In a column that should surprise no one in his New York Times column Paul Krugman strongly endorses Joe Biden’s economic plans:

Republicans also have a long history of claiming that progressive policies would lead to economic disaster. They’ve been wrong every time.

They’ve been wrong about tax hikes: When Clinton raised taxes in 1993, Republicans confidently predicted recession, but what actually happened was a huge boom. When California raised taxes under Jerry Brown, the right called it “economic suicide”; again, the economy boomed.

They’ve also been wrong about social programs. Obamacare, the G.O.P. insisted, would destroy millions of jobs. One of the dozens of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act was actually called the “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.” Yet in the six years after January 2014, when the act went into full effect, the economy added almost 15 million jobs.

And let’s not forget the flip side, the many, many times Republicans promised that cutting taxes on the rich would produce an economic miracle, promises that never came true. There’s a reason conservatives still go on and on about the Reagan boom, all those years ago; it’s the only example they have that even seems to support their economic ideology. (It doesn’t, but that’s another topic.)

But there’s a difference between saying that progressive policies are not the disaster conservatives claim and saying that Biden’s plan would actually promote growth. Why are Moody’s and Goldman Sachs so high on his proposals? Why do I share that optimism?

First, the background. Even before the coronavirus, good employment numbers could hide underlying economic weakness. For at least the past decade, we’ve been living in a world of excess savings: the amount the private sector saves persistently exceeds the amount it spends on real investments. This savings glut is reflected in low interest rates, even when the economy is strong.

Low interest rates, in turn, limit the ability of the Federal Reserve to fight downturns, which is why Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman, has been pleading for more fiscal stimulus.

In today’s world, then, we actually want the government to run budget deficits, because they put excess savings to use. But we also want those deficits to be productive — to boost investment, and strengthen the economy in the long run.

Let’s have another multiple choice question. What do you think?

1. Krugman is right. Biden’s plan will create substantial economic growth.
2. Krugman is wrong. Biden’s plan will reduce economic growth below what it otherwise might be.
3. It doesn’t make any difference. The U. S. is headed for a major depression regardless of what any president does.
4. It doesn’t make any difference. The U. S. is headed for an economic boom regardless of what any president does.
5. Taking money out of the private sector (taxation) and spending more politically (government spending) will result in increasing income and wealth inequality.
6. Other

If you have not heard the news, President Trump has tested positive for SARS-CoV-2:

(CNN)President Donald Trump announced early Friday that he and his wife both tested positive for the coronavirus, an extraordinary development coming months into a global pandemic and in the final stretch of his reelection campaign in which he has flouted experts’ guidance on preventing the disease’s spread.

The diagnosis amounts to the most serious known health threat to a sitting American president in decades. At 74 years old and obese, Trump falls into the highest risk category for serious complications from the disease, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans and more than 1 million people worldwide.

At this point both the president and First Lady are, apparently, asymptomatic. I understand the remaining debates have already been cancelled. Of course, I wish both of them well and a speedy recovery.

What can one say? How do you think events will unfold?

1. No change. The president will continue on as before. The president will be defeated in his re-election bid.
2. No change. The president will continue on as before. The president will be re-elected, possibly receiving sympathy votes.
3. Contracting COVID-19 will actually increase the likelihood of the president being re-elected.
4. The president will become sick enough that Mike Pence will need to take over the responsibilities of the president. The presidented will be defeated in his re-election bid.
5. The president will become sick enough that Mike Pence will need to take over the responsibilities of the president. The president will be re-elected, possibly receiving sympathy votes.
6. The president will become sick enough that Mike Pence will need to take over the responsibilities of the president. Mike Pence will become sick enough that he is unable to do so; Nancy Pelosi will assume the responsibilities of the presidency. Trump is defeated in his re-election bid.
7. The president will become sick enough that Mike Pence will need to take over the responsibilities of the president. Mike Pence will become sick enough that he is unable to do so; Nancy Pelosi will assume the responsibilities of the presidency. The president will be re-elected.
8. The president will die and be succeeded by Mike Pence. Mike Pence will be defeated in the presidential election.
9. The president will die and be succeeded by Mike Pence. Mike Pence will be elected president.
10. The president will die and be succeeded by Mike Pence. Mike Pence will become sick enough that he is unable to do so; Nancy Pelosi will assume the responsibilities of the presidency. Joe Biden will be elected president.
11. The president will die and be succeeded by Mike Pence. Mike Pence will become sick enough that he is unable to do so; Nancy Pelosi will assume the responsibilities of the presidency. Mike Pence will be elected president.
12. The president will die and be succeeded by Mike Pence. Mike Pence will become sick enough that he is unable to do so; Nancy Pelosi will assume the responsibilities of the presidency. Joe Biden will be elected president. He will die or become permanently incapacitated so that he cannot perform the responsibilities of the presidency. Kamala Harris will become president. (This has been suggested as a possibility by a regular commenter.)

