A couple of days ago Ray Dalio (or his social media assistant) had a impassioned post at LinkedIn on how urgently we need to balance the federal budget. I presume that was an indirect pitch for his new book.

I put a response there which has received a few approvals with a simple question: how? The only budget item that really could use cutting is healthcare spending and we can’t balance the budget by cutting taxes. Indeed, we need to raise the effective tax rate and that’s harder than it sounds. The effective tax rate on the top 1% of income earners has been remarkably steady since 1950 (2025 update here) despite a reduction in the top marginal tax rate from 94% to its present 37%.

As to cutting healthcare spending we’ve never been able to manage to do that. The most we’ve accomplished is slowing its rate of increase which is what was done in the last budget.

So, I’ll ask my questions here. How do you increase the effective tax rate; how do you decrease spending? I’m in favor of it. I just don’t know how.

I began assembling a chart of just how dependent the growth in the S&P 500 stock index was on just the “Magnificent Seven” stocks but, lo!, and behold the Visual Capitalist had already done it for me. What that chart tells me is that the index is very much dependent on those stocks and becoming more so.

Just seven stocks carrying such weight is a very narrow base. Their total global workforce is about 2.37 million people. Most of those are in the United States. They comprise less than 2% of total U. S. employment and all are technology stocks. I don’t think that’s healthy. Most of them are companies that didn’t exist 30 years ago and only one of them existed 50 years ago. Easy come, easy go.

At Liberal Patriot Ruy Teixeira takes note of something I’ve been pointing out for twenty years or more—today’s liberals don’t believe in liberty and our progressives don’t believe in progress:

American progressives used to embrace a number of universal values and aspirations that defined their political project. They sought to make life better for ordinary people by emphasizing their universal interests across racial, ethnic and cultural divisions, ensuring universal fair treatment in daily life and throughout society, promoting universal standards of merit, achievement and truth and providing universal access to the bounty from scientific achievement and economic growth. The core concept was that all Americans could prosper when treated in this fashion and that existing social and governmental arrangements should be pushed in that direction.

Making progress along these lines was what being a progressive was all about. Today’s progressives are different. They have rejected the universal approach for particularistic defense of professional class cultural priorities and policy preferences. In that sense they have lost the right to call themselves “progressives.” Instead they now stand in the way of progress as progressives used to define it—and progress as most ordinary voters would recognize it.

and

Some progressives have gone so far as to argue that our capitalist economy based on growth must be replaced with a “degrowth” economy focused on simple, healthy communities; efficient resource use; and the elimination of wasteful consumerism. If that means no or negative economic growth, so be it. Most progressives don’t quite go this far but the jaundiced view of growth—and the technological change that enables it—remains.

Indeed, today’s progressives are basically techno-pessimists. Progressives are now distinctly unenthusiastic about the potential of technology, tending to see it as a dark force to be contained rather than a force for good to be celebrated. This is very odd indeed. Almost everything people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to technological advances and the knowledge embedded in those advances.

I honestly have no idea what the political philosophy of today’s “progressives” is. Many claim to be “democratic socialists” whatever that means. The only observations I can make is that they like power and want to expand the scope and reach of government but much of that just means they want power.

How do you rationalize the positions of a founding member of the Congressional progressive caucus who has never voted for a nationalized healthcare system, worked ceaselessly to consolidate power in the hands of the Congressional leadership, and argued in favor of insider trading by members of Congress? They’re not socialists, they’re not progressives, they’re not liberals. What are they?

Once upon a time in the mists of the distant past, if you knew a web site’s numeric Internet protocol address, you could access the site. That was it. A bit later a tool was developed which indexed and archived File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites. It was called “archie” (for archive). A little while later a more complex method of indexing and archiving web addresses was developed called “veronica”. Those were the distant ancestors of Google and other search engines.

As Google and then Microsoft’s Bing gained dominance in archiving and searching the Internet, a new specialized skill evolved called “search engine optimization” (SEO). That means just what it says—optimizing the contents and construction of a web site to encourage search engines to find and, presumably, navigate to your web site when users performed appropriate searches. It’s an ever-evolving skill since the strategy, rules, and priority that search engines use to produce and display their results are always changing.

