At Slate Andrew Small has lurched uncontrollably towards a conclusion I arrived at 40 years ago:

With 75 percent of Americans still driving to work by themselves, changing over to electric cars looks like a promising step for reducing emissions. But a host of timing and technical challenges stand in the way. Electric vehicles accounted for just 2 percent of the 5.3 million cars sold last year, and Americans are holding onto their cars longer than ever; at current rates, it would take about 15 years for the current 263-million-vehicle fleet to turn over. Ramping up EV sales would require radically ambitious incentives. Many EV skeptics note that the vehicles themselves are resource-intensive to manufacture, and electric cars take about twice as much energy to build as a traditional internal combustion car. And before mass electrification of cars and decarbonizing the grid, Americans will need to reckon with two big facts: The population is growing, and people are driving more.

Just look at California, which has been battling the Trump administration over raising fuel economy standards. On Thursday, the federal government revoked California’s waiver to require auto fleets to get to 51 miles per gallon by 2025. And on Friday, California and 22 other states, along with D.C. and the cities of Los Angeles and New York City, sued the Trump administration over their right to set pollution limits, as the administration eyes freezing federal fuel standards to 37 miles per gallon. In California, 41 percent of the state’s greenhouse emissions are transportation-related.

Even with increased fuel efficiency, climate targets prove difficult to reach. Since 1990, the state’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards have helped reduced tailpipe emissions by 5 million metric tons, and fuel efficiency has grown by 35 percent from 1990 to 2016. But emissions still rose by 21 percent over that period. Why? Because driving—as measured in vehicle miles traveled, or VMT—increased by 50 percent, more than canceling out the technological gains.

The problem with cars isn’t just whether they’re powered by batteries or internal combustion engines. It’s how much we drive. There are multiple reasons for that.

One of them is the Jevons paradox: the greater the efficiency with which a resource is consumed the more of it tends to be consumed. Another is despite technology’s making less commuting possible most of us still commute to work and, despite stated desires to reduce traffic on urban expressways commuting is decreasingly practical. Contributing factors to that are sprawl, fewer routes, and fewer times per route.

The irony of this is that we’re actually subsidizing longer commutes. The ways in which we’re doing that include the home mortgage deduction and subsidizing new road construction. If you’ve ever wondered why we keep building new roads even though we struggle to maintain our present roads the reason for that is who pays. The federal government pays most of the bill for new highway construction; state and local governments are mostly responsible for paying for the maintenance of existing roads.

Even if we were to stop subsidizing longer commutes many of us commute to work because of the freedom and flexibility it affords. That’s where ride-sharing services created new possibilities but, as has been seen in California, a lot of that was based on extremely low wages for drivers. I doubt that Americans will be weened from their cars for the foreseeable future.

At The Hill Democratic stalwart Lanny Davis leaps to Joe Biden’s defense:

“When Biden first entered the presidential race, it triggered a burst of attention on Hunter Biden’s foreign business ties.”

Is “foreign business ties” a fact that, used in this context, implies even slightly possible wrongdoing? Of course not. Indeed, I couldn’t find a single fact in the Post story about anything improper by Hunter Biden due to his service on the Burisma board, much less anything criminal. Not even an “allegation” of such. Did he use his influence or perceived influence, as the son of a U.S. vice president, to obtain contracts for Burisma? Did he break any Ukrainian laws? Any U.S. laws? No facts even suggesting such.

That’s the risk for Democrats in the claim I’ve heard today—that the letter of the law is irrevelant. If it’s irrelevant for Trump, it’s irrelevant for Biden, too.

He closes by calling for the facts:

All I want to know are the facts and whether they show any possible wrongdoing. I strongly suspect that when the facts are reported, there will be nothing there.

That could be true for Trump, too. Are “the facts” even important?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal react to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement yesterday that she was endorsing an official inquiry into whether to impeach President Trump:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday endorsed an official inquiry to impeach President Trump, and there is joy across Resistance America—at least for now. The decision guarantees that this will go down as the Impeachment Congress, with little to show beyond investigations into the Trump campaign and now the Trump Presidency.

In one sense this moment was probably inevitable. Most Democrats and most of the media have never accepted Mr. Trump as a legitimate President. They can’t believe 63 million Americans voted for him over their nominee, Hillary Clinton, so they have looked every day since Election Night in 2016 for some reason to expel him from office.

