While I agree with Mark Penn and Andrew Stein’s lament in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

The Brooklyn Bridge cost $300 million to build in today’s money. The price tag for the Golden Gate Bridge was $750 million. Based on those numbers, the recent $1.2 trillion infrastructure package should be enough to build roughly 4,000 Brooklyn Bridges or 2,000 Golden Gates. If you believe that’s going to happen, we’ve got a bridge in Florida to sell you.

The sad reality is that the country will be lucky if any new bridges, tunnels or major roads get built. The numbers are huge: $110 billion for roads and bridges, $66 billion for Amtrak, $39 billion for public transit, $25 billion for airports. But watch where that money actually gets allocated in the next few years. So far most of it has gone entirely to renovation, not innovation. Environmental rules, endless delays, inflation, work rules and politics all play a role in ensuring that lots of pockets get lined but few new projects move forward.

On Jan. 31, President Biden visited New York to announce $300 million in federal money toward a replacement rail tunnel under the Hudson River—one phase of a larger renovation that will cost an estimated $30 billion and be completed in another 12 years. By contrast, the original Lincoln Tunnel was built in less than four years in the 1930s and cost $1.6 billion in today’s dollars.

Despite advances in engineering, building methods and computers, one rail tunnel repair now costs 20 times what a brand-new tunnel cost a century ago and takes three times as long, if it ever happens. Construction timelines are measured in decades rather than years. Had the projects of the New Deal been done this way, they would have stretched into World War II and beyond.

I don’t think their complaint about “efficiency” actually describes what’s happening. Why do we pay more per foot of road or bridge built than any other country in the world? It isn’t “efficiency”.

I suspect there are several possibilities:

• The United States has the largest number of lawyers per capita of any country in the world and lawyers are the foot soldiers of NIMBY.
• Neither the federal government nor state governments build roads or bridges. They let contracts for private companies to do them and only a very small number of companies are deemed qualified to bid. The successful bidders are rarely motivated to hire more workers or purchase more equipment to bring the projects in faster.
• Inflation is the enemy of bringing projects in at cost and on time.

just off the top of my head. BTW Boulder Dam came in on time and under cost. When was the last time you heard of a major infrastructure project doing that?

This morning President Biden had an op-ed in the New York Times sketching his plan to “save” Medicare. Here’s the plan:

My budget will build on drug price reforms by strengthening Medicare’s newly established negotiation power, allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for more drugs and bringing drugs into negotiation sooner after they launch. That’s another $200 billion in deficit reduction. We will then take those savings and put them directly into the Medicare trust fund. Lowering drug prices while extending Medicare’s solvency sure makes a lot more sense than cutting benefits.

Second, let’s ask the wealthiest to pay just a little bit more of their fair share, to strengthen Medicare for everyone over the long term. My budget proposes to increase the Medicare tax rate on earned and unearned income above $400,000 to 5 percent from 3.8 percent. As I proposed in the past, my budget will also ensure that the tax that supports Medicare can’t be avoided altogether. This modest increase in Medicare contributions from those with the highest incomes will help keep the Medicare program strong for decades to come. My budget will make sure the money goes directly into the Medicare trust fund, protecting taxpayers’ investment and the future of the program.

I don’t object to either of those changes in principle and I actually agree with the reasoning President Biden presents:

When Medicare was passed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans didn’t have more than five times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined, and it only makes sense that some adjustments be made to reflect that reality today.

If incomes had continued to grow at the rates they had up until just about the time that Medicare was enacted, neither Social Security nor Medicare would have the problems they do now.

I’ll reserve judgment on whether those measures will produce the results President Biden says they will until after actual legislation is drafted and the Congressional Budget Office weighs in. The phrase “earned and unearned income” troubles me especially from a practical standpoint. Also, the highest earners have strategies available to them unavailable to the rest of us. That makes relying on them for increased revenue iffy.

If I’ve missed anybody, please tell me and I’ll update the table.

I found these statistics in Freddie deBoer’s most recent post interesting:

The first, obvious answer is that people don’t want simply to create, but to make a living creating, to create as a profession. And this is vastly more difficult to achieve. Making a living on Etsy is notoriously difficult, with about 90% of Etsy stores earning less than $400 a month. Estimates for payouts for a thousand views on YouTube are around $18 dollars; less than 12% of videos even reach that threshold. 90% of Twitch’s users stream to six average viewers or less, and a quarter of even the top 10,000 highest-paid accounts make less than minimum wage. The average OnlyFans account earns just $150 a month. It’s estimated that 99% of podcasts make no profit. 98.6% of Spotify artists make an average of just $36 a quarter. On Patreon, a platform that creators of all kinds use to monetize their work, less than 2% of users make even the federal monthly minimum wage. I have no numbers for Substack, but we can be sure that it’s a similar trend. That’s because the creator economy follows a power law distribution; the vast majority of people in it get tiny amounts of money and attention, while a small sliver of users are handsomely rewarded with both. Any individual creator might become one of the winners. But at scale, almost everyone is going to fail. The growing number of people who are hungry to get rich in the creator economy—who believe themselves to be deserving of success by dint of their education and hard work—coupled with the awareness that almost all of them will fail is an example of elite overproduction. We have an artistic class which is predominantly made up of people who enjoy none of the financial rewards afforded to artists.

