I’m preparing a longer post on Iran but while I do so I wanted to blurt out one reaction. Protecting the flow of oil is not a legitimate casus belli. If it were, every attack anywhere would be one. The supply chains of American companies go everywhere. We should not go to war to protect supply chains.

War must always be a last resort. There are plenty of alternatives left. We could drive less. We could produce more oil. We could buy electric vehicles. Going to war to keep the price of a gallon of gasoline $2.50 rather than going to $5.00 is not just cause.

I have written any number of times that I have little or no insight into the workings of President Trump’s mind. This story, reported on at Politico, is a case in point:

TURNBERRY, SCOTLAND— Air Force officers who have earned medals for their tours of combat theaters can pick up some more brass with a short pitstop in Southwest Scotland.

As part of its relationship with the Air Force, President Donald Trump’s Turnberry resort occasionally gifts high-ranking officers a version of its “Pride Pin,” a lapel pin featuring the property’s iconic lighthouse — an honor reserved for VIPs — upon their arrival, according a resort staffer familiar with the practice.

Rank-and-file members can expect a more basic welcome package in their rooms, featuring goodies like Scottish shortbread.

A five-day visit to Turnberry and the surrounding region revealed that the regular visits from Air Force crews on layovers from Prestwick Airport have become a major facet of the life of the resort. It also revealed that, rather than being restricted to single-night refueling stops, some visits last multiple nights, expanding the known dimensions of the relationship between the president’s luxury resort and the U.S. military.

That may or may not be a corrupt practice but it certainly presents the appearance of corruption. President Trump is benefiting financially from these stays.

I read a quote from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the effect that that corruption is destroying American democracy, a statement with which I agree, but although I may agree with what she says I deny her right to say it. The entire Democratic leadership is incredibly corrupt, including Speaker Pelosi. Some is specific and some is institutional. For example, the relationship between Democrats and public employees’ unions is inherently corrupt. They are recycling taxpayer dollars into political constributions. How can they not see the corruption in that arrangement?

Perhaps Speaker Pelosi will be the Moses leading the United States to the Promised Land of a less corrupt politics and society. I have my doubts. If so, like the Biblical Moses, she may not be able to enter it.

As you may or may not know GM’s 49,000 UAW workers have gone out on strike. It is not entirely clear to me why they are on strike. Is it possible that one of the reasons is the the workers are angry and don’t trust GM’s management? USA Today reports:

One person said GM has proposed that workers pay 15% of their health care costs, up from the current estimated level of 3% of health expenses. Another person familiar with talks said GM’s offer preserves current health care benefits at the same cost.

GM and Ford, which will negotiate with the union after a deal is struck with GM, each spend $1 billion a year on worker health care, which some industry observers consider unsustainable. The average U.S. worker pays about 28% of health care costs, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor.

“We have many unresolved issues,” Terry Dittes, vice president of the UAW GM department, said early Monday in an interview with Bloomberg. “It’s not just a couple of things. How long will this take? I can’t say.”

Those close to the UAW believe it will be a long strike, perhaps lasting two to four weeks.

“People don’t realize how angry the workers are and that the health care proposal made them nuts,” said a person familiar with both sides who insisted on not being identified to preserve those relationships.

Others said the many unresolved issues could come together quickly if a few key issues get resolved.

GM took the unusual step Sunday of making public a version of what it said was its offer, which included $7 billion in investment and more than 5,000 new jobs over the four-year life of the contract, and an assertion that the company offered an improved profit-sharing formula and preservation of top-line health benefits.

Dittes said GM’s offer came to the union only two hours before Saturday night’s deadline, and had it come sooner, the strike might have been averted.

The American auto industry continues to practice something called “pattern bargaining” in which the UAW selects one company as a strike candidate, negotiates a contract with that company or goes on strike against it, and then secures similar contracts with the other companies. The intention of the practice is pretty clearly to prevent the auto companies from competing with each other on the basis of workers’ wages.

It’s a dinosaur, a relic of a bygone age when the auto industry’s entire supply chains were located in the United States. The industry’s supply chains reach all over the world now with much of it coming from Japan and South Korea. That’s beyond the reach of the UAW.

Engines for small cars are not manufactured in the United States. Batteries for electric cars, their largest cost components, aren’t manufactured here, either. I know that Tesla claims their batteries are made here but I’m skeptical. I think they’re made in Japan by Panasonic and assembled here.

Whatever the case a lengthy strike is bound to spill over into presidential politics. Even though the auto industry isn’t as important to the American economy as it used to be and what’s good for General Motors may not be good for the U. S. A., the UAW still swings a lot of weight.

Note that this strike highlights a point I’ve been making here for well over a decade. Most Americans have health care insurance. That was true in 2009, too. Their biggest concern is the cost of health care not coverage but the driving force in policy including “Medicare For All” is coverage. For cost control they are relying on a syllogism which may or may not be true. They have no Plan B.