They spent two years spinning a tale of Russian collusion that proved to be false. Then they hyped obstruction of justice because Mr. Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, but the public wasn’t persuaded. The payment to Stormy Daniels made a cameo, but that was too close to Democrats’ defense of Bill Clinton for “lying about sex” to fly.

Mrs. Pelosi has now found a rationale in a whistleblower’s accusation about Mr. Trump’s July 25 phone call to Ukraine’s President. Mr. Trump admits that he warned Volodymyr Zelensky about corruption, including Joe Biden ’s interventions in Ukraine against a prosecutor who was investigating a company with ties to Mr. Biden ’s son, Hunter. Mr. Trump also admits that he delayed U.S. aid to Ukraine in early July prior to the phone call out of concern for corruption and allied burden sharing.

Mrs. Pelosi has concluded that all of this is worth ginning up the impeachment machinery that has been exercised against Presidents only three times in U.S. history. “The actions taken to date by the President have seriously violated the Constitution,” she said after a meeting of House Democrats. “The actions of the Trump Presidency revealed dishonorable facts of the President’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.”

and conclude:

Mrs. Pelosi has often said that impeachment won’t be credible with the public if it isn’t bipartisan. Yet so far it is entirely partisan. Mr. Biden proved that point by calling Tuesday for Mr. Trump’s impeachment if he resists the demands of Congress. The House can impeach on a partisan vote and define “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” as it wishes. But impeachment is ultimately political, and the voters will decide in 2020 if impeachment is what they voted for in 2018.

while in his column William Galston, a Democrat, urges the House Democrats to step back from impeachment:

Because the courts offer no prospect of remedy, many representatives believe that impeachment is the only recourse, and also their duty. Speaker Pelosi’s announcement is the first step down this road.

Although I respect their motives, I disagree: Impeachment is a constitutional option, not a constitutional obligation. It is, in the broadest sense, a political act, and therefore is subject to political tests of feasibility and efficacy.

Fortunately for them and for the country, there is a third choice, provided by law: a resolution formally censuring the president. There is precedent. In 1834 the Senate censured President Andrew Jackson for withholding documents related to his defunding the Bank of the United States, one of the most hotly disputed decisions of his presidency.

The House should use the impeachment inquiry to develop the factual basis for a comprehensive bill of particulars against President Trump—an enumeration of his most egregious affronts to the spirit of the laws and the Constitution, and to the honor and dignity of the office he holds. They should pass this bill as a formal motion of censure.

I have long held that Speaker Pelosi has been engaging in brinksmanship, keeping impeachment on the table to pacify her caucus, elements of which have supported impeachment since November of 2016, while believing that impeachment could be damaging electorally to Democrats.

There are risks for both sides. The inquiry could drive Trump’s polling numbers which have been weak throughout his presidency even further down. The House Democrats could impeach him. A few Republicans could even join them.

But there are risks for Democrats as well. Depending on the actual contents of the conversation which, according to public accounts, are likely to be revealed soon, it could reveal Trump as seditious as Democrats have been claiming since November 2016 or it could expose the Democrats as partisan fools. If they argue that the letter of the law doesn’t matter, not only could it sink Joe Biden’s campaign but it could further reveal Democrats as having purely partisan motives. Does anyone seriously contend that the “Clinton Family Foundation” was anything other than a weakly disguised exercise in influence-peddling, carefully stopping just short of a quid pro quo? Further, treating the revealing of presidential conversations with foreign heads of state as whistle-blowing could potentially open the floodgates for revelations from past, present, and future presidencies. The temptation to overreach is enormous.

As I have pointed out repeatedly in the past, I did not vote for Trump, did not want him to be elected, and do not believe he deserves re-election. I wish that the Democrats would rally behind a candidate I could joyfully support. The next few weeks or months, heavens forfend, will be telling.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead writes about the likelihood of war with Iran:

Iran’s recent provocations have not yet crossed the classic Jacksonian red lines. Iran has not attacked American troops, launched terror strikes against the American homeland, fired on American-flagged vessels, interfered with the oil trade enough to cause a price shock in the U.S., made such progress on its nuclear program that an Iranian bomb is imminent, or invaded the territory of a country the U.S. has promised to defend.

