I see that Daniel Henninger in his latest Wall Street Journal column has lurched uncontrollably onto the interpretation of events that I have been suggesting:

Mr. McConnell reportedly wanted it all over by the end of the year, but what’s the rush? The Trump trial could run through January—31 priceless campaign days before the Democratic Party’s intensely competitive primaries. The Iowa caucus vote is Feb. 3, then comes New Hampshire’s primary on Feb. 11; Nevada’s caucuses are Feb. 22; and the crucially important South Carolina primary arrives Feb. 29.

Instead of competing for their party’s nomination, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Michael Bennet will spend invaluable campaign time planted on Capitol Hill during the days that the Pelosi-Schiff Trump trial drones on. Sens. Sanders and Harris can’t call Mr. Trump the “most corrupt president” in the history of the country and then skip out on the trial of public enemy No. 1 to campaign in a downstate Iowa diner.

Joe Biden, Mayor Pete, and Hillary’s new friend Rep. Tulsi Gabbard get to romp daily through the primary states, but who’s going to notice with the Trump impeachment trial siphoning away the nation’s media’s attention?

or, alternatively, the Democratic senators bying for their party’s nomination could just elect to skip the trial, casting doubt on the great moral imperative to remove Trump from office for his crimes.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal look askance at the advance of the impeachment inquiry in the House:

This requires more transparency and public scrutiny than Mr. Schiff’s unprecedented process of secret testimony, followed by selective leaks to the friendly media to put everything in the most anti-Trump light, in order to sway public opinion. If the evidence against Mr. Trump is so damning, then why not make it all public now so the American people can judge for themselves?

Trying to paint the WSJ editors as reflexive Trumpkins is a stretch. They support Trump policies that they like and criticize those they don’t. They like his tax policy; they dislike his foreign policy. IMO their reactions are fair.

The proceedings and revelations certainly haven’t covered President Trump or his administration in glory. Their conduct has certainly not been good or right. Whether they’re damning or not we should wait to assess.

In his Washington Post column this morning Robert Samuelson muses about the mystery of low inflation:

From 2010 to 2018, the CPI has increased only about 2 percent annually. In turn, the collapse of inflation has transformed political debate. We have gone from worrying about “stagflation” — the coexistence of high inflation and high unemployment — to arguing about economic growth and inequality. On the whole, this is a better place to be.

Recall the “misery index.” It combines the unemployment rate and inflation. In 1980, the index was 19.6 percent (7.1 percent unemployment rate and 12.5 percent inflation). In 2018, it was 5.8 percent (3.9 percent unemployment and 1.9 percent inflation). There won’t be much anti-inflation rhetoric in the 2020 campaign. Indeed, low inflation is one reason the current economic expansion is the longest in U.S. history. Despite the running feud between President Trump and the Federal Reserve, there has been no sharp increase in interest rates to dampen the recovery.

But there is one gaping hole in this otherwise happy story: We don’t know what has caused inflation to drop so low and to stay there. It’s a “puzzle,” as economist Janet Yellen, former chair of the Fed, recently put it at a Brookings Institution conference on inflation. The explanation matters. If we don’t fully understand low inflation, we may misinterpret its consequences.

The inflation mystery poses a simple question: Why haven’t wage gains increased faster as the economy has approached “full employment,” which is crudely put between 4 percent and 5 percent? Expressed technically, the question becomes: Why isn’t the Phillips Curve working? That’s economist A.W. Phillips, who argued in the 1950s that, as unemployment fell, wage gains would rise. Firms would have to pay more to attract workers. Some wage gains would feed into higher prices, a.k.a. inflation.

I don’t think it’s that big a mystery. Mr. Samuelson points to globalization, monetary policy, and a misinterpretation of the labor force as potential explanations and I think that’s partly right. My explanation would include four factors:

1. An enormous proportion of the economy is either grey or black and not included in the official statistics. When you have an illegal population as large as we do—officially about 14% of the population but actually possibly much higher—the statistics are just wrong.
2. For the last couple of decades China has been exporting goods and deflation and importing employment and inflation. There’s lots of inflation but in a globalized economy you can’t see it if you only look at one country.
3. The CPI is broken. It represents the economy of 50 years ago not the economy of today. The problem may well be in the weighting. In particular now that health care is a sixth of the economy and education (public and private) may be as much as 10% of the economy is that reflected in the CPI? Keep in mind that not only health care and education but military spending, police and fire, and other components of government spending including public pensions, particularly at the state and local level, are consumption and that spending is increasing at a ferocious rate. There may be lots of inflation; it just isn’t reflected in an obsolete CPI.
4. Monetary policy is working. It’s creating enormous inflation in the prices of equities. Evidence for that are the price/earnings ratios, unlike anything seen in the past. That’s also reflected in sharp increases in things closely tied to the prices of equities, e.g. executive compensation.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has presented her budget for the city of Chicago which closes Chicago’s nearly $1 billion deficit. The Trib reports:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot offered an $11.65 billion budget plan for 2020 on Wednesday, laying out a path to dig the city out of a daunting $838 million deficit without relying on steep property tax increases.

Lightfoot’s plan hinges on getting help from the General Assembly, which enters its fall veto session next week.

This is basically a “Hail Mary”. To the best of my knowledge the state has never ponied up money for Chicago unless it was sued for it.

The new taxes she’s proposing as well as the ones have been left unstated fall most heavily on the poor. Expect the exodus from Chicago to accelerate. Just in time for the decennial census.

