I very rarely cite The American Conservative but I thought Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s piece there, “The Federal Government Should Not Be Held Hostage for Ukraine Funding” worthy of comment. What follows is something between a fisking and a commentary. Sen. Paul opens:

Today I am putting leadership of the House, the Senate, and the President of the United States on notice. I will not consent to the expedited passage of any spending measure providing more American aid to Ukraine.

Continuing he writes:

Simply put: We have no extra money to send to Ukraine. Our deficit this year will exceed $1.5 trillion. Borrowing money from China to send to Ukraine makes no sense.

The federal government has three ways of obtaining the dollars it spends: taxation, borrowing, and extending credit to itself. “Taxation” includes both taxes and fees; the mechanism for extending credit is that the Federal Reserve purchases U. S. Treasury bonds which it is required to do by law. Here’s a breakdown of federal debt:

Here’s a scoresheet of Chinese ownership of U. S. federal debt:

Said another way China has not increased its holding of U. S. Treasuries for some time. Sen. Paul is incorrect. We aren’t borrowing from China. We finance most of the deficit by extending credit to ourselves.

Continuing:

Since the beginning of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the American taxpayer has provided Kiev $113 billion. Over the 583 days of war between February 24, 2022 and the end of this month, that average will come to $6.8 billion per month—or $223 million per day.

Some of that is supporting Ukraine’s war effort directly; some is humanitarian aid; some is supporting the Ukrainian government—that’s the largest chunk, I believe. Some of our direct support of the war effort has actually been subsidization of U. S. munitions companies.

Next:

This week, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington to lobby Congress to approve the Biden administration’s $24 billion supplemental aid request.

When will the aid requests end? When will the war end? Can someone explain what victory in Ukraine looks like? President Biden certainly can’t. His administration has failed to articulate a clear strategy or objective in this war, and Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive has failed to make meaningful gains in the east.

“What victory looks like” has actually been explained pretty clearly—at this point we are supporting Ukraine’s stated objectives which are

1. Return of all of the territory that was Ukraine’s prior to 2014 including Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk.
2. NATO membership for Ukraine and the unstated objective
3. Weakening Russia

I don’t believe Sen. Paul’s criticism is fair. You may disagree with those objectives but I think they’re pretty clear. My own view is that I do not believe that the first objective can be accomplished by anything short of direct U. S. involvement in the war which is likely to result in a nuclear exchange.

With no clear end in sight, it looks increasingly likely that Ukraine will be yet another endless quagmire funded by the American taxpayer. That’s why public support for the war is waning. A CNN poll from August shows that a majority of Americans now oppose Congress authorizing additional funding to Ukraine.

I think that’s a fair criticism.

The Senate leadership of both parties know this. That’s why they are trying to hold the federal government hostage by inserting the $24 billion aid request in a continuing resolution: to force our hand. Either we fund an endless war in Ukraine or the uniparty will shut down the federal government and make the American people suffer.

I am shocked, shocked to find political machinations going on in Washington!

This is a clear dereliction of duty, and I will not stand for it. My colleagues: As representatives of the American people, you should not stand for it. The bill that comes before us should be about funding our own government, not anyone else’s. I will do everything in my power to block a bill that includes funding for Ukraine.

I don’t think it’s dereliction of duty; I think it’s a disagreement on policy.

If that’s not bad enough, Senate leadership has prevented the implementation of effective oversight mechanisms to ensure that hard-earned American tax dollars don’t fall prey to waste, fraud, and abuse. As a result, besides the colossal costs of the war, we will end up paying a corruption tax.

Unfortunately, corruption runs deep in Ukraine, and there’s plenty of evidence that it has run rampant since Russia’s invasion. As Zelensky landed in New York earlier this week, we learned that corruption concerns in Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense resulted in the firing of six deputy defense ministers. This comes two weeks after the firing of Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who was removed after it was discovered that the Ministry of Defense had mishandled military contracts.

Last month, Zelensky fired all twenty-four regional military recruitment chiefs because they were “involved in illegal activities, including enrichment.”

Last October, we learned that U.S. shipments of grenade launchers, machine guns, rifles, bulletproof vests, and thousands of rounds of ammunition, were ending up in the hands of criminal gangs and weapons traffickers posing as humanitarian aid organizations.

I have been complaining about this myself for more than a year. Unfortunately, I believe that the only way to address it is risky—American civilian “boots on the ground”. Strict in-person oversight. If the Ukrainians won’t stand for that we shouldn’t support them. Even that is no guarantee but it’s better than just hoping for the best which appears to be present policy.

