The editors of the Washington Post have proposed a plan for salvaging Social Security:

A plausible plan would involve these elements: broadening the base upon which the 12.4 percent payroll tax is levied — currently 84 percent of all earnings — to the 90 percent that prevailed in 1982, at the time of the Reagan reforms; gradually indexing up the age, currently 67, at which people may retire at full benefits, to take account of longer retirements due to rising life expectancy; and shoring up the program’s distributional equity, via tweaking benefit formulas to trim how much high-income households get and increases for the most vulnerable. The latter category would include a minimum benefit equal to 125 percent of the official poverty line as well as a “bump up” in payments to the very aged. And all new state and local employees should be required to pay Social Security tax — and receive the benefits — though existing opt-outs for the small minority of state and local government workers who chose not to participate in Social Security should not be altered.

This package, illustrated in the accompanying table, would not quite eliminate the trust fund’s projected shortfall. It would close 87 percent of it, however, according to projections provided by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That’s good progress, given the tough politics of the issue and the uncertainties surrounding long-range forecasts.

Closing the rest of the 75-year gap would require one more major step: changing the formula by which Social Security adjusts benefits for inflation, to an arguably more accurate measure — known in wonkspeak as the “chained CPI.” The resulting benefit reduction relative to current policy would be real but manageable for most households, including less-affluent ones, if Congress adopted protections for them such as those we suggested. Yet the “chained CPI,” which a Democratic president, Barack Obama, supported as recently as 2013, can indeed be attacked as a cut to Social Security and has thus far proved politically impossible.

I actually approve of that plan—it’s not dissimilar to what I’ve suggested around here. However, we should acknowledge that it presents certain political problems beyond the one raised by tying benefit increases to chained CPI, the most important of which is that it violates one of President Biden’s most frequently-repeated pledges, not to increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000/year. Assuming that President Biden intends to run again, breaking that pledge may prove increasingly hazardous to him as 2024 approaches.

I’m still trying to figure out what point Peter Feaver, Christopher Gelpi, and Jason Reifler were making in their piece in Foreign Affairs, “The Strange Case of Iraq Syndrome”. They begin by contrasting the “Vietnam Syndrome” that afflicted U. S. policymakers following the conclusion of the Vietnam War:

After the Vietnam War, a generation of U.S. leaders developed what became known as “Vietnam syndrome”—a pathological belief that public support for the use of force was too fleeting, and the U.S. military’s power too uncertain, for foreign military operations to be advisable.

with something they’re terming “Iraq Syndrome”:

Iraq syndrome holds that Americans are casualty-phobic: they will support a military operation only if the cost in American lives is minimal. As a consequence, U.S. policymakers who wish to use force must fight as bloodlessly as possible and be quick to abandon their commitments if the adversary proves able to fight back and kill U.S. soldiers. The politically expedient position, in a world afflicted by Iraq syndrome, is a quasi-isolationist one, since the public is not willing to underwrite the costs of lasting international commitments.

“Quasi-isolationist” is a slander. There’s another term for it that’s already in the common parlance: noninterventionist. Are they embracing its opposite and encouraging Americans leaders to do so? There’s a term for that, too: imperialist.

I almost stopped reading when I encountered their definition of the goals of the U. S. invasion of Iraq:

Compared with the United States’ outright defeat in Afghanistan, the result of the U.S. campaign in Iraq looks like a modest success. It still might be possible to achieve some of the goals of the war—an Iraq that can govern and defend itself and that is an ally in the war against terrorists—albeit at a tragically high price.

a piece of historical revisionism if I’ve ever seen one. Here’s what President Bush said on March 19, 2003:

THE PRESIDENT: My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.

So, did the United States achieve its objectives in Iraq or fail to do so? There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to speak of, the “grave danger” to which President Bush alluded. Under Saddam Hussein Iraq was not a liberal democracy. It remains not a liberal democracy. Iraq’s disarmament was fleeting and largely took the form of removing Sunni officers from the Iraqi military.

Is Iraq our “ally in the war against terrorists”? I would say that we have taken the side of Shi’ite terrorists against Sunni terrorists, embroiling ourselves in a sectarian conflict that’s been going on for more than a millennium. In 2002 Sunni terrorists may have been our greater concern. Now Shi’ite terrorists are an equal if not greater concern.

I was opposed to our invasion of Iraq for reasons that have actually come to fruition, one of the few to take that position publicly although there’s no lack of people claiming to have held that view all along. I would say, contra the authors that we lost the Iraq War, too.

