Recommended: What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking

Distinguished Rutgers historian Jackson Lears has a good piece in the January London Review of Books entitled What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking. As he points out, liberals and the liberal media are still convinced  Russia somehow caused the election of Donald Trump, despite the fact that no evidence has yet emerged to support this claim. And he laments, as I do, that this narrative apparently has diverted liberals from the necessary self-examination as to why they really lost the election.

More than that, many liberals are actively hostile to any attempt to have a reasoned, evidence-based  discussion about this issue. It is part of the remarkably illiberal form of liberalism that has emerged recently, which includes shouting down campus speakers they don't agree with, and demonizing anyone who dares to question the reigning liberal orthodoxy.  This certainly isn't the liberalism I believe in.

Recommended: Anatomy of Failure

From the preface to Harlam Ullman's new book Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts:

Since the official end of the Cold War in 1991, remarkably, the United States has been at war or engaged in significant military conflicts and interventions for over two-thirds of the intervening years. . . . .Wars and conflicts in Iraq in 1991; Somalia, 1992-93; the global war of terror, and Afghanistan, 2001-present; Iraq, 2003-present; and Syria and Yemen since 2006 represent a total of nineteen of the past twenty-six years in which the nation's armed forces have been engaged in combat! . . . The only outright victory in the past six decades was the first Iraq War in 1991

Ulman sets out to examine why we have failed so consistently in our military adventures. This is an important book, not only to understand why we have failed so consistently in the past, but to understand what must be done to prepare the nation for the uncertain and highly dangerous future we face. Certainly the inexperience of our recent presidents in both parties (with the possible exception of the first President Bush) is a factor, as is the outdated Washington groupthink of the advisors they had and still have to draw on. But Ullman argues for a more comprehensive approach to building national strategy, based on a better understanding of our opponents and a more aggressive use of red teams to question and test the assumptions underlying our decisions to go to use military force.

A year of the Trump administration

As we come to the end of 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, what have we learned?

Well, clearly Trump himself is often his own worst enemy. He often undercuts his own efforts with contradictory and ill-timed Twitter postings.  On the other hand his Twitter postings do give him a direct line to the 34 million followers of his Twitter account, most of them probably his solid base, and most of them probably largely in agreement with his opinions. On balance I think his Twitter postings probably help him more than they hurt him, despite the sneering opinions of the media talking heads, because they let him bypass the largely anti-Trump spin that the mainstream media give almost anything he says or does.

In terms of the economy, which is probably the single most important factor in the upcoming midterm elections, the numbers look good. Blue collar wages are up in 2017 by between 3% and 4%, depending on the sector.  US third quarter 2017 growth is up to 3.3%, much better than the anemic 1.5-2% growth over the Obama years. Unemployment has dropped to 4%, the lowest level in many years. Companies are planning to repatriate trillions of profit dollars parked overseas, and investment is up significantly. This may or may not be due to anything this administration has done, but voters will give Trump and the GOP the credit for it anyway.

And they managed to pass the tax bill which will actually reduce taxes for most taxpayers next year, despite the rather hysterical claims by Nancy Pelosi that this is the end of the world. It has some reasonable things in it, like capping the state tax deductions and the mortgage interest deductions at middle class levels, and reducing the corporate tax rate to something in line with the rest of the world. Of course actually we really need to increase taxes to cover our massive annual federal deficit, but neither party is going to do that in today’s Washington.

There is of course a predictable amount of hand-wringing about Trump's reduction in the staffing of agencies like the State Department and the EPA. But realistically, with a half-trillion dollar a year federal deficit, these departments - and all other federal departments - need to be trimmed in size. Sure the things they do may be desirable, perhaps even important, but if the taxpayers aren't willing to pay enough taxes to support their size, then their size needs to be reduced. 

In foreign affairs, the Trump administration has managed to get China more actively involved in restraining North Korea’s nuclear and missile advances, which is more that Obama managed to do. The last round of UN sanctions was supported by both Russia and China, which shows some serious backroom negotiating with them, again more than Obama ever managed to do. Of course the sanctions may still not work – Kim has clearly decided that nuclear weapons are the only way to ensure the survival of his brutal regime.

The party in power typically loses seats in the midterm election, so Trump may lose control of the House in the midterms, and perhaps even the Senate. But the constant claims by Democrats that a “wave” is building seem to me based more on wishful thinking than on reality. Democrats still have no new and appealing messages or programs to sell voters, they are still split down the middle between the extreme populists (Sanders, Warren, etc) and the more moderate Democrats, they are still led by increasingly out-of-touch old guard leaders (Pelosi, Hoyer, etc), and they still haven’t gotten real about their demographic problems, or even about why they lost the 2016 election.. 

In fact it seems to me Democrats are still largely clueless. They are so focused on being part of the “resistance” that they have passed up several opportunities – most recently with the tax bill – to offer some bipartisan support in exchange for protecting some of their own high priority issues. Since they publicly announce that they will oppose anything the Republicans propose (including, by the way, some things that they supported under Obama), there is no incentive for Republicans in Congress to try to deal with them. As a result, since everyone knows they will reflexively oppose anything proposed,  they get shut out of any negotiations over bills, which is poor strategy on their part. They would be far smarter to offer potential Democratic votes in exchange for some concessions on the issues that matter to them. But they are being driven by ideology now, rather than pragmatic political tactics, so they are losing.

With respect to the endless investigations of Trump collusion with Russia in the election, I note that to date no actual evidence has yet surfaced, despite the increasingly expensive Muller investigation. But a good deal of evidence of improper activities in the FBI, in the intelligence community, in the Obama administration, and in the Clinton campaign has emerged and continues to emerge daily.  Democrats may yet come to regret opening this can of worms. It may end up hurting them more than it hurts Trump.

So on balance I would say the Trump administration has thus far not been as bad as one might have feared (nor as good as Trump promised), and has even done a few good things here and there. But the Democratic party, and the elite liberal world in general, is still in terrible shape, seemingly having learned nothing from this recent defeat. And that is worrying.

Recommended: A World in Disarray

Richard Haas is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a onetime Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, among other high profile assignments. His new book A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order is very, very good. He reviews the emergence of the world order - World Order 1.0 -  that has prevailed roughly since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and which is now beginning to break down, and he speculates, in the latter part of this book, on what a new world order - World Order 2.0 - might look like, and what American foreign policy ought to be to help arrive at a workable new world order.

In my previous post I suggested that America (and indeed, the whole world) faced a tsunami of exceedingly difficult problems.  One of the components of this presumed tsunami is the disruption of the world order, so this book is a good follow-on to Luce's book recommend above.  A dispassionate (ie- nonpartisan) view of American foreign policy in recent administrations, both Republican and Democratic, would suggest that those administrations (ie. presidents and the policy advisors who shape their policies and views) have been largely out of their depth, wasting inordinate amounts of money and lives and American influence and soft power on fruitless military adventures in the Middle East. The second Bush administration got us into the Middle Eastern quagmire, the Obama administration fumbled badly and naively both the so-called "Russian reset" and the rise of ISIS, and the current Trump administration thus far seems no better, and perhaps worse.

This is a book well worth reading for those who care about our foreign policy.

Recommended: The Retreat of Western Liberalism

I woke up this morning thinking about the approach of a tsunami as a metaphor for America today. The public, beguiled by the media and the twittersphere, is fascinated with the glittering trash and diverting scandals revealed in the newly uncovered beach (Trump, Brexit, the Middle East wars, identity issues, Russian collusion in the election, FBI collusion in the election, Trump again…..), and apparently completely oblivious of the tsunami that caused the beach to be uncovered in the first place and is about to overtake them.

