The editors of the Wall Street Journal call attention to the shortcomings of the Biden Administration’s and the Congressional Democrats’ plans to forgive student loan debt:

The Biden Presidency is quickly turning into Barack Obama’s third term, only more liberal. Consider the Democrats calling on President Biden to use the pandemic to cancel $50,000 in student debt per borrower. What they want everyone to forget is that in 2010 they used the last recession to justify a federal takeover of student loans that have since more than doubled to $1.6 trillion. Now they’re using the pandemic to justify loan write-offs they said would never happen.

The great student loan scam began in 2010 when Democrats used budget “savings” from ending the federal guaranteed-loan program to pay for ObamaCare. “By cutting out the middleman, we’ll save American taxpayers $68 billion in the coming years,” Mr. Obama declared. Where were the media fact-checkers then?

An analysis for the Education Department last year estimated that $435 billion in student loans (excluding private originated loans that are federally guaranteed) will eventually be written off. One reason: Democrats in 2010 created “income-based repayment plans” that limited borrower monthly payments to 10% of discretionary income and discharged the remaining balance after 20 years.

These plans now comprise a third of new undergraduate and nearly 60% of graduate loans. Since many borrowers are making only de minimis payments, their balances continue to grow and accrue interest, although most will be forgiven. In other words, the feds are already set to write down a large chunk of debt.

But unwilling to let the pandemic go to waste, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer and House Democrats are demanding that Mr. Biden go further and cancel as much as $50,000 in debt per person. Ms. Warren says this would cost taxpayers a wee $650 billion and “boost our economy right now.”

What needs to happen is a compromise but, judging by past performance, that’s just not in the cards. The outcome will be yet more welfare for “the rich”, defining the top 10% of income earners as rich. That group holds most of the educational debt. That will not “boost our economy”. It will increase the savings rate, however, which some might explain to you will boost the economy at some time in the future.

What goes unmentioned is that the underlying problem is that when you increase the willingness to pay prices inevitably increase. Underwriting student debut increases the willingness to pay. It’s a positive feedback loop.

The solution, as I have mentioned before, is not a debt jubilee but requiring educational institutions to have more skin in the game. That should at least slow the feedback loop.

In her latest Washington Post column Megan McArdle makes a suggestion to the Democratic leadership I feel confident will go unheeded:

If Donald Trump directly caused the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, then Democrats need to prove it.

To be clear, I believe Trump deserves to be convicted of grave crimes against the republic and barred from ever again running for office. But I also believe that asserting these things will not suffice; Americans need to see all the evidence. And I’m worried that Democrats won’t supply enough of it.

and explains her reasoning:

One reason is to put the powerful people who colluded with Trump on the record, under penalty of perjury. People who made baseless claims of election fraud, or helped assemble that volatile mob on the day of the certification, are more responsible for what happened than the deluded fanatics who followed their lead; they should be more accountable. Force them to acknowledge what they did, or let history record their refusal to do so.

More important is to lay out the entire case before the large number of Americans who haven’t understood exactly how the events of Jan. 6 unfolded or how much Trump and his allies did to foment that insurrection. That is, those Americans who support impeachment, but weakly, should be left in no doubt that they are on the right side. And Republicans who support Trump, but weakly, should be given every chance to change their minds.

Sadly, her column also expresses the roots of the core problem that faces us now. There are actual, grave differences of opinion about the past, present, and future of the country. To many Democrats the truth of those views is so evident that failing to agree with them can only be attributed to malice.

What they fail to recognize is that many Republicans see things precisely in the same way: the truth of their views is self-evident as is the malice of the Democrats.

At present I see no peaceful liberal democratic way to bridge those two different sets of views.

In this Wall Street Journal article on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) task force looking into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, this passage stands out. After calling out several different possibilities for the origins of the virus (from a wild animal, a leak from a research facility, spread from frozen food–a scenario being promoted by the Chinese authorities) there’s this:

Some scientists said they understood why the WHO is still considering the frozen-food scenario despite considering it unlikely. “I think the one thing that is really lost in all of this is that the entire investigation can’t be separated from political considerations,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security.

What this highlights is that we can’t really “trust the experts”. They are human and as such everything they say is said with mixed motives.

