The editors of the Wall Street Journal are chortling over the predicament in which the State of California has placed its residents:

Californians are learning to live like the Amish after investor-owned utility PG&E this week shut off power to two million or so residents to prevent wildfires amid heavy, dry winds. Blame the state’s largest blackout on a perfect storm of bad policies.

Two dozen or so wildfires in the past few years have been linked to PG&E equipment, including one last fall that killed 85 people. PG&E under state law is on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in damages and has filed for bankruptcy. For years the utility skimped on safety upgrades and repairs while pumping billions into green energy and electric-car subsidies to please its overlords in Sacramento. Credit Suisse has estimated that long-term contracts with renewable developers cost the utility $2.2 billion annually more than current market power rates.

PG&E customers pay among the highest rates in America. But the utility says inspecting all of its 100,000 or so miles of power lines and clearing dangerous trees would require rates to increase by more than 400%. California’s litigation-friendly environment has also increased insurance rates for tree trimmers and made it hard to find workers.

Meantime, opposition to logging and prescribed burns in California’s forests compounded by a seven-year drought has yielded 147 million dead trees that make for combustible fuel. Rural communities are at especially high fire risk when winds kick up as they have this week.

To avoid more damage, PG&E announced this week that it would cut power across 34 counties in Central and Northern California as long as there are sustained winds of 25 miles an hour and gusts of 45 miles an hour. After winds subside, the utility says it may take several days to inspect equipment before power returns, and there could be more blackouts this fall.

I wonder what the carbon emissions of several million gasoline-power generators is? I wonder when the state will prohibit their sale and/or possession?

Here’s the part of the editorial I found interesting:

A report this week by Next 10 and Beacon Economics warns that the state isn’t on target to meet its climate goals in 2030 because Californians refuse to abandon SUVs for electric cars. Wildfires last year produced more CO2 than the state’s businesses, homes and farms, offsetting state emission reductions in 2017 nine times over.

which highlights a debate I’ve had over the years. Assuming arguendo that carbon emissions produce climate change, it doesn’t make a bit of difference what the source of the emissions are—electrical power generation, transportation, cement production, running backup generators, or forest fires.

If you’re worried about climate change due to carbon emissions and neither nuclear power nor carbon capture figure in your plans to reduce carbon emissions, I don’t believe you’ve thought the matter through. Every baseload power generation method whether solar, wind, or nuclear requires backup generation capability and that is generally accomplished by burning fossil fuels.

I am quite confident that Drs. Saez and Zucman would be quite outraged at the interpretation of their latest op-ed in the New York Times of my title above but bear with me. In the op-ed they conclude that when local, state, and federal taxes are all taken into account the overall U. S. tax system is regressive:

America’s soaring inequality has a new engine: its regressive tax system. Over the past half century, even as their wealth rose to previously unseen heights, the richest Americans watched their tax rates collapse. Over the same period, as wages stagnated for the working classes, work conditions deteriorated and debts ballooned, their tax rates increased.

Stop to think this over for a minute: For the first time in the past hundred years, the working class — the 50 percent of Americans with the lowest incomes — today pays higher tax rates than billionaires.

The full extent of this situation is not visible in official statistics, which is perhaps why it has not received more attention so far. Government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office publish information about the distribution of federal taxes, but they disregard state and local taxes, which account for a third of all taxes paid by Americans and are in general highly regressive. The official statistics keepers do not provide specific information on the ultra-wealthy, who although few in number earn a large fraction of national income and therefore account for a large share of potential tax revenue. And until now there were no estimates of the total tax burden that factored in the effect of President Trump’s tax reform enacted at the end of 2017, which was particularly generous for the ultra-wealthy.

which is followed by a bizarrely formatted table which does not support their claim:

Unless I’m misreading that table it can be summarized as pointing out that our system is slightly progressive right up to the highest income earners at which point it becomes slightly regressive, due to the payroll tax. If the cap on FICA were raised to include all wage income, for example, all other things being equal our system would be quite progressive. I have supported raising the cap on FICA so that wage income right up to the threshold wage of the top 1% or income earners (presently $389,000) is subject to the tax. That’s a lot better than European countries in which the construction of their value-added taxes make their tax systems very regressive.

There are all sorts of flaws in their analysis but I will focus on just two. As I said you cannot evaluate a tax system based on rates. How you calculate income is where the real action is. When you add all transfer payments to income, our system is shown to be somewhat more progressive.

