In his most recent column Washington Post foreign policy columnist Fareed Zakaria turns to domestic policy and, perhaps not coincidentally, makes a point I have made for years. The surest way for Democrats to prove the superiority of their plans to what Republicans are doing is for them to govern well in the places they already hold the reins of government:

It’s hard to see how the government shutdown and reopening is anything other than a defeat for the Democrats — a high-stakes confrontation that ended with their own goals unmet and their message muddled. If they didn’t have the leverage or were not willing to use it to prolong the shutdown, then why did they stage it at all?

The shutdown reinforced the image of the Democrats as feckless. They promise wonderful-sounding new programs — free child care, for example — but in fact preside over bloated bureaucracies and inept execution. If America has an affordability crisis, it tends to be in places Democrats govern, like New York, Illinois and California, which all feature high taxes, soaring housing costs and stagnant outcomes in basic areas like education and infrastructure.

concluding:

The truth is that local government in the U.S. is already living on borrowed time. For decades, states and cities have traded short-term political harmony for long-term fiscal ruin. To keep the peace with powerful public sector unions, they promise ever-more-lavish pensions and benefits, then quietly defer the bill to future taxpayers. Across America, these obligations act like slow-motion fiscal time bombs — invisible for now, but guaranteed to explode.

These problems have been brewing for decades. Our savings rate has been too low for 70 years. Our spending has been too high for most of that period. Business investment has been too low for the last 25 years. We don’t produce enough of what we consume (for a good rundown on this see the San Francisco Federal Reserve).

The most likely strategy for dealing with debt at the federal level will be to monetize it—that’s what we’ve done for the last 25 years at least. That is diametrically opposed to the buzzword of the day: “affordability”.

Unless the federal government bails out local governments (something I oppose) that alternative is not open to state and local governments. What is to be done? I have been seeking answers to that question from Democrats for some time to no avail.

Nobody wants higher taxes. That is particularly true of Republicans. Every Republican president of recent memory has cut taxes. Everybody wants to spend more; they may differ on how they want to spend the money but everybody wants to spend more.

As I write this post the Chicago City Council is debating the mayor’s latest budget proposal. The mayor wants to balance the budget via higher taxes on businesses. The City Council realizes that is unlikely to attract businesses to Chicago. Chicago has its lowest population in a century and large businesses have been leaving not only the city but the state.

The state is raising the sales tax Chicagoans will pay. Chicago already has the highest sales tax of any major city and the highest property taxes of any major city. Illinoisans have refused to allow the state to create a graduated state income tax. We recognize that although the tax may be levied on those making the highest income at first in due course everyone with a job will be paying higher state income taxes. Neither the city nor the state appear to be capable of economization.

It’s not the Republicans’ fault. There are no Republicans on the Chicago City Council and the State of Illinois has supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. That has been true for decades.

Today is my mom’s birthday. How old would she have been (you might ask)? The answer is we don’t know. Just look at her birth certificate (you might say). Which birth certificate (I would respond)? We have three. All have the same day of the year, November 15. Each has a different birth year.

I’ve written a lot about my mom over the years, shown a lot of pictures of her. She was my dad’s favorite photographic model after all, we have tons of them, and he was an outstanding amateur photographer. He preferred “candids” which in my dad’s eye were picture taken in the most awkward possible circumstances.

I can’t tell you how much I miss my mom. Not only was she my mother, she was one of my best friends and I hope she would have said the same. I frequently sought her advice and vice versa. I have enormous respect for her and the challenges she overcame. In a very real sense it is to the challenges my parents overcame that I became the person I am today, for good or ill.

The other evening my wife and I were watching Wheel of Fortune and, when the winner failed to figure out the phrase in the final prize round, I turned to my wife and said, “Well, obviously he did not have a mother who was a remedial reading teacher.” I learned to read based on the shape of the words. In school I learned phonics; from my mom I learned whole word recognition. It has been a good combination. I still think of her at least daily.

At any rate, Happy Birthday, Mama! I love you.

Yesterday President Trump announced a cut in tariffs on beef, coffee, and other foods. I wanted to make an observation and a prediction.

My observation is that not imposing the tariffs in the first place would have been better.

Here’s the prediction. To use economic jargon food prices will turn out to be downwards inelastic. In other words although prices rise quickly when a tariff, for example, is imposed, removing the tariffs won’t cause prices to return to the status quo ante. At least not nearly as quickly. Competition among retailers won’t bring them down quickly.

One of the reasons that’s the case is how concentrated the grocery business has become. There used to be dozens of major chains and thousands of mom-and-pop grocery stores.. Now there are just a few chains and they don’t actually compete with each other. And then there’s the effect of regional concentration.

