

In the editorial, the point is not only that there are deep cuts, but that they are directed specifically at the poor and innocent.

The plan’s deep cuts land squarely on the people who most need help: the poor and the working class. . . .  [T]he plan proposes deep cuts to “mandatory” nondefense spending, which includes Medicaid, federal pensions, food stamps, farm supports and tax credits for the working poor. . . .    Over all, at least two-thirds of the $5 trillion in cuts over 10 years would come from programs that focus on low- and modest-income Americans, even though such programs account for less than one-fourth of all federal program costs. . . .   House Republicans are sticking to their tired themes of spending cuts, no matter the need or consequences, and tax cuts above all.

I've got the word "cuts" in there four times, two of them "deep cuts," just in that short excerpt.  Then there's the "news" article:

The prescribed cuts would be deep. . . .  The plan would cut billions of dollars from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. . . .  Domestic programs would be cut $519 billion below the already restrictive caps set in 2011. . . . 

So get ready and take the quiz.  It must be that with these "deep cuts" and "$5 trillion in cuts" over the next ten years that federal spending will be going down at least a little, right?  Wrong!  In fact, the budget resolution proposes that federal spending will increase in every year, and over the ten years will go from $3.664 trillion in FY2015 to $4.995 trillion in FY2024.  Here is a link to a chart attached to the resolution materials with the proposed year-by-year spending.  The "$5 trillion in cuts" is not a real cut in the sense that any normal person would use the word, but rather a "cut" from a higher previously proposed rate of spending increase to a somewhat lower trajectory of spending increase.  If we kept spending at this year's level, we would spend $36.6 trillion over the next ten years.  We were previously projecting that we were actually going to spend $47 trillion, but now we're "cutting" our projection to $42 trillion, which is still almost $7 trillion more than keeping spending level.

Am I the only one offended by reading  what purports to be news coverage of spending "cuts" that somehow never mentions that the spending is not going down, but rather up, and not by a small amount?  New York Times, this is how you have earned yourself the name of "Pravda."  You can argue all you want that spending going forward should be higher than the Republicans propose, but can't you at least be honest with us and let us know that even under their proposal spending is going up and not down?  Back in the Soviet Union, everyone knew that what was in Pravda was ridiculous, but nobody had any way of getting at the real facts.  Even in the U.S. it used to be that you had to go to Washington to look at these government documents, and nobody really questioned the New York Times narrative, no matter how preposterous.  Today, we can get the government documents online, and people like the Manhattan Contrarian can read them and see what they say.

And while we're discussing this subject, the food stamp program, aka SNAP, needs some special mention.  Before Obama, this program had at least some semblance of a real safety net item, and beneficiaries and spending generally went up and down with economic cycles.  Under Obama, there has been an aggressive effort to sign up absolutely as many people as possible onto SNAP and thereby hook them onto government dependency.  During a period of so-called economic recovery since 2009, beneficiaries have almost doubled to close to 50 million, and spending has more than doubled to about $80 billion per year.  Read about the aggressive campaign to sign up new recipients here.  Also, on the campaign to prevent any cuts, no matter how small, even though the program has somehow doubled when by any reasonable standard it should have been shrinking, see here. 

Which Is Better, Weak Currency Or Strong?

The field of economics is characterized by many brilliant insights about human behavior, combined with almost as many preposterous fallacies that somehow get widespread acceptance.  Like the idea that the way to improve a sluggish economy is to have the government borrow huge sums of money and waste it on unproductive projects -- how could anyone actually believe that?  (OK, it helps that the government puts out fake data that value wasteful projects as fully equal to productive projects.  But I digress.)

Right up there with that one is the idea that currency devaluation improves a country's economic position relative to others.  Suppose I put the issue this way:  Should the goal of a country's economic policy be to enrich the people of the country or to impoverish them?  Put in those terms, I would hope that most everyone would agree that the goal should be to enrich the people, and certainly not to impoverish them.  If a country that imports 20% of its consumption from other currency areas has its currency appreciate 10% relative to the other currencies, then its people just got 2% richer; and if its currency depreciates 10%, then its people just got 2% poorer.  Obviously currency appreciation is better.  What's so complicated about that to understand?

