Well, I went and did it again. I voted in the Democratic primary elections. A remarkable number of candidates were running unopposed. I only voted for candidates who were not running unopposed and I only voted for a single incumbent.

The primaries are likely to be more significant than the general election in November. I’ll be interested in seeing the actual turnout. They’ve been saying that the volume of early voting has been high.

The single best thing about the elections is that we’ll have a several month respite before the next wave of political ads. I suspect that there were will be an enormous amount of negative campaigning in this week’s general election.

A day or so ago I received an article from Seeking Alpha in my mailbox that raised my hackles. The article was about testimony from Congressional Budget Office Director Phillip Swagel. The gist was that the Social Security Old Age and Survivors Trust Fund will be depleted by 2031, just five years away. What raised my hackles was this:

The fundamental problem with Social Security, though, is a demographic one. We have an aging population, and the ratio of workers paying taxes to retirees receiving benefits is shrinking.

That observation is true as far as it goes. But it is not the fundamental problem. People get old and retire. But that’s not the “fundamental problem” that will result in the fund being depleted in five years. And the real lesson here is broader than Social Security. Demographics matter, of course. But the erosion of the taxable wage base has played a much larger role than is commonly acknowledged.

We have known there would be a “demographic hump” for the Social Security system starting around 2011 and continuing until roughly 2029 for 75 years. It didn’t just sneak up on us suddenly. The fundamental problem is somewhat different: the assumptions that guided the reform of Social Security in 1983 have not held true.

Under the 1983 reform 89% of wage income was subject to Federal Insurance Contributions Act withholding (FICA). Today only 83% of wage income is subject to FICA. Keeping the system solvent would have required only one adjustment: indexing the payroll tax cap so that roughly 89% of wages remained taxable. Because wage growth has been concentrated above the taxable maximum, a growing share of national wage income escapes the payroll tax entirely.

That shouldn’t have been politically impossible or even controversial. Any assumption worth making is worth defending. It was assumed that the mean wage income would rise at roughly the same pace as the median wage income. The 1983 reforms were explicitly designed so that roughly 90% of wage income would be subject to payroll tax. That ratio has steadily eroded as wage growth has concentrated above the taxable maximum. The reasons for that are beyond the scope of this post.

As it true of so much in public life we can’t take a mulligan on that. Now any solution adequate to solve the problem would be politically painful and even impossible.

The point of this post is not to propose a solution to the problem but to point out something different. In making public policy we need to check our assumptions and ensure that they continue to hold for the expected life of the policy. That isn’t just true of Social Security. It’s true of trade policy, immigration, tax policy, and much of what government does.

I began posting The Glittering Eye on March 15, 2004. That means that as of yesterday this blog is 22 years old.

Nearly 22,000 posts later I plan to keep posting here as long as I live which I hope will be a few more years. Given family history I doubt the blog will be around long enough to celebrate a 30th birthday but who knows?

An enormous amount has changed over 22 years and yet nothing has changed. There was once a flourishing blogosphere of thousands of individual voices arguing, speculating, linking, and responding to one another in realtime. Much of that world has since been absorbed into legacy media or platforms like Substack in attempts to monetize blogging. Monetization has never been a goal of mine and I have never seriously pursued it.

Partisans still reflexively bicker back and forth. We are at war in the Middle East. China remains our primary global competitor.

The technology changes. The arguments mostly don’t.

I keep posting.

While President Trump declaims that the war in Iran is materially over, he also asks Japan to send warships to the Gulf, something that will take one to three weeks to accomplish in the event that Japan actually sends the ships, something I doubt it will do. The price of gas at the pump is whipsawing—we have observed prices raised 10%, lowered 10%, and raised again at the same stations in the course of a single day. This morning one of the major “talking heads” programs interviewed the Iranian foreign minister, something hard to imagine in war time. Another program had one guest explaining that everything had been planned while the next reported that nothing had been planned for and then showed videos taken on smartphones of people rejoicing over the war in the streets of Tehran.

