Speaking of immigration U. S. Customs and Border Protection has updated their statistics to include May 2021. The results are above.

To my eye that does not appear to support the hypothesis that March and April’s striking increase in “enforcement encounters”, as they call them, were just a transient blip or that June’s numbers had been timeshifted into March or April.

One possible interpretation of VP Harris’s remarks in Guatemala is that the Biden Administration has recognized that Candidate Biden’s comments during the campaign were interpreted by people in Central America as an invitation and now they need to counteract that.

There’s an old vaudeville wisecrack about if we had some ham we could make a ham and cheese sandwich if we had some cheese. That’s what I thought of when I read this post at RealClearPolicy by Juan Jose Daboub and Gonzalo Schwarz. They say the way to solve our problems with immigration from Central America is to invest in the economies of countries there:

Imagine bringing millions of jobs to the region by nearshoring or re-shoring jobs from China and other countries outside of the Americas to the Western Hemisphere. While this sounds daunting, the rewards would be immense for opportunity and job creation. The pandemic-induced slowdown in international logistics and production chains shined a glaring light on the over-reliance of the United States on Chinese manufacturing. Suddenly the thought of having logistics and production systems in Central America – much closer to home for the U.S. – goes from inconceivable to a winning proposition for everyone involved. Some might argue that it’s even a matter of U.S. national security to find more congenial international partners.

I agree with that as far as it goes but, sadly, it’s a lot tougher than it sounds. The reason these countries are in the shape they are is bad government and there really is no practical way to make an end-run around their governments. The strategy proposed by the authors is, I wish I could say surprisingly, to fund an endeavor of theirs:

To make these ideas actionable, an investment strategy would envision more private partnerships and collaboration among businesspeople in Central America and the U.S. One such example is the recently created ThinkHUGE initiative. (HUGE stands for Honduras, USA, Guatemala and El Salvador Business and Investment Council) This is a private-sector-led effort for impact investment that will create thousands of jobs in the region by fostering conditions for capitalizing on nearshoring opportunities in textiles, pharmaceuticals, and other industries, as well as investing in key infrastructure projects, including U.S. technology-based energy and telecommunications. ThinkHUGE envisions that small and medium enterprises in the United States run by Central American immigrants will also be encouraged to expand their markets and work with local businesspeople in Central America.

Now all they need to do is demonstrate how that money is just not going to disappear. What provisions do they foresee for oversight?

Who is the most important person in government right now? According to Dean Baker in this post at The American Prospect, it isn’t Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or anyone else in the executive branch. It isn’t Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer or some committee chairperson or anyone else in the legislative branch. And isn’t Chief Justice Roberts or Stephen Breyer (although I think he’s a close second) or any other individual in the judicial branch of government. It’s Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell:

The story was that if too many people have jobs, then workers will have more bargaining power, and be able to get larger pay increases. These higher pay increases would get passed on in higher prices, which would lead workers to demand still higher wages, and we suddenly have a wage-price spiral like in the 1970s.

As Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell has broken sharply with this fixation on inflation. He has listened to the complaints that progressive Fed critics have been making for decades.

We have said that inflation is not always just around the corner. And when the Fed raises rates, it disproportionately hits those who are most disadvantaged in the labor market: Blacks, Hispanics, the disabled, workers with less education, and people with criminal records. We argued that the Fed needs to take seriously its legal commitment to full employment, not just its commitment to price stability.

Powell has explicitly embraced this logic. He has committed the Fed to keeping its key federal funds rate at zero until the economy approaches full employment. He sees the latter as being in the range of the 3.5 percent rate that we were seeing before the pandemic, not the 5.0 to 5.5 percent rates considered a floor by many economists just a few years ago.

I agree with him that far too frequently the Federal Reserve has stressed the “stable prices” flank of its dual mandate at the expense of its other mandate, low unemployment. Worse than that they certainly appear to be operating under the mistaken view that they are running the economy (something not in their empowering legislation) or that the prime purpose of the Federal Reserve is to ensure the DJIA goes up.

And where is the Fed in regulating banks and other parts of the financial sector? IMO they’re more in collusion with them than regulating them. Dr. Baker dismisses that as unimportant or at least a lot less important than full employment:

As far as financial regulation, it is important, as I have often said. But it is orders of magnitude less important than maintaining full employment. There is a myth about the cause of the Great Recession, that it was about the financial crisis, and not the collapse of the housing bubble. This myth was useful to Wall Street because it was their rationale for bailing out Citigroup, Goldman, and other behemoths who would have been sunk if we allowed the market to work its magic.

The claim was that the bank bailout was necessary to avoid a second Great Depression. I have often challenged proponents of this view, and in response have never gotten more than vigorous hand-waving, name-calling, and an occasional obscenity. The bailout prevented a once-in-a-century opportunity to eliminate a huge amount of bloat in the financial sector in one fell swoop.

I agree with that conclusion. I think that rather than bailing out Citigroup, Bank of America, et al. they should have been nationalized and split up. In 2008 they had a fully capitalized value of zero. Regulating banks isn’t the highest priority until it is and then it’s too late to minimize damage to innocent bystanders.