And yet we all know that in the 1930s world governments engaged in successive currency devaluations to try to improve the economic standing of their own country relative to others.  You may have thought that that era had passed.  No, it's back.  Today seemingly every major currency area is engaged in a game to drive its currency down -- Europe, Japan, China.  The ECB has just launched a big "QE" program, and suddenly the euro has had rather a dramatic decline against the dollar over the last several weeks.  And the big question is, should the U.S. be following suit?

Of course, the usual economic fallacists are popping up to advocate for competitive devaluation by the U.S.  As always, the leader is Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman, with a column on March 13:

Who wins from this market move [of the declining euro]? Europe: a weaker euro makes European industry more competitive against rivals, boosting both exports and firms that compete with imports, and the effect is to mitigate the euroslump. Who loses? We do, as our industry loses competitiveness, not just in European markets, but in countries where our exports compete with theirs. America has been experiencing a modest manufacturing revival in recent years, but that revival will be cut short if the dollar stays this high for long.  In effect, then, Europe is managing to export some of its stagnation to the rest of us.

Well, of course certain export industries benefit from a declining currency, but obviously they are a minority of any economy and the people as a whole are hurt.

In the category of people who can usually be counted on not to fall for fallacies, we have Megan McArdle of Bloomberg News, who also comes out (on March 12) for the benefits of a weaker currency.  Megan sees the positive of a weak currency in "export[ing] more than we import" because of the "importance of work" to our lives.  Huh?  There's no inconsistency between a hard currency and full employment.  In fact, it doesn't take much looking at world economies to figure out that the most successful ones have consistently strong currencies and really low unemployment.  Switzerland -- now there's a strong currency!  Sure the exporters complain every time the currency goes up, but somehow they always figure out that they still have a comparative advantage in something.  The unemployment rate has ranged between 2.9% and 3.5% over the past year.  Or Singapore.  There the unemployment rate is barely 2% and you have to pay about $80,000 per year to hire a hotel maid.

And then there are the economies where the currency is not just declining, but collapsing.  Russia and Venezuela come to mind.  Do they really represent models to emulate?

Can New York Ever Have A Normal Housing Market Again?

I've been spending the week in the area of Sarasota, Florida, and since I can't help myself I've been sizing up what the housing market looks like.   Of course the big historical event in the market here -- as in much of the rest of the country -- was the overbuilding up to 2006, followed by the bust of 2007.  According to this HUD report from 3Q 2013, the rental vacancy rate in this area was 10% as recently as 2010, but had dropped steadily to about 4% at that time.  New construction has resumed at levels more modest than at the peak.  Look on real estate web sites for homes either for sale or rent, and you find availability at all price points.  What look like decent rentals can be had for as little as $1 per square foot per month (about $750 per month for a decent-sized one-bedroom apartment) and quite nice ones for $2 psf/mth.   For condos, there are plenty available around $300 - 400 psf (that's around $500,000 for a nice two-bedroom), and $1000 psf gets you a premium high floor place in one of the top areas or at the beach.

And they got there basically by just letting the builders build.  OK, there was a contribution of Fannie/Freddie to the overbuilding, and that may still have some depressing effect on prices.  It's not possible to know exactly how much the depressing effect is, if any.  My own suspicion is not much.  Today, supply and demand are fairly well balanced.

And then we have the Manhattan market, with the extreme special case of the West Village.  We have rent regulations persisting on the majority of rental apartments, landmarking almost everywhere and vociferous neighborhood opposition to any attempts to build anything new.  Result: there has been minimal new construction literally since World War II.  Today, there is huge demand for apartments, but there are exactly two large condo buildings under construction in about a full square mile.  One is completely sold out, although still many months from completion.  The other is called the Greenwich Lane, at 7th Avenue and 11th Street.  Here is its website.  It's got at least a year to go to completion, but has limited availability remaining.  A modest 1000+ sq. ft. two bedroom over there will run you about $4 million -- $3500+ psf.  I hope you are not expecting a view for that price.