He concludes:

What are we doing? Is this fair to the American people? Millions of Americans are struggling each day to make ends meet. Millions of Americans are struggling to provide for their families and put food on the table. Can we honestly look our constituents in the eye and tell them that this is a good investment of their tax dollars?

Increasingly, especially as election day nears, that will be the critical issue not just on support for Ukraine but on controlling our southern border. The money we are spending on Ukraine and on “asylum-seekers” is not spent on domestic needs.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the number of times that Sen. Paul has voted for tax decreases. Budget items in excess of taxation are not limited to support for Ukraine. Put simply the amount we are being taxed does not cover the main budget items (defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt). If taxes do not increase, we must “borrow”. Simple as that. What does Sen. Paul have in mind?

I read this taxonomy of “narratives” about climate change at ImpactAlpha by Bob Eccles and Melita Leousi, hoping that it would produce more light than heat but having read it I’m not so sure. Here’s it’s opening passage:

ImpactAlpha, September 18 — The climate discourse by individuals and groups typically involves five narratives about the import and response to climate change. Some people are scientific, others skeptical. Some make moral arguments, others tout the opportunities. And, increasingly, many are warning of “doomsday” to spur urgency – or defeatism.

These narratives are “ideal types” that express themselves to varying degrees and in various combinations. We believe that recognizing the existence of these types can be helpful in fostering dialogue between people and groups who are addressing the challenges and opportunities of climate change (engaging with climate change deniers might naturally be harder).

with the following conclusion:

These are “ideal types” which we think can be a useful framing for fostering dialogue between people and groups who are addressing the challenges and opportunities of climate change.

To paint a stark example, take two groups that both use the Scientific Foundation as their dominant narrative, but one supplements it with the Doomsday Narrative and the other the Opportunity Narrative.

It would be natural for the Doomsayers to view the Opportunists as being overly optimistic and not having the proper sense of urgency. In contrast, adherents of the Opportunity view may find those warning of climate apocalypse to be shrill and failing to take a pragmatic view about the continued use of fossil fuels and the need for technological breakthroughs.

If well-meaning people who are concerned about climate change can’t talk to others simply because they talk about it in a different way, we will not be able to establish the social and political consensus necessary to address an issue that confronts us all, whatever our narrative.

The “narratives” are

• Scientific
• Skeptic
• Moral
• Opportunity
• Doomsday

For details on what is meant by each see the cited article. IMO framing the taxonomy in that way is itself somewhat argumentative.

My own view is that climate change models are weakly predictive, they are too susceptible to gaming, and that many of the strategies for dealing with anthropogenic climate change are questionable and/or are scams even if well-meaning, I don’t think that any strategy that does not involve nuclear energy, requiring China and India to reduce their carbon emissions, and, in all likelihood, carbon capture and sequestration are particularly serious. I think that some action is worthwhile but much of what is proposed is either ill-considered, regressive, or trying to accomplish something other than ameliorating climate change.

To understand why I say “weakly predictive”, cf. this passage by an article by Chad Small in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

Global climate models and real-world observations mostly agree on average ocean warming over the last 40 years. But this agreement breaks down when you peel back that average and look at regional snapshots of sea surface temperature.

“If you have ever looked at [sea surface temperature] linear trend over the past 40 years, since 1979, where we have the set of products with a more accurate [sea surface temperature] estimate, you can see everywhere is warming—of course not uniformly,” Yue Dong, a postdoctoral research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and one of the primary authors of a recent paper on this topic, said.

She adds that observed trends show a strong cooling trend in the Eastern Pacific and Southern Ocean, which goes against what the models predicted.

Putting it a little less kindly if the calculations to send a rocket to the moon had been as inaccurate as climate change models we’d have never reached the moon. Thousands of everyday industrial processes would be starting massive fires and explosions. Getting the directionality correct on average is not a high standard of accuracy let alone the “pretty accurate” assessment the models are frequently given.

In addition they are far too dependent on how and where measurements are taken. Moving sensors should not affect the predictions but they would. Too many are located near cities which means they’re measuring something else.

And, finally, the strategies proposed are guesstimates if not outright scams. Take carbon offsets, for example. The most recent scholarship suggests they don’t do much. Microsoft (or Google) shutting down its operations might have an impact; using carbon offsets to facilitate their emitting at will not so much.

My wife and I are both Jeopardy! fans. We watch when we can, dutifully answering the questions we know the answers for.

