Cromwell

There was a time when intelligence was viewed as a single concept, but that idea appears to be out of vogue, and for very good reasons.  To use myself as an example, I’m pretty good at identifying and solving abstract problems, but put a hammer in my hand, and I’m hopeless.  Different people have different abilities. That’s just the way it is.

Is “character” a monolith?  For much the same reason, I don’t think so.  If sexual fidelity equated to reliability in politics, many of the world’s greatest politicians would have been miserable failures.  And then, on the other hand, you have Charles I, who was faithful to his wife, but who never otherwise kept a promise in his life, and paid for it with his head . . .

5.  It will reduce the amount of money available for badly-needed public investments.

4.  It will drive up interest rates and the cost of health insurance on the individual market.

3.  It weaponizes the tax code in a manner that is unprecedented and invites retaliation in kind, thereby worsening the blue/red divide.

2.  It exacerbates inequality.

And, the #1 reason is . . .

1. Its impact on growth will be negligible, based on recent experience (Bush tax cuts; Kansas), logic (existing corporate cash mountains; low interest rates), and informal surveys of CEOs (the Cohn tape, among others).

However much you may deplore it, Murkowski’s vote on the tax cut bill made perfect sense.  Her price was drilling in ANWR, and she got it.  Case closed.

It’s harder to understand Susan Collins’ vote, because she didn’t get any such quid pro quo.  She’s not stupid, so she has to know that the bill will, among other things, increase taxes for some of her constituents, severely damage the individual health insurance market, drive up interest rates, and exacerbate inequality.  Why would she do it?

There are only two plausible answers:  donor and peer pressure.  Neither reflects well on her.  But, at least, she can always say she won one for the Trumpster. That should go over well when she runs for re-election.

In light of the events of the last few weeks, I offer the following graphic:

Jerk               Immoral         Illegal

Representative      No.                Probably.          Yes

Job Nexus.               No.                 No.                     Yes

Here is what the terms mean:

”Jerk” refers to offensive behavior that does not involve violence or an abuse of power.

”Immoral” means conduct involving an abuse of power that is not illegal.

”Illegal” speaks for itself.

”Representative” means you cannot abide the idea of such a person acting as your agent in  public.

”Job nexus” means the offensive conduct is clearly tied to the qualifications for the job.  For example, one wouldn’t hire a known liar as a bookkeeper.

As you can see, I don’t view jerkish behavior as being a job disqualification, although it might be if the behavior persists and the job is very public.  Illegal  behavior is always a disqualification even if there is no nexus to the job itself.  Immoral behavior is the closest call.  It depends on how egregious the facts are.

 

The Senate tax bill is such a travesty, one barely knows where to begin.  A good place to start is the unprecedented use of the tax code to punish the blue states and the universities.  There is no reasonable economic case for that;  the motivation is purely political.

The Democrats will have every reason to reciprocate when they regain power. What would a blue tax bill look like?  In all likelihood, it would pay for new social programs with stiff taxes on fossil fuels generated in red states.

Take that, Texas and West Virginia.  Oh, and by the way, Texas, don’t come asking blue states to subsidize your bad land use practices when the next hurricane hits.

As you can imagine, this is a very short list:

1.  It is clear that neither Clinton nor Bush foresaw that China would become the world’s workshop when they were negotiating the terms of China’s admission to the WTO.  The agreement should have provided more protection for American exports and intellectual property.
2.  The Trump Administration is right to join with the EU in arguing that China is not a “market economy.”  Large Chinese firms doing business with the US and Europe are essentially arms of the government, not independent actors.  That’s the meaning of the “Chinese dream;”   China as a whole prospers, and the benefits are distributed by the government as it sees fit.

That’s it.  Just because China is a mercantilist state doesn’t mean that we should behave in the same manner.  Our businesses, unlike theirs, are independent agents, and we cannot protect them in the same way.  The appropriate response to Chinese state capitalism is to use the rules that are in place to our advantage, not to tear them up and rely solely on our brute market power to get what we want.  The latter approach has already failed;  the public just doesn’t know it yet.

Steve Bannon, as we know, has no use for international entities and agreements. In his view, everything revolves around the power and values of individual nation-states.  In particular, he wants the US and European countries to collaborate in crusades against Islam and China, but on the basis of common Judeo-Christian values and interests, not through the UN or any kind of binding agreement.

