The editors of the Washington Post call on President Biden to compromise with Republicans on a new COVID-19 relief package:

SEEKING A bipartisan deal on a big covid-19 aid bill, President Biden met Monday with a group of 10 Republican senators led by Maine Sen. Susan Collins. Many in his party are skeptical. The 10 Republicans had offered a counterproposal to Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan that is less than a third the size, leading progressive commentators to accuse them of bad faith. Coronavirus aid is too important for the president to get caught in a holding pattern the way President Barack Obama did as he tried to negotiate a bipartisan health-care-reform bill in his first term.

SEEKING A bipartisan deal on a big covid-19 aid bill, President Biden met Monday with a group of 10 Republican senators led by Maine Sen. Susan Collins. Many in his party are skeptical. The 10 Republicans had offered a counterproposal to Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan that is less than a third the size, leading progressive commentators to accuse them of bad faith. Coronavirus aid is too important for the president to get caught in a holding pattern the way President Barack Obama did as he tried to negotiate a bipartisan health-care-reform bill in his first term.

Based on my experience with the state of Illinois I disagree with the editors on the vital necessity of providing aid to state and local governments. The problem? Money is fungible. Additional aid provided to state and local governments will enable them to spend more on other things that have nothing to do with COVID-19, e.g. public employee wages, benefits, and pensions. Giving the states breathing room to avoid the consequences of bad decisions they’ve been making over the period of decades would allow them to sidestep the decisions they have been refusing to make during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I agree with the editors that extending direct payments to income earners in the top 3% of earners is frivolous and wasteful.

Opportunities for improving the bill that go unmentioned by the editors include eliminating the provision for a $15/hour minimum wage and other aspects that have nothing to do with COVID-19. The preponderance of the evidence, e.g. from the CBO and the NBER, suggests that a $15/hour minimum wage would actually hurt more people than it would help.

I’m not a Republican so I can’t tell you what Republicans might do or will do. I do think they should be willing to compromise with the president but for the life of me I can’t tell you what the shape of the compromise might be.

The graph above illustrates the number of vaccinations as a percent of the population of the various countries. As you can see the U. S. isn’t doing too badly although Israel leads the pack.

That comports with an observation I’ve made here repeatedly—there are advantages in being a small, compact country with high social cohesion.

In terms of total vaccinations we’ve vaccinated the most people followed by China, followed by the European Union as a whole.

Graph and figures derived from here.

In his New York Times column Nikolas Kristof speculates that China may provide President Joe Biden’s biggest nightmare:

Biden needs to manage Xi and reduce the risk of war without pulling his punches: Biden should denounce cultural genocide in Xinjiang but not seek a boycott of the Beijing 2022 Olympics, and he should strengthen ties with Taiwan but not gratuitously poke Xi in the eye. We can send Army Green Berets to train with Taiwan armed forces without releasing video of the training, as the Trump administration did. We can also work with China to reduce the risk of accidents and escalation.

while China permahawk Gordon Chang, who’s been predicting the imminent collapse of China for the last 20 years, in a piece at the Gatestone Institute International Police Council laments that Biden is giving Xi everything he wants:

China’s challenge to America is comprehensive, on every front. So far, Biden has taken steps that certainly encourage Beijing. His rejoining the Paris Agreement, his cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and his repeal of the ban on Chinese equipment in the American electrical grid, among others, favor, directly or indirectly, Beijing. Also of great concern is the failure of Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo to confirm that Huawei Technologies will remain on the department’s Entity List.

Analysts say Beijing is testing Biden. Yes, but so far the Chinese do not need to lift a finger. The new president is giving them what they want, and they are not even having to ask.

I have several points to make. First, China is only a “nightmare” for the United States to the degree that we allow it to be. We chose to hollow out our industrial capacity. China didn’t force it on us. We chose to sell Treasuries to China. China didn’t force us to do it.

And I honestly don’t see how President Biden will accomplish most of the goals he’s established for his administration without changing our behavior and without running counter to China. Whether it’s re-invigorating our economy, making it more equitable, countering global warming, re-engaging with our allies, or standing up for human rights, it can’t be done without criticizing China and taking actions that thwart the Chinese authorities’ plans. His “climate czar”, John Kerry, has already acknowledged that even if the U. S. cut its carbon emissions to zero, it still would have little effect on global warming. The reason for that is China and its actions in Asia and Africa.

But I don’t think that China will be Biden’s biggest challenge. I think his own caucus will be. Especially when its left wing figures out that the way to get President Biden to move farther to the left is to move farther to the left themselves.

Finally, I agree with Mr. Chang to the extent that I believe there’s a genuine risk of Chinese collapse for many of the reasons that he’s mentioned plus others that I’ve analyzed. Our challenge is to ensure that we aren’t taken down with it.

This seems as good a place as any to start. At The Hill Albert Hunt reflects on the fact that although there’s been a change in administrations Washington remains unchanged:

It all is playing out in Biden’s crucial initial test: a $1.9 trillion COVID relief/stimulus bill. To pass the Senate, it needs at least ten Republicans; many have complained about the size and scope, though the White House has made clear, privately and publicly, that it is open to compromise.

Over the weekend, ten Republicans, led by Utah’s Mitt Romney and Maine’s Susan Collins, put forth a drastically scaled back $600 billion package and in a letter asked Biden for a meeting. If this is a serious opening bid and they are willing to meet the White House halfway — Biden would be amenable — a deal may be possible.

But many Democrats would never sign off on anything close to the size proposed by the Republicans, who — at least in the letter— make no mention of assistance to state and local governments or rental assistance, requisites for the administration and most Democrats on Capitol Hill.