What is this tsunami? It is a combination of things.  America now has a national debt of over $20 trillion, which ought to be frightening enough, but we have unfunded future pension obligations in excess of $127 TRILLION, far more than there is any possible hope of ever paying. So if we think today’s political world is upset, think of what will happen politically, and to the economy, when there is suddenly no more money to pay the pensions of tens or hundreds of millions of retired people!

Then there is the rise of China and India as world powerhouses currently set to eclipse America both economically and politically. That will certainly upset the smug Washington groupthink. And then there is the rise of a remarkably illiberal form of liberalism in America, which segregates us rather than unites us, which extols the virtues of presumed victimhood, which largely rejects the cultural and religious community-focused ethos that formed this nation in favor of a more self-centered individualism, and which has apparently forgotten John Kennedy’s wise inaugural words “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” And the growing and increasingly restive underclass of American workers who are being left behind as income inequality grows, and who, as this last election showed, can seriously upset the political world.

Go is an exceedingly complex game, much more complex than chess. It was minor news that Google’s AI program AlphaGo defeated Chinese grandmaster Ke Jie. What ought to have received more attention than it did was a subsequent story. AlphaGo was reset to only know the basic rules of Go, and then it played itself millions of games a day for only three days, at the end of which it was more powerful than the version that beat grandsmaster Ke Jie, had evolved, from scratch, most of the strategies that human players evolved slowly over 2000 years, and several new ones no human has thought of yet. Think about the implications of that for your job in the future.  And China has committed to be the world leader in this field, and put serious resources and education behind that commitment. Think of the implications of that for America in the future.

There are perhaps another dozen or so trends like this that may significantly affect the future. It is hard to predict exactly how it will all play out because from this point, while still in the middle of it, it is hard to see how much effect each trend will contribute or what unexpected side effects will emerge (and there will be unexpected side effects). But it is certainly clear that the total effect will be a massive disruption of American life, and American politics, as we know it now.

All of which is leading up to the recommendation of Edward Luce’s new book The Retreat of Western Liberalsim. This will not be a comfortable book to read, but it is important if one is trying to understand, and survive, the deeper forces – the tsunamis – that are building. Luce is a journalist and columnist for the Financial Times, and author in 2012 of Time to Start Thinking, a book which anticipated exactly the sort of politics of resentment that drove Brexit and the Trump election. He is worth listening to.

The tax “re-arrangement”

It may be a bit premature to talk about the pending tax bill, because it certainly isn’t a done deal yet. The House and Senate need to negotiate the differences in their bills, and there are a few issues that may yet sink the whole thing considering the disunity among the Republicans. But my guess is that it will pass, if only because the Republicans need SOMETHING to point to out of this unproductive Congressional session.

But it is a bit much to call it “tax reform”. “Tax re-arrangement” (as in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic) might be a more accurate term. Yes, corporate taxes will drop, not that that makes much differences to huge corporations like Apple or GE who have long ago figured out tax dodges so that they pay little or no taxes. (Apple apparently has managed to pay as little as 0.008% on some of the profits it stashed in Ireland). Yes, there will be a modest cut for the middle class, and more for the wealthier, because, as I pointed out in an earlier post, the wealthy pay most of the tax in the nation, so mathematically any tax cut helps them more.

But that is hardly reform. There are still 75,000+ pages of special interest deductions, exemptions and loopholes in the IRS regulations, and as near as I can tell this tax bill does nothing about them. So it is hardly “reform”.

And of course, as popular as tax cuts are, in truth the nation needs a big tax increase, not a cut. The federal deficit this year is estimated to be $666 BILILON – yes BILLION.  That is how much new money we borrowed in 2017 to add to the $20+ TRILLION – yes TRILLION, thousands of BILLIONS – the US already owes.

To put that $666 BILLION in perspective, in 2016 the entire non-defense discretionary spending – everything the government spent to run all its departments and agencies and discretionary programs – was $600 BILLION.  And everything we spent on defense was $585 BILLION.

Democrats of course are outraged (they seem to be permanently outraged these days – it’s getting tiresome) that it may add $1 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. But somehow Obama’s adding $10 trillion to the deficit over his eight years seems never to have bothered them. Ah well, hypocrisy is never far away in Washington politics, in either political party.

The Trump announcement about Israel

Sometimes the hypocrisy of the world’s leaders is just breathtaking. The reaction to Trump’s announcement that the US (eventually, not now) will move its embassy to Jerusalem is a case in point. Arab leaders are predictably voicing dramatic disapproval, but I doubt they will do much more than that because frankly they don’t really care much about the Palestinian situation except as a useful lever now and then to divert their public from their own domestic problems. Anyway, they are far more worried right now about ISIS-like jihadist movements and Iran’s growing influence in the region, and are highly unlikely to seriously offend the US when they depend heavily on us for support in their quest to restrain the Iranian and ISIS threats.

Nor are Arab leaders (outside of Iran and its supporters, like Russia) likely to provoke Israel at a time when they have discovered a common enemy (Iran) and have begun behind the scenes to work together to share intelligence and perhaps more. Not that they will admit this to their strongly anti-Israel populations, but they are pragmatists. It is an Arab saying after all, that the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend (for the moment, at least)”

The Palestinians and their various jihadist support groups, like Hezbollah, of course will try to stir up trouble and violence against Israel (why? Israel didn’t make the announcement, the US did.) in a futile effort to be relevant again, but they aren’t relevant.

European leaders and UN officials will issue sanctimonious one-sided proclamations demonstrating once again that European anti-Semitism is far from dead, or even buried very far below the surface. Never mind that it was the virulent anti-Semitism of Germany and its enthusiastic supporters in occupied nations like France that produced the Holocaust in the first place. Absent that virulent anti-Semitism much of the population of Israel would probably be living happily in the European nations their parents fled, and that their families enjoyed before the death camps.

The US foreign policy experts all claim to be dismayed that this will destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. What peace process?  One president and Secretary of State after another has tried fruitlessly, and often fairly naively, to bring peace to these two, and we are no further along than we were 40 years ago.  Neither Israel nor the Palestinians are anywhere near ready to negotiate for a true settlement, and everyone who understands the region knows it. The Palestinians have been and still are governed (to the extent they are governed at all) by fairly ruthless, yet fairly incompetent leaders who can’t give up the impossible dream of exterminating Israel totally, and who can’t even get together themselves (hence Hamas in the Gaza Strip vs Fatah in the West Bank).  The Israeli government depends on coalitions which always include some ultra-orthodox parties who will never agree to give up an inch of what they consider their true homeland. So again, what peace process? That annual sham US leaders go through to pretend they really care?

It is perfectly obvious to all that Jerusalem is in fact the capital of Israel, and has been for a long time. All branches of the Israeli government are located in Jerusalem, including the Knesset the residences of the Prime Minister and President, and the Supreme Court. Of what use then is the longstanding fiction that it isn’t?  And in fact it should be the capital.  It is the central city of the Jewish people. Jews would no more stand for it to be divided than the Arab world would stand for Mecca, the central city of Islam, being divided. 

Democrats profess to be outraged, yet it was their own President Clinton who signed the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which ordered the embassy moved to Jerusalem, though he issued waivers to keep the act abeyant.  It was President Barack Obama himself who declared in a 2008 campaign speech, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”  Apparently it’s OK for Democratic presidents to make campaign promises about Israel they don’t keep, but if a Republican president, and especially Donald Trump, actually does what he promised to do on the campaign trail, and follows a law actually passed by a Democratic President, it is outrageous.

As I say, the hypocrisy of the world’s leaders is sometimes breathtaking. I worry about a lot of what Trump does, but this seems like a perfectly sensible and long overdue action, perhaps finally shaking up the longstanding, unproductive, and largely anti-Semitic world foreign policy consensus to maintain a fiction about Israel, a fiction none of them would tolerate for a moment about their own nations.

