Cromwell

Marco Rubio is one of the co-sponsors of a new bill that would require fathers to pay child support from the date of conception. The financial obligation would be retroactive in the event paternity could not be established before birth.

You can see why this approach appeals to Rubio; it permits him to appear woman-friendly without expanding the size of the welfare state, which is of course anathema to the GOP. In fact, I predicted the GOP would move in this direction over a year ago. But the legislation comes with many problems, including:

1. The current child support system lacks effective enforcement tools even for the born, largely due to the fact that many fathers simply don’t have any money. Imagine the problems collecting for a fetus!
2. Rubio probably imagines that the vast majority of abortions are the result of hook-ups. That is not true; his legislation does nothing for women in stable relationships.
3. It is reasonably easy to determine the additional financial needs created by an actual child. For a fetus, not so much. It doesn’t require clothes or shelter or food separate from the mother. How would this calculation be made?
4. I don’t think it’s possible to do paternity testing until the child is born. If not, making the financial obligation retroactive does nothing for the immediate needs of the mother. Do you really think service providers are going to permit her to, in effect, borrow against the inflow of cash that the system says she will receive months from now? Would you be willing to bet on that, if you were such a provider?

The bottom line is that the state’s enforcement abilities would have to be beefed up very significantly in order to make the legislation work. Rubio and his friends aren’t going to vote for a major expansion of government for that purpose. That’s not how they roll.

Regardless of whether you support or oppose abortion rights, you have to admit that the Supreme Court has left matters in a mess. Having a patchwork of regulations is not necessarily a problem by itself, but red states attempting to impose their will on blue states is. We are looking at years of really ugly litigation, and strains on the federal system that haven’t existed since the Civil War. It’s not a pretty picture.

A national abortion referendum could help resolve the problem. The ultimate objective would be to use the results of the referendum, which would be done on a national basis–not state by state–as the basis for federal legislation that would preempt any state laws. It would require, at a minimum, both parties to agree up front that the bill implementing the election results would not be filibustered.

The referendum would include at least two multiple-choice questions. The first question would revolve around when abortion would be permitted; the answers on the ballot would be: never; only to save the life of the mother; only in cases of rape and incest, or to save the life of the mother; and no limit on reasons for abortion. People who checked the last box would then be asked to provide a number of weeks for the procedure to be legal: 6; 15; 20; 24; or no limit. More questions could be added to address other specific issues, but these are the two core items.

The approval of federal legislation consistent with the referendum would put an end to extraterritorial and vigilante-based state laws. While it would not silence the extremists on both sides, it would effectively defang the issue for the foreseeable future. Finally, it would give everyone a fair and equal shot at being heard, so there would be no basis for grievance politics after the referendum.

It appears to me that the mainstream of the GOP has shifted its position on climate change. Instead of looking loony by denying it altogether, the new position is, just deal with the heat by cranking up your A/C! Sure, it may cost you a few more dollars, and life may be a bit uncomfortable for a while, but it’s better than paying $5 for gas, right? And in the long run, we have plenty of resources and time to figure things out, so there’s no reason to panic.

Well, yeah. Except that some people don’t have A/C, and many people can’t afford to pay higher electric bills. Not to mention the additional deaths and property damage from hurricanes and wildfires, the lost agricultural productivity, the lost property value as insurance on the coast becomes increasingly unavailable, the forced migration of millions in the West whose environment is no longer habitable due to a lack of water and unbearable heat, and, of course, millions of additional climate refugees at the border.

Maybe cheap gas isn’t such a good deal, after all. What the right considers acceptable collateral damage is a lot more than that.

The system, at least at the federal level, is stuck, to the dissatisfaction of everyone except Mitch McConnell. Due to the filibuster and the reactionary Supreme Court, the left is all but powerless; the right is also constrained by the filibuster, and by decades of precedent in the judicial system, to say nothing of the literal language of the Bill of Rights.

In the long run, a political process that doesn’t produce meaningful results is unsustainable. Fortunately for us, we’ve been here before, at least at the state level, so we have some idea of how to respond. Rapid urbanization without reapportionment led to completely unrepresentative legislatures, which governed purely in the interest of rural residents and big business. A large part of the answer at the turn of the 20th century was the referendum. Why can’t the same thing be done at the federal level?

