At the Sun-Times Alden Loury laments the Supreme Court’s ruling in the affirmative action case:

Even though affirmative action got me admitted to a predominantly white college, it didn’t mean that I was accepted. The officers chose only to question five Black men in a sea of white students parading along Green Street — including many who had also gathered briefly in small groups as we had.

The sympathy I felt for my white classmate who did not get accepted has eroded over the years, as I’ve gained a deep knowledge of the overt racism of our past and the more subtle forms of discrimination that persist. Affirmative action may have provided me an advantage in getting into the U. of I. But he has advantages in practically every other facet of life.

Data shows he’s more likely to be approved for a mortgage, hired for a job, benefit from generational wealth and see his property values appreciate faster. He’s also less likely to attract the suspicions of law enforcement or the public at large.

The six Supreme Court justices who voted to kill affirmative action may have followed the letter of the law, but their assessment that the policy is “unfair” feels tone-deaf in a nation that was literally built on a system of oppression — a system that most Americans don’t seem to be motivated to change.

Fifty years ago I argued in favor of preferential access to education for black Americans, the descendants of slaves. During that period I also opposed mass immigration on the grounds that black Americans, the descendants of slaves, would be injured by it. Unfortunately, I was right. The primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in the form it has taken have been African and Caribbean migrants. Today I think it’s time to try something else. I suggest providing preferential access to education based on poverty or even zip code of family residence but I’m open to other approaches.

I also think that a Supreme Court that follows “the letter of the law” and precedent is precisely what we need. I’m seeing precious few critiques of the SCOTUS ruling on legal grounds that wouldn’t also defend Plessy v. Ferguson. Most of the criticisms I’ve seen complain about the policy and setting policy is not the SCOTUS’s job. That’s the job of the Congress. I find it difficult to fathom how the longest-serving members of Congress have longer tenure than any of the SCOTUS justices with their lifetime appointments.

The editors of the Washington Post look forward to the NATO summit in Vilnius:

As things stand now, only 11 of 31 members meet its target of spending 2 percent of annual gross economic output on defense.

Yet they have little choice but to step up their game, because Mr. Putin has proved that it is folly to play down the threat Moscow poses.

That danger is likely to persist following the illegal war in Ukraine, whenever it finally ends, and addressing it will be high on the Vilnius agenda. NATO’s collective security guarantee, under which all members pledge to respond to an attack on one, means it cannot grant Kyiv’s wish for accession without drawing the alliance into the war against Russia. But the leaders can and should craft concrete, long-term plans to give Ukraine top-shelf arms, training and intelligence.

while at The Guardian Simon Tisdall insists that NATO forces “step in” to prevent Ukraine from losing to Russia:

The pressing question of Ukraine’s membership is expected to dominate this week’s pivotal summit of 31 Nato states in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. Volodymyr Zelenskiy knows a gold-embossed official invite is unlikely to arrive while his country is still at war with Russia. But Ukraine’s leader is urging US president Joe Biden and alliance leaders to take immediate “concrete steps”, including security guarantees, a roadmap and timeline. Zelenskiy argues that would boost morale and send an implacable message to Vladimir Putin.

Zelenskiy is right. Like Finland, Ukraine’s accession should be fast-tracked. Yet important though this issue is, Nato faces a far bigger question this week: whether it is doing enough to ensure Kyiv wins the war – or at least, doesn’t lose.

There’s a risk, if the current counteroffensive produces no breakthrough, weapons supplies run short, a new winter energy crisis strikes and western public support drops further, that Zelenskiy will be forced into negotiations – even into trading territory for peace. Secret, informal US-Russia talks are already under way. If Ukraine were already a Nato member, as promised 15 years ago, all this would not be happening.

My hypothesis from the president’s recent announcement that he would send cluster munitions to Ukraine was that he was doing it because we had run out of other munitions to send and those were gathering dust on the shelves. I see that others have begun to think of that as well.

I suspect that if the topic of NATO membership for Ukraine is the main topic for the summit, discussion may get pretty heated. Arguendo, let’s assume that Ukraine is admitted to NATO. What will happen?

1. The alliance will collapse
2. Nothing much that isn’t already happening
3. NATO member states will begin committing troops to Ukraine
4. Russia will immediately start using nuclear weapons to attack Western capitols
5. Something else (specify)

I lean towards some combination of B (most likely) and A.

