I thought that Robert Shapiro’s Washington Monthly plan for financing a reduction in FICA by increasing capital gains and corporate income taxes was better than a lot of plans for redistribution I’ve seen. He concludes:

Whatever the details, payroll tax relief provides an unambiguous way to give working Americans meaningful support. At the same time, higher taxes on the capital gains and dividends banked predominantly by high-income investors, their stock market transactions, and the corporations that generate those capital gains and dividends can all provide equitable ways to pay for it. Any Democrat looking for a meaningful way to resonate with today’s voters might want to think about making such a proposal.

IMO an even better plan would be to increase FICA max to the threshold wage for being in the top 1% of income earners and reducing the FICA rates for both employers and employees commensurately. But I’m glad to see somebody thinking along these lines. If he added economic efficiency to his thinking it would be even better.

To my recollection at no time in my life has reality been more different for partisan Republicans than for partisan Democrats. News that would cause them to question their views can’t even sneak in because they’re getting their news from different sources as the chart above suggests.

I tend to sample outlets that fall within the “Skews Liberal” to “Skews Conservative” portion of the spectrum. As I pointed out in one of my earliest posts here it is only from the center that you can see both the left and the right. Those on the far ends tend to see as far as the center which they interpret as the “far left” or “far right” depending on their own partisan or ideological outlooks. The opposite extremes are actually largely invisible to them.

Highly partisan Democrats think that the House Democrats have prepared an unassailable case against Trump. Highly partisan Republicans think the entire thing is an attempted coup against Trump. Highly partisan Republicans think that Democrats are deliberately trying to import enough voters to create a permanent majority. Highly partisan Democrats think that racism is the only possible motive for opposing mass immigration.

No meeting of minds or compromise is possible. I just don’t know what to make of it all.

I’m not even going to bother to link to it but in one of Robert Samuelson’s recent columns he argued in favor of apprenticeship programs. Although I’ve written favorably about such programs in the past, I can’t honestly figure out what problem he’s trying to solve.

With 3.5% unemployment it would have to be some apprenticeship program to attract “discouraged workers” back into the labor force. I think the net impact of such programs under present circumstances would be to provide a way for employers to pay employees less by calling them “apprentices”.

Germany has had apprenticeship programs for some time. Their unemployment rate is presently 3.1% with apprentices counting as employed. The main effect of Germany’s apprenticeship and job-sharing programs is to jigger the unemployment figures to make them look lower.

What we really need are more, better jobs. I don’t think that will happen without a tighter labor market than we presently have.

The House Democrats have produced their articles of impeachment. Rather than diving into analysis, let’s just ask some questions. Presumably, there will be a brief sojourn in the House Judiciary Committee and then they will go to the floor. What happens next?

1. The articles of impeachment will be voted down in the House.
2. The articles of impeachment will be approved in the House by a bipartisan majority.
3. The articles of impeachment will be approved in the House in an essentially party line vote.

and then, assuming that the articles of impeachment will be approved in the House:

1. They will just be dismissed without trial in the Senate.
2. After a trial in the Senate, the Senate will vote to convict.
3. After a brief trial in the Senate, Trump will be found not guilty by the Senate by a bipartisan vote.
4. After a brief trial in the Senate, Trump will be found not guilty by an essentially party line vote.
5. After a lengthy trial (going at least past Super Tuesday) in the Senate, Trump will be found not guilty by the Senate by a bipartisan vote.
6. After a lengthy trial (going at least past Super Tuesday) in the Senate, Trump will be found not guilty by an essentially party line vote.

What will be the net outcome, assuming that the articles of impeachment are passed by the House and Trump is found not guilty by the Senate:

1. Whoever the Democratic presidential candidate ultimately is, he or she will be elected in 2020, Democrats will hold the House and take the Senate.
2. Whoever the Democratic presidential candidate ultimately is, he or she will be elected in 2020, Democrats will hold the House, Republicans will hold the Senate.
3. Whoever the Democratic presidential candidate ultimately is, he or she will be elected in 2020, Democrats will lose the House, Republicans will hold the Senate.
4. Whoever the Democratic presidential candidate ultimately is, he or she will be defeated in 2020, Democrats will hold the House, Republicans will hold the Senate.
5. Whoever the Democratic presidential candidate ultimately is, he or she will be defeated in 2020, Democrats will lose the House, Republicans will hold the Senate.
6. Other

I think the greatest likelihoods are C-F-E with the second greatest likelihood C-E-E (bipartisan defined as two or more Democratic votes to acquit). Nancy Pelosi will keep her caucus together but lose the majority.

If by some quirk of fate C is the net outcome, expect articles of impeachment within two weeks of inauguration.

Politico reports that a small group of vulnerable House Democrats is floating the idea of censure rather than impeachment:

A small group of vulnerable House Democrats is floating the longshot idea of censuring President Donald Trump instead of impeaching him, according to multiple lawmakers familiar with the conversations.

Those Democrats, all representing districts that Trump won in 2016, huddled on Monday afternoon in an 11th-hour bid to weigh additional — though unlikely — options to punish the president for his role in the Ukraine scandal as the House speeds toward an impeachment vote next week.

IMO that ship has sailed. If such a move were to garner anything resembling bipartisan support thereby giving those “vulnerable House Democrats” political cover, it would need to have happened within a week or so of the revelation of “Ukrainegate” while Republicans were still criticizing the president over it.

