Continuing on in the vein of my last post, in his Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley observes that the progressives who hold the reins of the Democratic Party are risking losing Hispanics with their views on immigration:

While the Department of Homeland Security is dealing with an unprecedented crush of migrants on the southern border that is straining shelter capacity and raising Covid concerns, Mr. Biden is urging his fellow Democrats in Congress to move forward with two amnesty proposals that would affect millions of people who reside in the U.S. illegally. One would provide a path to citizenship for people brought here illegally as children, the so-called Dreamers. The other would legalize the status of undocumented farmhands.

The problem with both measures has less to do with their substance than with their timing and the message to other would-be migrants considering a trek north. Immigration restrictionists with a zero-sum view of labor markets accuse foreign workers of stealing jobs and depressing wages. But the people who would benefit from these bills were already part of a thriving U.S. labor force that, before the pandemic, saw record-low unemployment rates, wages rising fastest for the less-skilled, and a pronounced worker shortage in several industries.

The question is why the Biden administration is pushing for the largest amnesty in history while Border Patrol agents are already at wit’s end and when homeland security officials are anticipating the situation will worsen as the weather gets warmer. The administration has boastfully reversed border-security policies put in place by Donald Trump, seemingly without regard for whether they were effective. This has won Mr. Biden plaudits in the media, but it also has undermined efforts on both sides of the border to reduce illegal crossings. The president should figure out which is more important.

How does this risk Hispanic votes?

The other reason Mr. Biden should be wary of moving too far left to please progressives is that it could fracture the party’s base, according to Democratic strategists who have done a deep dive into the November results. In an interview earlier this month with New York magazine, David Shor, a data analyst at the left-wing Center for American Progress, said that the party’s focus on progressive priorities cost Democrats support among blacks, Asians and especially Hispanics. “In the summer, following the emergence of ‘defund the police’ as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined,” Mr. Shor said. “The decline that we saw was very large. Nine percent or so nationwide, up to 14 or 15 percent in Florida. Roughly one in ten Hispanic voters switched their vote from [Hillary] Clinton to Trump.”

Mr. Shor’s comments on how the immigration issue played out in the 2020 campaign were even more illuminating. “In test after test that we’ve done with Hispanic voters, talking about immigration commonly sparks backlash,” he said. “Asking voters whether they lean toward Biden and Trump, and then emphasizing the Democratic position on immigration, often caused Biden’s share of support among Latino respondents to decline.”

That much should have been obvious from earlier polling data as well as studies by economists. Immigrants already here have more to lose from an unending torrent of new workers with whom to compete for too few jobs than other groups.

But they’re not the only ones. The most recent polling data I could find suggests that black voters recognize that they’re in competition with immigrants for jobs 3:2 compared with white voters. There’s no conflict between believing that illegal immigrants should be treated mercifully, a view held by many black voters no doubt due to their Christian faith, and believing there should be fewer of them.

As I see it progressives are engaging in a three-way gamble:

1. They’re betting that affiliation will outweigh either interest or conviction. So far it has worked out that way but the signs above suggest that the tide may be turning.
2. They’re betting that Republicans embracing racists and white supremacists or, at least, failing to reject them soundly enough will keep blacks and Hispanics in the fold. The Republicans have been cooperative in this.
3. Their media allies provide a continuing barrage of propaganda covering fire. They can probably rely on that for the foreseeable future.

but as I say, it’s a gamble. It will hold true until it doesn’t.

Things always appear larger in the rear view mirror, particularly popular support. That’s what the editors of the Wall Street Journal remind President Biden about in their editorial today:

What appears to be driving Mr. Biden is his memory of 2009, as a telling quote from two weeks ago showed. Musing on the $800 billion stimulus that Congress passed amid the financial crisis, Mr. Biden lamented Barack Obama’s mistake: He was too humble.

“He didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap,’” Mr. Biden recalled. “And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.”

Doesn’t every job candidate say excessive humility is his greatest weakness? Jokes aside, Mr. Biden must be misremembering. The 2009 stimulus was initially popular. The week it passed, Gallup showed 59% of the public as supportive. Around the same time, CNN put it at 54% favorable to 45% opposed. The law’s reputation sank later, as the money was ladled out.

By early 2010, the figures had flipped. “Nearly three-quarters believe that at least half the stimulus money spent so far has been wasted,” CNN’s polling director said. “Six in 10 believe that the projects in the stimulus bill were included for purely political reasons.”

As Abraham Lincoln famously observed you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. There’s a reason that the American people thought the ARRA was politically motivated: because it was. That’s what happens when the president delegates as much of the detail to the Congress as President Obama did with the ARRA and the bill is pass along straight party lines. We’re about to learn whether history repeats itself or merely rhymes.

