While I found Joel Kotkin’s discussion at UnHerd of what he characterizes as “a looming Democratic civil war” interesting and largely agree with his analysis of the various factions that comprise today’s Democratic Party I think there are a few things he’s missing. Here’s a snippet or two from the piece.

Take the Democrats’s newest supporters: America’s tech oligarchs, Wall Street financiers and urban real estate speculators. They may act “woke” on issues surrounding gender, race and the environment. But such “virtue signalling” is no substitute for the drastic policies pushed by the party’s Left: the confiscation of vast wealth, the break-up of monopolies and the introduction of ever-higher taxes. Big business, after all, is the clear winner in the status quo that the Left, with good reason, despises.

But the impending Democratic civil war is more than, as some conservatives see it, a two-dimensional conflict between “the establishment and the radicals”. Largely ignored in this narrative is the most unappreciated, least articulate yet arguably the largest Democrat-voting bloc: middle and working-class moderates who make up roughly 50% of the party. These voters may often favour populist economics, but remain threatened by the cultural, economic and environmental policies pushed by the other two factions.

and

Certainly, parts of Biden’s program — expanding health coverage as well as investments in basic infrastructure and manufacturing — could appeal to these voters, who are now generally supportive of an activist government. But Biden has also backed measures on cultural and environmental issues that are unlikely to win over the traditional working and middle classes. For example, fracking bans, already endorsed by Vice President Harris, could, according to the US Chamber of Commerce, cost 14 million jobs, far more than the eight million lost in the Great Recession.

Belying his regular guy image, Biden has also expressed support for programmes that would force suburban areas to densify. It is likely few suburbanites, the majority of all Americans, would welcome federal overseers deciding how their communities should be changed. Meanwhile, attempts to force residents out of their cars and into transit, something they were abandoning well before Covid, seems quixotic as well as politically stupid. The President’s Transportation Secretary has even suggested a tax on “vehicle miles” travelled, a measure almost calculated to alienate middle and working-class families outside a few dense urban cores.

and

Biden has already delivered on one of tech’s biggest concerns: the restoration of HIB tech workers — essentially, relatively cheap short-time servants from Asia. The Bay Area economy, for example, depends on for as much as 40% of its workforce from non-citizens. It’s no surprise that the travel ban and Trump’s often crude policies on immigration helped transform Silicon Valley into a virtually one-party state .

But this corporate Leftism extends well beyond Silicon Valley. Where the Democrats once ruled mining and manufacturing towns; today they represent 41 of the 50 wealthiest Congressional districts. Wall Street and the tech oligarchy can afford not to see Biden’s “green agenda” as raising living costs or threatening jobs. Instead, Valley oligarchs and Wall Street financiers salivate over the potential killing to be made from subsidies for their renewable fuels investments and electric car schemes, as the radical filmmaker Michael Moore, among others, has documented. The green economy has already spawned its first mega-billionaire, Elon Musk, whose core businesses feed largely on regulatory and tax policies that favour his products.

One of the things I think he’s missing is the “take it or leave it” attitude that has infected both political parties. Elected officials haven’t actually represented their home districts in years. By and large they actually represent the consensus in Washington, DC. Some blame that on the electorate but not I. I attribute it to huge, unwieldy gerrymandered districts which inevitably yield winners much like their predecessors. Those districts are neither competitive nor representative in any meaningful sense. In the last four elections a ridiculously small number of seats have changed parties and in some states 2/3s of candidates ran completely unopposed. The candidates represent themselves and the party leadership because they can. What’s the alternative when a candidate runs unopposed?

Another thing I think he’s missing is the affiliational nature of voting. Many people vote for the Democratic candidate because she is a Democrat. What he may believe or stand for other than party affiliation makes relatively little difference.

The third thing I think he’s missing is that however fractured or dissatisfied Democrats may be Republicans may not be able to capitalize on their disaffection. There may be some shifts at the margins but no truly tectonic change. As Adam Smith observed 250 years ago, there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.

