Although I materially agree with the point Megan McArdle is making in her latest Washington Post column:

Elon Musk is the latest in a long series of government reformers to go on the quest for the magic pot of money.

The magic pot of money is a Washington evergreen. Some politician or policymaker theorizes a fantastically large sum of government spending that can be easily excised from programs without affecting deserving beneficiaries or angering powerful interest groups. The belief in its existence has inspired many a politician to go on the hunt, but thus far, the quarry has proved elusive: The Reagan administration failed to find the “future savings to be identified” that its budget counted on to balance massive tax cuts. The architects of the Affordable Care Act failed to find the fabulous cost savings they believed to be hidden in the byzantine recesses of our health-care system.

Yet every generation, a new hero sets out to find these mythical riches so that they can be returned to their rightful owner, the American taxpayer. Musk thinks he is that hero, having suggested that with the support of the president, we can find $1 trillion in deficit reduction. And hey, he has certainly performed many epic feats. So perhaps he will finally slay the dragon of government inefficiency and liberate this pot of money from its hoard.

I’ve written as much here although not quite as sarcastically. Furthermore, I genuinely wish the exercise he’s going through were being done by the Congress. It is their job after all. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get Congress to do its job. Also, one of the things that has been completely overlooked in this discussion is that what is being done now from a process standpoint should be an ongoing process. It is a task that is never completed.

And I have little doubt that 100s of billions in waste, fraud, and abuse will be found. Rather obviously the “Department of Government Efficiency” started with the low-hanging fruit, e.g. USAID, CFPB. I have little doubt that billions of FWA will be found in Defense, Social Security, and Medicare (where the real money is). In each instance the source will be different. For example, I suspect that most of the fraud in the Medicare system is retail rather than wholesale, e.g. billing services that aren’t covered as services that are covered, but that will be extremely difficult to root out.

But here’s the critical question. Okay, I understand you don’t like Elon Musk, how he and his team are proceeding, and what they’re doing. What’s your plan?

I think this piece by Maria Schmidt at Brussels Signal is perhaps the harshest criticism of Angela Merkel I have ever read. Here’s a sample:

Merkel was an emotionless, heartless, cold, cruel, pragmatic and vindictive political operator. She did not truly lead Germany, or Europe, because she lacked the necessary imagination, creativity and commitment. She managed things. She was sunk in day-to-day politics, adapting her positions and opinions to the findings of focus groups and opinion polls. As a result, she fatally failed to take any decision that had medium- or long-term consequences. She took no risks, ran every conflict into the sand, blunted them and damped them down. Her guiding principle was, “After me, the flood.”

and

Merkel did not create anything, and did not build anything. Her time in power was marked by wasted opportunities, missed chances and irredeemably bad decisions that have squandered the future of Germans and Europeans. She robbed them of 16 years, because she diminished both Germany and Europe with her dilatory, indecisive, shiftless, soporific policies. She tore the continent’s societies apart, condemned its economies to stagnation, stifled its capacity for innovation, and extinguished its ambition.

While this, if true, is a scathing indictment:

In Merkel’s sixteen years as Chancellor, both she and Germany aged into shabbiness, greyness and ungainliness. In her monotone, dull and inelegant jackets, pants and shoes, she was the personification of the former GDR, in whose image she moulded the whole of Germany. She abolished freedom of speech, rendering the media uniform, boring and decrepit, and the country’s public figures slovenly and unkempt. Today Germany, once a better place, has become one big GDR.

This is much what I’ve been saying for some time:

She acted against the German army, and in the process she eviscerated it. She permanently weakened it, and suffocated its fighting spirit with the help of her protégé, the incompetent Ursula von der Leyen. She abolished universal conscription and reduced the armaments and equipment of the troops to the point of absurdity. In 2022, at the time of the shamefully precipitate US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the German army was unable to bring home its contingent there. They had no transport aircraft, and the task was beyond their logistical capabilities.

which is why achieving the “2% guideline” for NATO members is irrelevant, misdirection. Germany’s problem is lack of preparedness. 2% of GDP might not be enough to remedy that. 10% if GDP might not be enough. And if Germany with a quarter of total European GDP is not prepared, Europe is not prepared.

