Continuing on a related subject, if the journalists of the “upper class media” (as Scott Alexander deemed them) are willing to be anything other than party operatives, why aren’t they complaining about the House Democrats’ moves towards censorship as Glenn Greenwald is?

Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.

Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24 hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” Claiming that “the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” the Committee argues: “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”

No, private companies aren’t subject to the same restrictions as the government (“Congress shall make no law…”) but when they do so because they’re impelled to do so by Congressional bullying it is a violation of the Constitution.

I think we’ve reached a pretty terrible situation when freedom of the press is merely instrumental to promoting specific views.

The only observation I can make about Steven Taylor’s remarks at Outside the Beltway about our present lack of representativeness in the federal government is that there’s very little wrong with our present system that can’t be cured by substantially increasing the number of states and decreasing the size of Congressional districts and increasing the number of representatives. Capping the size of a Congressional district at, say, 100,000 people being represented would mean a House with about 3,300 members. How can two senators adequately represent the interests of a single state with a population ten times the size of entire United States in 1790. There were 26 senators than.

Divvying up states and increasing the size of the senate would require a constitutional amendment but increasing the size of the House could be done by ordinary legislation.

I think that Maureen Dowd is shutting the barn door after the horses have already run out in her New York Times column expressing concern that journalists increasingly see themselves as partisan operatives rather than impartial reporters of the facts:

When I went to the Vanity Fair Oscar party with A.G. Sulzberger in 2017, movie stars rushed up to thank him for fighting President Trump. Over and over again, he explained that it was not the mission of The New York Times to be part of the resistance. Rather, he said, the paper would be straight and combat lies with the truth.

As the Trump years went on and the outrages piled up, with the renegade president making it clear that he would not be bound by decency or legality, the left declared it a national emergency and acted as though all journalistic objectivity should be suspended. Some thought that the media should ignore Trump’s news conferences and tweets and that the only legitimate interview with Trump was one where you stabbed him in the eye with a salad fork.

Many reporters offered sharp opinions, the kind not seen before in covering a president. The tango between Trump and the media — his most passionate relationship — was as poisonous as it was profitable. For reporters, who hadn’t been this chic since Ben Bradlee battled Richard Nixon, fat cable, book and movie contracts flooded in. CNN was on “Breaking News” for four years straight, thanks to Trump’s dark genius at topping himself with outlandish narratives.

Lines were blurred that would inevitably need to snap back when normality was restored.

Some of the new assertiveness was good and should continue. After many years when I had to comb the thesaurus to find a synonym for “liar” to use about Dick Cheney, The Times finally allowed us to call high-ranking politicians who lied, liars. Thank you, Donald Trump!

But the press, bathed in constant adulation and better remuneration, will have a tough adjustment. A whole generation of journalists was reared in the caldera that was Trump’s briefing room.

I think she’s missing a lot. For one thing it didn’t start with Trump. It goes back at least 90 years, to Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. Nixon received much closer scrutiny that Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. Reagan receive closer scrutiny than Carter. George W. Bush and Donald Trump received closer scrutiny than either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Look, I think that Donald Trump is a shmuck, unworthy to be president, but, unlike many Democrats to this day, I think he won the 2016 election fair and square. Shmuck or not he was president but most journalists continued to justify their own partisan blinders because he was a shmuck.

We’ll see whether today’s journalists will be able to make her “tough adjustment”. I don’t believe they will, preferring to see themselves as party operatives. The present Kerenskyite position the media has taken over the last year in which white supremacists are a threat to the republic while left anarchists who are as bad if not worse go largely unreported does not bode well for such an adjustment. Such views are likely to have the same consequences today as they had for Kerensky.

At the New Republic Osita Nwanevu says what I’ve been saying for some time—that the main impediments to progressives not achieving their policy goals are not Republicans but other Democrats:

While the demand for a $15 minimum wage has become a central plank in the progressive agenda over the last decade, it’s worth being clear about the scale of change it would actually bring about. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that raising the wage would benefit 32 million workers. Hundreds of thousands would be lifted out of poverty. But $15 an hour is not a living wage, nor is it a sweeping solution to inequality in this country. It would not fundamentally restructure our economy in any way. Raising the minimum wage is best understood as the ground floor of welfare policy. In fact, it’s the basement⁠—a high aspiration for those whose expectations are subterranean. And this week, our lawmakers couldn’t manage it.