Yet Tehran has been inching closer to these lines, and it may yet cross them. As the administration sees it, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told me in a recent interview, the regime is trapped. The last major round of American sanctions, which took effect in May, essentially cut off Iran from world oil markets. Now Tehran faces excruciating trade-offs: how much money does it spend on Bashar Assad in Syria, on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and on the Houthis in Yemen while millions of middle-class Iranians go broke?

The North Koreans have said that they will make their people eat grass for 50 years to preserve their nuclear program, but senior U.S. officials believe the Iranian regime can’t match that resolve. Tehran is frantically seeking an escape as the pain of sanctions intensifies. The Financial Times estimates its economy will contract 9.3% in 2019.

Iran’s actions since May—demanding money from the Europeans, restarting its nuclear program, attacking Gulf shipping, and inflicting massive damage on a major oil facility—all have aimed at forcing the U.S. to provide, or at least to allow others to provide, some relief to the flagging Iranian economy. That the American response to these provocations has mostly involved angry tweets has convinced some in Tehran—and Washington—that Mr. Trump will never fight.

This misses the broader American strategy. The U.S. isn’t bombing Iran, but neither is it yielding on sanctions. As administration insiders see things, the driving force shaping the confrontation is Iranian impotence rather than American vacillation.

Mr. Trump’s restraint so far is a sign of America’s wider geopolitical strength. Thanks to American fracking, Iran’s troublemaking in the Gulf hasn’t affected American motorists at the pump. As one insider put it to me, “The Permian Basin saved Tehran.”

If Tehran continues to escalate its provocations in the Middle East and beyond, it will deepen its international isolation. On Monday, France, Germany and the U.K. blamed Iran for the Saudi attack. Continuing escalation will sooner or later cross a red line that would lead Mr. Trump’s political base to support a strong military response. Alternatively, Iran can return to the negotiating table on terms favorable to the U.S. and agree to both tighten the nuclear accords and limit its regional ambitions.

It is absolutely true that the Trump administration doesn’t want war with Iran, and not only because wars are politically risky. But that consensus is unstable, and Iran could easily blunder into a kinetic confrontation as it continues to writhe under the sanctions—especially if it internalizes the mistaken belief that Mr. Trump’s patience has no limits.

One of the considerations he omits is the recent elections in Israel. If Likud is out or Israel cobbles together a “unity government”, it seems to me that the prospects for war with Iran are greatly reduced.

Who is actually pushing for war with Iran in the United States? As far as I can tell only neoconservatives (who are mostly #NeverTrumpers) and strong supporters of Israel. If Israel takes a less combative stance than it has in recent years as seems likely, perhaps some of the drumbeat for war will be stilled.

Speaking of autoworkers, the editors of the Wall Street Journal point out that a substantial increase in in electric vehicles would be likely to reduce the number of jobs for autoworkers:

Some CEOs including GM’s Mary Barra believe electric cars will become more popular as batteries improve and decline in cost. But EVs make up only 2% of U.S. auto sales despite state and federal subsidies that can exceed $10,000 per car.

The economic risks are clear even to the UAW, which published a paper this spring warning that electric cars could cause thousands of job losses because they require fewer parts and less labor. An electric powertrain for a Chevy Bolt has 80% fewer moving parts compared to an internal combustion engine, but it is about three times as expensive.

Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess has said that “building an electric car involves some 30% less effort than one powered by an [internal combustion engine]. That means we will need to make job cuts.” GM will have to do likewise to compete. According to the paper, Ford has told investors “the product simplification that comes from EVs” can lead to “a 30% reduction in labor hours per unit compared to ICE production.”

Auto makers will also have to cut labor costs as electric cars crimp profits. The UAW says that auto makers won’t produce a profit on EVs comparable to gas-powered cars until 2028, which is one reason the UAW has demanded job guarantees and much higher wages in its new GM contract. The union knows EVs will dent future profits so workers better strike while they have more leverage.

I guess we don’t have much to worry about since at the present rate at which EVs are being purposed they will never make up a majority of the cars on the road. Even if 100% of new cars purchase were EVs it would take 20 years before they constituted nearly all of the cars on the road. Speeding that process up would be an enormously expensive proposition. And that doesn’t even take into account the massive changes to power generation and the power grid that would be needed to support a nationwide fleet of electric vehicles.

