We are not presently producing enough weapons and ammunition to support the Ukrainians in their war against Russia. If we want them to be able to prevail in any sense including at this point just to survive, we must have more heavy industry and the energy production that goes along with it in this country. Simple as that.

If our relative priorities are to value a reduction in energy and industrial production in the United States over Ukraine, let’s just acknowledge that. Anything else is wishful thinking.

I am deeply distressed about the issues raised in James Joyner’s post, criticizing Pope Francis’s stance on the war in Ukraine:

The problem with all of this is that it requires Francis to not only reject the West but centuries of Just War doctrine created by his own church, going back to Augustine and Aquinas. Putin invaded a neighbor without just cause and has committed mass atrocities, thus violating every principle of both jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Treating the situation as though it were simply a diplomatic squabble that needs to end is, well, evil according to his own church’s longstanding teachings. That those teachings are at the core of international human rights law simply compounds the evil.

I don’t believe that the war in Ukraine is a just war being waged justly, particularly but not exclusively on the part of the Russians. I don’t trust the reports we’re receiving about the war from anybody.

Furthermore, I don’t believe there is such a thing as a good war. There are only wars that are better than the alternative.

I also have questions:

• How can we actually determine what’s going on?
• Is the Ukrainian government a just authority?
• What is a realistic way to conclude the war?

and, most importantly, if it is a war of good vs. evil with the Ukrainians good and the Russians evil, why don’t the government of the countries representing most of the people in the world see it that way?

More good news for Chicago. 17 of the 20 highest property tax bills outside of New York City are in Chicago, led by Sears Willis Tower. Mario Marroquin reports at Crain’s Chicago Business:

Office landlords in Chicago and New York are paying the largest property tax bills in the country, despite the woes afflicting the sector.

According to a new report from real estate research firms PropertyShark, based in New York, and Santa Barbara, Calif.-based CommercialEdge, which ranked the largest property tax bills for office buildings last year, 82 of the top 100 were paid by buildings in New York City. And one Chicago building cracks the top 10.

The Willis Tower at 233 S. Wacker Drive, which paid over $50 million in property taxes in 2022, is the only office property outside New York’s five boroughs to reach the top 10 list.

Excluding New York buildings, 17 of the 20 largest tax bills for office properties nationwide were paid in Chicago in 2022, according to the report. Other buildings in the top 50:

I wonder what its property tax would be without the property tax multiplier?

I agree with the point Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is making in his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is a lifeline for tens of millions of low-income Americans who rely on it for food. But like most government programs, SNAP is in dire need of reform.

Though SNAP is meant to supplement nutrition, more than 20% of all program spending goes to unhealthy food and drink. Taxpayers are projected to spend $240 billion on junk food, with more than $60 billion going exclusively to soda, over the next decade. Equally important are the health consequences for those relying on the program.

This subsidization of junk food is fueling American health crises. More than 40% of U.S. adults are obese, and roughly half have diabetes or prediabetes. These diseases can be debilitating. They are also extremely expensive, costing hundreds of billions of dollars in medical costs each year. That SNAP plays a role in their spread is immoral, irresponsible and reprehensible.

Both Democrats and Republicans should support this and have expressed support for this idea. However, in our present oppositional world I’m concerned that even something as commonsensical as this will be condemned as racist, anti-poor, etc.

I also suspect it will receive substantial pushback from the corporations who are profiting from the present subsidies. It has been estimated that as much as 40% of Coca Cola’s revenues are derived from SNAP (the program that replaced food stamps). I haven’t been able to discover how much of Hostess’s and Little Debby’s revenues come from SNAP but I’m sure it’s substantial.

That brings up a point too infrequently mentioned. The vast wasteland that is the American diet isn’t just a matter of availability but preference as well. The reason that junk food is such an enormous industry is because people like it.

The editors of the Washington Post support a plan for avoiding a default and reducing the deficit:

Two things are simultaneously true: Congress needs to raise the debt limit as soon as June 1 to avoid the first default in U.S. history, and lawmakers need to address the nation’s unsustainable budget situation.

It’s welcome news that President Biden is finally sitting down with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other congressional leaders at the White House on Tuesday. But unless a miracle occurs, there likely isn’t enough time to agree on meaningful budget changes by early June. Mr. Biden wants a “clean” debt limit bill that solely raises the borrowing cap. Meanwhile, House Republicans want nearly $5 trillion worth of cuts. That’s a Grand Canyon-size gap. It’s encouraging that House Democrats have been quietly preparing to use an emergency parliamentary maneuver known as “a discharge petition” that would allow them to get a debt hike bill on the floor, but it’s a long shot. All Democrats and at least five Republicans would need to vote for it. That won’t happen without some sort of compromise budget deal in the works.

The plan they recommend consists of a short term debt limit increase, followed by “clawing back unspent emergency covid funds”, “revenue enhancers”, and “spending moderation”. The challenge for that is that President Bide poisoned the well when he backed off from the commitments he made to Joe Manchin to get his misnamed Inflation Reduction Act passed.

Democrats seem to have forgotten that during the last administration the president actually negotiated spending increases with the Congress to get the debt limit raised. I don’t actually blame them. Spending increases are more politically advantageous to them than spending reductions.

