At American Purpose Jeffrey Gedmin interviews Frederick Starr who repeats some points I’ve made around here including that Putin is not unpopular in Russia, indeed, he’s doing things of which many Russians approve. Here are some snippets:

We have a Putin problem because we have a Russia problem.

and

George Kennan always viewed writer Anton Chekhov as the model of the wise, prudent, and Western-oriented Russian intellectual. The list of others in that group extends deep into the 19th century and glitters with such names as novelists Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy, writer Alexander Herzen, composer Igor Stravinsky, a bevy of modern-thinking Russian lawyers, and a host of Soviet-era figures culminating in Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov.

But there were always others who went along with Russia’s imperial project or actively abetted it. This list, too, includes some of Russia’s greatest artists and thinkers, beginning with the urbane and otherwise humane poet Alexander Pushkin, who actively supported Russia’s conquest of Poland. Think of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s thunderous Marche Slav, or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s hatred of Catholicism and socialism, which he equated with the West, or his belief that Russia’s 1877 war against the Muslim Ottoman empire was necessary for salvation. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s post-Soviet proposal to combine Ukraine, Belarus, northern Kazakhstan and Russia into a new superstate also comes to mind. Particularly relevant today are the words of the much-hailed Russian poet Josef Brodsky who, writing after Ukraine declared its independence, dismissed Ukrainians as “khokhols” (the equivalent of our “N-word”) and versified about “spitting or something into the Dniepr.”

and

JG: After Ukraine, does the West need a new containment strategy? What would such a strategy look like?

SFS: Even though all possible outcomes must be considered, it is far too early to speak of a new containment strategy. And in projecting possible outcomes, the West must avoid focusing only on the two extremes, i.e., a “catastrophizing” scenario that includes a complete breakup of the Russian Federation or a rose-colored future that is merely a repeat of the naive optimism that prevailed in 1991 after the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine officially terminated the USSR.

Any postwar strategy by the West must be based on a thorough knowledge of the groupings and individuals who are now coming to prominence in Russia. Some of these are today working in Russian governmental and business offices; others are already meeting abroad; while still others are toiling unobtrusively within Russian academic and scientific institutions or think tanks or are maintaining their own blogs. Particularly important will be members of the rising generation, tens of thousands of whom fled abroad either as conscientious objectors or simply as draft dodgers. Generational change, no less than the outcome in Ukraine, will shape and design Russia’s future.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t agree with the Russians but, like Mr. Starr, I have some understanding of what they think and why. That’s why I recognize that Ukraine’s maximalist objectives are not merely off the table but a formula for the complete destruction of Ukraine. Similarly, not only do I think that breaking Russia up into ten or fourteen smaller chunks is beyond our capability it isn’t even in our interest not to mention that it would result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Glenn Greenwald dissects the results of a recent Harris-Harvard poll that found a sharp dichotomy between the views of most Americans and the stories the major media outlets are covering. Here’s his conclusion:

What’s so striking here isn’t that the corporate media relentlessly advocates views and ideologies that majorities of Americans – often large majorities – reject.

It’s that the views held by majorities are all but banned on NBC, CNN, NYT and WPost.

noting that it is no mystery that trust in the media is at an all-time low.

Here are some of the questions in the survey, my answers, and comments:

By and large my views were in line with the majority of voters. I agree with Glenn that the media are out-of-touch with most Americans. Also they don’t really care. They see themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat—they see their job as telling ordinary people what they should believe.

Feel free to chime in with your views.

The seven states that draw water from the Colorado River have reached an agreement. Daniel Trotta and Brad Brooks report at Reuters:

May 22 (Reuters) – Seven U.S. states that depend on the overused Colorado River on Monday reached agreement to cut consumption and help save a river that provides drinking water for 40 million people and irrigation for some of the country’s most bountiful farmland.

Arizona, California and Nevada will reduce intake by 3 million acre-feet (3.7 billion cubic meters) through the end of 2026, an amount equal to 13% of their river allotment, under a deal brokered and announced by the Biden administration.

Those three make up the Lower Basin states of the century-old Colorado River Compact, which assigns water rights to them plus the four Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

While the Upper Basin states draw their water directly from the river and its tributaries, the Lower Basin states depend on Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the Hoover Dam and whose spigot is controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Californians are already kvetching that they got the short end of the stick while the Coloradans have done well.

