You might be interested in this post at FilterBuy by David Heacock on the metro areas that have seen the fastest incrases in the cost of living:

Over the last decade, many of the places where the cost of living grew the most were economically prosperous states that have seen growth in high-paying jobs and attracted more residents to their major metros, like Washignton (Seattle), Oregon (Portland), and Massachusetts (Boston). Price increases now, however, appear to be a nationwide phenomenon, and for areas where the rate of job and wage growth is slower, household expenses may take up an increasingly large share of workers’ earnings.

Highest: Seattle, Denver, Portland.

If you’re wondering where Chicago stands, it’s way down on the list—housing prices are increasing slowly because no one wants to live here.

An interesting post from Scott Grannis on inflation. Here’s a sample snippet:

What’s happening these days is a vicious circle of sorts: money demand has failed to keep with the growth in the money supply, and this has led to rising prices; rising prices, in turn, erode the demand for money, since the value of money is declining as prices rise, and all of this reinforces the public’s desire to reduce money balances, borrow more, and increase spending.

This inflationary dynamic won’t end until a) the Fed substantially reduces the supply of reserves to the banking system, b) the Fed substantially increases short-term interest rates (by enough to offset the erosion of money’s value via inflation, c) the banking system becomes less willing to lend, and/or d) the public becomes less willing to borrow.

Of those four the easiest to accomplish from a technical rather than from a political standpoint is b closely followed by a. Then c and, finally, d. The politics is different. The ease is exactly the opposite. I’m guessing the Fed and the White House both start complaining about d.

At RealClearPolicy No Labels presents five facts on the shortage of truckdrivers:

1. According to the American Truckers Association, the U.S. currently faces an all-time high shortage of 80,000 truckers.
2. Four million job postings for trucking positions in 2021 required a Commercial Driver’s License at a minimum — and many also sought past professional experience.
3. Four out of five U.S. truckers are over age 45 — and nearly one in four are over age 55.
4. Turnover for truck drivers in fleets with more than $30 million of annual revenue was 92% at the end of 2020.
5. The Transportation Department projected last year that ground freight totals will rise by 50% by 2050 to 28.7 billion tons.

Here’s my question. When what passes for industrial policy in the U. S. over the period of the last 30 years has been to send everyone to college, preaching that the only way of getting a job that will enable people to maintain a decent standard of living is to go to college in search of a job that requires a college degree (or, increasingly, an advanced degree), what do they expect?

I suggest doing more local manufacturing and reducing interstate transport. Better yet hyperlocal. We should be doing a lot more with additive manufacturing. Do more local deliveries with autonomous vehicles.

I genuinely wish that those heaping praise on Sidney Poitier after his death would consider what they’re saying more carefully. Much of what is being said could also be said of Harry Belafonte and Harry Belafonte is still alive. First black-white romance? That would be 1959’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil with Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens, and Mel Ferrer (A Patch of Blue was in 1965).

A group of parents of Chicago Public Schools students, not content to wait for the CPS to take action, have filed suit against the Chicago Teachers Union. WTTW reports:

A group of Chicago Public Schools parents are suing the Chicago Teachers Union, seeking an immediate return to in-person learning after classes have been repeatedly canceled this week during the union’s COVID-19 standoff with the city.

Seven CPS parents filed a lawsuit against the CTU on Friday, which also marked the third consecutive day without classes during a union labor action that has seen its 25,000 members working remotely until the city agrees to stricter health and safety protocols.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in Cook County Chancery Court, the parents claim the union’s action is actually an “illegal strike” — language that’s also been used by Mayor Lori Lightfoot. They want a judge to immediately order teachers to return to their schools and resume in-person learning.

“CTU’s resolution calling members to not show up for work in-person is a strike regardless of what CTU calls it and violates both the collective bargaining agreement with CPS and Illinois law,” Jeffrey Schwab, an attorney with the Liberty Justice Center, which filed the suit, said in a statement. “CTU cannot unilaterally decide what actions should be taken to keep public schools safe, completely silencing parents’ input about what is best for the health, safety, and well-being of their children.”