Recommended: I’m A Liberal, And I Agree With Sean Hannity That American Journalism Is Dead

The Federalist has a piece by Saritha Prabhu, a part time freelance writer for the Nashville Tennessean, that sums up quite well what I have been saying about media bias. The piece is entitled I’m A Liberal, And I Agree With Sean Hannity That American Journalism Is Dead.

Media bias isn't new, and in fact it has been around all along, on both the left and the right. One can read history and find outright media bias back in the 1890's newspapers. But what is relatively new is (a) the almost complete dominance of mainstream print and TV media by the left, and (b) reporters and editors dropping any pretense of being even-handed, and becoming outright political activists, almost entirely for the left. Reporters used to at least make a pretense of being even-handed and objective, and if they didn't their editors would rewrite the story to make if look less partisan, as a matter of protecting the reputation of the newspaper or TV news show.. That standard seems to have gone by the wayside in this election. 

Of course, as Prabhu points out, if you agree with the bias it doesn't look like bias at all. So that we have this great liberal echo chamber running, in which reporters and Op Ed writers tell liberal readers what they want to hear and what they want to believe, and Democrats continue living in never-never land rather than facing up to their very real electoral problems and trying to figure out how to recover the voting base they lost in this last election.

Frankly, I'm disgusted by the whole thing. This administration has real problems, and needs an unbiased media to hold it to account (and so does the last administration, by the way). But the mainstream media has gone so far off the rails that it is thoroughly ineffective at this task. The left is deceived by the media, and the right no longer trusts it, so what is the point of it?

Recommended: The Tragedy of Liberalism

There is a startling perspective in a piece by Partick Deneen in the Fall 2017 issue of the Hedgehog Review, entitled The Tragedy of Liberalism. Deneen is an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame University, and author of several good books, including Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontent, and Democratic Faith.

I won't try to summarize this article , which is long and scholarly with lots of subtle points. But I strongly recommend it, as it gives an entirely new perspective to the current conservative-liberal battles.

A Draft Campaign Stump Speech from a Truthful Presidential Candidate

I got to thinking the other day what a really truthful presidential candidate might say in a stump speech. Of course a truthful candidate would never get elected, but here is what she/he might say:

------------------------------

A Draft Campaign Stump Speech from a Truthful Presidential Candidate (who would never get elected)

Thank you. I’m glad to be here in _____________ today/tonight. I’m here to ask for your vote, but unlike many politicians I’m not going to promise you everything you want, or try to shape my speech to appeal to your particular concerns or hot buttons. I’m going to tell you what I think needs to be done to save this country, and what I will try to do if I am elected. You may not like it, it may be uncomfortable, but it will be, as near as I can tell, the truth, and that might just be refreshing from a politician.

There are lots of things that need fixing in our system of government, far more than I could possibly talk about here, so let me just talk about a few of the top issues.

Let’s talk about the economy first, because the economy drives everything else. A strong economy provide jobs, and jobs provide tax revenue, and tax revenue is what pays to keep the potholes in our roads filled and the water and electricity running, and the Social Security checks coming, and..and…and…

The first uncomfortable truth is that we are going bankrupt as a country, and we need to do something about it before it destroys our economy and your jobs and savings. The federal government spends over half a trillion dollars a year more than it takes in and we have a national federal debt of about $19 trillion dollars, which is more that the entire country produces in goods and service in an entire year. Politicians and some economists have been telling you for years that it is nothing to worry about – believe me, it is something to worry about. If we divided this federal debt evenly across all the taxpayers in America, each one of you would already owe over $150,000!

The second uncomfortable truth is that we need to either raise taxes or cut government programs, or both, to stop growing the debt and begin to bring it down to a more manageable level. The federal government is simply spending way beyond its means. We all want lower taxes, and we all want all sorts of nice, even essential, government programs. And politicians in both parties have been telling you for decades that you can have both. You can’t. There is no free lunch. If we want all those nice government program we have to raise taxes to pay for them – and raise them a lot, about 40% - to eliminate the deficit and begin to slowly, over say 20 years, pay the national debt down to about 50-60% of our Gross National Product, so that we have enough borrowing capacity left to deal with the next financial crisis – and there WILL be another financial crisis from time to time. – you can bet on it.

If elected I will work with Congress to find a balance between reducing the size and cost of government and raising taxes that minimizes the pain. But it won’t eliminate the pain. You will be unhappy at the substantial tax increases. You will be unhappy when some of your favorite government programs get cut back or eliminated. If you are a government worker or contractor you may well lose your job. I’m sorry about it, but that is the real world. If we can’t afford it, if we aren’t willing to pay for it, we can’t have it.

Congress may of course balk at doing either, because most politicians these days care more about getting re-elected than saving the nation. That’s a harsh thing to say, but it is another uncomfortable truth. And in fact most of you really already know it. I can only urge you to elect people to the House and Senate who care more about saving the nation than about getting re-elected.

And in fact let’s talk now about our political system. It’s broken, and it doesn’t work. Both parties are controlled by big money donors – wealthy individuals, big corporations, powerful unions and special interest groups. There is a reason the IRS tax code runs to about 75,000 pages – it’s full of loopholes and exceptions and tax breaks for this or that special group, all bought by campaign contributions and election support to this or that legislator by this or that corporation or special interest group.

This is insane – in fact it is corruption. If you are rich or a big corporation you can hire expensive lawyers and tax accountants who will find loopholes to minimize your taxes or park your money overseas out of reach of US taxes, but if you are an average American you get stuck paying the full tax bill. That simply isn’t fair, and it time it stopped. The tax code ought to be simple, and apply equally to everyone, big or small, rich or poor. If elected I will work with Congress to try to achieve that. It won’t be easy – everyone with a tax break now will fight it tooth and nail - but it is essential if we are to root out the corruption in this system.

Another serious problem with our political system is that it is divisive; it is based on setting one group of Americans against another. This is crazy, and self-destructive. Ben Franklin said it best: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” This nation is strongest when we all work together, as we did for example during the second world war. It is weakest when we let ambitious politicians and activists divide us and pit one group against another. Working politics is not a winner-take-all proposition, it is the art of compromise, of finding ways of letting everyone get some of what they want, of representing all sides of the debate. We have lost that, and we had better get it back or we are done in the long term as a powerful nation.

I am not running as a Republican or a Democrat, or even as a third party candidate. I am running as an American, and if elected I expect to work with both parties, with both liberals and conservatives, to find compromises. That means neither side will get everything it wants, but both sides will get some of what they want. You may well be unhappy at some of the compromises – if both sides are equally unhappy than it was probably a fair compromise.

Finally let’s talk about the federal bureaucracy. The founders of our nation were smart. They could see how other systems of government worked and didn’t work, and they could see how easily power can be abused, so they tried to build a system of government that limited abuse. They created three branches of government – the executive with the president, Congress, and the courts. Only Congress could write new laws, but the president could veto them, and the courts could make sure they didn’t violate the constitution. The courts could make sure the president, in running the country, didn’t overstep his or her boundaries, and Congress had a say in who got appointed to the federal courts. So each of the three branches can limit the abuses of the other two. And then the founders of our country left a lot of power to the states, so that the states could act as a guard against abuses in the federal system.

What the founders never expected was that a fourth branch of government would emerge – the federal bureaucracy – that was largely outside of all the safeguards they put in place. President George Washington had a bureaucracy of three – three cabinet secretaries. But starting in the 1930s the federal bureaucracy has grown explosively, so that it now numbers over 430 departments, agencies and sub-agencies. Actually, no one really knows exactly how many agencies, departments and sub-agencies there are, but it directly employs over 2.6 million people, and indirectly employs many more contractors, and controls a budget of about $2 trillion dollars a year. And it all operates largely outside of any effective oversight by Congress or the president, simply because it is so vast.

