After describing his visit to a military rehab center in Ukraine in his latest Washington Post column, David Ignatius declaims:

Listening to their stories, you realize that Ukraine is bleeding out. Its will to fight is as strong as ever, but its army is exhausted by a ceaseless drone war that’s unlike anything in the history of combat. The Biden administration’s rubric of support — “as long as it takes” — simply doesn’t match the reality of this conflict. Ukraine doesn’t have enough soldiers to fight an indefinite war of attrition. It needs to escalate to be strong enough to reach a decent settlement.

He then turns to a conference he attended there:

A recurring theme of the conference was that President Joe Biden should remove current limits on Ukraine’s use of American ATACMS long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia. A procession of speakers said Biden should stop worrying about the danger of Russian escalation — and implied he was weak for even considering the issue. That strikes me as wrong; a primary responsibility of any American president is to avoid war with a nuclear superpower.

But I came away from the conference thinking the United States should take more risks to help Ukraine. It matters how this war ends. If Putin prevails, it will harm the interests of America and Europe for decades.

He concludes by arguing that U. S. national interest requires “deeper American support for Ukraine”. What I do not understand is how deeper support would change the fundamental realities he calls out earlier in the column. How strong would Ukraine need to be to “reach a decent settlement”? There is no depth of support that will create more Ukrainian soldier.

I wanted to call attention to this post by economist Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate:

Lately, another trilemma has preoccupied me. This one is the disturbing possibility that it may be impossible simultaneously to combat climate change, boost the middle class in advanced economies, and reduce global poverty. Under current policy trajectories, any combination of two goals appears to come at the expense of the third.

He goes on to describe the conflicts in more detail. The Biden Administration has focused, at least nominally, on the first two. Dr. Rodrik observes:

This new focus on climate and the middle class is long overdue. But what US and European policymakers see as a necessary response to neoliberalism’s failures looks, to poor countries, like an assault on their development prospects. The recent crop of industrial policies and other regulations are often discriminatory and threaten to keep out manufactured goods from developing countries.

concluding:

Climate change is an existential threat. A large and stable middle class is the foundation of liberal democracies. And reducing global poverty is a moral imperative. It would be alarming if we had to abandon any of these three goals. Yet our current policy framework imposes, implicitly but forcefully, a trilemma that appears difficult to overcome. A successful post-neoliberal transition requires us to formulate new policies that put these trade-offs behind us.

I think that Dr. Rodrik understates the degree to which the three goals are in conflict. For example, as long as the U. S. middle class is the consumer of last resort for the entire world, developing economies require a strong U. S. middle class.

Choosing one goal over another is not a challenge at which American politicians excel. For example, maintaining U. S. global hegemony, blithely described as “primacy in every theater”, requires increased real defense spending. Continuing to spend money we do not have without increased aggregate product creates inflation. We must choose.

A report from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, “Examining Widespread Fraud in Pandemic Unemployment Relief Programs”, considers fraud in the unemployment benefits program put in place during the pandemic:

[T]he U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that about 11 to 15 percent of total benefits paid during the pandemic were fraudulent, totaling between $100 to $135 billion.

Unofficial estimates place the loss rate at as much as 40%.

I think there’s almost no end of directions in which to point the finger of blame. Clearly, the program was not well-designed or administered. I recognize the complexities the circumstances presented. Those are no excuse. That’s a black spot against the Trump Administration.

However, the blame doesn’t stop there. Equally clearly, the program was conceptually flawed. That’s a black spot on the Congress.

Finally, those who perpetrated the frauds share a lot of the blame. I’m reminded of John Adams’s observation about the then newly-written Constitution:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

What sort of government will be needed to maintain order among the sort of people we are becoming?

One last observation. The estimates of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government have long been between 3% and 7%. What if it’s actually 11% to 15%? What if it’s actually 40%?

Given the evidence presented by the House committee I think the burden of proof lies on the federal government. Low levels of waste, fraud, and abuse can no longer be assumed.

To the best of my recollection I have never posted a link to American Greatness before and I don’t expect to again. The post there left me dumbfounded. Eric Lendrum argues that President Trump won his debate with Vice President Harris.

I certainly didn’t see it that way but I will acknowledge that it is far easier to identify who lost. The biggest loser was ABC News. The second biggest was the American people.

I think for some people it was, as Mr. Lendrum avers, a “Rorschach test” but to others it was a sad commentary on the low level of political discourse today and a case in point for why the form should be abandoned entirely. It’s just not an effective method of communicating with modern audiences.

Prominent Democrats (or, possibly, former Democrats) Mark Penn and Andrew Stein make some observations worth considering in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Think back to the Trump-Biden debate in June, in which the CNN moderators exemplified fairness. Had they had spent time correcting Mr. Trump while letting his opponent off the hook, as ABC did, the result might not have been as lopsided, and Joe Biden might still be the nominee. But CNN did its job fairly, and the public got a meaningful read on the two candidates.

