I have seen a number of articles today claiming that Social Security is safe from Trump because no one has the political will to cut benefits or that there will be little action on Social Security in the immediate future. These articles lead me to suspect that the authors don’t know how the system works.

In the absence of action on Social Security, when the trust fund is depleted and income from the payroll tax falls below notional benefits, benefits will cut themselves. That’s not a prescription, that’s just how the system is designed.

Is the assumption that politicians, fearing for their jobs, will pay promised benefits from the general fund?

CNN reports that the first death due to coronavirus outside China has occurred:

The coronavirus outbreak has killed at least 305 people and infected more than 14,300 globally, as it continues to spread beyond China. One person outside mainland China, a man in the Philippines, has died.

There’s a useful summary of what is known about the virus at the New England Journal of Medicine.

The disease is spreading exponentially. That means that in two months there won’t be 14,300 more cases but many times that.

Meanwhile at South China Morning Post Andy Xie complains that the outbreak illustrates a failure of China’s system:

China is effectively in a lockdown. From big cities to little villages, almost every community is under quarantine to a varying degree, or at least faces some travel restrictions. There is little information on how long this will last. One thing for sure is that the government is willing to keep the country in lockdown until the virus outbreak comes under control. A government mobilisation on this scale is unprecedented.
This shows the awesome power of the China model. With government power at the centre of everything, it can mould society in a way not possible in any other large or even mid-sized country. It has grass-roots party cells to implement quarantine policies in every urban compound or village. Going anywhere in the country feels like going through an international airport; someone may pop out suddenly to measure your temperature.
China’s political system allows it to put down everything else to focus on one thing. The economy can take a back seat. If the lockdown lasts for four weeks, which is an optimistic assumption, the economic loss could be around 2 per cent of the gross domestic product. If the crisis lasts longer, the cost escalates proportionately.
While overwhelming government powers are an advantage in handling a national crisis, they are not so effective at preventing one. Since the virus began to surface in early December, developments have unfolded like a sequel to the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome crisis, as if nothing had changed in 17 years. It shows that the China model is a blunt instrument good at doing obvious and big things, but not so effective with complex issues at micro levels.

In my view when China emerges from “lockdown” should not be determined solely by China. If the mortality rate of the Wuhan coronavirus begins to reach that of, say, the Spanish flu, which also emerged from China, there should be serious reconsideration of China’s role in the global system.

In a piece at The New Atlantis Zach Graves and M. Anthony Mills make a pitch for technocracy in this age of rising populism:

In his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, U.S. Naval War College professor and self-described Never Trumper, laments the turn of American politics toward “the worship of its own ignorance.” And libertarian-leaning Georgetown professor Jason Brennan writes in his book Against Democracy that “when it comes to politics, some people know a lot, most people know nothing, and many people know less than nothing.” Voters generally don’t know which party controls Congress, what major policy debates are about, or how federal spending is allocated. Brennan proposes the idea of “epistocracy,” a system where political power accrues more to the educated and knowledgeable — meaning, in practice, disenfranchisement schemes such as reviving literacy tests for voting, expanded to include basic economics and political science. Meanwhile, Parag Khanna, a TED Talker who describes himself as a “geopolitical futurist,” argues in his 2017 book Technocracy in America, “America has more than enough democracy. What it needs is more technocracy — a lot more…. Technocratic government is built around expert analysis and long-term planning rather than narrow-minded and short-term populist wins.”

America’s first flirtation with technocracy was in the early 20th century when there were serious proposals for a committee consisting of the heads of major corporations with the authority to control the country’s economy. You might not be surprised that these proposals came from the heads of major corporations.

“Technocracy” comes from a pair of Greek words, τέχνη (techne) and κράτος (kratos) meaning skill and power, rule, respectively, and means “rule by experts”. That immediately prompts the question who are the experts? A credential that says you’re an expert would be a start but it’s just a start. Would anyone seriously contend that an individual with a newly-minted Bachelors in Architecture was an expert in the same sense as a practicing architect with decades of experience and a track record of designing beautiful, functional building that were executed on time and within budget? Obviously not.