The second is that the United States does not have a tax system. It has tax systems. Thousands of them. In Illinois alone there are almost 7,000 independently taxing bodies. I can only speculate that there are tens of thousands of them in the United States as a whole.

Which brings me to the title of my post. Presumably, the authors support one aspect of Trump’s recent tax reform: the limitation on deductibility of state and local taxes. That tends to increase the tax liability of the highest income earners and, consequently, increases their taxes as a percentage of income. It also provides a political incentive for states to reduce their taxes, a major source of the inequity they point out.

I would claim that, other than FICA, most of the inequity in our “tax system” is on the part of a handful of high tax states. I would like to see an updated analysis on a state by state basis that considers income regardless of source.

Drs. Saez and Zucman have a plan:

Take big corporations. Some countries may have an interest in applying low tax rates, but that’s not an obstacle to making multinationals (and their shareholders) pay a lot. How? By collecting the taxes that tax havens choose not to levy. For example, imagine that the corporate tax rate in the United States was increased to 35 percent and that Apple found a way to book billions in profits in Ireland, taxed at 1 percent. The United States could simply decide to collect the missing 34 percent. Apple, like most Fortune 500 companies, does in fact have a big tax deficit: It pays much less in taxes globally than what it would pay if its profits were taxed at 35 percent in each country where it operates. For companies headquartered in the United States, the Internal Revenue Service should collect 100 percent of this tax deficit immediately, taking up the role of tax collector of last resort. The permission of tax havens is not required. All it would take is adding a paragraph in the United States tax code.

The same logic can be applied to companies headquartered abroad that sell products in America. The only difference is that the United States would collect not all but only a fraction of their tax deficit. For example, if the Swiss food giant Nestlé has a tax deficit of $1 billion and makes 20 percent of its global sales in the United States, the I.R.S. could collect 20 percent of its tax deficit, in addition to any tax owed in the United States. The information necessary to collect this remedial tax already exists: Thanks to recent advances in international cooperation, the I.R.S. knows where Nestlé books its profits, how much tax it pays in each country and where it makes its sales.

Collecting part of the tax deficit of foreign companies would not violate any international treaty.

I think they’re wrong in that last assertion but I have a question. How would they collect from Chinese companies? Sue? There is no such thing as a system of international system of civil law. And China does not have a robust system of civil law. The ability of foreign companies or even foreign governments to sue Chinese companies in Chinese courts is extremely limited.

Sue in American courts? How would they enforce the judgments? Seize the assets of those companies held in the United States? How much do those amount to? I would suggest that they come nowhere near covering the amounts that would be involved.

Better late than never, I guess. At the New York Times Farhad Manjoo laments:

The People’s Republic of China is the largest, most powerful and arguably most brutal totalitarian state in the world. It denies basic human rights to all of its nearly 1.4 billion citizens. There is no freedom of speech, thought, assembly, religion, movement or any semblance of political liberty in China. Under Xi Jinping, “president for life,” the Communist Party of China has built the most technologically sophisticated repression machine the world has ever seen. In Xinjiang, in Western China, the government is using technology to mount a cultural genocide against the Muslim Uighur minority that is even more total than the one it carried out in Tibet. Human rights experts say that more than a million people are being held in detention camps in Xinjiang, two million more are in forced “re-education,” and everyone else is invasively surveilled via ubiquitous cameras, artificial intelligence and other high-tech means.

None of this is a secret. Under Xi, China has grown markedly more Orwellian; not only is it stamping its heel more firmly on its own citizens, but it is also exporting its digital shackles to authoritarians the world over. Yet unlike the way we once talked about pariah nations — say East Germany or North Korea or apartheid South Africa — American and European lawmakers, Western media and the world’s largest corporations rarely treat China as what it plainly is: a growing and existential threat to human freedom across the world.

Why do we give China a pass? In a word: capitalism. Because for 40 years, the West’s relationship with China has been governed by a strategic error the dimensions of which are only now coming into horrific view.

He’s missing one word in that: crony. Free markets have nothing whatever to do with the disaster that China has been to the American economy. We do not now have free trade with China and have never had free trade with China. We have had managed trade and that has nothing to do with free markets and everything to do with crony capitalism.

There is also nothing in his piece that wasn’t apparent 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Only wishful thinking has allowed the policy with China that we have followed for the last 40 years. It’s time for a little hard-nosed reality.

