Paul Vallas, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s erstwhile opponent for the job of mayor, has a piece at Illinois Policy decrying Mayor Johnson’s handling of negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union:

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson will do whatever it takes to get his cohorts at the Chicago Teachers Union the unaffordable and egregious contract it wants, and it will be just the beginning of ruining city finances.

The mayor’s failed efforts to allow his office to make loans and grants to the school district through his infrastructure proposal, much like his renewed pressure on the district to borrow $242 million for pensions, is but a prelude to the efforts he will undertake to pay for a new teachers contract that is unaffordable. It will raise property taxes and force the city to cut services.

The last record-setting contract made CTU members the highest-paid workers among large school districts and added over 9,000 new staff, all while adding $1.5 billion in new spending. That lucrative contract did not stop the CTU from engaging in two illegal work stoppages, effectively forcing the district to keep schools closed during COVID with devastating consequences.

The increased spending didn’t improve student outcomes in Chicago Public Schools: five years after the 2019 contract negotiations, 41% of students are chronically absent and fewer than 1 in 3 students are proficient in reading and even fewer are proficient in math.

The CTU’s original demands for its next contract exceeded $10 billion. However you cut it, the new contract will force Chicagoans to pay substantially more for bad outcomes.

The City of Chicago’s present S&P credit rating is BBB—the lowest investment grade bond rating. The next step would be what is called a “speculative grade”, i.e. not investment grade. The recent downgrade is a vote of “no confidence” from S&P and will mean that Chicago will pay more to finance its debt going forward.

I voted for Vallas in the last mayoral election. I have no idea how anyone expected Brandon Johnson to do anything other than what he has done.

Chicago’s population has declined by nearly a million people since its peak in 1950. I see little prospect for Chicago being able to fix its financial situation with any measure short of bankruptcy. Those who want a solid financial basis are leaving Chicago and, indeed, the state leaving Chicagoans who think they are benefiting from the city’s profligacy behind.

Before writing more generally about the budget, I thought I’d express my thoughts on Social Security.

First, I think that there is no way other than a system like Social Security to ensure that Americans are not destitute in their old age. Any other plan bears some risk of loss which negates that. Furthermore, any plan that invests its trust fund in private investments will eventually come to own a substantial percentage of all assets, something I don’t believe those who propose such things want to happen.

Second, Social Security has become something quite different from what was imagined in 1935. In 1940 when the Social Security system began paying monthly benefits most could not expect to live to 65 and those who did could only expect to live into their mid-70s. There was no expectation that most Americans would retire in their 60s and collect benefits for the next 20-40 years. That’s a completely different system than was originally envisioned.

So here are the reforms I think should be made.

1. All wage income should be subject to Social Security taxes. That will not realize as much income as some seem to think since the highest income earners can arrange things to minimize their wage income and take their income in other forms.
2. The minimum Social Security Retirement Age should be gradually increased to 70 with the “full Social Security Retirement Age” gradually increased to 80.
3. These ages should be indexed to life expectancy.

I also think we should stop importing workers with low lifetime earnings expectations but that’s another subject.

If Congress wishes to create a separate compulsory retirement savings system in which funds can be invested in private investments, I would not oppose it but I honestly can’t imagine such a system. The present 401K system is lousy.

The situation with Medicare is even worse. Not only does it have the same age issues that Social Security does, Congress has shown no willingness to economize on Medicare costs. Some hold the mystical belief that can be corrected if everyone is covered within the same plan. I do not believe that will be effective as long as Congress is not willing to economize.

Something really does need to be done and that’s not a “right-wing MAGA” fantasy. Many economists and financiers including Lawrence Summers, Jared Bernstein, Jerome Powell, and Jamie Dimon (hardly a catalog of “right-wing MAGA” fanatics) have said that what we are doing is not sustainable. Even Paul Krugman has implied as much if not saying so outright. His terse response to questions about his thoughts on Modern Monetary Theory was “things don’t work that way” which in turn implies that what we’re doing is not sustainable.

The opinion pages are full of reactions to the Trump Administration’s ignoring of court orders staying the deportation of alleged Tren de Aragua members. A sample are:

Michael A. Fragoso at City Journal
Ray Brescia at MSNBC
Philip Bump at the Washington Post

just to name a few. Some of these refer to the situation as a “constitutional crisis”. Is there an actual constitutional crisis? I think there is but it’s not limited to the issues that are being called a “constitutional crisis”.

As I see it the crisis extends to the presidency, the Congress, and the judiciary. Nobody wants to do their own jobs. Maybe more precisely everybody is treating their jobs as a sort of cafeteria, picking and choosing the components they want to do.

Rather than focusing on the deportation issue, let’s consider the recent decision by district court judge Theodore D. Chuang with respect to USAID. It falsely asserts that USAID was created by Congress. USAID was created by President John F. Kennedy by executive order. Its reorganization by the Congress did not define its role, leaving that to the executive.

