It’s pretty early in the whole nominations process but just for fun let’s do some handicapping. Who do you think Democrats will nominate for president?

At this point I think the ticket is very likely to be Biden-Harris (although I’d prefer Biden-Booker). I’d prefer a Hickenlooper or Bennet at the top of the ticket but clearly Biden is the candidate to beat. He can get the support of the Praetorian Guard DNC and public employees’ unions, that’s for sure.

I don’t know about you but I’m seeing a lot of battlespace preparation that seems to indicate that Republicans have decided that Biden will be the nominee.

Here’s Walter Russell Mead’s analysis of the Trump policy on Europe from his Wall Street Journal column:

There are five elements of the Trump critique of the European Union. First, some of the “new nationalists” believe multinational entities like the EU are much weaker and less effective than the governments of nation-states—so much so that the development of the EU has weakened the Western alliance as a whole. In this view, cooperation between nation-states is good and through it countries can achieve things they couldn’t achieve on their own. But trying to overinstitutionalize that cooperation is a mistake. The resulting bureaucratic structures and Byzantine politics and decision-making processes paralyze policy, alienate public opinion, and create a whole significantly less than the sum of its parts.

A second concern—in the Trump view—is that the European Union is too German. As some on the president’s team see it, German preferences mean the Continent is too hawkish when it comes to monetary and fiscal policy, and too dovish when it comes to defense. A fiscal and monetary straitjacket has cramped Europe’s growth, while the refusal of Germany to live up to its NATO commitments weakens the alliance as a whole.

A third concern is that the EU is too liberal—in the American meaning of the term, which is to say too statist on economics and too progressive on social issues. Besides the common American conservative view that statist economic policy undermines European dynamism and growth, Mr. Trump seems to believe European migration policy—especially Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome more than a million mostly Muslim migrants to Germany—is a tragic mistake.

The fourth problem, as the Trumpians see it, is that the EU seeks to export its preferences on issues like capital punishment, climate policy, global governance, gender relations and so on to the rest of the world. Jacksonian American populists are deeply suspicious of virtually any form of global governance. On top of that, many of the causes that most engage the EU—LGBTQ issues, Palestinian statehood and carbon controls—aren’t exactly Jacksonian America’s cup of tea.

Finally, Mr. Trump doesn’t like the EU because on trade issues—the field where the EU operates most effectively in world politics—he believes it is an instrument intended to limit American power and reduce American leverage in trade negotiations.

I think that those “concerns” are just about right. As is not unusual they sound a lot more reasonable when they’re articulated by someone other than Trump. That fourth problem is interesting. I don’t think that the gilets jaunes protesters rallying in French cities every weekend as they have done since December are protesting “the causes that most engage the EU” other than very indirectly. Like Americans, they’re more concerned with basic bread and butter issues, ways and means rather than high level objectives.

And ways and means are my concerns about Trump’s Europe policies. I’m not convinced that his peripatetic, seat of the pants style will actually get results. As has been said in other contexts, at least he’s pushing in the right direction.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, unsurprisingly, are opposed to Illinois’s repeal of its present flat income tax:

A supermajority of Democrats in the Illinois Legislature voted last week to place a constitutional amendment on the November 2020 ballot establishing a graduated income tax. Public unions have long wanted to enact a progressive tax to pay for increased spending and pensions, and they think the political moment has finally arrived.

Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker says a progressive tax will hit only the wealthy, which he defines as individuals who earn more than $250,000. He also claims the middle class will get a tax cut. Don’t believe it. There aren’t enough wealthy in the state to pay for his spending promises, so eventually Democrats will come after the middle class.

To my eye the more significant passage in their editorial is this:

Illinois has no fiscal room to fail. Since 2015 Illinois’s GDP has grown a mere 1% annually, about half as fast as the U.S. and slower than Ohio (1.4%), Indiana (1.7%), Wisconsin (1.7%) and Michigan (2.1%). About 11% of Illinois residents have left since 2001, the second biggest state exodus after New York.

Taxpayer flight has been accelerating as income and property taxes have risen. Chicago’s diverse economy once attracted young people from across the Midwest, but the Windy City’s population is shrinking and Illinois was one of only two states (with West Virginia) to lose millennials between 2010 and 2015. A progressive tax would be a gift to Florida and Texas, which will vote in November on a constitutional amendment to prohibit an income tax.

Both Illinois’s and Connecticut’s populations are declining but Illinois’s decline is deeper even without a graduated income tax.

I am not unalterably opposed to a graduated income tax in Illinois but I am skeptical. To my knowledge no serious study of its economic impact has been done and neither the governor nor the legislators know whether it will cause state revenues to increase, decrease, or remain the same. The cold equation that I’m looking at is that 4.99% of $750,000 is greater than 7.99% of nothing.