There is one particular on which I disagree with Dr. Schmidt. If her observations are true, did she not read her own piece? If Ms. Merkel’s every policy position was the outcome of a focus group, the problem with Germany is not Angela Merkel but Germany. Angela Merkel is only the symptom not the disease.

Read the whole thing.

At Politico Eugene Ludwig, appointed by Bill Clinton as Comptroller of the Currency, has an op-ed asserting that voters were right in 2024 about the economy and the data were wrong:

Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.

What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?

continuing:

These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I’ve encountered something very different. Cities that appeared increasingly seedy. Regions that seemed derelict. Driving into the office each day in Washington, I noted a homeless encampment fixed outside the Federal Reserve itself. And then I began to detect a second pattern inside and outside D.C. alike. Democrats, on the whole, seemed much more inclined to believe what the economic indicators reported. Republicans, by contrast, seemed more inclined to believe what they were seeing with their own two eyes.

with the following conclusion:

The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics.

He goes on to show how the official statistics on unemployment, the median wage, inflation, and GDP are grossly misleading and that ordinary people’s lived experience suggests that none of those as experienced are nearly as rosy as the official statistics might lead you to believe. You may notice in his analysis some of the things that I have been saying around here.

I would point out that on some of the official statistics, particularly unemployment, his analysis just scratches the surface of the problems. My rule of thumb is that when the fudge factors used to arrive at the official statistics are much larger than the actual measured data you should suspect that something is wrong with the fudge factors.

Some of the discrepancies are undoubtedly due to preconceived notions but some are due to how different things are in the environs of Washington, DC and state capitols than in the country at large while some are due to institutional momentum.

At the Chicago Tribune Jason Meisner, Megan Crepeau, and Ray Long report that the jury in the trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan on corruption charges has reached a partial verdict:

A federal jury Wednesday convicted former House Speaker Michael Madigan, once the most powerful person in Illinois politics, of 10 charges including bribery conspiracy — but jurors deadlocked on several other charges in the wide-ranging indictment, including the marquee racketeering conspiracy count.

The panel also deadlocked on all six counts against Madigan co-defendant Michael McClain.

The split verdict does not avert the possibility of a significant sentence for Madigan. Several of the guilty counts carry a maximum of 20 years in prison, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Madigan departed the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse just before noon Wednesday, holding hands with his daughters. He walked out into the falling snow toward his attorneys’ offices followed by a horde of news cameras.

The jury was deadlocked on 12 charges, reportedly with two holdouts. Sadly, racketeering was one of the charges on which the jury was deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial on the 12 counts on which the jury was deadlocked.

Mr. Madigan was also acquitted on some charges:

Madigan was acquitted of two counts related to a purported scheme to get onetime political nemesis Juan Ochoa appointed to the ComEd board, and acquitted of all four counts related to an alleged plan to use his public power to get private law firm business from developers of a West Loop high-rise.

The four-month trial was the culmination of a decade-long corruption investigation that has already felled several of Madigan’s associates – but a guilty verdict for Madigan is easily the most significant victory for federal prosecutors.

The reporters comment on the political fallout:

Regardless of the ultimate verdict, jurors in the Madigan trial saw irrevocable proof of Springfield’s messy overlap of money, special interests, power politics and extraordinarily cozy relationships between lawmakers and lobbyists.

Toppling Madigan from his throne showed the power of federal prosecutors to damage the career of a singular political figure, but a verdict alone ignores the question of whether Pritzker and the Democrats who rule Illinois will take on the less-than-stellar system that consistently puts Illinois public officials in front of a judge.

The Madigan trial has amplified the findings of the Tribune’s “Culture of Corruption” series last year that documented how weak laws on campaign finance, ballot access, lobbying, ethics and oversight, and the byzantine structure of local government have all but encouraged politicians to stretch–and sometimes cross–the lines between what is legal and illegal.