That’s not to say a $15 minimum wage is dead—it isn’t, technically. A regular bill on the proposal can be introduced at any time. But the gambit of bundling an increase with the Covid-19 reconciliation package has failed. It has been written and said that the gambit failed because the Senate parliamentarian ruled that including the minimum wage increase would violate reconciliation rules. This is false: The Senate parliamentarian is a wholly powerless functionary who can be overruled at any time by the party holding the White House and Congress—both of which, as you might recall, are now controlled by the Democratic Party. The gambit failed because the White House and many Democrats in Congress opposed overruling the parliamentarian.

Progressives on and off the Hill have proposed alternatives that might satisfy the parliamentarian. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, for instance, wants a 5 percent total payroll penalty on large corporations that pay workers less than a desired wage, and a tax credit equivalent to 25 percent of wages—for up to $10,000 a year—for small businesses that pay their workers well. But most minimum wage workers aren’t employed by large corporations—in Oregon, only 20 percent of minimum wage workers are in firms with over 500 employees—and the measure would lack the force and simplicity of a federal minimum. Policy minds who’ve examined what Wyden has slapped together, including Dube, have been puzzling over whether and how exactly it might work.

But the reality is that Senate Democrats don’t have 50 votes for broadly and significantly raising the minimum wage, either directly or through some hastily jury-rigged tax scheme. Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin would have killed the increase even if the parliamentarian had approved it and would have killed it even if Kamala Harris had been willing to override the parliamentarian to include it in the reconciliation package. If the $15 wage is resurrected in a regular bill, their opposition to eliminating the legislative filibuster will kill it before the two of them have a chance to kill the proposal on substance in an up or down vote. Some have argued all this absolves the Democratic Party as a whole of responsibility for the proposal’s fate. But as long as Sinema and Manchin remain in opposition to it, it will be plainly and literally true that a $15 minimum wage increase is being blocked by Democrats.

Mr. Nwanevu goes on to blame President Biden for not using the “bully pulpit” sufficiently to impel enough Democrats to support a $15/hour minimum wage to drag it across the finish line.

IMO it’s long past time for progressive to recognize that the reason that their preferred policies aren’t being adopted is that there just aren’t enough people who agree with them. “Progressive” is not synonymous with “Democrat”, as anyone who’s travelled outside a major metropolitan area can tell you.

Just to clarify my views on a $15/hour minimum wage is that I think a national $15/hour minimum wage is imprudent and would result in less employment and slower growth in jobs that pay the minimum wage. Minimum wage multiple contracts might cause even more economic troubles.

What we really need is an economic policy that produces more jobs that pay substantially above the minimum wage but don’t require college educations to land. Reindustrialization of the U. S. could be an important part of accomplishing that. Producing more of what we consume and maintaining a tight job market are vital to it.

That’s essentially the opposite of the policies we’ve pursued over the last half century which have been to maximize the number of minimum wage jobs produced and increase the educational requirements for jobs that pay decent wages.

I found it gratifying that Leonard Hyman and William Tilles, writing at OilPrice, had much the same reaction that I did to the power and related water problems that people in Texas struggled with last week:

We have just witnessed the damage caused by poorly designed energy grids—rolling blackouts, skyrocketing electricity prices, people sleeping in their cars and in one insulated room to keep warm. At the same time a weaponized right wing media swings into action blaming wind turbines and the green new deal for Texas’s energy woes. There is a pattern here. These are variants of stories told after California’s forest fires and resulting power outages. But we see no easy end of power outages that have plagued electricity supply in recent years while adverse weather events seem to get more frequent and impactful. (See Figure 1.)

But this is the bottom line. In a way an electric system is like maintaining a car. Spend adequately on repairs maintenance etc. and reliable performance is reasonably assured. Or one could skimp repeatedly on maintenance, save a lot of money over the years and take one’s chances on vehicle reliability. The electric system in Texas was built it appears around the latter proposition. Their reserve margins are the lowest in the country (about 8%). And this is the third time the electric system failed to perform adequately in winter (1989, 2011 and 2021). Our point here is that any system that consistently fails in this manner regardless of the governance regime is designed that way— despite claims and protests to the contrary. This is a big problem for any region because an increasingly digital economy requires highly reliable electricity service. And what is being provided at present in ERCOT is anything but.

They go on to suggest that the problems will only become worse as people buy more electric vehicles which depend on plentiful, reliable electricity.

I was astonished at the figure they cited for the reserve margin of Texas’s electrical energy system. 8%? Really? Keep in mind that the ERCOT system is almost entirely self-contained. That’s a lot more confidence than I would have. I guess that’s the confidence it takes to be a Texan.