Present policies are incredibly perverse. State and local governments are slowly removing the impediments to the economy while the federal government is doing its level best to give people money to save (because that’s all they can do with it). Meanwhile the Fed is ensuring that savings aren’t worth anything. It’s not merely poorly aligned, it’s perverse.

In his latest Washington Post column George Will laments that today’s U. S. is incapable of “great building feats”:

Construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge took four years in the 1930s, but after a 1989 earthquake, when one-third of the Bay Bridge had to be replaced, the project took over two decades. A nation planning to quickly spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure should wonder why the repair proceeded so sluggishly — and why economists have found that the inflation-adjusted cost of building a mile of the interstate highway system tripled between the 1960s and 1980s.

The Claremont Institute’s William Voegeli considers this evidence of “activist government’s dysfunction” — government’s inability, or unwillingness, to do one thing at a time. Government cannot simply repair a bridge; it must do so while complying with an ever-thickening, sometimes immobilizing web of ever-multiplying environmental, labor, safety and other mandates. They also now include, as part of what Voegeli calls the Biden administration’s “shock-and-awe statism,” Washington’s obsession with “equity” — racial distributions of government goods and services.

Remember Barack Obama’s 2010 epiphany about the nonexistence of his promised “shovel-ready” projects? According to Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge in “Capitalism in America: A History” (2018), “Today bigger highway projects take a decade just to clear the various bureaucratic hurdles before workers can actually get to work.”

I think that’s what’s called in the trade an invidious comparison. For one thing it’s comparing apples and oranges. The federal government was only tangentially involved in the construction of the Bay Bridge. It wasn’t even a state project. It was a local project. It was financed by bonds approved by voters in San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, and Del Norte Counties. It’s a good example of a point I’ve made before: people are frequently willing to pay for the things they need and they themselves are the best judges of the things that they need.

As to whether the United States is capable of great building feats today I have one word for you: Starlink. That was largely paid for by funding provided by the FCC.

There is a fascinating analysis in the Wall Street Journal by Allysia Finley and Kate LaVoie on the effects of out-migration on states’ ability to tax:

New IRS data compiled by research outfit Wirepoints illustrate the flight from high- to low-tax states. The chart above shows the adjusted gross income (AGI) that states lost or gained from population migration in 2019 as a share of their total AGI. States in the Sun Belt and Mountain West generally gained income while those in the Northeast and Midwest lost income.

The image above may be too small for you to read. There is a larger available by clicking on the image. Now you may spy with you little eye that Illinois doesn’t appear in that chart at all. I turned to the original report from Wirepoints and it displayed pretty much what I expected:

Of course Illinois was dead last. It probably didn’t help that Illinois Gov. Pritzker was touting his graduated income tax for Illinois which Illinois’s citizens wisely rejected.

Keep in mind that these results are for 2019. I can only speculate what the comparable charts for 2020 would show for the biggest losers: California, New York, and Illinois. I’m going to take a flyer and suggest that it wasn’t good news.

Let’s return to the question I asked a few posts ago: given the weakness of progressive candidates, a Senate majority only by virtue a tie-breaking Vice President, and a very narrow House majority why has the Biden Administration lurched so much towards a progressive agenda? I think the answer is that they need the progressive wing of the Democratic Party if they’re to accomplish anything, they figure they can blame the Republicans for obstructionism, so they can escape blame for failure to get their agenda passed but not for being too timid. Time will tell if it’s a shrewd calculation.

I think they’re wrong about the sentiments of the American people and it’s a mistake. Blacks and Hispanics in particular are more focused on pocketbook issues and violence and crime in their neighborhoods than the ideological purity being demanded by a rather small percentage of the electorate.

And here’s Karl Rove’s take from his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Since January, Democrats have rejected bipartisanship and incremental reform in favor of a countrywide makeover via party-line votes—despite ending the election with only a five-seat margin in the House and a 50-50 Senate. They seemed to think Americans would welcome whatever expensive, wacky legislation Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Biden offered.

But now Democratic leaders are realizing they not only lack a mandate for their revolution; they don’t have the votes to pass the controversial measures with nice-sounding names they’ve offered. On most of these bills, Mr. Schumer can’t get 50 ayes (allowing Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie) required to pass this legislation, let alone the 60 votes (including 10 Republicans) needed to begin debating them.

As Democratic leaders awaken to that reality, they seem to be going bonkers. Mr. Schumer is now promising to force votes on motions to proceed on the Democrats’ H.R.1 bill for a federal takeover of elections, as he did on the Democrats’ Jan. 6 commission, even though he doesn’t have 60 votes. He hopes Republican use of the filibuster will increase pressure on all Democrats to abolish it. In turn, this would create enormous pressure on every congressional Democrat to go along with leadership’s radical agenda, no matter how obnoxious parts of it are to them.

I present that not as true but to illustrate how Republicans may be seeing things.