Steve Rattner, anointed by President Obama as an auto industry expert in 2009 so now he is one, points out the challenge for the GM workers who have been on strike now for eight days in an op-ed in the New York Times:

I’m all for workers earning more, but it’s important to understand that, at least in the car industry, this is not a case of rapacious investors profiting at the expense of workers. Since its initial public offering in November 2010, G.M. stock has risen by only 13 percent, compared with 154 percent for the overall market.

We need to be realistic about these challenges. The United States government can support the auto industry with initiatives like the new trade deal with Mexico, which would require that 40 to 45 percent of the vehicle is made by workers earning at least $16 per hour. But Mr. Trump’s flowery rhetoric notwithstanding, we’ll be lucky just to keep the jobs we have now.

When you consider the graph at the top of this page things look pretty grim for the autoworkers but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Total compensation is the real question not wages and on that score the autoworkers make out somewhat better. Since 2002 health care prices have risen about 75% so their health care plans make up a very significant part of that compensation. That’s why their health care plan is one of the main sticking points in the negotiations.

Since I tend to be a ways and means sort of guy and frequently take a “if you can’t raise the bridge lower the river” approach, perhaps we should look at the autoworkers’ expenses. What are they spending more on than they did 17 years ago? Health care and taxes are a lot more expensive than they were. Food, apparel, and home rental have about kept pace with the general rate of inflation.

Perhaps the best way to give the autoworkers a raise would, coincidentally, give all of us a raise: cut health care prices and taxes that fall on most of us, i.e. other than the personal income tax.

A “high crime or misdemeanor” is whatever the House says it is. If the members of the House think that President Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president meets that definition, the House should vote to impeach. If not they should stop acting as though it did.

Article III Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

Decide for yourself whether a charge of treason is reasonable based on the published reports. I think it’s a stretch.

At Bloomberg Satyajit Das is skeptical of a universal basic income:

UBI would allow for the introduction by stealth of “helicopter money,” a controversial proposal for central banks to print money and distribute it to consumers to boost growth and inflation. The idea covers a wide range of policies including the permanent monetization of budget deficits and direct transfers to households financed with base money.

Friedman outlined the concept in his 1969 parable of dropping money from a helicopter. If everyone is convinced that this is a unique, non-repeatable event, then it is assumed they will spend the money, increasing economic activity. The concept generated revived interest in recent years as a means of preventing deflation.

There’s a telling link between universal basic income and modern monetary theory, an unconventional economic approach that’s been gaining ground with politicians. MMT, loosely, argues that a state cannot go bankrupt where it can print its currency – a version of the argument that deficits don’t matter. Under MMT, governments should borrow and spend when demand is inadequate to move the economy to full employment. It provides theoretical cover for governments to issue debt to central banks in greater amounts than hitherto contemplated. This can then finance spending programs – such as a universal basic income – to maintain economic activity.

Whether a guaranteed minimum income can produce economic recovery is questionable, though. It’s a repackaging of existing approaches that have had limited effectiveness. There’s little new in central banks financing governments via QE or fiscal stimulus, including welfare spending. It doesn’t address key structural issues such as excessive debt, imbalances, wage levels and demographics. Adoption of such an approach would also mean the economy becomes dependent on government intervention to sustain activity.

A universal basic income financed by helicopter money may perversely increase uncertainty. Ordinary people may react to unlimited money printing by shutting their wallets and hoarding. Australia’s recent “cash back” program, which provided up to A$1,080 ($740) to taxpayers earning less than A$126,000, doesn’t appear to have offset pessimism about the outlook.

As H. L. Mencken put it there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. Shortly after Thomas More first proposed the idea more than five hundred years ago, it was pointed out that one of the effects of such a plan would be to increase prices, that is, you’ve also got to increase production for such a plan to be effective in alleviating poverty.

However, as Mr. Das concludes the “lure of a painless and easy solution” for poverty will prove to be irresistible and UBI will continue to raise its head periodically for the foreseeable future.