When referees put their thumbs on the scale, the game changes. The results have to be thrown out, we are robbed of our time, and democracy is drained of its meaning. A presidential debate shouldn’t be a staged wrestling match. It should feature two candidates on a level playing field so voters can make up their minds free of interference. Anything less makes a mockery of our institutions. ABC should have fact-checked both candidates or neither. Fact-checking only one was the worst possible decision. Even a Democrat can tell a whopper.

Time and again we find that supposedly neutral democratic institutions have been corrupted by bias. Debate moderators must check their biases and seek to be scrupulously fair, or they shouldn’t do the job. They should observe strict rules and come from a variety of networks. Most important, they shouldn’t interfere but rather trust voters to make their own decisions. ABC undermined the system for everyone.

I will post on this a little later but don’t be surprised if Tuesday’s debate was not just the last one of this campaign cycle but the last presidential debate broadcast by a major network full stop.

The graph above is taken from the Census Bureau’s report used by the WSJ editorial board.

As I predicted last night’s debate did not decide a great deal. At Reuters Helen Coster and Tim Reid report:

Reuters interviewed 10 people who were still unsure how they were going to vote in the Nov. 5 election before they watched the debate. Six said afterward they would now either vote for Trump or were leaning toward backing him. Three said they would now back Harris and one was still unsure how he would vote.

Harris and Trump are in a tight race and the election will likely be decided by just tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, many of whom are swing voters like the undecided voters who spoke to Reuters.
Although the sample size was small, the responses suggested Harris might need to provide more detailed policy proposals to win over voters who have yet to make up their minds.

That might present a real conundrum for the Harris campaign. If they can’t win a race based on the Biden-Harris track record and they can’t win an election based solely on “vibes” and aspirations, what’s next? There is not a great deal of time.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal explain why Americans aren’t doing victory laps over the state of the U. S. economy:

Real median earnings for full-time workers last year declined 1.6% and even more for high-school grads (3.3%). This means inflation outpaced wage gains for most low-wage workers. One culprit may be that workers logged fewer hours and less overtime as the labor market started to soften, especially in leisure, hospitality and manufacturing.

The upshot is that real median household income remains lower than in 2019 and has barely grown since 2020.

Americans have short memories but possibly long enough to remember when their wages were growing faster than inflation. Also, we’re spending a lot more on healthcare but not getting a lot more for it:

All told, federal healthcare spending has increased by more than $500 billion since 2019, yet this money hasn’t bought better health or coverage. The Administration has dangled more money for states to expand Medicaid for working-age, healthy adults under ObamaCare. Small employers have responded by paring back their health coverage.

The percentage of uninsured people is the same as it was in 2019 but more people are on Medicare and Medicaid.

It would be interesting to see the chart at the top of the page broken down by income quintile.

To the extent that there was a winner in last night’s presidential debate it was Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s easier to pick the losers. Trump lost by being Trump and we all lost from a nearly content-free debate. Most of all ABC’s moderators lost. They did not cut off microphones when they should have, showed bias, and failed to take note of the complete absence of substantive responses.

I materially agree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debated each other with the skill, knowledge and dignity befitting a great democracy on Tuesday—well, at least they appeared on stage together. Americans were able to see the candidates their two parties have bequeathed for President, for better or (mostly) worse.

Ms. Harris, less well known than the former President, had the most to gain and our guess is she helped herself. She clearly won the debate, though not because she made a powerful case for her vision or the record of the last four years. Though she kept talking about her “plan” for the economy, she largely sailed along on the same unspecific promises about “the future” that she has since Democrats made her the nominee.

She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set the trap so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years.

The Vice President had help from the ABC News moderators, who were clearly on her side. They fact-checked only Mr. Trump, several times, though Ms. Harris offered numerous whoppers—on Mr. Trump’s alleged support for Project 2025, Mr. Trump’s views on in-vitro fertilization, and that no American troops are in a combat zone overseas.

Tell that last one to the Americans killed by Iranian proxies in Jordan this year or the U.S. Navy commanders tasked with intercepting Houthi missiles in the Red Sea.

If that so-called debate presages what we have to expect from the next 50 some-odd days of the campaign, the Harris campaign will be one of aspirations alone. Perhaps that will be good enough to prevail.

The editors conclude:

Flush with its candidate’s success, the Harris campaign on Tuesday night called for a second debate in October. But don’t expect her to sit for any in-depth interviews. That would be risky. This was the only scheduled debate between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, and given what we saw Tuesday, the nation will be grateful if it is the last.

Amen.