It takes Laura Tyson and Jan Mischke quite a while to get around to “however” in their article on the prospects for increasing productivity in the U. S. economy at Project Syndicate but they get around to it ultimately:

In the US and other industrialized economies, the largest negative impact of the pandemic on jobs and incomes has been in food services, retail, hospitality, customer service, and office support. Many of these low-wage jobs could disappear altogether if pandemic-induced reductions in professional office time and business travel diminish demand for myriad services such as office cleaning, security and maintenance, transportation, and restaurant and hospitality services. Prior to the pandemic, these occupations accounted for one in four US jobs and a growing share of employment for workers without a post-secondary education.

Weak investment poses another demand-side risk to potential productivity growth. Business investment rates overall were already in long-run decline before the pandemic (hence the post-2008 productivity slowdown), and investment has since contracted further, owing to a decrease in private non-residential investment from its 2019 peak. That said, the decline in investment during the COVID-19 recession has not been as large as that of the 2007-09 financial crisis.

All of the improvements they categorize earlier in their piece require substantial amounts of business capital investment and such investment faces substantial headwinds. While a reduction in capital investment is not inevitable when business taxes increase it does seem likely and what’s more uncertainty about the requirements to pay additional taxes will itself reduce investment. Additionally, the lag between passing President Biden’s trillion dollar stimulus package and the funds actually being disbursed is substantial, another disincentive to investment. Finally, the areas in which improvements are likely and those in which the funding will be spent are not the same and boosting employment and improving productivity are in competition with one another.

It may ultimately come down to priorities. Which is more important? Improving productivity, creating better jobs, or employing people who are out of work? Doing all three at the same time is pretty darned unlikely.

In his regular Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley remarks on President Biden’s policy on immigration:

Beltway elites are reluctant to acknowledge it, but Mr. Trump had his ear to the ground on immigration. Voters didn’t always like his tone—and polling suggested they didn’t share his wall fixation—but his prioritization of border security resonated with millions, including many who typically vote for Democrats. Even Democratic strategists have acknowledged that deference to progressives, who by the way are now raising state income taxes to finance five-figure Covid-relief checks for undocumented workers, played a role in the party’s underperformance among Hispanics last year. Mr. Biden ignores all this at his peril.

By the time Mr. Trump left office, he had limited to 15,000 the number of refugees admitted annually to the U.S. In February, President Biden said that he would increase the cap to 125,000, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken later reduced to 62,500. Now the administration is having second thoughts about even that lower number, and for good reasons. The number of apprehensions along the southern border in March, more than 171,000, was the highest since 2006.

Now those statistics are somewhat miselading. “Encounters” as they’re called were reduced to 15,000 per month or thereabouts during a pandemic in which the U. S. was faring worse than Mexico. And various explanations have been put forward for the jump in encounters. We’ll kn9ow better in a month or so.

According to the U. S. Customer and Border Protection agency, the number of encounters in 2021 so far has exceeded those in 2019 on a month-by-month basis and jumped sharply in March. We’ll know in a month or so what’s actually happening but to all appearances it does appear as though something had changed. Whatever the cause of the jump, the number of unaccompanied children and teenagers has caused the Office of Refugee Resettlement to exhaust its annual budget and we’re only six months into the fiscal year.

Mr. Biden is already getting pushback on his approach to immigration from all sides—not just the nativists and restrictionists but immigration activists as well. Mr. Filey continues:

At some point, Mr. Biden will have to decide if his interest in immigration policy goes beyond political posturing. Our immigration laws need updating. Should the U.S. de-emphasize family ties and put more weight on the education and skills of newcomers, and how do you strike the right balance? What should we do with the millions of undocumented people who already live here? What are the economic and humanitarian costs of deporting them? And if you let them stay, how do you do so without encouraging future illegal entries or making immigrants who play by the rules look like saps?

These are questions worth debating openly and in depth, but serious debates are less likely to happen while hordes of foreign nationals are exploiting our laws or attempting to force their way into the country, and while the White House pays little more than lip service to trying to stop them.

