Here’s the peroration of George Will’s latest Washington Post column:

America has an aging population and an entitlement system (principally Social Security and Medicare) into which 10,000 baby boomers retire daily. It has a political class ideologically quarrelsome but operationally united by a shared incentive arising from a shared understanding. The class understands there are only two ways to finance government, present taxes and future taxes. The class has a political incentive to enlarge as much as possible the latter’s role in fiscal planning.

America cannot, however, forever fund the government it has chosen to have with the tax code it has, the domestic promises it has made and the defenses it needs. In fiscal 2019, taxes raised revenue equaling 16.3 percent of gross domestic product, and the government spent a sum equal to 21 percent of GDP. Higher tax rates and/or new taxes (e.g., on carbon) are coming.

The Democratic Party and an American majority believe the wealthy should pay higher taxes. The Republican Party believes . . . well, whatever today’s president says it believes. In its current plasticity, will it stand athwart this majority yelling “stop”? Wyden has a proposal, and patience, and plastic opponents.

Most of the preceding column is devoted to Sen. Ron Wyden’s tax proposal which is to earmark a tax on wealth to fund the coming shortfall in Social Security. My concern about any wealth tax is that it will, at the margins, reduce investment which in turn means growth in productivity that is insufficient which in turn means stagnant wages.

I don’t think that we need a wealth tax. European countries might but we don’t. What we need to do is to definancialize our economy so that more investment goes into primary and secondary production which will result in increasing wages.

Against my better judgment I watched the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate last night. It was, as I anticipated “let’s attack Bloomberg” night. His weaknesses as a candidate, particularly for the Democratic presidential nominee, were exposed. Some of his strengths were, too, but that could hardly be heard for the din. In many cases he told them the truth. They can’t handle the truth.

Overall I was left with the following impressions. Bernie Sanders is anticipating a vast wave of support from unseen and unheard ideological voters who support his position. That is a notion that crops up in American politics every so often on the part of highly ideological candidates. It was the assumption of the Goldwater campaign. It was the assumption of the McGovern campaign. That strategy has always gone down in flames in the past. Maybe this time is different. I would add that I’m not convinced that as many people have the burning hatred of Donald Trump that those on the stage had.

Joe Biden looked like he was desperate for attention. Elizabeth Warren’s attacks against Bloomberg were the most successful but somehow I received the impression that she is now running for the vice president’s slot on a Sanders-Warren ticket.

I thought that, if you’re looking for a president who would implement modest reform from within, you could do worse than Amy Klobuchar but if you want a president who will tear down the American economy and politics, Bernie Sanders is your man.

The editors of The Economist struggle, like fish on a hook, before admitting that the evidence seems to support that mass immigration has been holding U. S. wages down:

There are nonetheless scraps of evidence that some workers are benefiting from America’s growing antipathy to immigrants. Gordon Hanson of Harvard University suggests that if the impact of reduced low-skill migration is showing up anywhere, it will be in three particular occupations: housekeepers, building-and-grounds maintenance workers, and drywall installers. These occupations rely heavily on immigrant labour and the services they provide cannot be traded internationally. Average wages in those occupations are rising considerably faster than wages in other low-paid jobs, according to calculations by The Economist.

Intriguing evidence also shows up geographically. According to research by William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, five big metro areas saw absolute declines in their foreign-born populations in 2010-18. Wages in those areas are now rising by 5% a year, according to our calculations. Cleveland, which is in one such area, has pockets of severe poverty but seems to be doing better than before. Many of the city centre’s astonishingly grand buildings are being converted into luxury lofts for millennials.

and

The lesson from all these papers is that, over time, the economy adjusts to a fall in the number of immigrants. In the short term, native workers may well see a wage boost as labour supply falls.

just as I have been saying here for well over a decade. They go on to warn:

But businesses then reorient production towards less labour-intensive products; natives take jobs previously occupied by foreign-born folk, which may be worse paid; and bosses invest in labour-saving machinery, which can reduce the pay of remaining workers.

Even the apparent short-term benefits to wages are a poor economic argument for tough immigration restrictions. Migrants have economic effects far beyond the labour market. They spur innovation and entrepreneurship and they help create trade links between America and their home countries. Both low- and high-skilled migration are linked with higher productivity.

Reorienting production towards less labor-intensive products is jake with me. It should have been happening for a long time. Consider the story of fast food. IMO it’s pretty obvious that fast food franchises developed in response to a large number of new, unskilled, inexperienced workers coming into the labor force—the Baby Boomers. After that wave ended it was able to continue with a reliable stream of immigrant workers (legal and illegal). Is the development of fast food really a good thing? I would not mourn the demise of McDonalds and Burger King.

And, of course low- and high-skilled migration produces higher productivity as long as those workers work for lower pay than those they’re replacing. That’s just arithmetic. Again, is that really the model we want for the United States? The sort of increasing productivity we really want is the sort which is too low. What we need comes from business investment in something other than financial assets.