The Constitution neither authorizes nor prohibits national referenda, so any such elections would be legal, but could not be binding on Congress. Nevertheless, it would take a very brave or foolish member of Congress to ignore the clear will of the American people.

National referenda would not be appropriate for budgetary issues; they could only be used for matters of clear national importance in which the options can be distilled to two, or at least just a few. Over the next few days, I will provide examples of how this could work.

Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by about 7 million votes, but the GOP picked up seats in the House and almost managed to retain control of the Senate. The message from the electorate clearly was that they wanted an end to Trump’s divisiveness and chaos, but they liked the economy of 2019.

This was effectively a massive repudiation of efforts by progressives to use the pandemic to replace the dollar store economy with a more worker-friendly environment. In that sense, Joe Manchin has a decent claim to be more in tune with the voters than the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

What does this mean for 2022, particularly in light of the unpopularity of inflation? It means the progressive agenda, in the most sweeping sense, is no longer relevant. The more appropriate course of action for Democratic candidates is to attack GOP cultural extremism–particularly on abortion–and to focus on small individual measures, such as controlling prescription drug costs, that will improve the lives of voters in a manner they will note and appreciate.

As I noted in a previous post, Trump managed to obtain the support of the religious right in spite of his conspicuous personal shortcomings because he persuaded them that only he had the strength and ruthlessness to save them from cultural annihilation. Since then, times have moved on. Roe is gone, and reactionaries all over the country are flooding the zone with culture war legislation–all of this without Trump.

Do the religious reactionaries think they still need him at this point, or do they view him as more of a distraction than anything else? We will find out if DeSantis, or one of the other prominent religious reactionaries, has the guts to run against him.

The Democrats are openly supporting far right candidates in some GOP primaries in the hope of running against a weaker opponent. Leaving the ethics of this aside, is it tactically sound?

That depends on two variables:

1. HOW MUCH DAMAGE CAN THE EXTREMIST CANDIDATE DO IF HE WINS? A single House member has little influence in the process, so using the tactic for House races makes some sense. A governor, on the other hand, can do a whole lot of damage. Members of the Senate are in the middle.
2. HOW PLAUSIBLE IS THE PROSPECT OF AN EXTREMIST VICTORY? In Maryland, for example, the Democrats have a 3:1 registration advantage, so the likelihood of a victory for a Trumpist candidate is pretty low. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, is becoming a swing state. You can’t afford to run the risk under those conditions.

As far as I can tell, the predominant business model at our colleges and universities runs something like this:

1. Spend millions of dollars on new plant and equipment and hire lots of expensive administrators to provide new services, so your school operates like a resort.
2. Jack up the tuition to pay for the new buildings and services.
3. Use the new buildings and services to entice wealthy students who can pay the full freight.
4. Use any remaining funds from the endowment and from the higher tuition to let in other students regardless of need. They will either get scholarships or take out large loans.

This business model only works if the economy generates plenty of high-paying jobs for graduates, who can then pay off the loans. That hasn’t been the experience for Gen Z–hence, the calls for wiping out student debt.

For the reasons I have discussed on many previous occasions, using tax money generated from workers who didn’t go to college to eliminate the debts of students who actually managed to get high-paying jobs as a result of their education is obnoxious. Some debt relief on a case-by-case basis is appropriate, however. And in the meantime, while private schools are free to operate in any manner they see fit, state governments need to get serious about overturning, or at least mitigating, the impacts of the faulty business model. In other words, get rid of the unnecessary administrators and don’t build any more white elephants.

So we’re living with rapid inflation.

Discontent has enveloped the nation.

It won’t stop on a dime

But it eases with time.

Think on that when you see a gas station.

In what I would characterize as a bit of a sleeper NYT column this morning, David Brooks identifies two extremely different ways to view life: as a story or a game. People with the latter view see life as an unending contest with the rest of the world to gain and affirm status. Every human interaction has winners and losers. There are no other rules.

