Walter Russell Mead in his Wall Street Journal column thinks he has found the culprit responsible for killing nuclear non-proliferation—Barack Obama:

As President Clinton told the Irish news service RTÉ last week, the Ukrainians resisted American pressure to denuclearize: “They were afraid to give them up because they thought that’s the only thing that protected them from an expansionist Russia.” But Americans, as Mr. Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright once put it, “stand tall. We see further than other countries into the future.” And so the Clinton administration pushed another message on the Ukrainians: The rules-based international order would protect Ukraine’s future better than anything as anachronistic as nuclear weapons.

“I feel terrible about it,” Mr. Clinton told RTÉ, arguing that now Americans must help Ukraine in a crisis brought on in large part by their trust in our word.

The real situation was complicated. Russia still controlled the nuclear weapons left on Ukraine’s territory. They were less a Ukrainian hedge against Russian adventurism than outposts of Russian power on Ukrainian soil. Nevertheless, with hindsight it appears that trusting the word of a U.S. president and the rules of the international order rather than relying on a nuclear deterrent was a blunder of historic proportions.

Bill Clinton’s reflections come as the barriers to nuclear proliferation are rapidly weakening around the world. Russia and China are abandoning all pretense of opposing the North Korean arsenal. In South Korea, polls show that 70% of the population believes that the time has come to follow the North’s lead. In the Middle East, Iran’s relentless progress toward nuclear weapons is touching off the long-feared regional proliferation cascade. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are taking the first steps toward acquiring the capability to enrich uranium. Turkey is unlikely to lag far behind as nuclear weapons become a normal part of the arsenal of middle powers. Nationalists in countries such as Brazil and Argentina will want their countries to join the expanding nuclear club.

The fight against nuclear proliferation has been a centerpiece of American foreign policy since the first bombs fell on Japan in 1945. American diplomacy tried and failed to stop the Soviet, British, French, Chinese, Israeli, Indian, Pakistani and North Korean programs. The Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970 and was permanently extended five months after the 1994 signing of the Budapest Memorandum. In that memorandum, Russia, the U.S. and U.K. agreed not to threaten or attack Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and to consult on helping if they were attacked; also, the three former Soviet republics joined the NPT as nonnuclear states. The NPT has been hailed as a cornerstone of the rules-based international order. Backers hoped that nonproliferation was only the start. Ultimately the nuclear powers would follow the example of Ukraine and give up their nuclear arsenals in the service of world peace.

History will name Barack Obama as the man on whose watch nonproliferation definitively failed. His waffling response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine not only marked the end of the post-Cold War holiday from history; it also marked the death of the dream that the leaders of the democratic world had the strength and vision to uphold the principles of the rules-based international order in the face of a ruthless opponent. It further taught the world that nuclear weapons are a better defense than American pledges. Coupled with the failure to address North Korea’s nuclear progress and the Iran deal’s sunset clauses, which made the treaty about delaying rather than blocking Tehran’s nuclear advances, Obama-era diplomacy made clear that, despite high-flown rhetoric to the contrary, Washington had no plan to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

I think that nuclear non-proliferation was killed long before 2014 and the blame belongs to none other than Bill Clinton. To the clue mentioned by Mr. Clinton himself I would add:

• NATO expansion
• Failure to react to North Korea’s obvious prevarications regarding nuclear weapons
• the “Agreed Framework”

Much of North Korea’s nuclear development activities took place under Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s watches. You can’t blame Obama and let them off the hook.

Catherine Rampell expresses outrage in her Washington Post column over how little Americans pay in taxes and what she refers to as “the disconnect between the direction of tax changes and the direction of Americans’ views of their taxes”:

Alas, there’s not remotely enough money on those would-be money trees to pay for all the things that Democrats want. Or even the things that past Congresses have already committed to: Recall that the United States already has large fiscal deficits in the years ahead, even without creating new programs. We also already have a lower overall tax burden as a share of the economy than most rich countries, which generally have broader tax bases and higher average rates than we do.

Including for the middle class.

By all means, raise taxes on the ultrawealthy. They should pay more. But if we really want a more robust welfare state, or even to sustain the welfare state we’ve already promised, that probably requires higher taxes from most of the rest of us, too.

I have two answers for Ms. Rampell, one reasoned and one snarky. Reasoned first.

