I think Conrad Black’s diatribe against the Democratic Party at the New York Sun, reprinted at RealClearPolitics, is one of the harshest I’ve seen. IMO most of it is excessive but there’s one passage with which I agree:

The great Democratic party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and even up to a point Clinton, has given way to an unfeasible ragtag of superannuated tyros, influence peddlers, decayed servitors, and now completely unacceptable extremists personified by the likely nominee to be mayor of New York City, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, an economic Marxist who does not accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and expresses sympathy for calls to globalize the intifada.

The Democrats have no plausible opponents to Mr. Trump, no policy except Trump-hate, and have carried to its logical extreme the great liberal death wish.

I’ll continue on a related topic in the next post.

At The Hill Rinzen Widjaja argues that high-speed rail is not a good strategy for solving transportation problems in the United States:

There is a fundamental conflict between the notion of connecting the whole of the U.S. with high-speed networks and the American tradition of decentralized infrastructure. The success of the Eisenhower Interstate System was not that it connected major cities but because it empowered Americans to traverse the entire country, aiding local economies along the way. The Eisenhower Interstate System also allowed Americans to live far away from city centers and helped cement America’s car culture. The vision for a high-speed rail within the U.S. imports the centralized planning of a nation with drastically different values and geography, fundamentally misunderstanding what has contributed to the historical success of the Eisenhower Interstate System.

Furthermore, the financial logic of high-speed rail networks simply does not hold up, as ongoing projects turned into what many city planners now describe as logistical and financial “nightmares.” Citizens Against Government Waste pointed to the mismanagement of California’s high-speed rail, which has faced rising costs every year since the project began. While the claim that it would cost $33 billion was never feasible, the current $113 billion estimate is already 23 percent higher than the $81.4 billion that organization had originally estimated it would actually cost. It cites the “opportunistic contractors” that have exploited the lack of foresight involved in the project, 88 of which were booted by Gov. Gavin Newsom far “too late.”

I suspect that Mr. Widjaja as an Australian doesn’t recognize how policies get enacted into law in the United States, at least at the federal level. We have two major political parties and neither of them is a “programmatic party” although in honesty they have moved considerably in that direction since the Interstate Highway Act was enacted during the Eisenhower administration which most Americans no longer even recall. Our parties are composed of different factions and whatever actually makes it into enacted law is a compromise among those factions.

The major factions in the Republican Party are Jacksonian social conservatives, Hamiltonian pro-business interests, and anarcho-capitalists.

The major factions in the Democratic Party are traditional machine politics Democrats, technocrats, and a host of special interests including environmentalists.

It is the intra-party politics that explains what does and does not get done. Republicans are unlikely ever to support high-speed rail. The anarcho-capitalists oppose it outright on principal, no government incentive would be large enough to induce the Hamiltonians to support high-speed rail, and the Jacksonians don’t care much one way or the other as long as the plan serves the communities where they live and they receive some of the money appropriated for it. Mr. Widjaja does a pretty good job of explaining why those requirements are unlikely ever to be met. And that’s why Republicans won’t get behind high-speed rail.

While the Democrats support high-speed rail such projects are less about actually building and completing such things than the process of administering and approving them because those are the causes of the machine politics Democrats and technocrats. Under such a rubric the costs can expand without limit and never actually accomplish anything. A high-speed rail project that never actually gets built satisfies environmentalists since nothing gets built, satisfies technocrats since they’re employed planning and administering it, and satisfies machine politicians for a host of reasons.

And that’s where we stand. The Republicans won’t support it and Democrats won’t complete it because doing either is destructive of their coalitions.

Although the headlines we’re seeing frequently don’t include them, there’s a lot still going on in the world.

The new Syrian government is murdering Alawites by the thousand. As I predicted it is also persecuting Christians and Druze.

The Houthi harassment of Red Sea shipping continues.

Israel’s campaign against Hamas and, by extension, the Gazans continues unabated.

The “ceasefire” between Iran and Israel is hardly worthy of the name.

The Russians have surrounded Sumy, the seat of Sumy oblast in northeastern Ukraine. They had occupied it early in their campaign against Ukraine but had been driven out by late spring of 2022.