If you go back to the cow too many times, it eventually runs dry. That’s true of cash cows, too.

Just as a reminder. Illinois is 50th of the 50 states in the state’s contribution to public education. That’s dead last. Most of the money spent in the public schools comes from local taxes, i.e. property tax and sales tax.

That is true despite wording in the state’s constitution (“the state shall have a primary responsibility for public education”), a state lottery supposedly devoted to education, and several advisory referenda in which the people said that the state should be providing more.

I publish this every so often. Illinois has been last or next to last for years. The state has been sued by districts to provide more funding. Multiple times.

I found this interesting. The Huffington Post reports that the brash first-term Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed a challenger to the incumbent Democratic representative in a Texas district:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced Tuesday that she is endorsing Jessica Cisneros, an immigration and human rights attorney who has launched a progressive primary challenge against Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat.

The New York representative’s blessing is a major boost for Cisneros, who stands to benefit from Ocasio-Cortez’s national recognition and fundraising prowess. If she is successful, Cisneros, 26, would supplant Ocasio-Cortez, 30, as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.

This is obviously a skirmish in the ongoing struggle for control of the Democratic Party between the Democratic establishment and newcomers, many of them supporters of Bernie Sanders.

From my vantage point Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat and neither are his supporters. The DNC would be fools to allow him to be the party’s standard-bearer in 2020 and they very surely are not fools.

It all reminds me of an anecdote about Will Rogers. When asked if he were a member of an organized political party, he responded “No, I’m a Democrat.” Some things never change.

Last week in reaction to Hillary Clinton’s claims that Tulsi Gabbard was a pawn of the Russians, Rep. Gabbard declaimed:

Hillary Clinton throughout her career has espoused, advocated, and championed a very interventionist foreign policy, pushing for regime-change wars, toppling dictators in other countries, being the world’s police, using draconian sanctions to accomplish these things, and they have proven to be incredibly destructive…

thereby establishing that Hillary Clinton was, indeed, of presidential caliber. Nearly every president’s foreign policy has proven to be incredibly destructive. The last president whose foreign policy wasn’t was Dwight Eisenhower. Of course, some presidents should be singled out for extraordinary destructivity, e.g. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

If Americans paid more attention to candidates’ foreign policies, maybe our present foreign policy wouldn’t be such a mess.

I can’t help but wonder how Donald Berwick can be so confident in making the claims he does in his piece about “Medicare For All” at USA Today:

With costs rising painfully, insurance companies denying care and nearly 30 million people still uninsured, America desperately needs an honest health policy discussion. That’s why it has been so disappointing over the past several weeks to watch multiple candidates parrot right-wing attacks on “Medicare for All,” like claiming that it will greatly increase spending on health care or ringing alarms about raising taxes on the middle class.

The truth is the opposite: Medicare for All would sharply reduce overall spending on health care. It can be thoughtfully designed to reduce total costs for the vast majority of American families, while improving the quality of the care they get.

I think it’s a lot more complicated than that and when you’re dealing with real people and real money in a real world it’s a lot different than when you’re drawing diagrams on a whiteboard. And “thoughtfully designed” sounds uncomfortably like “no true Scotsman” to me.

It all depends on your assumptions.

I’ve already pointed out that providers don’t have the excess capacity to provide 6% of 10% more care than they do know without changing how care is provided. What will it take to accomplish that? How long? How much will it cost?

What will providers be paid? That they will be paid at Medicare rates is an assumption in which I don’t have the slightest confidence. If “Medicare For All” were actually enacted into law, I can say with metaphysical certainty that there would be a furor of lobbying to increase the reimbursement rates beyond present Medicare reimbursement rates. The failure of lawmakers year after year to hold the line on Medicare reimbursement rates (remember the “doc fix”?) strong suggests that they won’t hold the line with M4A.

Who is “all”? All citizens? All legal residents? All residents? Anybody passing through?

Keep in mind that all of the present Democratic presidential candidates have said they would decriminalize entering the country without approval and several have said they would abolish our present enforcement agency. Under the circumstances I have no idea how you can even predict how many people “all” might be.

What are the metric for “improving the quality of the care they get”?

If you cannot answer all of those questions and back your answers up with facts, you cannot make confident predictions.

I recognize that the idea that bringing everyone within a single system would result in lower spending with better care is an article of faith but, frankly, I doubt it. We are an enormous, diverse, complicated country that is changing at a ferocious pace. Not only do simple plans not work well here, everything the government does is more expensive here than it would be in other, simpler, smaller countries and always more expensive than planners predict.

I disagree with the definition of “limited war” put forward in this article at RealClearDefense by Adam Wunische:

Therefore, a limited war is any war in which regime change is not being sought.

Using that definition both Afghanistan and Iraq were not limited wars which is rather obviously not the case. The definition I would use is quite different. A limited war is just that—limited. The objective is not limited to regime change. The only objective of a war that is not limited is unconditional surrender. The reason that our military is unable to achieve the objectives of our limited wars is that those objectives are not achievable. We cannot eliminate the Taliban from Afghanistan by limited means because they are Afghans and Taliban is just a role. Those adopting that role may just flee into Pakistan where they will be beyond the limitations we have place on that war. We cannot turn Iraq into a liberal democracy allied with the United States because a majority of the people in Iraq do not seek liberal democracy or alliance with the U. S. for that matter.

All of our wars of the last 70 years have been limited wars and we have lost nearly all of them. The lesson I take from that is do not go to war unless there is no other alternative.