I don’t think that national grocery chains should be allowed to exist but I’m a dinosaur.

The short version of this is that prices went up fast. Don’t expect them to come down fast whatever happens.

I wanted to take note of an excellent primer on what an immigration judge does, written by a well-informed source. Here’s a snippet;

Before repatriating aliens with deportation orders, the Department of Homeland Security must obtain removal orders from a tiny pool of approved immigration judges. This lack of decision makers has caused adjudications to slow to a crawl in recent years.

In the meantime, aliens establish what are known as “equities,” meaning jobs, homes, and families, that make deportations more difficult. President Trump’s return to office, however, has allowed our nation’s immigration judges to do something they haven’t accomplished since 2008: decrease the backlog by closing cases faster than new ones are added.

This is a subject I know well, having served as an immigration judge between 2006 and 2015. Here’s how it happened, and what it means going forward.

If this is a subject that interests you, I recommend it.

It does point out a number of defects in present immigration law. The Immigration and Naturalization Act was written before the Department of Homeland Security existed and long before the Digital Revolution had really taken hold. As I’ve pointed out in the past the federal government is mired in the 1950s and has so many moving parts any major structural change (like creating the DHS) is bound to produce overlapping and conflicting roles and processes.

I’ve been waiting for a “hook” before expressing my opinions about the bombing of boats setting off from Venezuela, allegedly smuggling narcotics to the United States. Since so little opinion has been expressed on the subject by major outlets and no real news “hook”, just the occasional announcement of the boat’s destruction or speculation about President Trump’s intentions, I’ve decided just to go ahead and give my opinion.

Yes, boats from Venezuela have been ferrying illegal drugs to the United States. Have the boats that have been destroyed been doing so? We’ll probably never know. Occasionally, the families of men killed in the boats’ destruction have admitted that, yes, the boat was smuggling drugs, also asserting that they weren’t “narco-terrorists”, they were just poor guys trying to make a buck smuggling drugs. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Yes, Maduro is a bad guy and is bad for Venezuela. He’s a crook and an authoritarian just like his mentor, Hugo Chavez.

No, destroying the boats isn’t legal. It’s not an emergency by the normal non-federal government standard. The smuggling has been going on for years. Yes, destroying the boats is an act of war and the president is not empowered to make war on other countries except in an emergency or when authorized by Congress. To its discredit, Congress has been abrogating that responsibility for the last 65 years. This would be a splendid opportunity for Congress to reassert its prerogatives but I don’t expect that to happen with this president and this Congress.

Furthermore, destroying smuggling boats in the international waters of the Caribbean without specific Congressional authorization is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. Monitoring boats setting off from, say, Venezuela would be a splendid opportunity to use drone aircraft to monitor the boats until they’ve entered the U .S. EEZ at which point the Coast Guard could be deployed to apprehend the craft once they’d entered U. S. territorial waters. Or the drones themselves could destroy the boats at that point—the act of war would be Venezuela’s at that point. That’s the way of war that’s emerging since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Some of the reports I’ve read have claimed that the boats are being destroyed using MQ-9 Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles. As I understand it those missiles cost from $150,000-$200,000. A back-of-the-envelope estimation of the cost of each boat strike is about $1 million. While it would be using drone technology, using Hellfire missiles is a pretty expensive way to sink a smuggling boat. It also raises the question of why the attacks are being carried out in international or even Venezuelan waters. And why we’ve deployed the flotilla pictured above to the Caribbean.

We absolutely, positively should not be preparing to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela. We are unpopular enough with our Central and South American neighbors for such unilateral interventions as it is. Hardly the material for a Nobel Peace Prize.

I should add that I do not think most of those fleeing Venezuela are political refugees so there’s no emergency there, either. There’s hardly a better example in the world today of self-inflicted harm than Venezuela. Why we should provide a haven for people who’ve harmed themselves through their own fecklessness eludes me. “One man, one vote, one time” is a completely foreseeable consequence of electing a figure like Chavez. It reminds me of that scene in Blazing Saddles when Cleavon Little has a gun pointed at this own head.

Yet another Substack to which I’d subscribe if I had the money is Noah Smith’s “Noahpinion”. I was recently somewhat shocked in his observations about one of five things he found interesting. As it works out the average income of black Americans is rising, largely due to “selective immigration”:

As you can see from that chart, Black immigrants earn about as much as native-born Black Americans. But 2nd-generation Black Americans earn about as much as White Americans.

There are several important implications of this finding.

First, selective immigration is very important. The kids of Black immigrants to America move up in the world because they’re highly educated. Selecting for immigrants that value education is therefore a way of reducing racial gaps in America — in addition, of course, to the substantial contributions they make to America’s economy.