I would also suggest that we can tell nothing from President Biden’s repeated assertion that there will be no American “boots on the ground” in Ukraine. As conditions have changed we have done several things, e.g. sending F-16s, sending long-range weapons, sending F-16s, that he had said we wouldn’t do.

Stephen Bryen predicts the likely outcome of the upcoming NATO summit:

It will be very hard to get a NATO consensus on the road ahead, no matter how much arm twisting Washington uses on its European partners.

Europe is already in a recession thanks to both the COVID catastrophe, to the sanctions on Russian energy and the huge unemployment levels, impacting recent immigrants. The impact of all that is social unrest across Europe. France is already experiencing a serious revolt, and while the French situation has eased in the past few days, it will come back. Meanwhile the German government coalition​ is steadily losing popular support and the AfD, Germany’s right wing party, is now the second most popular party in the country. Sholtz and his coalition partners don’t know what to do: they may try banning AfD as a last ditch effort. Italy is also far from out of the mess, as the country already has a conservative leadership but is being battered by unprecedented waves of immigrants coming from the Middle East.

Europe is out of money and out of bullets. It is not in a mood to give a blank check to Ukraine or risk a bigger war that might spread into Europe.

concluding:

It will be interesting to see how Vilnius plays out. It will certainly be a propagandistic show, but there is a good chance Vilnius will be a flop.

I suspect our European allies will be delighted to see the U. S. contribute more to assisting the Ukrainians. Beyond that I won’t be surprised if there is little consensus.

Continuing on a subject that I touched on the other day, Kendall Qualls touches on something I mentioned in his piece at RealClearPolitics:

Anyone who examines the condition of black Americans objectively will see what I see – a culture that has departed from its roots of faith, family, and education. Since the 1960s, we have gone from 80% of black children being born into two-parent homes to 80% of black children being born to single mothers in 2017. Affirmative action programs cannot and will not make up for the decline of two-parent families over the last 50 years and its effects on generations of black children.

Research reveals that children from two-parent families, regardless of race, experience high levels of academic success compared to children from fatherless homes. A 2021 study from The Institute for Family Studies found that “Black children in single-parent homes were 3.5 times more likely to live in poverty.” The same study found that black children raised by two parents had a 70% higher chance of graduating from college, while those raised by single parents were “twice as likely to be incarcerated by their late 20s.”

The retort from those who believe that present day problems of people whose great-great-grandparents were slaves can be traced directly to that slavery is frequently declaiming that even to point out what Mr. Qualls calls “the elephant in the room” is racist.

The yield on the 10 Year Treasury Bond rose today to the highest level since George W. Bush was president. While mortgage rates aren’t actually tied to the 10 Year Treasury Bond, they do tend to rise in tandem.

I don’t know what the implications of this will be. I doubt it will result in an increase in real estate sales. I suspect it will result in a higher proportion of cash sales and further concentration of wealth.

As should have been expected, the Chinese government has not been content to remain passive as the U. S. attempts to bar technological exports to China and has responded by restricting exports of rare earth metals necessary for semiconductor manufacturing. Mai Nguyen reports at Reuters:

July 5 (Reuters) – China said on Monday it will impose export restrictions on gallium and germanium products used in computer chips and other components to protect national security interests.

The decision, widely seen as retaliation for U.S. curbs on sales of technologies to China, raised concerns that China might eventually limit exports of other materials, notably rare earths, whose production China dominates.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark:

Janet Yellen arrives in Beijing Thursday in an attempt to improve U.S.-China relations, and on Monday the Communist Party rolled out the red carpet: new export restrictions on minerals that are critical for the production of semiconductors, solar cells and other tech products. Huanying, Madam Treasury Secretary.

China’s Ministry of Commerce said that, starting Aug. 1, gallium and germanium will be subject to export controls in the name of national security. China accounts for about 94% of global gallium production, and China wants everyone to know it will use minerals as a political weapon. Beijing wants the U.S. to stop limiting tech exports to China that could have military uses, even as Beijing sprints to expand its navy and weapons to push the U.S. out of the Western Pacific.

Ms. Yellen shouldn’t fall for it. The Chinese have played the critical mineral card before, notably in 2010 when they temporarily halted exports to Japan after a collision at sea near disputed islands.

The main result of that gambit was to encourage the rest of the world to produce more rare-earth metals. The U.S. Geological Survey says China’s share of rare-earth output has fallen to 70% from 98%. The same could happen to gallium and germanium.

I’ll just repeat what I said in response to President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act. We do need to produce more semiconductors here but that’s not enough. We need a complete supply chain for semiconductors that doesn’t run through China. Or Russia.

