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The FBI searched another home owned by President Joe Biden to check for misplaced secret federal documents. An attorney for Biden said they found no classified documents. It is the third search of Biden-owned or occupied properties, adding to other searches for documents in the offices and properties of former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.

Is part of the problem that we have too many documents that are considered to be secret?

The New York Times recently reported:

The federal government classifies more than 50 million documents a year. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to keep track of all of them. Some get lost and found years later — and many more are likely still out there.

NPR adds:

Historian Matthew Connelly says one reason we see problems like this is that far too many government records are being categorized as “classified.”

On average, Connelly says, records are marked as classified three times every second, generating so many secret documents that it’s practically impossible to preserve them all.

“More and more of what’s classified are things like PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets and text messages and video conferences,” he says. “The sheer volume is something we can’t even measure anymore in paper. … We don’t know what’s stored in the cloud — or, in some cases, deleted and just destroyed completely so that no one will ever know.”

Connelly says that over the last 20 years, he’s noticed that documents he would have expected to find in the archives are simply not there. “If you want to try to do the history of the 1980s or even the 1970s, you find that there are just huge gaps in the documentary record,” he says. “And I couldn’t help but ask myself: How much more out there is missing? What is it that we don’t know?”

Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people have the power to declare a document classified. Each decision may include a level of subjective judgment, but there are guidelines for what is classified at what level.

In addition, there are three levels of secret documents. I recently explained that documents are classified by how much damage they would cause to national security if they were shared with somebody not authorized to see them.

(a) National Security Information (hereinafter “classified information”) shall be classified at one of the following three levels:

(1) “Top Secret” shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.

(2) “Secret” shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.

(3) “Confidential” shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security.

The temptation is to “overclassify” a document rather than “underclassify” it and allow sensitive information to be made public. There is little danger of legal trouble if an agency overprotects a document. Oona A. Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and former special counsel at the Pentagon, told the Times that only 5 to 10% of the documents that the Pentagon classifies really deserve that designation.

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Reducing Over-Classification Act, which had the goal of requiring “the Secretary of Homeland Security to develop a strategy to prevent the over-classification of homeland security and other information and to promote the sharing of unclassified homeland security and other information, and for other purposes.”

Not only does overclassification make it difficult to keep track of millions upon millions of documents, but the 9/11 Commission concluded that overclassification and inadequate information sharing contributed to the government’s failure to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11. 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste told a congressional committee:

The Commission found, however, that the failure to share information was the single most important reason why the United States government failed to detect and disrupt the 9/11 plot. … Information has to flow more freely.  Much more information needs to be declassified.  A great deal of information should never be classified at all.

As NPR points out, there is a sort of classified information creep that happens once a document gets marked as secret.

Every official who’s involved — and there are literally millions of people who have security clearances — every one of them … is required to stamp anything related to that as being classified at the same level. And so what happens is, maybe to start with some of this stuff is sensitive, but over time so much information starts to be classified that it can be ludicrous. And some good examples of that include when, if you recall during the so-called scandal over Hillary Clinton’s emails, a lot of what ended up getting classified was, for example, newspaper reporting about drone strikes. So even information that’s out there in the public, even things in some cases that were headline news at the time. Once they’re exchanged among senior officials, then even that information ends up getting classified.

In 1998, a Washington Post editorial stated the problem with too much secrecy:

Government keeps too many secrets. It keeps material classified far too long. Excessive secrecy is expensive, breeds popular distrust of government and withholds from historians, researchers and the voting public information that is important.

Used car boom comes to abrupt end

There is a certain amount of comeuppance in the news that used car prices are plummeting and some car dealers that were demanding outlandish prices for used vehicles during the pandemic are stuck with them now. USA Today reports:

Prices could drop up to 5% for new vehicles and 10% to 20% for used vehicles, according to a report from the bank J.P. Morgan.

The New York Times reports:

“After a huge run up in 2021, last year was a reality check,” Chris Frey, senior manager of economic and industry insights at Cox Automotive, a market research firm. “The used market now faces a challenging year as demand weakens.”

According to Cox, used-car values fell 14 percent in 2022 and are expected to fall more than 4 percent this year. That shift means many dealers may have no choice but to sell some vehicles for less than they paid.

Used car prices swung so high during the pandemic that they were a key ingredient in the Consumer Price Index, which is widely regarded as the key inflation rate for consumers. CNN points out:

Since the start of the pandemic and the resulting disruptions to new car supply chains first sent prices soaring, used car prices posted their largest annual increase on record – up 45% in the 12 months ending in June 2021, according to the Consumer Price Index – before swinging to a 12-month drop of 8.8% in the most recent reading for December.