The reader will have noticed immediately that this a perfect description of Donald Trump’s mindset, about which I write all of the time. What occurred to me afterwards, however, is how profoundly the gamer mentality conflicts with Christianity. How could someone with Trump’s fascist, amoral world view win the intense support of American Christians?

By engaging in grievance politics. By telling Christians they were losing–on the verge of annihilation, actually–and by persuading them that only he could bring them the permanent political and cultural predominance to which they were manifestly entitled. Millions of them still believe it today.

Florida is apparently giving what amounts to stimulus payments to a fairly large segment of its population in order to offset the impacts of inflation. When it was correctly suggested that this action would increase demand and thus drive up inflation, DeSantis’ press secretary reportedly said that inflation was caused by large federal deficits and by printing too much money, neither of which was relevant to the Florida stimulus.

It’s sort of hard to square this rationale with the fact that the country had an enormous deficit, ultra-low interest rates, and no inflation during the pandemic stage of the Trump administration. Today, we have a much smaller deficit, higher interest rates, and significantly higher inflation. DeSantis bucks will make matters slightly worse, just as the overly generous Biden stimulus payments (which, it should be noted, took the form of a tax cut) did in their day.

I’ve written extensively on this subject over the years. The principal reasons for soaring rents are: increased demand for low-density housing in somewhat remote areas due to the pandemic; the loss of construction workers after the Great Recession; rising materials costs; and overly strict, or at least poorly structured, local government regulations.

The first of these reasons has already started to ebb. The third can’t really be controlled by any level of government. The second could be addressed by encouraging immigration and by providing better vocational training opportunities. The last is complicated, but the key is to give neighbors incentives to support new housing projects instead of reasons and pathways to oppose them.

The Economist thinks the center-left, presumably starting with the president, should make a concerted effort to distance itself from woke culture warriors. Does that make sense?

The reality is more nuanced than that. First, discouraging the activists will only depress blue turnout in the midterms, when turnout is already low, and activists rule. Second, if even one Twitter warrior says something stupid, Fox News will make sure the whole Democratic Party wears it; the right is very disciplined and effective in that way. However, there is room for compromise here. Center-left candidates should make it clear that, while they do not accept the more extreme claims of the woke warriors, they do not support discrimination against historically powerless groups or censorship of their views. That will set them apart from both the right and the extreme left, and should win them plenty of votes in the center.

The GOP thinks the solution to rising health care costs is a wintry blast of market forces. Just make consumers put more skin in the game, they say, and the problem would go away. It sounds reasonable in theory. Would it work in practice?

No. With high co-pays and deductibles, American consumers already have a huge amount of skin in the game. Medical professionals, like professionals in other fields, don’t compete on price. Pricing is totally opaque, anyway. Consumers are rarely in a position to evaluate what they really need, as they lack the requisite training and information and are in exigent circumstances at the time they should be bargaining. Local hospitals are effectively monopolies. The health care field, as a result, is just one market failure after another.

The bottom line here is that, once a country has decided that health care is a right rather than a privilege, extensive government involvement is inevitable. The only solution to market failures is even more government. We need to follow the example of virtually every other country in the world and create a consumer cartel to impose reasonable prices on providers. Prescription drugs would be a good place to start; authorizing the government to bargain would be of great benefit to consumers, and innovation in drug production can be encouraged through more targeted government subsidies, as in the case of the Covid vaccines.

Believe it or not, the Russians played a generally constructive role dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat until now. Putin’s need for diplomatic friends after Ukraine has changed the equation, however. He now looks more like an Iranian ally than an honest broker.

The Iranian nuclear negotiations already appeared to be on life support; after this week, I can’t imagine they have any future. Then what? In one sense, the new axis of evil simplifies everything for American diplomats; the Israelis and the Saudis have been soft on the Russians for self-interested reasons to date, but they can’t possibly ignore the existential threat that a Russia-Iran alliance would present to them, so I would expect that posture to change. With the imminent failure of the negotiations, however, the American choice is stark: acquiesce to the Iranian nukes and rely on deterrence or send in the bombers. I’m afraid the latter is more likely.