The annual Code of Federal Regulations, which lists all federal regulations in effect, as of 2014, the last count I can find, stood at 175,496 pages in approximately 200 volumes. It is no doubt larger yet today. This is absurd. It takes batteries of expensive lawyers for a business to ensure that it meets all the regulations in effect, and vast staffs of people to manage the paperwork and filings involved. It is a drag on businesses.

Now we need some regulations and we need some agencies to create and enforce these regulations, but this whole federal bureaucracy has simply gotten out of hand. If elected I will work with Congress to find a way to prune the federal bureaucracy back to a more sensible size – which we need to do anyway to bring down the enormous federal deficit each year – and to bring some rationality to our regulatory system, so that business aren’t just swamped with paperwork from the federal government. Again, this won’t be easy. Bureaucracies fight hard to keep their turf and their budgets, and there will be lots of pushback from special interests. But it needs to be addressed.

There are lots of other things that need to be done, but these are a couple of the biggest issues. Now if I were a traditional candidate I would make all kinds of promises about fixing them, but the truth is the president has relatively little real power; it is Congress who holds the real power, just as the founders of our nation intended. So just electing me isn’t going to solve these problems. As president I can propose things to Congress, and help with negotiations, but nothing will get done unless you also elect to Congress Senators and House members who are willing to do the hard things, who are willing to negotiate compromises even at the risk of not being re-elected, who are willing to lead and educate their constituents instead of pandering to them, and who are willing to put the long-term health of the nation above their own short term political calculations.

We are a great nation, unusual for our generosity, for our strong work ethic, for our entrepreneurial spirit and inventiveness, and for our commitment to human rights for all humans, of whatever race, gender, or nationality. The world needs us. But we are of no use to the world if we are going to descend to petty bickering among ourselves, or if we are going to ruin the nation economically by spending beyond our means. I ask for your vote to begin the process of saving our nation from these ills. I won’t sugar coat this message - the path will be hard and painful for many in the short run, and will require sacrifices from all of us, but if we see it through we can perhaps save our great nation in the long run, and that is a noble cause worth sacrificing for.

Thank you.

Recommended: Sex, lies & excuses: Partisan madness on predators

John Podhoretz in the New York Post today makes a point I have been wanting to make, in his article Sex, lies & excuses: Partisan madness on predators. Hypocrisy I suppose is and has always been a staple of political life, but it is generally cloaked in more high-minded cover stories. These days politicians and journalists seem to be openly hypocritical without feeling any need to pretend otherwise.

Trump ought to be investigated for his supposed (still unproven) Russian connections, but Clinton shouldn't be investigated for her dealings in the Uranium One sale, despite $145 million in Russian donations to the Clinton fund and a $500,000 speaking fee to Bill from a Russian bank immediately after she approved the sale.

Republican Judge Roy Moore ought to be disqualified from running for office for his alleged (still unproven) sexual escapades, but Democrat Al Franken ought not to be removed for his (photographed) sexual excesses. Liberals deride Trump's argument that Moore's Republican vote is needed despite his unsavory character, but argue Franken's Democratic vote is so important that he ought to stay in place despite his unsavory character.

What do you suppose the liberal argument will be for Democratic Representative John Conyers, now accused by two woman?

Democrats argue that Trump ought to be impeached for his alleged (but unproven) past sexual adventures, but argue that Bill Clinton's excesses, including at least one alleged rape, ought to be overlooked because he was (by their lights) a good president.

And of course Democrats were outraged when Senate Republicans used the so-called "nuclear option" to get their Supreme Court nomination approved, even though they themselves had used the same tactic when they were in power, and bragged, before the election, that Hillary would use it to get her nominations approved.

Of course Republicans can be, and often are, just as hypocritical as Democrats, but the past few weeks the most outlandish hypocritical statements have mostly come from liberals.

More context on the state and local tax deduction

I mentioned in a recent posting the financial difficulties faced by a number of Democratically controlled high tax states. Just to get some perspective on the problems they face, here are the current estimated unfunded state and local future pension obligations for these states:

California is by far in the worst condition, with $241.3 BILLION in future pension obligations as of 2014. The state’s total future liabilities are estimated at $366 BILLION.  In 1999 Democratic lawmakers in California passed a new law (SB 400), under which than 200,000 civil servants became eligible to retire at 55 — and in many cases collect more than half their highest salary for life. California Highway Patrol officers could retire at 50 and receive as much as 90% of their peak pay for as long as they lived. This year the state will pay out $5.4 BILLION in pensions, which is about 30 times more than it was paying out in 2000.

New York City has a future pension obligation estimated this year at about $142 BILLION, and currently spends 17% of its annual budget on pensions.  In the early 2000s a new rule exempted most city employees from having to contribute towards their own retirement, which has made the problem even worse.

New York State is doing somewhat better, but New York State and local debt currently stands at $352 BILLION, and New York State and local pensions cost $34.4 BILLION this year.

Connecticut’s estimated unfunded pension liabilities stand at about $20.4 BILLION as of 2017

Illinois has more than $250 BILLION in unfunded future pension liabilities, and  Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded the state of Illinois’ credit rating to Baa3, just one notch above a noninvestment-grade, or “junk,” rating.

New Jersey’s pension debt now stands at around $49.1 BILLION. The state’s total unfunded liabilities stood at about $66.2 BILLION at the end of 2016.

Notice again we are talking BILLIONS here – thousands of millions! These are big numbers..

There is, of course, no way in hell that these states will ever manage to cover these future pension obligations, especially since their high tax rates are driving businesses and wealthy individuals to leave these states and hence reduce their future tax revenues, so a painful reckoning is coming.

Tax cuts for the rich?

A common liberal theme is the claim that Republican tax cuts mostly help the rich. We are hearing this again, now that the Republicans are trying to reform the tax code. Is this always true?  Let’s think about that for a moment.

First of all, about 45% of Americans (77.5 million households) pay no tax at all, because they don’t make enough money to reach the first tax bracket. So of course tax cuts never affect them.

The top 1% of Americans, who have an average income of more than $2.1 million, pay 43.6% of all the federal individual income tax in the U.S.; the top 0.1% — just 115,000 households, whose average income is more than $9.4 million — pay more than 20% of it.

If you rank household income into 5 bands, the middle 20% (the so-called middle class) pay only 9.2% of the federal taxes.  The top 40% pay 86.5% of the federal taxes.  (the lowest 40% pay only 4.2% of the total federal taxes)

So since the rich pay most of the federal taxes paid, of course any tax cut helps them most. It could hardly be otherwise, given the math, since they pay most of the tax in the first place.

But of course facts never seem to overcome political emotions. The claim is still a good one-liner for aspiring liberal politicians, and lots of voters probably are sucked up by the populist appeal, since they don’t understand the math.

The state tax deduction

One of the features of the proposed Republican tax overhaul is the elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes. This has caused a good deal of upset from Democrats, who claim it will “hurt the middle class”. Is this true, or is this just spin?

Well, the states that are screaming loudest seem to be New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut. And these are all states which have been under Democratic control for decades. And these are all states that have high state and local taxes. And these are all states with strong public sector unions, who have been strong supporters of state Democratic candidates, who in turn have negotiated generous salaries and pensions for their public sector workers. And these are all states that are in financial difficulty, largely because of huge pension obligations for their public sector union retirees. And these are all states having trouble maintaining their infrastructure, because they are short of money, because they have to pay so much for their public sector employees and their retired public sector employee’s pensions. Is there a message here….?

