The suggestion that Noah Smith floats at Bloomberg for regional research parks:

Gruber and Johnson envision a string of new federally funded research parks, located in lagging regions of the U.S. They identify a number of economically underperforming cities that are rich in high-quality university programs and graduates — and that have short commutes, cheap houses and low levels of violent crime. Rochester, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, Syracuse, NY, and Columbus, OH top the list.

founders on a simple question. Do you want to live in Santa Cruz, Raleigh, or Rochester? This ill-considered idea rears its ugly head every few years. Thirty-five years ago I stood up in a townhall meeting about plans to build a research park in Evanston, where I had been living for many years, to say something along the following lines:

This is an incredibly foolhardy plan. Evanston does not have the infrastructure to support a research park. Young people cannot afford to buy homes here. There aren’t enough apartments for more people to live in. There is no way to commute in or out of Evanston.

Most people would rather move to Santa Cruz or Raleigh than move to Evanston.

The only enduring legacy of implementing this plan will be to uproot an historic black community that’s been in the location you want to develop since before the Civil War.

After many years of little or no occupancy the idea of an Evanston research park evaporated as silently as it arrived. Its only enduring legacy was to uproot an historic black community that had been in the location in which they plopped the research park since before the Civil War.

The reason that Rochester is in an economic slump is not just because it was a one company town and when that company folded due to management’s failing to read the trends the town dwindled with the company. It was because there just aren’t that many people who want to live in a town that gets 80 inches of snow every winter. Especially when they had other alternatives. And the very essence of the plan the two jamokes want tax dollars to pay for is to provide alternatives.

I’m in favor of more federal spending on research. The way to do that is with a mass engineering project analogous to the space program. I suggest a completely redesigned national power grid. It can be built out incrementally. At least we’d have something to show for it.

I want to commend Elizabeth Bauer’s excellent article at Forbes on Chicago’s pension crisis to your attention. It is hard to excerpt but here’s a characteristic snippet:

So, again, to repeat: when we speak of the importance of pension funding, most of the time, it can be fairly abstract and hypothetical. It’s unfair to future generations to ask them to pay what amount to basic payroll costs. There’s a risk that a plan that relies on future tax base growth could fall apart because, let’s face it, by the time you can predict that a city or state’s population is declining rather than growing, it’s too late. And giving legislators the ability to defer funding places us at risk of them succumbing to a temptation they simply shouldn’t have. (Yes, I’ve hashed this all out before.)

But this is no longer hypothetical. It’s no longer about good governance principles. It’s about impending insolvency if the city backs out of its funding schedule.

How soon is “impending”? Eight years at the longest. Possibly as soon as 2025.

Meanwhile, the editors of the Chicago Tribune declaim about the official response to the crisis:

We’re grateful to hear an elected official confront the details of the pension crisis and commit to solving it, regardless of the potential political cost. So far the responses from Springfield have been empty. A lot of: We look forward to hearing what the mayor has to say. …

Where’s the urgency?

One aspect of the problem missing from both discussions is that Chicago’s population is declining. That means that the number of Chicagoans who must pay for the misfeasance of past administrations is a million people fewer than would have been the case 40 years ago while the number of public employees who’ve retired and collect pensions continues to increase.

The state and the city depend very heavily on revenue from taxing marijuana and an as yet imaginary Chicago casino to fill the gap. They have no studies to support their assumptions about revenue. It just has to work.

That’s a disease afflicting a lot of our public policy. The preferred solution just has to work because the alternatives are too awful to contemplate. It can be seen at the federal level in personal income tax policy and in our policies with respect to Afghanistan and Syria.

As it works out there have been studies of the effects of legalized casino gambling on local economies and they tend not to be benign. Most of the spending in such establishments is from local people and they operate like a highly regressive tax.

It should be obvious that there are serious limits to how much tax can be extracted by taxing marijuana. We already have a huge black market which we’ve been unable to eradicate. If the taxes are high enough that will continue to be the case. My understanding is that revenues have fallen short of policymakers’ expectations in every jurisdiction in which recreational marijuana has been legalized.

Gov. Pritzker’s spending plans depend heavily on the proceeds of a yet-to-be-approved amendment to the state’s constitution allowing a graduated income tax. To the best of my knowledge no study has ever been done of the likely results of such a tax but its effects are already being felt—rich people are leaving Illinois in numbers.