Global Macro Monitor illustrates how different the present spate of quantitative easing is from the one that was implemented as a response to the financial crisis. You could read the text or just skip to the bottom of the post and look at the two graphs, of the year-on-year growth of bank credit and the M2 money stock respectively. They pretty much tell the whole story. And illustrate neatly why I’ve been expressing concern.

I strongly suspect many will find the results of Technometric’s Direction of the Country index counter-intuitive:

Each month Technometrica’s monthly survey of Americans produces a few key metrics. We launched the tracking study in February 2001, and it is in its twentieth year now. Thanks to the sponsorship of Investor’s Business Daily, our media partner, without which we would not have been able to amass this data.

The objective of this article is twofold. The first is to deliver on the story’s headline, and the second, to introduce seven indexes that TIPP publishes each month to measure various country facets.

Here’s the index I found the most intuitive. The question was “Generally speaking, how satisfied are you with the direction that the country is going in at this time in terms of morals and ethics?”

Now here’s the big question: what will their indices look like in four years?

California has contradictions, too, as the editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:

The contradictions of green energy policies are becoming more obvious in the real world, and now comes more evidence in a new study of California’s electricity rates. The policies even contradict green climate goals.

“California has charted an ambitious course towards decarbonizing its economy,” the study by nonprofit Next 10 and the University of California, Berkeley Energy Institute at Haas declares. “At the same time, California has among the highest electricity prices in the continental U.S. These two facts create a tension: decarbonizing the economy most likely requires electrification of transportation and space and water heating, but high prices push against such a transition. High prices also have troubling implications for equity and affordability.”

Meanwhile, California imports a third of its energy from other states. Since energy is fungible by which I mean you can’t tell the difference between energy generated from green sources and that generated from burning fossil fuels when it’s coming down the wire and if any of the energy you’re buying is being augmented by energy from non-green sources it renders the entire thing sophistry.

They continue:

And here’s the kicker: Folks with solar panels get paid for surplus power they don’t use—sometimes at two to three times the rate of wholesale power. So California pays the well-to-do to generate solar power it doesn’t need and then pays Arizona to take it.

We’ve written for years that state “net-metering” programs shift the grid’s fixed costs to low- and middle-income people without solar panels. The Next 10 study estimates that this cost shift translates into $230 more for an average annual electric bill and $124 for lower-income customers with subsidized rates in San Diego.

Yet 25% to 30% of all residential electricity is discounted for low-income customers, and “the cost of this subsidy is borne by all other customers,” the study says. In other words, the middle class ends up financing rate subsidies for the poor aimed at ameliorating the higher costs of solar subsidies for the well-to-do. California’s cap-and-trade program and utility “public purpose programs” like battery subsidies add several more cents per kilowatt hour.

The study concludes that the state’s electric rates are so regressive that they could discourage people from buying electric vehicles and electrifying their homes by replacing gas-fueled appliances. Instead of raising electric rates, the study suggests making policies more progressive by increasing income taxes to promote its climate goals. So subsidize the rich, then tax them more.

For politicians it’s win-win-win. They get cred for supporting green policies and provide subsidies for the rich and poor alike. But the subsidies for the poor aren’t large enough to make up for the contradictions in the policy.

Government of the poor by the rich for the rich. As somebody said an environmentalist is somebody who already owns a cabin in the woods.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal point out different contradictions in the Biden Administration’s policies:

Friday morning’s airstrike against Iran-backed militias in eastern Syria sends a clear message: President Biden will use force to defend American lives. But this welcome development is an exception to the rest of Mr. Biden’s emerging Iran policy.

[…]

On the other hand, there’s Mr. Biden’s seemingly eager desire to return to the flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. After announcing that Washington couldn’t “snap back” United Nations sanctions, the new Administration is consulting with South Korea about releasing at least $1 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week the U.S. wants to “lengthen and strengthen” the accord—good—but then said President Trump’s sanctions on Iran had failed.

IMO sending a clear message is a lot better than sending mixed messages. There are times when strategic ambiguity is beneficial but this isn’t one of them.

I thought that President Trump’s abrogation of the JCPOA was a bonehead move. I wasn’t enthusiastic about the agreement either in process or as policy but we had already borne its costs while the benefits were still to be reaped.

As Heraclitus put it you can’t step in the same river twice and I strongly suspect that the Biden Administration will eventually reach that conclusion.