Of course even this one building has had to face strenuous neighborhood opposition.  Below is a picture of our new Mayor de Blasio at a rally back in 2013 when he was a candidate, protesting replacement of the predecessor hospital with this condo.  

At $3500 psf, almost nobody can afford to buy these things.  With severe artificial supply restrictions, they have priced just about everybody out of the market.  But our local housing geniuses think they have the answer, which is "affordable housing."  The big news in the past week is that the City has a 25,000 sq. ft. lot available up at 11th Avenue and 39th Street (about a mile plus North of the West Village).  At current values it could be sold for market rate development for about $250 million.  But instead the local Community Board wants to require "affordable housing" to be built on the site, and instead of just selling the site to the highest bidder, they will "designate" a developer to build the "affordable" building.  With luck a couple of hundred families will get these apartments at a subsidy of around $2+ million per family.  The City will be very lucky if it gets even a small part of the $250 million it could so easily have.  

Meanwhile, look around for a rental apartment in Manhattan, and you will find that no market exists except for the very top end.  All the rent regulated apartments are claimed for life by the current occupants, and never become available.

UPDATE March 17:  Crain's New York Business reports today on a speech given yesterday by Carl Weisbrod, de Blasio's Director of the Department of City Planning.  Weisbrod of course stood up for de Blasio's plan to build 80,000 "affordable" units over the next 10 years, but also took the position that the real problem is cutbacks of federal money:

"For all our effort, even if we hit all our targets, we won't fully solve the housing crisis in the next decade unless there is a radical change in federal housing policy -- sadly an unlikely occurrence," he said.  Over the long term, the federal government has made cuts to several housing programs used by the city to create affordable housing, including funding to the New York City Housing Authority.

Funny, but in the Soviet Union they had a full-court-press effort to build nearly "free" apartments for the masses, and after 70 years of that they had 25 year waiting lists for tiny apartments.  Over at NYCHA we have hideous eyesore permanent slums housing half a million people.  A twenty year waiting list for the apartments never moves, and if you're "lucky" enough to get in you are trapped in the place in poverty for life.  And the buildings have a multi-billion dollar backlog of maintenance, and no money to pay for it because nobody pays much rent.  And all Weisbrod can think of is, more of the free federal money for more of same.  Hey Carl, how about the solution of just letting the builders build.  Sure works in Sarasota!

Full disclosure:  I actually had Mr. Weisbrod as a client 20+ years ago when he headed something called the New York State Urban Development Corporation.

With Venezuela Collapsing, They Still Can't Learn

The latest from Venezuela comes from the New York Times in a March 9 article by William Neuman titled "In Chavez, Maduro Trusts, Maybe to His Detriment and Venezuela's."  (I actually met Neuman once back when he worked for the Real Estate Section, and he is one of the few guys at Pravda whom I would trust to report a story on world economics relatively straight.)  Neuman describes a Venezuela "sinking deeper into an economic crisis," while its leader, Nicolas Maduro, doubles down on the very destructive economic policies that got the country into its predicament:

Faced with huge lines and shortages of basic items like corn flour or sugar, Mr. Maduro has jailed retail executives while steadfastly maintaining the price controls that many economists say cause the problem.

Neuman even quotes former economics officials of the Chavez regime who are critical of Maduro for not changing policies in the face of their glaringly obvious destructive consequences.  However, none of those officials say what they would do differently, or, God forbid, suggest trying a little capitalism.