At City Journal Nicole Gelinas expresses skepticism of Modern Monetary Theory:

Eleven years ago, the 2008 financial crisis transformed politics, creating the conditions for a new crop of national-profile candidates who are throwing the old rules away, from Donald J. Trump to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, insurgent academics have come forward with a seemingly elegant theory to revolutionize economics, underpinning the profligate spending impulses of many of these newly minted politicians. This framework, “Modern Monetary Theory” or “Modern Money Theory,” has a simple premise: the U.S. and other Western countries can offer government-funded, good-paying jobs to anyone who wants one and pursue any other public-policy objective as well, through vastly increased spending. The outlays for such ambitious efforts, the theory holds, won’t result in high deficits, high interest rates, or inflation—the bugaboos, typically associated with runaway spending, that haunted Western policymaking on both sides of the aisle from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Those risks are exaggerated, MMT maintains, and can be mitigated through prudent government action.

Extravagant as they sound, MMT’s prescriptions resemble how the U.S. and other Western governments have approached economic and monetary policy in the years leading up to and following the financial crisis. That’s hardly a comforting feature of MMT, though. This upside-down theory matches reality only because reality is upside-down. Western governments have used their power over the past decade to inject trillions of dollars’ worth of government distortions into a supposedly free-market financial system, where the values of stocks, bonds, and real estate have become increasingly hallucinatory. Expanding the MMT model would drive the West only further from reality. MMT promises not a free lunch but a lifetime engorging feast, assuming that because the normal rules of economics don’t apply now, they will never apply. That’s a perilous assumption.

[…]

Throw everything in the old textbooks out, MMT partisans say. The guiding principle of MMT is that modern governments face no pressing constraints on spending—including the need to hike taxes to pay for it. Unlike older-style progressive economists, Modern Monetary Theorists don’t advocate for high taxes. The Robin Hood idea of taxing the rich and giving to the poor is “based on the misunderstanding that we need the taxes,” L. Randall Wray, an academic economist, writes in Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems (updated in 2015). Taxes might be useful tools to discourage bad things like smoking and encourage good things like solar power, or to flatten wealth disparities, but they’re ultimately not that important when it comes to budgetary concerns. If government doesn’t need to rely on taxes to pay for its services, though, where will it get the money? Borrowing? Not necessary, either, according to MMT. As Wray puts it, “government never needs to sell bonds before spending.” Bonds “have become anachronistic.” The government can sell bonds for the same reason it sells American Eagle Platinum Coins: because some people like them. But it doesn’t need to.

If the government doesn’t have to tax or borrow to fund its operations, it has only one other option: print the money. For MMT, that’s nothing to worry about. Modern governments don’t literally need to print money, of course; these days, they can create it on computers. “A government always spends by keystrokes,” says the brand-new, first-ever textbook built around MMT, written by Wray and fellow academic economists William Mitchell and Martin Watts, and called simply Macroeconomics (2019). Whatever amount the government wants to spend, the Federal Reserve can just conjure out of the ether and deposit in the Treasury Department’s bank account.

What follows is an adaptation of the comment I left to that post.

One of the problems that those who adhere to “the old textbooks” need to address is how we have been able to increase our level of federal debt without any of their predictions of doom coming true. Since the founding of the Republic, the debt in real terms has increased a hundred-fold and at every step people have been predicting catastrophe which never seems to materialize.

I don’t think Ms. Gelinas is being quite fair to MMT. Just like Keynesianism it has both a formal variety and a folk variety. Formal Keynesianism says that correctly timed and structured debt-based stimulus can replace a shortfall in aggregate demand and the debt should be paid down during the expansion phase of the cycle. Folk Keynesianism says that debt-based spending will always stimulate the economy, a somewhat different proposition, and there is no need to pay it back.

What Ms. Gelinas has described is folk MMT. More formal MMT proposes that we can extend credit to ourselves with impunity so long as the extension is tethered to increases in real production.

I have several bones of contention with MMT, the most significant of which is that I think that MMT-ers fail to understand hyperinflation which they tend to view as very high inflation. It isn’t. Hyperinflation is a catastrophic loss of confidence in the currency and that can happen quickly, without warning, and despite the underlying numbers. It’s a psychological and social phenomenon. Consequently, extending too much credit too fast bears serious risks.

Our problem is that politicians are not economists or any other variety of scientist and don’t really care about the underlying issues so long as they get re-elected. Folk MMT is like catnip to politicians.