Four of the state’s last 11 governors and nearly 40 Chicago aldermen in the last half century have served time in prison. State lawmakers and local officials from around Illinois also have worn out the paths to prison cells over the decades.

Even now, state Sen. Emil Jones III, the Chicago Democrat whose father once served as Illinois Senate president, has a federal corruption case still pending in Chicago. He has pleaded not guilty.

The father of Emil Jones, III to whom they refer was Emil Jones, Jr., the patron of young Barack Obama. That the corruption cases continue to be filed is significant evidence that the “culture of corruption” in Illinois and, in particular, Chicago politics contains to run things. There is a chain of corruption that leads all the way to the top of the party.

In my opinion a lot more than that is at stake. Mike Madigan chaired the Illinois Democratic Party for all but two years between 1998 and 2021 when he lost the chairmanship as the FBI case began to pick up steam and Illinois is one of the largest reliably “blue” states. More than any other living person the fiscal mess in which Illinois is, largely caused by the state and Chicago governments failing to make payments into the public employee and teacher pension funds while increasing the the size of those pensions and refusing to change the pension system into something the people of Illinois might reasonably be able to pay. IMO it strains credulity to believe that important Democrats in and out of Illinois including JB Pritzker, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and lots of other Democrats were not aware of Madigan’s corruption. They may or may not have had legal responsibilities to do something about it but they certainly had ethical and moral responsibilities.

The next shoes in this sordid story will drop at sentencing and if the charges on which the jury failed to reach a verdict are refiled. If Michael Madigan at 82 does not wish to spend the rest of his life in prison he potentially has a lot to trade for a light sentence. And a lot at risk if he doesn’t.

I didn’t want to let this get by without remarking on it. The editors of the Washington Post lament the decline in support for asylum in Western countries:

It is no coincidence that just as President Donald Trump declared the United States would stop hearing migrants’ asylum requests at the southern border, the Italian government of Giorgia Meloni defied courts in her country and restarted a program to ship asylum seekers to Albania.

The simultaneous gambits on both sides of the Atlantic reflect the worldwide collapse of political support for the post-World War II consensus that persecuted people should be granted the right to asylum. Facing a crush of asylum seekers at their borders, rich countries are experimenting with measures to keep them out.

I will steer away from remarking about the problems that mass migration poses for the ethnic nations of Europe to focus on political attitudes in a country with which I am more familiar, the United States.

Where were the editors when the Biden Administration was accepting five to seven million fraudulent asylum requests? The grant ratio for Mexican and Central American applicants hovers in the single digits, i.e. more than 90% are declined. I can think of no surer way to erode support for legitimate asylum than by issuing a blanket invitation to apply for refugee status to non-refugees. For nearly 40 years the number of asylum applications granted in the U. S. has been around 50,000. It’s still right around 50,000 but the number of applicants has skyrocketed, overloading the system and costing taxpayers billions.

Don’t be surprised if it’s a generation before the opinions of Americans towards immigration skews positive again. That’s what I’ve been warning about for the last generation. I hope those who encouraged the mass immigration are happy.

Here’s Gallup’s most recent reckoning of party affiliation:

If you’d prefer to group preference and “leaners” together here’s their reckoning:

My reading of that is that “Neither of the above” is the preference of more Americans than either Democratic or Republican and, if you insist on grouping “lean Democratic” and “lean Republican” with the parties neither party is a majority party but the Republicans have a slight edge over the Democrats.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Republicans hold majorities in the House, the Senate, and the Republican candidate in the last selection sits in the Oval Office.

I don’t see any way you interpret any of that as Democrats being the majority party. Other than, perhaps, the Pauline Kael standard.

Update

A regular commenter pointed out the graphical representation of the tables in the body of the post which I’ve taken the liberty of putting at the top of this post. Thank you, PD.

At Liberal Patriot Ruy Teixeira offers advice to the Democrats I see little way they can accept:

Three months after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the party is still reeling—leaderless, rudderless, and historically unpopular. Only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, the lowest rating since CNN first asked the question in 1992. Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina.

Think party pooh-bahs realize it is time for urgent change? Think again.