Here in the United States we pay less in taxes than Denmark or France, slightly less than Germany, roughly the same as in the UK, and more than in Canada, Japan, and Australia. Rough numbers for U. S. taxes are 19% of GDP for federal taxes, 15% for state and local taxes. Most comparisons between countries ignore that in the U. S. we are taxed by multiple levels of government.

However, we get tremendously less for what we spend than in any other country. We pay more in absolute dollars, more per capita, more as a percentage of GDP for education, healthcare, law enforcement, defense, and everything else on which government spends money than practically any other comparable country. We pay more per mile of road constructed or foot of bridge constructed than other developed countries.

For our money we get worse outcomes in education and healthcare, declining lifespans, more violent crime, and roads and bridges that are falling apart. A typical American wonders “why spend more?”

Why do we get worse bang for the buck? I’m open to suggestion. I attribute much of it to low social cohesion. We are much more diverse than most other countries. You could also say “individualism”. Everybody including government officials is “looking out for #1” and not overly scrupulous about it. Other possible explanations are the ever-popular waste, fraud, and abuse which I suspect translate into about the same thing.

I think the line of least resistance is improving return on investment rather than increasing taxes.

Now for the snarky response. Based on records available publicly Ms. Rampell has a household income of around $350,000/year. That places her family well within the top 2% of income earners. What is holding her back from sending more of the money she earns to the federal government?

The reaction of the editors of the Washington Post to the recent intelligence leak was similar to my own (just later):

The trove of roughly 100 leaked U.S. classified documents, some marked “top secret,” is a sensational intelligence breach and, according to some sources, a highly damaging one. But more than the juicy tidbits contained in the material, much of which involves detailed information pertaining to the war in Ukraine, the most sensational, and damaging, aspect of the story might be the fact of the leak itself. And on that score — how and why the documents came to see the light of day — very little is known.

If most of the documents are genuine, as they appear to be — with apparent alterations intended to exaggerate Ukrainian casualty estimates and minimize Russian ones — then U.S. authorities will urgently need to trace the leak’s provenance. The Justice Department has launched an investigation intended to do just that. The Biden administration will also be faced with some damage control based on information that was contained on some leaked briefing slides suggesting Washington has been spying on its own allies, including South Korea and Ukraine itself.

However, I thought they were being bafflingly discreet in their editorial. As I noted the fact of the leaks reflect incredible sloppiness on the part of U. S. intelligence. With even barely competent handling of those materials no investigation should be necessary. They should already know the source the leaks and dealt with him or her, presumably by prosecution. If so many people had access to all of those document as to make it impossible to determine, that itself is problematic.

I’m confused. Is occupying and disrupting the seats of legislations right or wrong? Democratic or undemocratic? Son of the lawyer that I am I’m predisposed to think it’s always wrong and undemocratic. Does it depend on circumstances?

This snippet from Matt Yglesias’s Bloomberg column is thought-provoking:

I’ve spent most of the past three weeks in Chicago, and the thing I heard depressingly often from supporters of both candidates was a kind of double-negative argument: Not that their guy would be able to put his best ideas into practice, but that he wouldn’t be able to implement his worst ones. Then they made the opposite case for their opponent.

Johnson fans assured me that a relatively pro-business city council would not let him pose a new “head tax” on downtown businesses that could scare off employers and impede efforts to get companies to bring people back to work. But they warned me that a mayor squarely aligned with the police union and national conservative forces really could cover up police misconduct without improving public safety. Vallas supporters, by contrast, told me that it was absurd to imagine that the city council or the state legislature would allow conservative policy ideas to take root in Chicago. Meanwhile, they said, Johnson could easily frighten corporate leaders and induce a police pullback.

These are both pretty good arguments as far as they go — making large-scale policy change is always much harder than candidates let on — but the debate was a depressing reflection of the impoverished state of the city’s politics.

Johnson doesn’t really have much of an agenda for urban reform, just a list of things he’d like to spend money on. It’s almost as if it was copy-and-pasted from a progressive agenda developed in the pre-Covid era for a much richer coastal city.

It’s probably true that he won’t, in fact, be able to impose big new tax increases. So then what will he do? Only 20% of Chicago high school students are at grade level in reading or math proficiency. Chicago teachers walked out on the job over Covid protocols as late as January 2022, by which time schools were fully operational almost everywhere else in the US. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to further empower a union this proud of its own militance and disregard for its public responsibilities.

