Euphemisms

The administration, and the media, are still trying to pretend there is no border issue, even though October saw over 160,000 people caught trying to sneak across the border (and who knows how many more not caught), more than double the number a year ago. These are, of course, illegal immigrants. Obviously illegal because they didn't follow the immigration laws. But Democrats can't bring themselves to use the word "illegal", so now we have euphemisms to try to hide the reality. First we had "undocumented" immigrants, as if this were all just a bureaucratic mix-up with the paperwork. But even that apparently is too offensive to the woke community, so now we have "irregular" immigrants. No doubt "irregular" will soon be seen to be too discriminatory, and we will get a new euphemism.

Unfortunately, euphemisms, while they may temporarily help hide the problem, won't solve the problem.

Recommended: Angrynomics

“It’s the economy, stupid” is a famous quote from Democratic strategist James Carville. And he was right. At its core, politics is driven by the economy. If the economy is good for almost everyone, politics is relatively benign and we all have the luxury of arguing passionately about inconsequential issues. If the economy is in trouble, politics become vicious and dangerous and we get populism or fascism or other nasty things, as we have currently. And the US economy (and the world economy as well, for that matter) is in deep trouble right now. I don’t mean just the short-term pandemic-driven problems with inflation, unemployment, and supply chain problems. I mean the long-term problem embodied in the chart below, which I have posted before:

 Fundamentally, since about 1970 wages for the bottom four-fifths of the nation have been stagnant, while the top 1% has gotten fabulously, even obscenely, wealthy off the labor of that bottom four-fifths. This level of inequality is simply unsustainable, and is at the root of the present disorder – including the Trump phenomena in the US. In Europe it is having much the same effect, driving things like Brexit and the French riots.

National economies are massively complex and hence very hard to understand. Economists, for the most part, don’t really understand national economies very well either. Despite the complex formulas they have developed (many based on highly dubious assumptions about human behavior), most seem to reason more from ideology than from data, which may be why their policies so often fail. (Think about the EU “austerity” plan which bankrupted so many southern European nations.)  I’m sure that assessment would seem overly harsh to a professional economist, but I think history supports my case.

Politicians seem to be largely clueless about economics, but then most of them are lawyers by training, so perhaps that is not surprising. Judging by the current bills before Congress, the Democratic (bare) majority doesn’t yet understand the real issue, and is focused on rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks. The Republicans haven’t shown any better understanding, or even much interest in trying to gain a better understanding. To be fair, all US national politicians are severely constrained in what they could do, even if they wanted to, by their indebtedness to the wealthy donors, corporations and special interest groups that put them in office and keep them there.

The best and most persuasive (and understandable) overview analysis I have seen of what has happened in the US national economy over the past half century, and how we got to our present unsustainable state, comes from Mark Blyth, Professor of International Economics and Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown University. Perhaps because he isn’t really an economist, but instead straddles the fields of economics, finance, political science and behavioral science, he seems to have better grasp of what is happening, or at least he is better at explaining it in understandable, even entertaining, terms to a lay person, so long as you can understand his delightful Scottish accent and brutal sense of humor. For a relatively quick summary of his explanation, watch his 2019 lecture on YouTube entitled “Global Trumpism and the Future of the Global Economy”. It runs about an hour and a half, but would be a well-spent hour and a half for anyone who really cared about what is happening.

But really this posting is a recommendation for his 2020 book Angrynomics, written with Eric Lonergan, an economist, author and philosopher. Written as a series of dialogues between Mark and Eric, it goes into the issue in much greater depth., exploring not only the economics, but also the whole psychological and philosophical issue of public anger. But be warned, reading this book will take some work, some concentration. It’s not that it is incomprehensible, it is in fact quite readable, and jargon and formula-free. It is that there are lots of interconnected ideas to follow, which in fact is what I find so interesting about it.  

Will China invade Taiwan?

Chinese premier Xi has said on several occasions that reclaiming Taiwan ought not to be left to future generations, implying that he feels the need to reclaim the island during his own generation, and perhaps even during his own term in office. That has raised again the question of whether the US would actively defend Taiwan if the Chinese attempted an invasion. And President Biden, perhaps inadvertently, has muddied the waters even more recently by asserting, in answer to a direct question, that yes, the US would defend Taiwan. That departs for the “strategic ambiguity” policy the US has followed for decades, and although his handlers in the White House tried to walk back his assertion, it has opened up the question again.

Strategically it would be difficult for the US to defend Taiwan against an invasion from China. The logistics are against it. China is only 100 miles from Taiwan, while the nearest major US base (Guam) is almost 3000 miles away. It would take weeks, if not months, to assemble a significant US military force to defend or retake the island. The military has wargamed such a defense repeatedly, and the unofficial word is that in 18 wargames, the US prevailed not once.

That’s not to say that a Chinse invasion of Taiwan would be easy for them. Amphibious landings are exceeding difficult, and the Chinese have no experience with them. Taiwan has spent a lot of time and money making itself a difficult target, and we have sold them lots of advanced equipment to help with that. A Chinese invasion, though probably ultimately successful, would probably incur very high casualties, not only among the invasion forces but in the nearby Chinese ports supporting the invasion fleet.

But there is a broader strategic picture that has to be considered. Taiwan is important to the US for at least two reasons. First, it is part of the “first island chain” that contains and controls China’s access to the sea, so it plays a vital part in the current US strategy to maintain the South China Sea as a free transport corridor for about 40% of the world’s goods. Second, Taiwan is the source of our most advanced microchips, without which the US economy and military would be in big trouble.

So while the US might have trouble providing direct military help to a beleaguered Taiwan, it would have no trouble at all cutting China off from its major oil supplies in the Middle East, or much of its food imports, or the exports to the West, principally the US, that account for a significant portion of its GDP.

Consider just energy. China in peacetime needs to import about 10.5 million barrels a day (about 8 supertankers a day) just to keep the lights on and the factories running. In wartime it would need much more. Almost all of that comes thousands of miles away from the Middle East along sea routs dominated by the US and it allies. Stop or sink a couple of tankers and that flow ends.

Or consider the Chinese economy, about 20% of which is accounted for by exports. Cut that off and the economy is in deep trouble, even worse trouble than it is in already.

So yes, China could probably retake Taiwan by force, but the cost would be very, very high. Whatever ideological pronouncements the Chinese may make for domestic or foreign consumption, the Chinese tend to be pretty pragmatic, and I would guess that they would look at the cost/benefit ratio and decide that while continuing to threaten invasion might serve a strategic purpose, actually attempting an invasion would cost them more than a victory was worth.