I would be more supportive of the amendment if it were coupled with another amendment to empower the legislature to alter public pensions not yet payable since I’m convinced that Illinois’s fiscal problems cannot be solved without such an amendment.

“You’re sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?”
“Yes.”
“Is this maybe influencing your decision?”
“Possibly.”

That distressing inner exchange is from an article by Stephen Rodrick at Rolling Stone about the rising suicide rate among middle-aged and elderly white men, illustrated by the graph above from RealClearPolicy.

The article is upsetting but worth reading. It’s not just middle-aged white men. The homicide rate for young black men, after declining for a number of years, is rising as well. I think it’s clear we’re doing something wrong. I can’t think of a single case of people who had devoted their lives to acts of kindness, doing good to others, and faith has ever been driven to taking their own lives.

Following up on an earlier post, I’m going to muse a little bit here on media bias. You don’t need to read a lot of right-leaning sites to encounter the ironclad conviction that the media lean left. On left-leaning sites there is an equal and opposite conviction—that the media lean right. There has even been a book purporting to prove that latter conviction. It leans heavily on the genetic fallacy, the mistaken belief that if it’s corporate it must be right-leaning (Sen. Elizabeth Warren is both corporatist and left-leaning), and that ironclad conviction.

How can that be? And why?

In one of my earliest posts on this blog I nade the observation, obvious to me but apparently not to others, that everyone sits at the center of his or her own universe. Consequently, they typically see themselves as more in the center than they actually are. Anyone to their right must be on the right; anyone to their left must be on the left.

I think that my political views defy characterization to some extent. I’ve variably been termed left-wing, right-wing, a classical liberal, a pragmatist, and—my favorite—eclectic. But I have empirical or at least quasi-empirical evidence that I’m smack dab in the middle. Every time I take the Political Compass that’s where I land. I’ve also been called both left-wing and right-wing for the same opinion—as good an indication of being in the center as any.

Consider the infographic at the top of this page, thoughtfully provided by All Sides. You may notice something about it. I, systematically and conscientiously, lean most heavily on sources they rate as “Center” which in their terms means balanced between left and right.

Quickly scanning through their ratings and tallying Left, Right, and Center resulted in about 40% of the media sites being Left or Left-Leaning, about 23% Right or Right-Leaning, with the remainder Center, i.e. balanced. That alone would seem to provide evidence to support the right-wingers’ view. All Sides does not do this but I believe that if you weighted the sites by reach and influence the effect would be even more pronounced with the Left or Left-Leaning sites over 50%, the Right or Right-Leaning sites under 23%, and the remaining sites Center.

How, then, could anyone whose views were to the left of center imagine that the media had a right-wing bias? I think it can be explained by the possibility that, once you have a certain level of conviction, anyone who doesn’t agree with you sufficiently must be right-wing.

At 8:00am CDT I plan to restore the CSS I was previously using for this site so that we can diagnose the problems that users of Internet Explorer and Edge are having (dark background). Apparently, it can’t be diagnosed any other way.

In New York Magazine Josh Barro laments that infrastructure project in New York are so expensive:

New York’s infrastructure problems are not the same as the whole country’s. This is not an article about “our crumbling roads and bridges.” Some of New York’s roads and bridges (and tunnels and stations) are indeed crumbling, but those can be fixed in normal ways through normal financing mechanisms. The experience of New York City Transit head Andy Byford’s “speed team,” which is accelerating service by fixing faulty speed sensors and raising unnecessarily low speed limits in the subways, shows some of those fixes can even be inexpensive. And the repairs requiring significant additional labor time can be addressed by making maintenance a spending priority, as the MTA already did once when dragging the subways out of the malaise of the 1970s.

Where New York stands out is the massive price tags associated with proposed and actual new projects, and the delays and limitations of vision they impose on new construction. Second Avenue — perhaps the most appropriate corridor for a subway line in the United States that, as of 2016, did not have one — has taken nearly 100 years to go from proposed subway service to actual service and then only along a fraction of the planned route. Dense but unserved corridors in the outer-boroughs, like Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, are unlikely to see subway lines in your lifetime. They would simply be too expensive to build.

Why are these projects so expensive in New York?

Preferred project alternatives are chosen by politicians, and then review and outreach processes are run to support those preferences, even when they add cost and even when they provoke community objections that must be expensively addressed. Design choices are often grand instead of practical. Environmental reviews take too long and do not consider the cost and negative environmental impact of tying transit projects up in environmental review. Government agencies do not work well together. Projects are overstaffed, and labor rules — often made more complicated by the difficulty agencies have in working together — reduce productivity. The MTA tries to shift the risk of cost overruns onto outside companies it contracts with, even if those overruns are caused by factors outside their control; the companies are not stupid, and they respond to this by inflating their bids for work on MTA projects in what’s known as the “MTA premium.” New York has unusual laws about contractor liability that make insurance very expensive. And on and on.

