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.

As is not uncommon I find the Economist’s commentary on President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan quite sensible:

It is not surprising that America failed to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Nation-building is difficult, and few imagined that it could become Switzerland. Nor was it unreasonable for Joe Biden, America’s president, to want to draw the conflict to a close. America has spent 20 years in a place of only modest strategic importance about which most American voters have long since ceased to care. The original reason for the invasion—to dismantle al-Qaeda’s main base of operations—was largely achieved, though that achievement could now be reversed.

The claim that America is showing itself to be a fickle ally by allowing the Afghan government to fall is also overblown, given the duration, scale and expense of the American deployment. The defunct regime in Kabul was not an ally in the way that Germany or Japan is. It was far weaker, more corrupt and completely dependent on America for its survival.

But none of that absolved America of the responsibility to withdraw in an orderly fashion. Mr Biden failed to show even a modicum of care for the welfare of ordinary Afghans. The irony is that America had a plan to do just that, which had been in the works for several years. It had hugely scaled down its garrison, from around 100,000 troops in 2011 to fewer than 10,000 by 2017, along with a similar number from other nato countries. They were not supposed to defeat the Taliban, but prevent the Afghan army’s collapse, largely through air power, and so force the Taliban to the negotiating table.

Apologists for Mr Biden argue that his predecessor, Donald Trump, had already scuppered this plan by trying to rush it to a conclusion before last year’s presidential election in America. It is true that Mr Trump was so desperate to strike a quick deal that he accepted preposterous terms, agreeing to end America’s deployment without even securing a ceasefire, let alone a clear plan to end the civil war. He had already reduced the American presence to little more than 2,000 soldiers by the time Mr Biden took office, and had promised to get the rest out by May 1st.

But Mr Biden did not have to stick to this agreement. In fact, he didn’t entirely, refusing to keep to the original timetable. The Taliban were clearly not holding up their end of the bargain, pressing their advantage on the battlefield instead of negotiating in good faith with the Afghan government. That could have been grounds to halt or reverse the American withdrawal. There was little political pressure within America to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. Yet Mr Biden was working to an arbitrary and flippant deadline of his own, seeking to end the war by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Although the speed of the Afghan government’s implosion surprised most observers, including this newspaper, America’s soldiers and politicians were among the most naively optimistic, insisting that a total collapse was a vanishingly remote prospect. And when it became clear that the Afghan army was melting away, Mr Biden pressed on intransigently, despite the likely consequences.

As a result, America’s power to deter its enemies and reassure its friends has diminished. Its intelligence was flawed, its planning rigid, its leaders capricious and its concern for allies minimal. That is likely to embolden jihadists everywhere, who will take the Taliban’s victory as evidence that God is on their side. It will also encourage adventurism on the part of hostile governments such as Russia’s or China’s, and worry America’s friends. Mr Biden has defended the withdrawal by arguing that Afghanistan was a distraction from more pressing problems, such as America’s rivalry with China. But by leaving Afghanistan in such a chaotic fashion, Mr Biden will have made those other problems harder to deal with.

However, I regard their conclusion as hand-wringing and a touch of fantasy:

The shambolic withdrawal does not reduce the obligation of America and its allies to ordinary Afghans, but increases it. They should use what leverage they still have to urge moderation on the Taliban, especially in their treatment of women. The displaced will need humanitarian aid. Western countries should also admit more Afghan refugees, the ranks of whom are likely to swell, and provide generous assistance to Afghanistan’s neighbours to look after those who remain in the region. The haste of European leaders to declare that they cannot take in many persecuted Afghans even as violent zealots seize control is almost as lamentable as America’s botched exit. It is too late to save Afghanistan, but there is still time to help its people.

As I’ve said before there is plenty of blame to go around. It will be a travesty if some of the blame does not fall on U. S. military leaders and intelligence officials. But it would be completely remarkable if President Biden emerges from this entire matter unscathed and the longer Afghanistan remains the lead story in the media the worse the damage will be. That will make everything he tries to do more difficult.

1. To what country have we given almost $35 billion over the last 20 years?
2. In what country was Osama Bin Laden killed? (in a safe house next to the country’s leading military academy)
3. What country has a nuclear arsenal of at least 50 weapons?
4. What country sheltered, armed, and trained the Taliban?
5. What country is, according to Sadanand Dhume in his column in the Wall Street Journal, 50 times more dangerous than Afghanistan?

The answer, as should have been obvious, to all five questions is Pakistan.

Here’s a telling quote from the linked piece:

Exultant Pakistanis shared a video clip from 2014 featuring Hamid Gul, a former head of the army’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America,” Gul says to a fawning TV studio audience. “Then there will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.”

