I did not follow GoT but I did find this post at Vulture interesting from a show biz perspective. In the article they list the 25 biggest winners in Game of Thrones from 25 to 1. My pick for biggest winner—HBO—was listed in the article as #3 so I wasn’t that far off the mark.

It certainly has made a lot of careers. I can’t think of any other TV show that catapulted so many unknowns into major movie roles.

I am not as sympathetic as the editors of the Wall Street Journal over the alleged plight of the heirs of IRAs being induced to withdraw the proceeds more rapidly:

Under current law, a 5-year-old grandson who inherits money in an IRA can “stretch” the mandatory distributions over his lifetime. That allows for longer tax-free growth, giving legacy-minded investors a way to build family wealth. The Secure Act would require the IRA to be emptied within 10 years. This would speed up the tax liability, which could also push the bunched-up distributions into a higher tax bracket.

Maybe there’s an argument that IRAs weren’t meant to be used as vehicles for inheritance. Nevertheless they are, and the figures can be large. Mitt Romney’s retirement account made news in 2012 when financial disclosures, which specify wealth in ranges, said his IRA held between $21 million and $102 million. Those numbers were thought unusual, a result of savvy investments Mr. Romney made in Bain Capital projects.

Still, you may be surprised: Fidelity Investments says that its last census of 401(k) millionaires includes 180,000 of its account holders, along with 168,000 IRA millionaires, plus another 22,000 educational workers or nonprofit staff who are 403(b) millionaires. And that’s only Fidelity. Some 33,000 federal workers have accumulated $1 million or more in their Thrift Savings Plan accounts, which can be rolled into IRAs.

Rather than spend this on wine and cruises, some of these people may prefer to pass on as much money as possible, perhaps to help their grandchildren pay for college or starter houses. If savers spent years building up their accounts with that goal in mind, it is hardly fair to switch the rules for everybody who’s still alive six months from today.

Under present law they are able to withdraw from those erstwhile IRAs slowly rather than paying taxes on them all at once as would otherwise be the case. That’s largely welfare for the rich.

I think that IRAs need reform but I’m indifferent to these heirs. For example, I don’t think I should be required to withdraw from my IRA while I’m still working. The State of Illinois is seeing to it that the taxes I’m paying are rising faster than my income which makes it darned hard to save. I’m not poor but I’m not rich, either. If I stop working not only must we curtail our present not particularly lifestyle, I won’t be able to save. Our only luxuries are our opera subscription, the fish I buy, and the dogs. It may be that our home will become a luxury we cannot afford. Consequently, I’m working far past what most people think of as retirement age and plan to continue as long as I’m able but I see the hand writing on the wall.

I was saddened that the Washington Post editorial on the UN’s report on global poverty contained so little real insight. You can read it if you like but it can be summarized by the title of this post. It doesn’t address why poverty has declined or the factors that can reduce poverty.

The answer is that although we don’t really know there are some things we can assert with confidence. Autarky (neither importing nor exporting) produces poverty. Both China and India, where most of the world’s poor lived, have greatly reduced poverty by opening their countries to exports and, to a lesser degree, imports. Could they have achieved more had they opened their markets more? We don’t really know.

Sad as it is to say, adopting liberal democracy has little or nothing to do with alleviating poverty other than possibly as a side effect. China greatly reduced poverty without adopting liberal democracy.

Policies that move workers from subsistence farming to manufacturing reduces poverty. Consequently, encouraging subsistence farming or discouraging manufacturing increases poverty. Those include bans on imports of agricultural products.

Educating women may reduce poverty indirectly by reducing the number of births.

Here in the United States we still have people who are genuinely poor. I think we would do better by, rather than fulminating on relative poverty, concentrating on real poverty. The relatively poor we will always have with us but the only reason we have genuinely poor people here is indifference. In the United States most of the genuinely poor live on Indian reservations or rural areas where the social safety net does not reach. Increasing the depth of that safety net without increasing its breadth will do little to eliminate poverty in the U. S.

At a visceral level I agree with the position of the editors of the Washington Post on the minimum wage:

What the CBO’s report does, or should, remind lawmakers is that there is a trade-off in raising the minimum wage so substantially — and that, while the upside would accrue to society’s most vulnerable, so would the downside. Those who would lose out, in the form of no job at all, would wind up not with less pay but with no pay.

That fact alone argues for proceeding with caution. So, too, does the fact that most of the U.S. workforce already lives in a jurisdiction that has raised the minimum wage above the federal level, with the highest new minimums scheduled for states such as California and New York where wages and living costs are relatively high to begin with. If research from University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube is correct, and the optimal minimum wage is 50 to 60 percent of a given regional labor market’s median hourly wage, then employment in Louisiana, where the median wage was $16.05 an hour in 2018, could be badly hurt by an increase to $15 between now and 2025. Puerto Rico, where a $15 minimum wage, if applied, would equal 150 percent of the current median wage, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, could be devastated.

