The Daily Parker

So far—and keep in mind, we're only 2/3 done with the month—Chicago has had more precipitation this May than in any previous May, with 216 mm total. It's interesting to note that 2019 and 2018 were also the wettest Mays ever, with 210 mm and 208 mm respectively.

In Northwest Michigan, the record rainfall caused a pair of dams to break, flooding the town of Midland under 2.75 m of water.

The Lake Michigan-Huron system continues at record levels for the fifth month in a row, with no sign of receding.

Welcome to the new normal.

I think today is Tuesday, the first day of my 10th week working from home. That would make today...March 80th? April 49th? Who knows.

It is, however, just past lunchtime, and today I had shawarma and mixed news:

• Carbon emissions have declined 17% year-over-year, thanks to Covid-19-related slowdowns reducing petroleum consumption. (See? It's not all bad news.)
• Crain's Chicago Business reviews how businesses rate Mayor Lori Lightfoot's first year in office. And their editorial board says we should "start rethinking 'normal'."
• Consistent with the way authoritarian governments have always worked, Attorney General Bill Barr wants to send his own personal history down the memory hole.
• Speaking of populist lies, McSweeney's has the new New York Times style guide on how to avoid saying "the president lied."
• Scientific American explains "death awareness" and how it makes people respond to, say, pandemics.
• Metra, Chicago's heavy-rail commuter agency, will break ground on a new station in Edgewater this month.

Earlier, I mentioned that the state's unemployment office accidentally revealed thousands of records in an own goal. Turns out, Deloitte Consulting did the work, so I am no longer surprised. Note to anyone who needs software written: don't hire a big consulting firm. They don't attract the best developers because they use manager-driven development patterns that irritate the hell out of anyone with talent.

Long day, with meetings until 8:45pm and the current sprint ending tomorrow at work, so I'll read most of these after the spring review:

• Tara Smith warns about the unholy alliance of anti-vaxers and Covid-19 quarantine protesters. Libby Watson calls it a "deranged civil religion."
• You think President Trump firing State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was about walking Mike Pompeo's dogs? Uh, no. It was about the $8 bn arms deal with Saudi Arabia that Linick was about to expose.
• Why is Trump going after Obama again? Jennifer Rubin has a theory. Even Attorney General Bill Barr, no ethical paragon he, shut down the idea of investigating Obama or Biden—probably for no other reason than it would not be good to have that precedent on the books next January.
• In his latest time capsule, James Fallows looks at the past week and can scarcely believe the 5 or 6 scandals that would have been top stories in any other year.
• After we got 200 mm of rain in the last 36 hours, the forecast calls for slightly drier and much warmer weather ahead. The Sears Tower remains without power, however, after police in boats had to rescue homeless people on Lower Wacker Drive. (“Two of the top 5 wettest May days ever were in the past 4 days – no wonder why the flooding is so bad, that is unreal,” [National Weather Service meteorologist Gino] Izzi said.)
• Cranky Flier analyzes Delta's 777 retirement plan.
• Anthony Paletta looks at "why airports die."

Finally, Sheffield, U.K., wildlife photographer Simon Dell built a Hobbiton for the local field mice. It's as adorable as it sounds.

On 18 May 1980, forty years ago today, the Washington-state volcano Mt St Helens exploded, killing dozens of people who had been warned to evacuate days earlier:

I was 150 miles away on May 18, 1980, when Mount St. Helens blew, but my bed shook and the windows on my Oregon A-frame rattled.

I rushed to my radio station and its clacking Associated Press wire machine, and pulled up a pile of wire copy from the floor. The reports coming in from southwest Washington state were hard to believe....

Despite two months of earthquakes, ashfall, and a growing bulge on the north side of the mountain, the night before was quiet. That morning was tranquil. The cone-shaped mountain had a white mantle of snow.

U.S. Geological Survey geologist David Johnston was [10 km from the mountain]. He had a car and camper and was calling in reports to the USGS command post in Vancouver, Wash. The day before, he convinced visitors from the University of Washington to leave. They wanted to camp with him overnight. "It's too dangerous," he told them.