I was astonished to awaken this morning to find both the editors of the New York Times:

A first step in resetting the conversation is to eliminate the debt ceiling before its next scheduled appearance in 2025. President Biden has brushed aside calls for his administration to pursue a legal ruling that the ceiling is unconstitutional. In doing so, he is repeating the mistake he made last fall, when he failed to press for legislation to repeal the ceiling. A case pending in federal court in Boston, brought by federal workers concerned that a default would come at the expense of their pensions, offers a potential vehicle. Other legal avenues also should be explored. It makes sense to pursue a ruling while there is no imminent danger of hitting the ceiling. If courts reject the legal challenges, that would also be clarifying.

Any substantive deal will eventually require a combination of increased revenue and reduced spending, not least because any politically viable deal will require a combination of those options. Both parties will have to compromise: Republicans must accept the necessity of collecting what the government is owed, and of imposing taxes on the wealthy. Democrats must recognize that changes to Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of federal spending growth going forward, should be on the table. Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable.

That will require painful choices. But the failure to make those choices also has a price — and the price tag is increasing rapidly.

and the editors of the Washington Post:

Unless Americans are willing to live with a substantially smaller military, reduced Social Security payments, more crowded classrooms and other diminishments in what their government provides, lawmakers need to find about $2 trillion in additional tax revenue over the coming decade, on top of the money-saving budget reforms that we have detailed elsewhere. Congress’s task is to raise the money without dulling efficiency and warping incentives to grow, innovate and work.

writing about the urgent moral necessity of increasing taxes. Just to give a quick take the preferences of the WaPo editors are eliminate the “carried interest loophole” (disagree), let the Trump tax cuts expire (agree about personal income taxes, disagree about business taxes), and imposing a carbon tax (regressive).

I think there are two points worth making. The first is that taxes are by definition withdrawing money from the private sector. That always reduces economic activity.

The second is that raising tax rates is hard enough but generating additional revenue is that real kicker. Consider this graph:

As you can see although there’s considerable noise in the federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP it has remained within the same range for nearly 80 years regardless of changes in the tax code.

State and local tax revenues have skyrocketed over that period. When they declaim about federal revenues, they’re actually saying that the federal government needs to break through that 22% barrier.

I know there are lots of countries that pay a larger percent of GDP in taxes than we do. Most of them have much higher social cohesion than we do, too. As a consequence they receive more in government services than we do. Our problems are (in descending order of importance) poor ROI on government spending, too much government spending, not enough tax revenue.

I wanted to add my own musings to Steven L. Taylor’s post at Outside the Beltway so I’ll do it here. Steven opens with the Reuters article about which I wrote last week. Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:

To be clear: I am not asserting some notion of guilt-by-ancestral association. But, at a minimum, understanding how a given person got where they are in the now matters. It all illustrates that as much as we want to pretend like we are all self-made, this is simply not true in the main. Even if we build most of the structure, we cannot pretend like some of the foundations upon which we build were not laid by those who preceded us. Some acknowledgment and understanding of that fact is requisite.

The rest of this post may be a bit stream of consciousness so bear with me.

I may be the wrong person to comment on this. I literally cannot remember a time when I was not aware of what slavery was, that it was evil, and had consequences, some of which may persist to the present day. I knew that slaves were sold on the steps of the old St. Louis Courthouse. I knew that’s where the Dred Scott case was originally heard and what that was. I knew what the Civil War was. At least three of my great-great-grandfathers had fought for the Union in that war.

Here’s something you may not have thought of. Some white people benefited from slavery but others were injured by it. The explanation should be simple. You can’t compete on a wage basis with a wage of zero. My ancestors mostly fell into that category—they were injured by slavery and did not derive a benefit from it. That might explain why some of my ancestors were abolitionists.

By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected president he had been speaking publicly against slavery for decades. His views were known. After his election in 1860 the southern states began to announce their secession from the Republic. First South Carolina, then Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. It is not a coincidence that the Civil War started a month after his inauguration.

One thing that remains unmentioned: the percentage of white political leaders whose families benefited from slavery vs. the percentage of whites whose families did not. I suspect that the real implication is that a lot of old money is based on slavery. It should be obvious that not all whites have old money.

Steven transitions to remarks about a Gallup poll and I want to focus on those. There is a drastic difference between the views of white Americans on the vestigial effects of slavery on black Americans today and the views of black Americans. Twice as many black Americans (63%) as whites (32%) think that slavery has “a lot”. There’s actually more than one matter there. The mere difference in views is important but that’s not the only important thing. To what degree are black Americans right?