Some combination of education and certification, experience, and performance would seem to be a winning formula. Who would be dissatisfied with that? The answer, obviously enough, is the uneducated and the young. They would chafe at such a system and, since they had no say in the policies reached, should not be expected to support those policies.

All of the foregoing is the theory of technocracy but, as Yogi Berra pointed out, while in theory there’s no difference between theory and practice in practice there is. In practice technocracy inevitably means either rule by lawyers or rule by the connected. As evidence I would submit that Rahm Emanuel got a job in finance without a degree or prior experience in finance and became quite wealthy, purely on the basis of his political connections while Steve Rattner was placed in charge of the reorganization and recovery of General Motors without a degree or experience in the auto industry, business, finance, or General Motors. What’s the relevance of those two individuals? They represent the technocratic wing of the Democratic Party.

I would also point out that education and health care are two of the most technocratic sectors of our economy and they both have the same problems: enormous increases in costs coupled with diminishing marginal returns to additional spending.

Quite to the contrary there are significant advantages to letting policies emerge from a diversity of opinions. This has been characterized as “the wisdom of crowds”. A diversity of independent opinions can actually result in better decisions than would have been made otherwise.

In conclusion I would point out that under a technocracy Mssrs. Graves and Mills would have no role whatever in formulating the policies that would implement their suggestions. They don’t have the credentials or experience.

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal with an op-ed warning them that Democrats’ objective should be defeating President Donald Trump in November rather than tearing the Democratic Party apart:

Reform is often more effective than revolution. Amid the heated rhetoric now blowing through Iowa, Democrats appear to be losing sight of that. Progressivism isn’t a destination—it’s an orientation. Purists are anxious to box some of us out by narrowing the definition, but we all share in the mission of using government’s tools to serve those who have been left behind. The next nine months will present our raucous coalition a rare opportunity to establish a new Democratic “metropolitan majority” that could last for years. We can’t afford to let internecine disagreements about how to reach our common goals get in the way.

Let’s pause right there. I think his head is right but his heart is wrong. Is it really true that “we all share in the mission of using government’s tools to serve those who have been left behind”? Or is Mayor Emanuel engaging in a bout of nostalgia?

He continues:

In recent months both Presidents Clinton and Obama have come under withering criticism—not from conservatives but from Democrats arguing they were insufficiently progressive while in office. Set aside the unforced error of attacking fellow Democrats at a moment when retiring Donald Trump ought to be our singular goal. The underlying critique fundamentally misunderstands how we should judge any given leader’s stewardship of our agenda.

He apparently has not been paying attention as one former Democratic mainstay after another has been “cancelled”, as they call it, for grave infractions of the still unwritten code. The best way of gauging the discontent is by the results. The technocrats and the connected are getting rich; the left behind are still left behind.

Here’s his head talking:

Regardless, the coming campaign is bound to be difficult. In the past century, only four presidents lost bids for re-election. Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were all burdened by recession. Mr. Trump’s consistently low job approval suggests he is uniquely vulnerable. But with unemployment hovering near record lows, the Democratic nominee will need both substance and style that contrast well with Mr. Trump’s conflict and chaos.

and here’s his heart:

The country appears poised for the sort of political realignment Messrs. Clinton and Obama could only dream about. Many suburban women, for instance, regret empowering a president who ended up tearing children from their parents at the border. But to establish a metropolitan majority, progressives need to seize the opportunity with the right candidate and the right approach.

Right now it all seems to come back to the Dirty Harry question: “Feel lucky, punk?”

I think that Mayor Emanuel is kidding himself. As I said in the previous post, this time really is different. Today’s reformers are of a different stamp than those of 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. They won’t settle for gradualism. They want to overturn the whole system now.

In his latest New York Times column Paul Krugman makes a series of predictions, all predicated on the assumption of a Democrat being elected president in November and serving with a Senate that has a majority of Democrats as well. Basically, he says that it doesn’t make a great deal of difference which individual running on the Democratic ticket is elected as long as someone running on the Democratic ticket is elected. Here’s his prediction of the outcome:

In practice, any Democrat would probably preside over a significant increase in taxes on the wealthy and a significant but not huge expansion of the social safety net. Given a Democratic victory, a much-enhanced version of Obamacare would almost certainly be enacted; Medicare for All, not so much. Given a Democratic victory, Social Security and Medicare would be protected and expanded; Paul Ryan-type cuts wouldn’t be on the table.

