In a piece at Project Syndicate Obama Administration economic advisor Jason Furman makes two points, first, that the present inflation is largely driven by increased demand:

CAMBRIDGE – Commentators have generally offered two arguments about advanced economies’ performance since COVID-19 struck, only one of which can be true. The first is that the economic rebound has been surprisingly rapid, outpacing what forecasters expected and setting this recovery apart from the aftermath of previous recessions.

The second argument is that inflation has reached its recent heights because of unexpected supply-side developments, including supply-chain issues like semiconductor shortages, an unexpectedly persistent shift from services to goods consumption, a lag in people’s return to the workforce, and the persistence of the virus.

The first argument is more likely to be true than the second. Strong real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth suggests that economic activity has not been significantly hampered by supply issues, and that the recent inflation is mostly driven by demand.

and, second, that it is likely to be persistent:

Looking ahead, there are some reasons to expect demand to cool, but these will need to be weighed in the balance. Fiscal support is indeed winding down everywhere. Interest rates are starting to rise in the US and the United Kingdom, and will increase later this year in Europe as well. And equity markets have recently fallen back sharply.

But households still have substantial excess savings, and the overall stance of monetary policy remains accommodative, suggesting that demand will continue to be strong.

To my eye it’s pretty obvious that the present inflation is at least partially driven by printing money. Consider, for example, the oil to gold price ratio:

When measured in dollars the prices of both oil and gold have increased substantially over the last 15 months. Over that period the price of oil has nearly doubled. The gold price has increased, too. The price of oil in gold has risen, too, but not at the rate its price in dollars has.

I’m not a gold bug but one of the remarkable facts is how stable prices are when measured in gold. My point here is that if you truly want to stabilize prices, we shouldn’t issue ourselves more credit (print money). If you think that relief for the poor is a necessity under present circumstances, either 1) divert money from other uses or 2) realize more revenue. Note my diction. “Raising taxes” meaning “increasing marginal rates” does not necessarily generate more revenue. Don’t print more money. That won’t do much to solve the problem.

Kyle Kondik, writing at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball makes two points:

1. Republicans are likely to take control of the House of Representatives
2. At present all of the momentum is in the Republicans’ favor

To the first point:

So our main question about the House continues to be not whether Republicans will flip the House — although we would not completely shut the door on Democrats’ retaining control if the political environment improves markedly — but rather how big the Republicans’ eventual majority will be.

and to the second:

Toward that end, we are making 11 House rating changes, all in favor of Republicans. Let’s go through them, and then we’ll take a look at the overall House picture.

concluding:

As of this writing, redistricting remains incomplete in Florida, Missouri, and New Hampshire. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the following: 1. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) gets his way, and Republican state legislators approve his recently proposed map, where we’d rate 20 districts at least leaning Republican and 8 at least leaning Democratic; 2. Missouri eventually adopts a map that preserves 6 Republican-leaning seats and 2 Democratic-leaning ones; and 3. New Hampshire passes a map with 1 Democratic-leaning seat and 1 Toss-up.

If that happens, and no other state maps change due to legal action, here would be our topline ratings: 210 seats would be rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican, 198 would be rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Democratic, and 27 would be rated as Toss-ups.

Given the political environment, we’d expect Republicans to do quite well among the Toss-up races. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, they win 20 of the 27. That would result in a 230-205 Republican House, or a net gain of 17 from what Republicans won in 2020.

To be honest, that seems a little light in terms of Republican gains. If we had to guess, today, what Republicans would net in the House, we’d probably pick a number in the 20s. So that means our ratings are probably at least a little bit friendlier to Democrats than perhaps they should be. However, we do have several more seats rated Leans Democratic (15) compared to Leans Republican (8), which is one way of indicating how the playing field could grow. On the other hand, our ratings also reflect the possibility of a Democratic comeback in which they limit Republican advances.

Short of a Wayback Machine, I don’t believe there’s much that Democrats can to about the situation at this point. Many of the factors pushing things in the Republicans’ favor are long-term or structural matters; others are materially beyond their control. One thing I have noticed lately is that the surest way for President Biden to bolster his approval rating or, at least, to keep it from descending farther is to maintain a low profile. That doesn’t bode well for a more activist posture between now and November being helpful to Democrats.

