I find it astonishing that the editors of the Washington Post can draft an editorial about the increasing number of homicides in the last year or so in the U. S. with elephant in the room. Here’s their prescription:

There has been too much finger-pointing focused on law enforcement — including, on the extremes, by activists who want to abolish police or those who fault progressive policies for reform — and not enough attention to other, evidence-based programs that can address the problem. Among efforts that show promise, as Vox has reported, are providing summer jobs; raising the age at which students can legally drop out of school; making physical improvements to neighborhoods such as installing more streetlights and greening vacant lots; and providing more drug addiction treatment.

That elephant, of course, is how gang-related so much of the violence is. I don’t see much in their prescriptions that would actually reach the source of the problem.

With respect to their proposal to raise the age at which students may legally drop out of school, what good will raising the truancy rate do? Also the editors should be prepared for the charges of racism that such an approach would provoke. The most truant students are either black or Native American; the least truant are Asian.

There’s one thing on which Walter Russell Mead and William A. Galston agree in their pieces on the situation in Afghanistan: Biden has screwed up in his handling of withdrawing from Afghanistan. Mr. Galston proposes three steps to remediate the situation:

• Step one: Honor our commitments to our friends in Afghanistan.

• Step two: Do everything possible to repair relations with our allies.

• Step three: Do what is necessary to restore the credibility of American security guarantees.

while Dr. Mead see the situation as emblematic of something deeper:

The Afghan debacle doesn’t create a crisis of belief in American military credibility. Informed global observers don’t doubt our willingness to strike back if attacked. The debacle feeds something much more serious and harder to fix: the belief that the U.S. cannot develop—and stick to—policies that work.

He provides an explanation of the source of the problem:

Americans tend to look at foreign policy in partisan terms. Democrats think Republicans are the problem and vice versa. This isn’t how it looks from abroad. To many overseas observers, the 21st century has seen mostly unsuccessful U.S. responses to challenges from China, Russia and Iran even as global issues like climate change, refugee and migrant flows, and the pandemic intensify. From this perspective, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden all seem to have failed; and from the invasion of Iraq to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the story of American foreign policy since 9/11 looks even to friendly eyes like one of continuing and perhaps now accelerating drift and decline.

I don’t believe that it’s possible to effect Mr. Galston’s three step program while maintaining President Biden’s deadline for removing our forces from Afghanistan, something I can’t imagine happening. It would mean he would have screwed up twice with one policy which I doubt would bolster his popular support.

And I find it surprising that Dr. Mead doesn’t recognize the source of the problem with our foreign policy. After all he wrote a book about it. Our foreign policy is an emergent phenomenon which the professionals in the State Department, DoD, and intelligence agencies mistakenly believe they control. They don’t control it but they can be pretty successful in impeding the president’s ability to implement his own policies.

I don’t believe that our foreign policy will improve until the voters start considering foreign policy more important in their selection of a president which on a first approximation will be never.

Here are some rather eye-opening statistics relating to Illinois from a post by Bryce Hill at RealClearPolicy:

According to the Illinois Department of Employment Security, the average Illinoisan earns approximately $55,770 per year at work. Meanwhile, the Illinois Policy Institute found if that person stayed home with their kids and collected unemployment, they could earn $51,627.

So go to work, average $55,770 and pay for child care, transportation and taxes. Or stay home, skip the expenses and get up to $51,627. It appears Illinois’ unemployment benefits are incentivizing workers to stay home.

I found those reported numbers a bit hard to believe since they’re not in agreement with the Census Bureau. But let’s just take them at face value. There are presently 120,000 jobs posted on the state’s jobs site. Why would a person earning a median income or below take one of them? That’s a question. I don’t know. I also find it hard to justify the governor’s support for continuing the enhanced unemployment benefits. I’m open to explanations.

I do find the mismatch between those facts and figures and the claim that the way to reduce the number of homicides is through jobs programs grimly amusing. What good are jobs programs if people won’t take the jobs? Other than for the people administering the jobs program, I mean.

