At Forbes Jude Clemente has a reasonably dispassionate article on the five issues that any Green New Deal must address. They are:

1. Spacing
2. Intermittency
3. Developing Nations
4. Sinking Other Investments
5. Fossil Fuel Inputs

I’ve been pointing out that last one for decades. To accomplish their goals the proponents of any GND must paradoxically be willing to increase carbon emissions in the short term if they are to reduce them in the long term.

There are all sort of article around this morning about the next moves that China might make in the so-called “trade war” with the United States, most of them self-destructive which IMO is why China won’t do them. Niall Ferguson warns of a new Thirty Years War. IMO we’ve been in a new Thirty Years War since the Iranian Revolution but nobody has noticed that’s what it is. What else would you call a war without borders and without end?

You might want to glance at this piece at Bloomberg by David Fickling which explains why blocking exports of rare earths to the U. S. is just about the dumbest thing that the Chinese might do:

As is often pointed out, most rare earths aren’t in fact rare. Lanthanum and cerium are as abundant as copper and lead, and are used in such pedestrian applications as pool cleaner and cigarette-lighter flints. Even the more prized magnetic elements such as neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium and samarium are humdrum enough that Apple Inc. uses rare-earth magnets to make its power cables stick in place. Pottery enthusiasts can pick up neodymium oxide for around $50 a kilogram online to give a blue tint to their glazes; that’s probably a bit more neodymium than you’d find in a typical electric car.

Supply is particularly generous when you set it against the most crucial and alarming segment of demand: military hardware. This amounts to no more than around 500 metric tons a year, according to a U.S. Department of Defense study, equivalent to what you’d get from Lynas’s plant in about 10 days. Solvay SA, a French chemicals company, recently set up a demonstration project to produce nearly 200 tons a year of rare earths just from recycling light bulbs.

In hindsight, the U.S. government might have been wise earlier this decade to provide the loan guarantees to put Mountain Pass on a more solid footing.

It might be worthwhile to consider why the Department of Energy demurred from guaranteeing Molycorp’s loans. It was mostly the Obama Administration’s environmental concerns.

The only dumber thing the Chinese might do would be to dump Treasuries, something that would remind me of nothing so much as that scene in Blazing Saddles in which Cleavon Little held a gun to his own head.

I don’t think that Bruce Jepsen really understands why in his words:

much is to be done to educate the public at large even as single payer supporters like Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris push Medicare for All on the campaign trail.

Read his piece at Forbes. It’s actually a pretty fair survey of some of the plans out there.

The reason is that only having a slogan maximizes support. You don’t need to get into analyzing, producing, or defending the messy details. Once you get into the messy details opposition will mobilize quickly.

That same principle applies to a broad swathe of hot-button political items including the Green New Deal and “comprehensive immigration reform”. Yes, there are plans out there but no omnibus plan, no “real” plan. It’s a nice strategy as long as you can make it work. It also provides the opportunity to draw yourself up to your full height and demand that your political opponents produce their plans. Playing defense is easier than offense.

…shot to hell. At Forbes Sally Pipes reports on the results of implementing electronic health records (EHR), one of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act:

The EHR push started with the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. President Obama approved billions in spending to encourage the healthcare industry to embrace the technology. Doctors and hospitals who failed to adopt a government-approved digital system by the end of 2014 faced cuts in their Medicare reimbursements.

So providers rushed to implement EHRs. Ninety-six percent of hospitals have EHR systems today, up from 9% in 2008. Most doctors adopted them as well.

But these EHRs ended up being seriously flawed—and dangerous for patients.

For one, patient records routinely have errors. In one survey, 21% of patients reported mistakes in their own electronic medical records. In some cases, when a physician pulls up a patient profile, the system displays a doctor’s note for a different patient.

Other issues abound. Systems are supposed to flag potentially dangerous drug orders but often fail to do so. Records frequently don’t list the correct start and stop dates for prescriptions. And transmitting data between systems is a huge challenge.

Consequently, the recent Fortune-KHN investigation revealed, “alarming reports of patient deaths, serious injuries and near misses—thousands of them—tied to software glitches, user errors and other flaws.”

More than 3,000 medication errors at pediatric hospitals from 2012 to 2017 were due in part to EHR problems, a study in Health Affairs found. About one in five of these could have caused patient harm.