Bannon’s brand of nationalism, of course, helped to bring about the two world wars.  It is much more likely that neighboring countries in a nationalist frenzy will fight each other than cooperate in a battle against a remote group of outsiders. Leaving that aside, however, consider the example of Northern Ireland after Brexit:  the British, Northern Irish, and Irish governments all deplore the idea of a hard border, but without the involvement of the EU, there doesn’t seem to be any viable way to avoid one.  All of the parties in Ireland will suffer needlessly as a result.

Sometimes, international entities and agreements are indispensable, even if Bannon doesn’t understand that.

It hasn’t received the appropriate amount of publicity, but the fact is that Trump’s trade agenda is already a failure.  I say that because his theory was that the US had so much market power, it could dispense with multilateral agreements and impose more favorable bilateral agreements on its partners.  The administration has made no–zero–progress on that front.  Instead, our partners are making trade deals among themselves, and leaving us out in the cold.

It is clear that the parties to the US-less TPP still want us to join, as we should, when Trump is gone. Will the Democrats rise to the occasion, or will they make the mistake of trying to out-Trump the man himself on trade in an effort to win back the 70,000 votes in the Rust Belt that cost them the election?  My hope is that Trump will make protectionism so unpopular, free trade will be back in 2020.  Whether that will actually occur or not, I do not know.

OK, so maybe this is a bit frivolous, but I don’t have to write about war and taxes all of the time.

The first season of “The Crown” was slow, but compelling, TV.  Mostly set in the 1950’s, the implicit message of the program was that the lives of members of the royal family were subject to government control in a way that virtually all of the rest of us would find completely intolerable.  Choices on where to live, whom to marry, what kind of job is suitable, and so on were completely limited by the system, which turned royal rebels like Edward VIII (who nonetheless comes across as a grifter in the show) into pariahs.  Accepting those limits was a form of duty and patriotism.

I say “was” because it is clear that Princess Diana changed everything.  Diana insisted that she had rights to live what the rest of us would call a normal life, and so did her children.  The result is a matter of public record.

Today, the British public, and even the royal family, seems accepting of the notion that Prince Harry can marry a biracial divorced American woman just because he loves her.  What does that mean?  Well, mostly nothing;  I’ve never taken the activities of the royals very seriously as history.  However, it does seem to confirm my opinion that the UK has become more free and open, and far less class- and tradition-driven, than it was when I was there in 1979.  And that, on balance, is a good thing.

As I, and numerous other commentators, have noted previously, blustering about the North Korean nuclear program creates the potential for uncertainty about motives and, therefore, could result in an unwanted war in and of itself.   If you assume, however, for purposes of argument that we won’t just stumble into war over rhetoric, how do you tell the difference between bluster and reality?

The salient facts are as follows:

1.  The Trump Administration doesn’t really want war.  If it did, the war would already have started.
2.   Nothing short of war is going to stop the North Korean program.  Period.
3.   The program is moving steadily to the point where it threatens mass destruction on the US mainland.  The time to act is running out.

And so, in the final analysis, North Korea has already made its choice to create a nuclear program that threatens the US, and the Trump Administration will ultimately have to choose between war and deterrence to keep it at bay.  Based on what we’ve seen so far, it appears that deterrence is going to win, but that isn’t set in stone.

Everything else–all the tests and all of the verbal threats–is just noise.

The tax cut bill resembles the various Obamacare repeal bills in the following ways:

1.  The fundamental premises of the bills were lies.  In the case of Obamacare repeal, the GOP promised legislation that would provide more and better insurance even though the party’s actual position was to require people to have more “skin in the game.”  With the tax cut, the lie is that the bill is directed at the middle class;  it isn’t.

2.  The bills were rushed through the system in an effort to head off opposition.  This tactic appears to be fairly successful, and will probably be emulated by the Democrats in the future.

3.  The bills were hideously unpopular with the public, but moved forward, anyway.   The GOP apparently decided that failure to produce a product was more politically damaging than producing a product that hurts millions of Americans, many of them GOP voters.

