VP Biden has made criticism of President Trump’s response to COVID-19 a recurring theme in his campaign. You can see what he plans to do differently here.

It looks pretty likely that COVID-19 will be the elephant in the room for the foreseeable future so it presents a conundrum. He can’t avoid speaking about it at all but IMO emphasizing it too much would be an error for the Biden campaign. Even if the entirety of what he proposes were enacted into law or effected via executive order, I doubt it would change the course of events much.

He has a number of advantages over President Trump in that regard. He won’t have constant media sniping or a resistance within the permanent bureaucracy to contend with. But he can’t order a safe, effective vaccine into existence or mandate the availability of materials or guarantee that the results of the “free” tests (read: paid for by the federal government) that play a prominent role in his plans will be available on a timely basis.

If he’s elected and if a safe, effective vaccine is available by 3Q2021 and if people are vaccinated in sufficient number, he could be a national hero. But that’s a lot of ifs. I think it’s a lot more likely that we will have COVID-19 to contend with for the foreseeable future, governors will continue to be major forces in dealing with emergencies, and his complaints about Trump’s handling of COVID-19 will ring more hollow in 3Q2021 than they do now.

I mentioned what I think the best case scenario of a Biden presidency would be but not the worst case. I think the worst case would be his removal on 25th Amendment grounds within the first year of his presidency.

I wanted to call out Pat Lang’s recent remark re: Joe Biden’s mental condition. From a comment at his blog:

Take my word for it. He was a mean spirited screamer when I knew him 20 years ago. Does he not seem demented to you?

That’s sort of a two-bagger, calling into question both VP Biden’s public persona and his present state of health. I’m not testifying to the veracity of Pat’s observations just noting that those are his observations and he has firsthand knowledge.

I think I would characterize Pat’s view of Trump as “complicated”. I think he has a sort of disdain for Trump as a know-nothing blowhard and no patience for the prism through which he thinks Trump views things. But on the other hand he’s furious about the treatment that Trump has received at the hands of the intelligence establishment and FBI which, without trying to put words in his mouth, I read as thinking has crossed the line into sedition.

Political conventions have been anticlimactic for decades and rarely more so than this particular Democratic National Convention. I stumbled across one characterization of from Marianne Williamson as like “binge-watching a Marriott commercial”.

I think different people have different reasons for supporting Joe Biden for president:

• He’s not Trump (IMO probably the most common reason)
• They long for a “return to normalcy”
• They’re restorationists, longing for a return to the policies of the Obama Administration

Maybe somewhere there’s a voter who genuinely believes that VP Biden is genuinely the best presidential candidate out there. Maybe there is but I doubt it. I also don’t believe that picking Kamala Harris as his running mate will garner a single vote from anyone who wouldn’t have voted for him anyway. If anything I suspect it may lose him a few votes. I might have voted for Joe Biden and the right running mate. I won’t vote for Biden-Harris (I also won’t vote for Trump). Keep in mind that Sen. Harris didn’t collect a single delegate and 90%+ of Democratic primary voters picked anybody else. Tulsi Gabbard did better than Sen. Harris did. I think the results of the primaries were actually pretty clear. Regular Democrats by and large voted for Biden. Progressives voted for Sanders or Warren. That pretty much sums it up.

In my view both VP Biden and Sen. Harris are what used to be called “Nixonian centrists”. They feel out where the center of the party is and head there. Their stances are somewhat different because Joe Biden represented Delaware while Kamala Harris represents California and the center looks different to you depending on where you’re looking from.

I think the best case scenario for a Biden presidency is that the administration of the federal government goes back to the autopilot status of being run by the permanent bureaucracy while there’s a futile attempt at restoring the status quo ante in foreign policy, the area in which presidents ostensibly have the most influence. The reason that that we won’t see a restoration of the policies of the Obama Administration is it ürür, kervan yürür (the dog barks but the caravan goes on). There will be no restoration of Chimerica or imagined trust by the Europeans. We have nothing to offer the Iranians any more. I will be very interested in seeing how the Biden pro-immigration policy is reconciled with double digit unemployment. Or whether the Obama trade policies can be resuscitated, especially in the context of increased leverage on the part of the progressives in his party and their general attitude towards trade.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has had it with demonstrators of any stripe in front of her house and she won’t put up with it anymore. The Chicago Tribune reports:

The Chicago Police Department has effectively banned protesters from demonstrating on Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s block in the Logan Square neighborhood, ordering officers to arrest anyone who refuses to leave, the Tribune has learned.