Yesterday it occurred to me that SEO has entered a new phase. Today it must also mean strategies that encourage users to “click through” from search engine results to your site rather than merely review the summaries and excerpts of the contents produced by the artificial intelligence of search engines.

I suspect that Google and Microsoft and other search engines which, rather than their traditional activities of identifying, archiving, and listing web sites are summarizing them, are exposing themselves to a titanic class action suit. I have always thought that the business models of Google, etc. were iffy. They make money by acquiring and using information which does not belong to them. But there was always a sort of fair exchange involved: users produce content, Google analyzes the content and directs traffic to the users’ web sites. What happens when Google stops directing traffic to web sites?

Why even have a public web site? Under those circumstances wouldn’t it make more sense to make use of specialized aggregators like Amazon.com, Facebook, and to some extent Substack?

I want to bring a conversation between Yascha Mounk and Isaac Saul, published at Mr. Mounk’s Substack, to your attention. The link is to the transcript but you could listen to the conversation if you like.

The first section of the discussion is largely devoted to recent Supreme Court decisions and I think there’s one factor that they neglect to mention. Over the last 50 or more years there has been an ongoing conflict over how policy goals are realized. In the courts that conflict has been reflected in policy goals which could not or would not be reached by the legislature being realized by the Supreme Court without recourse to the written law, common law, or legal precedent. Those who admire that apparently prefer a civil code system over our common law system. The beneficiaries of that have largely been progressives or sexual libertarians and those groups are now horrified when their political opponents resort to the same tactics against them or, worse, reverse judgments arrived without recourse to written law, the common law, or legal precedent. Whatever happened to the “arc of the moral universe”? (My answer would be that whether the legislative, executive, or judicial branch or all three in combination the government is not the “arc of the moral universe”.)

The balance of the discussion is about executive overreach and I share Mssrs. Mounk’s and Saul’s concerns. WRT immigration I would remind them that every presidential administration, Democratic or Republican, since the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act has somehow managed to limit the number of asylum seekers annually to around 50,000. IMO the Biden Administration didn’t just drop the ball they own-goaled it.

Americans are soft-hearted so they are unhappy with the actions needed to restore the status quo ante. IMO the solution to a bad law is to enact a better law but once a law has been enacted it should be enforced. No winks and nods. That’s authoritarian and undermines the rule of law.

I wanted to share a couple of quotes from the group discussion among Washington Post columnists and editors with you. I think the first, from Chris Suellentrop, hits the nail right on the head:

For me, losing Stephen Colbert and the “Late Show” is a lot like losing the independent bookstore in your neighborhood that you never went to but were happy that it was there. By which I mean, I didn’t really watch the show. I loved “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, and I’ll watch (or listen to) whatever he does next. But I am not sure the departure of this CBS show in 2026 changes my media diet in any way.

As it turns out none of those in the discussion have made a regular practice of watching late night television since Jay Leno left The Tonight Show. I think that tells the whole story.

Here’s the other quote I wanted to share with you from Alyssa Rosenberg:

The question is: Can still you make enough money to put on an old-fashioned, heavily staffed late-night show? And the answer seems to be no. In 2009, David Letterman’s late-night show brought in $271 million in ad revenue, more than any other show in that format. Last year, all the network late-night shows combined brought in $220 million in ad revenue. So yes, I think this was a business decision, but one that was probably also convenient for a company trying to close an acquisition deal that needs approval from the FCC.

That’s an enormous decrease and note that her claim is incorrect. She didn’t provide a citation for the ad revenue claim so I can’t tell whether it includes Fox’s ad revenue as well. In my researches I did discover one thing: the viewership for ABC, NBC, and CBS late night appears to be shrinking fast than that for Fox which appears to be growing.

Said another way cancelling The Late Show was a business decision. Continuing to subsidize a partisan, money-losing program would have been a political decision against business interest. The editors and columnists regret the choice because they sympathize with the positions being staked out but not enough that they’d pay to keep it going.