My own view is that the leadership of both parties is now lacking in basic political skills that facilitate bi-partisan agreement. That is to be expected: they’ve gotten where they are through seniority—being re-elected again and again, mostly from safe seats, frequently in states which have mostly safe seats for a generation. They can’t help themselves. Every bill submitted is full of overreaches, signaling, and poisoned pills. Furthermore over the last several decades, at least in the House Democratic caucus, increased power has been vested in the Speaker and the Speaker has been disinclined to accept amendments from the floor. That’s not a formula for bi-partisan agreement. But it’s a relic of another day—when Democrats held 60% or even 70% of House seats. Those days are gone, replaced by narrow majoritarianism.

There’s an interesting post at Larry Satabo’s Crystal Ball by Alan I. Abramowitz, forecasting the outcome of the 2022 mid-terms. Here’s the meat of it:

Despite their extremely narrow majorities, the forecasts in Table 3 show that Democrats have a reasonable chance of keeping control of both chambers in the midterm elections if they maintain at least a narrow lead on the generic ballot. A recent Quinnipiac poll gave Democrats a nine-point lead on the generic ballot. A lead of that magnitude would predict a Republican gain of one seat in the House and a Democratic gain of two seats in the Senate giving Democrats a 221-214 seat majority in the House and a 52-48 seat majority in the Senate. Given the standard error of about 10 seats for the House forecast and three seats for the Senate model, however, the safest conclusion would be that the balance of power in both chambers would probably be very close. A smaller Democratic lead in the generic ballot, or a Republican lead, would predict a Republican edge in the House, and possibly also in the Senate.

One additional factor that is not included in the House forecast is the impact of redistricting, which will take place this cycle based on the results of the 2020 census. Republicans are widely expected to gain at least a few additional House seats in 2022 by virtue of controlling states with far more House districts during the redistricting process. A similar situation occurred in the 2012 election, in which Republicans managed to hold onto their majority despite losing the national popular vote for the House. If we assume that redistricting will be worth an additional 10 House seats to the GOP, Democrats would likely need a lead of at least 10 points on the generic ballot in order to maintain control of the lower chamber.

The emphasis is mine. The analysis the precedes that explicitly ignores redistricting. It reminds me of one of my college profs who said that he ignored any undergraduate paper until the first “however”.

There’s more than one headwind opposing the Democrats, even considering the “generic ballot”, i.e. ignoring individual candidates. Among those challenges are that presidents’ parties have tended to lose House seats going back more than 200 years, redistricting, and the internecine warfare highlighted in the previous post.

Where to begin, where to begin? How about we start with this piece in the Washington Post by Michael Scherer, Gregory S. Schneider, and David Weigel. Apparently, more progressive candidates aren’t faring that well in primary elections:

Democratic primary voters have been turning away this year from the anti-elite furies that continue to roil Republican politics, repeatedly choosing more moderate candidates promising steady leadership over disrupters from the party’s left wing.

Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, which brought the renomination of former governor Terry McAuliffe and primary losses by three of the Democrats’ most outspoken liberal delegates, only underscored a pattern that was previously apparent in special House elections in Louisiana and New Mexico. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a moderate Democrat, won his party’s nomination without a challenge from the left after two protest candidates failed to collect the 1,000 signatures needed for ballot access.

In the crowded Democratic primary in New York City, a similar crop of contenders, including Eric Adams and Andrew Yang, have emerged as front-runners by pushing platforms that include an embrace of police as an essential component of public safety, a far cry from the “defund the police” mantra that some liberal activists embraced in 2020.

I wish they wouldn’t equate “liberal” and “progressive”. I don’t think it’s correct to say this is different from the “anti-elite furies that continue to roil Republican politics” but rather it’s pretty much the Democratic version of the same phenomenon. Is there actually such a thing as a “political establishment” in either party these days? If so I think the rank-and-file of both parties are reacting against their respective establishments. The Democratic leadership is more progressive than the rank-and-file Democrats and Americans, generally, tend to be pragmatic rather than ideological. Here’s another telling snippet:

“There is nothing wrong with being one of those trailblazers who shakes up the status quo, but you can do it in a way that brings people along with you,” said Michelle Maldonado, a small-business owner from Bristow, Va., who defeated the state House of Delegates’ only self-described democratic socialist in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. “Prac-tactical — you’ve got to be practical and tactical at the same time.”

Such rhetoric has left some liberal politicians fuming, as they see the dream of remaking the Democratic Party slipping away like it did during the 2020 presidential campaign, when perceived electability became the most valued commodity and voters coalesced around Joe Biden.

“People like myself who are grass-roots-funded, who don’t take corporate money, are not able to compete effectively,” said Del. Ibraheem S. Samirah (Fairfax), another disruptive liberal who lost in the primary Tuesday after his opponent was endorsed by centrist leaders. “The party is not progressive.”

That’s right. Try as they might to convince themselves otherwise only about 25% to 50% of Democrats are progressives.

Note that Terry McAuliffe, who is handily cruising to re-election is

1. a known quantity and
2. a Clintonista rather than a Bernie Bro

It does raise an interesting question: why is the Biden Administration’s stated agenda so progressive but progressives just aren’t doing that well at the polls? More on this question after a few posts.