California’s deficit this year is about $1.6 BILLION dollars. The current estimates put New York state’s deficit at about $4 BILLION next year. New Jersey is projecting a deficit of about $3.6 BILLION within five years.  Illinois just added $5 BILLION in new taxes on its taxpayers, and still projects a deficit of at least $1.3 BILLION next year. Connecticut, at last estimate, expected to run a deficit of at least $1.6 BILLION in the 2017-2018 fiscal year.  Note that we are talking BILLIONS here!

If you think about it, what the state and local tax deduction effectively does is spread a state’s tax liability over everyone else in the country. The state collects a tax, and that tax is deducted from each taxpayer’s taxable federal income, reducing the federal tax they pay and therefore the income to the federal government, which then has to be made up by higher tax rates on everyone else in the country.. So in essence the state and local tax deduction passes part of that state tax burden on to the taxpayers elsewhere in the country.  Not exactly a fair system, I would say.

Of course these high tax states are now faced with a real worry. Several depend heavily on a relatively few very rich residents for much of their tax income, and with the loss of the state and local tax deduction, some of these very rich people may just decide to move to lower-rate states. Just one New Jersey hedge fund investor (billionaire David Tepper) moved to Florida last year and the state lost hundreds of millions in tax revenue.

So on balance I would say eliminating the state and local tax deduction on federal returns is a good thing to do – it makes the system much more fair. States which are improvident can’t pass part of their burden on to everyone else – they need to live with it. States which manage their affairs better aren’t forced by federal tax law to help bail out states that are feckless. And that seems to me right.

But these are Democratically-controlled states, so of course the Democrats are upset at the proposal, but of course they can't admit that their Democratic policies are the reason these states are in such financial trouble (they may not be able to admit that even to themselves), so they have to spin their opposition in some other way - and "hurting the middle class" is what they have chosen.

Recommended: Americans Aren't As Divided As You Think

Politico has a good article today by Ken Stern: American's Aren't As Divided As You Think. We certainly have extremists - both liberal and conservative - in this country, but the majority of the population is more moderate.  The problem is that the extremists on both wings of the political spectrum dominate the news, both mainstream news and social media, so it looks like there is far more discord than there actually is. That and the fact that politicians on both ends of the political spectrum seem to think they need to pander to the most extreme in their base in order to get re-elected has produced an impression that isn't apparently quite correct.  There certainly are disagreements on some policies, bu apparently not nearly as much disagreement as an outsider would expect from the daily drumbeat of hyperventilating news reports.

Innocent until proven guilty?

It is a fundamental principle of English law, from which American law is derived, that an accused is assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. That principle seems to have gone by the board recently with all the sexual harassment accusations being tried in the press and on social media.

Now there is no question that sexual harassment and outright sexual predation  has been going on for generations, and that the rich and powerful and famous are often involved in it and use their power and wealth to protect themselves.  And there is no question that our male-dominated society has ignored and suppressed and intimidated women when they brought such accusations, and generally behaved shamefully, and even women have participated in this oppression (as when Hillary Clinton publicly attacked and trashed Bill Clinton’s accusers). And I have little doubt that most if not all of the current wave of accusations against people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are true.

BUT, and this is a big BUT, having no personal doubt they are true is not the same as PROVING they are true. Of course proof is hard in these cases – there are generally no third party witnesses so it becomes one person’s word against another’s, and sometimes about events decades in the past.  Probably the current wave of accusations will have a salutary effect on some men, and that is a good thing.

But politics is a dirty game, and it won’t be long before someone figures out they can ”weaponize” these accusations, pay a woman or two or a man or two to make accusations that ruins the career of their political opponent, or some vengeful spouse or lover uses this method to destroy their former spouse or lover. It will be precisely because it is so hard to prove or disprove such charges that this tactic will be appealing.

This is a dangerous path we are on. The more so because there really has been a great deal of abuse of women, and it needs to stop. But there was a reason that the “innocent until proven guilty” principle became the cornerstone of English law – it was to prevent just this sort of “trial by mob rule” that is going on now. If we begin to abandon that principle, even for a cause as good as this one, then none of us are safe from false accusations that can ruin our lives and the lives of our families.

We have seen this horror movie before, during the Communist witch hunt days in the 1950's when unscrupulous people like Joe McCarthy built a career ruining people's lives with unproven, and often false, accusations. We ought to remember that lesson now.

Rights and responsibilities

One of the things that seems to me to have been lost these days is the rather obvious connection between rights and responsibilities. I would argue that there are no rights without corresponding responsibilities. That one has no right to ask something from a community unless one is also willing to contribute more or less equally to the community. That freeloading on the generosity of others is not a concept that works in the long run, either for the freeloader or for the community.

So along those lines let me suggest some ideas.  First, for those in the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party who propose things like free college for all, free medical care for all, and perhaps even a government issued basic income, what do they expect the recipients to give back to the nation in return? 

Our nation is currently defended by a military made up of less than 1% of the population. Perhaps like Israel and Switzerland we ought to expect everyone who receives these “free” benefits to give two or three years of their lives in service to their country (with equivalent CCC-like civilian alternatives for those who are religiously opposed to being in the military).  It is true that the military has become so complex that only professionals can do the more technical jobs, but there is still plenty of “grunt work” as well that even a relatively untrained civilian can do, or be quickly trained to do.

And for those on the right wing who believe so strongly in the benefits of free enterprise, how about a system where those of us who have benefitted handsomely from free enterprise be expected to give X hours per week to unpaid service work to the community – including even (or especially) overpaid senior managers and CEOs.  There are plenty of community projects that could use experienced free help.  Yes, I know some of these overpaid people give handsomely of their money to charity, but money is cheap for them. Their time and experience is what is really precious, and that is what they ought to be donating as well.

It has in the past been one of the strengths of our nation that culturally we expected to take responsibility for our communities. It seems to me that has eroded into a greedy, self-centered  “me generation”, and that we need to get back to the concept that we each give to the community as well as get from it, as a way of ensuring the long-term health of our nation and communities.

Yes Virginia, there are “deplorables” *

Hillary Clinton got into a lot of political trouble last year, and may have lost the election in part, because of her comment labeling supporters of her opponent “deplorables”.  But in fact she was right; there are “deplorables”. She just didn’t apply the label to the right groups.

The deplorables certainly include some of the more extreme right-wing religious fundamentalists, who not only believe illiberal things about women’s rights and sexuality based on their interpretation of the writings of male-dominated cultures thousands of years ago, but insist on trying to impose their religious views on everyone else.

But the real deplorables also include:

Pampered college students who are so ignorant of the nation’s history, and of the valor and sacrifice American military, men and women alike, have made and are still making that they tear up American flags on Veteran’s Day, as happened yesterday at Brown University.

Government officials, including Hillary Clinton herself, but also including thousands of others in Congress and the administration and federal agencies who use their government positions and power to enrich themselves and their friends.

A Congress, including both parties, that is so irresponsible that it continues to buy votes with expensive federal programs, but is unwilling to take the politically painful step of raising taxes to pay for them. So that we now run an annual deficit of over half a trillion dollars, and have a federal debt that exceeds the entire gross national product of the entire country, and is still growing!

The ultra-liberal Hollywood elite who are quite willing to lecture the rest of the nation (especially those who happen to hold different views) on its failings, but have for decades tolerated blatant sexual harassment and outright sexual predation among their ranks and kept quiet about it.

The mainstream media, both liberal and conservative, many of whom have openly abandoned responsible journalism for outright partisan political activism.

And I’m sure you can add to the list.

So yes, Virginia, there really are “deplorables” in the country.

-------------------------------------------------

* For those who didn't catch the 1897 reference, see here.

The Virginia and New Jersey elections

It is amazing – even perhaps pathetic – the media response to the Virginian and New Jersey gubernatorial elections. These were both races that Democrats were supposed to win, and win handily, in states that are deep blue.  The fact that they actually managed not to lose elections they were supposed to win is being spun by the media as a massive blow to Republicans!  This is a level of self-delusion that Democrats can’t afford right now, when they need to get real about why they are so far out of power locally and nationally.