It probably hasn’t sunk in yet, either for the president or Democrats more generally but the common experience of presidents is that, whatever their hopes, dreams, or goals, they are inevitably overtaken by events. We won’t end up judging the Biden presidency based on his promises or aspirations but on how he responded to those events.

Two concluding observations. Unless the teenagers and adults who cross the border illegally already speak. read, and write English fluently the odds are that they never will. That’s not judgmental; it’s just stating the facts. And public money will be lavished on them from the CBP to the OFRR to public schools, public safety, and health care and the jobs they’ll be able to secure will never be able to defray those costs.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Chicago community activist Jasson Perez takes Mayor Lori Lightfoot to task for her dodging accountability in her remarks about the shooting of Adam Toledo:

Last week, shortly before the public release of body-cam footage showing the police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) said at a news conference: “Simply put, we failed Adam.”

No, “we” didn’t.

[…]

Some of us work to keep youths alive and give them a better chance at life. This is the we who have protested, held vigils and demanded that Lightfoot do better by passing policies our city needs. People elected Lightfoot to make real change. When she and other politicians point to a collective failure in the wake of a wrongful death, it minimizes their responsibility for the tragic circumstances and broader pain. It also obscures actions she and other mayors have taken against policies or initiatives Black and brown communities have sought to keep their neighborhoods and cities safe — and even thrive.

The factors that led to a police officer shooting a 13-year-old are complicated, but the path to a better future is not. Working-class Black and brown communities in Chicago have been fighting for them for years. We need a mayor who has the political courage and will to make necessary change happen.

To place those remarks in some context Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor, running for office for the first time against experienced pol Toni Preckwinkle based on just two campaign promises:

• Reform the Chicago Police
• Don’t raise property taxes

She hasn’t followed through on either of those.

As you have probably heard by now former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been found guilty on all counts in the killing of George Floyd.

What’s next?

I think we’re all waiting on tenterhooks to see if there’s civil disorder in Minneapolis or anywhere else. Tensions are visibly running pretty high here in Chicago. I also don’t see how the other officers involved in the incident will escape indictment.

I recommend reading a piece at City Journal by Rafael A. Nangual about the death of Adam Toledo in Chicago. Here’s the conclusion:

In the end, Adam Toledo’s tragic death was caused not just by a police officer’s bullet but by the forces that introduced him to gang life—influences that won’t go away unless steps are taken to target the incorrigible violent offenders who reduce the chances of kids like Toledo living long and productive lives. That mission will require a groundswell of support to carry out.

Read the whole thing.

A “straw man” argument is one in which the opponent’s argument is claimed to have been refuted by attacking an exaggerated and, frequently, over-simplified version of the opponent’s actual argument i.e.

1. Creating a weak, cartoonish version of the opponent’s argument (the straw man) and
2. Attacking that rather than the opponent’s actual argument

It is not the same as a reductio ad absurdum (“reduction to absurdity”). In a reductio ad absurdum a claim is established by showing that to do otherwise would lead to absurdity.

The planning fallacy also known as the “rosy scenario fallacy” is when only the best case scenario is considered rather than the likely scenario. There’s also the tertium non datur fallacy in which only two choices are presented although there are, in fact, other possibilities maybe not just three but potentially many.

I honestly don’t know what Justin Gest is trying to accomplish in his recent opinion piece at CNN, “What America would look like with zero immigration”:

As the US government now grapples with a backlog of asylum-seekers and immigrants at the southern border, a team of economists, demographers and I modeled what America would be like if those earlier policies were to continue hereafter. Commissioned by the bipartisan immigration advocacy group FWD.us, our independent research used the most recent US Census and economic data to project the outcomes of a variety of different policy scenarios — one that cuts immigration to zero as Trump effectively did in 2020; one that cuts immigration admissions in half; one that extends recent levels; one that increases recent levels by 50%; and one that doubles recent levels.

concluding:

No doubt, the US needs an orderly system of migration management. But the young and industrious newcomers yearning to stabilize their lives and secure their survival are actually critical to our nation’s survival, too.

but I think it’s either a straw man argument, a clumsy and flawed attempt at a reductio ad absurdum, an instantiation of the planning fallacy, or a tertium non datur. I’m leaning toward the latter.

