Blog/2026-04-21/Bills Above Replacement
Sports fans are somewhat invested in how their teams do, and especially American sports fans love a good statistic. Perhaps it's the popularity of Moneyball or baseball cards or perhaps the same people who'd like that would naturally also come up with these things. In any case, that means that while fandom can blind you to what works, sports fans have a pretty good concept of "Is this guy any good?": Wins Against Replacement. It's not enough to say a guy isn't good enough for your team because you're not winning enough. The key thing to know is whether you'd win more if you replaced him with the next best alternative. A pretty smart idea.
But for some reason that principle is never applied anywhere else in American society. One thing recently came up in the CA-11 congressional district race. Nancy Pelosi is retiring after a long and lucrative career in US politics and we're going to try to find someone to replace her. The two options are, in San Francisco terms, the moderate Scott Wiener and the progressive Saikat Chakrabarti. The race is full of all sorts of nonsense about carpetbagging[1] and tech money and this and that. I'd prefer if Scott Wiener would win the race because he seems like a fairly sensible policymaker. But Scott Wiener has a big cloud hanging over him: he passed a bill that bans junk fees on receipts and carved out an exemption for restaurants. The carve-out has convinced many that he's in the pocket of "Corporations" and so on.
But the thing here is that none of the other candidates running in the primary have passed (or even proposed) any legislation that bans junk fees for anyone. So as far as I can see, it looks like this (leaving out the joke candidates any race has):
| Candidate | #(Types of Businesses Affected) | #(Types of Businesses Exempted) |
|---|---|---|
| Scott Wiener | 1 | |
| Saikat Chakrabarti | 0 | 0 |
| Connie Chan | 0 | 0 |
If I were interested in junk fees being banned, it wouldn't make sense for me to select one of the candidates who hasn't done any work on that front. It would only make sense for me to pick someone who has managed to get something done. I'm also a big fan of compromise legislation that makes progress on an issue without blocking it forever. So I think highly of someone who can make incremental progress in a way that ratchets forward things on issues I care about. But that's besides the point: if you care about junk fees[2] then it would make sense to select the guy who's acting on that.
Notes
[edit]- ↑ This is particularly amusing in San Francisco - which has a Terminal named after Harvey Milk of "I'm from Woodmere, N.J." sign fame - but it is a fairly typical example of modern politics in the US where the "we don't like y'all outsiders" and "you're not from around here, are you?" is now primarily a left-wing position.
- ↑ I suspect this is not the case and it's a politically convenient attack just like allegations of carpetbagging against Saikat Chakrabarti.