Contrary to what MY is suggesting it isn’t the City Council that will prove Mr. Johnson’s biggest barrier. Chicago, whether City Hall or the City Council, doesn’t have the authority to do what he proposes. He would need to roll over the City Council, Springfield, and Washington to do what he wants. I can’t see how everybody pulling in different directions can possibly be good for the country or the state let alone Chicago.

You may have forgotten about the Silicon Valley Bank failure but the Wall Street Journal hasn’t. This quote is from Aaron Klein’s WSJ op-ed:

The deposit-insurance limit didn’t cause this crisis. Silicon Valley Bank’s management caused their bank to fail. The Fed failed as the bank’s supervisor. The bank’s auditors and credit-rating agencies didn’t catch the problem. SVB’s creditors, including the businesses that banked with them, ignored warning signs such as a Journal story five months ago flagging SVB’s problems.

There will always be some banks that fail. Government’s job is to protect the vulnerable, and existing deposit-insurance limits do that. When banks fail, losses should go to those who had their money at risk. Capitalism doesn’t work if the wealthy can never lose their money.

I honestly don’t see how extending FDIC protection to all deposits will work. If you raise the FDIC fees to the level that it will produce enough revenue to cover all deposits against all risks, I suspect that will be high enough to increase the number of the “unbanked” and most of those will be individual depositors and small companies. If you just cover defaults out of what is blithely called the “general fund”, it will effectively subsidize risk-taking to an intolerable level.

It seems to me that the failure was one of oversight. Nobody, not bank employees, board members, large depositors, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, or anyone else who actually has a fiduciary responsibility was exercising it. Tighter regulations won’t help. Who guards the guards?

Here’s an interesting passage from a Wall Street Journal piece by Bob Tita on the employment situation faced by the construction industry:

About one-fifth of construction workers are older than 55 years old and are often the most skilled workers or supervisors on a job site, the builders-and-contractors group said. As older, higher-skilled workers retire or leave for other jobs, many contractors haven’t been able to quickly replace them with younger workers with the same skill levels.

Those twenty percent are Baby Boomers. Telling kids for more than a generation that there’s something wrong with working with your hands and a bright future means getting a college education has a price.

It isn’t just the construction industry. Of the top 20 box office movie stars six are Baby Boomers and one is Silent Generation (Harrison Ford). That’s a third and several of the others are older Gen Xers.

The more I hear about the intelligence leaks on the Ukrainian battlefield situation the more sloppy and undisciplined it makes our intelligence services look. The investigation they’ve announced had best identify the leaker(s) quickly, establish definitively that they’re fakes, or our intelligence services are likely to face repercussions.

An individual working for Allied Van Lines reached out to me in reaction to one of my earlier posts. AVL’s “US Migration Report” is here. The top five states from which people are departing are:

1. Illinois
2. California
3. New Jersey
4. Michigan
5. Pennsylvania

I suspect if that were per 100K population the situation would be even more stark and look worse for Illinois. The top five cities from which people are moving are:

1. New York
2. Anaheim
3. San Diego
4. Chicago
5. Riverside

Note that three of the top five are in California. The top five destination states are:

1. Arizona
2. South Carolina
3. North Carolina
4. Tennessee
5. Texas

I’ve visited all of those states, some recently. I don’t think you could pay me to live in any of them. Here’s a passage from the linked page:

Large cities struggled to attract new residents in 2022. Besides the five listed above, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. also saw major losses. Even Phoenix, the most popular inbound city in 2021, fell to number six this year.

While housing prices obviously played a role, so did the coronavirus pandemic, which led to more Americans working from home. (Many of the current migration patterns in the US can be traced back to the pandemic.) Now that they no longer need to come into the office, people are free to live where they prefer. Whereas previously they had to stay in the city, now workers can choose to live further out, in communities with cheaper housing and better access to nature.

Before the pandemic, most Americans bought houses 15 miles from their old homes. Today, they’re buying houses 50 miles and greater from their old homes, outside major metro areas. Suburbs are cheaper, greener, and offer more living space than cities, hence it’s not surprising consumers are taking advantage of the opportunity and moving out.

I suspect a lot of the moves today are part of the reverse Great Migration.