The editors of the Washington Post speak out in favor of “the Quad”, the co-op of the United States, Japan, India, and Australia, revitalized by President Trump and with whom President Biden met (virtually) last week. I agree.

However, this passage struck me funny:

That said, the strength of the grouping should not be overstated. It is not a military alliance and is unlikely to become one anytime soon; if the Xi regime launches a war in the Pacific in the coming years — say, to conquer Taiwan — it might not be of much help. Under its new prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, Japan appears less invested in the initiative than it was under his hawkish predecessor, Shinzo Abe. Perhaps most troubling, the Quad casts itself as a group of democracies promoting liberal values, but Mr. Modi’s government has been so repressive of free speech and civil liberties that India was recently downgraded to “partly free” in the Freedom House survey.

for several reasons. First, the same thing could be said of our NATO allies in the event of a war with Russia. How much help would they be really? Of them only France and maybe the UK are capable of doing their own logistics and, as we learned in 2011, not for very long.

The second reason is the passage critical of India:

but Mr. Modi’s government has been so repressive of free speech and civil liberties

I think that’s a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. I would rather India were more closely allied with the U. S. than more closely allied with China. Which would they prefer?

If they can only tolerate views of civil liberties like those we’ve historically espoused, that pretty much limits things to the Anglosphere, i.e. the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

I wanted to bring an article by Perry Bacon at FiveThirtyEight to your attention. In the article the author examines ten “increasingly influential on the left”. The ideas include a rejection of American exceptionalism, systemic racism, skepticism about capitalism, systemic sexism, and cash reparations for blacks. A table they display shows how these ideas are picking up steam in the Democratic Party:

I don’t believe that it’s a coincidence that in the week of January 21 of this year the Gallup poll of party affiliation found that 50% of those surveyed identified as independents, the highest percentage since they’ve been asking this question. If you scroll a little further down in that poll to “leaners”, it’s also clear that Democratic leaners were what made the difference. My view of what’s happening politically in the country is that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are leaving considerable fractions of their voters out in the cold. That’s real disenfranchisement.

To expand on some of the issues gaining ascendancy in the Democratic Party, I think that many are born of ignorance and propaganda. Take capitalism, for example. There are only two known ways of allocating resources: markets and a command economy. Most national economies including the U. S. economy are hybrids. Our problem is not too much capitalism; it’s too little. What we have now is highly financialized crony capitalism, barely recognizeable as capitalism at all. Giving politicians and bureaucrats more power in the economy won’t improve things.

I think that “systemic racism” has no referent. AFAICT all it means is that blacks are not a majority in the U. S., a fact I will concede. For me the question is how can the circumstances of blacks, the descendants of American slaves, be improved? I believe that’s going to take a combination of policy changes and social changes among blacks themselves. It can’t be accomplished through preferences, set-asides, or patronization.

And cash reparations? It’s a nonsensical idea, unsupported by most Americans, and unjust to boot. That it is taken seriously at all is not a mark of contrition but one of opportunism.

What the editors of the Wall Street Journal miss in their lament about the tax increases looming on the horizon:

Democrats are elated with the popularity of their $1.9 trillion spending bill, which they passed under the political cover of the Covid emergency. Handing out money is always popular, especially when there appear to be no costs.

Enjoy the moment because the costs will soon arrive in the form of tax increases. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen put that looming prospect on the table on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

[…]

So Ms. Yellen won’t even rule out Ms. Warren’s wealth tax that would hit all assets above $50 million each year and that Mr. Biden didn’t campaign on. The Treasury Secretary is also floating a global minimum tax on corporations, which would reduce the tax competition among countries that is a rare discipline on political tax appetites.

Expect more such taxing surprises, as Democrats debate which taxpayers to gore, but one sure bet is that this won’t be as popular as passing out money. Paying the bill never is.

which is that a tax increase at this point is bad policy. To understand why you’ve got to understand more about the economic and politics of tax increases.

Taxes are by definition taking money out of the private sector. The effect of removing money from the private sector is to slow economic growth. But what if you plan to spend more money in the private sector (I hear someone ask)? It results in less economic growth than would otherwise be the case. The difference is deadweight loss.

There’s a big different between the policy of just issuing credit (described in the previous post) and taxing and spending. The former is risky but it might increase economic growth. Not as much as just dropping money from a helicopter but it might increase economic growth. The latter just reduces potential economic growth.

Do we really need less economic growth?