With the primary elections just two days away everyone is lying, everyone is corrupt, no one is competent to perform the offices to which they are aspiring or likely to accomplish any of the things they’re running on. Ideally, they would all lose.

I am still recovering from watching one of the worst productions of Madama Butterfly I have ever seen, redeemed primarily by a couple of good performances and Puccini’s beautiful music. I’ll post on this in more depth later. On our way to the performance we walked across a bridge over a Chicago River dyed green a few hours earlier. Tonight the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academy Awards will be televised. One of the movies expected to be a top pick for Best Motion Picture has been characterized by some of those who’ve seen it as the “worst movie they’ve ever seen”. I have seen none of the films nominated and I probably will never see most of them.

It appears inevitable that the Chicago Bears, who’ve played in Chicago since 1921, will leave Chicago.

In the weather today we expect clear, pleasant weather, rain, thunderstorms, “wintry mix”, and snow.

I am surrounded by a swirling kaleidoscope of irrationality.

Former Chicago Mayor and ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and for the life of me I can’t identify its target audience. Its title is “Opposing Trump Isn’t a Global Strategy”, a thesis with which I completely agree. The slug is “Here’s my first draft of a national-security agenda for Democrats seeking the White House in 2028.”
As I see it prospective audiences include:

• Democratic primary voters
• Democratic candidates and staff
• Donor class
• Foreign policy establishment
• Media gatekeepers
• Future administration personnel pools

Let’s consider some of those. One might speculate that the audience is Democrats who plan to run for president in 2028 or their staffs. Do any of them or their staffs read the Wall Street Journal?

Another possible audience is Democrats who read the Wall Street Journal. I’m one of them and I read his op-ed—mission accomplished. Frankly, I doubt that I or even people like me are the target audience.

Another possibility is that the op-ed is aimed at potential donors to his own presidential campaign. I find that unlikely. Mr. Emanuel does not strike me as a viable candidate in today’s Democratic Party. Bluntly, he is “too male and too pale,” and he is much more Zionist than most Democratic primary voters.

After more than 600 words of preamble he finally produces some foreign policy proposals, divided by area of the world (Europe, Indo-Pacific, Middle East, Africa, Western Hemisphere). That lends weight to the that his purpose in the op-ed is to signal seriousness.

I agree with some of what he has to say and disagree with other parts. I’ll devote more serious attention to his actual proposals in another post but in this post I want to focus on his target audience.

The only likely guess I’m left with is that I suspect he’s angling for a cabinet-level position in a future Democratic White House and trying to prove he’s a serious thinker about foreign policy. Does anyone else have other ideas?

The tragically sad part of his op-ed is that I think that Democrats should be paying attention to what he has to say. Opposing Trump is not a sufficient foreign policy. Yet that increasingly appears to be the entirety of what many Democratic candidates at every level are offering.

Today there is a cacophony of voices offering advice on the war in Iran: I find the advice not only conflicting but substituting feigned context for actual context. The Iranian Revolution’s seizure of American diplomats in 1979 was not merely an American grievance. It was a direct challenge to the entire diplomatic system embodied in the Vienna Convention. The Carter administration treated it primarily as a bilateral hostage crisis. Everything that followed has been the accumulated cost of that failure.

Here are several examples of the commentary I have seen:

Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post, “Iran is an imperial trap. America walked right in.”

After recounting Britain’s position and actions in the 19th century Mr. Zakaria observes:

The primary, indispensable role of the U.S. is to anchor the global system against the revisionist ambitions of Beijing and Moscow. China is not getting bogged down in Middle Eastern quagmires; it is relentlessly investing in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, solar and wind power, batteries and robots — the technologies that will determine the balance of global power. Russia remains fiercely committed to disrupting European security and undermining Western democracies through hybrid political-military warfare that has proved hard to detect and even harder to defeat. But while Moscow and Beijing challenge the basic architecture of America’s world order, Washington is preparing, once again, to spend blood and treasure policing the Middle East and trying to pick the leaders of one of its countries.