As for innovation and entrepeneurship, there are different groups of immigrant workers. The groups responsible for the greatest number over the last 30 years aren’t the same as those innovating or starting their own businesses.

You might find The Hill’s investigation of its own handling of John Solomon’s columns published at The Hill on Ukraine interesting. I did. Here’s its opening:

On Nov. 18, 2019, The Hill announced it was reviewing John Solomon’s opinion columns on Ukraine after State Department diplomats criticized several of those columns during House impeachment hearings.

This review was conducted independently by The Hill’s news staff under the direction of Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack.

The Hill established working panels for each of 14 relevant pieces that appeared on TheHill.com. These working groups analyzed and discussed the columns at length, looking at possible corrections and/or context that could have been added at the time of the writings. In addition, The Hill reviewed congressional testimony and other public documentation related to Solomon’s columns, as well as related media reports, to add editor’s notes to the columns regarding what has been learned since the columns were posted by The Hill. The Hill also reviewed its editorial policies and processes.

and its closing graf:

Solomon’s Ukraine columns represented a departure from The Hill’s standard opinion content because they attempted to blend opinion and investigative, “original reporting” material. The Hill will avoid such blending of reporting and opinion columns going forward.

I find the free and, frequently, undetectable intermingling of news and opinion problematic, indeed, journalism’s single gravest problem. Here at The Glittering Eye I have frequently urged a return to 5W-style news writing over the point-of-view favored today. I hope other news organizations or what used to be news organizations follow The Hill’s example and perform critical examinations of their own practices.

My all-time favorite wisecrack during Jay Leno’s stent hosting The Tonight Show was this from one of his opening monologues during the early Aughts:

I don’t know why anyone is surprised that France won’t help us liberate Iraq. During World War II they wouldn’t even help us liberate France.

In a similar vein Walter Russell Mead observes about the paradox facing our notional European allies in his Wall Street Journal column:

Since the 1940s, U.S. leadership in the service of a united and secure Europe has been the one unchanging feature in the Continental landscape. For generations, the U.S. committed to protect Europe from Russia, maintain bases in Germany to prevent it from threatening its neighbors, and promote European integration. Now Europeans don’t know where they stand, and a mixture of bafflement, anger, disappointment and fear fills the atmosphere at conferences like the one in Munich.

There’s little doubt that Trump administration policies, ranging from trade wars to toughness on Iran, have tested trans-Atlantic relations to the breaking point. But to understand the growing weakness of the Western alliance, Europeans need to spend less time deploring Donald Trump and more time looking in the mirror. A good place to begin is with a Pew poll released earlier this month on the state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Superficially, the poll looks like good news. In 14 European countries plus Canada and the U.S., a median 53% of respondents said they had a favorable view of NATO, while only 27% saw the alliance unfavorably. Despite double-digit declines in NATO’s favorability among the French and the Germans, these numbers aren’t bad. Mr. Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are all less popular in their home countries than NATO is.

So far, so good—but that support is thin. When asked if their country should go to war with Russia if it attacked a NATO ally, 50% of respondents said no, and only 38% supported honoring their commitment to NATO allies.

Let those numbers sink in. Only 34% of Germans, 25% of Greeks and Italians, 36% of Czechs, 33% of Hungarians and 41% of the French believe their country should fulfill its treaty obligation if another European country is attacked. Only the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands and Lithuania had a majority in favor of honoring the NATO commitment to mutual defense.

I’ve quoted it before and I don’t recall whether it was German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer who said it but it states the problem well: “European politicians know what they need to do. They just know that they can’t keep their jobs if they do it.”

It’s called “clearing the field”. They can increase the price of television spots to the point at which it’s impossible to carry on from lack of funds. Or they can crowd the rest of the field out.

After recapitulating the same analysis of Bernie Sanders’s record (spoiler: he is a state socialist), Megan McArdle continues in her Washington Post column:

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) looks increasingly likely to win the Democratic nomination, left-of-center people are anxious to downgrade Sanders’s self-described socialism into something more politically palatable — like Great Society liberalism, or perhaps, at maximum, a Nordic-style welfare state.

In this, they struggle with an inconveniently well-documented Early Bernie Sanders, with his calls to nationalize “utilities, banks and major industries,“ his kind words for left-wing dictatorships, and his “very strange honeymoon” in the U.S.S.R. — where he blasted U.S. foreign policy before returning home to say “Let’s take the strengths of both systems. … Let’s learn from each other.”

One should be forgiven almost any number of youthful flirtations with bad ideology. But Sanders was in his early 40s when he went gaga for Nicaragua’s brutal Sandinista regime, and 46 during his sojourn on the Volga. In February 2019, when he was refusing to describe Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as a “dictator,” Sanders was 77.