That doesn’t cover all of the possibilities but it’s a start. Needless to say, as the stock market is telling us, it’s a time of considerable uncertainty.

I found this article by Tim Hsiao and Aaron Blake on police shooting at Human Events interesting and informative so I’m passing it along:

While it’s not new to see “internet experts” pop up whenever something controversial happens, the torrent of terrible suggestions about self-defense being peddled right now goes beyond mere ignorance. Such advice can actually have deadly consequences if enshrined into public policy. Police officers and citizen defenders stand a good chance of getting killed or injured if they follow this advice. If that happens, those who peddle dangerous myths about self-defense and use-of-force have blood on their hands.

It’s worth exploring and debunking some of these dangerous myths.

Readers should be aware that, as is clear enough from reading the article, that Human Events is a right-leaning publication. Somehow I don’t believe that the authors’ analysis will satisfy those who are taking to the streets in protest over police shootings.

My view is that there are multiple different problems with varying legitimacy, solvability, and strategies for resolving them. For example, I believe that part of the problem in police shootings is that making police forces more inclusive has had the unforeseen adverse secondary effect of making police officers less able to control dangerous situations, e.g.:

A 6’5 male bodybuilder can easily overpower and kill a 5’2 woman, child, or elderly grandfather with his bare hands. And someone in a mounted position throwing blows with his fists while you are pinned on concrete (as was Trayvon Martin when he attacked George Zimmerman) is easily capable of killing you, even if you are both similarly built.

I think that all police officers should be able to control situations involving unarmed opponents without drawing a firearm using a nightstick, for example. If they are unable to do so, perhaps they are not prepared to be police officers.

My impression, too, is that police officers are presently afraid of black men far out of proportion to the actual risk. I have no clear notion of why that might be. Maybe that impression is wrong. I would appreciate someone enlightening me on the subject.

Can anyone cite examples from Joe Biden’s Senate and vice presidential career of his demonstrating material leadership? I think the greatest likelihood is that as president Joe Biden will continue being who he has been over the last half century, to the greatest degree to which he remains able. That will mean that he will be a centrist relative to the Democratic Party but not that he will be its leader.

Let’s engage in a little thought experiment. Imagine you are a diplomat in 1916 of a country that an alliance with Tsarist Russia. Do you still have that alliance in 1918? At this point Russia is governed by Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks and their interests, objectives, and attitudes are drastically different from those of the Tsar.

In his latest Washington Post column David Ignatius makes a darned good case for an urgent intercession of the United States to prevent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan:

The United States, Russia, France and Germany have urged diplomacy, and Pashinyan said he and his colleagues have talked with top officials from all of those countries. Russia has offered to host peace talks. But so far there has been no evident progress toward a cease-fire or settlement negotiations.

The State Department has been increasingly concerned about the showdown between a big U.S. ally (NATO-member Turkey) and a close Russian one (Armenia). But President Trump, who in the past has boasted of his friendship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has so far been silent about the situation. Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday the U.S. should move “immediately to deescalate the situation.”

In case you’re wondering about the nature of this conflict and, indeed, where the heck Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh are and what Turkey’s interest is, I’ve put a map at the top of this post, helpfully provided by the BBC. As you can see Armenia is bordered by Turkey, Azerbaijan by Russia, and Nagorno-Karabakh is a small strip of land just about 30km wide and about 100km long between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The population of Azerbaijan is Muslim and mostly Turkic people. Those are Turkey’s interests. The people in Nagorno-Karabakh are Armenians and Christian. Armenia and Azerbaijan are former Soviet republics. Those define Russia’s interests. It should be obvious that by location, history, and religion Russia has substantial interest in this matter.