The federal minimum wage is, indeed, overdue for an update, having lost about 18 percent of its real value since its last increase in 2009. The smart way to do that, however, is by pegging it to local conditions and then having it automatically grow with inflation going forward — no politics needed. The Third Way think tank has a plan that would set the national minimum wage at “one-half of the hourly wage for nonsupervisory workers” — that figure in 2019 would be $11.72 — and then allow local levels to vary above or below that depending on living costs. The Republican-controlled Senate probably will not act on the House measure. Another advantage of the Third Way proposal, therefore, is to show there is an alternative to that do-nothing approach, too.

but intellectually I agree even more with the need for reflection. What would the effect of a $11.72 minimum wage in Puerto Rico be? Louisiana? Seattle? New York City? My intuition tells me that it could well be devastating in the first two and have no effect whatever in the latter two.

The larger issue is what is the purpose of a national minimum wage? If it’s to ensure that people whose jobs are worth no more than the minimum wage can raise a family on their earnings, should that be the objective of policy? Or should the objective of policy be faster growth in the number of jobs worth paying more than the minimum wage? I think the latter.

Suggesting that we can do both is blithe. Politicians have tremendous difficulty walking and chewing gum at the same time. “Fight for $15!” sucks the air out of the room.

Said another way, it’s a way of changing the subject away from what we should really be talking about.

I see that Tom Friedman has noticed the same things I have which I think means that they are obvious. From his most recent New York Times column:

I was shocked that so many candidates in the party whose nominee I was planning to support want to get rid of the private health insurance covering some 250 million Americans and have “Medicare for all” instead. I think we should strengthen Obamacare and eventually add a public option.

I was shocked that so many were ready to decriminalize illegal entry into our country. I think people should have to ring the doorbell before they enter my house or my country.

I was shocked at all those hands raised in support of providing comprehensive health coverage to undocumented immigrants. I think promises we’ve made to our fellow Americans should take priority, like to veterans in need of better health care.

And I was shocked by how feeble was front-runner Joe Biden’s response to the attack from Kamala Harris — and to the more extreme ideas promoted by those to his left.

He goes on:

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

I agree. Glenn Reynolds has been saying much the same thing somewhat less kindly for some time: all the Democrats need to do is not act crazy and they can’t even do that.

Maybe the candidates are right. Maybe there is an overwhelming but unevidenced groundswell of public opinion in favor of Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, late term abortions, open borders, a debt jubilee for educational debt, and extending public benefits to illegal migrants. Maybe Americans really want to see a good fight between whatever Democratic candidate ultimately wins the nomination and Donald Trump rather than the “more normal” country polls have suggested. Or maybe all of those things just represent the views of a relatively small number of activists, what’s true but unevidenced is that people who tell pollsters they disapprove of Trump will vote for him anyway because the alternative is so much worse, and that Donald Trump may well become yet another presumably unpopular president who carries more states in his re-election bid than he did when he won the first time.

Although I agree with the thrust of Charles Sykes’s Politico post to the effect that the Democratic presidential candidates who are embracing a long laundry list of radical positions are doing themselves no good for the general election, there is one particular with which I disagree:

President Richard Nixon, while lacking Trump’s theatricality and instability, was regarded with fear and loathing by much of the country.

I fear that Mr. Sykes’s memory is deserting him. According to Gallup, Nixon’s approval rating ranged from 50% to 63% throughout 1972. That is an approval rating of which more recent presidents including Clinton and Obama can only dream. Nixon’s approval rating only began to plummet for good in 1973 after he had been re=elected when the Watergate revelations hit the news media. On Nixon’s handling of the Vietnam War in particular his approval rating was higher than that of Lyndon Johnson, his predecessor.

I never voted for Nixon but I do remember what the late 1960s and early 1970s were like pretty vividly (except 1969 about which my memories are fuzzy for reasons I’ll explain another time).

By the standard Mr. Sykes is setting both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both feared and loathed by much of the country. What I think is fairer to say is that Nixon, Clinton, and Obama were all despised by a relative handful of activists, loved by others, and most of the American people didn’t give a damn one way or another.

What really happened in 1972 is that activists, caught within their own echo chamber, convinced themselves that Richard Nixon was much less popular than he really was, put forward a nominee whose views were out of step with what most of the American people believed, and went on to lose every state other than Massachusetts including Mr. McGovern’s home state. No Democratic president of the post-war period has won 49 states. It wasn’t dirty tricks that won the 1972 election. It was taking the temperature of the country incorrectly that resulted in a resounding defeat.

That’s what Democrats need to consider. Don’t assess your chances based on what your own most extreme supporters believe.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead is concerned about Erdogan’s Turkey’s leaving the Western orbit, such as it is:

The potential defection of a major ally like Turkey poses a significant challenge to NATO, not least because the alliance has no legal means to expel members that default on their obligations. While Mr. Erdogan’s purchase of the Russian system requires a serious response, and the delivery of F-35s must be put on hold, Washington should move cautiously.