This appears to be their thesis:

Iraq syndrome holds that Americans are casualty-phobic: they will support a military operation only if the cost in American lives is minimal. As a consequence, U.S. policymakers who wish to use force must fight as bloodlessly as possible and be quick to abandon their commitments if the adversary proves able to fight back and kill U.S. soldiers. The politically expedient position, in a world afflicted by Iraq syndrome, is a quasi-isolationist one, since the public is not willing to underwrite the costs of lasting international commitments.

But as prevalent as it is among politicians, Iraq syndrome does not appear to be as widespread among the broader public. American voters are not nearly as allergic to military force as their leaders think. In fact, the public will continue to adequately support a military mission even as its costs mount, provided that the war seems winnable. That means policymakers do not need to abandon a national security commitment as soon as the costs start to mount, provided that the leaders are pursuing a strategy that will lead to success. Leaders should pay more attention to prospects for good outcomes rather than try for cost-free commitments, an impossible standard that the public does not demand and that only hobbles the United States in a dangerous world.

I would say that there remains little evidence that Americans are particularly interested in foreign policy. I think that we “support the troops” but not necessarily the objectives for which the troops have been engaged. Deploying our military more frequently is not the logical implication of that. Deploying our military more prudently is.

I’ve been mulling this over for some time but haven’t found any post in which working it in was appropriate. The problems that people are complaining about these days: crime, inflation, income inequality, immigration, politics, homicides, war, and so on and so on are all downstream from the culture. What comprises the culture? History, sexual mores and practices, gender roles, family structure, and language just to name a few of its aspects.

There is copious evidence that culture has an impact on all of the problems in the list. There is very little evidence that culture has zero influence on them. Just to cite one example every country in which English is the primary first language is a liberal democracy. Among countries in which Spanish is the primary first language how many are robust liberal democracies are there? Uruguay maybe? Possibly a couple of others. That’s an obvious difference. We’re not entirely sure why there’s a difference but that there’s a difference is indisputable. BTW, what I’m describing is called the “weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” if you’re interested in the subject.

Here’s something else to mull over. Traditionally, in the United States the family structure known as the “absolute nuclear family” has dominated. The short description is two biological parents plus children. An enormous number of things depend on it: our form of government, jobs, education, and so on.

The absolute nuclear family has been under considerable stress for the last 50 years. My own view is that, like it or not, the absolute nuclear family is disappearing, there’s little that can be done about it, and that has implications. The America that DeTocqueville described is disappearing along with it. What will replace is we don’t know but whatever that may be at this point it certainly doesn’t look pretty.

As just one example of the change I’m talking about in the black community the majority of households are single parent headed by women. We don’t know how that influences crime, attitudes towards education, employment, and so on but it would be incredible if it had no effect whatever.

William Galston devotes his Wall Street Journal column to explaining how Silicon Valley Bank avoided oversight. Here’s the meat of it:

On one level, this is a saga of bad management. As deposits soared, SVB’s executives had invested in long-term assets without hedging adequately against interest-rate risks. And the firm lacked a diversified portfolio of depositors, most of whom came from the venture-capital sector. As the sector came under increasing pressure, its members tried to withdraw their funds simultaneously, and the bank couldn’t meet its obligations.

But there is a story behind this saga. After the financial collapse in 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 to regulate the banking practices that had nearly plunged the world into a second global depression. Among other measures, Dodd-Frank imposed new reporting requirements on banks, toughened standards for capital adequacy, and restrained banks’ ability to use deposits for speculative investment. Banks with assets above $50 billion were deemed “systemically important” and subjected to especially strict scrutiny.

These standards brought greater stability to the sector, but also higher expenses and lower profits. Bank leaders weren’t pleased and soon began lobbying to mitigate the legislation’s impact on their operations. SVB’s CEO Greg Becker was an early objector who argued that subjecting his midsize bank to the full range of Dodd-Frank requirements “would stifle our ability to provide credit to our clients.”

and I want to endorse his conclusion:

Not all regulations are “burdensome.” Some are essential to prevent bad things from happening, as in this case. Congress and the Fed should rethink their decision to exempt key parts of the financial system from the discipline of oversight.

As I’ve said above, I think the primary culprit here is Congress. They listened to whose money was talking the loudest but that’s not what they’re elected to do and they don’t have to do it. There’s a clear conflict between their personal interests and the public interest. Their primary concern should be the public interest. The primary concern of bankers should be their banks. As long as they believe that Congress will cover their bad bets, they’ll keep making them. Not to do so would be remiss.