I would not make a good Jeopardy! contestant. While I have considerable knowledge of the subjects that interest me, e.g. history, philosophy, geography, languages (particularly classical languages), politics, science, the arts, literature, etc., I have very little knowledge of subjects in which I have little interest specifically contemporary popular music and sports and both of those loom large enough on the show as to make me a poor contestant.

I found this article in The Guardian interesting. Oliver Milman reports on a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) plant under construction:

The advent of the 65-acre (26-hectare) site, which will be marked by a vast network of pipes, buildings and fans to scrub CO2 from the air and then inject it into underground rock formations, was solemnly likened to the Apollo 13 moon mission by Lori Guetre, vice-president of Carbon Engineering, the Canadian-founded company spearheading Stratos, during the groundbreaking.

“This time the Earth has some serious complications, and it needs the brightest minds,” Guetre said, adding that “that the world is watching and counting on us … The team’s will to overcome is quiet, steady and unwavering.”

This milestone was followed, in August, by Biden’s energy department announcing that two facilities – one a separate venture by Carbon Engineering, in the southern reaches of Texas – will be given $1.2bn to act as DAC “hubs” to help jumpstart the carbon-removal industry in the US while also purging more than 2m tons of CO2 from the atmosphere between them. A further two hubs will be chosen by the federal government, as part of a $3.5bn effort to help create a market for carbon that will be “crucial to tackling climate change”, according to Jennifer Granholm, the US secretary of energy.

It will be interesting to see whether this enterprise turns out to be an effective way of removing carbon from the air or a sham and rent-seeking strategy. It could be both.

I shouldn’t leave the subject of Michael Tomasky’s piece without addressing the point of departure for it: following Paul Krugman’s lead he was asking why President Biden isn’t getting more credit for the improving economy? The answer at which both he and Dr. Krugman arrive is that people have been misled by the right-wing media. That is poppycock. It’s based on their lived experience which is enormously different not just from Dr. Krugman’s and Mr. Tomasky’s but from the CPI which ignores that the CPI deliberately excludes two expense categories that loom higher the lower your income: food and gasoline.

The sharp rise in the cost of food and fuel over the last couple of years is impressed on people every time they go to the grocery store or gas station.

That graph actually understates things if anything because price increases are cumulative. What we notice are the increasing prices not the decrease in the rate which they are increasing. Furthermore, people are carrying higher credit card balances than they were a few years which makes them more sensitive to the higher interest rates we have now.

Shorter: it’s not the right-wing media. It’s the grocery store, the gas station, and their credit card companies that tell people to worry.

I had intended to post on Michael Tomasky’s piece at The New Republic but James Joyner beat me to it. I will only commend James’s post to your attention adding some remarks of my own. James’s post is difficult to summarize. To some extent it’s a lament over the state of modern journalism.

I will add two observations of my own, one about the nature of bias in reporting and the other about how newspapers slant the news.

Mr. Tomasky leans to the left. I’m quite sure he would agree. But it is the nature of political bias that your view is solipsistic; you tend to see anyone who espouses views your perceive as right-wing as right-wing and anyone who espouses views to your left as left-wing regardless of their actual position on the political spectrum.

Every couple of years I calibrate my own political views based on the The Political Compass. They invariably place me in the center, occasionally very slightly libertarian or very slightly culturally conservative but extremely slightly—basically a dot’s width. That’s why I feel qualified to observe the left or right leanings of various news outlets or other people.

Lest you think that the center is a comfortable place—it isn’t. When I comment on other blogs (as I do) I am frequently castigated as a left-wing or right-wing tool, depending on the POV of the commenter.

I agree with Mr. Tomasky’s complaints about Fox News as being right-wing; I take just about anything else he says with a grain of salt.

The most frequent complaint I get is what is now called “bothsidesism”. That is usually followed by a torrent of what is now called “whataboutism”. I can only observe that I come from a political family. When I was a kid judges, elected officials at all levels, and our Congressional representative were occasional guests in our home. Our senator’s kid was in my patrol in Scouts. I met the senator numerous times. More recently I’ve had lunch sitting across the table from our governor (or someone who would soon become governor) on more than one occasion. I’ve shared the elevator with the mayor, the Secretary of State, or the governor. I chat with our City Council representative while walking my dog. You may not like it but politicians are politicians.

Both of our political parties are horrifically corrupt. I don’t give much of a damn about Republicans because they don’t have much effect on my life. I would like to see a better, less corrupt Democratic Party and do what I can in my small way to make that happen.