Turkey and the West do best when they work together. The Ottoman alliance with the Central Powers ended with dismemberment of the empire in World War I. But the rift was also costly for Winston Churchill; the Allied defeat at Gallipoli damaged his reputation and haunted him for years. The Istanbul election demonstrates that opposition to Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly erratic leadership is deepening. A century after the Great War, Washington should remember that Turkey is bigger than one man and focus on the long term.

What he fails to do is make any case whatever that the West should want to retain an irredentist, neo-Ottoman non-Kemalist Turkey which is precisely what Mr. Erdogan has been constructing. That is not the Turkey that was admitted to NATO and I do not believe it is a Turkey we should wish to defend. It is not so much that the West has abandoned Turkey, as Dr. Mead asserts as that our interests have diverged.

I found David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column largely a lament for an America that has been gone for nearly 40 years, one in which there was a liberal and conservative wing of both the Democratic and Republican Parties and they didn’t hate each other. Indeed, that might be the capsule summary of most of his columns. Here’s the kernel of his piece:

No matter how moderate or left, Democrats of a certain age were raised in an atmosphere of liberalism. I don’t mean the political liberalism of George McGovern. I mean the philosophic liberalism of people like Montaigne, John Stuart Mill, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass — people who witnessed religious and civil wars and built structures to restrain fanaticism.

Philosophic liberalism, Adam Gopnik explains in his essential book, “A Thousand Small Sanities,” begins with intellectual humility. There’s more we don’t know than we do know, so public life is a constant conversation that has no end. In the liberal view, each person contains opposites and contradictions. You flatten and dehumanize complex individuals when you see people according to crude dichotomies and assign them to tribal teams.

Liberals prefer constant incremental reform to sudden revolution. “Liberal reform, like evolutionary change, being incremental, is open to the evidence of experience,” Gopnik writes. Liberals place great emphasis on context. The question is not: What do I want? It’s: What good can I do in this specific circumstance?

Liberalism loves sympathy, suspects rage and detests cruelty. Politics is inevitably a dialogue between partial truths. Compromise is a virtue, not a sign of cowardice. Moreover, means determine ends. If you win power through rhetorical violence, and by hating those who disagree, your regime will be angry and destructive. Liberalism arose out of the fact that political revolutions, while exciting at the outset, usually end up in brutality, dictatorship and blood. Working within the system is best.

People who came of age in the past few decades did not grow up in an atmosphere of assumed liberalism. They often grew up in an atmosphere that critiques it.

Progressives are not liberals. Liberals love what the United States is and has been and yearn to make it better through gradual, gentle, and consensual change. Progressive love the United States only for what it might become under their tutelage.

If you think that is a good formula, try it out on your boss in describing how you feel about your job, on a chef in describing his preparation of a dish, on your spouse, or on your mother. I predict that in short order you will find yourself without a job, unwelcome in the restaurant, without a spouse, and persona non grata in your parents’ home.

There’s an old joke about a man who moved to a small Maine town at two days of age and remained there without leaving until he died at 96. On his tombstones the people put the inscription “He was almost one of us”.

Robert A. George, one of the editors of the New York Daily News, finally uses the right word in describing President Trump’s tweet of a few days ago which, imprudently in my view, seized the attention from the internecine warfare within the Democratic Party to himself:

The person who smears Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers (even grudgingly admitting “some are good people”) is clearly a nativist bigot.

The person who initially attempted to pass by executive fiat a ban on Muslim immigrants is clearly an Islamaphobic bigot.

The person who caviled for years that the first black president — of Kenyan heritage — wasn’t really born here (despite voluminous, contemporaneous, evidence to the contrary) is clearly a xenophobic bigot.

The person who suggests that four members of Congress should just shut up or “go back” to other countries is clearly an ignorant and xenophobic bigot. Ignorant because of the “four Progressive Congresswomen” Trump alludes to, Ilhan Omar, is Somali-born, but a naturalized American; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a New York-born Latina; Rashida Tlaib is a Michigan-born Arab; Ayanna Pressley is a black Cincinnati-born, Chicago-raised Massachusetts representative.

The word is “nativist”. I recognize it because I have some nativist streaks myself. For example, I think we need to devote significantly more attention and resources to American Indians (AKA “Native Americans”) and native-born blacks, particularly rural blacks, who comprise most of the people in the United States who are genuinely poor, and less to economic migrants from Mexico and Central America. Consequently, I think “the wall” is a waste of resources. What we need is a skills-based immigration system enforced in part by serious workplace enforcement and penalties on employers, much like those in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, coupled with a public relations campaign emphasizing the impossibility of getting a job in the United States without legal immigration.

An interesting point has been raised, however. What are we entitled to expect from immigrants or those reared in immigrant households? I don’t think we’re entitled to gratitude—that would be a bridge too far. I think that at the very least they should not despise us or our history, they should be fluent in speaking the English language, they should abandon the prejudices with which they were reared, and they should not devote their lives to changing everyone but themselves.