Second, fears of segmented assimilation — the idea that the kids and grandkids of Black immigrants will end up with economic trajectories similar to those of native-born Black Americans — seem overblown.

Third, America is a land of opportunity for Black immigrants, but not nearly as much so for Black people whose families have been here a long time. This means that the “ADOS” concept — meaning Black Americans whose ancestors were slaves — is probably a useful one. It defines the group of people who most need help from the government. For example, affirmative action programs targeted at Black people in general are likely to award college spots to the kids of elite African immigrants. Instead, in the interest of maximum efficiency and fairness, they should probably be targeted at ADOS specifically.

That is a point I have made for more than 20 years but Mr. Smith doesn’t appreciate the degree of what is actually happening. Black immigrants are benefiting disproportionately from racial set-asides, quotas, preferential hiring or college admissions, and programs intended to promote “equity”. That has been true for 50 years. I think the reason for that is culture (see above). But it bodes very poorly for what he refers to as “ADOS” and which the late sociologist Charles Moskas called “Afro-Americans”.

What Mr. Smith doesn’t address is how do you accomplish what he wants to do? I presume he opposes nativism. Isn’t he supporting it explicitly in this post?

Tomas Pueyo’s Substack, “Uncharted Territories” is another to which I’d subscribe if I had the jack which I don’t. I think it is interesting and he is insightful. I don’t know whether his basic theme is that geography is dispositive or merely a highly important factor but it’s one of the two.

In a recent post he considered why Argentina is poor. A century ago it was one of the richest countries. Now it isn’t. His conclusion is that the Argentines have mad a lot of bad decisions over a long period of time.

I would suggest that Mr. Pueyo (a Spaniard) consider an additional question. Why are nearly all former Spanish colonies poor and nearly all former British colonies rich? I would suggest two reasons and they both apply to Argentina. The first is that the Spanish did not invest capital in their colonies (the opposite if anything) and the second is cultural.

Consider the British colonies as a comparison. The British (and Dutch) invested heavily in the young United States. Even just a few years after the War of 1812 the Erie Canal (now celebrating its bicentennial) was heavily financed by British and Dutch investors. The same is true later on of the railroads that enabled the U. S. to remain a single country which were heavily financed by foreign private investors (mostly British and Dutch). The British were also vitally important in financing the telegraph lines that tied the farflung country together.

I think that a major reason the British and Dutch invested so much in the U. S. is cultural. The United States was settled by middle class and lower class Britons (then the Germans, then the Irish). By and large the British nobility stayed at home.

And, as I noted in one of my earliest posts, although settlers don’t bring their meager possessions with them when they emigrate they do bring their cultures. Behaviors, practices, religion, language. And so on. The British and Dutch saw that as an attractive basis for investment.

On his Substack Nate Silver remarks on the apparently imminent end of the government shutdown:

As someone who is supposed to take three cross-country flights over the next seven days, I’m happy that I won’t miss my meetings, I guess.

But as political strategy, I think this is malpractice. Predictable enough malpractice for a perpetually risk-averse party with a weak, unpopular leader who clearly doesn’t have confidence of his caucus. But malpractice all the same.

What happened in late October? There are a handful of plausible explanations, but I think the evidence is reasonably clear. On Oct. 18, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned voters that food stamps — more formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program or SNAP — would run out of funding at the end of the month. This program is a huge deal, affecting roughly 42 million Americans. Although Rollins tried to blame Democrats, voters didn’t buy that at all — not when the Trump has been fighting court orders to continue to fund the program, and holding Great Gatsby-themed dinners at Mar-a-Lago.

Google searches tell the story here. Since the shutdown began, searches for terms related to the Affordable Care Act — Democrats’ ostensible rationale for withholding votes — has never been more than a blip on the radar. Conversely, searches related to SNAP benefits increased roughly tenfold over their baseline beginning in late October.

The numbers really tell the story.

Of course President Trump’s approval rating would decrease more over the SNAP issue than over the ACA or the “No Kings” rallies.

Nate continues by observing that Chuck Schumer is a poor Senate Minority Leader. I’ve heard Chuck Schumer speak in person. The amazing thing isn’t that he’s a poor Senate Minority Leader. It’s that he’s a senator at all.

As I predicted at the outset of the shutdown, it will end shortly after the election. My logic was simple. Has any opposition party ever received concessions following a government shutdown? Any benefit realized will have been realized in the election. The Democratic candidates won the elections they were expected to win plus, perhaps, a few seats in the Virginia state legislature. Time for the shutdown to end.

