I wanted to take note of this Wall Street Journal op-ed by Joel Zinberg. Here’s the opening passage:

Sen. Bernie Sanders first introduced his Medicare for All legislation in 2017. Despite multiple reintroductions, the proposal has never received a floor vote in either congressional chamber. Medicare for All has become a rallying cry for progressives this election season, and recent polling suggests public support has surged. Voters should be careful what they wish for.

Two-thirds of Americans favor Medicare for All, according to a new KFF poll—a substantial increase from 2020, when roughly half of respondents were in favor. But most Americans don’t understand the proposal or its likely effects. Medicare for All would eliminate competition and choice in medical care, limit access, and inevitably lead to tax increases.

but the passage I found most telling was this:

When respondents in the KFF poll were told the effects of Medicare for All, support plunged. Only 52% were in favor when told that private insurance would be eliminated, 38% when learning Medicare for All could threaten the current Medicare program, 35% once they considered that Medicare for All could require most Americans to pay higher taxes, and 24% after learning it could lead to delays for medical tests and treatments.

It has been said that Sanders’s bill isn’t a bill that has been enacted by Congress and that’s true enough. My question is what is an incoming Democratic Congress likely to do? Given that 84% of Democrats support “Medicare for All” I think it’s a measure very likely to be enacted by the hypothetical incoming Democratic Congress even though the actual bill might have considerably less support.

IMO the likely outcome of such a single-payer system in the United States is likely to be considerably worse than Dr. Zinberg suggests. If public payment rates make private practice sufficiently attractive, some physicians could withdraw, serve smaller affluent patient panels, and reduce the capacity available to everyone relying on the public program. I think that unless the restrictions on practicing medicine outside the national systems are considerably more strict than the bill presently establishes the actual outcome will be concierge healthcare for the well-to-do, unfettered by the price restrictions of “Medicare for All”, and less healthcare for the balance of the population.

Today Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s column in the Wall Street Journal is “Latin America’s Coming Population Bust”. Here’s a snippet:

When the Biden administration opened the southern border, it seemed there was no end to the millions of hungry working-age migrants who wanted to enter the U.S. Western Europe experienced something similar in 2015-16, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed a flood of refugees, mostly from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

But the days of an endless supply of labor eager to serve the needs of the developed world may be drawing to a close. Not tomorrow, but soon enough. Countries accustomed to receiving great numbers of aspiring young people from beyond their borders may have to learn to do with fewer.

Here’s the population pyramid for Latin America and the Caribbean:

The short version is that in Latin America and the Caribbean Generation Alpha (the one after Gen Z) is smaller than Millennials and about the same as Generation X. And at this point it is unlikely to get larger (since Gen Beta is hot on its heels).

There are a number of comments that come to mind about that but I’ll limit myself to just one. That’s likely to result in political turbulence and possible upheaval. After decades of convincing people that aggregate consumption is the way to measure economic wellbeing, changing course to convince them that it might not be that important after all will be darned hard.

Dark. As in no light, opaque. It’s truly amazing to me how little significant news in Africa is being covered by U. S. major media sources. It is as though the continent barely exists. For example, are you aware that there are presently four major areas of armed conflict in Africa at present: Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sahel, particularly Mali and Burkina Faso?

Here’s another. The outbreak of Ebola presently going on in eight provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with nearly 10,000 infections and 4,500 deaths is the largest in its recent history. And it has spread beyond the DRC: Kenya and Uganda have experienced deaths from Ebola.

To me this is an illustration of the weakness of our journalistic profession. It’s news. It’s a story. And an important one.

As I mentioned in my last post about our trip, we spent the next several days with friends in Wasilla. The first evening they treated us to an “Alaska dinner” (pictured above) that included salmon, halibut, moose, and bear.

The next day we toured a musk ox farm, guided by one of our friends, the operating manager of the farm. We found the farm fascinating and charming. We wanted to take a musk ox home with us! Sadly, they would not thrive in Chicago—it’s too warm here!

North to Alaska
Next Stop, Ketchikan
Port of Call: Juneau
Next Stop: Skagway
At Sea
Leaving the Ship

I was actually astonished by this Bloomberg editorial via ArcaMax. It’s not that I don’t agree with them. I do. It’s that they seem to think what they’re suggesting can actually happen.

With a month to go until midterm elections, Democrats find themselves in better shape than expected. Odds are, they’ll win the House and perhaps a slim majority in the Senate. Exactly what they’ll do with that power, though, remains a mystery.