Meanwhile, on the same day, a great article from Kevin Williamson at NRO on the same subject, title "The Left's Mess in Venezuela."  This one definitely merits quoting at some length:

Venezuela had a good run of it for about five minutes there, at least in public-relations terms. When petroleum prices were booming, all it took was a few gallons of heating oil from Hugo Chávez to buy the extravagant praise of House members, with Representative Chaka Fattah (D., Philadelphia) issuing statements praising Venezuela’s state-run oil company “and the Venezuelan people for their benevolence.” Lest anybody feel creeped out by running political errands for a brutal and repressive caudillo, Joseph Kennedy — son of Senator Robert Kennedy — proclaimed that refusing the strongman’s patronage would be “a crime against humanity.” Kennedy was at the time the director of Citizens Energy, which had a contract to help distribute that Venezuelan heating oil. . . .  

So Venezuela had the good fortune to be sitting on a lot of oil reserves during a brief period when oil prices were high, giving it the momentary ability to create an illusion that socialism could work.  Things were already starting to fall apart even when oil prices were high a few months ago, but when the prices fell the crisis really hit.  Williamson then gets into quoting some of the endless list of leftist fools and dupes who fell for the Chavez illusion: 

Celebrities came to sit at his feet, with Sean Penn calling him a “champion” of the world’s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as “a great hero,” Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, Danny Glover celebrating him as a “champion of democracy.” His successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued in the Chávez vein, and even as basics such as food and toilet paper disappeared the American Left hailed him as a hero, with Jesse Myerson, Rolling Stone’s fashionable uptown communist, calling his economic program “basically terrific.”  

And it goes on from there.  Thank you, Kevin, for calling these people (or at least a few of them) out.  All I can say is, there isn't nearly enough reporting coming out of Venezuela to keep in our faces how socialism inevitably ends.  But -- with my great apologies to the sad people who have to live in these places -- thank God we at least have Venezuela, and I guess Cuba and North Korea, to keep alive human memory of what happens when you try to pursue the socialist illusion.

And the ultimate question: Is it possible for human beings to learn these lessons?   Really, I thought when the Soviet Union fell that the socialist illusion would die with it.  Boy was I wrong!  Here are a couple of recent data points:

• A month ago on February 10, IBD reported on a January 22 speech at the annual Davos confab of U.N. climate pooh-bah Christiana Figueres (she's "Executive Secretary of the Framework Convention on Climate Change"), where she said, among other things, "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution. . . .  This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history."  Everybody understood that the idea is to replace capitalism with socialism.  And you thought that the "climate change" scare was about saving the environment?
• And finally, from today's Wall Street Journal, a front page article by Bill Spindle titled "Drop in Oil Threatens Iraq Terror Fight."  First line: "Clobbered by falling oil prices, Iraq is headed over a fiscal cliff, unable to make critical investments needed to keep its oil flowing and still pay the skyrocketing costs of fighting Islamic State extremists, according to government officials."  Huh?  How in heavens name did the Iraqi government get itself in the position of being the only entity that can make investments to increase oil production in that country?  Yes, the U.S. occupation ended with the oil industry socialized in Iraq, and thus a drop in oil prices means that limited state revenues must be allocated between either enhancing oil production or fighting the existential enemy.  At the same time, perhaps by magic, the U.S. manages to be the world's number one oil producer without devoting a dime of government investment to the enterprise.  Capitalism!  Could it really be that our own government doesn't know how capitalism works and was so stupid that it poured a trillion dollars or so into liberating Iraq only to put its oil industry in the hands of a socialist state?  Yes, that's how stupid we are.  And it happened substantially on the watch of W, although with final implementation by the Obama administration.  

Literally nobody, even Republican presidential administrations in the United States, understands how or why capitalism works and socialism doesn't.  And it seems that no number of socialist disasters can teach the lesson.
 

"Diversity" Hits A Dead End

"Diversity" is one of those words that has a completely different meaning in the New York Times than anything you thought it might mean.  If you don't believe me, you will be entertained by considering an article by Elizabeth Harris that appeared on Friday March 6, headlined "Lack of Diversity Persists in Admissions to Elite City Schools." 