AFAICT no one is arguing that we should have zero immigration. Most polling shows the overwhelming preponderance of Aemricans supportive of some level of immigration. There’s a good argument that he has instantiated the planning fallacy because there are so many variables he and his colleagues have not, apparently, considered. Let me list some of those:

• a significant number of immigrants with zero productivity
• the cost per immigrant
• Japan

Japan is a particularly interesting case. Immigration there is miniscule, the population is actually declining, but the GDP per capita is increasing. That doesn’t sound like a scenario he and his colleagues have entertained.

For my part I don’t want zero immigration as should be clear from my many posts on the subject. What I want is for us to establish rules for immigration and to enforce them. Is that really too much to ask? If so, how could one have “an orderly system of migration management”? I also think that the U. S. will benefit more from immigration if we optimize the immigrants that we admit as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand do.

In an interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal the CEO of ExxonMobil and the president of its Low Carbon Solutions arm, Darren W. Woods and Joe Blommaert, explain how the company is positioned to benefit from the carbon capture and sequestration funding in President Biden’s infrastructure plan:

About 80% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions come from three critical sectors of the economy: power generation, commercial transportation and industrial manufacturing. Meaningful progress toward achieving the world’s climate goals requires emission reductions from these sectors.

One of the proven technologies available that could play a major role is carbon capture and storage, or CCS, the process of sequestering industrial emissions and safely storing them permanently underground. CCS also promises the potential to reduce carbon emissions significantly at a cost competitive to other solutions, especially for the manufacturing sector.

For the past three years at ExxonMobil we have been studying the concept of creating multiuser CCS “hubs” in industrial areas. They would be located near safe geologic storage sites. A CCS Innovation Zone would bring together government incentives and private-sector investment.

IMO CCS is a worthwhile technology for R&D. It’s also something that would require subsidization to make it pay although the subsidies could take a variety of different forms.

There are even better prospective approaches. Imagine a world of plentiful, cheap, highly available energy whose generation doesn’t produce carbon emissions. Captured carbon dioxide could be split into its component elements—carbon and oxygen. The carbon could be reused in a variety of ways including to produce fuel.

All sorts of things become practical in such a world. And to my eye the most likely path to such a world runs through small modular nuclear reactors.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Stephen J. K. Walters takes a look at what’s happening in Baltimore:

Any objective review of Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby’s recent news conference explaining her approach to the city’s crime problem would be equally pithy: “Baltimore’s crime policy stinks. Marilyn Mosby is the stinkee.”

Mosby’s statement came amid another bloody week in a long parade of such weeks in the United States’ second-most-deadly big city (behind St. Louis). There had been seven murders in the previous six days; in the last month, there have been 33. The 2021 body count of 86 has the city ahead of last year’s pace and even its record 2019 rate. Not a good time to announce that, though elected as a prosecutor, she would not prosecute what she labeled “low-level crimes,” making permanent her policy of dismissing all criminal charges for the possession of drugs and attempted drug distribution, prostitution, trespassing and other “minor” offenses.

What goes unmentioned in his piece is that Ms. Mosby is one of a number of “rogue” prosecutors, sponsored and financed by George Soros, around the country. Here in Cook County was have one of our own: Kim Foxx who was narrowly and to my mind inexplicably re-elected. She, like Ms. Mosby is manifestly incompetent and has abandoned her statutory responsibilities in favor of another political agenda.

Whatever Mr. Soros’s political motivations, he is, among other things, a currency trader and currency traders benefit from chaos and misery. Perhaps he sees those consequences as just a coincidence fortunate to him.

Mr. Walters concludes:

Mosby’s strategy is, then, a roll of the dice — with lives at stake. How many Baltimoreans will continue to tolerate this experiment, and how many will say “goodbye” to their increasingly disorderly, dangerous city?

Add that to the centrifugal forces pushing people out of cities and, indeed, states.