A 2016 test simulation of hospital EHRs revealed that, in roughly four in ten cases, the system failed to detect potentially harmful drug orders. Of those, 13% could have been fatal errors.

I take a sort of perverse satisfaction in seeing that just about everything I have predicted about EHR has actually happened. Back in 2010 or 2011 I recounted the story of the presentation by an EHR vendor to one of my physician clients. At the conclusion of the horrifically arrogant presentation and after the vendor had left, I turned to my client and said “You were much more polite than I would have been. I would have thrown him out a half hour ago.”

Good systems and health care are not a congenial match. It is rare indeed that a system is designed following an industry-wide study of needs and practices. What is much more common is that systems will be what is easy to implement, what is fashionable, what a single client would pay the designers or implementers for, or whatever sticks against the wall. I haven’t look at EHR systems for a while but I would predict that today’s systems have all sorts of glossy claims about artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other buzzwords du jour.

I have looked casually at the systems being used by my wife’s health care providers and so far all of them have been ghastly. Any system in which the physician, PA, or nurse is tethered to a monitor and keyboard IMO is a failure.

Regardless, I think that EHR systems have tremendous, largely unrealized potential. It will take a while before it is realized.

There is a school of thought that all economic growth can be traced back to the price of gasoline. More broadly, that school would hold that the more energy that is produced, the greater the economic growth. Consider the chart above in that context.

That, too, is the context of this post at RealClearEnergy from Kathleen Hartnett White:

The economy is picking up steam. Fears of a recession have faded. Unemployment has hit a 50-year low, and it could go even lower. Wages are rising, and consumer confidence is sky-high.

Energy is driving all of those indicators. Cheap, abundant, concentrated energy fuels a manufacturing boom. Consumption of electricity has a direct correlation with economic growth. Our GDP, indeed, is rising at a brisk pace.

There is no inherent conflict between that view and strategies for a greener future. There is a conflict between that view and anti-development and BANANA strategies. Care should be taken to avoid conflating opposition to anything that might actually produce more energy with advocating strategies to use resources more efficiently, release fewer pollutants into the air, or decrease carbon dioxide emissions.

I agree with a lot of what’s in this piece at Founder’s Broadsheet but not this:

Populist nationalists in the Republican Party and socialists in the Democratic Party both believe that government should intervene to protect society’s members from the disruptive effects of economic development. They both believe that government can do a good job at this. Both share a delusive nostalgia for a bygone manufacturing era that cannot possibly return — as manufacturing becomes more capital-intensive and dependent on fewer but better educated workers.

[…]

We certainly need to thwart Chinese theft of US trade and defense secrets, but if China wants to take over and subsidize the production of our low-tech manufactures so our workers can move up in the division of labor, so much the better. It’s the Chinese theft of US trade secrets in advanced and military-related products that should concern us and their attempts to thwart the marketing of these products where our companies attempt to do so in China.

The emphasis is mine. It would be fine if that were happening but it isn’t and the author must surely know it. Just look at any monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Report. Manufacturing jobs have been replace by service sector jobs requiring even lower skills and paying considerably less. I’d like to see his model of how that is good for most Americans.

The problem of our self-destructive relationship with China is not merely that the Chinese are capitalizing on our investments by letting us do the R&D, it’s that they’re using what they gain to force the U. S. economy into an dead end niche. We are a very diverse country and we need an equally diverse economy, one in which there’s room not only for professional and highly-skilled manufacturing workers but less-skilled workers, primary production, and agriculture.

At RealClearPolitics Charles Lipson warns that various law enforcement and intelligence officials are about to receive their comeuppance:

Over the next few months, we will learn the extent of that failure. We will see if top officials misused their agencies to investigate and crush their political opponents. Constitutional democracies cannot permit that. They cannot wave it off as yesterday’s news and expect to survive unscathed. If undetected and unpunished, it will happen again to another party, another candidate.

As the evidence comes out, a hard rain’s gonna fall. The damage will be compounded by partisan divisions, corroding trust in our basic institutions, and an impending election. For democracy’s sake, let’s hope the bitter winds are not a Cat-5 storm.

