Is the Biden Administration’s abandoning of our policy of “strategic ambiguity” with respect to Taiwan good or bad and why?

If you are concerned about American problems, you might consider reading this lament for France at Brussels Signal by Kevin Myers:

The most traditionally-French thing about modern France is its ability to conjure riots out of thin air: this time last year, in a single nation-wide eruption 2,000 cars were torched, 3,380 buildings set on fire, 220 towns and cities were swept with violence and 40,000 police were mobilised, with 250 of them being injured. Which is why the gendarmerie has banned fireworks during this summer’s national feast day, especially since the latest “festive” rockets can be fired horizontally at 100 km/hr.

Not Belfast: Bastille Day. Aux armes, citoyens!

I have been to Normandy on four occasions in the past two years. Each time was like visiting an old folk’s home as the residents slumbered their way to the grave. The last trip. the two of us, just off the ferry and searching Cherbourg for breakfast, finally found the only café that promised both coffee and baguettes (or so we thought).

The result was intrinsically Egyptian: the coffee tasted like the effluent from the Cairo fever hospital and the baguette was one of the “long-life” variety, this one apparently from the age of Tutankhamun and resembled a condom filled with wet sawdust ….well, I hope that’s what it was.

Thereafter, matters grew worse, like time-travelling to Poland in the 1960s. Even finding somewhere that served lunch would usually take at least an hour. One day we consumed an omelette that had apparently died after a long and painful illness, bravely borne, and sought consolation in two coffees. “Désolée, monsieur,” yawned the waitress [ed.: sorry, sir] through her tattooed hand. “Nous n’avons pas de café aujourd’hui. Demain peut-être?” [ed: We have no coffee today. Maybe tomorrow.]

Lunch the next day in a different café seemed to consist of road-kill on toast. The menu promised café au lait, which we asked for, it being a café. “Désolée, monsieur,” snuffled Waitress Mark Two through her nose-ring, “nous n’avons pas de lait aujourd’hui. Demain peut-être?” [ed.: We have no milk today, etc.]

No milk in Normandy? There was a supermarket two doors away. Travail is such travail in modern France.

Read the whole sad thing. I just received some photos from friends who live in Paris, one of the Seine. They’re planning to swim in that? They might be able to walk across it.

While I’m on the subject of Chicago politics Ed Burke, the longest-serving alderman in Chicago history, sometimes called “Chicago’s most powerful politician”, has been sentence to two years in prison, convicted of various charges of corruption. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Ed Burke, once the most powerful Chicago alderman, was sentenced on corruption charges Monday at the Dirksen Federal Building.

Judge Virginia M. Kendall gave him a two-year prison sentence and $2 million fine.

The fine consists of $200,000 on count one and $150,000 on each of the remaining counts. The money will go toward the victims of Burke’s crimes.

My reaction: it’s a start. If every Chicago alderman who engaged in corrupt practices were tried and convicted, the City Council probably couldn’t get a quorum together. Now on to Mike Madigan who has been chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party for much of my lifetime. He, too, is facing trial on charges of corruption.

I didn’t want to let the story of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s reparations task force pass without comment. Here’s the editors’ of the Sun-Times/s reaction:

Johnson didn’t say what form reparations would take or how they would be funded. Any potential solutions would likely have to be policy-based, given the city’s budget constraints.

Johnson’s office issued a news release saying the task force will “create a definition and framework” for reparations, identify “core issues for redress and reparative actions,” and examine “all policies that have harmed Black Chicagoans from the slavery era to the present day.” The task force would then “make a series of recommendations [to fix] past injustices and present harm.”

All of this seems iffy, ponderous and time-consuming. If the mayor wants to make things better for Black Chicago, he doesn’t have to wait for a task force’s findings.

He can fix the CTA so people all across the city can get to work and school safely and on time. He can fight to make sure the public school system, with its $9.4 billion budget, is properly educating all students.

He can make crime in Black communities a priority by working closely with police and the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability on a coherent, workable plan to make those neighborhoods safer.

He can make sure parks on the West and South sides are safe, have good programs and are properly maintained, the same as parks on the North and Northwest Side.

Fixing these things won’t change the past. But they can make for a better future.