This agreement doesn’t solve the problem; it just kicks the can down the road for a few years. The fundamental problem is too much demand for water and not enough water. Since all three of the “Lower Basin” states depend disproportionately on growing populations for their economic health, it will only get tougher from here on out.

Changing agricultural practices is part of the problem as well. For example, California’s production of almonds has doubled over the last decade and almonds take a lot of water. California’s share of the $1.3 billion dole from the federal government will effectively subsidize almond production and building houses.

Unlimited cheap power would allow California to extract fresh water via desalinization rather than than taking it from the Colorado but that doesn’t seem to be the direction in which the state is heading.

72% of Arizona’s water utilization is by agriculture, mostly produce but increaingly pistachios and pecans—once again, substantial consumers of water. In Nevada it’s 69% and its top crop is alfalfa.

Judging by scanning the American, British, French, German, Italian, and Russian news sites, the biggest story in the world today is the war in Ukraine. Not only do I have absolutely no idea what’s actually going on there I have no idea how anyone else does, either. Everything is propaganda of one sort or another.

Update

I left out Al Jazeera which I find to be publishing remarkably good coverage on the war as well as a number of other subjects.

This piece by Jacinda Bowler at Cosmos:

A modelling study looking at electric vehicles has found that the resources to produce them will be significantly strained in the next few years. The researchers suggest that to stop the worst of the bottleneck will take an overhaul – we need to change the way we think about our cars and cities.

“It seems very likely we’ll have a shortage,’ says Fernando Aguilar Lopez, a renewable energy researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

“The key lies in the demand. The demand needs to decrease to avoid long-term supply problems.”

The researchers used a model called MATerIaL Demand and Availability (MATILDA) to analyse at how lithium and other elements will be available from the extraction phase, all the way through to production, use, and scrapping. They looked at more than 8,000 scenarios in the paper has just been published in Resources, Conservation and Recycling.

Although there’s plenty of lithium, cobalt, nickel and phosphorus in the ground, the problem lies in mining. An older paper from 2022 suggested it can take up to 30 years from the initial exploration to be able to use the elements in electric cars.

“The ‘technology metals’, such as cobalt, lithium, rare earths and platinum group metals, are generally produced in much smaller amounts (hundreds to thousands of tonnes) from a small number of mines worldwide,” reported the older paper.

“We will require a massive and rapid increase in the production of technology metals, essential to the function and performance of electric vehicles (EVs), if we are to meet the targets of governments and the car industry.”

Worse, the researchers for this new paper have suggested that recycling won’t be solution in the near term as there are not enough electric vehicles being scrapped to reuse as a replacement for the bulk of new materials.

while interesting is hardly surprising. Many others (including me) have been saying things along those lines for 40 years. The article goes on to discuss reengineering cities to require less transport. Easier and cheaper than that would be to abandon the centralization, sprawl, and commute model we’ve been following for the last 75 years. It’s going on even as I speak.

For the last two years my employer has been located in London. I never went there, remaining here in the U. S. For the two years prior to that I rarely went into the office. I strongly suspect that work from home AKA remote and/or the “hybrid” model are here to stay. There are also lots of small towns that have practically been vacated as the manufacturing that used to support their economies has vanished overseas. Lots of room there.

None of that is what went through my mind as I read the article. Dovetailing with a post of mine from yesterday, I think we’re going to see a flurry of investment and innovation not just on recycling but also in refining and extraction from seawater, etc. These are among the many reasons that the strategy we’re using for carbon emissions reduction (reducing the production of energy and/or replacing it with less concentrated approaches) is foolhardy. There are all sorts of things that are possible with more power (as Tim Allen used to say).

Last week a pair of organizations with ties to newly-inaugurated Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (yes, I know, the T-shirts are already being offered for sale) issued a proposal for increasing taxes and decreasing expenses. The Johnson Administration was quick to distance itself from the proposal. A little. Despite all of the proposals having been things that Mayor Johnson ran on. Inspiringly, the proposal had the title of this post as its title.

The editors of Crain’s Chicago Business have some recommendations for Mayor Johnson:

The proposal, authored by two grassroots organizations with ties to Johnson — Action Center on Race & The Economy and the People’s Unity Platform — calls for measures such as a city wealth tax, an income tax, deep cuts in police spending and an end to all tax-increment financing projects. While these ideas may sound good to many of the Chicagoans who voted Johnson into office, it’s important to read the fine print and understand just how many middle-class Chicagoans — not just fat cats — would be hurt if many of these notions became policy.