This is one of the things that has griped me about the trope “mostly peaceful”. If you’ve ever read old newspaper coverage of World War II, it is quite obvious how scant the information people on the home front were receiving, how greatly delayed, and the war itself consisted of a series of relatively brief battles (the Battle of the Bulge took 41 days) that punctuated substantial periods of preparation and comparative quiet.

I commend the piece from ACLED in particular to your attention. It describes the statements by both the Houthis and the United States on the Red Sea actions as a “hall of mirrors”.

The talking heads programs this morning were chock-full of stories I don’t have any interest in. The biggest stories were about the federal budget, the state of Iran’s nuclear development program, and the New York City mayoral primary. The answer to every question we might have was “we don’t know”.

Will the Democratic Party embrace Zohran Mamdani?
What is the status of the Iranian nuclear development program?
Will the Senate pass the budget bill? And will the House approve the reconciliation bill?

There were some things on which there was pretty general agreement. That Iran’s nuclear development program was “obliterated” is typical Trump exaggeration. That Republicans really, really want to make the tax cuts from President Trump’s first term permanent. The Democrats really, really want to spend more on healthcare. I could have told you any of those and I don’t have a staff of investigators.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries really struggled to avoid endorsing Mamdani. The strategy that Democratic consultants seem to have settled on about Mr. Mamdani is that he’s not really committed to the things he’s said over the years. We’ll see. Maybe New Yorkers will dodge this bullet and re-elect Adams.

I’ve expressed my view of the federal budget any number of times. We need to tax more and spend less. Spending on Medicare and Medicaid spending cannot continue to grow at the rate they have over the last ten years.

I’ve already provided my opinion on the reforms we need to make to Social Security.

The key point is that all of the necessary reforms are poisoned pills. They won’t be embraced by either political party.

As to the president’s beloved tax cuts consider this:

Do you see an increase in real business investment subsequent to their enactment? Me, neither. I think it’s possible (and desirable) to affect business investment via the tax code but cuts in the personal income tax rate would need to be much more targeted than the sort they have been for the last 40 years to accomplish that.

I materially agree with the editors of the Washington Post about the irresponsibility of the way we’ve been borrowing to spend and cut taxes over the last 40 years. Here’s a snippet:

Cheers greet those who announce new benefits, while those who suggest raising taxes to pay for them meet with voter fury. This is why the United States has a persistent budget deficit exceeding 6 percent of the economy.

This behavior is bipartisan, though the details vary by party: Democrats boost spending without raising enough revenue to pay for it; Republicans hack away at taxes without offsetting spending cuts. Both, however, have relied on irresponsibly large sums of borrowed money to finance their priorities.

Most of their ire is directed against the Republicans but make no mistake: the irresponsibility is bipartisan. I did want to make some additional points.

First, the empirical evidence remains that borrowing faster than we’re growing impedes growth. In other words as the federal debt overhang increases it becomes decreasingly likely that whatever economic growth is generated by cutting taxes will pay for the tax cut.

Second, as an increasing proportion of the economy depends on federal spending, the increase in deadweight loss will outrun whatever growth the spending produces.

Third, as long as stock index funds make 20% per year, why would anyone make investments that would actually increase the productive economy or make it more efficient?

Fourth, we don’t need a Congress to spend more than we can afford. We can accomplish that without Congressional help. We need a Congress to make the tough decisions and set priorities. IMO the priorities have been wrong for decades. For example, we still have people in the United States, one of the richest countries in the world, who meet the definition of poverty by global standards. That is unconscionable. Most of those people either live in Indian reservations or are rural blacks so they don’t have enough votes for anyone to care. They don’t matter.

The Supreme Court has decided that nationwide injunctions against President Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants in the United States illegally exceed the courts’ authority. Bart Jansen reports at USA Today:

The Supreme Court decided to lift nationwide blocks on President Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship for the children of parents who were in the country temporarily or without legal authorization.

The court ruled 6-3 that District Court rulings that temporarily blocked Trump’s order “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority that the lower courts should review their temporary blocks on Trump’s policy. She explicitly said the court wasn’t deciding whether Trump’s order was constitutional.

I wonder if the SCOTUS recognizes the seismic effect that decision will have across the country? I suspect it will be exceeded only if the Court decides that the Constitution’s census and redistricting provisions don’t apply to illegal immigrants.

