Author: hamilton1788

Florida Republicans are on a tear, and that doesn’t even include their new proposed abortion legislation. First, one of them filed a bill regarding defamation cases and public officials that is clearly intended to push the Supreme Court to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan. Now, the same guy is trying to force all bloggers who write about DeSantis and other state officials to register with the state and disclose any compensation received for writing the blog. This bill is so unconstitutional under prevailing interpretations of the First Amendment that it makes my head swim, which I suppose is the author’s point.

I’ll leave the legal analysis for another day. The first question I want to ask this guy is, do you think what happens in Florida will stay in Florida? Do you think Gavin Newsom likes criticism any better than DeSantis? Don’t you understand that, if you somehow prevail, your friends at Fox News and Breitbart will be in terrible trouble in blue states? Overturning prevailing First Amendment precedents won’t just impact blue people; it will severely damage liberal democracy in America, and impact the interests of dissenters everywhere, including red pundits in blue states.

If there is one thing on which all members of the GOP agree, it is opposition to wokeness. As a result, it is hardly surprising that some limited government advocates are describing federal programs that largely benefit white Christian workers as “woke.”

Aside from the opportunism, there is a certain logic to this; if wokeness is a kind of war for equality, why must it be limited to people of color? But the public understanding of wokeness revolves around race and sex, not federal spending. Poor white people will be astonished to hear that Medicaid spending keeping rural hospitals in business is “woke.” As a result, these efforts aren’t going to work.

A note to my readers: We will be taking a break from our house restoration until Tuesday. Regular postings will resume next Wednesday.

The obvious solution to the Social Security shortfall is to eliminate the income cap on the tax, which is currently around $160,000. Doing so admittedly would do some damage to the widely held perception that Social Security is a standard insurance program, based purely on consumer payments and actuarial statistics, but that’s only an illusion, so who cares?

Biden has shown a willingness to address the income cap, but only for people earning over $400,000 per year. Why that number? It’s a relic from the Obama years. It bears no relationship whatsoever to public perceptions regarding who is rich and who is middle class. It doesn’t bear any relationship to anything, as far as I can tell.

There is no obvious reason why a poor or middle-class person should pay a higher rate of FICA tax than someone making $399,999 per year. This number needs to go.

Rick Scott, the party’s most prominent CL, and Josh Hawley, its best known “national conservative,” aren’t running for president. That means the scope of disagreement on the issues among the candidates will be relatively narrow. Since the candidates will all be looking for votes from the Reactionary and PBP factions of the party, the real questions will involve their ability to create bridges between the two factions.

For all that, there will be some genuine disputes, including the following:

1. UKRAINE: Trump openly supports Putin and despises Ukraine; DeSantis dismisses Putin as a problem; the rest of the candidates will probably be openly pro-Ukraine. Advantage, the others.
2. ABORTION: All of the candidates will support new restrictions on abortion, of course, but they will probably disagree on a national ban, exceptions, and the length of the legal abortion window. Mike Pence will undoubtedly take the hardest line and win millions of pro-life votes; the others will be all over the map.
3. CLIMATE CHANGE: Trump will say it’s a complete fraud. The others will probably acknowledge its existence, but insist nothing can be done without wrecking the economy. The latter position is closer to the position held by the median GOP voter, but it remains to be seen whether moderation on this issue can attract votes.
4. AGRICULTURE AND TARIFFS: Trump will say his Chinese tariffs were a complete success. Iowa voters may beg to differ, which leaves an opening for the other candidates.
5. IMMIGRATION: Trump will never let any opponent take a more extreme position on the border than he does. He will probably advocate for family separation again. Will the others follow, or simply criticize Biden without proposing any real alternatives? If the latter, will the base punish them for their equivocation? My guess is yes.
6. ENTITLEMENTS: We know Trump fully understands that the base supports Social Security and Medicare. He will never support cuts, regardless of what the donor class wants. What about the others? Expect vague statements about the need to “save” the programs, but no commitments on cuts, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the PBPs and the Reactionaries.
7. TAX CUTS: Republicans have to have a new tax cut warming up in the bullpen, don’t they?