The Pakistanis are not our friends. I don’t know that they’re anybody’s friends other than, perhaps, the Taliban.

Maybe French President Emmanuel Macron was right. Here he is as quoted by the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

French President Emmanuel Macron took considerable flak in 2019 for saying NATO is experiencing “brain death.” He warned that with or without President Trump in office, the U.S. was becoming a less reliable ally and argued that Europe would need to “reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States.” Mr. Biden has made him seem prescient, and the wonder is that Mr. Macron has been too polite this week to point it out. French leaders are now planning for the refugee crisis Paris fears Mr. Biden has unleashed on Europe.

I think that withdrawing from Afghanistan was a 9 on policy, has been a 2 on execution up to this point, and could deteriorate. I also think that NATO is barely an alliance at all at this point. I don’t know how our putative allies will respond or what they’re thinking. I’d speculate that whatever they’re saying in public they’re mostly thinking about themselves.

Three points to make here:

1. President Trump was “underwater” (disapproval rating higher than his approval rating) for nearly his entire presidency
2. It’s not impossible to recover from this sharp a decline in approval/increase in disapproval. Obama accomplished it several times in the course of his presidency. It is, however, unusual to recover the earlier high approval rating.
3. This is a significant decline. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding himself or herself.

President Biden needs to do some course correction quick.

Shikha Dalmia, in an op-ed in the New York Times, proposes that the federal government allow the states to decide how many foreign workers they need and want:

America should begin its own version of this program but take it one step further and let states set their own limits on foreign workers. This would get federal bureaucrats out of the business of centrally planning the labor market for the whole country. States that understand their own labor markets would do a much better job of finding suitable workers for their businesses.

The states wouldn’t have to hew to the federal high-skilled and low-skilled distinction for visas. Right now, both high-tech and low-tech states are suffering from a tight labor market. States that don’t want or need immigrant workers could opt out of the program. Foreign workers would be free to travel anywhere in the country, but they would be limited to jobs in participating states until they are naturalized. This would be an improvement over the existing system for them, since work visas currently tether them to a single employer, unless they find a new employer to undertake the onerous process of sponsoring them. It would also reassure states that they would have a measure of control over the level of in-migration from other states at least for some time.

States wouldn’t be required to participate, but they would face an inherent incentive to do so because businesses are far more likely to prefer locations where there are suitably skilled, motivated workers. Such a program would render the current broken and dysfunctional federal immigration system beside the point. (Constitutionally, immigration is a federal function, but nothing prevents Washington from voluntarily giving states more latitude to make their own decisions about foreign workers. Other aspects of immigration policy can remain in federal hands.)

which she characterizes as following the Canadian model. I am reflexively drawn to such a system but I am retain some skepticism. We have problems that Canada does not have including a completely broken tourist and student visa program, a counter-productive sponsorship program, an ancillary lottery system, and a country with which we share a 1,500 mile border with a median family income 20% of ours. Had we the same circumstances as Canada and as strict a system of labor enforcement as Canada does I would support the plan enthusiastically.

I’d also like to repeat something I’ve mentioned before. Under our present system state and local governments bear most of the costs for illegal migrant workers which cannot possibly be recouped from most of the migrants and for some reason of other boosters of increased immigration always cite the benefits of immigration without reckoning its costs which are substantial. If all of our migrant workers were professionals with six figure incomes it would be one thing but the overwhelming preponderance earn minimum or even sub-minimum wage. And nobody actually knows how many of those there are—everybody’s guessing.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post William F. Parker and Govind Persad question the Biden Administration’s plan to emphasize COVID-19 booster shots for Americans:

This decision is a mistake. Not only does it risk depriving millions throughout the world of the vaccine, but there also is no evidence that additional shots meaningfully reduce death or hospitalization from covid-19 for healthy Americans. Far better would be to wait for solid trial data on booster shots.

I point this op-ed out for two reasons. First, it mentions something I have mentioned from time to time in the past: the urgent need for the United States to subsidize vaccinations if not all over the world at least in Central and South America and the Caribbean.

But second I don’t think the decision is completely cut and dried. I honestly don’t know how effective booster shots for those already vaccinated will be in preventing serious disease and, if the authors are correct, no one else does, either. And even more importantly reducing the incidence of disease in Central and South America by ensuring that more doses of vaccine are administered there will not only reduce morbidity and mortality due to the disease in those countries but will also have some impact on reducing morbidity and mortality here. How much? Who knows?