I don’t have any insider information on the operations of the Senate Democratic caucus but note that the senators “crossing the aisle” have nothing to lose. Is it statesmanship, conviction, or are they sacrificial lambs?

Nate’s Substack is one of the half dozen or so to which I’d subscribe if I had the jack which I don’t.

On Friday night my wife and I attended Lyric Opera’s productions of Mascagni’s 1888 one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s 1890 one-act opera Pagliacci. The two one-acts are routinely paired and referred to as “Cav/Pag”. At 1:10 and 1:15 respectively, the timing is reasonable and together these two short operas form the very definition of the Italian verismo style of opera.

In verismo the main characters aren’t heroes or kings but ordinary people and the problems they face are generally sexual, romantic, violent, or all three.

I have always thought that Cavalleria’s music was magnificent but its libretto is troubling, even flawed. Nearly all of the significant action—Turiddu’s love for Lola, his going into the army, Lola’s marriage in his absence to Alfio, Turiddu’s marriage proposal to Santuzza, his resuming his affair with the now-married Lola, and the duel with Alfio in which he is killed—take place offstage. Nonetheless, the opera is full of action including Santuzza’s appeal to Turiddu’s mother, an Easter procession, Alfio’s challenge to Turiddu, and Turiddu’s farewell to his mother. There’s enough emotionally-charged action for a full-length opera. Hearing about it rather than having it performed for us is not dramatically satisfying.

Pagliacci on the other hand is nearly perfect. All of the action takes place on stage and in real-time. When coupled with Leoncavallo’s stunning music, particularly Tonio’s introduction in front of the curtain turning the classical tradition on its head by advising the audience that what they are about to see are real people and Canio’s famous Vesti la giubba (“put on the costume”).

I found all of the performances in both works very good with no particular standouts. The orchestra was fantastic—a great improvement over the performance of Medea we heard a few weeks ago.

When my wife and I arrived at our seats tape to the seat was a card from Lyric Opera, thanking us for having been subscribers and contributors for 40 years now. Prior to that I had been a subscriber (and contributor) on my own for six years.

I found this observation by the reviewer insightful:

Lyric musical director Enrique Mazzolaa didn’t exactly make the Lyric Orchestra swing Saturday night, mi dispeace, no, but he certainly pushed for a lush, enveloping volume, an accessibly immersive melodic experience that influenced the scores of Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Williams, and even the Scottish composer John Lunn, who wrote the music for “Downton Abbey”.

Mascagni’s lush music was proto-Hollywood scoring and the libretto by Giovanni Targioni–Tozzetti and Gujido Menascii involving love and betrayal in a Calabrian village was the prototype of the verismo genre, operas about ordinary folks that emerged as the European theater was also discovering the power of domestic realism.

Lawrence Johnson writes:

Lyric Opera has seen few house bows in recent years to match the sensational company debut by SeokJong Baek as Turiddu Saturday night. The young Korean tenor is the real thing, blessed with a big Italianate voice, ample squillo, intelligence and taste. From the yearning ardor of his offstage Siciliana that opens the opera, Baek was terrific across the board, impassioned in his confrontation with Santuzza, delivering a jaunty Brindisi, and conveying stark remorse and impending doom in his final aria. It was a genuine thrill to hear a voice of this quality cutting loose in Mascagni’s soaring music. The young singer also has dramatic chops, and Baek conveyed the persona of the impulsive, self-pitying Turiddu whose affair with another man’s wife leads to his sad fate.

As the rejected Santuzza, Yulia Matochkina was nearly as fine vocally. The Russian mezzo-soprano has an attractive, flexible and lustrous voice with enough reserves of power for this role. She sang an affecting “Voi lo sapete,” soared over the chorus’s Easter hymn (“Regina coeli”) and brought fervent desperation to her scene with Baek’s Turiddu.

Dramatically, Matochkina proved less inspired. The hectoring Santuzza is a tough role to carry off, but the mezzo’s melodramatic gestures and histrionics were over the top even for this emotionally unhinged character, for which revival director Peter McClintock must take some blame.

Quinn Kelsey is the only cast member to appear on both ends of Saturday’s double bill. With his suit and walking stick, Kelsey’s Alfio was more a bourgeois nouveau-riche owner of a successful trucking firm, than the usual T-shirt-clad ruffian who drives a horse cart.

Despite his mobster-like social promotion, Kelsey’s Alfio is clearly still someone you don’t want to mess with. Singing fluently with his dark, oakey tone, the baritone delivered a spirited account of his aria and conveyed the lurking violence beneath the character’s respectable exterior in his duet with Santuzza.

There has been no review from the Sun-Times as yet.