In his latest New York Times column Paul Krugman makes a series of predictions, all predicated on the assumption of a Democrat being elected president in November and serving with a Senate that has a majority of Democrats as well. Basically, he says that it doesn’t make a great deal of difference which individual running on the Democratic ticket is elected as long as someone running on the Democratic ticket is elected. Here’s his prediction of the outcome:

In practice, any Democrat would probably preside over a significant increase in taxes on the wealthy and a significant but not huge expansion of the social safety net. Given a Democratic victory, a much-enhanced version of Obamacare would almost certainly be enacted; Medicare for All, not so much. Given a Democratic victory, Social Security and Medicare would be protected and expanded; Paul Ryan-type cuts wouldn’t be on the table.

What caught my eye was his definition of the Republican Party:

Now, the Democratic Party is very different from the G.O.P. — it’s a loose coalition of interest groups, not a monolithic entity answering to a handful of billionaires allied with white nationalists.

I will leave it to those interested to provide their own definitions of the parties. I don’t think his view quite captures the nature of either today’s Republicans or Democrats.

But I think he’s wrong. Assuming the House, Senate, and the White House all in Democratic control, I think a Sanders presidency or perhaps a Warren presidency would be significantly different from a Biden presidency. Said another way, this time it really does make a difference.

I guess the larger question is does the outcome of the election actually depend on who is nominated? I’m afraid it no longer does.

Do you really care about Brexit and why?

I don’t first and foremost because I don’t think it is any of my business. The Brits can do any damn fool thing they want to with their own country.

As of this writing it appears very much as though witnesses will not be called in the trial of the impeachment of President Donald Trump. All that is left is the vote on whether to convict or acquit. Hardly anyone believes the Senate will vote to convict.

Here’s my question. Will more Democrats vote to acquit Trump than Republicans voted to impeach? I think so.

This entire proceeding has been full of “don’ts”. Don’t elect low characters like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump to the presidency. Don’t appoint Hillary Clinton Secretary of State. Don’t make her your nominee for the presidency.

Don’t open an impeachment investigation unless you’re willing to do a thorough job of it with the patience to see claims of executive privilege through the courts and unless you can get bipartisan support for an eventual impeachment. Don’t expect that the House can strongarm the Senate. Don’t insult people whose support you’re trying to obtain.

And for goodness sake, don’t ask a foreign head of state to investigate your political opponents.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, once again, express what has essentially been my view of the impeachment proceedings all along:

Presidents conduct foreign policy in what they think is the national interest, but they also hope it will be in their political interest. Presidents typically act from “mixed motives,” as Mr. Dershowitz put it, that are difficult to discern or to separate the high-minded from the self-interested.

It is thus too low a constitutional bar for the House to claim, as it does, that Mr. Trump can be impeached because Democrats think his motives were corrupt. The acts themselves must qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Mr. Trump’s acts don’t qualify—because asking aid recipients to investigate corruption isn’t illegal, and in any case the aid to Ukraine was delivered on time and no investigation of Joe Biden was started. This does not condone Mr. Trump’s request, which was reckless and dumb, but it isn’t an impeachable offense.

What would be a clearly impeachable offense?

He could be impeached for soliciting a financial bribe, for example, or seeking a campaign contribution from a foreign source. He could also be impeached for exceeding his constitutional authority.

or a contribution to his or her foundation I might add. How, then, it has been asked do you constrain presidential power? The answer is under the law, applied even-handedly. Enact laws that that define and prohibit in clear terms the behaviors you wish to eliminate. Ask less of the military and reduce its size and power. The larger the federal government, the military, foreign aid, and the State Department in general, the greater the power of the president.

In his latest Washington Post column Robert Samuelson muses about the factors that make up the present insecurity about jobs. On the one hand job tenure is actually increasing. On the other there’s a lot of insecurity about it. How can those two things be reconciled:

The numbers are dramatic. In the 1980s, an estimated 39.5 percent of men 50 to 59 had been in their current jobs for 20 years or more. For men 60 to 64, the percentage — 40 percent — was virtually identical. By the mid-2010s, those percentages had dropped sharply to 26 percent for men 50 to 59 and to 32.3 percent for men 60 to 64.

Meanwhile, women’s average job tenure was increasing. For those 50 to 59, the share who had 20 or more years in the same job rose from 15.2 percent in the 1980s to 21.3 percent in the mid-2010s. Among workers 60 to 64, the share increased from 23.1 percent to 27.9 percent in the mid-2010s.

It’s possible for the labor market to exhibit both rising and falling job security, according to the study, which was recently released as a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was written by Federal Reserve economists Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith and Abigail K. Wozniak.

or, said another way, agism is a genuine factor in men’s work and job prospects.

There’s a very interesting post at Mischiefs of Faction that lays out why it makes sense for reporters and, indeed, Democratic elected officials to treat Bernie Sander’s candidacy different from that of others seeking the Democratic nomination. I mean other than that he’s not a Democrat:

I’ve been examining patterns among donations to the presidential candidates during 2019. In the 3rd quarter of 2019, there were roughly 60,000 donations to the various Democratic presidential candidates of $200 or greater. The vast majority of those who donated to a candidate only did so for one candidate. However, a few donated to multiple candidates. In the figure below, I draw out a network showing the links between candidates based on their shared donors. The program (Gephi) arrays all the nodes (candidates) so that those with greater ties to each other appear closer to each other. The pink fuzzy balls are actually dense clouds of donors giving just to one candidate, but the ties between those balls shows the shared donor patterns.

What we can see is that there’s an inner core of candidates receiving the bulk of the donations and having most of the shared donors between them. This consists of the likes of Warren, Harris, Booker, Biden, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg. Sanders is off to the far left (of the graph). He has some shared donors with Warren, but pretty much none with the other major candidates. This is a way of saying that Sanders’ support really is different from that of the other candidates. He certainly has a strong donor base, but those donors are not well tied to the rest of the party. (Whether you see that as a good or bad thing probably says a lot about how you evaluate Sanders as a candidate.)

Check out his network diagram. It really tells the story in pictorial form. He goes on to predict that Sanders is likely to repeat his primary performance of 2016: doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire but then quickly losing out to, presumably, Joe Biden as other candidates drop out of the race.

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.