Month: February 2018

So the Super Bowl champs are from Philly.

The oddsmakers look kind of silly.

Nick Foles was just great;

Brady coughed it up late;

The Bud Light folks said “Dilly Dilly.”

Here’s what I would demand:

1.  A path to citizenship for all current illegal aliens.  If it needs to be easier for Dreamers, so be it.

2.  Money for better treatment for refugees at the border.  The current system is a national disgrace.

3.  No decrease in the number of legal immigrants.  Demographically and fiscally speaking, reducing legal immigration makes no sense.

4.  No withdrawal from NAFTA.  No elaboration is required.

Here’s what I would be willing to give up:

1.  Go ahead and build the wall.  Sure, it’s wasteful and stupid, but it doesn’t do that much harm.  Think of it as a big public works program.

2.  Make the legal immigration quotas more skills-oriented.   We have the right to take only the economic refugees that we want.  That would include agricultural workers, for obvious reasons.

3.  More money for enforcement, apart from the wall.  If the system as a whole is fair, there’s nothing wrong with enforcing it.

Will anything like this really happen?  I’m not holding my breath.

Life in the time of Trump.

He hates the FBI.

While he stomps and claims

He’s been defamed,

The story just won’t die.

Republicans won’t do their job

To check and to resist him.

They’ve offered him their strong support.

They’ve chosen to assist him.

That the GOP Congress would enact a huge, regressive tax cut is about the least surprising thing in the world.  What is novel, however, is the clear policy preference for business owners over high wage earners, as manifested in the pass-through provisions of the legislation.

Where did this come from?  I think there are two reasons:

1.  The GOP has genuinely started to believe all that rhetoric about “job creators.”  As a result, the idle rich are seen as being more virtuous than hardworking  high wage earners.

2.  High-earning professionals disproportionately vote for Democrats due to the GOP’s position on science and the culture wars.  The pass-through legislation contains distinctions relative to professions that only make sense if you view them as a reward or punishment for voting patterns.

Naturally, this approach makes the party’s neo-Victorian approach to the poor look like rank hypocrisy.  More on that at a later date.

Trump is, of course, polling very poorly, but he takes consolation in the fact that the stock market is soaring.  He’s not the only reason for that, of course;  markets are going up all over the world.  It would be churlish, however, to suggest that his tax cut and deregulation program didn’t have something to do with it.

The problem is that the stock market is overvalued by most standard historical criteria.  What happens when we have a correction?  Will he feel compelled to overreact in order to deal with the damage to his self-image?  It could easily happen.

On the one hand, the “King of Debt” talks down the dollar in order to boost exports, and his Treasury Secretary did the same thing at Davos last week.  On the other hand, he promotes a tax cut bill that is designed to encourage foreign investment and increase the deficit and interest rates, which will push the value of the dollar up.

I don’t get it.  Do you?

The purpose of the Black Lives Matter movement is to educate individuals and governments about institutional racism in the judicial system and law enforcement and to get the government to do something about it.  Whether you sympathize with the movement or not (I do), you can’t say there is anything illogical about their goals or tactics.

#MeToo is a different matter.  The movement seems to consist primarily of rich and famous women appearing on TV to denounce sexual harassment by rich and powerful men.  Who is the audience for this, and what can it accomplish?  Here are some possibilities:

1.  If the point is to send a message to men who don’t engage in that kind of behavior, it’s irritating and pointless.  As I’ve said previously, I don’t need to be told that sexual harassment is wrong any more than I need to be told that robbing banks is wrong.
2.  If the point is to reform the harassers, chances are that they don’t even recognize themselves as harassers.  That battle needs to be won by affected individuals fighting back in the trenches on a day-to-day basis, not by celebrities wearing pins or flowers on TV.
3.  If the point is to speak to other, similarly-situated women, that is a very small universe, and why inflict the message on everyone else?
4.  If the point is to inspire women who are not rich and famous to fight back against their oppressors, do celebrities really have a right to speak for them?

In my opinion, #MeToo is just about aimlessly blowing off steam.  That’s understandable, but it doesn’t accomplish anything in the long run.

The most appropriate response is, compared to what?  The authoritarian models would be Russia and China.  A few rhetorical questions are in order:

1. Are refugees from Africa and the Middle East lining up to get into either country?
2.  Has economic growth in Russia outstripped the US in recent years?
3.  Do Putin’s military successes in Crimea and Syria somehow make Russia a better place to live?
4.  Do the Russians produce anything that anyone wants to buy except petroleum products?
5.  Are the people of Hong Kong happy about increasing Chinese efforts to control the politics in their city?
6.  Would you like to live in a country that kidnaps citizens of foreign nations and holds them in secrecy?
7.  Would you like to live in a country that severely limits your access to foreign web sites?
8.  Is inequality in China increasing or decreasing?

No, liberal democracy has not failed, particularly relative to the alternatives.  Individual politicians and governments, yes;  the systems themselves, no.