In his Wall Street Journal column Democrat William Galston calls for President Biden’s leadership on what he deems the “border crisis”:

The Biden administration recently announced that it will abandon this policy as of May 23, a move that has driven Democrats facing tough re-election campaigns into full panic mode. The four most vulnerable Senate Democrats—Mark Kelly of Arizona, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada—have all criticized the move. Sen. Cortez Masto, long a critic of using Title 42 to control illegal immigration, recently issued a statement disputing the move to abandon it. “This is the wrong way to do this and it will leave the administration unprepared for a surge at the border,” she said. “We should be working to fix our immigration system by investing in border security and treating immigrant families with dignity. Instead, the administration is acting without a detailed plan.”

The lack of a plan to replace Title 42 points to the larger problem: Democrats recoiled in horror at the enforcement excesses of the Trump administration, symbolized by the separation of families at the border, but they never reached an agreement on a strategy to replace these excesses.

This is no accident. While most Republicans agree on the aims of immigration policy, Democrats are split. Progressive advocates claim to oppose open borders but reject any policy that would regulate the flow of migrants into the U.S. Moderates want a better balance between immigration flows and border security. They favor reforms that would reorient U.S. policy around economic factors rather than family reunification.

What sort of leadership does he want from President Biden?

No one will solve this problem for Mr. Biden. He must take charge of his administration and make the tough calls. Endangered Democrats have done the political math and have concluded that the costs of inaction exceed the costs of angering progressive immigration activists. The president should stop looking for a no-cost way out of this morass and do what needs to be done.

This means reversing course on Title 42 and continuing to enforce it until the administration’s new system for accelerating the assessment of asylum claims is fully up and running. It also means allowing the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy to remain in force while negotiating new measures with the Mexican government to enhance the safety and living conditions of migrants who are waiting for their claims to be adjudicated.

I think he’s asking too much of President Biden. If he took those actions many in his caucus would feel betrayed and I doubt it would gain a single independent vote for Democrats. Indeed, I think it would make Democrats look that much more rudderless. In Lincoln’s words, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

I would also say that I don’t believe we have a border crisis. I believe we have an immigration crisis. With something upwards of 1.6 million people crossing our southern border last year and this year, we certainly have the highest proportion of immigrants population in more than 110 years and possibly in considerably longer than that. Most of those immigrants are from Mexico, Central, or South America. Almost none are native speakers of English but most are native speakers of Spanish. The situation is unprecedented. We have never had such a large cohort of non-English speakers in the country, all speaking the same language other than English. No one really knows how many people are entering the country illegally. Estimates vary.

Meanwhile there is pressure for us to accept more political asylum-seekers and guest workers. I believe that as the total number of immigrants rises, the more resistance there will be to admitting more for any reason whatever.

There’s an interesting piece by Timothy S. Rich, Maggie Fields, Kierigan McEvoy, and Joe Black at The Diplomat on South Koreans’ support for U. S. military presence in their country and willingness to pay for it:

Conventional wisdom suggests that, outside of high-profile scandals such as rape cases, the South Korean public remains generally positive about the U.S. military presence. This is despite tensions in recent years about the costs of hosting U.S. troops. For example, in 2020, the Trump administration demanded a fivefold increase in South Korea’s payments for U.S. military costs, rejecting a 14 percent increase proposed by the Moon administration. The Biden administration ultimately agreed on a six-year extension with increases over time.

However, little attention has been to paid to what the South Korean public sees as a fair cost-sharing arrangement, and how this corresponds with overall evaluations of the U.S. presence.

It’s tricky to calculate how much of the cost of stationing U. S. forces within South Korea is borne by South Korea but estimates are between 30% and 44%. Said another way few doubt that the U. S. bears the majority of the costs.

The bottom line is that a narrow majority of South Koreans support the U. S. military presence in South Korea but most South Koreans support bearing a lower proportion of the cost than they do at present.

I don’t entirely agree that all of the things Katherine Boyle characterizes as “unserious” at Bari Weiss’s Substack are, in fact, unserious but I think they’re worth reflecting on. Here’s a partial list:

It is unserious to beg dictators in failed states to send America oil when we invented fracking. It is unserious to talk about renewables and not nuclear. It is unserious to attack the companies leading our electrification revolution because you don’t like their memes on Twitter.

It is unserious when the most trusted men in news are stand-up comedians.

It is unserious to LARP the culture war on cable television while our adversaries bomb maternity wards.

It is unserious to attack American tech companies while turning a blind eye to China’s theft of it.

It is unserious to watch the most educated generation in American history not be able to afford a starter home.