As Crain’s Greg Hinz first reported, a few of the proposals these groups are espousing match up with concepts Johnson himself campaigned on, most notably:

• Reinstating the “head tax” of $33 per worker on companies with at least 50 workers, netting $106 million a year.

• Boosting from 5 cents to 14 cents the tax per gallon on jet fuel used at Chicago’s airports, raising $96 million.

• Raising the real estate transaction fee on sales of at least $1 million by 1.9 percentage points, a move the group estimates would generate $163 million.

Beyond that, the progressive advocates also propose:

• Imposing a city income tax of 3.5% on any household with income above $100,000 a year. This tax would apply to Chicago residents as well as money made by suburbanites employed in the city. Here in Chicago, at least a third of city residents would end up paying at least some city income tax under this plan;

• Creating a 0.4% annual wealth tax on the richest 10% of Chicagoans.

• Levying a tax on luxury-apartment vacancies that’s designed to pressure landlords into lowering rents to more affordable levels.

• Taxing financial transactions at Chicago’s financial exchanges.

On the spending side of the ledger, the plan calls for eliminating all vacant positions in the Chicago Police Department, and then cutting the police budget another 9% a year. All new TIF spending would be eliminated, with efforts to renegotiate or file lawsuits against existing TIF deals, such as the one extended to the Lincoln Yards development. And a new city bank would issue debt at lower than private-market costs, a move the proposal’s authors contend would save the city money.

Undergirding all of these ideas are two faulty premises: one, that Chicagoans aren’t taxed enough, and two, that we have plenty of police to keep the city safe. Johnson would be correct to add even more space between himself and both of these notions.

CME Group chief Terry Duffy has already threatened — on the day of Johnson’s inauguration — to move the exchange out of town if the tax situation becomes too burdensome. Major employers such as Caterpillar, Boeing, Citadel have already headed out of the city, with Guggenheim Partners apparently poised to follow on their heels.

It’s unlikely this report’s authors or the people who are aligned with them concern themselves overmuch about these departures. These are big, bad corporations, after all. But perhaps the report’s authors should consider how these taxing ideas will affect constituencies they care more about: Chicago workers and families.

As Crain’s Jack Grieve reported on May 1, Chicago residents need to earn an annual income of $172,600 for their purchasing power to equal that of the average American taking home $100,000. And in order to sustain households bringing in even that much of a salary, the city needs a base of employers able to create and support decent-paying jobs. Head taxes undercut job growth. And wealth taxes seem likely to hit middle-class families saving for goals like college and retirement.

When pressed for insight on the mayor’s own attitude toward these proposals, a senior adviser told Crain’s, “if we were for these ideas, we would have said it.” And yet, given many opportunities to express opposition to these measures, the adviser said only: “Everybody should have a right to put their ideas into the public square.”

That’s not exactly comforting. Nor is the pushback from some observers who have been quick to argue these are merely fringe ideas that would be dead on arrival in Springfield, where many of these measures would have to be blessed before they could be implemented. Messaging matters — especially at a time like this, when investor and employer faith in Chicago as a great place to do business is faltering. If the mayor truly isn’t considering things like a city income tax, a wealth tax, a financial transactions tax or any of the other ideas contained in this report, he ought to say so, loudly and unequivocally.

I wanted to make a few observations. First, Chicagoans are among the most highly taxed people in the country. Sales taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, and fees are all high. Chicago’s problem is not that taxes are too low but that we don’t get value for what is received in city services. That more than 20% of Chicago’s budget is devoted to public employee pensions, making up for years of non-contribution, doesn’t help.

Second, the fuel tax would require an act of Congress and the city earnings tax, head tax, and wealth tax would require action by the state legislature. To paraphase German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, they could do it. The question is whether they could keep their jobs if they did it.

Third, taken together those taxes make the city even more dependent on those earning the highest incomes while providing them with very little incentive to stay.

I want to commend this article by Raphael S. Cohen at War on the Rocks to your attention. I found it thought-provoking. Here’s a snippet:

Above all, the Ukraine conflict shows that wars are fundamentally unpredictable. In Ukraine, a war that nearly everyone thought would be over in a matter of days and offer a relatively clean Russian victory has ended up dragging on for well over a year and put the Vladimir Putin regime on increasingly shaky ground. That’s an uncomfortable implication for all leaders thinking about using force in the future — no matter whether they are sitting in Moscow, Beijing, or Washington.