My question about reparations is the same as it has always been: paid by whom to whom? I question the justice of newly-arrived Hispanic and Asian immigrations paying reparations to Chicagoans of African-American ancestry, some of whom are recent immigrants themselves. I do predict that the $500,000 budget announced for the task force will improve the lives of some Chicagoans of African-American ancestry: those serving on the task force.

I noticed two things in the Wall Street Journal editorial, lauding NATO members for increasing their defense spending to 2% of GDP:

Some 23 of 32 NATO member countries are on track to spend at least 2% of their economy on national defense in 2024. That’s up from a mere six in 2018 and three in 2014, when members agreed to the 2% floor.

No surprise that the countries spending most are those that understand the Russian threat from painful experience. Poland is spending 4.12% of its economy, with half of its expenditure on equipment. Estonia and Latvia are above 3%. The doughty Finns, one of the alliance’s newest members, sit at 2.41%.

But even Germany, France and the Netherlands are on track to squeak above 2% in 2024. Ditto for Albania and Montenegro. The prize for embarrassment goes to Canada, which is wealthy enough to devote more than a mere 1.37% to defense. Spain is a more predictable but still deplorable low at 1.28%. Both countries should be told to meet their burdens or they’ll be replaced as members by better allies.

The first is that nearly a third of NATO members, including, as the editors mention, Canada and Spain, are spending less than 2%.

The second is that the words “readiness”, “preparedness”, or “fitness” do not appear at all in the editorial. Let me explain.

Imagine that you decided 30 years ago that you need to spend 2% of your income on home maintenance to keep your house up and then for the next 30 years you spend 1% or less. Unless your income is a lot more than mine that means you wouldn’t be able to replace the roof, repair the floors, repair the foundation, paint the hour, or do anything substantial with the plumbing, electric, or HVAC. After 30 years of neglect I daresay the house would be in falling down condition. If at that point you step up and start spending 2% on home maintenance, how long would it take you to put the house in livable condition?

That’s the situation that NATO is in. As of 20 years ago the only NATO members with militaries at the highest levels of readiness were the United States, France, and Britain and, sadly, France and Britain have not kept their military readiness up. What level of readiness will “squeaking above 2% in 2024” achieve?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, taking note of the trends in the graph above, argue that the United States does not have a tax problem but a spending problem:

You may have heard that the 2017 GOP tax cuts blew a giant hole in the federal budget—or so Democrats tell voters. The Congressional Budget Office’s revised 10-year budget forecast out Tuesday offers a reality check. Spending is the real problem, and it’s getting worse.

CBO projects that this year’s budget deficit will clock in at roughly $2 trillion, some $400 billion more than it forecast in February and $300 billion larger than last year’s deficit. This is unprecedented when the economy is growing and defense spending is nearly flat. The deficit this fiscal year will be 7% of GDP, which is more than during some recessions.

CBO says deficits will stay nearly this high for years, and the total over the next decade is now expected to total $21.9 trillion compared to $19.8 trillion in its February forecast. Debt held by the public will grow to 122.4% of GDP in 2034 from 97.3% last year.

Notably, CBO’s revenue projections are little changed. Revenue is expected to total 17.2% of GDP this year—roughly the 50-year average before the pandemic, as the nearby chart shows. But CBO significantly revised up projections for federal spending. Outlays are now expected to hit 24.2% of GDP this year and average 24% over the next decade. Wow.

You will note that although noisy federal tax revenues as a percentage of GDP have been remarkably stable. Federal tax revenues of roughly 17% are more than a “50 year trend”. That’s basically the post-war trend and marginal tax rates have made little difference.

There are a couple of ways of looking at that. One is that the Congress has carefully crafted the federal tax laws to return that percentage of GDP. Another is that 17% is what Americans are willing to pay in federal taxes. Beyond that they lobby, cheat, or otherwise arrange to limit their federal taxes to 17%. Those two are not mutually exclusive.

I would add that I think our problem is neither a tax problem nor a spending problem but either a consumption problem or a production problem (or both). Either we’re consuming too much or we’re not producing enough.

I wanted to call your attention at an opinion piece at The Hill by Jeremy Etelson, explaining why young voters are turning away from Joe Biden:

The generation that was raised during the global financial crisis and the onsets of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has been a stalwart for the Democratic Party for over a decade. I was knocking doors for President Obama and local Democrats in 2012 even before I could vote.