At The Hill Will Marshall rises to the defense of the Biden Administration’s handling of the situation in Afghanistan. He makes three points:

First, the U.S. intervention in 2001 was inevitable and unavoidable. Afghanistan was the base from which al Qaeda mounted the spectacular Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that demolished the twin towers, damaged the Pentagon and wantonly killed nearly 2,000 people while wounding about 6,000 others.

I disagree with that. He completely fails to make a case that invading and occupying Afghanistan was either a political or strategic necessity, preferring to rely on several fallacious arguments, e.g. tertium non datur, appeal to emotion, appeal to popularity.

Second, President Biden has made the hard but correct strategic call. The U.S. public has lost confidence in our Afghanistan mission. We long ago passed the point at which the costs of staying there outweigh the risks of leaving.

I agree with that but it is not a fact. It is an opinion. Given my preference (a sharp, severe, punitive raid in 2001), we would never have gotten into the fix in which the Obama, Trump, and the Biden Administrations have found themselves.

Third, how we disengage from military interventions matters. The longer we stay, the greater the debt we incur to the people who risked their lives helping our soldiers, diplomats, aid workers, administrators and contractors do their jobs.

Here the president’s policy is harder to defend. “The likelihood that there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and own the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden declared confidently at a July news conference.

Again that’s not a fact but an opinion. And it’s not “harder” to defend. It’s impossible to defend. I fully acknowledge that, too, is an opinion but I don’t claim that it is a fact.

Do people no longer understand the difference between facts and opinions?

I have said it before but it bears repeating. I think that our immigration policy should be changed in the following ways:

• We should greatly increase the number of work permits available to people from Mexico and Central America. Most of those who come here are migrant workers and would return home if it were easier.
• We should have very rigorous employer-based enforcement of eligibility to work.
• We should allow people brought here illegally as children and who have been in the U. S. all of their lives to remain here legally and whatever standards are established for that should be rigorously enforced.
• We should abolish the immigration lottery and “family reunification” as criteria for admission.
• We should have immigration laws that more closely resemble those of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than our present laws do.
• We should pick some number of legal immigrants, stick to it, and rigorously enforce our laws. What should that number be? Fewer than one million per year.

When you add it up it means I disagree vehemently with Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s position as expressed in her Wall Street Journal column:

A humane U.S. immigration policy would recognize the need for workers from outside the country and give migrants a legal path to those jobs by allowing them to apply for visas at local consulates. Coupled with an unmistakable message that asylum claims—even with children in tow—aren’t a free pass, access to worker visas would go a long way toward normalizing migration flows.

The estimates of how many people would come to the U. S. if they could vary but 150 million is a pretty good number. Of those 150 million how many could actually support themselves? I mean when you consider the cost of workers who do not read, write, or speak English and have few skills which warrant pay over minimum wage? As Joschka Fischer put it, “We wanted workers; we got people”. They have health care, educational, safety, sanitary, transportation, etc. needs and those do not pay for themselves.

The first thing you learn in economics class, the very first lesson on the very first day is that as when supply exceeds demand the price goes down. The evidence that there is increasing demand for unskilled labor in this country is very, very weak. If it were salaries for unskilled workers would be rising (they aren’t). There’s an additional factor: you can design and build machines to do many kinds of work or it can be done by hand. Which of those happens depends on the supply and demand for unskilled labor. Designing, building, operating, and maintaining those machines generally pays better than the labor they replace does.

Ms. O’Grady’s “humane” policy is humane to people who don’t live in the United States and inhumane to native born Americans and to foreign-born workers who are already here. I don’t think that’s humane at all. I think it’s cruel, exploitive, and opportunistic.

