The editors of the Wall Street Journal finally get around to the point I’ve been making since August:

The questions from Senators in the impeachment trial aren’t plowing much new ground, but they have been useful in underscoring some constitutional principles. To wit, it isn’t legitimate to toss a President from office because the House thinks otherwise legal acts were done with “corrupt motives.”

House managers concede that President Trump broke no laws with any specific actions. Instead, they claim that he abused his power because his motives for asking Ukraine’s President to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden were self-interested—to assist his re-election rather than as Mr. Trump claims to investigate corruption.

More than one Senator teed up the issue, and White House lawyers did an admirable job of explaining the constitutional point. “All elected officials, to some extent, have in mind how their conduct, how their decisions, their policy decisions, will affect the next election,” White House Deputy Counsel Pat Philbin said. “It can’t be a basis for removing a President from office.”

The emphasis is mine. I don’t think that’s quite correct. I think that for it to be legitimate corrupt intent would need to be proven and that is self-evident from the conduct itself only if you bring that to your consideration of the facts.

BTW, I’m all for calling all of the witnesses. Call Bolton. Call the Bidens. We should also have depositions from the president and the president of Ukraine.

I his latest Wall Street Journal column Jason Riley lurches uncontrollably onto a point I have made for years here. People come here from abroad to work:

A Supreme Court ruling on Monday allows the Trump administration to start denying green cards to immigrants who might become economic burdens on society. The justices said nothing about the merits of any policy change, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t assess them. So do most immigrants come here to work or to go on the dole?

One way to answer that question is to look at where migrants settle after arriving here. If they are coming for Medicaid and food stamps, you might expect them to head to states with the most generous benefits, such as New York and California. Yet according to a Brookings Institution analysis of census data, between 2010 and 2018 the five states with the fastest-growing foreign-born populations were North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Delaware and Iowa. New York ranks near the top in the nation in Medicaid spending per beneficiary, and South Dakota is at the bottom end. Nevertheless, the immigrant population in New York grew by just 3.5% during this period, while South Dakota’s rose by 58.2%.

Another way to get at what draws immigrants to the U.S. is to look at their employment numbers. In 2018 the percentage of U.S. workers born outside the country reached its highest level since 1996, yet their unemployment rate was 3.5%, versus 4% for the native-born. And the labor participation rate for immigrants was slightly higher than the rate for workers born here, 65.7% to 62.3%. A common fear is that immigrants are displacing U.S. workers, but the U.S. is experiencing record low unemployment and there are still over a million more job openings in the country than there are people looking for work.

In addition to concerns about illegal border crossings, the White House is worried that too many poor migrants are entering the country lawfully and will overburden social programs. President Trump says he wants to attract foreign nationals who are higher-educated and less likely to turn to public assistance. To some extent, this is already happening, as you would expect in a country with relatively flexible labor markets. And as the needs of businesses and the economy at large have changed, so has the type of migrant seeking to build a new life here.

Illegal immigrants aren’t the only source of unskilled workers from abroad in the United States. Our entire system of legal immigration fosters them. In addition to refugees and asylum-seekers there’s the immigration lottery and sponsorship of relatives for immigration by legal immigrants.

I don’t have the concern about welfare freeloaders the Trump Administration apparently does but I am concerned about legal unskilled workers coming from abroad. It’s not 1883 any more. That we do not have a demand for such workers is obvious from the wage statistics—the wages of workers without high school diplomas or with less than a college education have been flat or declining for years.

We need a skills-based immigration system similar to those in the countries which we most closely resemble, e.g. Canada, Australia, and serious enforcement.

One thing I should have mentioned in my previous post is that I thought that pronouncing the outbreak of Wuhan coronavirus in China an epidemic was premature. Has the WHO (or anybody else other than the new media) actually determined it is an epidemic? There are actual criteria, you know.