I suppose I should explain my “hierarchy of blame” first. For nearly any given problem I think the blame lies on in more or less descending order of importance:

1. Congress
2. The civil bureaucracy
3. The president, primarily for failing to provide proper guidance to the civil bureaucracy, bucking them if necessary
4. Corporate management
5. Human nature

You may wonder where the electorate is in this hierarchy. I’ve lived in Chicago for almost all of my adult life. Maybe it’s different elsewhere but when you have three (or ten) candidates running and they can all be expected to do the same things, I find it hard to blame the electorate. Take the Chicago mayoral election, for example. I realize it’s a sort of cottage industry for Republicans to chortle that Chicagoans are getting what they deserve but there hasn’t been a Republican candidate for mayor in some time. Maybe it’s tough to get elected as anything but a Democrat in Chicago but it’s impossible to get elected if you don’t run.

The grimly entertaining aspect of the whole Silicon Valley Bank debacle is how neatly it fits into that hierarchy. If Silicon Valley Bank had been more closely scrutinized, wouldn’t its exposure have been revealed? Why didn’t they receive more scrutiny? Congress raised the threshold for such scrutiny from $50 billion to $250 billion, presumably responding to the squawks of bankers who complained that they couldn’t make any money if they followed the rules. Why not blame the bankers? Because they were just doing what anyone would have done in their circumstances, based on their incentives. Just as in the financial crisis of 2007-2008 banks, depositors, and even Congress are just responding based on their incentives. We really need to change the incentives. That Congress values political contributions so highly is the root of much evil.

Twenty years ago today I posted my first post here at The Glittering Eye. Since then I have written 20,246 posts and 18,661 comments.

My posting style and frequency have changed considerably over the years. I rarely write truly long form posts any more. My posts tend to be less poetic than they were once upon a time. I actually write more posts than I used to on a daily basis—typically five per day. Once upon a time I rarely wrote more than three a day.

Twenty years ago solo bloggers were the norm. Now they’re pretty rare although Substack seems to have breathed new life into the solo blog.

On a typical day I get around 200 readers. Nothing in comparison to the big blogs but, honestly, it’s probably not out of line with the number of readers the opinion pages of small newspapers have. At least that’s what I’ve been told by newspapermen.

I haven’t run out of ideas and I intend to keep posting for the foreseeable future.

Ryan Redington has won the Iditarod. Fifty-one years ago his grandfather, Joe Redington, dreamed up the idea of the Iditarod, the “last great race on earth”. No Redington has ever won the Iditarod. Until now. At the Anchorage Daily News Zachariah Hughes and Michelle Theriault Boots report:

NOME — Ryan Redington crossed the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race finish line in Nome on Tuesday to earn his first victory in the grueling race his grandfather pioneered more than half a century ago.

His team of six dogs, featuring leaders 6-year-old Ghost and 4-year-old Sven, came to a rest on Nome’s Front Street at 12:13 p.m., a couple hours after the sun cracked over the sea ice on the southern horizon.

Redington is the first member of his family to win the Iditarod over the decades they’ve been part of its legacy. “We’ve waited 51 years for this, ladies and gentleman,” emcee Greg Heister of Iditarod Insider told the crowd in Nome, to a roaring cheer.

Redington made the nearly 1,000-mile run in 8 days, 21 hours, 12 minutes and 58 seconds. Hundreds of people lined the race chute in excitement as he jogged beside his sled and up toward the finish line in his lime-green parka ruffed with wolverine fur.

There’s something I found perplexing about Alexander Gabuev’s remarks about the “Russia that might have been” in Foreign Affairs:

The current trajectory of Russia’s foreign policy was not predestined, and there were many chances for the Kremlin to do things differently. For much of the last 20 years—even following the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014—Russia had a historic opening to build a dynamic new place for itself in the international system. When Putin was sworn in as president, in May 2000, Russia was entering a period of greater possibility—both within and beyond its borders—than at any other point in its history. Internally, Russia had survived the collapse of the USSR and the tumultuous 1990s to go from an empire to an influential nation-state in the making. Despite the horrendous wars in Chechnya, Russia was, by the turn of the century, largely stable and at peace. Its planned economy had given way to an adaptable market economy. It was an imperfect but vibrant democracy.

Then, around 2003, Russia got lucky. The U.S. invasion of Iraq coupled with China’s spectacular economic boom led to a sharp increase in global commodity prices. The Kremlin’s coffers were suddenly flooded with revenues from the sale of oil, gas, metals, fertilizers, and other products on the global market. This windfall allowed Russia to quickly repay its foreign debts and nearly double its GDP during Putin’s first two presidential terms. Despite mounting corruption, most ordinary Russians found that their incomes were rising. Compared with their troubled imperial and Soviet past, Russians had never been so prosperous and, simultaneously, so free as in the first decade of the twenty-first century. With these strong economic and political foundations, Russia was well positioned to become a global power between East and West—benefiting from its links to both Europe and Asia, and focused on internal development.