The death toll reached 57 and included ham radio operator Gerry Martin and USGS geologist David Johnston. All but three of those killed were outside the "red zone" established by Washington Gov. Dixy Lee Ray. Geologists had pushed for a larger area with mandatory evacuations. But pressure to shrink the danger zone was intense from cabin owners, campers and hikers, and logging companies, including Weyerhaeuser, the timber giant that owned private forests in the area.

National Geographic explains what we've learned since then:

The volcano’s defiant position out of line perches it atop a zone of rock too cold to produce the magma necessary to feed its furious blasts.

“There shouldn’t be a volcano where Mount St. Helens is,” says Seth Moran, scientist-in-charge at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver, Washington.

Four decades after Mount St. Helens’ eruption, scientists finally are unearthing some clues to its curious position. In one of the most comprehensive efforts to trace a volcano’s roots, the Imaging Magma Under St. Helens project, or iMUSH for short, used a slew of analyses to bring these subterranean secrets to light. Overall, the volcano doesn’t follow the textbook picture of a peak sitting above a chamber of molten rock. Instead, it seems, a diffuse cloud of partially molten blobs lingers deep below the surface, offset to the east of the edifice, toward the neighboring Mount Adams.

Most of the Cascade volcanoes—and others around the world—take shape above the spots where the plunging slab descends to roughly 62 miles deep, where temperatures get high enough for magma to form. But the situation is different at Mount St. Helens. Standing tens of miles to the west of other volcanoes, the infamous peak perches a mere 42 miles above the subducting plate.

Mt St Helens remains active, having erupted most recently in 2008.

Charlie Pierce, noting that "[p]eople with firearms forced the civil government of the state of Michigan to shut itself down," wants to know in what sense this isn't terrorism. In other fun weekend stories:

• The Illinois Dept. of Employment Security had a "glitch" in their unemployment claims processing app that exposed private information. I'm curious who wrote the software.
• Jared Kushner: evil and stupid.
• Speaking of evil and stupid, the president continues to downplay and undercount Covid-19 deaths because, let's face it, he's responsible for many of them.
• Chicago faces another $1bn budget hole next year.

And it's pouring, and will continue to do so for several more hours.

Today I'll try to avoid the most depressing stories:

• The North Shore Channel Trail bridge just north of Lincoln Avenue opened this week, completing an 11 km continuous path from Lincoln Square to Evanston.
• Experts warn that herd immunity (a) is an economic concept, not a health concept and (b) shouldn't apply to humans because we're not herd animals.
• Wisconsin remains in total chaos today after the state supreme court terminated Governor Tony Evans' stay-at-home order, approximately two weeks before a predictable, massive uptick in Covid-19 cases.
• Delta Airlines has decided to retire its fleet of 18 B777 airplanes years ahead of schedule due to an unexpected drop in demand for air travel.
• The pro-contagion, rabid right-wingers flashing placards saying "Be Like Sweden" clearly have no comprehension of Sweden's efforts to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2.
• US retail sales declined 16.4% in April, pushing the total decline since February to nearly 25%, the worst decline in history.
• Wired has a portrait of Marcus Hutchins, the hacker who stopped the WannaCry virus from killing us all and then went to jail for his previous activities designing and spreading malware.
• Andrew Sullivan tells the story of Samuel Pepys, "the very first pandemic blogger."

Finally, Vanity Fair has reprinted its 1931 cover article on Al Capone, which seems somehow timely.

The bascule bridge over the Chicago River at Michigan Avenue turned 100 today. The Chicago Tribune has photos.

Also:

• The Tribune explains how the various Covid-19 tests work, and where Illinois is in getting them to people.
• Seems I'm not the only one who thought a combination between GrubHub and Uber might not fit in with US antitrust laws.
• A new book says the US would lose a direct military confrontation with China, because they're set up to fight a different war than we are.
• Turns out, the 4-3 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision yesterday that sent the state's Covid-19 response into chaos may not have been the Republican Party's best move.
• The FBI has seized US Senator Richard Burr's (R-NC) mobile phone as part of an investigation into his alleged securities trading on the nonpublic information he received about Covid-19 in an intelligence briefing in January.
• The full 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals overturned a 3-judge panel from the same court, holding that the president's businesses cannot derive income from foreign governments under the constitution's emoluments clause.

And the New York Times interviewed science-fiction author John Scalzi, whose The Last Emperox came out two weeks ago.