The directive surfaced in a July email from then-Shakespeare District Commander Melvin Roman to officers under his command. It did not distinguish between the peaceful protesters Lightfoot regularly says she supports and those who might intend to be destructive, but ordered that after a warning is given to demonstrators, “It should be locked down.”

This is not a good look. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Nobody want demonstrators in front of their houses. Not only did she voluntarily seek to become mayor she has spoken in favor of “peaceful protesters”. She should just suck it up or take more stringent measures against protesters in general. Here’s one attorney’s reaction:

The city interpretation of the statute is on questionable constitutional grounds, and an administration that believes in accountability to the people wouldn’t try to ban picketing near the home of the mayor even if an argument could be made for its constitutionality.

which strikes me as just about right.

There’s what strikes me as a pretty reasonable examination of Modern Monetary Theory, an idea that has captured the imagination of people on both sides of the aisle, removing, as it is perceived incorrectly to do, any need for restraints on federal spending, from Julian Jessup at CapX. Here’s its opening:

Imagine that the government could simply print whatever money it needs to guarantee everyone a decent income, fantastic public services, and a secure job if they wanted one – with enough left over to save the planet too. That, for many, is the promise of a new economic paradigm known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

If you’re already thinking that this sounds too good to be true, you are not alone. Many economists – myself included – think that MMT is a frustrating muddle.

To be fair, MMT has a respectable academic pedigree, helpfully summarised here, which some trace all the way back to Keynes himself. It has several prominent advocates, notably Professor Stephanie Kelton, author of The Deficit Myth and an advisor to the Democrats in the US.

In particular, MMT appears to offer a credible alternative to conventional thinking on the importance of balancing the government’s books. The global economic slump and the explosion of debt and money printing during the pandemic have added to its popular appeal. But I remain a sceptic.

My criticism is a bit different. Like Keynesianism there are folk varieties of MMT and the canonical variety and people who should know better are embracing the folk varieties because they let them do things they very much want to do.

I think there are also knowledge, timing, and political issues but that’s another subject.

This has been rumbling around in my head for a while now so I’m just going to blurt it out. I think we need major reforms in campaign funding. I would not oppose an outright ban on any organizations of any stripe whatever making political contributions right along with strict limits on individual contributions.

I disagree with the Supreme Court. I don’t think that money is speech. I think it’s a platform, a megaphone. More money means a bigger megaphone.

I have followed the bickering over the U. S. Postal Service with some amusement over the last week and would like to make a few observations.

First, my wife and I avoid sending anything by U. S. Mail to the greatest degree possible. We have learned from painful experience that it cannot be depended on. That did not begin with Trump. It did not begin with Obama. It has been true for decades. You just need to search the newspaper archives for stories of retired mail carriers with tons of undelivered mail in their attics to understand part of the problem. Another component is that the schedules according to which mailboxes are serviced is aspirational rather than something upon which one can depend.

We will not pay bills by automatic checking account deduction for the simple reason that I know for a fact that very few companies follow their own security policies (how I know that is another story) and I don’t wish to publicize my checking account information. We will not bank online for similar reasons. Banks don’t even follow their own security policies.

I am completely convinced that handing a letter to the next passer-by heading more or less in the direction of your addressee with a request to pass it on to someone going in that direction is about as good as the USPS.

Second, I served for more than 20 years as an election judge for the City of Chicago. I have firsthand experience of how elections are tabulated. Fun fact: universal voting by mail provides a by-the-numbers method for engaging in voter suppression at a monumental level. I won’t go into the details here but it would be enormously easy. That would be more than enough to throw elections presently being decided by a percentage point one way or another which is a lot of them. It’s an extremely poor idea and pointing out absentee votes or that it works in Oregon is irrelevant. In Chicago precincts that didn’t vote for the regular Democratic candidate in the last election would magically have astonishingly low turnout.