I served as a College Democrats chapter president through the 2016 election cycle, and then voted for President Biden in 2020. In 2024, less than four years into the Biden administration, the world and our country have entered alarming trajectories. If Biden is nominated for reelection, he will be the first Democratic nominee whom I do not support.

Biden is currently sitting on top of a seismic shift in the political parties’ voting coalitions. His average approval rating under 38 percent unfortunately is historically low for a president at this time in a first term. In 2020, Biden won young voters by 25 points.

Now disapproval of Biden is widespread among young voters, with him losing 18–29 year-olds and all under-45 voters when polled against all general election candidates. The dissent is not baseless, and not all young dissenters are doing so because of American support for Israel’s war against Hamas. Beyond Biden’s personal cognitive challenges, his administration’s policies are having indefensible consequences.

The United States is now entrenched in numerous international conflicts, each of which is increasingly dangerous and more complicated than a good-versus-evil narrative. Biden is largely responsible for escalating the Russia-Ukraine war, funding Ukraine through their incremental defeat while ignoring diplomatic negotiation and ceasefire offers. Biden has also allowed the funding of Iran throughout their proxy war against American and our Middle East allies. Meanwhile, North Korea has abandoned the decades-long reconciliation process with South Korea, following our escalation of multilateral military exercises in the region. Nuclear world war is now more probable than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Read the whole thing. In honesty I can’t follow his logic in some cases. For example, this:

The full effects of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act, which together cost more than $3 trillion, remain to be seen. These new laws take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are insufficient to meaningfully curb climate change.

Does he think that a second Trump Administration would do more to “curb climate change” than a second Biden administration? I doubt it’s even on Trump’s radar.

My only point in highlighting this piece is to illustrate a risk the Biden campaign faces.

I have little objection to President Biden’s announcement of amnesty for violations of U. S. law in the case of spouses of American citizens and their children other than a) I think he’s going beyond his authority without Congressional authorization and b) in addition to the 10 year residency requirement I think they should be required to have been married for one year prior to eligibility and remain married for at least one year to retain amnesty.

I also think some of the complaints about it are rather amusing. Yes, I am shocked, shocked that politicians should engage in baldly political actions during an election year. Such a thing is unheard of!

I agree with Tom Friedman’s conclusion in his most recent New York Times column which is that American leaders should stop courting Israel. His argument has a certain amount of partisan slant:

They have done so much damage already, and yet President Biden, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and many in Congress have not come to terms with just how radical this government is.

Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow G.O.P. mischief makers decided to reward Netanyahu with the high honor of speaking to a joint meeting of
Congress on July 24. Pushed into a corner, the top Democrats in the Senate and the House signed on to the invitation, but the unstated goal of this Republican exercise is to divide Democrats and provoke shouted insults from their most progressive representatives that would alienate American Jewish voters and donors and turn them toward Donald Trump.

but

No friend of Israel should participate in this circus. Israel needs a pragmatic centrist government that can lead it out of this multifaceted crisis — and seize the offer of normalization with Saudi Arabia that Biden has been able to engineer. This can come about only by removing Netanyahu through a new election — as the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, bravely called for in March. Israel does not need a U.S.-sponsored booze party for its drunken driver.

What is notable about the column is that Mr. Friedman does not make a single mention of U. S. interest. What is the U. S. interest in supporting Israel? In supporting the Palestinians? I would say that our interests in either are quite narrow and somewhat abstract. Our interest are humanitarian. Mr. Friedman does, however, point out why we should not support Israel:

Unlike any previous Israeli cabinet, this government wrote the goal of annexing the West Bank into the coalition agreement, so it is no surprise that it spent its first year trying to crush the ability of the Israeli Supreme Court to put any check on its powers. Bibi also ceded control over the police and key authorities in the Defense Ministry to Jewish supremacists in his coalition to enable them to deepen settlers’ control over the West Bank. They immediately proceeded to add settlement housing units in the heart of that occupied territory by record numbers to try to block any Palestinian state there.

He does not similarly point out why we should not support the Palestinians but it’s pretty simple. They are violent radical Islamists. Not only do they support Hamas but the more violent and radical a faction is, the greater is their support for it.

As I’ve pointed out before American supporters of either group are thinking about imaginary Israelis or imaginary Palestinians. Neither the real Israelis nor the real Palestinians are particularly appealing to us.