The reality is that manufacturing should and may return to the United States but the manufacturing jobs “lost” over the last 40 years are gone for good. If we’re going to continue to manage trade, it should be managed in a way that benefits most Americans rather than just a relative few.

I want to consider the issues raised by the editors of the New York Times in their editorial on the ongoing “impeachment inquiry” piecemeal. I agree with their opening:

The House of Representatives has undertaken the impeachment inquiry of a president only four times in American history. Each time, the House has set its own ground rules. The Constitution prescribes no specific process, nor does federal law. Court rulings and precedents, such as they are, tend to be narrow and particular. So when lawmakers determine that such a proceeding is warranted, they are forced to rely on their own cobbled-together rule book, with the trust of the American people in their government at stake.

This requires Congress to be rigorous in setting out the rules for conducting an inquiry.

That’s followed by a little throatclearing and then a discussion of the White House’s recent letter:

Take the first claim first, that there is nothing wrong with Mr. Trump shaking down a foreign leader for his own political benefit. Perhaps that’s the only position the White House can take, because the facts of the July 25 call are not in dispute. The administration’s own written summary of the conversation reveals that Mr. Trump pressured Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a top political rival, and his son Hunter for supposed corruption. At the time of the call, Mr. Trump was withholding nearly $400 million in promised military aid to Ukraine — a topic that was alluded to in connection to his requests that Mr. Zelensky “do us a favor.”

Despite Mr. Trump’s claims to the contrary, this is not O.K.

which I agree with. That’s followed by some half-hearted defense of the House Democrats’ reluctance to hold a vote authorizing the inquiry:

First, there is nothing magical about a House vote authorizing an impeachment inquiry. The administration’s letter calls it a “necessary authorization,” but that’s simply false.

It’s false but unwise as the editors acknowledge later:

Ms. Pelosi also wants to protect Democratic members who represent more conservative districts from having to take a difficult vote that might come back to haunt them in 2020. This isn’t a very compelling rationale, especially when those same members will almost surely be called upon to vote on articles of impeachment soon enough.

They then challenge President Trump’s good faith:

Finally, Ms. Pelosi knows that Mr. Trump has no intention of cooperating with an impeachment inquiry, even if it were authorized by a vote. Instead, he would use what would likely be a party-line vote to further disparage the inquiry as a partisan hit job.

That’s probably true but I honestly have no idea. They present some contradicting evidence:

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump was asked whether he would cooperate if the House held a vote authorizing the impeachment inquiry. “Yeah, that sounds O.K.,” the president said. “We would if they give us our rights.”

Then they get to the real meat of the editorial:

And yet it may be a mistake for the Democrats to proceed much further without an authorization by the House. For one thing, a vote would strengthen Congress’s hand in any litigation arising out of the inquiry. A federal judge in Washington, Beryl Howell, said on Tuesday that having such a vote on record would make it “easier” for her to step in and make a ruling on House demands for documents or testimony.

Second, a resolution in support of the inquiry could also lay out specific ground rules, which could enhance the legitimacy of the inquiry in the minds of Americans.

Clearer, unified ground rules for this inquiry could address the other two main complaints in the White House’s letter: a lack of due process or subpoena power for the Republicans in the minority.

I agree with nearly every word of that. That’s my position.

They follow that by expressing skepticism again about the president’s good faith and pointing out that an authorization vote isn’t required before arriving here:

Still, there are good reasons to grant Mr. Trump certain procedural protections at this stage. For one thing, as Mr. Cipollone’s letter correctly notes, House Democrats gave President Nixon some of these protections during their impeachment inquiry in 1974, as did House Republicans with President Clinton in 1998. In that latter inquiry, House Republicans also gave Democrats in the minority some authority to issue subpoenas.

The bottom line is that Democrats need to honor basic fairness and conduct a thorough inquiry, but they also need to set hard limits on how much time they are willing to spend on any given negotiation or debate or vote.

Again, I agree with nearly every word of that. If the House Democrats are to produce anything but a partisan rallying cry that practically invites Republicans to vote against it and move independents, 40% of the country, to sympathize with Trump, it’s a purely partisan impeachment inquiry and ultimately vote which is widely considered unfair.

It all depends on what they want more.

In listening to the back and forth in the discussion of the oral arguments Bostock v. Clayton County and Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC it occurred to me that over the period of the last several generations there has been an ongoing battle about the role of the Supreme Court that should be debated openly.