Third, the USPS’s business model has been failing for decades. Email and online payment were its death knell and the rise of e-Commerce occasioned by the lockdowns of 2020 will be the final nail in its coffin. Once the USPS lost its fight for exclusivity against FedEx and UPS the fight was already lost. It won’t be saved with a bailout of $50 billion or one of $150 billion. It’s dead but the corpse is still twitching.

But I’ve got to give the Democrats credit. If they can pin the blame for the USPS’s decline or an election in doubt due to universal vote-by-mail on Trump, more power to them.

Finally, George Washington appointed his campaign manager (Ben Franklin) as the first Postmaster General of the United States. Complaints about politicizing the USPS are laughable. It was born politicized. In what world was it not politicized?

After thirteen paragraphs of blaming the Obama Administration for the phlegmatic economic growth from 2009-2016, the editors of the Wall Street Journal arrive at a destination that I think we should all agree about but probably won’t:

The Biden economic plan is best understood as Obamanomics pulled left by Bernie Sanders. He’d raise taxes by $3 trillion by his count—about $4 trillion by independent calculations. His spending plans run to at least $7.4 trillion, conservatively estimated. His labor proposals are the most pro-union since the 1935 Wagner Act. Regulations on health care, energy, transportation, technology and finance will multiply, often with a priority of reducing racial inequities rather than increasing opportunity.

The U.S. economy will have a growth spurt in 2021 as the pandemic ends no matter who wins the election. But over time these destructive policies will inevitably lead to slower growth. The Fed will be called to do even more, perhaps including bond purchases of private companies and modern monetary theory’s debt monetization. Asset holders will benefit more than wage earners.

That last sentence is a hat tip to an observation made earlier in the editorial—the reason for the increases in income and wealth inequality is precisely what you’d expect from the combined Obama Administration and Federal Reserve policies after the financial crisis. It doesn’t make a smidgeon of difference whether they intended those consequences or not.

I fault the Obama Administration for something rather different from the complaints of the WSJ editors. I think that Democrats have learned the wrong lessons from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first and second terms. Neither the New Deal nor Keynesian spending pulled the United States out of the Great Depression. That was not effected until after World War II had concluded, the American people had been saving ferociously during the course of the war, and the U. S. economy was the world’s only intact economy.

No, the lesson they should have learned is that FDR engaged in furious activity, trying one thing after another, through both of his first two terms. Here’s a quick list of the measures enacted into law just during his first term:

1933

Emergency Banking Relief Act
Beer-Wine Revenue Act
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)
Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA)
Agricultural Adjustment Act
Securities Act of 1933
Home Owners’ Loan Act of 1933
Banking Act of 1933
Farm Credit Act
National Industrial Recovery Act
Federal Surplus Relief Corporation
Civil Works Administration (CWA)
Public Works of Art Project (PWAP)

1934

Gold Reserve Act of 1934
Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act
Securities Act of 1934
National Housing Act

1935

Soil Conservation Act
Resettlement Administration (RA)
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
Rural Electrification Administration (REA)
Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA)
National Youth Administration (NYA)
Taylor Grazing Act
National Labor Relations Act
Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP)
Social Security Act
Banking Act of 1935
Federal Project Number One

1936

Rural Electrification Act of 1936
Robinson-Patman Act

I’ve probably missed something in that list. By comparison after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama Administration turned its attention away from the economy towards health care. My point is not to defend any particular component of FDR’s first term actions but to point to their sheer number. I can’t imagine any modern administration, Democratic or Republican, with that sort of energy.

It is a fact that if you withdraw as much from the private sector (taxation) as Joe Biden has promised, however you utilize it you will produce less economic activity than would otherwise have been the case. The dramatic decline in U. S. domestic production activity over the years as a proportion of consumption (measured in imports) tells us conclusively that there will be little or no Keynesian multiplier from today’s government spending. VP Biden is promising to preside over a diminished U. S. economy, redistributing revenue as politics dictates. If you don’t have much to lose or you believe that some of those funds will make their way into your pockets, you may find that prospect attractive.