What you won’t hear is a debate on wokeness. There isn’t one in the GOP.

In a way, the assassination saved my reputation. If I had lived to deal with Reconstruction, I would have been caught between my instinct to be generous with the rebels and my desire to do right by the former slaves. I would have been more successful in dealing with Congress than Johnson–that’s not a high bar–but would I have embraced the Radical Republican agenda or attempted to tone it down? We’ll never know.

Unfortunately, the racial issue just morphed into something more subtle and permanent after the war; it didn’t disappear. The fight for racial equality long postdates Reconstruction. In some ways, the Civil Rights Movement was the sequel to the Civil War. Even now, racial issues largely drive American politics.

Like virtually everyone else during my day, I was a racist, albeit an unusually enlightened one. Events since then have proved to my satisfaction that racism is wrong. The Republican Party is consequently no longer on the side of the angels; ironically, it is the Democrats, who opposed the war in the 1860s, who are on the cutting edge of history.

There once was a woman named Greene

Whose ideas were really extreme.

Like Jewish death rays.

We’ll be thrilled and amazed

If she’s hit by a space laser beam.

I never made any bones about it; while average citizens were entitled to some say in government, real power should be exercised by the elite–or, if you like, the “establishment.” By the elite, I didn’t mean some small ossified group of large landowners; I was referring to the most dynamic part of the population–the capitalists. There always has to be room in the establishment for new, enterprising, well-educated people. People like me.

By and large, my vision for America has become reality. America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on the planet. But battles between the establishment and populists have been a theme of American history from the beginning. Jefferson and I fought about it in the late 18th century. Sometimes, as with Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan, the populist cause didn’t deserve any support. Sometimes, as with FDR and the Civil Rights Movement, it did. Make no mistake: I would have supported MLK every step of the way. He was fighting against the erection and maintenance of artificial legal barriers against black citizens. I was always opposed to those kinds of barriers.

Today’s populists are the product of racism, economic failures partially attributable to our political leaders, media without responsible gatekeepers, and a misbegotten war in the Middle East. They claim to have some sort of entitlement to run the country by virtue of being white Christians even though they don’t have any economic or educational credentials that justify their leadership. That’s not what I had in mind when I supported the creation of a dynamic, flexible establishment. If the populists and the demagogues that exploit them–Trump reminds me of Burr, but has even fewer redeeming qualities–ever get firm control of our country, God help America.

Unlike the nexus between the pandemic and a temporary payment moratorium, the logical connection between the pandemic and permanent debt relief is fairly shaky, which means you could rule against the students on the merits without invoking the vague, arbitrary, and generally odious “major questions doctrine.” The standing question is quite another matter, however. No Supreme Court with any sense of legal propriety would say that there was an injury in fact to any of the plaintiffs in this case.

Do I have any confidence that the Court will rule this way? None whatsoever! The Court is itching to blow up every Biden administrative initiative that makes any difference in the lives of average citizens. That means, inevitably, that Supreme Court reform will be on the menu during the 2024 election, because the left is in office, but not in power.

I was always about checking the power of overmighty governmental authorities. When state governments were out of control, I supported federalism and the Constitution. When Hamilton started using the powers of the new federal government in a way I hadn’t contemplated, I became an advocate for states’ rights. Some people accused me of changing sides, but it wasn’t true; I was just responding to a new and different factual situation. That’s what reasonable people do when conditions change.

I always thought that making fundamental changes through government should be hard; most change should be evolutionary and driven by the private sector. It should require a lot of effort and compromise to build coalitions large enough to get majorities in Congress. That’s what Federalist #10 was trying to say. There is a big difference, however, between difficult and impossible.

The combination of the filibuster–an innovation that was unknown in 1787–along with a partisan Supreme Court has made significant legislation virtually impossible. Since power abhors a vacuum, the executive branch and the judiciary have encroached on the powers of Congress in order to get anything done. That isn’t constitutional government; it’s government by slapdash work-around. It needs to be changed as soon as possible if the objective is to restore limited, but effective government in Washington.