I also didn’t want to let this editorial at Bloomberg on the horrible mess of our fiscal policy go by without comment. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a greater free flight of fancy. Here’s a snippet:

A comprehensive back-to-basics overhaul of Washington’s budget process is undoubtedly called for. The goals would be simple enough: Explain exactly what new spending is meant to achieve; ensure that value for taxpayer dollars will be maximized; be clear about how new commitments will be paid for; judge the long-term implications for public debt and the economy; and do all this transparently. Over the years, reformers have proposed numerous schemes with such basic principles in mind, and none have gained traction. Members of Congress would find such disciplines inconvenient, and they face no great pressure to change. For the moment, they prefer to fight about other things.

More modest reforms might be feasible, though. Washington’s fiscal incompetence is so extreme that smaller tweaks could make a big difference. Last month, for example, a group of representatives from both parties voiced support for an annual Fiscal State of the Nation — a joint hearing of the House and Senate budget committees, at which the head of the Government Accountability Office would give an overview of the country’s finances. Another bipartisan proposal, the Sustainable Budget Act, would create a new National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. This too could be valuable: Getting Congress to pay attention to the issue would be progress in itself.

Narrower reforms are also worth undertaking. Put the debt ceiling at the top of this list. Planning spending increases as though the debt ceiling didn’t exist, and then resorting to “special measures” to avoid a foreseeable self-induced crisis, might be the single biggest absurdity in current fiscal practice. The solution certainly isn’t to ignore mounting debt. Quite the opposite. Budget measures should face the implications for debt — raising the ceiling if that can be justified — as and when the borrowing is agreed to, not later. Smarter targets, based on debt as a proportion of national income, as opposed to debt in money terms, would give a better sense of whether additions to borrowing are prudent or excessive.

I think they are missing some things that are gob-smackingly obvious:

1. Both the Democratic and Republican Congressional leadership think that what they have been doing is working and from their point of view it is. They’re being re-elected year after year, aren’t they?
2. Contrariwise, they think that they wouldn’t keep those jobs if they followed the editors’ advice.

I agree with the editors that we need need fiscal reform. I disagree that it is something that any foreseeable Congress will impose of its own free will. It would need to be imposed on them.

I wanted to pass along the frank assessment of Afghanistan from David Ignatius in his most recent Washington Post column:

The weird part is that military victory was never really the United States’ goal. We were playing for a tie — a stalemate that weakened the Taliban enough that it would accept a diplomatic solution. We started trying to negotiate with the Taliban back in 2009 when the legendary Richard C. Holbrooke was special envoy, and serious talks were underway two years later under his successor, Marc Grossman.

President Barack Obama announced the official end of the United States’ combat mission in 2014, but it continued. President Donald Trump briefly tried for a win, hoping the enormous explosive device known as the “mother of all bombs,” would intimidate the Taliban. When it didn’t, he gave up and had his envoy Zalmay Khalilzad negotiate a peace deal. Trump was too worried about the risks to actually pull out the troops — but President Biden, who had been dubious about the Afghanistan mission, rejected the advice of his advisers and pulled the plug. U.S. combat troops finally left, and in six weeks, the tower of illusion crumbled.

Biden is being flayed both for his decision and its sloppy execution. Many of us had warned that by withdrawing the small remaining force too quickly, without a transition plan, he was unwisely ending a low-cost insurance policy against the disaster now unfolding. Biden owns the final decision, for better or worse.

But the hard truth is that this failure is shared by a generation of military commanders and policymakers, who let occasional tactical successes in a counterterrorism mission become a proxy for a strategy that never was. And it was subtly abetted by journalists who were scratching our heads wondering if it would work, but let the senior officials continue their magical thinking.

He continues with a timeline of activities in Afghanistan cover January 2008 through 2014. Here’s my assessment. There’s an enormous amount of blame to spread around. Putting “boots on the ground” and beginning a strategy of nation-building and counter-insurgency is on George W. Bush. Providing too-optimistic and glossy assessments is on the general staff and our intelligence organizations. There was a narrow window in 2013 when President Obama could have withdrawn our troops from Afghanistan. His failure to do so is on him. President Biden’s handling of that withdrawal is on him. Had President Trump been re-elected he might be facing even more vehement criticism for withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan than President Biden is experiencing now. We’ll never know.

The facts that we need to get our heads around but I doubt we ever will are that

1. Nation-building in Afghanistan was never possible.
2. Afghanistan was never going to be able to defend itself.
3. A successful counter-insurgency strategy requires a commitment to staying forever.
4. Out-waiting the Taliban was never a practical strategy.
5. However well-planned or executed our withdrawal from Afghanistan was never going to be anything other than a debacle.

There is a saying, the sense of which goes back millennia: success has many fathers but failure is an orphan. There’s another statement that only goes back about 40 years: the only way to win the game is not to play. That about sums it up.