There are really only a handful of ways to address the city’s and state’s fiscal problems. Most of the focus has been on raising taxes but that, as noted above, is already having adverse effects on our economies.

We can amend the state’s constitution to allow legislators to reduce future pension outlays. We can cut the pay of present public employees. We can reduce other spending—most of that is either Medicaid or road repair and the state’s roads are already in wretch shape as anyone who has driven from Illinois to Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, or Missouri can attest.

Or we can grow while limiting public spending to what we can afford. We are presently doing the opposite.

A county that accomplishes a 100% voter turnout is nothing. Cook County can get a 120% voter turnout.

To get a better idea of what has happened in the United States as a result of China’s mercantilist policies, read this op-ed at The Hill by Shalabh Kumar. Mr. Kumar proposed seven steps to heal the U. S. economy:

1. Place tariffs on all imports from China for six months to establish a new baseline and demonstrate America’s resolve — all means no exceptions, particularly finished goods.
2. After six months, invite them to rejoin negotiations.
3. President Trump should demonstrate his earnestness with a concession on 10 percent of the goods imported, a good-faith move to show Beijing that we will concede in some areas while retaining our right to protect long-term manufacturing.
4. All negotiations should include manufacturing experts. Our biggest mistake in trade negotiations is that we do not have these experts on the negotiating table. Lawyers are great, and are needed, but you can be assured that China has their best manufacturing minds on the table.
5. The manufacturing experts will know what makes sense for both parties to be happier.
6. Manufacturing experts will focus on how to bring back the high-tech manufacturing jobs by picking the proper Harmonized System codes to tariff — the standardized names and numbers to classify traded products — not for the benefit of Wall Street and their quarterly reports, but for long-term manufacturing renaissance in America. Some Silicon Valley CEOs will complain that their costs will go up, but that is quite minor compared to the overall growth of American economy. When America reduces its trade deficit and budget deficit, every American prospers.
7. The balance of 90 percent should be very carefully scrutinized, once again not solely by lawyers and economists but also by manufacturing experts.

I would add one more measure. I think that the purpose of the tax code should be to generate revenue rather than to change behavior or create a basis for granting political favors. If that’s how the tax code were viewed, we would abolish the corporate income tax. It is an inefficient tax.

As long as we’re committed to using the tax code for purposes other than generating revenue, at least it could be used to cultivate behaviors we want rather than those we don’t. The tax code should be changed to encourage businesses to modernize and/or expand facilities rather than encouraging them to consolidate.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton carried the following states by a majority of the vote: California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland. In the other states she carried more people voted against her than voted for her.

Update

Add this to your pipe. Here’s the rank of those states in terms of fiscal health (worst is 50—Illinois, natch):

That’s a catastrophic display of bad governing. On whom shall we depend for good government? Too many Republicans are minarchists or anarcho-capitalists for that.

There is something terribly wrong with this paragraph from Nikolas Kristof’s lament at MSN over the possibility of China’s subduing Taiwan by force of arms:

There are steps the U.S. can take that might reduce the risk of a crisis. Washington can emphasize to Beijing that Taiwan will not take any unilateral action, such as declaring itself an independent country — unless China makes a military move, in which case it will do so at once. The U.S. can also caution Beijing that if the electricity goes out in Taipei, the same may happen in Shanghai, and that if Taiwan-bound ships are harassed, they may be reflagged as American vessels.

The first and most egregious is that Taiwan is not the United States. Washington cannot “emphasize to Beijing that Taiwan” will not declare independence. It does not have that authority. That’s up to the Taiwanese.

The second is that the Taiwanese are not without agency. If they do not have the ability to defend themselves, they should cultivate it quickly.

For the last three generations the United States has maintained a precarious policy of declaring that the political situation of Taiwan was a matter to be settled between Beijing and Taipei not by the United States. We should continue that policy.

I presume that Mr. Kristof’s reaction was prompted by the situation in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a part of China. That “one country two systems” could not be sustained was obvious 25 years ago. If we did not want Hong Kong to be subsumed into the mainland, we should never have granted China most favored nation trading status and vetoed China’s admission to the WTO when we had the chance.