That was the biggest 12-month plunge in prices for used cars since June 2009, when General Motors and Chrysler were both in bankruptcy proceedings and the economy was hemorrhaging a half-million jobs a month.

Data from Edmunds shows the average price of a used car purchase in December at $29,533, down nearly $1,600 from the record high of $31,095 reached in April 2022.

MotorBiscuit explains how everything in the car sales business is now going in reverse:

Leasing is way down, meaning there aren’t low-mileage cars for a dealership to pluck wholesale. Interest rates are high, and new cars are beginning to reach post-pandemic production for the first time. But they’re much more expensive due to inflation and, well, because automakers can get away with it.

Now we have car buyers with less money to spend. And with fewer cars coming off leases, and new cars viewed as too costly. The result is that car dealers are now looking for clean, older, high-mileage cars as a way to make sales. Obviously, they’re worth less, so they cost less. One dealer told Automotive news, “I normally wouldn’t, but we sold a 2015 Ford F-250 with 80,000 miles on it the other day.”

Automotive News says dealers can only lower prices, accept a lower gross profit on sales, and pay less for trade-ins. But most say they will ramp up used sales this year. That could be tricky as franchised dealerships report it now takes 42 days, on average, to sell a used car.

Another problem concerning dealers is the trend of lessees buying their off-lease cars in lieu of a new and much higher lease. Even a $200 or $300 monthly increase for a new lease can be too much to bite off when many more Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.

The counter to that is there are fewer low-mileage off-lease cars showing up at wholesale auctions. Dealers are hoping that this will be temporary because new car production is beginning to get back to normal. When they start being turned in in two or three years there will, once again, be a higher volume of these desirable cars to sell.

A 2023 phrase: ‘Performative altruism’

You may not know the name Jimmy Donaldson but you might know the name MrBeast, one of the world’s biggest YouTubers. He has 131 million followers and is growing at a rate of a million followers per week.

These are the stats for MrBeast, according to SocialBlade:

(SocialBlade)

MrBeast is well known for doing good things for people and filming it, including rebuilding storm-damaged homes (11.6 million views) and handing out wads of cash to people in need (44 million views). In 2022, he gave away at least $3.2 million in cash — plus a $2.5 million jet and a private island.

But this week’s MrBeast endeavor has already attracted 72 million views and more than a little criticism, even though it undeniably did some good for a lot of people. Donaldson said he was paying for cataract surgery for 1,000 people.

“Unfortunately, nearly half the population with curable blindness doesn’t have access to this surgery, so I wanted to provide this to as many people as possible,” he said in the video. Some of the patients not only got their sight back, but also won $10,000 from MrBeast. He gave one young man $50,000 to pay for college.

According to the nonprofit MyVision.org, which was a partner in the campaign, cataract surgery costs an average of $3,500 per eye.

But all of this comes with social media criticism that MrBeast is using good work to make more money. Why not just do the good work and not tell the world on YouTube?

Devil’s advocate, but while it was an amazing piece of altruism on your behalf: why make a video about it? Why not just do good with no reward other than self satisfaction, knowing you’re making the world a better place? Maybe some people see it as attention seeking. *shrug*

— Oliver Busch (@KefTheBeerMan) January 31, 2023

Insider reports:

As the video continued to circulate, some people voiced questions and concerns about the cost and inaccessibility of eye surgery. Most notably, political commentator and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker reacted to Donaldson’s video in a January 29 livestream, saying that watching it filled him with “rage.” He then alluded to the fact that many American citizens cannot afford surgeries due to their high cost or a lack of medical insurance.

Piker’s comments sparked a wider discussion on Twitter, where clips from the stream were reshared among some users who wrote that they thought people should not be turning to wealthy influencers to fix widespread societal problems.

He responded:

Twitter – Rich people should help others with their money

Me – Okay, I’ll use my money to help people and I promise to give away all my money before I die. Every single penny.

Twitter – MrBeast bad

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) January 30, 2023

Insider adds:

In 2020, Donaldson founded an organization called Beast Philanthropy, with the initial focus of distributing food to underserved regions around Donaldson’s hometown of Greenville, North Carolina, but which has since launched humanitarian aid projects around the world. His charitable and elaborate giveaways featured in videos across his multiple channels have previously been received with overwhelming support and positivity.

The whole cataract surgery campaign began, Donaldson says, when he saw a TED Talk video of an ophthalmologist who said he nearly hung up on MrBeast when he called because he had not heard of him.

Journalists, beyond the curious story of this social media phenomenon, maybe there is a story waiting for you about how many people in your community need cataract surgery but cannot afford it. What prevents them from getting the help they need?