I can’t help but find the Japanese reaction in their recent election to the wave of immigration they’re experiencing grimly humorous. Japan’s immigrant population is about 3%. Ours is over 15%—I think somewhat higher. Mention that whenever someone refers to U. S. reaction to immigrants as “xenophobic”. The Japanese are real xenophobes.

Just for the record my view of immigration is that I think we need more skilled legal immigrants who speak, read, and write English and far fewer unskilled or low-skilled illegal immigrants who don’t.

There’s a wisecrack attributed (without evidence) to Gandhi. When asked “What do you think of western civilization?” he is said to have responded “I think it would be a good idea.” In his Washington Post column George Will laments President Trump’s lack of understanding of “western civilization” in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. He writes:

Donald Trump’s frustration with Putin’s refusal to split differences like a rational real estate broker flows from Trump’s failure of imagination. Trump’s incomprehension of Putin, his inability to understand Putin as Putin understands himself, is a failure to recognize the reality of deep-rooted, durable civilizational conflicts.

Varouxakis, citing U.S. scholars James Kurth and Michael Kimmage, says, “No recent American president has shown himself more prepared to withdraw from ‘Western civilization’ and ‘the West.’” And “there is truth in the statement that during his 2017-2021 presidency, Trump was ‘the first non-Western president of the United States.’”

I probably should read the book on the history of the term “the West” cited by Mr. Will in his column. I think that “Western civilization” was a term revived in the 18th century to distinguish between Britain, Netherlands, and secular France on the one hand and Germany, Austro-Hungary, parts east, along with southern Spain, Portugal, and Italy on the other. In the 20th century it was redefined to include the United States whenever Britain needed our help to win a war. After World War II it was redefined again to include West Germany as part of “the West” for the first time. That’s what created the “Plato to NATO” historical construct.

Contrary to Mr. Will I don’t believe there has ever been a meaningful “West” that included the United States. The U. S. is an outlier in an enormous number of ways. Not just in size, demographics (until recently), and wealth but the rights asserted in the Bill of Rights, property rights, commerce, government, and almost every other way.

I am no Trump supporter. I have supported Ukraine against Russia’s invasion not to defend “the West” against “the East” but to save Ukrainian lives and because Russia was wrong to invade just as the U. S. was wrong to bomb Serbia, invade Iraq, and encourage if not foment the Ukrainian putsch against the legitimately elected but pro-Russian Yanukovych government.

The American Anglophile Henry James wrote:

… unprecedented and unique in the history of mankind; the arrival of a nation at an ultimate stage of evolution without having passed through the mediate one; the passage of the fruit, in other words, from crudity to rottenness, without the interposition of a period of useful (and ornamental) ripeness. With the Americans, indeed, the crudity and the rottenness are identical and simultaneous;…

That was over a century ago. Europhiles continue to preach that gospel today.

In my opinion the greatest mistake we could make would be to abandon what makes us distinctively American in favor of some imagined, chimeric, and ephemeral “West”

I found the American Bar Association’s analysis of the demographics of the practice of law interesting. I did not realize that the number of lawyers had grown by more than 1 million since 1960. That’s nearly twice as fast as the growth in population.

IMO such a large number of lawyers is both bad for the public and bad for the lawyers—too much competition in trying to scrape a living together.

I also found the list of states with highest per capita number of lawyers interesting: New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, California, Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland, Missouri. Is it a coincidence that the most corrupt states in the Union (Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey) are also on that list? I can think of several explanations for that:

1. It’s a coincidence.
2. All of the states have high levels of corruption—it’s just in states with high proportions of lawyers that the corruption has been uncovered.
3. There’s a positive feedback relationship among corruption, activist governments, and lots of lawyers.

I don’t believe it’s #2. I certainly hope it isn’t.

Lawyers are disproportionately men and of primarily European or Asian descent, i.e. only 5% of lawyers are black and only 6% Hispanic.

BTW, as I’ve pointed out before incomes in lawyers occur in a bimodal distribution (like the humps on a camel). There are the lawyers who graduated from Top 20 elite law schools who earn very good incomes, indeed, and the rest. That means there’s no such thing as average or median income for lawyers. There are two averages and two medians.