On the other hand, it is good news that a moderate Democrat won in Virginia – perhaps it will give the Democratic Party some pause in its self-destructive rush to go too far left.

Pragmatic political questions

Underneath all the dramatic hyperventilation and righteous indignation and spin and distortions and virtue posturing and character assassination that passes for serious political discourse these days from both liberals and conservatives in the media and Congress there are some pragmatic questions about the future of our nation that someone ought to be attending to. These include:

1. How to craft workable political policies that embrace the concerns of both the well-off urban secular liberals and the less-well-off rural and small-town religious conservatives. After all, what Ben Franklin said at the founding of our nation still applies today: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”  Creating “us vs them” situations, as identity politics has been doing, is destructive to the nation and a long-term threat to America.  We need politicians, and political messages, that will unite us, not divide us.

2. How to get big money – personal and corporate and special interest – out of our political process. Both parties are now thoroughly beholden to wealthy donors, corporations and unions, all of whom expect to buy favorable legislation with their donations.  This is a thoroughly corrupt system, and will sink the nation eventually if it isn’t stopped.

3. How to force the federal government – meaning Congress - to live within its means, either by reducing expenditures, increasing taxes, or both. Running a half trillion dollar a year deficit simply can’t continue indefinitely, unless the government allows inflation to skyrocket so as to cut the actual value of the debt – but that destroys everyone’s savings.

4. How to address the structural changes in the workforce being created largely by automation. Capitalism depends on healthy markets, and healthy markets depend on consumers with incomes to spend. Putting large numbers of people out of work with automation (and to a much less extent, outsourcing to other nations) is an existential threat to the whole capitalist system that has brought prosperity to the nation over the past 200 years.  Someone needs to be thinking about this problem and attending to it – neither party is doing so now.

5. How to build and maintain a credible and effective military, including alliances, capable of defending the nation, deterring war, and maintaining the freedom of the seas on which so much of our trade depends, without driving the nation deeper into debt.

These are hard problems, which is probably why politicians avoid talking about them, but they are crucial pragmatic questions that bear directly on the future of our nation – far, far more important questions than the trendy social and cultural issues that seem to consume the media and our current politicians.

Finally!!

Finally we are beginning to see some hard-headed and realistic analysis of why the Democratic Party has been losing so badly and so steadily for the past decade or so. William Greider summarizes the new report in The Nation in his current article What Killed the Democratic Party, and it is well worth reading.  The full 34-page report is available online at this link: Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.

The authors are certainly correct that Democrats have to go back to appealing to their working class core constituents, but I’m not sure they are going to manage that by following Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren yet further left. That strategy might possibly win them the presidency next election if Trump’s administration continues to be so chaotic, but I don‘t think it is a viable long-term strategy because I don’t think the far-left proposals are either economically or politically viable either nationally or at the state and local level, and I think a continued swing to the far left will ultimately doom the party. America as a whole is more centrist.

Recommended: The Primal Scream of Identity Politics

I highly recommend today's article in the Weekly Standard by Marty Eberstadt, The Primal Scream of Identity Politics.  It is an unusually thoughtful and well-researched piece, and an interesting follow-on to Mark Lilla's recent book (recommended earlier, see book list in sidebar), The Once and Future Liberal.

Three recommendations

I have been arguing for months now that liberals need to stop their childish tantrums and outrage and get their act together if they are to have any chance of regaining political power. I see Op Ed writers are beginning to say the same thing. I am not especially a fan of Piers Morgan, but his piece in the (UK) Daily Mail, Snowflakes Are Screaming, But Trump's Likely to Win Again seems to me right on the money.  Eugene Robinson’s piece in today’s Washington Post The Democrats Are in Crisis Too is also worth reading. And finally let me also recommend Roger Altman’s piece today, also in the Washington Post, Trump Was an Election Surprise. Expect More.

It is clear that neither political party has any idea how to solve the nation’s current problems, and indeed one can make a convincing argument that neither party, as currently constituted, has any hope of even understanding the nation’s problems, let alone finding workable solutions to them. That is a pretty strong claim, but I offer the current comments and reactions of Washington politicians of both parties as evidence. Is there any indication yet from their public statements  that either the Republican or the Democratic politicians are even aware that they are out of touch with their voters?  Unpredictable and eccentric as Trump seems, he is certainly more in touch with the feelings and fears of his supporters then the professionals in either party.

I find it interesting that a recent poll by the Pew Research Center suggests that the increasing gap between the political left and the right in this country since 2011 has come almost entirely from the liberal wing moving further left, rather than from any further rightward movement of conservatives. That doesn’t bode well for Democratic prospects in upcoming elections, because the nation as a whole simply isn’t that far left (in fact the nation as a whole is pretty much in the middle), and will probably never be.

Political Spin

The Senate this week voted down a new rule that would have expanded the range of class action lawsuits allowed. Democrats were (predictably) outraged, claiming that it was a giveaway to Wall Street and big corporations. No one of course mentioned how this system really works.

I have been part of several class action lawsuits – not that I entered them voluntarily, but I got notices in the mail advising me that since I had purchased this or that item in the past I was now automatically part of a class action lawsuit against the manufacturer unless I actively withdrew.  And I eventually actually got settlement payments, the largest of which, if I recall correctly, was under $5.  The lawyers who filed these cases, if I recall correctly, got fees ranging from about $1.5 million to $2.5 million.

The scam runs like this: find a manufacturer who has committed some sort of error, initiate a class action lawsuit in one of the jurisdictions that is especially friendly to such suits, get a settlement and then petition the court for extravagant legal fees, which are usually approved. I’d like to have a job where I could charge $500/hour for my time! Some law firms make a steady and highly profitable business of this.  Manufacturers of course pass on their costs to their customers in higher prices.

So who really got hurt by rejecting this proposed rule were the few highly profitable law firms who make their living by milking companies with class action lawsuits (just under 70% of US companies get one or more class action lawsuits each year – it’s big business for the lawyers). Of course no one wants to openly admit this, so Democrats spin the story by claiming Wall Street and corporations are the real winners. Yet more Washington political spin.

Taxation craziness

There is no doubt that America very badly needs an overhaul of its system of federal taxation. The IRS tax code currently runs to an unbelievable 74,608 pages and includes tens of thousands of loopholes and special deals for various special interests, so that any large corporation or wealthy individual who can afford to hire clever tax accountants and attorneys can manage to pay almost no tax at all.

The nominal federal corporate tax rate is 35%, but the 30 largest corporations in America paid an effective tax rate of 26.7%.  General Electric even managed to pay no taxes at all and get a $400 million rebate, for an effective negative tax rate of -4.5%.

So certainly the tax code needs to be massively simplified and cleaned out of all the special interest deductions and loopholes. But total taxes don’t need to be reduced – they actually need to be increased. Democrats ignore the fact that their programs are debt financed.  Republicans make a big deal about reducing the debt, but when in power they only increase it. Voters seem to ignore the debt – they want more from the government but they certainly don’t want to pay for it.

In fact the federal debt exploded 101% under the second (Republican) President Bush who added $5.8 trillion to the debt. Then it exploded another 68% under (Democratic) President Obama, who added another $7.917 trillion during his administration. Currently we are running an annual deficit of about $660 trillion, yet the current Trump administration is talking about reducing taxes, which is clearly the wrong direction to go, and Democrats like Bernie Sanders want to add yet more wildly expensive debt-financed programs like federally financed medical care for all.

Of course voters don’t want to give up their government benefits like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, and certainly they want things like National Parks and support of the arts, but in fact when push comes to shove they don’t want to pay for these things.