Viral video clips from the Democratic National Committee’s election for a new chair this past weekend seemed like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college. In one, outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison explains how the presence of a gender nonbinary candidate affected the committee’s gender-balance rules. (“The nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”) In another, every candidate for chair blamed Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump on racism and misogyny.

No word on whether they debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

He recommends that Democrats

1. Avoid the name-calling
2. Moderate starting with immigration
3. Cooperate with Trump when he’s right. He offers Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion reform as an example.
4. Embrace energy abundance

Shorter: abandon the views of the progressive wing of the party. Since progressives are now the largest faction among the Democrats, how can they do that? I don’t see it.

At Newsweek Joseph Nye, who coined the terms “hard power” and “soft power”, outlines why he thinks the U. S. has “a better hand” than China:

President Donald Trump describes China as the greatest external threat to American power. It is the world’s largest manufacturing country, and the leading trade partner with more countries than is the United States. China is increasing its military budget, modernizing its forces in Asia, and increasing its nuclear arsenal. Now, it seems to be closing the gap in artificial intelligence. The Pentagon describes China as “the pacing challenge.”

A serious strategy must neither underestimate nor overestimate a long-term threat. America has many problems, but overall, in the long-term competition, I would rather be playing the American rather than the Chinese hand. Imagine an entity from Mars visits Earth and sees two great powers locked in a strategic poker game. Using its x-ray vision to look into the hands of the two players, which would it bet to be ahead in 2040? Seeing that the U.S. holds seven higher-power cards in this game, it would bet on America.

The factors Dr. Nye cites as advantages of the United States are:

• Geography—we have both Atlantic and Pacific coasts and our immediate neighbors are “friendly”
• Demography—China’s working age population is actually decreasing in number
• Productivity—”China’s total factor productivity of labor and capital has been declining, while productivity in the U.S. continues to grow.”
• Technology although he acknowledges it’s “a close call”
• Finance and the role of the dollar
• American “soft power” remains stronger than China’s despite substantial efforts by the Chinese leadership to turn that around
• Our alliances

concluding:

Of course, holding high cards is not enough to predict the outcome of a poker game. The result also depends on the skills of the players. There is always the danger that they will play poorly. If Trump discards the American high card of alliances, or tries to stop rather than control immigration, or so overuses dollar sanctions that counties flee to other currencies, our imaginary Martian may lose the bet. Let’s hope that the Trump administration assesses the strategic balance clearly and does not discard any of our high cards.

I note that in his zeal to point out our advantages, Dr. Nye neglects to mention that China has strengths, too. I will mention only two: population and technocracy.

China’s population is about three times ours. That means that all else equal China has three times as many people capable of being engineers, scientists, physicians, etc. as the United States. At present about 17% of China’s population has a college degree or more compared with 44% in the United States. That’s about twice as many people. I would further assert the rather contentious claim that China’s 17% reflects the actual number of people in the country who can benefit from tertiary education. Note that admission to college in China is by competitive examination. We’re providing college educations for a lot of people here but I question how many of those degrees make sense. The odds are that the baristas at your nearest Starbucks have college educations. Do you actually need a college education to be a barista at Starbucks? Every year more journalism majors graduate from U. S. colleges than there are people employed as journalists.

Also, as I’ve tried to explain before, in China technocracy is a natural consequence of the country’s languages, orthography, and history. In the short term that produces significant advantages as China’s rapid economic and scientific development illustrates. In the long term it has disadvantages, producing significant deadweight loss as China’s sparkling new cities (not buildings, cities) in which very few people live illustrate.

Much as some in the U. S. wish it were otherwise, technocracy is not natural to the United States. That has advantages but it also has disadvantages.

Does anyone other than President Trump like the idea of a U. S. occupation of Gaza? Initially, I attributed the comment to a bad habit the president has: floating trial balloons. Now he appears to be doubling down on it.

Was anyone surprised by Jordan and Egypt refusing to accept the Gazans? Arab states won’t accept them for multiple reasons the most important being a) it would signal surrendering the territory to Israel; and b) the Palestinians are troublemakers.

“Everybody loves it”? Give me a break.