I think the Supreme Court should be rendering neutrally applying interpretive principles in full recognition that perfect neutrality is impossible. Simply because human beings are human beings does not mean that it is impossible to apply interpretive principles in a neutral fashion. I think that the courts should follow the law and leave the political decisions to the Congress.

Increasingly, I think it’s apparent that not everyone agrees with that role for the Supreme Court or, indeed, that justices should be bound by established law, precedent, or anything other than their own consciences.

So, here’s my question. If Supreme Court justices are to be political actors, should they be subject to the same review as other political actors? I.e. should they stand for re-election? It could be just a yes/no for retention as it is here in Illinois for judges or it could be a full-fledged election and it could be every 2, 4, 6, 8, or more years.

Should Supreme Court justices stand for election?

What are the House Democrats trying to accomplish with their “impeachment inquiry”? Are they doing their constitutional duty to remove President Trump from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Are they engaged in a elaborate political stunt to make Trump easier pickings in the 2020 election? Is the exercise to appease their more radical members? Trying to draw attention away from their own misconduct? A fit of pique? As the editors of the Wall Street Journal point out, the process that the House Democrats are pursuing certainly makes it excusable to suspect they are not motivated purely by the first objective:

Democrats are moving fast toward what looks like an inevitable vote to impeach President Trump, so why aren’t they doing more to persuade Americans who don’t already agree with them? They won’t convince anyone else with their current method of irregular order, secret hearings and selective leaks to the pro-impeachment press.

Start with the news that Democrats may attempt to keep secret the identity of the intelligence whistleblower whose complaint started the impeachment drive. The Washington Post reports that Chairman Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee may have the official testify away from Capitol Hill, or allow only staff to attend, or obscure his image and voice as in a mafia trial.

This is astonishing. The key witness in an attempt to depose an elected President would testify without the American public getting a clue about who he is or what his motivations might be. Impeachment isn’t a criminal proceeding, so the right of Mr. Trump to face his accuser doesn’t apply. But you’d think that annulling the 2016 vote of 63 million Americans would be significant enough to demand witness transparency and a chance for both parties to test his knowledge and credibility.

At this point if the objective is to push Trump’s approval rating far enough down that the voters abandon him, it’s not working. According to the RCP index of polls, Trump’s approval rating has declined about two points after weeks non-stop criticism. It’s still 6-8 points higher than it was a year ago.

IMO the House Democrats should follow the procedures of the last two impeachment inquiries. They should take a vote. They should comport themselves with dignity. Stunts like Adam Schiff’s imaginary conversation should be eschewed. The spirit of the proceedings should be one of inquiry not inquisition.

Finally. Somebody calling for a corrupt practices act. In an op-ed in the New York Times Peter Schweizer remarks:

In 2016, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $264 million as part of a settlement with the federal government. The reason? An Asian subsidiary of the company had hired the children of Chinese government officials in the hopes of currying favor with their powerful parents — a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Had the same thing happened with a foreign company and an American politician’s family, however, no violation would have occurred — because no equivalent American law prevents a foreign company or government from hiring the family members of American politicians.

This glaring loophole provides political families with an opportunity to effectively “offshore” corruption and cronyism. It gives the politically connected class enormously tempting opportunities for self-dealing, the sort of thing that is blatantly illegal in almost any other context.

He then goes on to outline the shenanigans of the Biden and McConnell families, enriching family members through what is essentially legal influence-peddling. Calling it for what it is, political corruption, is long overdue.

But I have a basic question. How in the world would it be enforced? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? What we really need are elected officials whose own informed consciences would prevent them from engaging in corrupt practices and an electorate who won’t elect and re-elect corrupt officials because they belong to the right political party.

Corruption is endemic in government at every level and will not root itself out. It raises the cost of practically everything that government does. To name the most widespread and broadly accepted form of corruption public employee labor unions allowed to make political contributions are an inherently corrupt arrangement.

We’ll see if people are outraged enough to insist that action be taken. My bet is that we will return to our normal somnolent state. It’s a troubled sleep but it’s sleep nonetheless. Corruption will not find reasonable limits and resolve itself. The reason that greed is one of the Seven Deadly Sins is that it is not self-limiting.