People continue to hope for philosopher-kings but there are none. Pretending that ordinary fallible, self-seeking, self-promoting humans are philosopher-kings is actually the worse approach. What we should be doing is relying on experts for their genuine expertise, recognize the limits of that expertise, and make prudent judgments. I trust Paul Krugman when he’s remarking on patterns of international trade. I ignore his political judgments and I take his opinions on fiscal policy with a grain of salt. It’s not a binary choice—trust the expert vs. ignore the experts.

The problems arise when the political considerations so overwhelm professional expertise that we can no longer separate the two. Has the WHO reached that point?

Yesterday all 50 Democratic senators were joined by 6 Republicans in a vote to continue the trial of former President Donald Trump. While a simple majority is sufficient for the trial to proceed, it’s not enough to convict. Unless something emerges in the course of the trial which would convince the 44 Republicans who voted that the trial was unconstitutional, it’s hard for me to see how any of them would vote to convict.

So the outcome is a foregone conclusion. That would make the second instance in American history in which a trial of impeachment failed to convict at least in part because enough senators believed that once an individual had left office he or she was no longer subject to impeachment.

If you believe there should be consequences for President Trump’s words before the breaching of the Capitol on January 6, blame the House. They should have acted with a greater sense of urgency. Laws should be put in place governing the situation.

I think you should probably read Rafi Khetab’s exposition at RealClearDefense on why the U. S. should not withdraw its troops from Afghanistan as President Trump had agreed:

There are five national security reasons why the U.S. should keep a strong residual force in Afghanistan. There is also an important moral argument why America should not abandon the Afghan people and leave them in the clutches of the world’s most savage terrorists. In a highly controversial withdrawal deal signed in February 2020 between the Trump administration and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, U.S. troops are to be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan by May 2021. Such a premature withdrawal will trigger a chain of events that will ultimately expose the U.S. homeland to major terrorist attacks.

He gives five reasons:

1. Withdrawal emboldens Global Terror
2. Withdrawal Portrays U.S. Military A Defeated Force
3. Withdrawal Destabilizes a Nuclear Armed Region
4. Withdrawal Exposes U.S. Homeland and Europe to Attacks
5. Taliban Violating Peace Deal

I won’t respond to each of those points but I will respond to his moral argument. By the end of President Biden’s first term we will have been in Afghanistan for 23 years. Is there no time limit on a moral obligation to do something we can only accomplish by remaining in Afghanistan? I’ll stipulate that we can prevent the outcomes he points to in his argument on the morality as long as we maintain a force presence in the country. Can we not also agree that as soon as we leave, whether that’s in five years or ten years or a century that everything he points to will still happen and there’s practically nothing we can do about it?

Skeptical as I am about the balance of Daniel R. DePetris’s piece at 1945 on the Biden Administration’s policy with respect to Iran, I completely agree with this passage:

The U.S. should also take unilateral steps to de-prioritize the Middle East in its overall grand strategy and reduce its military presence in the region more generally. Washington can start by removing U.S. ground forces from Iraq and Syria a presence that puts U.S. personnel at significant risk from a number of security threats—including rocket attacks from Iranian-sponsored Shia militias. These withdrawals wouldn’t be a gift to Iran as is frequently portrayed, but rather a long-overdue acknowledgment from the Biden administration that the U.S. counterterrorism mission in both countries has been accomplished.

It’s good advice. Sadly, I see little prospect of the administration taking it. Quite to the contrary I think it’s more likely they’ll attempt to do the impossible: re-engage with the Iranian regime while escalating their efforts in Syria and Iraq.

Let me put my cards on the table right at the start. I think that the U. S.’s biggest foreign policy challenges are

• Reindustrializing America. If you don’t think that’s a foreign policy challenge, consider that U. S. prestige is founded, not on admiration of American values, but on admiration of the American economy and military might. Doing that will be opposed tooth and nail by our notional European allies. Doing what we need to do will also probably catch flak from the WTO and the BANANA wing of the environmental movement.
• Reassure our Asian allies (Japan, South Korea, India, Philippines, etc.) in the face of an increasingly aggressive China.
• Build better relationships with our Central and South American neighbors and do what we can to help their economies and encourage political liberalization. The job-seekers masquerading as asylum-seekers showing up on our borders are best deterred by increasing the opportunities available to them at home. And we do need to deter them.
• Butt out of other people’s civil wars or, worse, wars of aggression.