Rank-and-file CTU members on Tuesday voted in favor of the labor action, claiming CPS has not done enough to protect students and staff inside schools from surging COVID-19 cases, driven largely by the omicron variant.

In an ideal world the CPS and the CTU would collaborate in getting the schools open. Facilities and protective measures would be reviewed on a case by case basis and corrected to the satisfaction of both parties. As a regular commenter astutely observed, the easy solution for the teachers is remote learning while the easy solution for parents and children is in-person learning. IMO ease is likely to prevail over the expensive and arduous work required to take the necessary remediative steps.

There is one mistake I hope will be avoided: trying to tar these parents as MAGA hat-wearing Trump supporters. They’re undoubtedly all or nearly all Democrats. This is Chicago. But it would be consistent with the predisposition these days to seek heretics rather than allies.

I found this interview of Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko by Adam O’Neal in the Wall Street Journal very throught-provoking. What first caught my attention was the surname Radchenko. Although the surname occurs in Russia it is more common in Ukraine. As it turns out Dr. Radchenko was born on the island of Sakhalin. Sakhalin, as you presumably are aware, is in the Pacific ocean, sandwiched between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. It must be a lonely, even boring existence there. However, I’ll accept him as a Russian.

This is the part of the interview that caught my attention:

Consider the Berlin crisis (1958-61). Khrushchev perceived the balance of power shifting as the Soviet nuclear arsenal grew, and he believed he could bluff away some of his country’s foreign-policy dilemmas. “He would say, ‘OK, we’ll squeeze the Americans out of Berlin.’ Obviously Berlin was a big sore point for Khrushchev, much as Ukraine is for Putin today,” Mr. Radchenko says. “He presented an ultimatum to the Americans—that you have to sign a peace treaty with Germany, paving the way to a withdrawal from Berlin. And if you don’t, he implied, then the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and they’ll kick the U.S. out of Berlin.”

The archives show that Khrushchev “thought that the Americans were unlikely to go to war over Berlin, and he made the calculation that it was a 95% chance that they would not go to war,” Mr. Radchenko continues. Still, that was a 5% chance of “an absolutely destructive, suicidal war. And that was too much for him. So he decided to back down and quietly wind down the whole Berlin thing by building a Berlin Wall.”

Today Mr. Putin seeks an agreement that would limit the size and activities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, effectively restoring Russian dominion over much of Central and Eastern Europe—a nonstarter for Washington and the alliance’s leadership. “I’m not trying to suggest that Putin is Khrushchev or Khrushchev is Putin,” Mr. Radchenko says. “What I’m saying is that Putin cannot be blind to this general perception—that’s not just in Russia but around the world—that there’s a changing correlation of forces.”

Let’s consider the two situations. Was Berlin as important to Khrushchev as Ukraine is to Putin? Is Ukraine as important to Biden as Berlin was to Eisenhower? I think the answer to both of those questions is “No”. Khrushchev backed down at least in a sense. He built a wall. Based on that understanding what do you think is likely to happen with respect to Ukraine?

There is also an issue of relative strength. Don’t make the mistake that the U. S. made for 40 years and overestimate the Soviet Union’s postwar strength. Putin’s tactical position with respect to Ukraine is enormously stronger than Khrushchev’s with respect to Berlin and his strategic interest are far stronger. The situation is the reverse for the U. S.

Interestingly, Dr. Radchenko ends on an optimistic note which is worth considering:

If Mr. Putin is hell-bent on incorporating Eastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation, he has the military capability to do so. But Mr. Radchenko sees some space for optimism. “I feel that Putin is an opportunist,” he says. “If he is an opportunist, then it’s likely that he can be convinced, with the proper inducement and proper application of sticks and carrots, to pursue a different policy. But you also have to then consider what to give him, and how to give it, in order not to potentially encourage further encroachment and further aggression.”

