With decision time getting tantalizingly close for the presidential election, the seven states that we rate as Toss-ups have dominated political discourse—and our own internal thinking—to a perhaps unhealthy degree.
Wednesday night, David Plouffe, a veteran Obama strategist who is now advising the Harris campaign, said that all 7 Toss-up states are on track to be decided by a percentage point or less. At this point, we’d truly not be surprised if Plouffe’s prediction comes to pass. However, we did want to look back through history to see how common it was to have so many states decided by such narrow margins.
What’s going to happen?
I genuinely have no idea what the outcome of the election will be but I don’t expect either presidential candidate to run away with it. My gut level tells me that Kamala Harris will win but will have next to zero coattails and the Republicans will hold the House and gain a narrow majority in the Senate.
A friend told me, “I don’t think I can take another four years of Donald Trump clips on the ‘Today’ Show, with that whiny voice butchering the English language, complaining about what people think of him.” It’s hard to argue. On the flip side, I don’t think I can take another four years of performative hand-wringing, like Kamala Harris’s Columbus Day 2021 “shameful past” speech to the National Congress of American Indians: “Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations—perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease.” How uplifting.
Under Mr. Trump, expect me-me-me, mockery and misogyny. Under Ms. Harris, climate craziness, wokey woo-woo and pronoun patrols. I don’t like either scenario.
But he concludes on a sort of optimistic note:
Second-guessing will begin as soon as a winner is declared—hopefully before New Year’s Day. Meanwhile, we have checks and balances. So go ahead, hold your nose, pick your poison—our republic will survive. And then vote early, but please (especially in Chicago) not too often.
I suspect that just how bad the outcome is will largely depend on the House and Senate races.
If Trump wins and the Republicans hold the House and get a majority in the Senate, I suspect he’ll be able to secure more tax cuts but, since that appears to be the only thing on which Republicans can agree, that may be it. I doubt he’ll be able to pursue his enemies as his opponents keep warning us he will or that he’ll get much of what he’s run on during the campaign. Although I think we will see some deportations, I’m skeptical that we’ll see the “mass deportations” he’s spoken of.
If Harris wins and the Democrats take the House and hold the Senate, I suspect we’ll see the end of the filibuster as we’ve come to know it. Beyond that I have no idea what she’ll do. She’ll have a pretty free hand.
If Trump wins but the Democrats take both houses of the Congress, I expect a rapid impeachment and conviction but beyond that I have no idea what will happen. That will be blocked if the Republicans get a majority in the Senate but I expect a reenactment of Trump’s first term.
If Harris wins but the Republicans hold the House, I expect a replay of Trump’s first term with everybody changing roles. If Republicans also gain a majority in the Senate she could even be convicted.
Said another way I expect it to get pretty bad. I also will be surprised if we know who’s been elected before Christmas.
Of this mercifully truncated presidential campaign we may say what Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: No one ever wished it longer. Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?
Donald Trump, a volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums, is painfully well known. There is nothing to know about Kamala Harris, other than this: Her versatility of conviction means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.
I think this assessment is pretty much on the money as well:
Many of the nation’s 59 prior presidential elections have been choices between mediocrities, with some scoundrels thrown in (and into office). This year’s choice is, however, the worst ever.
This measured judgment is validated by pondering, one by one, previous elections. To understand how far the nation has defined mediocrity down, consider the campaign’s pitiless exposure of the candidates’ peculiar promises and reprehensible silences.
On foreign policy, Trump and Harris have different styles of being incomprehensible. He is pithy, promising to settle Russia’s war against Ukraine “in 24 hours,” details someday. She is loquacious, as when explaining the Middle East to CBS’s “60 Minutes”: “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region … We’re not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end …”
He will not say Vladimir Putin is an enemy. She will not say Israel has a right to fight as fiercely against genocidal enemies next door as the United States fought in World War II against enemies oceans away.
But I’m afraid this is wishful thinking:
Whoever wins, both parties should be penitential about what they have put the country through. And both should begin planning 2028 nomination processes that will spare the nation a choice that will be greeted, as this year’s has been, by grimaces from sea to shining sea.
Already senior Democrats (part of that nomenklatura I’ve mentioned), are declaiming that however small the majority by which Kamala Harris prevails, she will have a mandate. Trump always thinks he has a mandate so that reaction of his would be no surprise.
Job growth slowed sharply last month, with workers sidelined by hurricane effects and the continuing Boeing strike.
The Labor Department on Friday reported that the economy added a seasonally adjusted 12,000 jobs in October, versus a September gain of 223,000. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal, anticipating storm and strike effects, expected a gain of 100,000.
Still, the unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1%, in line with economists’ expectations.
Note that even the expected 100,000 gain was far below the replacement level.