So in fact whatever the Trump administration is proposing for tax reform is thoroughly inadequate, and whatever Democrats are proposing is just plain crazy.

Mainstream news cover up?

Is there some significance to the fact that while several conservative news sites today are reporting evidence that the FBI knew about and covered up bribes and pay-for-play payments (including an hour speech that the Russians paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to give, and several million dollars donated by the Russians to the Clinton Foundation) while Hillary was Secretary of State (and which she never reported, despite having promised in writing to report all foreign donations to the foundation while she was Secretary of State) and while she was approving the sale of a 20% stake to the Russians of a critical uranium mine, the mainstream news is ignoring this story in favor of a complaint that Trump didn’t call fast enough the family of a soldier who died?

Is there some significance to the fact that several of the key players in the current special prosecutor investigation into alleged Russian-Trump ties, including the special prosecutor himself, were apparently aware of the FBI evidence, yet neither notified Congress nor opposed the sale, yet none of this – so far – is being reported in the mainstream press?

Strange how the liberal mainstream press is trying still to link Trump to Russia (with no hard evidence yet appearing), yet is ignoring the Clinton-Russia story.

Another perspective

I have liberal friends who are upset that President Trump canceled the Dreamers plan (which gave semi-legal status to illegal immigrants who were brought here as children), that  he withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, that he refused to recertify the Iran Nuclear Agreement, and that he cancelled the ObamaCare subsidy payments to insurance companies.

Irrespective of whether one agrees with these steps or not, one needs to look at these actions in perspective. The fact is that all Trump has done is put these issues back on a more legal footing.

Immigration laws are supposed to be established by Congress, and only by Congress. The administration is by law only supposed to enforce the laws Congress has passed. So Obama’s executive action to exempt a certain class of illegal immigrants from deportation was a constitutionally questionable action from the beginning, however much people may have approved of the result. All Trump has done is put the issue back to Congress, where it belongs in the first place.  Congress of course may bungle it – in fact given how dysfunctional the Republicans seem to be the odds are pretty good they will fail to act. But that is Congress’s fault, not the presidents’.

The Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Agreement are treaties, and by law treaties must be approved by Congress. The fact that President Obama bypassed Congress for both of these agreements by some legal shenanigans (because in fact Congress would likely not have approved them) doesn’t change the fact that by law they were supposed to be approved by Congress. All Trump has done is put the issues back to Congress, where they should have been in the first place. Again, Congress may or may not drop the ball, but either way by law Congress is supposed to be involved.

President Obama managed to arrange for the ObamaCare insurance company subsidies to be paid even though Congress never appropriated funds for them. Again, by law Congress has the power of the purse, and by law the government isn’t supposed to spend money that Congress hasn’t appropriated. So all Trump has done again is put the issue back to Congress, where it should have been resolved in the first place.

Once again, people may not like Trump’s actions in these cases, but in perspective all he has really done is undo some executive actions that by law Obama  should never have been allowed to put in place in the first place. Obama did it, of course, out of frustration with a Congress that wouldn't agree with him - but in fact our government is deliberately set up so that on serious issues like treaties and spending, the administration is supposed to need the support of a majority of Congress. If the president can't get enough support from Congress, than, so the framers of the Constitution reasoned (correctly, I think),  he/she shouldn't be allowed to proceed.

Recommended: The G.O.P. Is a Mess. It’s Not All Trump’s Fault.

I have been harshly critical of liberals in general and Democrats in particular over the past few months because I actually believe in many, perhaps even in most, liberal goals. But I think the current Democratic Party is doing a terrible job of promoting those goals. Hence my critical comments.

But that doesn’t mean I think the Republicans are, by contrast, in good shape. The Republican Party is in just as bad a mess, or perhaps even a worse mess. Their electoral successes in the past decade, both at the national level and the local level, certainly show that they are more in touch with voters, and have a better game plan. But their current inability to get anything done in Congress is a clear symptom of their problems.

In that regard, I highly recommend Peter Suderman’s Oct 13 Op Ed in the New York Times: The G.O.P. Is a Mess. It’s Not All Trump’s Fault.  I have been arguing that Trump is not the problem; he is a symptom of the problem. And if he hadn’t come on the scene someone very like him would have. Perhaps without quite the same chaotic personality, but certainly responding to the same working-class anger.  I think Suderman has a pretty good analysis of what ails the GOP.

Liberals – Get Real!

Liberals have been trounced over the past decade in both national and local elections. As a party, Democrats haven’t been in such bad shape since the 1920s. So what have they proposed recently to reverse this trend?

There is the movement to abolish the electoral college, so that the winner of the popular vote would become the president. First of all, that does nothing to address the Congressional elections or the state and local elections, which are far more important in the long run. Second, you have a majority of fly-over country already pissed off at the big city coastal elites – do you really think proposing to disenfranchise all those states by arranging that presidential elections are essentially settled by a few big liberal states – primarily New York and California – will fly?    Do you really think a majority of states will vote for a constitutional change that reduces their influence? Do you think pushing for it is going to win you elections? Get real!

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are pushing far left soft-socialist ideas like free college for everyone. Just what does free college do for a 50 year old machinist outside of Detroit who has been laid off, or for an unemployed 20 year old who had trouble getting through high school? What is this liberal fascination with getting everyone through college? Much, perhaps even most, of the nation has no interest in spending four years studying English literature or academic economics or batting their brains trying to understand calculus. Get real!

Then there is the Sanders/Warren proposal for free medical care for everyone. Notice the word “free”. Didn’t anyone ever teach liberals that there is no free lunch?  In fact their proposal would require either incurring a massive additional federal debt, which would soon sink the economy, or just about doubling income tax rates. Think that will fly? Do you think that will win you elections?  Get real!

Hillary lost the last election partly because of immigration. She (and Obama) essentially wanted to give the country open boarders, where anyone could come in. Oh, they didn’t phrase it that way, but if you aren’t going to prosecute and deport illegal immigrants, that is essentially what you have – open borders. So you have a large segment of the middle of the country already uneasy and unhappy about the number of new immigrants moving into their cities and neighborhoods. Do you think proposing to increase this problem is going to win you elections? Do you think lecturing those people - telling them, from your holier-than-thou elite liberal ivory tower - that they shouldn’t feel that way, is going to win you elections?  Get real!

Finally there is the liberal outrage over any accommodation to religious voter’s concerns about issues like contraceptives and abortions and gay marriage. As it happens I agree with the liberals on these issues, but the reality is that most of the country has religious beliefs of one sort or another, and liberals, whatever their own personal views on religion, are never going to win elections by ignoring those beliefs, or even worse, by disrespecting those who hold strong religious beliefs. Get real!

The theory is that the liberal elite is better educated than the rest of the country. Apparently that better education didn’t include enough psychology to teach them that looking down your nose at a group, or calling them names doesn’t win their votes. Apparently that better education didn’t include enough history to teach them that ignoring the economic desperation of a large segment of the population doesn’t win them votes, and breeds revolutions. Apparently that better education didn’t teach them enough political science to understand that candidates have to offer voters something they care about to win their votes. Apparently that better education didn’t include enough sociology to teach them that they need to get out of their own isolation bubble if they want to see the world the way it really is, instead of the way all their peers see it.

What I see is a bunch of proposals that appeal ideologically to the existing liberal base – that will get votes from the liberal elites who already vote for Democrats.  I don’t see anything that will bring in new voters, especially new working class voters. I don’t see anything that shows the slightest understanding of why Democrats have been losing so badly all across the nation over the past decade or two. I don’t see anything that addresses the very real angst and worries of the working class voters who used to be a reliable Democratic base. I don’t see any evidence that liberals are getting real!