Now to news media. Lying is not the only way that news outlets slant the news. There are basically three ways: the stories they cover, the stories they do not cover, and how they cover the stories they do. About 50 years ago news reporting began to change from the 5Ws (who, what, where, when, why) to the point-of-view style. The point-of-view style means that stories are inherently slanted one way or another. Sometimes balance is attempted by citing an opposing view. There are multiple ways of slanting that, too. You can place the opposing view twenty paragraphs after the view being advocated, for example. The eminence or credibility of the individual with the opposing view may not actually be comparable with that of the individual espousing the primary view. Choice of language helps, too. Pointing out the political affiliation of the individual with the opposing view while you did not point out the political affiliation of the individual with the primary view.

At Financial Times Rana Foroohar ruminates on the broader implications of the ongoing UAW strike:

The unions are not just fighting for a few more bucks. This battle may determine not only the future of the clean energy transition in the US, but potentially the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and the future of the Democratic party. It’s a worthy battle, but also a very, very risky one. 

and

This is in some ways a life-or-death battle for the union. The EV transition is already predicted to significantly lower the number of jobs in the automotive sector in the short term, since you simply don’t need the same number of components and thus workers on an assembly line as you do to manufacture cars with internal combustion engines. Ford chief executive Jim Farley told the Financial Times back in 2022 that the EV transition might require 40 per cent fewer workers. 

and

While some would argue that China flooding Europe with EVs in violation of World Trade Organization rules matters less than getting more cheap EVs on the road, the tough political truth is that if western countries are perceived as selling out their own workers, we’ll see a harder and broader swing towards Trump-style autocratic populism.

A better idea would be for the US and Europe to come together and set joint labour and environmental standards on how EVs are made. This would help avoid a race to the bottom with either China, or each other, and put tariffs on vehicles that don’t adhere to them.

Briefly stated the implications are not just economic but environmental and political. The economic implications are pretty obvious. Will the union succeed in wresting concessions not only on pay but on benefits and the present tiered workforce from the companies? I sympathize with the union in its argument that CEOs compensation has grown enormously while theirs has declined cf. here:

Furthermore, how much of the increase in CEOs’ compensation is actually warranted? Are they doing good jobs or just benefiting from a general bull market?

The sad reality is that if the CEOs’ compensation were reduced to zero, it would provide just about $500 per worker. Not only wouldn’t that offset the pay increase the UAW is demanding, it wouldn’t pay for retirees’ healthcare insurance, another demand. Where is the money supposed to come from? It won’t come from raising prices. That would just drive more market share to non-union competitors.

In this day of activist media I can’t tell whether we’re comparing apples with apples. What I can tell you is that the market shares of the formerly Big Three have declined, the number of workers they employ, both hourly and salaried has declined, and Toyota and Honda employ non-UAW hourly workers.

The environmental implications extend beyond whether EVs will be built to where they were built. Building EVs in Germany (or the United States) produces fewer carbon emissions than building them in China so it makes a difference.

And the political implications for President Biden are serious, too. This strike will be a test of his bona fides as a defender of workers. If the strike is resolved in the union’s favor, it will help him. If the opposite is true it will be another nail in his political coffin.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune remark on Chicago’s budget shortfall:

Most city money goes on personnel: salaries, benefits, pension costs. Most of the increased revenue ideas we know about risk unintended consequences, are going to take a lot of time to implement, and may require approval at the state level.

Johnson could also use someone to remind him that his job as the city’s chief executive is to get the best available deals for the city, and its taxpayers, and it’s not to pay contractors, vendors and the like as much as possible, just because he thinks the world should be so.

I wonder where they got that idea? What if Mayor Johnson, rather than seeing it as his job “to get the best available deals for the city”, sees his job as allocating money, picking winners and losers? And ensuring his own re-election, of course.

I found this piece at AlJazeera, an interview by Oliver Jarvis of Arundhati Roy, thought-provoking. Here’s a snippet:

What has happened in India and it’s so dangerous, so blatant, is that the country, the nation, the government and its institutions have all been conflated with the ruling party – a political party. And that ruling party has been conflated with Modi, the individual. In fact, there is hardly any ruling party now, there’s just a ruler. So it’s as if Modi is hosting the G20. All of us are locked in. We can’t go out. The poor have been purged from the city. The slums have been screened off. The roads are barricaded, the traffic is shut down. It’s as quiet as death. It is as if he’s so ashamed of all of us, of what the city is really like. It’s been purged and locked down for this event.

I think we need to be very, very careful about India. If it isn’t already, India is verging on becoming a fascist state.