There’s a pretty depressing article on the status of diplomacy in the Far East at FP:

This means that both Japan and China have an interest in seeing the United States face a binary choice between supporting Japan and stepping back from confrontation with China. Tokyo wants Washington to prove unambiguously that it will not sacrifice Japanese interests in order to avoid a rift with Beijing. Beijing wants to show Japan-and the rest of Asia-that America is no longer willing to defend their interests against China’s growing power.

Of course Washington wants to avoid that choice, and it seems to think it can. In Washington, they seem to assume that if shots are fired, China would back down rather than confront the United States militarily. If that’s true, the United States would not have to choose between fighting China and abandoning Japan.

It ain’t necessarily so. Read the whole thing.

Ignore whether global warming (manmade or not) is happening. Here’s an example of why I’m skeptical of the policy proposals intended to combat it:

The world needs to triple the energy it gets from renewables, nuclear reactors and power plants that use emissions-capture technology to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, United Nations scientists said.

Investments needed to keep climate change within safe limits would shave a fraction of a percent off annual global growth, the UN said yesterday in the third part of its most comprehensive study on warming. A delay in stemming rising greenhouse gases will cut chances to limit the global temperature increase, add to costs and lead to increasingly reliance on unproven technologies, they said.

Energy production, transportation, and cement production are the great producers of greenhouse gases. If people won’t accept curbs on transportation (they haven’t) and the level of investment required to build enough nuclear power plants, large scale windmills, and large scale solar isn’t imaginable (it isn’t), and we keep right on building roads, knocking down old buildings, and building new ones, I think you’re going to hear a lot more about ways to deal with the carbon that’s already been released than about releasing less.

Just a little reminder. The backend of Healthcare.gov is still presenting problems. The user-facing part of the site is, apparently, much improved, but, like an iceberg, that’s only a seventh of it.

The user experience may be better but to say that’s it’s working now is at best an exaggeration and at worst a lie. It still has a long way to go.

I could hardly let the recent Wall Street Journal article, “What’s the Matter With Illinois?”, pass without comment. I’ve taken the liberty of sampling the graphic above from that article. As you can see, Illinois has fared far worse in the recovery than its neighboring states.

The WSJ attributes Illinois’s problems, essentially, to Democrats:

Democrats say Illinois taxes aren’t all that high and have room to grow…

[…]

Democrats want to impose a progressive income tax because they don’t want to extend their “temporary” tax hikes on their low and middle income constituents…

[…]

The real reason Democrats want higher taxes is the state’s exploding government-employee pension costs…

[…]

Democrats in Springfield are also teeing up a bailout for Chicago’s pension funds…

[…]

Taxes and public union governance aren’t the only policy differences in these states, but they have been the most notable since 2010. Judging by the record so far, nothing would make the four Republican Governors of neighboring states happier than for Illinois to keep soaking its millionaires.

I think that concluding paragraph begins to get to the heart of the matter but let’s do a more detailed comparison of the five states.

or, in summary, Illinois is larger, richer, less equal, has a larger urban population, and has a larger percentage of minority and poor people than its neighboring states. It really isn’t as similar to its neighboring states as one might expect. It also has a higher state minimum wage than its neighboring states. Indiana can become Indiana just by competing with Illinois, tempting businesses to move across the state line, but it’s a lot harder for Illinois to improve its economy by attracting business away from Indiana. The numbers just don’t favor it.

What does Illinois need to do? Illinois isn’t a destination state like California or Florida and it doesn’t depend on natural resources as Texas does oil. The decline of the coal industry, largely a result of environmental regulations, has hit Illinois hard. Not only have thousands of working people been thrown out of work, many of those people headed to Chicago searching for jobs that proved elusive. Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood is still full of them.

Illinois needs to be more friendly to business, slowly reform its tax system to become less regressive, weed out government corruption, learn to live within its means, and recognize that it’s only by producing more that the state can prosper. Without business and industry Illinois will inevitably decline.

The editors of the New York Times lament that the economic recovery has left Millennials, Americans aged 25 to 34, behind:

The Federal Reserve, increasingly optimistic about the economy, is dialing back its stimulus efforts. The International Monetary Fund has raised its forecast for growth in the United States. Congress has long since reduced aid to the economy, with many lawmakers, mostly Republicans, adamant that the economy is better off with less government involvement.

The official line is clear: The worst is over, and recovery has given way to expansion.

But that’s not the whole story. Economic gains so far have mostly benefited those at the top of the income and wealth ladder. Worse, future growth is likely to be lopsided, because the foundation for broad prosperity is arguably the weakest it has been since World War II.