But what about income and wealth inequality (I hear someone else ask)? Although changing marginal rates is within the power of the government, realizing additional revenue by doing it is an if-come. However you may try you may not be taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. You probably won’t be doing much about income inequality.

Here’s what the editors of the Wall Street Journal have to say about the challenge that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell faces now that the Biden Administration has passed its COVID-19 “relief bill”:

The sheer magnitude of the deficits to be financed is a rare experiment in U.S. fiscal history. Even before the $1.9 trillion spending bill passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the deficit as a share of GDP would be 10.3% in fiscal 2021. With the Pelosi-Schumer-Biden blowout, the deficit this fiscal year will now be in the neighborhood of 18% of GDP. That’s the highest by far since the four wartime years of 1942-1945.

That’s also a lot of Treasury bills, notes and bonds to sell. U.S. investors have historically been able to finance about 4%-5% of GDP. The appetite of foreign buyers will depend on relative interest rates, currency values and confidence in the U.S. economy. Treasury’s Feb. 25 auction of seven-year notes was a warning sign as low demand almost led to failure.

Treasury auctions since have been more robust, but there’s little doubt that the Fed will be a bulk purchaser of U.S. debt for years to come. The Fed is currently buying $120 billion a month of Treasurys and mortgage securities, and (unlike in Europe) there is no limit on the amount it can buy.

plus this

The Biden Treasury and Powell Fed are joined at the policy hip.

concluding:

Good luck to Chairman Powell and the FOMC in this brave new world in which politicians believe they can spend as much as they want without policy consequences. Mr. Powell won’t be able to say he warned us.

The real challenge is that we’ve never run such large deficits other than in wartime and there’s no obvious escape plan. We’ve started an enormous realworld test of Modern Monetary Theory. If it succeeds it will be a new world in policy-making. If it fails, as most economists including those aligned with the Biden Administration have predicted, it will be painful in the extreme. As usual the poorest will be hurt the most.

In his New York Times column Bret Stephens calls for the creation of a “Liberal Party” in the U. S. because our two major political parties are increasingly being dominated by radicals. After noting that support for forming a third party is at an all-time high but there’s no general agreement on what sort of a third party is desireable, he remarks:

First, the Republican and Democratic brands are weak. Party decline is an old story. But in 2016 the Republican Party collapsed in the face of what amounted to a hostile takeover. Democrats are at less risk, helped by Joe Biden’s politically astute combination of leftist policies and a centrist tone. But the fact that the Senate majority leader is afraid of a second-term congresswoman from Queens also says something about the inner weakness of the Democratic Party establishment.

Second, the people who now seem most eager for a third party are at the political extreme. The striking, if unsurprising, finding of the Gallup survey is that Republican support for a third party jumped by 23 percentage points in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat and his talk of forming a new party. The possibility of a full-blown G.O.P. split in 2024 is obvious.

Third, the neglected territory of American politics is no longer at the illiberal fringes. It’s at the liberal center. It’s the place most Americans still are, temperamentally and morally, and might yet return to if given the choice.

By “liberal,” I don’t mean big-state welfarism. I mean the tenets and spirit of liberal democracy. Respect for the outcome of elections, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and the principle (in courts of law and public opinion alike) of innocent until proven guilty. Respect for the free market, bracketed by sensible regulation and cushioned by social support. Deference to personal autonomy but skepticism of identity politics. A commitment to equality of opportunity, not “equity” in outcomes. A well-grounded faith in the benefits of immigration, free trade, new technology, new ideas, experiments in living. Fidelity to the ideals and shared interests of the free world in the face of dictators and demagogues.

or, shorter, he wants a political party that affirms the “Washington Consensus”. Whatever happened to that consensus? It prevailed for about 40 years but it’s hardly anywhere to be seen right now. The answer is that it flopped. It produced the situation we have now including two increasingly programmatic parties with opposing programs, a concentration of enormous wealth in the hands of a relative few people (in 1970 most wealth was in the hands of middle income people—people whose incomes were within a standard deviation or two of middle; that is no longer the case), offshoring of manufacturing and the jobs that used to go along with it, offshoring of an increasing number of jobs that aren’t protected by professional licensing and regulation, ever-increasing healthcare and educational spending, and, until quite recently, little income growth for people in the middle. That’s what happened.

But the reason his Washington Consensus Party idea isn’t going anywhere is that the Republicans and Democrats are baked into the system in a thousand ways. They’re all that matter. Districts are gerrymandered both for Republicans and Democrats to protect incumbents and both concentrate and dilute racial, ethnic, and political minorities. I’ll give you one example I know well. Here in Chicago judges of election must consist of equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. There is no provision whatever for Greens or Libertarians. Just Republicans and Democrats. That in heavily Democratic Chicago that results in a significant number of people (something between 2,500 and 7,500) becoming Republicans for a day, conforming to the law in theory if not in practice, makes no difference.