I don’t know. I’d be willing to bet a shiny new dime that not one of the worthies mentioned by Professor Lipson (James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch, and their senior aides) are ever convicted of anything. There’s already an iron-clad case for perjury against several of them and they haven’t even been indicted.

I’d also be willing to bet that all of their net worths are higher today than on the day they took office. Nice gig.

Meanwhile, here in Illinois the Democrats in the state legislature have another big idea on which they can agree—that there is no limit to the amount of revenue that may be extracted from the taxpayers of the state of Illinois as this Sun-Times column from Mark Brown explains:

Sometime before the end of the coming week, the Illinois General Assembly is expected to approve a constitutional amendment allowing for a graduated state income tax, at long last putting the matter before voters in the 2020 general election.

What happens next is something most Illinois voters may have never seen: a chance to directly decide a major public policy issue by referendum, accompanied by the bruising campaign that goes with it.

I’m looking forward to the vote, having believed for some time that Illinois needs to scrap its flat tax, but dreading the campaign that will come first.

All the same mechanisms we are accustomed to seeing deployed in support of major political candidates — tons of television, digital and direct mail advertising — will be trained instead on an idea. The nuances of tax policy will be reduced to 15- and 30-second spots that further exploit our culture wars.

IMO Gov. Pritzker’s “Fair Tax” proposal is less workable in Illinois than it might be elsewhere for the simple reason that while the legislature may be able to raise the marginal tax rates on “the rich” they can’t force the actual rich to stay here. Note that those making $250,000 per year, the proposed threshold for those who will pay more taxes, include married couples consisting of a Chicago firefighter and a Chicago public high school teacher or the median physician. They will find it harder to leave Illinois than the top management of a big company will. Illinois is losing population faster than any other state in the Union and I suspect the “Fair Tax” will not slow that process.

Have the two major political parties become parties with just two big ideas on which their members can agree? For Republicans those ideas are a) cutting taxes and b) opposing a sitting Democratic president. Needless to say Democrats have a similar resistance to presidents of the opposing party. This editorial from the Washington Post may give you some inkling of what the other idea is:

THE MOST enduring — and unforgivable — civil rights offense in our country today is the consigning of so many poor, often minority children to failing schools. Among the more promising efforts to deal with this urgent issue have been public charter schools, which give poor families the choice in their children’s education that more prosperous parents take for granted. That makes all the more distressing the bid by some Democrats to blame charter schools for all the ills of public education.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a candidate to become the Democratic presidential nominee, launched a broadside against charter schools, calling for a moratorium on federal funding for all charter schools and a ban on for-profit charters (which account for a small proportion of charters). “The proliferation of charter schools has disproportionately affected communities of color,” wrote Mr. Sanders as part of his 10-point education plan this month.

Mr. Sanders is right about the outsize effects on minority communities — but those effects have been positive, not negative. Of the nearly 3.2 million public charter school students, 68 percent are students of color, with 26 percent of them African Americans. Studies indicate that students of color, students from low-income families and English-language learners enrolled in public charter schools make greater academic progress than their peers in traditional schools. Research from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that African American students in charter schools gained an additional 59 days of learning in math and 44 days in reading per year compared with their traditional school counterparts.

Charter schools are not a replacement for traditional schools, and not all charter schools are good. Bad ones should not be tolerated. But blanket calls to curtail charter schools are wrongheaded. There is a reason that parents line up on waiting lists for coveted high-quality charter schools. Like wealthy parents who pay for private schooling or middle-class parents who move to neighborhoods for better schools, poor parents want a good education for their children. Without it, they know there will be diminished hope for upward mobility and a better future.

The politics of charter schools have always been fraught for Democrats because of the influence of teachers unions — which oppose charters for reasons having nothing to do with the welfare of children. We hope candidates keep in mind the polls that consistently show support for charters among black and Hispanic voters. It’s easy to oppose charters if you are well-off and live in a suburb with good schools. We hope we will also hear from candidates who know about the value of charters from their experiences — including as a mayor who used them to begin to turn around a failing district, as a partner in an administration that promoted charters, as a schools superintendent who made a place for charters.

George Santayana once quipped that a fanatic is someone who redoubles his efforts after having lost sight of his goals. It is not too much to say that Democrats’ support of public employees’ unions has become fanatical, to the actual detriment of the goals purportedly being sought.

We need to open a new can of political parties.