Here’s another statistic. You’ve got to be in the top 3% of Youtube creators to receive more than $16,800 in ad revenue. And it’s practically impossible to reach that level. Again, power law—early movers garner most of the views.

Of course except for a relatively tiny sliver of time there were few “financial rewards afforded to artists”. If you had a wealthy patron, you got paid. Otherwise there was nothing. Shakespeare wasn’t poor but he wasn’t wealthy, either, and he was basically at the top of his profession of playwright, theatrical producer, and actor. Rembrandt had money from commissions and was paid as a teacher. He earned on the high end for skilled craftsman at the time but he was far from wealthy. But for his brother Theo, Van Gogh would have starved.

Most of the post is about “elite overproduction”. IMO most of the discussion has it completely backwards. I think that holding out college educations as the key to prosperous, fulfilling careers is cruel. It’s cargo cult thinking. Fifty years ago college educations were pre-professional or pre-managerial training. A college degree was largely a signifier that you were prepared to assume a role in the professional class and a significant part of the college experience was making contacts among other young people who were part of the professional class.

However, the ranks of professionals are still limited to a relatively tiny 14% of the population while we’re trying to give half of the population college degrees. No wonder there are so many dissatisfied young people. Saddled with debts they’ll never pay off, unable to make a living in their chosen fields, no real prospect for ever doing so.

The 51st Iditarod has begun! If you’re wondering why the first musher to start was issued bib #2, #1 was issued to four-time Iditarod winner, the late Lance Mackey, who died this year at the too-young age of 52.

The number of mushers participating this year is 34, the lowest since the race started 51 years ago. The low number of entries is attributed to costs, inflation, and dwindling sponsorship.

I want to commend Peter Nimitz’s lengthy history of Ukraine to your attention:

History is a complex tapestry with many threads, and is constantly rewoven. Sometimes threads decay and disappear. Other times old threads are strengthened. Some threads are ripped out, and replaced with new threads. The shapes made on the tapestry are usually agreed upon, but the story they tell is usually disputed.

To understand the roots of the Donbass Wars and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, one must first identify the important historical threads. Some such as the recent growth of Protestantism in Ukraine are quite new. Others are very old, and to understand them one must go back deep in the past.

I found it fair, balanced, and amazingly complete given that it’s only a couple of thousand words long. The TL;DR version is:

• Many countries and people have ruled the territory within Ukraine’s present borders over the last thousand years or so including Poland, Lithuania, Russia, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Greeks.
• Prior to 1954 no country with borders approximating those of present day Ukraine had ever existed.
• Without substantial ethnic cleansing bringing peace and order to eastern Ukraine within a united Ukraine is unlikely.

You will find more infographics at Statista
The chart above illustrates how much aid the largest donating countries have provided to aid the Ukrainians in their defense against Russia. But what about aid as a percentage of donor GDP (I hear someone ask)?
You will find more infographics at Statista
That chart tells a clearer story. Aid is proportional to how threatening countries deem the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Right up at the top are Baltic countries, then Poland. Slightly below that are the United States and the United Kingdom. Where, you say, is Germany? Where, indeed. The German commitment has been around .17% of GDP.

My interpretation of that is that the Germans are shrewd. The more we provide, the more it allows them to reduce their aid.

This post was inspired by a remark in comments to the effect that Americans, conservatives in particular but I think it applies to Americans in general, are not patriotic because they are not “willing to fight/risk one’s life to defend the country”. Let me state my thesis first and then I’ll return to it to build my case.

My thesis is that

1. U. S. foreign policy should be focused on defending the United States and keeping it secure
2. We don’t really face any foreign threats. Actually, we’re our own worst enemy

I think that we haven’t actually had a need to defend the U. S. in 150 years, since the American Civil War. Let’s work backwards. Pretty obviously, we are not defending the United States by our activities in Syria which are ongoing at present. How do I know that? Let’s define “victory”. You have achieved victory in war when you accomplish the political goals of the war.