I think they are partially right but not entirely. A lot has happened in 150 years. Consider, for example, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births which is closely related to the percentage of single-parent households:

I think it’s not unreasonable to attribute the discrepancy between blacks and whites in prior to 1950 as being a consequence of slavery. But not the discrepancy between blacks and white after 1965. IMO some of that must be attributed to the Great Society program.

I’d like to see a breakdown of the rates among black women based on urban vs. rural as well. I suspect it’s a lot lower among black rural women.

In her column at the Washington Post Megan McArdle explains why she has hope for the United States:

So in honor of 247 years of American independence, let me lay out why I am still optimistic about our country’s future.

To people on the right, I would note that capital appears to be undergoing a Great Unwokening, and the hated deep state is the same bureaucracy that validated the Hunter Biden laptop suspicions and spent years investigating him. As for expert capture, yes, it is real. But over the long run, I’m more worried that political showboating will discredit experts who have true and important information to share, as happened with public health officials during the pandemic, than I am that some PhD will bullyrag parents into letting their kids identify as cats.

To the left, I would point out that the republic has survived many sudden reversals of Supreme Court precedent, as well as the discovery of all sorts of new rights, under the Warren and Burger courts. Disliking the results of judicial fiats is not the same as proving they are incompatible with a functioning democracy.

As for Trump, yes, he would, if he could, bulldoze every American institution that stands in his way — but note how conspicuously he has failed to do so. When he was president, American institutions were tested, but while they creaked a bit here and there, they ultimately held strong.

Will they continue to do so? Many on the left see Trump’s failings as the natural outgrowth of various troubling currents on the right and therefore fear he is a harbinger of even worse to come.

and here’s her conclusion:

Watch Americans dealing with one another day to day and you will mostly see them going out of their way to be nice. There are far more random acts of kindness in this country than there are drive-by shootings, and far more people acting with honesty and integrity, even when no one’s looking, than there are con men and thieves. We focus on the latter precisely because they are rare.

In a similar vein Charles Lipson expresses his reasons for hope in a piece at RealClearPolitics:

Our shared aspirations and common identity are our country’s best hope for the future. And our history should be a source of hope, as well as somber reflection.

Those ideals are not “our country, right or wrong.” They are not “our country with an airbrushed past.” Neither are they “our country as a relentless record of evil and oppression, at home and abroad.”

Rather, they are “our country as it strives to become better, to celebrate its accomplishments, to overcome its historical wrongs, to heal its lasting wounds and, ultimately, to achieve the ideals set before us in the Declaration of Independence and made concrete in our Constitution.” Whether our ancestors came over on the Mayflower, a slave ship, or a boat from Europe, escaping the Nazis, those are our shared ideals, but only if we embrace them.

What are those ideals? What are those accomplishments, incomplete as they still are? They are the promise that all men and women should be treated equally, allowed to speak freely and assemble peaceably, worship as they choose, permit others to worship, speak, and assemble as they choose, vote for whichever candidates they prefer, and live in safety, governed by laws made by the representatives they choose in fair elections. Those goals are grounded in tolerance and mutual forbearance, which are essential for a cohesive society where people come from different backgrounds and hold different beliefs.

I could fisk both of those pieces but rather than doing that I’ll try to explain why this time really is different.

First, both of our political parties are completely under the control of their most extreme third. The Trump wing really is controlling the Republican Party; the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party really is calling the tune there.

Second, neither of those factions is self-limiting. Progressivism by definition is not; there is always more “progress” to be made. What is being called “conservatism” these days is actually nothing of the sort. What are they trying to conserve? Quite to the contrary I think they are merely unhappy with the status quo and there’s no path to happiness that will satisfy them for the simple reason that it won’t work.

And the two factions really are at daggers drawn. No compromise is possible for either of them their goals are so widely separated.

Third, all of our institutions are either corrupted, debased, or weakened. Chesterton once said, accurately I think, that America is a country founded on a creed. What creed would that be now? For at least 10% of the population whatever you hold up as our common secular creed would be anathema.

And that’s all it takes. Communists were never more than 10% of the population of the Soviet Union; not more than 10% of Germans were Nazis.

Finally, even as recently as 50 years ago if you couldn’t stand the conditions in one part of the country, you could move to another part and escape it. Modern communications has made that practically impossible. You can shut yourself off in isolation but you can’t actually escape.