I think that Mr. Barro would be astonished to learn that New York’s problems are exactly like those everywhere else. Roads and bridges are more expensive everywhere in the United States because of a network of corrupt arrangements that guarantee they will be expensive. They are so pervasive they aren’t even recognized as being corrupt any more.

And it isn’t limited to infrastructure projects. It extends to the military, to education, and to health care. It extends to everything we attempt to do through the government. In a sense it’s the price we pay for our lack of social cohesion relative to the comparatively small ethnic states of Europe.

I’m not arguing for no government. I’m arguing for limiting our goals more realistically or, as my many times great-grandfather put it, “don’t set the fence too far”. And better, more transparent government with fewer people becoming wealthy through its actions.

I’m skeptical of Cenk Uygur’s claim that 60% of the American electorate are progressives in his piece at The Hill. I think it’s more like a very vocal and local 20%. He’s outraged that Bernie Sanders is not getting a fair shake in the media:

The people on TV don’t like Sanders because he represents change and they got into their positions of power in this current system — and the last thing they want to do is change it. These television anchors claim they have no perspective. Think about how absurd that claim is. Of course you have a perspective — it’s just that you have privileged your own perspective so much that you assume that it must be the norm for everyone. In reality, that is the deepest bias you can have.

The New York Times and The Washington Post are arguably worse. Their core assumption is that maintaining the status quo is not a perspective, so it is the correct baseline by which to judge all other perspectives. Anyone who wants to challenge or change the current system is treated as a radical and delegitimized. This is a form of deplatforming. You implicitly never share the opinions you don’t agree with while never acknowledging it and pretending that your perspective is the only legitimate one. This de facto deplatforming is in some ways more odious because it’s done in the dark of night without having the honesty to admit it.

But I agree wholeheartedly with this:

Establishment Democrats are not progressives! No one fights progressive policy ideas more than corporate Democrats, especially Democratic leadership. If you think they are on our team, even though they oppose all of our policy proposals, you either don’t understand politics or again you’re so biased that you treat progressives as invisible, which is exactly my point.

which is very much the reason that I think that progressives are far less numerous than Mr. Uygur does. More than anything “establishment Democrats”, i.e. Democratic officeholders and bureaucrats, want to hold onto their jobs and that means nominating candidates who at least have some chance of winning. They recognize that, however he may fare in the primaries, Bernie Sanders has little chance of winning the general election.

The reality of American political life is that, although many Americans are not above snatching a $20 bill if it’s left sitting on a table unattended, they aren’t much interested in politics. Those who are interested are not representative and those who are representative aren’t interested.

Those in the media deal in simple stories. Winners and losers. Horseraces. Boxing matches. Nuance does not photograph well. The danger of a press that is in lockstep agreement is that they’ll force the real stories into the Procrustean bed of their preconceived notions. Nobody who doesn’t conform to that consensus will get a fair shake.

Today the subject that people are fulminating about is the murders of 12 people and the wounding of several more in Virginia Beach yesterday. The editors of the Washington Post have an explanation for it:

Mass shootings at schools, newspapers, concerts, nightclubs and factories have become a threat to public health and safety in the United States, an epidemic of violence resulting in hundreds of deaths every year. Would the nation’s politicians be mute and paralyzed if, say, 199 people were killed by food poisoning, a defective toy, or an automobile part malfunction? That is the number who have died in mass shootings so far this year (along with 643 nonfatal gunshot wounds), according to one group that keeps track. Sadly, sensible gun control generates headlines for a few days after each massacre, but then nothing happens.

The reason for this inaction is no mystery: Politicians are intimidated by a gun rights movement, led by the National Rifle Association, that has for too long stood in the way of action.

I think it’s a little more complicated than that. I think that more people want to be able to own firearms than want to deny others the ability to do so and politicians recognize that.

Second Amendment absolutists point the finger in a different direction: they think that “gun free zones” are the cause of these murder sprees.

I have no idea what precipitates these incidents. In a county of 330 million there will inevitably be a certain number of people who are disturbed enough to do such things. The U. S. does not have the largest number of mass shootings on a per capita basis. Norway, Serbia, France, and other European countries all have more. Some of these countries have much stricter gun control laws than we.

What to do? I suspect that changing our laws with respect to mental illness and its treatment would be more productive than gun control laws. Maybe one’s view of the matter depends on whether one owns a gun or is mentally ill.