Whatever the source of the attack on Saudi oil fields proves to be, we should not leap to the KSA’s defense. They should handle it themselves. If they need help, they could withdraw resources from their ill-conceived war against Yemen or ask for help from the United Nations Security Council.

If the UNSec passes a resolution to defend KSA, we should not participate by sending troops. We are not the world’s policeman and the last time we helped the KSA we got terrorist attacks for our trouble. They are a heinous regime who are not our friends let alone our allies. If it was, indeed, the Iranians behind the attacks, it’s one heinous regime against another.

We’d be better off if they both lost.

This article at Atlantic by Paul Tough made me unhappy for a number of reasons:

Despite the sunny claims of The Wall Street Journal and Marco Rubio, the real-life welding jobs that Orry was able to find in western North Carolina were paying experienced welders between $12 and $15 an hour, which was less than he was making at the door factory. Orry knew that better-paying welding jobs existed, but they were far away and short-term and physically arduous, and if he went out and chased one, he’d have to leave his kids behind. Now that he was back together with Katie and they had what felt like a genuine family, he wanted to stay close to home and be a real father. Besides, even those well-paying welding jobs didn’t pay that well—maybe $30 or $40 an hour, if he got lucky.

This is the other glaring flaw at the heart of the case for welding as the ideal alternative to college. The overwhelming majority of American welders are not earning $150,000 a year. Not even close. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary for an experienced welder in 2018 was a little more than $41,000 a year—which was only about $16,000 above the poverty line for a family of four.

The good thing about welding as a profession is that it has a relatively high salary floor. You’re almost always going to make more than minimum wage, even starting out. But the downside, economically, is that welding has a pretty low salary ceiling. Welders at the 90th percentile of income for the profession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, earn $63,000 a year before taxes. Those are, statistically, the top earners, and they are usually expert welders with decades of experience. The salaries that make headlines in The Wall Street Journal are somewhere between rare and apocryphal.

There’s also an article at FiveThirtyEight by Farai Chideya on the very same subject that makes the very same point in a more FiveThirtyEight-ish way:

Since people with philosophy degrees do many things, one way to track them is by earnings regardless of their day job. According to American Community Survey data, the median earnings of full-time year-round employees ages 30-49 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, and no graduate degree, was $51,000 per year from 2010 to 2012. In addition, the Department of Labor (DOL) also keeps statistics on what people earn by job category. “Philosophy and Religion Teachers, postsecondary” earn, on average, $71,350 (and presumably many are college professors with graduate degrees and the associated time-commitment and/or debt). The DOL’s figures show that “Welding, Soldering and Brazing Workers” make $39,570 on average. Two other job categories including “welding” or “welder” have median wages of $40,040 and $36,450.

The first thing that bothered me was the title of the Atlantic piece: “Welding won’t make you rich”. If your objective to to be rich, there’s nothing that beats getting a job with a big financial services company. Of course to do that you’ll need to get an MBA from one of the Top 15 B-schools and those are very selective. It helps in getting into those schools if you’ve graduated from an Ivy school, preferably Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Those are pretty selective, too. And to get into those Ivies it helps if you’ve graduated from a top prep school—even more selectivity not to mention expense. Kiss in the low five figures worth of educational debt goodbye. Or you could be a pro basketball player or a plastic surgeon, orthopedic surgeon, or other top-paying medical specialty. There are fewer than 500 pro basketball players in the U. S. and about 7,000 board certified plastic surgeons. Translation: unless you’re very, very good you won’t make it.

That’s the first awful truth. The odds are that you won’t get rich.

Here’s some more. There are about 130 million workers in the U. S.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which of those is rich. The median income for a family of four is around $55,000. For most people the rung above you is rich. Wages of $41,000 are a nice, middle class salary. If your wife is a welder and you have a minimum wage job, between the two of you you’re above the median.

Here’s the next one. If you gave every person in the United States $2 million, that wouldn’t make us all rich. To make us all rich you’d need to increase what we’re producing by $2 million per year in real terms. Otherwise prices will just rise and everybody will be right back where we started.

Finally, there’s this. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are 398,000 welders and 23,000 philosophy and religion teachers. Being a welder is a growth field and being a professor of philosophy is not. Basically, to get a job a professor of philosophy has to die.

Which of those areas do you think you’re more likely to get a job doing? I don’t give a darn what Marco Rubio said or what the Wall Street Journal says. We need to stop putting jobs that require a decade of higher education on a pedestal while thinking of blue collar jobs as demeaning.

And I haven’t even gone into standard deviation.

I found this argument in favor of Chicago’s seeking bankruptcy by Richard Porter at RealClearPolitics interesting:

Chicago’s population is already shrinking, which is powerful evidence that the city is already taxing too much for too little service: for too many residents and potential residents, the cost imposed to live here now exceeds Chicago’s many benefits, and so Chicago shrinks while dozens of other cities grow. As population shrinks, property values fall, increasing the burden of future expected taxes, driving the population and property values down even further. Increasing taxes further only exacerbates this cycle of failure.