Take, for example, Americans age 25 to 34, the leading edge of the so-called millennials, the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s. They are worse off than Gen Xers (born from the mid-1960s to the late-1970s) were at that age and the baby boomers before them by nearly every economic measure — employment, income, student loan indebtedness, mobility, homeownership and other hallmarks of “household formation,” like moving out on their own, getting married and having children.

The solution, obviously, is to tax the young and give the proceeds to the old. It hardly seems like a coincidence that a wave of closings is striking the retail sector and many of the stores closing cater to the young.

I don’t think the young are the only people who’ve been left behind in this recovery. Others include the poor, middle income people, and people who live in the middle of the country. Then there are the long-term unemployed.

In the worst circumstances of all are young, black men.

However, if you’re only concerned about averages, the economy is doing very well.

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

Kaminski on Ukraine

I respond to Wall Street Journal editor Matthew Kaminski’s lament about the West’s failure to oppose Russia in Ukraine.

Robert Samuelson muses about long-term unemployment:

A study by Princeton economists Alan Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho is discouraging. Among the long-term unemployed from 2008 to 2012, only 36 percent had jobs 15 months later, the study found. As for the rest, 30 percent were unemployed, and 34 percent were not in the labor force. Even for workers with jobs, success was limited. A third had full-time jobs; the others had part-time or interrupted full-time work.

Disturbingly, the study also argues that labor markets may be tighter than they seem. We could be closer to an inflationary wage-price spiral than the relatively high unemployment rate (6.7 percent in March) suggests. With a lot of unemployed workers, competition for jobs should prevent an inflationary wage surge. But, says the study, the long-term unemployed are so much “on the margins” that they only weakly influence wages. More important is short-term unemployment of less than six months. If it’s low, wage pressures are high; surprisingly, it’s now close to its 20-year average of about 4 percent. This could cause the Federal Reserve to tighten credit to prevent labor bottlenecks.

Of course, that would be disastrous for the long-term unemployed, because it would probably slow hiring and make finding a job even harder. It’s also unnecessary. Other indicators portray a labor market that isn’t tight, notes David Stockton of the Peterson Institute, formerly a top Fed economist. Employee “quit rates” remain below pre-crisis levels, betraying workers’ fears of finding new jobs if they leave the ones they have. Business “hire rates” are similarly low, reflecting ingrained cautiousness. Involuntary part-time work is two-thirds higher than before the Great Recession. A broad unemployment measure, so-called U-6 (covering the officially unemployed plus involuntary part-time workers and “marginal workers”), is 12.7 percent.

None of this describes an economy close to its productive capacity.

Now consider the hot-button political issues of the day. Immigration reform that includes normalization and a “path to citizenship”. Increasing the minimum wage. Increasing the number of people with healthcare insurance. Balancing the budget. Ending global warming.

Whatever the merits of any or all of those issues, it’s hard for me to see how any or them or all of them will result in putting more people who’ve been unemployed for six months or more back to work.

Megan McArdle explains why the PPACA isn’t the first step in the process of getting to a single-payer system using Vermont as an example. Basically, it’s just too darned expensive. Our present basis for healthcare spending is just too high.

This weekend I’m engaging in my annual rite of penance and mortification. Somewhat like Prince Vronsky in Anna Karenina, I take the opportunity of the due date for my federal income taxes to re-examine and put the finishing touches on my books for the previous year.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, last year my income in real terms was the lowest it’s been in my adult life. The reasons for that are complicated. Mostly it boils down to my long-term clients having fallen on hard times, a result of the sluggish economy, changing conditions, and long-term mistakes (not my mistakes but theirs many of which I’ve been fighting for, literally, decades).

Now I’m rebuilding my client base. It’s something I should have been doing all along but, honestly, I got a bit lazy. My new clients haven’t produced much billing yet but I have hopes.

My wants are pretty limited. I need about $15,000 more business to stop being panicky and with about an additional $30,000 in net billing I’d have as much as I want or need. You’d think that would be doable but it’s proven elusive. Nominally I have some pretty desireable skills, I have extensive experience, and I’m very good at what I do. I rarely have problems closing once I’ve gotten my foot in the door.

Only my dear wife’s earnings prevent me from being desperate but it’s pretty humiliating. I really should be doing much better than I am.

I’m not a particularly desireable employee for a variety of reasons including my age and that I don’t want to be employed full-time. That’s why I’m looking for business rather than a job. If this goes on, I may be forced to look for a job, something I haven’t done in 35 years. The conditions are really terrible for that and, as I say, I’m not a particularly desireable employee.

A desireable employee is me, thirty-five or forty years ago. Somebody who’s young, unmarried, energetic, and ambitious who’ll work for half of what he’s worth and put in 60 hours a week doing it. Somebody who doesn’t have a life.