The House leadership has determined that forcing Democrats representing districts that went for Trump in 2016 to walk the plank is worth it.

then a lot of us have no future. There are 382 metro areas in the United States. From 2005 to 2017 just five of them accounted for 90% of the tech jobs that were created, reports the Wall Street Journal:

Just five metropolitan areas—Boston; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and San Jose, Calif.—accounted for 90% of all U.S. high-tech job growth between 2005 to 2017, according to the research by think-tank scholars Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

The nation’s 377 other metro areas accounted for 10% of the 256,063 jobs created during that period in 13 high-tech industries such as software publishing, pharmaceutical manufacturing and semiconductor production. Among the smaller cities that gained tech jobs were Madison, Wis.; Albany, N.Y.; Provo, Utah; and Pittsburgh. Some prominent cities— including New York and Austin—lagged in tech job creation, according to the study.

Over that period Chicago and Los Angeles have actually experienced a decline in the number of tech jobs.

I would speculate that the reason for the phenomenon is two-fold: nameplates and money. Most of the increase in tech jobs has been concentrated in a handful of companies—Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.—and those companies are concentrated in those metro areas and it’s easier to get financing for your start-up if you are located in one of those metro areas.

I haven’t commented about the Department of Justice’s Inspector General report because I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Until that happens everything else will be battlespace preparation.

In the comments section of Doug Mataconis’s post at Outside the Beltway on the WaPo’s “Afghanistan Papers” series, the commenters are refighting the war in Afghanistan.

Okay, I’ll play. What should we have done in Afghanistan?

In my view our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan exemplified a struggle between political and strategic interest. Politically, President Bush had to respond militarily. Thinking objectively and strategically about it, while a military response was politically necessary, its most persistent effect has been the deaths of more Americans. Nuking Afghanistan, as wanted by some, would have been widely condemned and might well have resulted in U. S. leaders becoming subject to war crimes charges.

Or, said another way, I think that practically everything we’ve done since September 12, 2001 has been wrong, counterproductive even. I said so at the time and I still think so. Political interest has triumphed over our strategic interest again and again.

I thought you might be interested in Walter Russell Mead’s take as expressed in his Wall Street Journal column:

Much of the American foreign-policy establishment, both inside and outside the government, is liberal internationalist and Atlanticist. They believe that America’s chief task is to build a world order on liberal principles and that America’s chief allies are the NATO and European Union countries that share our convictions. They see Russia as the primary opponent of this effort and therefore of the U.S. Moscow’s efforts to interfere in European and American domestic politics threaten the cohesion of the EU and the liberal democratic principles for which the West stands. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea are direct attacks on liberal order and the Atlantic world.

From this perspective, the war in Ukraine matters to the whole world. To use Ukraine’s aid as a bargaining chip in a cynical domestic political ploy isn’t merely a political dirty trick. It’s collusion with the enemy. It’s like blocking Lend-Lease during the Blitz to make Winston Churchill investigate Thomas E. Dewey. President Trump’s exact feelings toward the Kremlin aren’t of great importance. It doesn’t matter if he is being blackmailed into it, sees the Russian president as a soul mate and fellow traveler on the road to destroying American democracy, or is a malignant clown bent on destroying a complex international system that he doesn’t understand. Donald Trump, his most determined opponents believe, has committed something very close to treason even as he shamelessly abuses his office to enrich himself.

For most Republicans, the Ukrainegate question is much narrower: Was Mr. Trump’s attempt to hold back congressionally authorized aid to force Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden a constitutional crime that requires removal from office, or can the decision be left to the voters? Unless investigators can show that Mr. Trump pressed Ukraine to frame the Bidens, to concoct false evidence and make false charges to discredit them, the president’s hold on the White House through January 2021 looks secure.

It isn’t that Republicans don’t care if Mr. Trump is a Russian agent. They approach Ukrainegate differently because many of them, uneasy as they may be about some aspects of his foreign policy, see some much-needed changes taking shape.

Among the administration’s most consistent features is a belief that the U.S. should change the priority it gives to the different theaters in world politics. From this perspective, the center of gravity of American policy must move from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. Latin America deserves more attention as a growing social and political crisis creates larger threats in the hemisphere—of which the chaos on the Southern border may be only a foretaste.

After Latin America, the threats of jihadist violence and Iranian expansionism make the Middle East the next-highest priority for the Trump administration. Europe, America’s highest priority for much of the Cold War, has fallen to fourth place. For the Trump administration and many of its Republican allies, Russia, because it is weaker and poorer than China, comes after Beijing on America’s list of geopolitical concerns—an important disagreement with the liberal Atlanticist foreign-policy establishment and not the only one.

Beyond geopolitics there is ideology. The rules-based world order means much less to Mr. Trump and to many Republican senators than it does to liberal Atlanticists. The president isn’t a believer in the application of the broken-windows theory of foreign policy—that a violation of one rule in one place materially increases the chance of other rules being broken in other places. A “realist” in the jargon of international relations, Mr. Trump thinks that national power matters much more than international law.

which I expect will evoke quite a bit of skeptical commentary.

I’m trying to distinguish between supporting Trump which I don’t do and supporting a realignment of U. S. foreign policy which I do. I think that most of our European allies aren’t allies at all but passive aggressive clients and there is no practical prospect of their becoming allies. They know what they need to do but they also know they’d be voted out of office if they did.