What is the U. S. interest in the conflict other than a wish that war be avoided? I would submit that we none other than a putative alliance with Turkey. Our alliance was with a different country—Kemalist Turkey. Kemalist Turkey was secular, largely run by its military, and closely allied with the U. S. Erdogan’s Turkey is Islamist, irredentist, authoritarian, and not aligned with the U. S. as it has proved again and again over the last 20 years.

Will U. S. intercession improve the situation or make it worse? I would submit that under the circumstances it would make it worse and that, if there is any peace to be made, Russia is in a very good position to make it.

Pretending that Turkey is an ally does not make it so in any way other than on paper. Boot Islamist Turkey out of of NATO. Problem solved. To quote Lord Palmerston, we have no eternal allies only eternal interests.

Is there any prospect whatever of a Biden Administration staying clear of this situation? I don’t see it and IMO Mr. Ignatius’s column provides substantial evidence that is the case.

I found USA Today’s editorial on the “presidential” “debate”, which was neither presidential nor a debate, apt, more’s the pity. The U. S. is infected with more than COVID-19:

In the midst of a deadly coronavirus pandemic, economic distress and racial turmoil, American voters deserved a serious exploration of the nation’s problems and the range of solutions. Instead, they got a chaotic insult fest that was like one of those awful 90-minute movies that leave the audience dumber than when it went into the theater.

Entering Tuesday night’s clash in Cleveland, it was clear what each presidential nominee had to accomplish.

For Democrat Joe Biden, the task was to present himself as an acceptable alternative for anyone turned off by President Donald Trump. Biden has spent his lengthy career being just that: acceptable, nothing extraordinary, but not too hot, not too cold; not too hard, not too soft; not too liberal, not too conservative. At 77, his remaining task was to prove he is not too old, or too solicitous of the extreme left.

For Trump, the goal was a bit more complex, and highly contrary to his nature. He had an opportunity not just to energize his base and heap congratulations on himself, but also to reach out to the relatively few undecided voters and outline a second-term agenda. He particularly needed to appeal to women, who, polls suggest, have deserted him in droves since he took office.

concluding

This was not the presidential debate that Trump needed to catch up with poll-leading Biden. More important, it was not the kind of debate that reassures America about the fate of its troubled democracy.

I have no idea what Trump was thinking. He didn’t convince me of anything other than that he’s unsuited to be president, that’s for sure.

I suspect this post isn’t ahout what you think it is. The editors of the Washington Post point out the crimes of the Chinese government which I will quote in full because it’s too brief to excerpt:

FOR THE past three years, China’s Communist regime has waged a campaign of cultural genocide in the sprawling western region of Xinjiang. It has confined more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs to detention centers and sought to eradicate their allegiance to Islam. Detainees have been forced to eat pork and memorize Chinese songs; women have been sterilized, and children separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools. An Orwellian system of electronic surveillance has been established to monitor the rest of the population, using technologies such as facial recognition.

Slowly, the United States and other Western governments have begun to react to this extraordinary crime. Though President Trump reportedly signed off twice on the repression in meetings with Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions on officials responsible for carrying out the crackdown and imposed some restrictions on imports from the region. Last week, the House passed a bill that would bar imports from Xinjiang that were not proved to be untainted by forced labor.

Mr. Xi, however, is unfazed. At a conference of Xinjiang and party officials last weekend, he declared that “practice has proven that the party’s strategy for governing Xinjiang in the new era is completely correct.” He ordered more measures to “make a shared awareness of Chinese nationhood take root deep in the soul” of the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. Mr. Xi is doubling down on genocide.

Two new studies released last week showed his words were more than bluster. The Xinjiang Data Project of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that the regime is building scores of new prison-like compounds where Uighurs are held. Satellite imagery showed 380 suspected detention sites created or expanded since 2017, including 61 since July 2019.