To my eye both parties are living in fantasy worlds. The Democrats demand real spending increases, imagining that will result in economic growth while the Republicans demand real tax reductions, similarly imagining economic growth. What are needed are much more targeted spending or tax reduction that results in real increases in production. We need to produce more of what we consume and, by the way, paying more for the same services is not an increase in production.

Targeting that precisely and correctly is difficult—it doesn’t play to the Congress’s strengths.

I’ve been quiet for the last few days. There’s a simple reason: there hasn’t been much to write about. I couldn’t be interested less in Charles III’s coronation. So far I’ve held off from needling some of my anti-monarchy Brit friends about it, the better part of valour, etc.

The partisan squabbling over the debt limit is entertaining in a perverse sort of way. What’s to be said that hasn’t already been said? In the place of the Republicans in Congress would you take Joe Biden’s word that he’d gladly negotiate spending reductions on Tuesday for a debt limit increase today? Statesmanship is a perfectly good argument but what makes anybody think that any of those involved are statesmen? I heard some political positioning to blame any impending recession on the Republicans. Will that work?

Depressing as it is mass shootings are a daily occurrence now. Nobody has any practical solutions for them. We’re not going to ban firearms. Even if we did there are so many of them out there banning them would do little good. Will we ban shopping malls? How about schools? The underlying problems are anger and attitude and, especially, mental illness.

The spring counter-offensive in Ukraine is beginning to look more like a summer counter-offensive. The media narratives are so pervasive I have no idea how anybody really knows what the heck is going on.

The surge at our southern border looks like it will become a torrent. I’ve already made my suggestions but the reality is that any reform worthy of the name to our immigration system involves denying entry to somebody and the further reality is that we’re not prepared for that.

As I’ve written before I think that things are coming to a boil for Joe Biden and, indeed, the rest of us. His age, the economy, immigration, the war in Ukraine, possible prosecution of his son, violence, urban disorder, you name it. It’s going to be a long, hot summer.

Vivekanand Jayakumar’s conclusion in his piece at The Hill is a bit milder than its caption (“Those predicting a soft economic landing may be in for a rude awakening”) might lead you to believe:

Expectations that decades-high inflation levels can be brought down (alongside an unwinding of more than a decade of monetary excess) without causing any major financial or economic turmoil requires a level of innate optimism that might border on delusional thinking. Those who still think that a soft-landing is the likeliest outcome may be in for a rude awakening. The stock market in particular may be mispricing near to medium term risks.

A recession is the likely outcome, and the possibility of a stagflation-lite scenario cannot be ruled out. But resilient consumers (aided by relatively strong household balance sheets and tight labor markets) offer a modicum of protection against the possibility of a deep or protracted recession. Limited fiscal space and sticky inflation may, however, restrict policymakers’ ability to offer sizable stimulus this time around.

The statistics (debt service to disposable income, total household debt, etc.) seem to bear out his observation about the “resilient consumers”. I’m still concerned that our elected representatives are victims of Maslow’s hammer. “Stimulus” is the only thing they know.

President Biden may wish that a brief recession had taken place in 2022-2023 rather than holding off until 2023-2024. He will have a lot on his plate next year.

The slug on a New York Times editorial calling for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein to act gave me the giggles: “Senate seats are not lifetime sinecures”. I could only wonder why they would print something so easily falsifiable.

The average age of a U. S. senator is 65. Average, mind you. The majority of senators are either Baby Boomers or Silent Generation which is to say they are over 58. To the best of my knowledge there is one Millennial in the Senate and a relative handful of Gen Xers.

I believe that at 89 Sen. Feinstein is the oldest sitting senator, a few months older than Chuck Grassley, also 89. She has served since 1992; she’s presently serving in her sixteenth Congress.

That’s the norm in the Senate. Once elected you tend to be re-elected until you resign or die. If that’s not a lifetime sinecure I’m not sure how else you’d describe it.

In the first of what Nikolas Kristof threatens will be a series of columns in the New York Times he discusses pain:

All this raises the question: Is this physical suffering a canary in the coal mine warning us of larger dysfunction in our society?

Here’s what we do know: Tens of millions of Americans are suffering pain. But chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families.

As someone who has experienced chronic pain for so long I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t in pain this passage rang true for me:

Dr. Daniel Clauw, director of the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center at the University of Michigan, believes that we already have a toolbox of remedies that can help 80 percent or 90 percent of chronic pain sufferers but that our treatment system and insurance protocols betray those in need.

“We’ve really over-medicalized pain,” he told me. His first recommendation to patients with chronic pain is simple: Get more sleep and exercise. There’s no simple solution, he emphasized, and it takes work by patients to recover.

“I’m a huge advocate of physical therapy,” he added, and he also sees positive results from yoga, acupuncture, acupressure, cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation.

but I would add that the very idea that you can escape from pain is flawed. In some ways I blame our consumer culture. Life is not a spectacle to be witnessed but something you experience through active participation. To live is to be in pain. You can escape pain temporarily with drugs or permanently through death.

For me the better solution is learning to tolerate pain and go right on living.