Just when you thought the Republican Party couldn't become more anti-science and pro-profit (at the expense of workers), the Wisconsin Supreme Court just struck down Wisconsin's stay-at-home order on a 4-3 party-line vote.

If only that were all:

• Jennifer Rubin points out that "Trump's abject hypocrisy shows us where he's failed."
• Not only has Trump "lost the plot," he "has no plan," according to two articles this week in The Atlantic. How is this news cycle different from all other news cycles?
• The US Supreme Court listened to arguments this week about the electoral college and Trump's tax returns. It seems likely the nation will lose both cases.
• The judge presiding over Michael Flynn's case has asked a retired judge to brief him on whether to hold Flynn in criminal contempt for perjury, after the Justice Dept. sought to end its prosecution of Flynn.
• The City of Chicago has ordered food delivery services to disclose the fees they charge restaurants so consumers have more transparency. Restaurants have complained about price-gouging from GrubHub and others.
• Meanwhile, Uber is in talks to buy GrubHub. If we had a functioning FTC, this would never happen.
• David Kamp brings back my childhood with his paean to Zoom, the children's television show I watched religiously when I was a kid.
• Anthropologists have found a 45,000-year-old midden containing homo sapiens tools, bones, and jewelry in a cave in Bulgaria. It's evidence of the earliest modern humans in Europe.
• The New York Times has an oral history of Mad Max: Fury Road, which the author calls a "modern action classic." (It's one of my faves as well.)

Someday, we'll all look back on this time, laugh nervously, and change the subject.

This is a wonky post about tax law and at the same time a pissed-off post about political advocacy under cover of "neutral" commentary that takes advantage of people's ignorance of a nuanced area of law.

Bruce Willey, an Iowa-based tax lawyer, claims in a pearl-clutching post on Kiplinger that recent IRS guidance on Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan forgiveness "could bankrupt small businesses:"

On April 30, late in the evening — when few people were likely paying attention — the IRS released guidance that essentially nullified much of the benefit of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) created under the CARES Act. It stated that those who receive PPP may not receive tax deductions for using those funds to pay expenses. That includes expenses like payroll and rent, the very point of the PPP.

Let’s say a small-business owner requests and receives $600,000 to cover payroll for the 10 weeks where he or she is covered by the PPP. If they can’t deduct that amount as expenses, that means their federal tax burden clocks in at a rate of 37%.

That equates to a $222,000 increase in their taxable income. Meaning the effective tax-free benefit of the loan is $378,000, not the $600,000 intended by the law.

No, no, no, it does not. And it's easy to see why.

Let's say that the small business takes $600k in PPP loans and pays out $600k in payrolls (including employer payroll taxes) in 2020. Let's also say the business takes in $600k in sales revenue, and that their total 2020 deductible expenses would be $1.2m regardless of the PPP.

So: Under the CARES act, they have $600k in taxable income and $1.2m in deductible expenses. But, since 50% of their 2020 books income was the $600k grant, they can only deduct 50% of that $1.2m—i.e., $600k. Result: $0 adjusted gross income and $0 taxes.

Now let's look at what happens if Bailey's wish comes true, and why the IRS said no. If the business can deduct the full $1.2m, they will have a net operating loss (NOL) of $600k, that they can use to offset future income. And that can generate future NOLs until they finally have enough AGI to offset the full NOL. A $600k NOL for a $1.2m-a-year business would probably wipe out their income tax burden for many years.

In other words, the result of the IRS guidance isn't that the IRS would cost the business money; it's that it would prevent the business from avoiding legitimate taxes in future years. And Willey knows this; he's just hoping you don't.

(Also, the IRS releases guidance every Friday night, which he also knows. But people who don't deal with income tax regularly probably don't, which he's counting on.)

My day kept getting longer as it went on in a way that people living through the pandemic will understand. So I didn't have time to read any of these yesterday:

• The Chicago Tribune produced six charts that explain the pandemic's economic effects.
• Rolling Stone identifies the four men most responsible for our current calamity.
• The Washington Posts lists six takeaways from Dr Anthony Fauci's testimony before the Senate today.
• Consumer Reports helps you avoid Zoombombing.
• The New Yorker describes the secret lives of fungi.

Finally, Jon Oliver has put out a line of Last Week Tonight stamps to help support the US Postal Service. So naturally I bought some.