As background for those unfamiliar with our system, New York City has eight elite specialized high schools, the most famous being Stuyvesant (in Manhattan), Bronx Science and Brooklyn Technical.  Admission to these schools is by a test given each year to eighth graders.  Because the result is strictly determined by a test, there is no opportunity for behind-the-scenes maneuvering and racial gerrymandering as we find, for example, in admissions to most elite state universities around the country.  Somewhat remarkably, in this competition the chips just fall where they may.  The results of this year's test just came out, and 5,103 students (of a total of about 70,000+ eighth graders) were offered spots in the eight elite schools. 

And the racial breakdown of those admitted?  According to Harris, of the 5,103, 5% were black, 7% were Hispanic, 28% were white, and 52% were Asian.  (She doesn't tell us about the missing 8%.)  Recognize here that the Asians are substantially immigrants or children of immigrants, and themselves from wildly diverse communities including Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Tibetans, Filippinos, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Afghanis, Iranians, Israelis, Arabs, and I could go on.  If you want to get some flavor of this, try taking the #7 subway train out to Queens some day.  So how exactly do these test results demonstrate "lack of diversity"?  Harris does not explain.  Here's the only explanation I can come up with:  We are operating with a new definition of "diversity" where the word means something like "a situation where blacks and Hispanics are represented with at least as high a percentage as their percentage of the population as a whole, and where all other ethnic groups are represented at a percentage lower than their percentage of the population as a whole."

You are undoubtedly curious as to how these high school admissions numbers compare to the racial breakdown of New York City's population overall, and to the racial breakdown of all New York City public school students.  You won't be surprised to learn that Harris does not provide most of those figures, but here is a 2013 report prepared for the New York City School Construction Authority (pdf) that has both Census data for the City as a whole (at pages 8-9) as well as demographic data for the City schools system (at pages 34-36).   Of course, even here we do not get any further breakdown of the "Asian" category.  With that limitation, here are the numbers:

City as a whole (2010 Census data): White 44%, black 25.5%, Asian 12.7%, Hispanic 28.6%.  (The Census numbers add up to well over 100% because "Hispanic" is not a race and overlaps with other categories.)  New York City school enrollment (2011/12 school year): White 16%, black 28%, Asian 15%, Hispanic 41%.

One thing immediately obvious (and that Harris totally omits) is that it's not just blacks and Hispanics, but also whites, who come out in the high school admissions competition with substantially fewer successful candidates than their pro rata share of the population.  In other words, there is no way of construing the numbers to imply that whites are advantaging themselves over the blacks and Hispanics.  Rather, it's the Asians who are highly successful, claiming slots from all of whites, blacks, and Hispanics.

Harris's summary of the reaction to the test results:

In the public school system in recent years, just shy of 30 percent of students have been black and about 40 percent have been Hispanic, and there is widespread agreement that the low numbers of these students in specialized schools is a problem.

I love that unspecific "there is widespread agreement."  Has anybody asked any of the Asians?

Then there are the reactions of Mayor Bill de Blasio and his Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose son is a senior at Brooklyn Technical High School, the largest specialized school, said the schools should more closely resemble the population of the city.  In a statement on Thursday, the city’s schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said, “It’s critical that our city’s specialized high schools reflect the diversity of our city.”

Sounds to me like they are proposing naked discrimination against the Asians.  Hey Asians, how many of you know that you have now been designated as people against whom naked discrimination by the state is to be permitted and encouraged?  Your dad may speak broken English and drive a cab 12 hours a day, but already you have been deemed to have too much "privilege" and you must be knocked back by having the state impose quotas on you.

What de Blasio and Farina are proposing is very analogous to the naked discrimination practiced against Jews in an earlier generation by, for example, the Ivy League schools and large law firms.  Except in the case of the Jews, while others discriminated against them, New York City and State behaved honorably and, for example, allowed them to dominate the elite high schools for many years.  The good news is that the Jews overcame the discrimination against them, and my bet is that the Asians will too.