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.

Exxon is getting into the lithium-producing business. From a report in the Wall Street Journal by Benoît Morenne and Collin Eaton:

Exxon Mobil is bracing for a future far less dependent on gasoline by drilling for something other than oil: lithium.

The Texas oil giant recently purchased drilling rights to a sizable chunk of Arkansas land from which it aims to produce the mineral, a key ingredient in batteries for electric cars, cellphones and laptops, according to people familiar with the matter.

Lithium is far removed from the fossil-fuel business, which has powered Exxon’s profits for more than a century, and signals the company’s assessment that demand for internal combustion engines could soon peak, the people said. It would also mark a return for the company to an industry it helped pioneer almost 50 years ago.

Exxon bought 120,000 gross acres in the Smackover formation of southern Arkansas from an exploration company called Galvanic Energy, according to some of the people. The price tag was more than $100 million, people familiar with the matter said, a relatively small transaction for a company of Exxon’s size.

This is good news. More EVs doesn’t make a great deal of sense if we’re importing batteries and/or the stuff needed to make them from countries that emit lots of carbon in the process. I expect more of these diversifications.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Sounds like our own time, doesn’t it, rather than two centuries ago? The title of this post, of course, doesn’t come from A Tale of Two Cities but from Pat Moynihan’s famous wisecrack: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” Except today, of course, there’s such a deluge of information that everybody does, indeed, have their own facts.

That’s one of the things that leapt out at me when listening to the talking heads programs this morning in the commentary about the debt limit. The Republicans said that the House had produced the one and only proposal to raise the debt limit. That is true as far as it goes. The Democrats said

1. President Biden published his budget back in March
2. What good would it be for the Senate to produce its own bill? The House would just reject it anyway.

The first of those assertions is also true as far as it goes. The second is an opinion rather than a fact. The problem is that’s the way our system is supposed to work: the House passes a spending bill, the Senate proposes its spending bill, there’s a reconciliation process, the president signs the resulting compromise, and the spending bill becomes law. Pretty much Schoolhouse Rock.

Something else the Democrats have said which is true as far as it goes: McCarthy is in a weak position. What so far has remained unsaid: Schumer is in a weak position, too.

The debt limit isn’t the only subject on which everybody has their own facts. Yesterday a commenter lamented:

You can apply this statement to almost everything in the “news” today: Patriot missiles, Durham Report, FBI collusion with dems, COVID statistics, climate change predictions and fears, the circumstances surrounding the J6 protests and illegal surveillance by the FBI, Norstream sabotage, the 2020 & 2022 election malfeasance, the current debt ceiling Dem/Republican debate, for starters.

to which we might add the Battle of Bakhmut. Has Bakhmut fallen or not? It depends entirely on who you listen to and, echoing President Clinton, how the meaning of “fallen” falls.

I’ll go on the record with my opinion about each of these. Note that these are just opinions—I wouldn’t elevate them to the level of facts.

• I don’t think the Patriot missile has shone in Ukraine. I think it may have reduced the damage of some Russian attacks but a lot of Patriot missiles have been expended in the process and/or lost. And they’re expensive.
• There was no “smoking gun” in the Durham Report but it did support the claim that the FBI needs reform.
• The greatest likelihood is that Poland and Ukraine sabotaged the Nordstream pipeline, Seymour Hersch notwithstanding.
• I think that anthropogenic climate change is a risk but not an issue, i.e. it hasn’t already happened but it may. There is no workable solution that doesn’t involve fewer imports from China (and India), more nuclear power, and CCS.
• The breaching of the Capitol on January 6, 2020 was unacceptable. Some of the participants may have thought of it as an insurrection but most didn’t. Keeping it in the news has helped Democrats.
• “Ballot harvesting” is a problem; voting machines do not appear to be. Joe Biden was elected president in 2020. There was no “red wave” in 2022 because Republicans screwed up and Trump was a big part of that.

I want to close this post with one more thought. Josh Billings was right: “I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain’t so”. That was true 250 years ago and it’s just as true now. With the sheer volume of information not to mention large language model “artificial intelligence” and deepfakes telling true from false is harder than ever but that doesn’t make ideologically-based reasoning more effective or make discerning the truth less necessary.

All of the approval ratings above are from the Morning Consult (for consistency). I don’t know that there’s ever been a weaker showing among the G7 leaders.

In a sense just attending a summit probably helped them—looking statesmanlike is always good.

I don’t know that it would be possible for me to disagree with Con Coughlin’s column in the Telegraph, repeated here at MSN, more. His thesis is that

• China is a threat
• China is preparing for war
• “We” in the West are preparing to surrender

I don’t believe that any of those is true.