What caught my eye was his definition of the Republican Party:

Now, the Democratic Party is very different from the G.O.P. — it’s a loose coalition of interest groups, not a monolithic entity answering to a handful of billionaires allied with white nationalists.

I will leave it to those interested to provide their own definitions of the parties. I don’t think his view quite captures the nature of either today’s Republicans or Democrats.

But I think he’s wrong. Assuming the House, Senate, and the White House all in Democratic control, I think a Sanders presidency or perhaps a Warren presidency would be significantly different from a Biden presidency. Said another way, this time it really does make a difference.

I guess the larger question is does the outcome of the election actually depend on who is nominated? I’m afraid it no longer does.

Do you really care about Brexit and why?

I don’t first and foremost because I don’t think it is any of my business. The Brits can do any damn fool thing they want to with their own country.

As of this writing it appears very much as though witnesses will not be called in the trial of the impeachment of President Donald Trump. All that is left is the vote on whether to convict or acquit. Hardly anyone believes the Senate will vote to convict.

Here’s my question. Will more Democrats vote to acquit Trump than Republicans voted to impeach? I think so.

This entire proceeding has been full of “don’ts”. Don’t elect low characters like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to the presidency. Don’t appoint Hillary Clinton Secretary of State. Don’t make her your nominee for the presidency.

Don’t open an impeachment investigation unless you’re willing to do a thorough job of it with the patience to see claims of executive privilege through the courts and unless you can get bipartisan support for an eventual impeachment. Don’t expect that the House can strongarm the Senate. Don’t insult people whose support you’re trying to obtain.

And for goodness sake, don’t ask a foreign head of state to investigate your political opponents.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, once again, express what has essentially been my view of the impeachment proceedings all along:

Presidents conduct foreign policy in what they think is the national interest, but they also hope it will be in their political interest. Presidents typically act from “mixed motives,” as Mr. Dershowitz put it, that are difficult to discern or to separate the high-minded from the self-interested.

It is thus too low a constitutional bar for the House to claim, as it does, that Mr. Trump can be impeached because Democrats think his motives were corrupt. The acts themselves must qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Mr. Trump’s acts don’t qualify—because asking aid recipients to investigate corruption isn’t illegal, and in any case the aid to Ukraine was delivered on time and no investigation of Joe Biden was started. This does not condone Mr. Trump’s request, which was reckless and dumb, but it isn’t an impeachable offense.

What would be a clearly impeachable offense?

He could be impeached for soliciting a financial bribe, for example, or seeking a campaign contribution from a foreign source. He could also be impeached for exceeding his constitutional authority.

or a contribution to his or her foundation I might add. How, then, it has been asked do you constrain presidential power? The answer is under the law, applied even-handedly. Enact laws that that define and prohibit in clear terms the behaviors you wish to eliminate. Ask less of the military and reduce its size and power. The larger the federal government, the military, foreign aid, and the State Department in general, the greater the power of the president.

In his latest Washington Post column Robert Samuelson muses about the factors that make up the present insecurity about jobs. On the one hand job tenure is actually increasing. On the other there’s a lot of insecurity about it. How can those two things be reconciled:

The numbers are dramatic. In the 1980s, an estimated 39.5 percent of men 50 to 59 had been in their current jobs for 20 years or more. For men 60 to 64, the percentage — 40 percent — was virtually identical. By the mid-2010s, those percentages had dropped sharply to 26 percent for men 50 to 59 and to 32.3 percent for men 60 to 64.

Meanwhile, women’s average job tenure was increasing. For those 50 to 59, the share who had 20 or more years in the same job rose from 15.2 percent in the 1980s to 21.3 percent in the mid-2010s. Among workers 60 to 64, the share increased from 23.1 percent to 27.9 percent in the mid-2010s.

It’s possible for the labor market to exhibit both rising and falling job security, according to the study, which was recently released as a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was written by Federal Reserve economists Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith and Abigail K. Wozniak.

or, said another way, agism is a genuine factor in men’s work and job prospects.