Recommended: Dems Are Playing Checkers While Trump Is Playing Chess

Thomas Edsall had a very good Op Ed piece in the New York Times yesterday: Dems Are Playing Checkers While Trump Is Playing Chess.  There is an old saying that if you are stuck in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. It does seem to me that the Democrats, having found themselves in a hole in this last election, are still madly digging the same hole.  Hillary said once during the campaign that it was dangerous to elect a president who can be set off by a Twitter posting. Well, it seems it is in fact the Democrats who seem to overreact predictably on every Trump Twitter, and Trump knows that and uses it.

We are most of the first year through Trump's presidency, and I still don't see any evidence that Democrats have learned anything, or developed any thoughtful strategy for getting back into power.  It is beginning to look like they are simply incapable of getting out of their bubble, of abandoning their perpetual childish outrage and getting real about their problems. On the contrary, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seem to be moving the party even further left. And I certainly don't see any evidence that the party is working to recover those working class voters that used to be their base - on either economic issues or cultural issues.

Well, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" law applies in politics as well - if they can't shape up they will disappear as a party, which is a real disaster because then who will represent the liberal point of view?

Hypocrisy

I suppose hypocrisy is always around us, but recent events have certainly brought it to the fore:

Hollywood stars are forever pontificating about the behavior of others, but now it turns out that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment has been an open secret in Hollywood for decades, but only now are stars who knew about it willing to be “shocked” in public!  Of course jokes about the “Hollywood casting couch” go back to the 1920s, so really I don’t suppose this is new behavior in Tinsel City.

And then there is the New York Times, that bastion of investigative reporting, always ready to expose wrongdoing (especially by Republicans) who apparently suppressed a story about this in 2004 after getting pressure from Weinstein. The Times of course denies that it did this, but the evidence is pretty clear. To their credit, they were the ones who – finally – broke the story this year.

Then there are the NFL football players demonstrating against the killing of unarmed blacks by police (16 last year, according to the FBI), but conveniently ignoring the epidemic of blacks killed by other blacks (over 7000 last year, but 61% of black homicides are never solved, so it is probably actually much higher).  And of course they aren’t going to protest the high rate of spousal abuse among NFL players either.

It does seem to me that hypocrisy is more in fashion this year.

Thoughts on upgrading our naval power

I have been thinking a great deal and reading a great deal about the current state of our navy, particularly in light of the book recommended in the preceding post. Clearly the proliferation of very quiet diesel-electric submarines around the world, the evolution of increasingly effective ship-killer cruise missiles and medium-range ballistic missiles, and the advances in space-based sensor systems has dramatically changed the naval battlespace. Looking at the current and planned future developments in the US navy has led me to the following observations:

The current trend to decrease the manpower on warships is short-sighted. Yes it cuts the operating costs – fewer sailors to train and maintain. But in real combat ships get damaged, and what keeps them afloat and fighting are the damage control teams. Cut the manning down too far and there aren’t enough sailors for effective damage control teams. Lightly-manned ships are fine in peacetime, but I fear in actual combat we will lose ships and sailors we could have saved if there had been enough manpower aboard to do effective damage control.

The recent focus on shorter range air-superiority fighters on carriers is short-sighted. Because of the new developments, carrier groups will likely have to operate further from the battlefront, and their air wings will need a longer reach. Mid-air refueling can help the problem a bit, but the relatively slow and unprotected refueling planes are an obvious early target for any opponent. We need to develop longer-range naval aviation planes.

The new “distributed lethality” concept is a good one – equip more smaller ships with effective anti-ship missiles, so that every navy ship, whatever its size, is a serious combatant, instead of just a few of the major battlewagons. Of course anti-ship missiles are only as good as their guidance and targeting information, so even the smallest of these ships will need to be connecting to the evolving combat networks.

A clear weak point in the US military as a whole is the increasing dependence on space-based sensors and communications assets, which any serious opponent will probably try to knock out at the very beginning of hostilities, either with a high-altitude nuclear EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) burst and/or anti-satellite missiles.  China in particular has invested heavily in developing and testing anti-satellite weapons.  We ought to take that into account.

We ought to push hard the evolution of unmanned stand-off weapons like cruise missiles with intelligent guidance systems that are not wholly dependent on GPS for their accuracy.  We are likely to need to launch initial attacks from further away, given the increasingly effective anti-access weapons systems around the world (like the new Russian S-400 missile system, arguably better than anything the US currently has).’

We ought to push hard the evolution of long-endurance unmanned submarine systems, for intelligence, sub hunting, missile launching and mine laying/detecting.  Underwater vehicles will likely be much safer in a future war than surface vessels, and much likelier to be able to get close to enemy shores.  The current limit on such vehicles is the power source – batteries just aren’t high enough capacity yet. But this will change.

We ought to be paying attention to our industrial base. The US is down to only seven major domestic shipyards capable of building, maintaining or repairing large navy ships. In World War II we had 29. As it is we are seeing delays in replacing our end-of-life carriers and submarines because of shipyard capacity. For example, on our current building schedule we will have a shortfall of attack submarines for over a decade, between 2025 and 2041, partly because of funding issues but also because of shipbuilding capacity. (The current requirement to keep 10 attack submarines deployed around the world every day requires 48 total attack submarines in the inventory)   If I were an opponent, I would seek early on to put a few of these shipyards out of action.

Will any of this happen? It depends on whether Congress and the administrators in power over the next decade or so get real about the threats, or continue to dither and hold unrealistic expectations about a peaceful world.

Recommended: Anti-Access Warfare: Countering A2/AD Strategies

People may resent the amount we spend on our military, but in fact it is American power that keeps free access to the seas around the world, and it is the sea that carries the vast majority of the trade that keeps our economy, and the economies of our trading partners going, so like it or not it is very much in our own self-interest to act as the policeman of the high seas.  Retreat from that obligation would be very foolish and short-sighted indeed, much as it might please the pacifists among us.

There is no nation that currently threatens us on the high seas, but there are several that have spent a great deal on their military to deny us access to their local waters, the Peoples Republic of China being the most worrisome. Not only would the PRC like to deny us the ability to protect Taiwan if/when they decide to take it back (an eventuality for which they have been planning and arming for decades now), but they claim almost the entire South China Sea (the so-called nine dash line), an area that carries one-third of the entire world’s shipping. And of course Iran can always threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, shutting off 20% of the world’s oil supply. Both have invested heavily in anti-access weapons. Clearly there are issues here we ought to be thinking about.

Sam Tangredi’s 2013 book Anti-Access Warfare: Countering A2/AD Strategies is worth reading for anyone who wants to be better informed about the challenges our military may face in the future, and the weapon developments and investments we ought to be making to meet that possible future. This is not a causal read – but it is worth it.

Now that we know more....

Now that we know more about the shooter in Las Vegas, one important thing is pretty clear: none of the steps currently proposed by gun-control advocates would have been effective in stopping this tragedy.   The shooter appeared perfectly normal to his family and  those who knew him. He had no known political agenda, or even interest. He had no criminal record. He had no known history of mental illness. He bought at least one shotgun at a gun store and passed the background check.

He seems to have amassed a sizeable collection of guns (42 at last count), and modified some of them to fire automatically. And apparently even his brother didn't know he had done this. I suppose a national register of all gun purchases might have raised a flag, but even then there are perfectly normal collectors who might own that many guns. He was wealthy, so it would not have been unreasonable for him to have been (or posed as) a collector.

But certainly the usual steps proposed by gun-control advocates, such as universal background checks, would have been ineffective in this case. That doesn't mean they aren't still good ideas, and worth doing. They will stop some shooters. Burt let's be clear - none of the proposed steps would have stopped this shooter.  Only eliminating all guns in the civilian population might have been effective, and that is clearly a political non-starter in America, and probably unenforceable in any case.