The Post’s Anna Fifield provided a rare eyewitness account of one of the new facilities near the city of Kashgar. Encompassing more than 60 acres and surrounded by 45-foot walls and guard towers, it has 13 five-story residential buildings that can hold more than 10,000 people, she reported. Barbed-wire fences and floodlights belie the regime’s propaganda claims that these are vocational training centers and that most people once in them have been released. On the contrary, many Uighurs who were at first confined to lower-security camps have since been transferred to the new prisons, while others have been enlisted in forced labor.

A second report by the Xinjiang Data Project, also based on satellite imagery, found that some 8,500 mosques in the region had been destroyed since 2017, and an additional 7,500 had been damaged. That represents two-thirds of Xinjiang’s mosques — and again demonstrates that Chinese official claims to be protecting mosques are lies.

Mr. Xi has clearly signaled his intent to continue these criminal acts. Yet the international response remains weak. The European Union, for example, has confined itself to feckless requests to send observers to the region. What’s needed is a concerted and unified response by Western democracies that imposes much higher costs on Beijing. That’s not likely to happen unless Mr. Trump, who according to former national security adviser John Bolton believed that Mr. Xi’s attack on the Uighurs was “exactly the right thing to do,” is voted out in November.

There is exactly one major power that is openly fascist in nature by the dictionary definition of fascism:

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

and that is China. I oppose war with China which leaves one alternative for dealing with the country: ostracization, refusing outright to deal with China. I wish we had a more adroit presidential administration, capable of forging the international coalition that would be needed to achieve that, but we don’t and neither presidential candidate shows any signs of being able to do that.

There’s an old wisecrack in the newspaper business, variously attributed, that dog bites man—not news; man bites dog—that’s news. When New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin sharply criticizes President Trump’s behavior during the “debate”, it’s news:

America was mistreated Tuesday. A highly anticipated showdown in a closely fought presidential election in a deeply divided country had the potential to be a clarifying moment.

Instead, it was a sweaty, formless flop. Worse, it was annoying. Neither the candidates nor moderator Chris Wallace acquitted themselves well.

Joe Biden was sharp and coherent enough, though he relied heavily on notes in front of him. He didn’t exactly raise the bar of decorum with his name-calling, alternately labeling President Trump a clown, a liar and a racist. Ho hum.

Yet the bulk of the blame falls on Trump, who came with a clear plan and executed it flawlessly. Unfortunately, it was a very bad plan.

The very worst part is that next year one of these two men will be president. That this result is the best that our two political parties can produce is proof positive that there is something very wrong with our politics.

I have said in the past that I have absolutely no insight into Donald Trump’s mental processes. The only explanation I can come up with for his strategy is that he thinks that he can win the election with his base alone and the Democrats will do the work of increasing his base for him.

Holman Jenkins’s assessment of the status of COVID-19 in his regular Wall Street Journal column struck me as pretty fair:

Lockdowns at least are universally understood, even by the media, not to be a solution to the virus. Governments need strategies for coping while still having an economy, so people can eat and sustain themselves and receive services. Something else to get realistic about: Large classes of people, like the young, are at relatively low risk. By the laws of human nature, they will start behaving as if the disease is not a serious threat to them personally.

Countries that apparently suppressed Covid with strong measures to keep people apart now are experiencing outbreaks once people no longer find it tolerable or acceptable to be kept apart. Epidemiologists, to reconcile a desire to have both minimal spread and an economy, pushed aggressive testing, tracing and confining as the magic pill. It has not been terribly successful in most places, maybe from a lack of trying, maybe because elected officials realize voters are not up for having their lives disrupted because an app or an informant says they might have been exposed.

The progress of the disease in country after country seems idiosyncratic and perhaps less responsive to policy overtures than modelers and planners hoped.

Is he right? Wrong? Both? That last paragraph seems to me to be about right.

My own view is that the lockdowns were prudent for about the first three weeks of the outbreak here in the U. S. but became progressively less prudent the longer they were maintained. Here in Illinois I cannot relate the governor’s policies to anything.

One thing I have noticed is that here in the U. S. there’s a very close correlation between the number of deaths per million population and the state’s percentage of black and/or native American population. I have no idea whether that’s a coincidence, caused by racism, caused by the number of blacks and native Americans who are “essential” workers, an increased susceptibility to the disease among individuals in those groups, or what.