Those are egregious errors of fact in Judge Chuang’s opinion. As of this writing the Supreme Court has not reversed the decision but Chief Justice Roberts has expressed disapproval of President Trump’s calling for Congress to impeach Judge Chuang. What’s wrong with calling for the impeachment of judges who commit egregious errors of fact in their decisions?

The Congress, too, has been remiss. The budget is its responsibility and the continuing resolution is not a budget. Its kicking the can down the road instead of enacting a budget. More on the budget later.

The list of derelictions is practically endless.

You might want to read Alan J. Kuperman’s piece at The Hill. Here’s its opening:

I rarely agree with President Trump, but his latest controversial statements about Ukraine are mostly true. They only seem preposterous because western audiences have been fed a steady diet of disinformation about Ukraine for more than a decade. It is time to set the record straight on three key points that illuminate why Ukrainians and former President Joe Biden — not merely Russian President Vladimir Putin — bear significant responsibility for the outbreak and perpetuation of war in Ukraine.

The piece is copiously annotated. The three points are:

1. The violence that provoked Russia’s initial incursion into Ukraine was initiated by ultra-nationalist Ukrainians.
2. President Zelensky violated multiple peace deals with Russia, seeking NATO membership and support instead.
3. President Biden basically gave Zelensky a blank check, “escalating and perpetuating” the fighting.

Dr. Kuperman concludes:

The basic outlines of a deal to end the fighting are obvious even if details remain to be negotiated, as Trump and Putin started doing today in a phone call. Russia will continue to occupy Crimea and other portions of the southeast, while the rest of Ukraine will not join NATO but will get security guarantees from some western countries. The sad thing is that such a plan could have been achieved at least two years ago if only President Biden had made military aid conditional on Zelensky negotiating a ceasefire.

Even more tragic, whatever peace deal emerges after the war will be worse for Ukraine than the Minsk accords that Zelensky foolishly abandoned due to his political ambitions and naïve expectation of bottomless U.S. support.

I presume that Dr. Kuperman’s piece will be dismissed as Russian propaganda. Unfortunately, whatever the truth might be it has become irrelevant. We can choose from Ukrainian propaganda or Russian propaganda.

I’m not particularly interested in watching them dye the Chicago River green. I’ve been down to see the South Side St. Patrick’s Day Parade. It was okay. Public drunkenness isn’t my idea of a good time. Or, at least, it’s more fun to be a participant than a spectator.

Consequently, our St. Patrick’s Day was pretty quiet. Corned beef and cabbage is Irish-American rather than Irish. I made a sauté of Irish bangers, onions, leeks, carrots, potatoes, and cabbage. Sort of a combination of bangers and colcannon. My wife wants to have it again tonight.

Then we watched The Quiet Man on TV. Director John Ford created as close to a love note to Ireland as you can get in that movie. It’s probably John Ford’s most beautiful movie. When you consider how many movies he shot in Monument Valley that’s saying something.

For my money the unsung heroes of the picture are all of the members of the Abbey Theatre (National Theatre of Ireland). That includes Maureen O’Hara, her brother Charles FitzSimons, Barry Fitzgerald and his brother Arthur Shields. They provide most of the humor and local color in the movie.

The editors of the Washington Post call for a lifting of sanctions against Syria:

More than three months since the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus, the country remains in a desperate situation. Fourteen years of civil war have shattered the economy. Ninety percent of Syrians live below the poverty line, 1 in 4 are jobless and half of the children are out of school. Seven million people survive in tents and makeshift shelters, and some 16.5 million rely on humanitarian assistance to meet their basic needs. The central bank has too little cash to pay salaries, and the Syrian pound, the national currency, is scarce.

The new government, a rebel coalition led by the Islamist militia group Hay?at Tahrir al-Sham, is struggling to impose security. A recent clash between remnants of the ousted regime’s armed supporters and the government’s security forces left hundreds dead, most of them members of Assad’s Alawite minority based in Syria’s coastal provinces. There were clashes with the minority Druze community outside Damascus. Kidnappings and reprisal killings have surged. And Israel has launched scores of airstrikes and raids targeting weapons depots while building its own military outposts.

Fixing the economic mess, imposing security and preventing the country from splintering along sectarian lines are the daunting challenges facing Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. He needs all the help he can get — including from the United States. One thing the Trump administration could do right away is lift the crushing U.S. economic sanctions that hinder Syria’s recovery.

Their argument, essentially, is that unless we lift economic sanctions from the radical Islamic Sunni Arab government Syria will become a failed state.

Syria is already a failed state. The editors opposed the Assad government because Assad was a tyrant. al-Sharaa is a tyrant but, apparently, they support him. Worse than just being a tyrant, he is a radical Islamist Sunni Arab tyrant. Remember the guys who launched the largest terrorist attacks against the United States in our history in 2001? They guys who massacred and enslaved the Yezidis in Iraq?

The multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Syria we have known for the last 80 years is gone, replaced by a government whose soldiers are killing hundreds of Syrians who are Alawites, Druze, or Christians. Any notion that post-Assad Syria will be a liberal democracy is a fantasy. Yes, Syria is desperately poor. It is desperately poor because it is run by tyrants. If we lift sanctions, Syria will continue to be desperately poor but it will make it easier for today’s tyrants to continue their pogroms against Alawites, Christians, and Druze and the tyrants will become rich. Supporting Syria’s latest tyrant is not in the U. S. interest.

I literally have no idea of what the editors of the Washington Post believe in and editorials like this do nothing to clarify their views. Are they nihilists? There are many wiser foreign policy analysts on Substack.

The Trump Administration has begun a more systematic campaign to counter Houthi strikes against commercial and military shipping in the Red Sea. Nancy A. Youssef, Saleh al-Batati, and Benoit Faucon report in the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. military officials described Saturday’s strikes as the beginning of a sustained campaign targeting the rebel group. The USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group is currently operating in the region and led the U.S. military response, a U.S. defense official said.

The operation included “precision strikes against Iran-backed Houthi targets across Yemen to defend American interests, deter enemies, and restore freedom of navigation,” U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Middle East, posted on X.

Trump said the strikes were also a message to Iran that it needed to immediately halt support for the group. If Iran threatens the U.S., “America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!,” he said on his Truth Social platform.

Hours after the U.S. strikes in Yemen, Hossein Salami, the top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, rejected Trump’s allegations that Iran was backing the Houthis. Iran plays no role in the Houthis’ strategic and operational decisions but Tehran would respond if threatened, Salami was quoted as saying by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.

Tehran also publicly denies that it supplies the Houthis with weapons, but United Nations inspectors have regularly traced seized weapons shipments back to Iran.

The Houthis began targeting commercial and military ships transiting the Red Sea and other nearby waters shortly after the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in what it described as support for the Palestinians. The group suspended those attacks in January, following a cease-fire deal reached by Israel and Hamas.

But in recent weeks, disputes over how to move to the next phase of that cease-fire have threatened to derail an already fragile deal.

Will these strikes be more effective than the Biden Administration’s program of retaliatory strikes against Houthi targets has been? Frankly, I doubt it. I cannot imagine that the area of Yemen in question is a target-rich environment.

The last several years has demonstrated rather conclusively that it’s much harder to maintain sufficient control of an airspace to prevent enemies from striking your commercial or military interests than it used to be. It doesn’t require a national-style air force to conduct such operations. They may be conducted by small groups or even individuals.

As I said at the outset of Houthi harassment of Red Sea shipping two years ago, actually eliminating the possibility of such attacks will require control of the territory from the Red Sea to a 100 km into the interior of the country. That’s 10% of the country or more. I suspect it would require ground operations and such operations have been avoided to date.

There’s a rather remarkable column in the New York Times from Zeynep Tufekci, undoubtedly motivated by the fifth anniversary of COVID-19. Here’s the meat of the piece:

The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. had already come to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?

I found the use of the passive voice in the title amusing, given the tenor of the column itself: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives”.

And, as Dr. Tufekci makes clear in her column, it was not just a case of knowing little about the virus at the outset but that physicians, scientists, and bureaucrats actively and knowingly lied about the virus and what they knew or did not know.

The German press recently has been full of stories about how the German intelligence service believes with high certainty that the pandemic was the consequence of a “lab leak” from the Wuhan laboratory. My own view, as I have said before, is that is a step too far.

We don’t really know what produced the pandemic—naturally evolving or lab leak—and we are unlikely to know unless the Chinese government miraculously becomes forthcoming about it. The only thing I can imagine that might cause that to happen, as I have said before, would be for our judges and political leaders to allow a civil suit against the Chinese government seeking in the vicinity of $30 trillion in consequential and punitive damages over COVID to proceed.

In the meantime I hope we learn how essential it is for professionals on whom we rely for their expertise be unswervingly honest in their public pronouncements. To be otherwise undermines public trust and, indeed, the very reasons that we rely on them. Furthermore, I hope we have learned that we should not subsidize “gain of function” research outside a place where we can control the safety measures put in place or how the knowledge is used.

Interceptions of eggs smuggled into the United States from Mexico or Canada have increased sharply this year, a response, no doubt, to the high prices. Jeanne Whalen reports at the Wall Street Journal:

The 64 pounds of meth stuffed into the seats and spare tire of a pickup truck caught the attention of border agents in El Paso, Texas, who seized the drugs last month. But it was the trays of eggs that really alarmed them.

As egg prices soar in the U.S., travelers have been stocking up on cheaper supplies in Mexico and, to some degree, Canada. The U.S. Department of Agriculture bans such imports because eggs not inspected through official channels can spread disease.

So-called egg interceptions are up 36% nationwide so far this fiscal year, compared with the previous year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Along parts of the Texas border, they have risen by 54%, according to CBP’s Laredo field office. In San Diego, they have more than doubled, CBP has reported.

The restrictions on imports of eggs are not due solely to industry lobbying or avian flu. There are risks of salmonella and other diseases as well.