and

When Putin came to power in 1999, the external geopolitical environment was more favorable to Russia than at almost any previous point in the modern era. No neighbor or great power posed a serious threat to Russian security. The collapse of the Soviet Union had not produced territorial disputes between Russia and its neighbors of the sort that would lead to inevitable conflicts. And until the 2014 decision to illegally annex Crimea, Moscow seemed mostly happy with its borders, including with Ukraine. The Cold War was over, and the United States treated Russia as a declining power that no longer constituted a threat to it and its allies. Instead, Washington sought to support Russia in its transition to democracy and a market economy. Foreign investment and technology helped modernize the Russian economy and started to heal the wounds caused by the country’s traumatic adoption of a new economic model in the 1990s. Exports of Russian commodities were enthusiastically purchased by many European nations.

Moscow’s relations with Germany, as well as with other major European countries such as France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, were at a historic peak. In eastern Europe, there was a Soviet legacy of economic ties and personal connections between Moscow and such countries as Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as the newly independent Baltic states. Consecutive waves of NATO and EU enlargement in the 1990s and 2000s made Russia’s neighbors to its west more prosperous and secure, and thus far less fearful of potential Russian revanchism, and opened the way for a dynamic of pragmatic and mutually beneficial engagement, which persisted for much of the 2000s. During these years, Russia and the EU discussed strengthening trade, as well as economic and energy ties. Although the EU did not invite Russia to join the union, it did offer to harmonize trade regulations and remove many of the barriers that limited ties between Moscow and Brussels.

As for its relations with the East, Russia managed to resolve a decades-old territorial dispute with China in 2005, finally putting the relationship with the new superpower on a predictable and productive footing. By then, China was the world’s largest importer of hydrocarbons, providing Russia with a new, enormous, and still expanding market. Meanwhile, with an eye on their own energy security, Japan and South Korea were also interested in helping bring Russia’s vast hydrocarbon resources in Siberia to the market. In turn, by building ties to these two technologically advanced Asian democracies, as well as to China, Russia had an opportunity to tap into the rapidly modernizing potential of the Asia-Pacific region. For the first time in its history, Moscow was able to sell its commodities to both Europe and Asia, diversifying its trade relationships and cultivating new markets as it accessed money and technology from both the West and the East.

Finally, Russia maintained Soviet-era connections to many developing countries in the diverse global South. These ties enabled Russia to keep afloat its Soviet-era industries, particularly its defense sector and civilian nuclear power, by turning contracts with countries like India and Vietnam into sources of revenue that supported domestic manufacturing.

What do I find perplexing? I don’t think you can have it both ways. The admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO in 1999 makes no sense in the context of a Russia that was “a nation with an economy similar to Canada’s, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, and geopolitical neutrality”. Quite to the contrary it only makes sense in the context of Eastern European countries in fear of “Russian revanchism”.

Furthermore the rebuffing of Russia offers to join NATO, made by every leader of the post-Soviet Union Russia including Putin does not point to a Russia that would be “geopolitically neutral”. That neutrality only makes sense in the face of a hostile NATO and wouldn’t have been possible in that case. Hence my perplexity.

So which was it? Was Russia irremediably and irrevocably hostile to its neighbors? Or is Mr. Gabuev correct?

Peter Jacobsen makes a prudent observation at the blog of the Foundation for Economic Education:

Allowing banks to fail may sound extreme, but it’s really the most reasonable solution. It’s true there will be some costs if the banks fail. Any time a business fails, other investors tied financially to the company lose.

But here’s the rub—people who invest in bad businesses should lose. SVB’s failure is a reflection of the fact that it was a wealth shredder. It took depositors’ perfectly good cash, and converted it into now severely devalued bonds.

Banks that destroy wealth shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do so indefinitely. And when depositors make a “run” on bad banks, they’re performing a public service.

At this point, a bank bailout not only would mean the taxpayers will be left holding the bag for bankers’ mistakes—it would mean screwing up incentives in the banking industry even more.

I suspect it will go unheeded. Here’s another consideration: it’s incoherent on the one hand to complain about income inequality and on the other to bail out financiers when they screw up. If there’s a more perfect example of privatizing profits and socializing losses than that I don’t know what it is.

Bailing out big banks when they screw up is a prima facie case that regulators don’t care about income inequality.

I’m not sure what the Biden Administration’s hypothetical retort to that would be. That they don’t want little people to get hurt? Little people don’t have deposits over $250,000 in banks. And harsh as it might be to say the tech companies that stored tens or hundreds of millions in Silicon Valley Bank don’t actually employ that many people and the median household income in Silicon Valley is $140,000/year. It’s a stretch to call those the “little people”.