The city needs to lower taxes to start growing again, but lower taxes would mean Chicago can no longer service its debts. Federal law offers a procedure for reducing those debts by commencing a case in bankruptcy court. A bankruptcy judge has the power under federal law to reduce the city’s liabilities, change its pensions, reorganize its functions into a more efficient ongoing structure and eliminate some of its debts — but the judge does not have the authority to raise your taxes.

Bankruptcy is a painful process because it forces creditors who facilitated the city’s failure to take a loss: bond holders, such as hedge funds, Wall Street bankers that sold the bonds and the people who are waiting to be paid for goods and services sold to Chicago, including past and current municipal employees. (The city can and will still be able to offer generous pension benefits to its workers, but perhaps with a cap limiting pensions of well more than $100,000 and without the automatic 3% COLA; the exact terms of any new deal would be hammered out in negotiations under the auspices of the court.)

But, bankruptcy offers an upside: a future free from fear of ever-increasing city taxes and improved services. If government confronts its problems now while Chicago’s core retains its current vibrancy, the city will still offer benefits that make it a wonderful place to live — the lakefront, our skyline, our restaurants, museums, people and jobs — all at a lower expected future cost in taxes charged by the reorganized government. Bankruptcy offers Chicagoans relief from bearing the accumulated burden of a generation of imprudent administration.

I do not think there is any real prospect of this happening because I think that the politicians in Springfield would rather see Chicago fail than to risk their own jobs to save it. Mayor Lightfoot continues to claim that everything is on the table but so far only raising taxes and reducing city services have been on the table. Lucifer’s line in Milton’s Paradise Lost may apply here: “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”.

You can read an unwalled version of the Washington Post’s editorial supporting passage of the deal the Trump Administration has negotiated:

In one respect — updating rules for cross-border e-commerce, which was still in its infancy when NAFTA took effect 25 years ago — Trump’s deal is a real improvement over the status quo. For the rest, it mostly leaves NAFTA intact, or changes it in ways Democrats and their union allies have long demanded, especially by increasing the amount of U.S.-made inputs that cars and trucks would need to qualify for tariff-free trade among the three countries. What’s more, Trump negotiated access to a greater percentage of Canada’s notoriously closed dairy market. Neither the auto nor dairy provisions have much to do with free trade — “managed trade” would be a better description. But Democrats can’t really object, given their past positions. In fact, sending Trump’s deal down to defeat could have political costs for Democrats, too — specifically, in House districts where farmers and other interests support the deal, and in the auto-making state of Michigan, pivotal for the presidential election.

Anyone want to make book on what will happen? My guess is that presidential political considerations will prevail and Democrats, unwilling to give Trump a win, will not approve the deal.

Speaking of differences of opinion at New York Magazine Jonathan Chait, echoing Rahm Emanuel’s take I cited here the other day, thinks the debates have been a debacle:

The odd thing about this race to the left is that there’s little evidence it appeals to the primary electorate, let alone the general election version. Democrats strongly support universal coverage, but have lukewarm feelings on the mechanism to attain this. They prefer reforms that involve a combination of public and private options over the Bernie movement’s manic obsession with crushing private health insurance.

This applies as well to the party’s general ideological orientation. More Democratic voters express concern the party will nominate a candidate who’s too liberal (49 percent) than one who’s not liberal enough (41 percent). By a similar 54–41 margin, more Democrats want their party to move toward the center than toward the left.

He’s writing about health care reform in particular but, as you can see, he veers into more general issues as well.

I don’t want Donald Trump to be re-elected. I didn’t vote for him in 2016 and I don’t think his performance as president is worthy of re-election. I wish that a temperate, centrist candidate would adopt some of the more sensible positions he’s staked out in highly intemperate terms.

We need better control over our southern border than we have now. That should be beyond debate. We need to recalibrate our trade with China. It’s up to the other NATO members to define NATO’s relevancy today rather than simply assuming that the U. S. will carry nearly all of the freight.

That seems to be beyond the realm of possibility.

There seems to be some disagreement about just who won Thursday’s Democratic presidential candidates’ debate:

Christopher Buskirk: Donald Trump
New York Times columnists: Elizabeth Warren
Kathleen Parker: Donald Trump
Henry Olsen: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar
The Washington Post’s Ranking Committee: Nobody
Matthew Yglesias: Joe Biden
Google: Joe Biden
Twitter: Andrew Yang

Consequently, no clear winner would seem to be the best conclusion. Based on the coverage I’ve read Joe Biden won simply on the basis of surviving. The challenge for the other Democratic candidates is not just demonstrating that they’re the best candidate but that Joe Biden isn’t a good enough candidate and they didn’t do that. So VP Biden won.