Quite to the contrary I think we—the United States—are our own biggest threat, that there is a risk of China’s being big, strong, and aggressive enough to threaten us, and that we’re responding by continuing to dismantle our own industrial infrastructure, import more of what we consume from China, redefining consumption as investment, and bickering among ourselves about matters that can only puzzle most of the world.

I’m not even going to bother to read Eugene Robinson’s latest Washington Post column. Here’s its title: “We can’t unmake nuclear weapons. But we can decide never to use them”. True enough. We might make such a decision. What we can’t decide is that they will never be used against us. That’s why making the decision never to use them is imprudent.

The case is similar with respect to artificial intelligence with one exception. Not only are we unable to decide not to have it used against it, we are unable to prevent its being developed.

I found these two pieces provided an interesting counterpoint. In the Wall Street Journal James Freeman reads the description of one of the posts incoming Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson just created via executive order:

The Deputy Mayor for Labor Relations is responsible for working with all City agencies and departments to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of Chicago; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights, including working with relevant authorities to help enforce workers’ statutory rights.

and, quoting from the Trib:

That’s a gift-wrapped present for the [Chicago Teachers Union], which probably had a big hand in its composition. It says nothing whatsoever about any obligation to protect taxpayers, homeowners, businesses or, frankly, even the democratic process. It basically says: Do what unionized workers want, find more ways to give them more of what they want, and your annual review will be just dandy. Any private sector manager, or even a private sector union leader, closely reading that language, would be shaking their head in amazement.

In fact, if you take that job description at face value, any deputy mayor pushing back on any union demand whatsoever would, in fact, be contravening what their boss says is the requirement of the job. If a union asks for something that it says “advances opportunities for profitable employment,” then the deputy mayor’s job is to immediately give it to them and think up more stuff, too. If the deputy mayor were to say, for example, we can handle a 5% raise but not 25%, such a statement would contravene their very job description.

declaims:

This gift to the Chicago Teachers Union is appalling but perhaps not surprising to Journal readers.

The other piece is a post by Bryce Hill at RealClearPolicy:

The new poll from Echelon Insights in partnership with the Illinois Policy Institute shows Illinoisans prefer pension reform 3-to-1 over tax hikes and service cuts.

Here’s the exact wording of the question: “When it comes to public-sector pensions for government workers, which of these statements do you agree with more, even if neither is exactly right? Illinois should …”

• Amend the State Constitution to preserve retirement benefits already earned by public employees and retirees, but also allow a reduction in the benefits earned in the future by employees and allow for slower growth in retirees’ future benefits.
• Raise taxes or reduce state spending on higher education, public safety, and social services to fully fund the state’s pension obligations to government workers.

Fifty-six percent of respondents supported the pension reform position, compared with just 18% of respondents who supported tax hikes and service cuts.

With respect to Mr. Freeman’s point I believe that any thinking person knew that before Mayor Johnson was elected. It was obvious. No executive order was needed to make the determination.

With respect to the second although I think the poll’s question is a little cooked (for one thing they should have separated raising taxes from cutting services), I completely agree that public pension reform in Illinois is a dire necessity made all the more urgent by higher inflation than has been seen in decades—cost of living increments are baked into public pensions and have the force of law. It certainly isn’t surprising: Illinois voters already rejected a graduated state income tax. And we already pay among the highest taxes in the country. The reforms that should be implemented are legion including:

• We should transition from a guaranteed benefits plan to a guaranteed contribution plan. We should have done that a decade ago.
• School districts should be required for pay a larger proportion of retired teachers’ pensions. Ideally, all of it.
• The practice of “goosing” teacher pay for the last couple of years before retirement should be forbidden by law
• Either Chicago teachers should be rolled into the same plan as other Illinois school districts’ retirees or Chicago citizens should be exempted from the part of state taxes used to pay the retirements of non-Chicago retired teachers or the city should be reimbursed by the amount that Chicago overpays. The present situation is unjust.

I also think that the wages of public employees must be kept in line with the incomes of the communities they serve but that’s a slightly different subject.

But my main point is that I don’t see any straightforward way of reconciling Mayor Johnson’s goals. We’ll have an interesting test case soon. Although the Chicago Teachers Union just negotiated its contract the Chicago Federation of Police has not. The FOP didn’t support Johnson’s mayoral campaign and, as I have reported here, public safety is a key concern of Chicagoans. Although I’m not naive enough to believe there’s a straight line connection between the FOP and public safety, they’re not completely unrelated either. I think there’s a straight line relationship between the uptick in crime and decreasing number of arrests.

There’s a conflict among public safety, defunding the police, and the limits how much revenue can be extracted. I’m reminded of the faux Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.