He thinks “freezing the situation on Donbas probably would be everyone’s preferred solution at this stage, because the alternative is unfreezing it and we don’t want to unfreeze it at this moment, because this would mean war. That is why advice would be, both to Kyiv and in fact to Moscow, to try to find some sort of compromise solution. And that, of course, means avoiding by all means a renewal of military hostilities on the actual line separating the two sides in Donbas.”

There are two key points there. First, Putin is very much a realist as well as an opportunist but Khrushchev was very much the idealist. He had played a role in the 1917 revolution and the subsequent civil war. That runs parallel to the difference between today’s Russia and the Soviet Union.

The other point is that such a settlement, while in the interests of both Russia and the U. S., will absolutely be opposed by both the unreconstructed Cold Warriors and the Poles and Ukrainians who have such great influence on U. S. policy. It’s a dangerous time and I hope that we maintain a firm eye on U. S. interests.

Although I materially agree with the observations in Matt Bai’s most recent Washington Post column, I don’t think he fully apprehends their implications. He states his thesis pretty clearly in his opening sentences:

Democrats, who nominally control Washington, are about to face a reckoning on covid-19.

At some point soon, they’re going to have to start treating the coronavirus not as the uncontrollable public health crisis it used to be, but as the public policy crisis it has now become.

After the obligatory sideswipe at Donald Trump he continues by dividing the American public into three groups:

The largest group is the fully vaccinated. For most of us, the new variant is a serious nuisance, like an especially virile flu, but not much more than that. It’s unpleasant (I know, because I have it), but if this were the version of covid that hit everyone who got infected in 2020, no school or business would have closed.

The second group is the immune-compromised, even if they are vaccinated — including people with underlying conditions and the elderly. The risk to them remains high, and the extra care they have to take can be isolating. But that’s the case with every contagion, including the flu. We don’t reorder the society around it.

The third group is, of course, the unvaccinated. (I’m not including children under 5, who are still not eligible for a coronavirus vaccine.) They’ve now had a year to absorb all the warnings and weigh all the arguments. They’ve seen high-profile vaccine deniers — talk show hosts, Trumpian candidates — needlessly dying from a virus they chose to exploit.

At this point, the unvaccinated are like unrepentant smokers. We’ve spent decades telling them they might get lung cancer. We’ve plastered warnings everywhere.

But you know what? All of us get to make our own idiotic choices — that’s the American way.

which brings to mind Robert Benchley’s observation about people who divide other people into groups. And it’s where I think Mr. Bai hasn’t thought things through. The definition of the first group is, shall we say, emergent. Yesterday it was people who’d received two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine; today it’s people who’ve also received a booster. Tomorrow? Who knows?

The second group is equally fluid. How does one distinguish between the first and second groups? Presumably, if you’ve been fully inoculated and you still contract COVID-19, are you in that second group? Is there a real empirical distinction between the two? I don’t think so.

His remarks about the unvaccinated are equally problematic. People who smoke don’t provide as great a risk to those who don’t as people who are not inoculated against COVID-19 pose. Consider President Biden’s recent remarks:

All these people who have not been vaccinated, you have an obligation to yourselves, to your family, and, quite frankly — I know I’ll get criticized for this — to your country.

Get vaccinated now. It’s free. It’s convenient. I promise you, it saves lives. And I, honest to God, believe it’s your patriotic duty.

Does that sound like an acknowledgement that people have a right to make their “own idiotic choices” to you? Me, neither. Is that position reconcilable with mandates? How?

The reality is that those who are unwilling to accept a heightened level of risk, regardless of cost-benefit, will not be persuaded. That’s playing out right now in the work stoppage being carried on by Chicago’s teachers.