If the number of Congressional seats were greatly increased so that, rather than representing districts of from 750,000 to 1.5 million people, they represented a more manageable number of people, it’s possible that might change but as things are Republicans and Democrats have no incentive whatsoever to change that. They like being the only two viable political parties and intend to keep it that way whether they actually serve the will of the people or represent them or not.

There’s a lengthy “project” by the editors of the Washington Post that makes their argument for deemphasizing police forces in favor of a broader notion of fostering public safety that I agree with in some ways, disagree with in other ways, and think makes a combination of category errors, unsupported claims, and false analogies. It stretches on for page after page and is hard to excerpt but here’s a sample passage:

We should think about public safety the way we think about public health. No one would suggest that hospitals alone can keep a population healthy, no matter how well run they might be. A healthy community needs neighborhood clinics, health education, parks, environments free of toxins, government policies that protect the public during health emergencies, and so much more. Health isn’t just about hospitals; safety isn’t just about police.

More apples-to-apples comparisons would be to say “no one would suggest that police stations alone can enforce the law” or “no one would suggest physicians alone can keep a population healthy” and I agree with both of those statements. In the case of public health we rely not just on physicians but on a wide array of other professionals and, most importantly, personal responsibility and institutions.

The same is true of public safety. In addition to police officers there are firefighters, building inspectors, air traffic controllers, and who knows how many other people who all play roles in safer streets and safer cities but a cursory search for information will reveal that the primary responsibility for public safety is on individual people. Are the editors trying to envision a world without personal responsibility and in which the only institutions are government agencies? It sure sounds like it.

Police departments are responsible for enforcing the law. Full stop. Legislators and executives enact laws which are in turn enforced by police officers and the courts.

Here in the city of Chicago over the last year or so we have seen an enormous spike in violent crime including carjackings. Homicides are almost twice what they were in 2019 and carjackings have more than doubled—we’ll probably have three times as many carjackings in Chicago in 2021 as we did in 2019 (603). While the rate at which violent crimes has risen the resolution rate has plummeted. I honestly don’t know how you can blithely assert, as the editors do, that victims of homicide almost always know their killers when the clearance rate is below 50% and the resolution rate lower than that.

I would also add that the number of social workers and crisis intervention professionals has skyrocketed without reducing the amount of violent crime. In other words there’s a disconnect between reality and what they propose.

We have social workers and crisis intervention professionals. When you come home and are faced with burglars robbing your house or gunfire is ringing through your neighborhood, who are you going to call? A crisis intervention professional or the police department?

In a piece at The Week Damon Linker tries to provide some background on the history of Wokeness:

The Great Awokening is gathering speed.

Hardly a week — and sometimes barely a day or an hour — goes by without a fresh incident of “cancel culture” or another “woke” scandal breaking in the news.

Whether you think the trend a good thing, a bad thing, or a trivial thing, you know exactly what I mean. To list just a few of the stories from recent weeks: Longtime New York Times reporter Donald McNeil was fired for quoting a racial slur in conversation with high school students on a trip sponsored by the newspaper; six Dr. Seuss books were discontinued by their publisher because an advisory committee flagged racist images within them; the incoming editor in chief of Teen Vogue has gotten into hot water for tweeting anti-Asian remarks 10 years ago, when she was a teenager; the host of the TV show The Bachelorette has been pushed out because he defended a current contestant who, according to CNN, “was reportedly photographed at an antebellum plantation-themed fraternity formal in 2018.”

He traces it back about 50 years. Given its increasing prominence in education, media, and entertainment, the “commanding heights” of the culture to paraphrase Lenin, IMO simply dismissing it as inconsequential or only being promoted by an irrelevant minority is not a credible argument.

As I’ve said before I think it’s largely Marxism, replacing class consciousness with race consciousness or sexual identity consciousness mutatis mutandis which not only is not an improvement, it’s actually dangerous since it is inherently a demand for minority power.

He concludes:

That’s just the barest sketch of what might be behind the Great Awokening roiling our politics and culture. Until we make more progress in coming to terms with its deepest motives and ultimate aims, we will find ourselves at a loss in how to respond.

I don’t believe that “responding” is nearly as difficult as he does. All it takes is fortitude which, as we have had demonstrated over the last year, is in increasingly short supply, particularly among our political leadership. And as Tom Lehrer pointed out years ago it take a certain amount of courage to stand up in a coffeehouse and sing a song protesting against things that everybody else there believes in.