4.  The bills have the support of the PBP and Reactionary factions of the GOP.  In the case of the PBPs, the motive, of course, was tax cuts.  The Reactionaries wanted Obamacare repeal because it would deprive millions of undeserving poor people, many of them minorities, of an ill-gotten government benefit.  They don’t stand to gain much from the huge tax cut for plutocrats, but at least it will be a “win” for their guy, which, apparently, is enough.

5.  The potential opponents are the same.  The CD and CL factions of the GOP have equal and opposite issues with both bills.  The CLs are concerned about deficits and excessive government regulation;  the CDs are concerned that the bills hurt poor people in the interests of the wealthy.

6.  The bills are jury-rigged pieces of legislation designed to meet Senate rules and get 51 votes;  they make little sense from a policy perspective.  No elaboration is required.

In the case of Obamacare repeal, Dudley Do-Right managed to free the damsel in distress from the railroad tracks just in the nick of time.  Will that happen with the tax bill?  I’m guessing not, in which case the GOP will have to live with the consequences of its success, which probably won’t be pretty.

One last word on the subject:  the donor class is happy with the tax bill, as it should be, but the benefits to rich people revolve primarily around rising share prices.  What happens if the market falls for other reasons?  Then even the principal recipients of the bill won’t gain anything, and the bill will be a failure even as a quid pro quo.

On the GOP bill to cut tax.

Its supporters ignore all the facts.

The bill is a crock.

It should come as no shock

That the leadership’s covering their tracks.

 

A more detailed discussion will follow.

Trump’s trip to Asia gave us a glimpse at what could be a radical shift in American foreign policy:  the US could temporarily resolve its trade deficits with Japan and South Korea, while eliminating the cost of protecting both nations, by selling them hundreds of billions of dollars in high tech weapons, including nukes.

This would be a stunning reversal of 70 years of American policy, and it would make Asia a far more dangerous place to live.  But hey, that would be their problem, and America first–right?

Imagine that you are Shinzo Abe.  The cause that drives you, above everything else, is the revision of the constitution that was imposed on Japan by the Americans after World War II.  There are a number of reasons for that:  part of it is the desire to “normalize” your country and its defense policies; part of it is a denial that Japanese aggression caused the war (understandably called the “War of Japanese Aggression” in China); but a big part of it is a realistic appraisal of the military and economic threat that a rising China presents to an island nation with long, exposed sea lanes.

The current constitution has substantial support in the Japanese public and will be difficult to change.  Fortunately for you, you have two unlikely allies:  Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump.  The former has been lobbing missiles through your country’s air space, and needs to be deterred;  the latter complains endlessly about America’s trade deficit with Japan, and can’t be relied upon in a conflict with China or North Korea.

There is a logical way to deal with this situation:  buy hundreds of billions of dollars worth of arms from the Americans, including nuclear weapons, in order to close the trade deficit, protect the nation from the crazoid in North Korea, and free yourself from dependence on the American military.  That approach solves all your problems at once, and provides a strong justification for your constitutional amendment.

Now, imagine that you are Xi Jinping.  You have always maintained that, however bad the regime in North Korea might be, letting it collapse would be worse.  Is that really true if maintaining the regime means that Japan will have nuclear weapons?

There are no good options for Xi here.

Not without reason, David Brooks thinks America is coming apart at the seams. He blames in more or less equal parts the right, for exalting money, the markets, and the interests of wealthy people over the community as a whole, and the left, for emphasizing freedom and group victimhood over responsibility and national solidarity.

There’s a lot of truth in that, but he rarely has anything meaningful to say about what needs to be done to get back to Point A from Point B.  On its face, the logical contenders are:

1.  A charismatic politician who seeks to bring the nation back together.   We tried that, and it didn’t work.

2.  A religious revival.  You can’t make people believe in things that don’t make sense to them.  In any event, conservative Catholics are more interested in the “Benedict Option” than community outreach, and the evangelicals voted for Trump.  Good luck bringing the country together with that.

The closest American analogy I can think of is the 1920’s, when technological change, unequal economic growth, scientific advances, and opposition to Prohibition probably created something of a similar environment (think the public reaction to Al Smith’s presidential campaign).  How did that end up?  With two disasters that brought the country together:  the Great Depression and World War II.  That’s what it might take today, and Trump is certainly capable of providing the disaster.