If this were 20 years ago, that would be “October surprise” level scandal. With an election period of several months, many of the votes already having been cast, the impact is certainly much lower than it might have been. Still, it’s not nothing. It is likely to have an adverse effect on Vice President Harris’s election prospects.
Worse still is that the only remedial action that might be taken will add to inflation. Since inflation is a lagging indicator, it will take a while for it to materialize but fasten your seatbelts.
Can someone please explain to me what Mark Toth and Jonathan Sweet are saying they want in this piece at The Hill?
Americans will make their presidential choice on Tuesday. Whoever wins then will be faced with their own choice. Will they resolve to win World War III and give a fireside chat of their own ahead of Thanksgiving? Or will they too continue blindly sleepwalking through this ever-growing global conflagration?
Increased defense budgets? More direct U. S. involvement in the various hotspots around the world? Let alone how those can be accomplished?
I won’t even delve into the peculiarly skewed worldview that is their premise. Suffice it to say that France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, India, Japan, Germany, Mexico, Russia, China, etc. all have national interests and will pursue them regardless of what we do. So does the U. S. although I’m not entirely sure how what we’ve been doing for the last 30 years relate to those.
In that period we’ve been directly involved in three major wars only one of which resulted in even marginal success and a dozen more minor ones both directly and indirectly. Will greater involvement result in greater success?
When Jack and I were walking this morning I got a very fine example of what civilization means: a four-way stop. At a four-way stop the first vehicle to arrive at the intersection has the right of way. When two vehicles arrive at the same time the following rules apply
Always yield to the right
Straight traffic takes the right of way over turning traffic
Right turns take the right of way over left turns
So long as everybody knows the rules and by and large complies with them, traffic can proceed safely and quickly. Note that has two components: general compliance with the rules and the expectation of compliance. These rules aren’t laws of nature. They are rules that allow us to drive safely and quickly.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s announcement of a $300 million property tax hike in the city comes hard on the heels of a major increase in property taxes due to reassessment. Christian Piekos, Craig Wall, Mark Rivera, and Eric Horng report at ABC 7 Chicago:
CHICAGO (WLS) — Mayor Brandon Johnson said he plans to raise property taxes next year, walking back a major campaign promise as the city faces a nearly $1 billion budget deficit.
In a Wednesday morning City Council meeting, the mayor unveiled a budget proposal that includes a property tax hike of $300 million, as well as eliminating more than 700 vacant positions. More than half of those vacant positions are from the Chicago Police Department.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is pitching a $17.3 billion budget that avoids layoffs but relies on a massive $300 million property tax increase to close the city’s 2025 budget gap.
The budget proposal — Johnson’s second — marks a major flip-flop on his cornerstone campaign promise to not raise property taxes on Chicago homeowners, and comes on the heels of what the mayor’s office said was an “excruciating process” to close the gap.
I continue to wonder what those who voted for Johnson expected him to do. He’s doing exactly what I expected him to do—spending lavishly on himself (the City just spent $80,000 remodeling an office for his wife) and doing whatever the CTU wants him to do.
To place this in some perspective here are some comparative property taxes in major U. S. cities from the Civic Federation:
and there’s a rundown of city sales taxes from the Tax Foundation:
Houston’s sales tax ranks 80th or so. There is no city or state income tax in Houston.
Said another way we are taxed punitively here. Why? Corruption and mismanagement.
If you wanted an honest green eyeshades-type who would fix the City’s bloated budget, you should have voted for Paul Vallas. Also just to correct one of Mayor Johnson’s many items of misinformation property taxes are not a “tax on the rich”. They are a highly regressive form of taxation. Even renters pay property tax in the form of increased rent.
It appears that Liberalism has run out of steam, and if its advocates don’t come up with something soon, then feminism, LGBTQ rights, and multiculturalism were just an intermission of modernity. Certainly, their worldview still dominates the cultural and educational institutions in most Western countries but given the recent shift to the right by Gen Z, even that dominance has an expiration date. And that is no surprise: both locally and globally, the groups that are supposed to be most protected by the ideology of liberalism, increasingly find themselves left alone. I am not just talking about the issue of biological males in women’s sports or other issues that catch the attention of Western media, but about how a growing part of the non-Western world is turning its back on liberal ideas.
I don’t think that he or many of those in the West understand what’s happening. There was never any great fondness for liberalism in the developing world. It was always seen as merely instrumental in securing economic growth. The fact that for Americans liberalism was always more honored in the breach than the observance was not lost on them.
Now that we are sacrificing our economic power on the altars of environmentalism, DEI, and consumer spending, there’s even less reason for the “non-Western world” to turn to liberalism.