Some other things I did not work into the post are that plague originated in China, the “Spanish” flu originated in China, and we’ve had serious flu outbreaks originating in China roughly once a generation over the period of the last 60 years. There’s a message there. Conditions in China are conducive to the development of new diseases, presumably zoonotic diseases. It’s not just their population. It’s a combination of the population, their practices, and their attitude towards disease and health care.

Either China needs to become a much better global citizen than it is or we need to start treating it differently.

Who bears the cost? How about a tithe on Walmart?

And I haven’t even touched on China’s routine abuse of antibiotics.

The number of cases of Wuhan coronavirus that have been diagnosed to data has now exceeded, 6,100 worldwide—more than the SARS virus. From CNBC:

The total number of cases of the coronavirus reached more than 6,100 worldwide with 132 deaths in China, Chinese and international health authorities said Wednesday. Since the first patient was identified in Wuhan on Dec. 31, the number of coronavirus cases in China has mushroomed to more than 6,060, exceeding the total number of SARS cases in that country during the 2002-2003 epidemic. There were 5,327 SARS cases in China and 8,000 across the world between Nov. 1, 2002, and July 31, 2003, according to the World Health Organization.

Meanwhile, this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb rubbed me the wrong way for some reason:

The novel coronavirus now epidemic in China has features that may make it very difficult to control. If public-health authorities don’t interrupt the spread soon, the virus could infect many thousands more around the globe, disrupt air travel, overwhelm health-care systems, and, worst of all, claim more lives. The good news: There’s still an opening to prevent a grim outcome.

China failed to contain the virus early. More cases in the U.S. are inevitable. Experience with the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic suggests that emergency measures such as school closures and border screening—in place at 20 U.S. airports—can at most buy time. Several traits of the virus make border surveillance less effective. It results in a respiratory illness that looks like many other diseases. Some infected people won’t show symptoms while they’re traveling. Checkpoints don’t have tests that can diagnose the virus rapidly.

The U.S. government’s actions to prevent the virus from entering the country are valuable, and there aren’t many good options in such early stages of crisis response. But it’s time for additional measures. As more U.S. cases develop, the strategy needs to incorporate another goal: preventing transmission of the coronavirus within the U.S. Four important steps now could help.

The four steps they list are:

• Identify and isolate cases to halt the spread
• Focus on the flu
• Hospitals need to prepare for an influx of patients who will need to be isolated
• Develop a vaccine

The article struck me as an uncomfortable combination of alarmist, nonsensical, and too little, too late.

If they had acted earlier it might have been possible for the Chinese authorities to halt the spread. Other than ending all air travel to or from China or quarantining everyone who arrived from China recently, what could authorities outside of China have done? I’m sorry but I just don’t see it.

As far as focusing on the flu is concerned, that’s blithe but unrealistic. It’s too early to tell right now but the flu vaccine that was used this year may be as little as 9% effective. Either the flu vaccine is being oversold or, since this is the second consecutive year in which the efficacy of the vaccine has been dubious, it sounds to me as though something basic is wrong with the process.

Do hospitals really have that ability? In 1975 we had a million and a half hospital beds in this country. Now we have 980,000. And there are half again as many people now in the U. S. now as there were then. Efficiency and changes in the practice of medicine have their costs and one of them is reflected in the number of beds available. Need I add that the real price of a hospital stay is much, much more expensive than it was in 1975?

Finally, we should be prepared for the eventuality that no vaccine will ever be found. People die of the common cold every year—there’s no vaccine for that. That’s not for a lack of trying.

Robert J. Samuelson’s latest Washington Post column is a jeremiad against the rising public debt:

What is missing in this campaign, as I have written before and no doubt will write again, is an informative and honest discussion of the role of government in American life. We don’t want to admit that government worth having is worth paying for, through taxes — with the well-known exceptions of recessions and wars, when deficits are often inevitable and ­desirable.

