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.

I generally don’t comment on the state and local elections of states and localities in which I have never resided and of which I have little actual knowledge. I think they have a complete right to elect any damned fools they care to.

I find George Friedman’s latest offering frustrating. Here’s a snippet:

In other words, technological advancements have rendered the 18th-century framework of war declaration obsolete. A congressional debate over the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would have eliminated a fundamental necessity of war: surprise. It would also undermine a fundamental element in diplomacy: the ability to credibly threaten military action unless the other side makes concessions. If the president cannot make such threats without a public congressional debate, then the threat becomes less immediate and less persuasive. Both the secrecy and ambiguity essential to war and diplomacy are compromised.

Shorter: if you think the law is obsolete, ignore it.

I see no way that such a view is compatible with the rule of law. Clearly, Mr. Friedman doesn’t, either, and provides no remedy in his piece. His observation is not a new one. For more than 200 years we have recognized that autocracies can be more decisive than democracies. Somehow we’ve managed to muddle along.

Today I’m seeing articles in many news outlets questioning the efficacy of President Trump’s attacks on the Iranian nuclear development facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. At Commentary Seth Mandel tackles them head-on:

CNN reported one US intelligence assessment concluded that Iran’s nuclear program has only been set back a few months. The New York Times soon followed with a nearly identical piece.

There are no specifics in either piece. We don’t know—and it’s clear the reporters do not know—which sites they are relaying quotes about. And there’s a strange, or maybe not so strange, unwillingness to note that the assessment in question, from the Defense Intelligence Agency, was made with “low confidence”—which is code for “we don’t really know what happened so we’re going to guess, kind of.”

He goes on to quote David Albright’s WSJ interview.

So now we’re bickering over whether the attacks accomplished their objective or not. My opinion is that nobody knows and will not know for some time if ever.

One of the things that strikes me is that from some of his published remarks it’s reasonable to infer that President Trump is receiving Israeli intelligence and has more confidence in it than U. S. intelligence which IMO is a sad commentary.

Take a quick look at this graphic at Visual Capitalist and then explain to me how countries (like Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and Belgium) that can’t scrape up 2% of GDP will manage to spend 5% of GDP on defense? This is after two years of the threat posed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It should be noted that some countries are spending in excess of 3%, notably Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. What could possibly explain that? Unfortunately, their aggregate GDP is less than that of Spain.

My answer is that our European allies are much more skilled at issuing press releases than they are at expanding defense spending.

Bonus question: how much will Germany and Italy need to spend to bring their militaries up to an adequate level of readiness and preparedness?