The Republican plan also would drop the proposed increase in the minimum wage to $15, which may be a casualty in this process anyway.

One Republican provision Democrats should accept is to reduce the size of any individual stimulus checks and to target them more to those in actual financial need.

The best guess would be Republicans won’t move; despite the “bravery” of Romney and a few others, for too many of them fear of cooperating raises the Trump factor. Many also view it as good PR for the next election.

It also seems like as good a time as any to consider compromise. Moderation, as Plato pointed out a couple of millennia ago, is essential under a republic and the way moderation is achieved is by being willing to compromise with those with whom you disagree. If you find the prospect of compromising with Republicans intolerable, you reject republican government. If you claim that the Republicans are unwilling to compromise, you’re saying that they reject republican government.

With all of the bloviating about preserving democracy that’s been going on, I see precious little democracy to preserve. I think they’re arguing to preserve the ruling oligarchy. I’m more concerned about preserving republican government which, between emergency directives, executive mandates, executive orders, and party extremists seems to be clinging on by a thread.

It’s looking more and more as though Washington getting nothing accomplished is the best case scenario.

We’ve had 8″ to 10″ of new snow in the last 24 hours and are expecting several inches more. That’s on top of the 4-5″ we had earlier this week.

I’ve been spending a lot of time today shoveling. Yes, I shovel by hand. I’m careful not to overdo it.

As I did it occurred to me that there are three stages of snow removal:

• Why bother?
• Just keep up with it.
• Where do I put it?

During the first phase there’s so little it hardly seems worth doing anything about it—it’ll just be gone in a few hours. We’ve been in the second phase for most of the last day. Now we’re entering the third phase. The biggest challenge isn’t shoveling it but throwing the shovels-ful over the earlier piles of snow.

I honestly never thought I’d be writing these words at my advanced age. I have quit my former job and taken one with a different employer. I probably won’t write about my new employer any more than I did about my old. Suffice it to say that my new employer grew during 2020, I wanted to have more responsibility and more money than I was making, and I didn’t see any way for either of those things to happen with my old employer.

I actually shed a few tears in the elevator on my way down. I will miss them but onward to new adventures.

It may turn out to be a shrewd move or the greatest career mistake I’ve ever made. I’ll know in due course. As Maurice Chevalier’s character sings in Gigi, forevermore is shorter than before.

I’m seeing a lot of opinion pieces chortling over a moribund Republican Party, identifying Republicans as the root of all evil, and the like. I have frequently been taken to task by other Democrats by not being as anti-Republican as they.

I believe that if they were sitting where I am, in the state with the lowest credit rating, in the city with the lowest credit rating, with the school system with the lowest credit rating, they might see things more as I do. Here in Illinois in Chicago whatever problems the Republican Party has are largely irrelevant to our problems. The Illinois Republican Party has been supine and, frankly, nuts for the last 20 years but they have practically no role in Illinois’s problems. Even when Bruce Rauner captured the governor’s mansion it didn’t mark a resurgence of Republicans—he did it under his own steam.

If there weren’t a single Republican in Illinois, we’d have all the same problems we do now, just without Republicans to blame for them. A string of incompetent, corrupt, criminal, or all three Democratic governors, mayors, and legislative leadership have driven Illinois one rating agency downgrade from being unable to borrow at all, forced to limit spending to actual revenues in a state with a dwindling tax base.

People talk about the Californication of the United States but before that happens we’ll probably be Illinoised.

In a piece from 1945 reproduced at RealClearDefense James Holmes, after explaining the Monroe Doctrine, notes that it might be poised for a comeback:

But if Latin American governments come to side with an overbearing China, it will become obvious that circumstances have corroded the inter-American ideal. Washington might resort to a more unilateral foreign-policy doctrine if the problem appears dire. If U.S. foreign-policy overseers conclude that China’s economic diplomacy poses a military threat, Monroeism could make a comeback—even if no one in officialdom ever utters the names James Monroe or John Quincy Adams. Here again, the history of the Monroe Doctrine supplies a yardstick for evaluating present-day foreign policy and strategy.

History need not repeat itself precisely to render valuable service. In fact, the differences between then and now may enlighten more than do the likenesses. So crack open an old volume of U.S. diplomatic history—and learn a lot about the present day.

To refresh your memory the Monroe Doctrine was the notion that any intervention by European powers in the Western Hemisphere was contrary to American interests and the U. S. reserved the right to respond to them. Later, under the original Progressives, it came to mean a belief in effective American hegemony over the entire hemisphere.

I’m more than a little skeptical since I think the Biden Administration will be more predisposed to favor engagement over confrontation with respect to China even in the face of obvious American interests for a simple reason: they, too, as Mr. Holmes suggests our Latin American neighbors may, are likely to favor even an ephemeral or elusive prosperity over securing our interests in the face of international disapproval.

In a piece at Atlantic via MSN by John McWhorter, after outlining a series of incidents at prominent universities of anti-racist demands being presented and in general being accepted uncritically, pleads for a different view to emerge:

The writers of manifestos might classify resistance as racist, denialist backlash. But the civil, firm dismissal of irrational demands is, rather, a kind of civic valor. School officials must attend to the fine line between enlightenment and cowardice—for the benefit of not only themselves, but the Black people they see themselves as protecting.

He argues that the school administrators are committing to burning the universities in order to save them.

For more than a century several different views have been circulating among African Americans, vying for primacy: those of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Marcus Garvey figuring prominently among them. For a brief moment in the 1970s it appeared that Booker T. Washington’s views might emerge dominant. For most of the last 40 years those of W. E. B. Du Bois have held sway, to the detriment of many blacks. It appears that Marcus Garvey’s are beginning to triumph.