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.

In his latest Washington Post column, George Will, never a Trump supporter, cautions against trying to block Trump’s candidacy for the presidency in 2024 using the 14th Amendment:

Leave aside (as a court will be unable to do) the fraught questions about what causal connections there were between Trump’s rhetoric before and on Jan. 6, 2021, and the actions then of his acolytes: They, after all, had agency. And never mind how to calibrate “aid or comfort.” Just concentrate on “insurrection.”

The Confederacy — the attempted secessions of 11 states; rebel cannon firing on federal installations; armies on the march against U.S. forces — was unambiguously an insurrection. A riotous rabble — whatever its motivations and delusional aspirations — on a January afternoon? Rather less so. They were criminal and disgusting, but closer to vandals than to the Army of Northern Virginia.

and

People advocating a 14th Amendment solution to the problem of Trump are spreading the acids of cynicism and suspicion that are corroding trust in institutions. And some states’ election officials — watch Colorado — are apt to seize this occasion for grandstanding, trying to keep Trump’s name off their ballots. This will thicken his armor of martyrdom.

The problem that I see with the push to disqualify Trump from running based on novel and strained interpretations of the 14th Amendment is that I don’t believe they as much a principled arguments as opportunistic ones. The rationale appears to be that Trump is such a threat to democracy that any action is justified in preventing it. That the views of those who rioted on January 6 are the mirror image of that does not seem to occur to them.

It’s all very post-modern. Like burning the village in order to save it.

I’m afraid the Fareed Zakarias is engaging in wishful thinking in his latest Washington Post column. He pleads with Democrats to change their position on immigration:

The Democrats are confronting a crisis that could cripple their chances at the polls at the national, state and local level. I’m talking about immigration. It’s happening not only because Republicans are taking advantage of the problem but also because Democrats are unwilling to accept that their policy ideas on the issue are wrong and grossly inadequate to the challenge at hand.

The number of people coming across our southern border, most claiming asylum, has been around 2 million per year every year since Joe Biden took office. Add to that the number of “gotaways”—those known to have entered but not apprehended—at around 500,000 per year and some unknown number of completely undetected border crossings.

Here in Chicago dealing with the influx of migrants has resulted in a 4% budget shortfall. In a city with very nearly if not the lowest credit rating of any major city and a declining population that is a serious issue.

In short the enormous influx of migrants is threatening a collapse.

I see no prospect whatever that President Biden will admit that he was wrong. Candidate Biden ran on letting “asylum seekers” into the country apparently not realizing that along wiht the legitimate asylum seekers we would get an even larger number of illegitimate claims for asylum. Admitting fault is not something that politicians do well.

The question now is whether the federal government will address the problem at all or will merely stand frozen like a deer in the headlights. Addressing the problem and securing the border has always been within the president’s authority: he could order the military to do it. The asylum requests overloading the system could be addressed by imposing a stricter standard than the present hihgly subjective “credible threat” standard. That, too, is within the president’s authority.

One more point. There is broad agreement among Americans that immigration is good for the country. My concern is at is always has been that the large amount of illegal and illegitimate immigration will threaten support for legal immigration and legitimate claims for asylum.

Here’s Mr. Zakaria’s proposal:

There is only one solution to this crisis, as Nolan Rappaport, a longtime congressional expert on the issue, has suggested: The president must use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending. The British government has passed a law to this effect.

Do you believe that President Biden will do that? That’s the material equivalent of exactly what I said above—closing the U. S. even to legitimate asylum-seekers. The next step would be an outright ban on immigration and I’m concerned that is coming.

The United Auto Workers union has taken the unprecedented action of going out on strike against all three of what used to be referred to as the “Big Three Automakers”. Phoebe Wall Howard, Eric D. Lawrence, and Lily Altavena report at The Detroit Free Press:

The UAW declared a strike against Detroit Three automakers Thursday as contract talks failed to secure new labor agreements before the current deals expired at 11:59 p.m.

UAW President Shawn Fain announced the first wave of plants the union would strike if a new labor agreement was not reached before midnight: Ford Michigan Assembly Plant (Final Assembly and Paint only) in Wayne, Stellantis Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio and General Motors Wentzville Assembly in Missouri.

The graph at the top of the page illustrates how poor the timing is for this particular action. Auto loan delinquencies are at a ten year high and trending in the wrong direction. The manufacturers bear at least some of the costs of those delinquencies. Also consider this:

The Big Three aren’t the Big Three any more. That’s the distant past. At this point Tesla, Toyota, Honda, and Mercedes all have non-union manufacturing facilities in the U. S.

I have some sympathy with the argument the union is making: I think that auto company CEOs are overcompensated relative to performance and the workers deserve a bigger share of the pie. But that’s a determination for the companies’ stockholders to make and that they haven’t made it is an illustration of the perverse state of corporate governance.

Which of the following is most likely?

1. The union will achieve its objectives and that will be a small first step in rectifying the increasing income inequality in the U. S.
2. The union will succeed in driving more manufacturing to “right to work” states (mostly in the South).
3. Both
4. Neither

I think B is the most likely.

If there’ is a better example of what I think of as the “cafeteria approach” to policy, it would be difficult to find a better example than Matt Sheehan’s article at Foreign Policy on the lessons the U. S. federal government should take from China’s approach to regulating artificial intelligence. The “cafeteria approach” is the idea that it is possible to select certain features from other countries’ approaches to solving problems without adopting all of them and despite our, well, being a different country. It’s encountered most frequently in laments of why the United States can’t have Scandinavian social policies. Combine that cafeteria approach with naïveté and you’ve pretty much got this article.

It ignores things like Chinese society being much more cohesive than ours, it not having independent courts, the control the state imposes on Internet connectivity, and a host of others. Note that I’m not saying that China’s strategy for dealing with AI won’t work in China. The jury is out but perhaps it will. The question is whether the Chinese approach would work in the United States. Frankly, I doubt it.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

The clearest difference between the nascent congressional approach and China’s regulations lies in their scope. Schumer is leading a push for comprehensive AI legislation that would address the technology’s impact on national security, jobs, misinformation, bias, democratic values, and more. That approach is praiseworthy for its ambition, but cramming solutions to all of these problems into a single piece of legislation is almost impossible. The contours of these problems are just coming into focus, and the interventions needed to address each issue may prove wildly different.

By contrast, the Chinese government has taken a targeted and iterative approach to AI governance. Instead of immediately going for one all-encompassing law that covers all of AI, China has picked out specific applications that it was concerned about and developed a series of regulations to tackle those concerns. That has allowed it to steadily build up new policy tools and regulatory know-how with each new regulation. And when China’s initial regulations proved insufficient for a fast-moving technology like AI, it quickly iterated on them.

I suspect that Sen. Schumer is taking the approach he is because he believes, likely correctly, that he will get at most one bite from the apple. The iterative approach being suggested would be blocked at every step by the courts. You’d spend a fortune on defending the government’s position and at the be left with very little.