I largely agree with Paulo Aguiar’s analysis of the effects of Yahya Sinwar’s death on the war in Gaza in Geopolitical Monitor and for these reasons:
Hamas isn’t reliant on a single figurehead or a tight circle of leaders. It’s decentralized, with local commanders and a somewhat clear line of succession. This structure allows the group to continue operating even after losing prominent figures like Sinwar. Whoever steps into his shoes is likely to carry forward the same hardline stance, continuing Hamas’s resistance against Israel and their broader goal of reclaiming what they see as historic Palestine. In that sense, killing Sinwar is more of a symbolic victory than a strategic one – it may lift spirits in Israel, but it won’t dismantle Hamas or bring an end to the cycle of violence.
Furthermore, I think there’s a pretty simple reason that Israel’s “endgame” is so unclear. I don’t think the Israelis have a realistic plan for concluding the war. Hamas is the government of Gaza. The more militant it is, the more popular it becomes among Palestinians including on the West Bank.
I genuinely have no idea what the Israelis plan to do. Drive the Gazans out? Exterminate them? Fight wars with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Iranians all at the same time?
My concern is that they’re escalating to draw the United States farther into the conflict than it already is.
At RealClearMarkets David Hebert makes the case against tariffs, largely a response to Oren Cass’s defense of Trump’s plans. His arguments generally follow the standard neo-classical arguments with a soupçon of ad hominem tossed in:
Oren Cass has written several articles about the need for tariffs to save America. Like all his writings on this subject, he reveals that he has learned enough economics to be a nuisance but not enough to be helpful. In them, he accuses economists of only thinking about the costs of tariffs, such as the increased prices, the net loss of jobs, stagnated economic progress, and the retaliatory tariffs which other nations levy against America, which cost us dearly. At this point, anyone following his work can be left with but one conclusion: he will not let facts stand in the way of his agenda. While his tenacity is admirable, his economic prowess is not.
In these articles, Cass commits three fundamental errors: 1) a misapplication of what economists call “externalities,” 2) falling victim to the water-diamond paradox, and 3) a disregard of secondary effects.
I’m not arguing against him because I largely agree with him but I wanted to address some specific points that Dr. Hebert makes and explain where I differ from him.
By allowing innovations, even those from abroad, to proliferate in the American economy, new jobs that were previously unimaginable are created. In 1900, for example, there were no pediatric oncologists. Today, there are over 2,000.
This is a very complicated subject, too complicated for a blog post. First, people who work in the healthcare sector are compensated based on how much care they provide not based on how much health they provide. Now specialization is a necessity as the absolute amount of knowledge increases but it is also aligned with the incentive to provide more care.
From 1900 to 2000 life expectancy (a reasonable enough proxy for health) grew considerably but starting around 2005 that peaked and, indeed, has actually decreased in recent years. Some but not all of that decrease was due to COVID-19. Some was due to bad habit but I believe that some was a result of increased care having a limit in its marginal productivity. At this point while I think there’s a good argument that different care could produce additional benefits I don’t think the argument that more care will is quite as good as it used to be.
I suspect that here Dr. Hebert is succumbing to the flaw he criticizes—failure to consider marginal benefits. Does one more pediatric oncologist actually produce more health?
Equally impressive, in 1900, almost 40% of the American working population was employed in agriculture. Today, that number is less than 2%.
I’m going to use wheat production as a proxy for agricultural production here. As you can see from the graph above a decreasing number of people working in agriculture were able to produce an increasing amount of wheat. Until 1980 that is. What happened?
I don’t know. You tell me. I can think of all sorts of explanations but what happened is hard to argue. Starting around 1980 U. S. wheat production went flat (noisy but flat) and has remained so. My key point: production is how much wheat you are producing. I suspect that globalization played a role.
This post is starting to get long and I have several additional points to make. I’ll be as terse as I can. I understand comparative advantage but there are three problems. I have yet to meet a CEO who understands comparative advantage or one who does not understand absolute advantage. Chinese has an absolute advantage over the United States on a very wide array of manufactured goods. Under the circumstances comparative advantage makes little difference. And the Chinese leadership has sufficient authoritarian control to limit imports and regulate prices to give China comparative advantage as well as absolute advantage.
As I’ve said before I think that China is a special case and we have little recourse but to impose tariffs on China.
Finally, I think that Dr. Hebert is engaging in a certain amount of hand-waving. Consider the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s list of fast-growing occupations. Some don’t pay enough to maintain a middle class lifestyle (home health assistants and veterinary assistants); some are highly subsidized (wind turbine service technicians, solar photovoltaic installers); and some require qualifications that relatively few can satisfy (veterinarians, physicians assistants, data scientists). Every single one of them is tertiary production.
I think we need more primary and secondary production. Does Dr. Hebert believe we can support the American population based on tertiary production alone?