David Ignatius, Washington Post, “Iran’s Islamic Republic 2.0 is coming — and it won’t be pretty”

The TL;DR version of Mr. Ignatius’s column is that a) the U. S. can’t win the war; and b) if the Iranian regime falls it will be replaced by an IRGC regime that is far worse than the present theocracy.

If there’s one lesson America and Israel should have learned in recent decades, it’s that military success doesn’t usually translate to political victory — in Gaza, Afghanistan or, now, Iran. The adversary keeps coming back. The Israelis have learned that they have to keep “mowing the grass,” the harsh phrase they use for the cycle of recurring violence. America, after avoiding an all-out clash with Iran for 47 years, may now be caught in a similar cycle.

The Iran war will be a tactical triumph in the short run, and all the encomiums about America’s unmatched military power will remain true. If the conflict ends tomorrow, Iran will have lost nearly all its nuclear facilities and scientists, most of its missiles and missile launchers, most of its weapons factories, most of its navy, and much of the command and control for its military, intelligence and security forces.

But the regime survives. It has taken America’s best punch, and it’s still standing. Tiers of senior military, intelligence and political leaders are dead, but they have been replaced by others. There’s no sign of a popular uprising. The cadres of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hide among piles of rubble, but they haven’t been eliminated.

This will be the Islamic Republic 2.0. For the foreseeable future, it will be an IRGC state, working in a corrupt but pragmatic alliance with Iran’s business interests.

Editors, Wall Street Journal, “Will Trump ‘Fight to Win’ in Iran?”

The regime’s strategy in response is now clear: Target the production of oil in the Persian Gulf and its flow through the Strait of Hormuz. If it can raise the price of oil high enough for long enough, it believes it can force Mr. Trump to call off the bombing campaign.

Iran’s advantage—its only one—is that it can employ asymmetric means to impose that economic pain. Drones are cheap to produce and hard to intercept when they swarm a target. Mines can be laid cheaply, and do great damage to U.S. ships if undetected. The U.S. hasn’t been as prepared to counter these threats as it has been against Iranian missiles. Any ideas, Secretary Hegseth?

In short: escalate if necessary, but do not allow Iran to impose costs that force an American retreat.

Caitlin Talmadge, Foreign Affairs, “The Hormuz Minefield”

Of the pieces linked here this is by far the best. In the piece Dr. Talmadge outline the significance and challenges of preventing the Iranian regime from obstructing traffic through the Straits of Hormuz. Here’s her excellent paragraph on the history of mine warfare:

Historically, even relatively small numbers of mines have had outsize effects. For example, in 1972, the United States stopped all traffic in and out of North Vietnam’s Haiphong harbor when it dropped just 36 mines. In 1991, the Iraqis were able to discourage a U.S. amphibious invasion by laying only 1,000 mines off the Kuwaiti coast—two of which later hit but did not sink U.S. warships. And in 1950 the North Koreans delayed the U.S. landing at Wonsan by laying only 3,000 mines across 50 square miles.

observing:

These episodes suggest that even a relatively modest Iranian mine-laying campaign could inhibit tankers from entering the strait, as Iranian missile and drone threats have already appeared to do over the past week. Mines are unlikely to actually sink tankers, which are buoyant and compartmentalized. Yet threats to the crews are real and already seem to be playing a major role in inhibiting traffic in the strait—even without the placement of mines.

One factor that all of these opinion pieces fail to acknowledge is that the risks they are identifying that Iran poses have been present since the Shah was removed. They are not new. They cannot simultaneously be tolerable and intolerable.