That last is a good example of something that I don’t think is unserious. I think it’s simply mistaken. Education is an input. There is no necessary relationship between the cost of inputs and prices. Prices are based on willingness to pay. No willingness to pay at the asking price—either the asking price will go down or the product won’t be sold. There are two different and interrelated factors that are unserious: 1) thinking that education ipso facto leads to higher wages and 2) not recognizing that prices are determined by willingness to pay.

Something else I believe was unserious: believing that we could convert Afghanistan into a liberal democracy in something other than geological time. I don’t think the unseriousness was in letting the country fall into chaos through a botched withdrawal after investing trillions in it. I think that anything beyond a punitive expedition was unserious.

Here are her prescriptions:

Build housing for the middle class. Build schools for the kids who want to learn math. Build next-generation defense capabilities with young people who grew up coding. Build PCR tests so that a nasal swab stops the nation from closing businesses at the mere sight of Covid case increases. Build trade schools. Encourage men and women to work with their hands again. Cut the red tape that stops us from building infrastructure fast. Build factories in America. Build resiliency in the supply chain. Build work cultures that support mothers and fathers so they can have more children.

I think there’s a lot of unseriousness built into that list in the form of bad assumptions, e.g. she assumes that young people grow up coding and that coding is enough for a next-generation defense capability. IMO those are assumptions of a coder. I on the other hand think that some young people grow up coding and that coding is an input to building a next-generation defense capability but not the most important input.

What are unserious policies other than those she mentions? IMO anything other than an “all of the above” energy policy is unserious. I think it’s unserious to increase the vitalness of reliable electricity without increasing grid capacity, security, and reliability. I think saddling future generations with debt for personal consumption today is unserious.

What would be serious policies?

In this case I mean nuclear reactors rather than nuclear weapons. Historically, it has been by making an issue a defense priority that policies which otherwise might have faced stiff opposition into realities. That has been the case with racial integration, our highway system, and expanding the number of people with college educations, just to name a few. It appears that might be the case with small-scale nuclear reactors. In an article at Military Times Todd South notes:

Pentagon officials recently announced that the Defense Department will build a nuclear microreactor that can be flown to an austere site by a C-17 cargo plane and set up to power a military base.

A statement released Wednesday by the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office announced the construction and testing decision that followed the office’s Environmental Impact Statement work for “Project Pele.”

The project’s Program Manager, Dr. Jeff Waksman, told Military Times that the office expects to choose one of two designs submitted by BWXT Advanced Technologies, LLC, out of Lynchburg, Virginia, and X-energy, LLC, out of Greenbelt, Maryland, in the coming weeks.

The article goes on to note that there are a dozen locations which could be used as pilot locations.

I expect that the plan will be subject to legal opposition, one of the major costs of nuclear power, but I also suspect that going via the military will sidestep the opposition to some extent.

The U. S. Customs and Border Protection agency has released the number of “encounters’, i.e. enforcement actions at our southern border for March 2022. The graph of the results is at the top of this post.

As you can see it is the largest in recent reckoning. The number of such “encounters” in 2021 exceeded the number for any year in the last 20 years at least with 1.74 million “encounters” having taken place. The greatest number of encounters is of single adults but there are a large number of families and unaccompanied minors as well.

At the Wall Street Journal Tarini Parti and Michelle Hackman report:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. has made more than a million arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border since October, the fastest pace of illegal border crossings in at least the last two decades, according to new data released Monday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Border agents made 209,906 arrests along the border in March, making it the busiest month in two decades. Another 11,397 migrants were permitted to enter the country to seek humanitarian protection at land border crossings, according to the data. The numbers cover a period from the beginning of the fiscal year to the end of March.

The numbers included a sharp rise in migrants from Cuba and Ukraine. About 32,271 Cubans crossed illegally at the border in March alone—almost as high as the 38,390 Cubans who crossed in all of the last fiscal year. So far this year, 79,377 Cubans have crossed the border illegally.

Nearly 5,000 Ukrainians were allowed to enter the country on temporary humanitarian grounds, primarily at a border checkpoint near San Diego.

There are several factors that should be taken into consideration. First, noone really knows what percent of people entering the country illegally via our southern border are apprehended. Maybe it’s 100%; maybe it’s 1%. Second, by and large these encounters end with those apprehended being released within the United States, presumably to appear at a hearing later. Based on recent statistics about a quarter of those fail to appear.

Third, over the last two years the number of illegal immigrants entering the country by our southern border constitute at least 1% of our total population.

What do I think should be done? Several things. Unaccompanied minors should be returned to their countries of origin full stop. If their countries of origin cannot be determined they should be returned to Mexico. There is no good solution to the problems they pose for us but what we are doing now amounts to kidnapping.