Forty years seems enough cultivate skepticism about what you’re shown while visiting a Communist dictatorship. And 77 is certainly old enough to have read the 2019 Human Rights Watch report on Venezuela, which noted that “polls had not met international standards of freedom and fairness,” and went on to state that no “independent government institutions remain today in Venezuela to act as a check on executive power. … The government has been repressing dissent through often-violent crackdowns.” All of which sounds positively dictatorial. If that wasn’t enough, Sanders might have been convinced when Maduro started using military blockades to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching his own famine-stricken citizens.

Her conclusion: “Thus, it’s unsurprising to find that Sanders remains considerably to the left of Europe’s moderate social democrats.” That is certainly true of the version of “Medicare for All” that he has promulgated. It doesn’t actually resemble the systems presently in place in Scandinavia or Germany or France for that matter.

What should concern Democrats about Bernie Sanders is not merely his radicalism but that he has no friends in Washington. He won’t bring a coterie of more moderate connections with him into the White House and he won’t meekly accept the usual suspects of the Democratic Party nomenklatura.

Relying on Republicans to defend you from your own excesses is downright weird to my ear but that seems to be the assumption that a lot of Democrats are making right now.

The big news here is President Donald Trump’s commutation of the prison sentence of impeached former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Doing so is completely within President Trump’s legal authority. It is also uncalled for and unwise.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune declaim:

After Trump revealed his wrongheaded commutation Tuesday, former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and the three trial lawyers who prosecuted Blagojevich issued a reminder that said in part:

The criminal conduct for which a jury unanimously convicted Mr. Blagojevich included the following actions:

(1) extorting the CEO of a children’s hospital by withholding important state funding to help sick children until the CEO provided campaign contributions;

(2) extorting the owners of a racetrack by intentionally holding up the signing of important state legislation until the owners provided campaign contributions in response to an explicit demand for them;

(3) extortionately demanding funding for a high-paying private sector job, as well as campaign contributions, in exchange for naming a replacement to an open U.S. Senate seat; and

(4) lying to the FBI to cover up his criminal activity.

Trump’s decision spits in the eye of those prosecutors, but also the jurors who found the ex-governor guilty. Remember, too, that we’ll never know how many top-notch people were cheated out of careers in government, or how many employers lost chances at state contracts because, during the Blagojevich years, the fix was in. Nor may we again see such a selfish betrayal as Blagojevich’s effort to sell that Senate seat, which belonged not to him but to the people of Illinois.

while the editors of the Sun-Times first agree with the commutation but then launch into an attack on President Trump’s motives for it:

We have long argued that the former governor is guilty as charged but that his 14-year sentence was way too harsh. On the merits of the case, and especially given the considerably shorter sentences handed out to public officials guilty of more egregious corruption — such as the 6 1⁄2 years given to bribe-taking former Gov. George Ryan for racketeering, conspiracy and fraud — we would argue Blagojevich has been fully and fairly punished. He has been imprisoned for almost 8 years.

But Trump’s decision to commute Blagojevich’s sentence at this time is all of a piece with the president’s warnings that he’s not about to stand by and watch Stone go off to prison for any extended time.

Stone is one of Trump’s closest and shadiest back-channel operatives. He was found guilty of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, including five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness.

If Stone’s conviction stands, and especially if he is forced to serve prison time, Trump knows it will be seen as a symbolic indictment of the president himself, who wants the world to believe Congress’ entire probe of Russian interference was a “hoax.”

He did not receive the maximum sentence allowed under the law for his crimes. I concur with the district court judge who rejected Blagojevich’s appeal of his sentence: “these are serious crimes that had an impact on the people of Illinois”. The argument that it’s hard on his kids is specious. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. All crimes are hard on the children of the felons. His crimes were hard on many, many more children.

Taken together President Trump’s pardons and commutations would seem to convey the message that white collar crimes should just not be punished severely. I think the opposite. Just because you commit your crimes with a pen rather than a gun doesn’t make them better. IMO the punishments were too lenient rather than too severe.

This post was inspired by this one at Outside the Beltway. I’m sure this is a topic that will be debated with some heat for the rest of my life. What were our objectives in Afghanistan? I think they were

• Punish and/or destroy the people who were responsible for our being attacked on September 11, 2001.
• Establish a government there willing and able to prevent those people or similar from setting up shop in the country again and which would be allied with us.
• Be able to withdraw from the country within a fairly short timeframe, leaving the government we’d set up able to stand on its own.

It was obvious to me from the very first that those objectives could not be achieved. Oh, the first objective could be achieved but it could have been achieved on the afternoon of September 12, 2001 with ICBMs. We didn’t need to invade. We didn’t need to spend 20 years there. As soon as we put “boots on the ground”, as the saying goes, we accepted certain obligations which led inexorably to the other two objectives.

Here’s my follow-up question: what are the ethical obligations of an American general ordered to accomplish those objectives?