In article at Dissent on the legacy of the Obama Administration Corey Robin describes the “defining achievement of Barack Obama” as the Affordable Care Act, which has been undergoing attack from Republicans since it was enacted but more recently from Democrats as well. He refers to :”the Obamanauts”, the True Believers in the historic mission of the Obama Administration. He writes:

Leftists often dismiss liberals and Democrats as bloodless technocrats and pallid wonks. But that’s not true of the Obamanauts. Theirs is a libidinal attachment. Not to science, reason, or Harvard but to an incongruous sense of history—dopey and epochal, encyclopedic yet uninformed. Obamanauts think of themselves as a “storied band of brothers.” They grill five-year-olds on the facts of presidential history. They speak of history lying in “our hands.” Yet many of them know little of consequence about the past. Pfeiffer thinks the demand for politicians to be authentic is a “new rule,” but Nixon was dogged by the charge of inauthenticity all the time. Virtually all of the Obamanauts are dumbfounded by the Republicans’ hatred of the Affordable Care Act, even though opposition to universal healthcare has been a rallying cry of conservatives since Harry Truman first proposed it in 1945. But Obamanauts do know that, with the exception of Harold Stassen, Obama was the first presidential candidate to campaign outside the United States and that John Kerry’s three-week trip to Vienna was “the longest any secretary of state had ever remained in any single city outside the United States in the history of the country.”

Whatever happened to authenticity? It has practically vanished from the public scene. None of the prospective candidates for president, Republican or Democrat, can lay any real claim to it. Joe Biden might have authentically been a scrappy middle class kid from Scranton 50 years ago but 50 years is a long time.

The intellectuals aren’t authentic intellectuals, the victimized minorities aren’t authentic victimized minorities, and the tribunes of the plebs aren’t authentic tribunes of the plebs. What happened? Other than if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.

From New York Magazine via MSN Eric Levitz proposes that three policy failures are “killing the American Dream”:

The United States has never been richer. In 2018, American households boasted a collective net worth of over $98 trillion. If that wealth were divided evenly across the U.S. population, every human being in our country would have roughly $298,000 to their name — and every family of four would be millionaires.

Few Americans feel entitled to full communism. But many do have trouble reconciling their nation’s unprecedented wealth with the increasing insecurity of middle-class life. In the 1960s, economists worried that 21st-century Americans would struggle to find purpose once economic progress turned full-time employment into an archaic chore practiced solely by the eccentric, like churning butter or collecting CDs. And yet, in 2019, middle-class Americans are working harder than ever. We were promised flying cars. Instead, we got 60-hour workweeks.

So, what went wrong? How did we miss the exit for fully automated comfort-plus capitalism?

The three failures he cites are:

1. We let the wages fall too damn low.
2. We let the costs of housing, health care, and higher education rise too damn high.
3. We let our social welfare institutions (such as they are) grow too damn outdated.

and concludes:

The American Dream isn’t dying of natural causes. We know what must be done to revive it. The problem is simply that a lot of powerful people would rather pull the plug than pay for the cure.

Let’s assume arguendo that he has identified our three biggest policy failures. Are they not actually one big policy failure? Is not immigration of low-skill workers, particularly illegal immigration, a major contributing factor in all three. A reliable, predictable, unending supply of workers places employers in control of wages. Further, when the workers are unskilled jobs are tailored so they can be done by people with minimal skills.

The cost of housing, health care, and education are all affected by immigration as well. In New York City 40.6% of public school students are Hispanic, in Los Angeles Unified 64.9% are Hispanic, and in Chicago 47% are Hispanic. Most of these kids are either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants and have low comprehension of English. The cost of education for each child are $17.5, $11K, and $15K respectively. A little basic arithmetic tells you that immigration brings high costs and immigration of people who will receive low wages means a high net cost.

As to his third “policy failure”, I know of cases in the LAUSD in which primary school classes of ten students have six different first languages. What sort of institutions would be required to deal with that situation? In Chicago the voting instructions are the size of a small phonebook because of the multiple language in which the instructions are printed. I don’t believe any institution is capable of dealing gracefully with such a situation.

It isn’t merely housing, health care, and education that are too expensive. We pay more per mile of road constructed, more per mile of pipe laid, more for our military, and more for just about every service for which government at any level pays than any other OECD country. Spending more because we have more people than we otherwise might is one thing but it doesn’t explain why everything that government pays for costs so much more here. I think it is a more general lack of social cohesion which is exacerbated by our present very high percentage of immigrants but which has deep societal roots. That limits the range of issues that government is capable of addressing and not merely for lack of funds.

I’m open to other explanations but those seem to make the most sense.