With respect to asylum claims we should pick one of the following. Either

1. We should change our laws to add whatever conditions we believe are reasonable and just to our present laws. If we think that poverty is a legitimate cause for asylum, we should add that to the law. If we think that high levels of crime and violence are a legitimate cause for asylum, we should add that. If we think that women having cruel and/or violent husbands have a legitimate cause for asylum, we should add that. None of those are presently legitimate claims for asylum and those presently making such claims are overloading our system. Only a minority of asylum claims are granted OR
2. We should enforce our present laws.

What we are doing now is arbitrary and capricious and inconsistent with the rule of law. We should also expand our publicity campaigns in Mexico and Central America to ensure that people have the correct information.

I’ve also made my views on immigration clear. I think that

1. We should greatly expand the number of work visas for which Mexican workers are eligible.
2. We should end the lottery and family reunification provisions of our present code.
3. In general we should have immigration systems much more like those of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than like the system we presently have.

I also think the very high percentage of foreign-born residents presently in the U. S. is destabilizing and our first line of attack should be in reducing the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border.

And speaking of laments, I can think of no better way to characterize Michel Lind’s article at Tablet Magazine which I don’t believe I’ve ever cited before. In the article Mr. Lind argues that today’s progressives have blundered down the same arid path that conservatives did years ago and there’s precious little creativity or dissension from the accepted orthodox view:

If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.

Consider center-left journals of opinion. In the 1990s, The New Yorker, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Washington Monthly all represented distinctive flavors of the center left, from the technocratic neoliberalism of Washington Monthly to the New Left countercultural ethos of The Nation and the snobbish gentry liberalism of The New Yorker. Today, they are bare Xeroxes of each other, promoting and rewriting the output of single-issue environmental, identitarian, and gender radical nonprofits, which all tend to be funded by the same set of progressive foundations and individual donors.

It is not surprising that the written output of this billionaire-funded bureaucratic apparatus tends to read like an NGO word salad with crunchy croutons in the form of acronyms that stud post-intellectual progressive discourse: DEI, CRT, AAPI, BIPOC, LGBTQ+. Wokespeak is Grantspeak.

Meanwhile, in one area of public policy or politics after another, Progressivism Inc. has shut down debate on the center left through its interlocking networks of program officers, nonprofit functionaries, and editors and writers, all of whom can move with more or less ease between these roles during their careers as bureaucratic functionaries whose salaries are ultimately paid by America’s richest families and individuals. The result is a spectacularly well-funded NGO-sphere whose intellectual depth and breadth are contracting all the time.

In the 1990s, you could be a progressive in good standing and argue against race-based affirmative action, in favor of race-neutral, universal social programs that would help African Americans disproportionately but not exclusively. Around 2000, however, multiple progressive outlets at the same time announced that “the debate about affirmative action is over.” Today race-neutral economic reform, of the kind championed by the democratic socialist and Black civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and the Marxist Adolph Reed, is stigmatized on the center left as “colorblind racism,” and progressives in the name of “equity” are required to support blatant and arguably illegal racial discrimination against non-Hispanic white Americans and “white-adjacent” Asian-Americans, for fear of being purged as heretics.

The same mindless orthodoxy is seen in issue after issue from immigration to energy to LGBT+ rights and a host of others. The orthodoxy is enforced through a combination of blacklisting and censorship.

Read the whole thing.

In a similar vein in his Sun-Times column Neil Steinberg laments that all-out war with Russia is inevitable:

Is the United States heading toward war? It seems a very real possibility. Some arms convoy in Poland will be hit, and the gears of general conflagration will start to turn. It’ll all seem inevitable, afterward. Then we can be haunted aplenty.

Just to be clear. I’m not saying the United States shouldn’t continue arming Ukraine. We have to. Which means we must accept the possibility of war. We don’t like to think about that. The whole strategy of handing weapons to Ukrainians and letting them actually pull the trigger is a tactic designed to avoid dragging ourselves into actual fighting. The easy way.

We should keep in mind that every wargame of great power conflict over the period of the last 30 years at least has resulted in a nuclear exchange. Every one. How did we get ourselves into such a predicament?

If nothing we have done contributed to Putin’s rise to power, if nothing we have done has had any effect on Putin’s actions, indeed, if Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was inevitable, we are completely helpless and there’s nothing we can to do prevent a worldwide conflagration. All of the choices are Putin’s.