If I were President Xi and if I were intent on taking control of both Hong Kong and Taiwan and the United States were to make the pronouncements Mr. Kristof proposes, I would make a pre-emptive nuclear strike, presumably an EMP attack, to neutralize the United States in one master stroke. I doubt that any of us including President Xi are prepared for that.

I don’t entirely agree with Bradley A. Thayer and Lianchao Han’s take on our trade war with China, expressed at The Hill, but I think that their statement of its sources are on target:

In 1987, China’s trade surplus with the U.S. was only $2.7 billion, one-twentieth of Japan’s. By 2018, the People’s Republic of China’s trade surplus with the U.S. had reached nearly $418 billion, 150 times what it was three decades ago. In the past 30 years, China has snatched an astronomical $4.4 trillion from the U.S. Additionally, there is an estimated $300 billion to $600 billion annual loss from China’s theft, and at least 3 million highly paid U.S manufacturing workers lost their jobs because of competition from China. Chinese government-subsidized or forced labor produced billions of dollars worth of cheap goods that have been dumped onto the U.S. market.

This newly gained wealth has helped China create a dystopian nation, modernize its military into a formidable force, take the South Sea as its inland water, expand its political influence globally, rewrite international laws and norms, export its ideology and development model to developing countries, and contend for dominance in international politics.

That didn’t need to happen and, in particular, it didn’t need to happen at the pace that it did. It was an artifact of mercantilist Chinese policies. We dug a trap for ourselves and then fell into it. Climbing out will be neither easy nor painless but it’s something we must do for the health of our own economy and society. The transition mostly involves changing our behavior.

Those who fall back onto abstract arguments in favor of free trade ignore that we have never had free trade with China. We have had trade carefully managed to ensure that the benefits of trade go mostly to China and secondarily to top managers of big corporations who’ve reaped most of whatever economic surplus the Chinese allowed to flow in this direction.

Thinking that Trump has mismanaged that trade war or is a blowhard is fair enough. But if you want to return to the status quo ante, it’s incumbent on you to explain how the 50%+ of the American people who will never get college degrees will earn a decent living. I don’t think we can do that absent a diverse economy based on more than retail, health care, and education.

The first episode of Gunsmoke on the radio was broadcast on April 26, 1952. From then until the end of its run on June 11, 1961 some 480 episodes aired including reused scripts. Roughly 420 of these are available free, streaming online at archive.org.

For the last year and a half I have been doing a lot of medium distance driving, visiting a customer in southern Wisconsin once or twice a week. During these trips I have stayed alert by listening to episodes of Gunsmoke. As of today I have listened to all of the episodes available online. I recommend them. They may give you a different view of the 1950s, radio, Gunsmoke, or all three.

IMO it’s the greatest radio drama ever aired through a combination of fine acting, scripts, and production. Throughout the entire run William Conrad (later on television narrating Rocky and Bullwinkle or starring in Cannon) portrayed Matt Dillon, Parley Baer was Chester, Howard McNear was Doc, and Georgia Ellis was Kitty. John Dehner was in so many episodes he might just as well have been considered a member of of the principal cast. He played practically everything imaginable from grizzled old buffalo hunters to gunslingers, to cavalry officers, and to Washington bureaucrats. He must have been gunned down by Matt Dillon more than anyone else in history.

Speaking of predictions, in his Wall Street Journal column William Galston makes some predictions about the 2020 presidential election:

• Turnout will be very high. I suspect he’s wrong about that. How high is high? In each of the last four presidential elections turnout has been between 54% and 58%. I think it is very unlikely that voter turnout will exceed 2008’s (58.2%). I think it’s more likely to be what it was in 2004 and 2012—right around 55%. I wouldn’t call such a turnout high. Voter turnout was around 80% in nearly every presidential election between 1840 and 1900. The sad reality is that the higher the registration, the lower the percentage turnout.
• Despite the rise of cultural issues, the economy will matter. I agree with that.
• President Trump is likely to receive significantly less than 50% of the popular vote, and a smaller share than his Democratic opponent. I have no idea whether that’s right or wrong. Hillary Clinton received 65,853,514 and Donald Trump received 62,984,828 votes in 2016. That’s a difference of 2.1% of the popular vote. That’s within the margin of error. IMO the people who are making such predictions have been reading their own press releases too long. They could be right but they could be wrong, too.