Mr. Bai goes on to make a valuable observation:

Sure, you can argue that the virus still overwhelms hospitals and is costing us a ton of money. But that’s a capacity problem, not an existential crisis. You don’t solve technical shortages by shuttering schools and keeping nurses at home with draconian quarantine policies.

There are a couple of things we need to come to terms with. Failing to expand capacity permanently is predicated on the assumption of “Zero COVID” and that assumption is decreasingly supportable. Reasonable people may have different views of that but I think it reflects a basic problem with our whole healthcare system.

After that lengthy exposition he finally gets to the point:

If Biden is going to beat the pandemic rather than be undone by it, he is going to have to acknowledge the new reality, which is that our public policy is way too weighted toward a bunch of people who made the wrong choice.

Biden said as much in remarks at the White House Tuesday, addressing his comments to the unvaccinated. That’s fine.

But it’s his own Democratic constituencies — teachers unions, local governments, ultra-leftist Trump haters who refuse to let go of the culture war over the virus — who would continue to hold the country hostage to what now is a manageable public health risk. In Montgomery County, a group of parents and teachers who want to close the schools issued a call this week for children to stay home in protest.

Biden needs to take these people on and steer his party toward a more sensible course.

There is an old phrase used to characterize such advice: whistling past a graveyard. President Biden can’t “take these people on”. Not only has he failed to do so throughout his lengthy political career, he depends on them.

There’s another reality that we’ll need to come to terms with soon. As the number of “fully vaccinated” people (whatever that means at the time) rises as it undoubtedly will the percentage of “fully vaccinated” people hospitalized for COVID-19 and who die of it will rise. That’s just mathematics. Look at any study, any infographic on those hospitalized with COVID-19 and those who died of it. The percentage of “fully vaccinated” in their number is non-zero. That mathematical fact alone will provide all of the ammunition those Democratic constituencies Mr. Bai calls out need to continue the “culture war” over the pandemic into the indefinite future.

Deplatformed, er, retired Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass has advice for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for dealing with the Chicago Teachers Union’s refusal to work in person in the face of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2:

Only a small handful of Chicago public school students, most with serious co-morbidities, have died from the pandemic. But about 230 kids have been victims of homicide in Chicago, according to wirepoints.org

Who weeps for that 15-year-old South or West Side boy who was already academically behind, that boy who was cut adrift during last year’s failed remote learning?

Now, after one year already lost and CTU shutting schools again, that boy is again cut loose by a morally indefensible system.

He’s lost out there. A few of his friends may get lucky and find a productive future, perhaps join the Marines or the Army and realize structure in discipline.

But that lost boy? His future is all about fear and prison and pain. He’ll become a statistic floating away in Chicago’s river of violence, where the names of the dead are forgotten by a city already numb.

And who’ll weep for that boy?

CTU leaders won’t weep. Neither will hard left progressives who love their virtue signaling and back the CTU’s illegal work stoppage. Randi Weingarten–president of the American Federation of Teachers that serves as the shock troops for the Democratic Party–won’t weep. And neither will Chicago’s silent, frightened business community.

CTU president Jesse Sharkey, the angry man in red in the photograph above, piles on Lightfoot. As does Weingarten.

And the left continues devouring its own.

As I typed that last sentence, I was reminded of an iconic photo of the George Floyd riots in Chicago. You may remember it. It was in the Sun Times, taken as the left began to devour administrations of liberal black mayors across America, including Lightfoot’s, in those “sometimes fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”

The photo was of an angry white woman facing off against two black Chicago police officers. I didn’t see any identification, she could have been an incognito Republican secretly hell-bent on discrediting the raging neo-Marxists, but I doubt it.

I figured her for a CTU member teaming up with Black Lives Matter rioters out on Michigan Avenue, or one of those angry suburban female leftists, just before all the Boul Mich storefronts were shattered and looted.