Sunak’s deal with the EU looks reasonable and fair–obvious, even–and in the best interests of both sides. Will he be rewarded for that with a revolt by the hardline Brexiteers? It wouldn’t shock me.

When the French government increased taxes on gasoline in order to reduce emissions, the countryside erupted. The American left learned from the example of the gilets jaunes; they gave up the idea of taxing carbon in favor of subsidies and regulations in order to mute the objections from the populist right

On the other hand, most of the American right has learned from the demonstrations regarding Macron’s pension reform bill that cutting Social Security is a non-starter, at least for now. As I’ve noted before, there is a constituency for entitlement cuts in the GOP that will never go away, but as long as the reactionaries are calling the shots, they won’t happen.

My vision of an America dominated politically by free yeoman farmers prevailed for about fifty years; that’s why the Federalists died out. But the combination of successful wars and dramatic technological change led to an America dominated by immigrants, large corporations, and industry. My dream was dead by 1900. America became Hamiltonian, and still is.

There are some people out there who think I would be on the side of the giant corporations and the red states against the federal government today. They point to my comments about immigrants and cities and my concern about the encroachment of federal powers on the states. Those are the same people who also falsely insist that I was a committed orthodox Christian. In reality, my attitudes about cities, immigrants, and the like were a product of the conditions that prevailed at the time; my overriding interest was in progress, tactical flexibility, the possibilities of science, and the need to protect the middle class from the predations of rich financiers.

Given a choice between a powerful federal government and unchecked giant corporations, I would pick the former every time, because it at least is accountable to the general public. That’s why I’m a Democrat today, not a Sarah Palin Republican.

Paul Krugman is puzzled. Why haven’t the Fed’s interest rate increases significantly cooled aggregate demand? The answer is simple, and I’ve stated it many times before; demand is being fueled by pandemic savings and high stock and real estate prices, not by borrowed money. As a result, interest rate increases are largely irrelevant in the fight against inflation; they don’t account for the significant progress to date, and they won’t solve the problem in the future.

All the Fed can do is drive the construction industry to its knees, lower home prices, and damage the confidence of stock market investors, which would ultimately lead to reduced spending by affluent consumers. The problem is that the investors see the improved inflation data and think lower interest rates are on the way. As a result, the Fed has to sound hawkish even when the data don’t justify it. It’s a fairly ridiculous state of affairs.

If you really want to lower inflation to 2 percent, the best way to do it would be a tax increase on the affluent that would suck up the excess pandemic savings. That, of course, is completely off the table. What we are left with is an inflation-fighting mechanism that doesn’t really work. Does that make sense to you? Of course not.

The heroes of the Roman Republic were my role models from my childhood. I always tried to behave with dignity, grace, and self-restraint. Patriotism always prevailed over the will to power. I may not have met my standard in every case, but I can honestly say that I always tried.

I don’t see that in America today. The citizenry is reasonably independent and well educated; I will give them that. America is the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet. But what are the citizens doing with their advantages? Demagogues, largely operating on cable TV and social media, drive the train. No one respects science, traditions, and the law. We have people dressed as furry Vikings storming the Capitol. Mob rule fed by unscrupulous politicians and the media–it was my worst fear, even in the 18th century.

Ben Franklin once described our system as a republic, if we could keep it. Right now, I don’t know if Americans even want to keep it. Nearly half of them would vote for Caligula over Cato if you gave them the choice today.

Medvedev told the world a few days ago that Russia needed more security space; as a result, the frontier with Poland would have to be rolled back a bit.

DeSantis and Carlson insist that Putin isn’t a threat to NATO countries. Whoops! Don’t you wonder what they’re saying now?

The irony here, of course, is that Poland is as determinedly anti-woke as Putin, so the extreme right is going to have to make a difficult choice. It’s like having to reject either Trump or DeSantis.