If you read between the lines of the editors’ of the Washington Post’s latest offering you may detect a concern that the House Democrats may scuttle the “infrastructure bill”. They rather clearly blame the moderate Democrats:

Lawmakers are supposed to vote on a budget resolution that would clear the way for the Democrats to advance a big “reconciliation” bill, which would enable them to pass a range of taxing and spending policy through the Senate with only Democratic votes. But nine centrist House Democrats, enough to deny a House majority, insist that they will not vote for the budget resolution until the House passes a different bill, the $1 trillion infrastructure package the Senate approved earlier this month.

Doesn’t equal if not more blame belong to the progressives who insist on an additional $3.5 trillion (or $4.5 trillion or $5.5 trillion depending on whom you read) to gain their votes for the already bloated $1.5 trillion “infrastructure bill”?

They conclude:

The reconciliation bill promises to slash drastically child poverty through an enhanced child tax credit, cut the ranks of the working poor with a boosted earned-income tax credit, enshrine in law an ambitious federal climate policy and promote many other worthy reforms. But is pumping up Medicare, including for many wealthy seniors, more important than shoring up Obamacare or ensuring that low-income people caught in Medicaid’s coverage gap have basic health-care access? Does the nation need free community college when it can instead enhance Pell Grants for the neediest? The reconciliation bill’s answer to these questions is: Do it all. And to pay for it, the reconciliation bill’s architects suggest some significant new revenue sources, such as higher corporate taxes, and some squishy pay-fors, such as projected economic growth.

Democratic infighting must not ruin what is a rare opportunity in Washington, a moment when substantial reform is possible. Instead of issuing ultimatums, the party that narrowly controls the House should get to work.

The reason I use quotation marks around “infrastructure bill” is that so little of it is devoted to infrastructure. Again, that depends on whom you read. Here’s one assessment from Fortune/i>:

Infrastructure as many people think of it—construction or improvement of bridges, highways, roads, ports, waterways, and airports—accounts for only $157 billion, or 7%, of the plan’s estimated cost. That’s apparently what Vought was referring to. The definition of infrastructure can reasonably be expanded to include upgrading wastewater and drinking water systems, expanding high-speed broadband Internet service to 100% of the nation, modernizing the electric grid, and improving infrastructure resilience. That brings the total to $518 billion, or 24% of the plan’s total cost.

No matter whose assessment you read the majority of the $5.5 trillion in spending is not infrastructure unless you define everything that makes life possible infrastructure which is to remove any meaning from it. If everything is infrastructure nothing is infrastructure.

There’s something else I would remind you of: when your willingness to pay (what you’ll spend) exceeds the cost of what’s on offer, the price of what’s on offer will rise. In some sense that’s the point of all the spending. The administration clearly wants the wages of home healthcare workers to rise. Make more money available for it and that’s what will happen.

I should also mention that even Modern Monetary Theorists believe that if government spending increases faster than aggregate product, it will produce inflation. Again, in some ways that’s probably the point of all the spending. The debt is less burdensome when the dollar is worth less.

In comments a frequent commenter pointed to an opinion piece in The Telegraph harshly critical of President Biden’s handling of U. S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. It isn’t just the British Tories who been shaken by events in Afghanistan. From a round-up of “expert” opinion in The Guardian:

It may be tempting to dismiss this as an unfortunate but understandable logistical failure. If only. Optics matter. Narratives matter. Is this how America treats its friends and allies when it grows tired of them? This is the question on minds of officials in foreign capitals everywhere. As Politico Europe reported, “Even those who cheered Biden’s election and believed he could ease the recent tensions in the transatlantic relationship said they regarded the withdrawal from Afghanistan as nothing short of a mistake of historic magnitude.” Even if this isn’t how European officials and others should interpret Biden’s nonchalance, they are perceiving it nonetheless. And perceptions – or misperceptions – have a way of creating new, darker realities.