Once upon a time in the mists of the distant past newspapers and news media more generally had target audiences. The audience for the New York Times was people who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan or wish they did. The Washington Post reflected the views and interests of the Washington nomenklatura—people who held influential posts with the federal government, wanted to hold such posts, or were interested in what they thought. The target market for the Wall Street Journal was people who were interested in business. I’ve never actually been sure who the target market for the Chicago Tribune was but I’m pretty sure they had one.

A lot of things have changed but that hasn’t. There are still target markets. The NYT market seems to be fundamentally unchanged as is the case for the WSJ. The people and their views may have changed but those outlets still target those markets. The audience for the Chicago Tribune, increasingly, is people who used to live in Chicago.

But things are different for the WaPo. There are a few old hangers-on like David Ignatius who still seem to reflect the Washington prevailing wisdom. Consider this snapshot of the WaPo opinion page:

At least to me there’s no obvious target market. When you dig a little deeper it’s even more confusing. Lots of the regular columnists are writing about the New York City mayoral primary.

So, who’s the target market for today’s Washington Post? Is it Jeff Bezos? Do they still reflect the DC prevailing wisdom? Are they writing for themselves?

I still have nothing to say about the NYC mayoral primary but I thought you might be interested in these observations from Bill Daley of the Chicago Daley clan in his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Democrats rightly deplore the Republican Party for capitulating to Donald Trump and an agenda that threatens democracy and decency. But we’d better pause and note how our own party is creeping dangerously close to an agenda that’s equally outlandish and radical.

The clearest sign is the victory by Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York. His endorsers included Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Mr. Mamdani is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. So it’s worth examining this group’s official platform. It seeks to “defund the police” by cutting “budgets annually towards zero,” to “disarm law enforcement officers,” to “close local jails,” and to “free all people from involuntary confinement.” It calls for “social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure” and “the nationalization of businesses like railroads, utilities and critical manufacturing and technology companies” as well as “institutions of monetary policy, insurance, real estate, and finance.”

There’s more. The DSA would “dramatically slash US military spending,” “close all US foreign military bases,” and “immediately withdraw from NATO.” It would “end all deportations,” “demilitarize the border and end all immigrant detention and abolish ICE.” It would allow noncitizens to vote and “abolish the Senate.” Mr. Trump beat the DSA to two of its goals: abolishing the U.S. Agency for International Development and Voice of America.

concluding:

Mainstream Democrats must loudly disavow these views. If they appear meek or indecisive, it makes it easy for Fox News commentators and others to paint the party as wildly out of step with the majority. Party leaders should insist that Mr. Mamdani, Mr. Sanders, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other DSA supporters go line-by-line through the group’s platform and explain: Do you agree with this proposal? With this one? If not, say so out loud.

Mr. Trump didn’t take control of the GOP directly. First, the tea-party movement emerged as an antitax, antigovernment and antitruth force. When it receded, MAGA filled the void. Mainstream Republicans who failed to articulate a robust, sensible agenda now watch from the sidelines.

Rank-and-file Democrats and party leaders risk a similar fate if they shrug off Mr. Mamdani’s victory. There was nothing secret about the DSA’s platform when Mr. Mamdani welcomed the organization’s support. It was out there for everyone to see. His stunning victory in New York is a singular moment in U.S. politics. That ringing you hear is a wake-up call. Will my party answer it?

It’s getting harder every day for me to tell who is a “mainstream Democrat”.

I agree with Dominique J. Baker’s observation about the utility of “key statistics” at Brookings:

As a country, we need to understand who goes to school, where, and what their experiences are. It’s hard to ensure that students have access to quality education without some basic information about our schools.

IMO there is no better argument for why education should remain a state and local responsibility. The finer the granularity of the statistics you’re seeking the even truer that becomes.

The federal government has no way of compelling state and local governments to feed them information. They can provide incentives but the decreasing real discretionary spending

Sources: OMB and CBO

makes it that much harder. Education is not the only area in which that is true. It is particularly true related to national crime statistics. There are multiple major metropolitan areas that are known not to have provided the FBI with crime statistics for years. And then there are the issues of false, misleading, or incompatible reporting by different jurisdictions. How can you make prudent policy decisions about law enforcement based on that? I don’t think you can. That’s why we have legislatures.

Returning to education Chicago has proven definitively that the data reported by state and local governments cannot be taken at face value. Chicago reported data contrived to show improvements for years. The actual data made the mayor look bad.