What were the objectives of the war in Afghanistan? I would say its objectives were to

1. Eject Al Qaeda from the country
2. Install a government there that would be an ally of the U. S. and would not support Al Qaeda

We failed at both of those objectives. Consequently, we lost the war in Afghanistan. If the intention of those objectives in Afghanistan was to defend the United States, does it not follow that, since we are not experiencing attacks from Al Qaeda on the U. S. homeland, that either we failed in defending the United States in the war in Afghanistan or that defending the U. S. was irrelevant to our objectives in Afghanistan, i.e. they were based on false assumptions about the threats we faced. I think it’s the latter. If fighting Al Qaeda does not defend the United States or make it more secure, our activities in Syria cannot against DAESH cannot achieve those objectives.

We can now be confident that our invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with defending the U. S. or making us more secure—it was based on bad assumptions. I’ve already dealt with Afghanistan.

We lost the war in Vietnam. Losing in no way weakened us or threatened us except, possibly, politically. Consequently, the assumptions made in that war were wrong, too.

Although we didn’t lose the Korean War, we didn’t win, either. The same argument applies. Since the stalemate there did not weaken or threaten us, our entire involvement there was clearly predicated on bad assumptions.

If you are very, very expansive we were actually defending the U. S. during World War II. But let’s be very clear: you need to be very expansive. Neither Germany nor Japan ever succeeded in attacking the U. S. homeland. Japan attacked U. S. overseas possessions. Its balloon attacks against the U. S. failed. We weren’t defending ourselves against the Japanese but our role as a colonizing power, defending the American Empire. The most Germany accomplished was landing eight saboteurs by U-boat. They failed in their plans. Germany did threaten the British but they didn’t threaten us.

The threat posed by the Central Powers during World War I was even more distant than that. We weren’t threatened and there’s a pretty good argument that our entry into the war ultimately led to World War II.

When was the last time there was actually a need to defend the United States? I would argue that the last time was 150 years ago during the American Civil War. Again, what about 9/11? I would argue that we were actually threatened by our own extremely lax approach to immigration and travel. The nineteen militants who boarded and seized flights in the United States were here on travel and student visas and, basically, completely unmonitored. That problem remains. We’ve done little about it in the 20 years that have intervened.

What about Russia? Doesn’t Russia threaten us? I don’t think so. Obviously, not only does it threaten Ukraine but also Poland, the Baltic countries, and other countries that border it. It will continue to do so as long as there is a Russia. There’s nothing we can do about that and, since there is no achievable goal there, we cannot be the guarantor of their security. They live in a tough neighborhood. It will always be a tough neighborhood.

We squandered the opportunity to reduce the threat posed by Russia to its neighbors by rebuffing Russia’s offers to join NATO and the European Union and by expanding NATO right to Russia’s border.

But what about China? I don’t think that China threatens us, either. What actually threatens us is our eagerness to export our industry and manufacturing offshore. We aren’t being forced to do that. We’re doing it to ourselves. Furthermore, no one forced us to make China a Most Favored Nation trading partner. That was a self-inflicted wound.

That’s what I mean by our being our own worst enemy. We have foreign policy, trade, environmental, and immigration policies that don’t make us stronger, wealthier, or more secure and arguably do the opposite. We have met the enemy and he is us.

Here’s David Axelrod’s take from CNN on Lori Lightfoot’s defeat:

When she ran for mayor, her status as a crusading outsider with prosecutorial zeal was core to her appeal.

But those pugilistic qualities quickly became obstacles in a job that often requires an ability to cajole, and not simply command.

Early in her term, Lightfoot stubbornly took a teacher’s strike many deemed avoidable, and then settled on the union’s terms.

Deeply suspicious of the motives of other politicians, she systematically alienated Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the Democrat-led state legislature and the Cook County leadership, all of whom are fellow Democrats.

As a result, she lost key legislative battles, including a law that over the next three years will shift control of the Chicago public schools from mayoral appointees to an elected 21-member school board, far larger than what she had wanted and the largest by far in the country.

She ran on limiting the prerogatives of City Council members, then humiliated them in her inaugural speech and alienated them in the job, prompting one of her once-allies Alderman Susan Sadlowski-Garza to say, “I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with. Police, fire, teachers, aldermen, businesses, manufacturing.”

The exodus of some high-profile businesses – and the likely, unthinkable departure to the suburbs of the city’s beloved Chicago Bears – contributed to a sense of a city backsliding.

By the time of the election, more than half of Chicago voters gave the mayor negative ratings.

In winning and losing, Lightfoot did it her way. Now Chicago will have a new mayor – and a race that will be the most ideologically divergent in recent history.

which I think is remarkably lacking in insight. As I have noted before she was put in office not by Lakeshore liberals or black activists but by white voters on the Northwest Side. She achieved victory because she was not Toni Preckwinkle but that alone didn’t light her path to a re-election that she lacked the political skills to bring about, especially since Toni Preckwinkle was not on the ballot.