On the campaign trail, most of the party’s congressional candidates have been long on rhetoric and short on policy. In lieu of an agenda, many are promising partisan warfare: more investigations of the president, expansive impeachment proceedings, subpoenas for documents and witnesses, aggressive oversight hearings, and more.

Here’s the amazing part:

For now, suffice it to say that the country has a lot of problems to fix, and there are plenty of opportunities for progress, if lawmakers are willing to compromise. There’s rarely been a better time to put pragmatism over partisanship.

Here’s a video that illustrates how the political parties have changed in ideology over the last 250 years, Congress by Congress. For a complete description see here.

The TL;DR version is that the two political parties are farther apart today than at any previous point since the Civil War. To my eye the two political parties have forgotten how to forge compromises.

In the interest of bonhomie here are a few proposals for producing bipartisan legislation:

• Negotiate in private before going public.
• Let both sides declare a win.
• Start with a small, cross-party working group.
• Agree on facts before arguing about solutions.
• Build positive personal relations with members of the other party.
• Don’t include “poison pills” in legislation. This one is vital. If you make it suicidal for the other party to agree with you, don’t be surprised if you don’t get a lot of agreement.
• Be willing to give up something you actually want.

I have never read an editorial in which the editors of a major newspaper danced around an idea in such a determined fashion as this editorial from the Chicago Tribune. In the editorial, the editors clearly cannot bring themselves to recommend we vote for Don Tracy, the Republican challenger to Juliana Stratton for the seat in the U. S. Senate that Dick Durbin has held for nearly 30 years. Here’s their conclusion:

Stratton is to the far left of her party; Tracy is on the moderate wing of his. But by moderate wing, we don’t want to imply he’d be a Republican revolutionary. And, given where we are this moment, many will conclude that will just not be enough.

Their rationale is earlier in the editorial:

For many of our readers, the notion of flipping the venerable Dick Durbin’s seat in the United States Senate to a Republican at the very moment when Donald Trump has capriciously abandoned his support for the brave people of Ukraine and climbed into a diesel-filled waterbed with the dangerous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, would be as irresponsible as it is unconscionable.

We more than sympathize.

The editors focus on the Senate seat as an instrument of national party politics. For me the more crucial question is how effectively will the next senator advance Illinois’s interests?

I wonder if the people of Illinois realize what’s about to happen to us and it will happen whoever we elect to the Senate. We are about to replace one of the most powerful figures in the Senate with a backbencher. Illinois is typically ignored by the national Democratic Party. Illinois is characterized as a “Blue State”, i.e. it is carried by the Democratic candidate in national elections. Illinois last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988. We are taken for granted. That will be even more the case when Stratton succeeds Durbin.

I have just learned that a very old friend has died. How old? I have known him for almost 70 years, since he was a small child. I babysat for him, introduced him to reading, taught him to play the guitar, which he proceeded to make his life.

His wife died a little less than a year ago and he never really recovered. Rest in peace.

I wanted to remind readers of several things:

1. I support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. I think Russia was wrong to invade Ukraine. Whatever legitimate grievances Russia had, they did not justify invading Ukraine.
2. From the very first day I opposed going to war with Iran. A casus belli does not impel one to go to war, especially without a coherent plan for achieving one’s objectives at a cost one is willing and able to bear.
3. I have opposed our assisting Saudi Arabia in its war against the Houthi. Simply stated, the Saudis are not our friends. What American interest justifies helping them prosecute this war? What are we supposed to accomplish, and why should we expect our assistance to accomplish it?

I do have some things to add to those. Despite believing we should continue to support Ukraine, I don’t think we should have any illusions about Ukraine. The Russo-Ukrainian War is not the good guys fighting the bad guys. We shouldn’t idealize Ukraine.

I am constantly surprised at how poorly President Trump understands the oil market. Self-sufficient or not, there is a global market for oil and that continues to affect us because we’re part of that global market. Does he genuinely believe that buying diesel from Russia will materially ease the price increases in the United States?

One thing I don’t believe I’ve mentioned before: the jinn is out of the bottle. The Iranians have demonstrated in practice that they can impede traffic in the Straits of Hormuz. Even if the war ended tomorrow, Iran will continue to be aware that they can create havoc in world oil markets by their ability to impede traffic in the Straits. That won’t go away.

Honoring the debt could destroy the political coalition necessary to govern France; defaulting could destroy the financial capacity needed to carry out its policies. Default, which is an actual possibility, would have strongly deleterious effects on German banks. There could well be a ripple effect in Europe.

France’s basic problem continues to be that its large public debt impedes its growth and its participation in the euro renders it unable to monetize its debt.

As I said before, all of this is primarily of concern to me because of the prospective impact on France’s defense posture.