Le Monde

The editors of Le Monde are more sympathetic. After outlining how things came to this point (their views are pretty consistent with mine—they think the U. S. erred in occupying Afghanistan) the remark:

Même si la décision américaine peut être considérée comme légitime, un parallèle est donc à craindre, que M. Biden a vécu comme vice-président de M. Obama. Après le retrait américain d’Irak en 2011, le mouvement djihadiste irakien a regagné une telle vigueur qu’il a fallu réengager des troupes quelques années plus tard pour combattre l’organisation Etat islamique. Nul doute que M. Biden a ce précédent à l’esprit et que, au-delà de la déroute spectaculaire des alliés afghans de Washington, il doit prier pour ne pas avoir à renvoyer des soldats en Afghanistan, dans quelques mois ou quelques années, pour y combattre une nouvelle génération de djihadistes internationaux.

the gist of which is that they’re worried about the run-on effects of the chaotic American withdrawal. Will it encourage Islamists terrorists beyond Afghanistan’s borders?

A recent editorial in Al-Alam, an Iranian-owned Arabic-language publication, warned people not to trust the Americans the way the Afghan people did.

The people of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Libya “link the fate of their countries and their people with America and believe this will open a new door, through which they will enter into a bright and brilliant future. That’s what the Afghans, who were deceived for 20 years, had drummed into them too,” the editorial argued.

Although it’s written in Arabic, Al Alam is actually published by the Iranian state — so perhaps it’s not surprising they condemned this week’s messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan so harshly. Iran has long had an adversarial relationship with the US.

But the Iranians are not the only ones in the Middle East talking this way about what is happening in Afghanistan as the Islamist militant Taliban group take over.

If you think you detect a theme emerging in the commentary from our NATO allies, you’re right: they’re worried about themselves.

For Europeans, the situation is difficult. The American umbrella we have always counted on is now full of holes and there is, at the moment, no spare umbrella . The gap between the two liberal societies, the European and the American, is as strong now as in Trump’s time: Biden made his choices for internal political reasons without worrying about the negative repercussions on Europe. Which, of course, will help fuel European anti-Americanism. This could, in the near future, restore momentum and consensus to forces with illiberal traits that, in various European countries, appeared, just a few weeks ago, to be downsized.

One of the things I notice in all of the commentary was a repetition of what I think is a Western conceit—that the Taliban does not enjoy consider popularity among Afghans, especially Afghan women. I think they’re projecting they’re own preferences on others, a sort of cultural colonialism. I think quite to the contrary that at the very least a significant portion of the Afghan people including women have always supported the Taliban if only because they’re Afghans.

If I get a few spare moments I’ll synopsize Russian opinion for you.

I think that historian Michael Kazin’s piece in the New York Times is great comic writing but does provide some useful historical perspective mixed in with its apologetics:

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson and his fellow Democrats secured crushing majorities that enabled them to enact a flurry of landmark legislation: the Voting Rights Act, the bill establishing Medicare and Medicaid, an overhaul of immigration law. It is a feat Mr. Biden and progressive Democrats in Congress today would dearly like to emulate.

But Johnson’s decision early in 1965 to send thousands of troops to combat the Vietcong soon halted the momentum of his Great Society agenda and put Democrats on the defensive. A year later, as the war dragged on and protests mounted, Johnson’s approval rating dipped below 50 percent. In the midterm contests of 1966, the Republican Party picked up 47 seats in the House, and Democratic governors in eight states were replaced by Republicans — one of them a former actor in California named Ronald Reagan. By 1968, Republicans had taken back the White House, and Democrats never achieved a progressive policy agenda as far-reaching again.

Joe Biden bears far less responsibility for the defeat in Afghanistan than Lyndon Johnson did for the debacle in Indochina. As Mr. Biden mentioned in his address to the nation on Monday, as vice president, he opposed the troop surge ordered by Barack Obama in 2009. He can also claim that he was merely carrying out an agreement Donald Trump signed last year.