Let’s concede that higher deficits are one problem that can’t be blamed on President Trump. Since the 1970s and 1980s, Democrats and Republicans alike have evaded the hard questions required to balance the budget.

Should we direct more — or less — aid to those in the bottom half of the income distribution? Have we shortchanged defense? With an elderly population that is richer and healthier than its predecessors, should we raise eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare? Should government continue to run a railroad (Amtrak)? Are we undertaxed? Do farmers need to be so heavily ­subsidized?

His concerns about high levels of debt are:

First: As government debt piles up, it increasingly crowds out private investment. This, in turn, weakens productivity growth, which is a major source of higher living standards. With interest rates now so low, this doesn’t seem a problem — which is why it is.

Second: The truly scary possibility is a run on the dollar. If huge budget deficits subvert global confidence in the dollar — causing investors to dump the currency — restoring that confidence might require deep cuts in federal spending and steep increases in taxes.

The first is not materializing. If there were a crowding out effect, you would expect private borrowing to decrease as public borrowing increases. That isn’t happening.

Regarding the second, you might be interested in the Treasury Department’s chart here. I realize that these things can happen very suddenly but I don’t see any signs of a run on the dollar and President Trump’s last budget should certainly have produced some effect. The point that chart really makes to me is that it’s very, very clear that Japan and China are up to something. They are holding far too much in the way of Treasuries. Unless they are, in fact, boosting their foreign trade by buying up large amounts of Treasuries, I see little explanation. Compare them with Germany.

If there is any concern about public debt the target of that concern should be state and local governments. After all, state and local debt accounts for about half of the total public debt as a proportion of GDP.

The Public Health Act of 1944 clearly established the authority of the federal government to quarantine “any individual reasonably believed to be infected with a communicable disease in a qualifying stage and…if found to be infected, may be detained for such time and in such manner as may be reasonably necessary”. Executive Orders 13295, 13375, and 13674 (issued by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama) define the diseases for which the president may order quarantines on his or her own authority as

• cholera
• diphtheria
• infectious tuberculosis
• plague
• smallpox
• yellow fever
• viral hemorrhagic fevers (Lassa, Marburg, Ebola, Crimean-Congo, South American, and others not yet isolated or named)
• severe acute respiratory syndromes (SARS)
• influenza, from a novel or re-emergent source.

To the best of my knowledge these executive orders have never been challenged in court.

In addition that the states have authority to order quarantines is without question unless the state constitution expressly prohibits it. Illinois’s constitution does not contain such a prohibition.

Here’s a snippet from Gallup’s January 2020 poll of American satisfaction on various issues:

That highlights a point I have been making for some time. Historically, Americans have tended to re-elect presidents unless they are very unhappy with things as they are, particularly unhappy with the economy.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is running largely based on a platform of transformation. As things look right now it’s quite possible he’ll win the Democratic nomination for the presidency (I continue to think that the Powers-That-Be in the Democratic Party will act to prevent that). Do you think that under the circumstances indicated in the poll to which I’ve linked a platform of transformation will gain enough support to supplant an incumbent president? Me, neither.

And if you’re wondering why all of the econometric models of the presidential election are predicting a Trump victory, that poll should provide your answer.

From now until November is still a long time and all sorts of things might happen but unless something dramatic happens, the headwinds do not favor any Democratic presidential candidate let alone Bernie Sanders, still largely a wildcard.

The editors of the Washington Post urge the creation of a vast, new government program to deal with the Wuhan coronavirus:

WHETHER CHINA’s draconian quarantine measures will contain the new coronavirus infecting thousands of people is not yet known. But the latest outbreak underscores an inexorable reality: New viruses will arise from contacts between humans and animals, and humans need to prepare for pandemics, just as for terrorism or tornadoes. If China’s containment fails — a worse-case scenario — the stress on health and economic well-being could be intense in the United States and even more so elsewhere. We ought to do more than wait and hope.