The photo shows her masked, her face a foot or so away from two black cops. The veteran officers were calm. She was not calm, with both of her beefy pink arms upraised, giving the officers the finger from each hand. It was an image beyond words:

Angry white woman of the left up in the faces of two unmasked black cops, her two middle fingers up, her political rage boiling through that mask that protected her identity. You could almost hear her screams.

Some 35 years ago, then Secretary of Education William Bennett pronounced Chicago’s Public Schools as the “worst in the nation.” Now, it’s even worse than Bennett could have imagined.

Over the last few years, as more and more parents—black, brown and white—began pulling their children from Chicago Public Schools in droves, the CPS budget kept growing even as the CPS student population shrunk. Yes, the system is morally bankrupt, but flush with cash, spending about $27,000 a year per student only to fail them.

To those of you wise in the Chicago Way, the muscle flexed by militant CTU leaders is clear:

They’re measuring the drapes in the mayor’s office. CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates has been floated as a mayoral contender. Sharkey isn’t the power. He’s the front man. Gates is the one with the real juice and the nerve.

And the 2023 mayoral campaign proceeds in a dying city.

Lightfoot opposes CTU’s move toward remote learning. She has responded by locking CTU teachers out of remote learning platforms. She’s threatened to withhold their pay. She deserves credit for talking tough, but then, she’s talked tough many times before. Each time she’s caved to the CTU.

She hasn’t had a win since her inauguration day, when she shamed the City Council. Now she struggles in her mayoral fundraising efforts, flailing.

The other day she made a speech, trying to reboot on fighting the crime wave. But her rhetoric isn’t nearly enough, especially not after she failed to stand up to rioters and looters that savaged the city during the BLM George Floyd riots, as Chicago began its plunge into lawlessness.

She talks of “positive police interactions” with communities, even as murders in those neighborhoods go uncharged, as crime goes unprosecuted, as violent career criminals charged with more violent crime are released back on the streets through low or no bail, or electronic home monitoring, to victimize others even as they await trial.

Much of the blame for this goes to Cook County State’s Atty. Kim Foxx and Foxx’ patron Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Yet Lightfoot dares not mention Toni’s name. And Lightfoot endorsed Foxx for re-election.

As troubled parents flee with their kids–some running to Indiana, Florida, Wisconsin, some to private/parochial schools they can’t afford–we should remember what former Mayor Rahm Emanuel said about crisis.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Emanuel said. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.”

What is that thing Chicago couldn’t do before?

Real School Choice.

Real School Choice is the only way out for Chicago and the nation. It is the only way to break the militant teacher union leadership’s hold on the most vulnerable families. It is the only way to stop the left’s radicalizing of children in the cities and the suburbs.

Let tax money follow the students. Give families a choice. In Chicago, the money is there. $27,000 a year can pay for private school tuition.

This is called freedom. And not freedom only for those with means, but hope for low-income black and brown and poor whites who’ve been left behind by a corrupt system controlled by corrupt political actors.

which I feel confident she will not take.

I also don’t think that would be quite as effective as Mr. Kass seems to believe. It would require parents who are willing to abandon their local public schools in favor or more distant and less convenient alternatives and I suspect those are a minority in Chicago.

It would, however, be effective in ensuring that Mayor Lightfoot has at least one well-funded primary opponent in her re-election bid.

Last month was a recordbreaking one for raises offered by small firms. James Freeman reports at the Wall Street Journal:

The fierce competition for workers among U.S. employers has inspired another record-setting month for wage hikes at small firms. That’s according to the latest monthly employment survey from the National Federation of Independent Business, due out later today.

NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg reports on the December numbers from member companies participating in the survey:

Seasonally adjusted, a net 48 percent reported raising compensation, up 4 points from November and a 48-year record high reading. A net 32 percent plan to raise compensation in the next three months, unchanged from November’s record high reading.

Maybe I should start looking for a new job. I’ve had my present one for a year now. I’d hate to leave my present employer in the lurch (I would leave a very large hole)