At some level, the critics of U.S. support for Ukraine have a point. Deterrence vis-à vis China is eroding. Unlike the American-Russian military balance, at least some military trends are going in China’s favor. As a result, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, unlike President Vladimir Putin, can afford to be patient. No matter what the United States does in Ukraine, in the long run, China will be more difficult to deter as its power and ambition grow.

As a matter of policy, however, the key question is how the United States will use the tools it has today to maximize its deterrent effects. From an operational perspective, the Ukraine War has not hurt the military balance versus China. In fact, the United States has demonstrated that it can continue to pursue its Indo-Pacific-focused capabilities while still aiding Ukraine. Moreover, the Ukraine War may even help in the long run if it spurs both the United States and its allies to understand that industrial warfare is not just a topic for the history books and to prepare accordingly.

Read the whole thing.

I wish I were as confident about what’s happening in Ukraine (and in Russia, for that matter) as the author seems to be. The only contribution I can make to the discussion is that IMO deterrence is less likely to be effective when you’re talking about a strategic opponent’s core interests and, like it or not, we can’t dictate to them what those core interests are.

I have a pretty simple question: why is California Sen. Dianne Feinstein continuing to serve? It’s highly unlikely she has no other interests—she was already, shall we say, very mature when she was first elected to the Senate. It’s not a matter of partisan loyalty—another Democrat would be sure to be appointed and then elected.

Maybe she likes being a senator but I doubt she likes it as much as she did, say, five years ago. IMO the most likely explanation is that she has the insecurities so common among members of the Silent Generation. She’s afraid of what will happen to her, to San Francisco, to California, and to the United States should she stop being a senator.

It’s not that I don’t like Sen. Feinstein—I do. I would have gladly voter for her for president in preference to Al Gore, for example.

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle remarks on a study of what happened during the student loan payment moratoria:

A working paper out of the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics by economists Michael Dinerstein, Constantine Yannelis and Ching-Tse Chen compares what happened in households that had loans eligible for the moratorium with those whose loans were privately held, and thus outside the emergency pause.

Some of the effects were unsurprising: People who didn’t have to make payments had more disposable income and fewer delinquencies on student loan debt; as a result, their credit scores were on average somewhat higher. They also, of course, ended up with higher student loan balances — around $1,500 worth — because unlike their counterparts with private loans, they weren’t making payments to reduce the principal.

Somewhat more surprisingly, the pause on student loan payments didn’t do much for delinquencies on other kinds of debt — people whose loans were on hold mostly don’t seem to have used the breathing room to get caught up on their credit cards or mortgage payments. Rather the opposite, in fact: Mortgage, auto and credit card debt all rose by an average of $1,200. Overall, household indebtedness not only didn’t improve for those who benefited from the pause, but deteriorated to the tune of almost $2,700.

Now that isn’t what I would have done. I would have used the available cash to pay off other debts but I hate debt. It’s the way I was brought up. We live below our means.

Ms. McArdle continues:

A few takeaways follow from this. First, while we often talk about a policy working, or say it doesn’t work, reality is more complicated: Policies can work on one dimension and fail on another. Pausing student loan payments can boost the economy, quickly, by keeping people spending. On the other hand, if you think of student loan relief as a way to help upwardly mobile households build generational wealth, these results are much less encouraging.

A second observation is that it’s hard to get people to save more. Yes, we managed during the pandemic by firehosing money into bank accounts at a time when there was a lot less to spend it on — but as things began reopening, the personal savings rate dropped to well below its pre-pandemic average. And in more normal times, policymakers struggle to raise savings appreciably — economists are still debating whether tax-advantaged savings accounts such as 401(k)s, one of the most popular savings programs of all time, actually increase the savings rate.

Which brings us to the third and most important lesson, or rather, a reminder: While people do respond to incentives, they often respond somewhat unexpectedly.

I certainly wouldn’t have expected it.

Something we should keep in mind is that saving is a perverse sort of behavior. You are delaying present gratification for later gratification or in case of urgent need. Unlike spending saving has no immediate reward. Both living beyond your means and saving are habits and saving is a much harder habit to acquire.