The idea of Occam’s Razor is to examine a theory. If the theory is relatively simple and straightforward, it’s more likely to be correct than if it’s really complicated. This was a piece in my local paper, today’s Philadelphia Inquirer (The Inquirer doesn’t like posting the author’s pieces because it attracts too many partisan commenters, so I have to use the AEI site to get an online version of the editorial). The editorialist comes up with what I feel is an overly complex theory.
He feels that President Biden wore a mask to his address to the Joint Session of Congress on the 28th of last month. Biden also instructed the people at the address to socially distance from each other. But, the editorialist says, everyone there was vaccinated! It must be some sort of conspiracy to create an atmosphere of crisis!
Hmm. Or, perhaps, it could be that the COVID-19 crisis isn’t quite over yet. As we see in these two charts at the top, we’re doing well, but we’re not doing that well! It really isn’t time to break out the champagne just yet. In which case, Biden may be modeling the sort of behavior he’d like to see the rest of us adopt so that we can get out of the crisis faster!
The second theory presented is that Biden wants to spend a humongous amount of money and thereby needs to create a sense of crisis in order to justify that.
Hmm. Or, perhaps Democrats have wanted to spend a lot of money on infrastructure and other items for a long time and Republicans have been standing in the way. Check out how many filibusters they’ve deployed against the legislation that Democrats would like to pass. Filibuster motions filed per two-year periods remained in first the single, then the double digits until the 2007-2008 session. It’s been at least 100 per session since then. Maybe there’s a big backlog of legislation that Democrats would like to pass!
I tend to favor the second, simpler theory in both cases!