Furthermore, unlike the Vietnam War, which provoked a long, scorching debate that divided the country far more bitterly and profoundly than the more limited, if longer, battle with the Taliban ever did, this conflict could soon be forgotten. As the public’s attention shifts away from Afghanistan, Mr. Biden’s decision may seem less like a failure and more like a sober, even necessary end to a policy that was doomed from the start.

Yet the president and his fellow Democrats face a political environment so daunting that even the slightest disruption could derail their domestic agenda. Even before the Afghan crisis, they needed the vote of every senator from their party to enact their budget blueprint, and Mr. Biden has never had the sky-high approval ratings that allowed Johnson to rule Congress with an iron fist. This week, for the first time, his rating dipped into the 40s. Whatever they manage to accomplish in Congress, Democrats could easily lose their narrow control of both houses in the next midterm elections, especially if Republicans effectively inflame fears about Afghan refugees being resettled in this country.

What’s an example of the comedy? Contrary to what you might glean from Dr. Kazin’s piece, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 all had bipartisan support and, indeed, a higher percentage of the Republican caucus 89^th House of Representatives voted for them than of the Democratic caucus. And although President Johnson is the Forgotten Man of Democratic politics, largely due to the Vietnam War, he had much tighter rein on the Congress than President Biden does today. Joe Biden’s challenge is keeping his own caucus with its razor-thin House majority in line.

Consequently, while I’m in agreement with Dr. Kazin that President Biden’s legacy is at risk and, possibly, his very presidency, I don’t believe that he and I are in agreement on the source and nature of the risk. IMO the risk is that a weakened Biden, none too strong to start out with, will be unable to corral the House progressive caucus which will yield to its own worst impulses, refusing to accept the half a loaf represented by the $1.5 trillion “infrastructure bill” which has at least tepid bipartisan support, preferring none on Chernyshevskian grounds (*the worse, the better”).

In a piece at The Nation David Bromwich looks at the scorecard and proclaims the Democratic Party the party of the rich:

Some recent US figures on the distribution of income by party: 65 percent of taxpayer households that earn more than $500,000 per year are now in Democratic districts; 74 percent of the households in Republican districts earn less than $100,00 per year. Add to this what we knew already, namely that the 10 richest congressional districts in the country all have Democratic representatives in Congress. The above numbers incidentally come from the Internal Revenue Service, via Bloomberg, and are likely to be more reliable than if they came from Project Veritas via theblaze.com.

We have known for some time that the dark money of Charles Koch is answered by the conspicuous money of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, George Soros, Bill Gates, and a swelling chorus of others, none of whom “identify Republican.” Yet it has been comforting, in a way, to continue believing that real wealth resides with the old enemy: Big Oil and Big Tobacco and the rest. They were the ultimate source of the power that distorted American society and politics.

The income of their voters aside, Democrats enjoy the active, constant, all-but-avowed support of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, all three of the old television networks, CNN, NPR, and the online mainstream of Slate, Salon, and HuffPost. Any sentient reader can easily add a dozen more outlets. But along with the benefits of this mutual understanding comes a liability. The warm handshake with a friendly media establishment can grow so familiar that you get out of the habit of seeing what it looks like when you strut your stuff in public. And no longer seeing what it looks like, you stop asking what it might look like to people not already on your side.

His ultimate point is, if you think Democrats will be speaking frankly about wealth and privilege any time soon, fuggedaboutit. I would see it a bit differently. Given the federal government’s increasing power, it’s not surprising that the rich would flock to the party of government. The birds of prey always gather where the corpses are.

I wish Mr. Bromwich had delved into Democratic support among professionals—I suspect the situation is even more lopsided and that’s equally easy to explain. People who depend heavily on rent-seeking for their livelihoods should be expected to support expanding the reach of government.

I would submit that this isn’t a new phenomenon. Why do you think Ted Kennedy sat in the Senate for 47 years? Cynics (like me) think it expressly for the purpose of preventing a wealth tax in the United States of the sort being adopted in Western Europe at the time.