Because it now appears this virus is transmissible from one person to another, the goal must be to break the chain. China’s quarantine of 50 million people in the center of the country is a crude and uncertain tool. Such roadblock-style methods may have a legitimate rationale; China’s vast Lunar New Year travel, if unchecked, could accelerate the transmission. But this is stopgap, not full stop. Viruses do not halt at passport control.

The first priority should be a crash effort to develop an effective vaccine. The ability to create just-in-time medical countermeasures — a rapid response capability for pandemic — is still not a reality. As Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, has pointed out, multiple vaccine candidates should be pursued at the same time, rapid clinical trials prepared and planning set in motion for mass manufacturing when an effective vaccine is found. After the swine flu pandemic a decade ago, an effort was made to improve U.S. flu vaccine manufacturing capacity, but more needs to be done. If a vaccine is created, production ought to be strategically placed around the world. It won’t do if just the United States has a vaccine needed by millions elsewhere.

They also want better diagnostics and “hard thinking”.

Fortunately, the private sector is ahead of them. Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Gilead all have active programs to develop a vaccine. As to distributed production, the biggest impediments to that are governments in India, China, and the EU which control what companies can have production facilities in their countries. And world government is far in the future if such a thing will ever happen. Common government requires shared values and if there is one thing we have learned over the last couple of decades it is that there are grave differences among the values held in different places in the world.

Last Friday a colleague of mine, born in Shanghai, showed us a video that appeared to depict people throwing a whole bat into a soup pot and claimed that was the source of the outbreak of coronavirus. Whether that was true or not, I agreed that the conditions of life in China suggest that, when the next great pandemic emerges, as it most surely will in time, it is highly likely to emerge from China. Something that had not occurred to me was that the urge to secrecy on the part of the Chinese authorities was one of those conditions.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Paul Wolfowitz and Max Frost take note of that:

Xi Jinping has acknowledged that the “accelerating spread” of a new coronavirus from the central Chinese city of Wuhan is a “grave situation.” To stop the virus’s spread, the Chinese government has barred residents of Wuhan and nearby cities from traveling and blocked outbound flights, trains, buses and ferries. But if this develops into a catastrophe, the cult of personality around Mr. Xi and the Communist regime’s efforts to control information will deserve much of the blame.

For a precedent, look back to 1918, when the Spanish flu broke out amid World War I. In the U.S., government officials and the press did all they could to play it down lest it hurt the war effort. While the Los Angeles health chief declared there was “no cause for alarm” and the Arkansas Gazette described the disease as the “same old fever and chills,” people were dying by the thousands.

The name “Spanish flu” was a misnomer. In the countries where it originally surfaced—France, China and the U.S.—the news was suppressed by censorship and self-censorship to maintain wartime morale. (China sent only civilian laborers to the battlefield, but it declared war on Germany in August 1917.) Not until King Alphonse XIII of neutral Spain fell ill did news of the virus spread widely.

Between the spring of 1918 and early 1919, three waves of Spanish flu tore across the planet, facilitated by censorship and secrecy. The results were catastrophic: 50 million people were killed world-wide, including nearly 700,000 Americans.

Because the Chinese Communist Party cares more about its social control than the well-being of China’s people, a similar situation is imaginable today. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has praised the Chinese authorities for being transparent and cooperative, including by publishing the sequence of the viruses they have isolated. But in other respects Beijing’s behavior has heightened the risk.

So far as far as I can tell, the Centers for Disease Control has responded very appropriately and responsibly. I’m not convinced the Chinese authorities are. For example, my understanding is that the CDC has asked to come there and review their findings at first hand but so far the Chinese have demurred.

I also think that our domestic news media have been overreacting. It isn’t the Zombie Apocalypse. So far, at least, it isn’t even the Spanish flu. 10% of those who contracted that disease die and, at least based on the statistics coming out of China, the number of fatalities from this new virus is nothing like that. Of course, we are relying heavily on China for those.