Armed with that let’s turn to Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column. In the column Dr. Mead expresses skepticism of the Biden Administration present course on foreign policy:

The Biden team is driven by conviction. It really believes that America’s leading position in the world rests on global admiration for U.S. values. The administration thinks America’s alliance network is based on those values and Washington’s commitment to a multilateral approach. President Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, in this view, was an all-out assault on the foundations of U.S. power.

Let us hope that Mr. Biden’s leadership will strengthen alliances and rally the rattled forces of democracy against rival authoritarian great powers. But talk is easy; work is hard.

No president in recent decades made as many inspiring speeches about democracy and human rights as President Obama—and yet no administration in recent decades saw authoritarian powers make so many gains. In 2011 Mr. Obama put down a marker in Syria: “The time has come for President Assad to step aside.” A decade later, propped up by Russia and Iran, Bashar Assad is still there.

It is very well for Mr. Biden to say he isn’t Mr. Trump, but what he needs to demonstrate to the world is that he isn’t Mr. Obama. The Obama administration’s mix of tough words and fumbled deeds in places like Egypt and Syria—along with its serial failures to curb Russian and Chinese power plays from Crimea to the South China Sea—badly diminished American prestige. The prospect that the new administration will similarly dissipate Washington’s energy and credibility in empty gestures and moralistic word salads quietly worries U.S. allies (and delights and encourages American adversaries).

He barely scratches the surface of the shortfalls in the Obama Administration’s foreign policy which included:

• Failing to recognize that nation-building in Afghanistan is a Sisyphean task which the Trump Administration was unable to call to a conclusion and which threatens to be reinvigorated.
• Lack of attention to the myriad economic and political problems in Central and South America.
• Intervention in civil wars in Libya and Syria and a war of aggression of the KSA against Yemen.
• Expansion of drone warfare (which the Trump Administration also underwrote).

Do we really want to return to tho
se? I should add that there’s an open question as to whether Israel will actually attack Iran if the Biden Administration attempt to return to the JCPOA.

One more point. I there’s something to be learned from the Carter Administration, it’s that although human rights and democracy promotion may inform American foreign policy, we can’t let it become the extent of American foreign policy.

There were 225 guys in my high school class. I had black classmates, Hispanic classmates, and East Asian classmates. I had classmates who were from the richest families in St. Louis as well as classmates from working class families. Most of us were Catholics but not all—I had a few Jewish and Protestant classmates, too.

What we had in common was that before being admitted to the school we had taken the same examination at the same time and had scored from first to 225th on it and had managed to graduate.

On graduation day after the ceremony my high school advisor summoned my best high school buddy and me to his office. When we arrived he showed us the results of that entrance examination. I had the highest score. My buddy had the second highest score. He said, beaming, “You found each other”.

I hasten to mention that my performance in high school in no way measured up to that demonstrated potential. I was a lazy student, continually cracking wise. I did graduate with an A average in the top 10% of the class. I genuinely regret not having been a more industrious student.

The editors of the Washington Post call for the Senate to convict Trump of the offense for which the House has impeached him:

THE SENATE will begin considering Tuesday whether to convict Donald Trump following the House’s unprecedented second impeachment of the former president. Mr. Trump’s lawyers, as well as many Republicans, deny that the proceedings are legitimate. They are wrong. The Senate must hold its trial, and the right vote is for conviction.

concluding:

Senators must not hide behind fig-leaf arguments. They should listen to the nearly 400 congressional staffers who wrote them a letter about the trauma they endured on Jan. 6, begging them to convict Mr. Trump. And they should think about the precedent they set. As the House managers put it, “Failure to convict would embolden future leaders to attempt to retain power by any and all means — and would suggest that there is no line a President cannot cross.”

I have expressed myself on this subject multiple times before. I think that President Trump’s statements immediately preceding the breaching of the Capitol on January 6 constituted an impeachable offense because context matters. When you yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater it matters whether there actually is a fire.

I am also sympathetic to the claim that there should be consequences for such recklessness but equally sympathetic with the observation that the Framers and, indeed, subsequent Congresses never envisioned a president who would speak in that way under the circumstances that obtained. Present law and precedent does not support the argument that the Senate has no alternative but to convict and under our system when the law and precedent do not apply, they don’t apply.

Congress should act expeditiously to remedy the present omission in the law and not merely assume that the law applies.