I thought the Carter Administration erred in not insisting that the United Nations Security Council take action against the threat that the Iranian Revolution posed to international diplomacy. We held a position of strength. “Nice United Nations you’ve got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Iran has been capable of threatening shipping in the Gulf, sponsoring proxy warfare, and obstructing diplomacy since the revolution in 1979. For nearly half a century the United States and its allies have chosen to tolerate those risks rather than resolve them. If they are now intolerable, that implies a very different strategic objective than merely degrading Iran’s capabilities.

There are no mulligans in international affairs. The challenge to the U. S. in prosecuting the war in Iran is not whether we are capable of striking and eliminating our designated targets from the air or in the sea. It is whether we have the stomach to identify the outcome we wish and achieve it. That will require more than assurances of victory from President Trump.

Is President Trump risk-seeking or risk-averse?

As I’ve said many times in the past my insight into his thought processes is very limited.

Please support you answer with examples.

IMO a lot in the U. S. war with Iran depends on the answer to that question.

I omitted a couple of other interesting things about the negative advertising I’m seeing today. Illinois negative advertising now routinely attacks characteristics that describe the Illinois political system itself.

The first example is that her opponents are trying to tie Illinois Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton to Mike Madigan who is presently serving a prison term in federal prison on charges of corruption in office. As a reminder Mr. Madigan was the long-term Speaker of the Illinois House and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party.

The other interesting thing is Rep. Robin Kelly’s ads complaining about billionaires holding political office.

The former is interesting because given Speaker Madigan’s decades of control over the Illinois Democratic Party and House organization, a very large share of Democratic officeholders inevitably had some political interaction with his organization.. That is what decades of party control means: eventually your organization touches almost every political career in the state.

The latter is interesting because it’s not entirely clear whom Rep. Kelly’s ads are alluding to. She may believe she’s complaining about President Trump but the sitting governor of Illinois is a billionaire, too. Illinois voters have elected two consecutive billionaire governors. Complaining about “billionaires in politics” therefore risks indicting the political choices of Illinois voters themselves. Democrat JB Pritzker was preceded by Republican Bruce Rauner.

I agree with both of those points. That so many Illinois politicians are connected to former Speaker Madigan and that our last two governors have both been billionaires is suggestive of a deep pathology in Illinois politics and a reckoning is long overdue. Illinois has had four governors and literally hundreds of other elected officials imprisoned in the last half century.

Illinois politics contains the seeds of its own indictment. The question is what forces, if any, could produce the reckoning the system seems to require. More likely we will see Illinois politics as usual: complaining about the influence of billionaires, i.e. the other party’s billionaires, and ongoing corruption in office.

The primary election that is expected to determine who will be elected to the Senate post being vacated by Dick Durbin is next week. In the past I’ve mentioned how closely aligned the main Democratic candidates were on the policy front. There were three planks: fight Trump, abolish ICE, Medicare for All. Otherwise the campaign was largely what’s called a valence campaign—the candidates competed on how hard they would fight and how urgent they thought these policies were.

A week or so ago something changed. Although all three continue to campaign against President Trump and the Republicans, they are openly campaigning against each other as well. All three of the leading candidates and the PACs that support them are running strongly negative ads against their Democratic opponents. Candidates are being tarred as being financed by “MAGA donors”. That phrase is used repeatedly. I do not recall a Senate campaign in Illinois in which the candidates attacked each other quite this aggressively.

One of the things that alienates me is the constant use of the word fight. Every candidate promises to fight. I don’t want a senator who fights. I want a senator who thinks, discusses, and legislates. In the present climate “fight” seems to me a particularly poor choice of words. Legislators are supposed to deliberate and persuade, not simply posture for combat.

Julia Stratton is obviously the candidate preferred by party leaders—she’s been endorsed by the governor and other statewide officials. From that I infer that she is considered a reliable party vote. The other two appear to be House backbenchers.

I expect turnout to be low, which means that anything could happen. Watching the ads, I have the strong impression that every message has been carefully focus-grouped to appeal to the mythical “Democratic primary voter”. The difficulty is that although I am a Democrat and I vote in the primaries, I apparently do not resemble that voter very closely.