At The American Interest Andrew Michta takes the note of an urgent necessity:

The once-accepted view of America as one nation, with the attendant sense of pride rooted in the belief in its exceptionalism, has been steadily losing ground over the last three decades, while secondary drivers of group identity, such as race and ethnicity, claim ever-greater prominence in our public discourse.

Unfortunately, his prescriptions are weak tea:

To start reversing the deconstruction of Americanism, we need a concerted counter-revolution, one in which traditional American common sense is elevated above grievance-mongering and tribalist point-scoring. We should start with the schools. Congress ought to take a hard look at how government funds are spent by our college and university administrators. The pressure could be even more effective if alumni donors and parents start to demand accountability from the academic institutions they endow. The one-sided indoctrination of our future generation must stop now.

and

Furthermore, Congress needs to bring back the idea of mandatory national service, be that in military form or through some kind of mandatory community work, so that Americans from all socio-economic backgrounds can discover their fellow citizens“out there”—so that they can put a real face and name to the broader nation to which they all owe allegiance.

Read the whole thing. Something he never addresses is what are these “ideals and values”? They are what G. K. Chesterton noted when he said that “America is a country founded on a creed”. IMO a good place to start is with the preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It should be noted that “general Welfare” does not mean the federal government’s paying your health care bills, your college tuition, or your rent. It means things that are good for all of us, are non-excludable and non-rivalrous (like a stable currency or the rule of law).

To be honest, I think he’s whistling past a graveyard. America as a nation cannot be revived without taking steps that too many people would find intolerable.

It may have escaped your notice but not Kelly Brozyna’s, writing at RealClearPolicy:

Congressional Democrats are quietly trying to pass the biggest tax increase you’ve never heard of. Rep. John Larson (D-CT), who chairs the House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee, has introduced legislation called the Social Security 2100 Act which would significantly raise the payroll tax for entrepreneurs and employees alike.

This proposal would raise the payroll tax over several years by 2.4 percentage points (about 20 percent) to 14.8 percent of earned income. On the surface, this seems like a small tax increase, but it would take a painful bite out of the incomes of entrepreneurs, workers, and small business owners.

The tax increase is split between employers and employees, meaning they’d both see their taxes increase by 1.2 percentage points to 7.4 percent. What’s more, the proposal eliminates the cap on Social Security taxable income, which would suck a dramatic amount of capital away from job creators and out of our communities.

The payroll tax is the most regressive federal tax. My first choice in reforming it would be to abolish it altogether along with the system of fund accounting it supports in favor of paying Social Security retirement payments from general revenues, supported by increases in the personal income tax as necessary. My second choice would be to increase the cap on taxable income to whatever the threshold of the top 1% of income earners is and index it to keep it there while reducing the worker and employer rates to remain revenue neutral but keep the system solvent.

The reform described seems intent on punishing people—workers, employers, people with very large salaries. If this reform goes through, I predict you’ll see fewer of all three.

Here’s a snippet from Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass’s remarks about Mr. Mueller’s testimony:

The left’s anxiety attacks are their own affair. It’s what happens when people insist on clinging to a fantasy, that Mueller would appear and make their dreams a reality.

Mueller had warned them he wouldn’t perform for them. He told them he’d stay with what was in the report, but the Democrats trotted him out anyway, and they cranked up their organ music as if he were their monkey and told him to dance.

And he wouldn’t.

Is that Mueller’s fault? No, it’s their fault.

The Democrats said Americans didn’t read the Mueller report, they wanted Mueller to give them the movie. But it wasn’t “Seven Days in May.” It was more like “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.”

The Mueller report made it clear that there wasn’t enough to prove a conspiracy with the Russians. And without a crime, all the Democrats have is their hurt feelings. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knows it.

As Trump puffed his chest in victory, the Democrats lined up and tried to spin again Wednesday evening, but they were exhausted, and it was over.

They’ll keep beating their Russian horse. But Trump and the Republicans will now move to the next phase of the story. Attorney General William Barr and FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz are investigating the federal investigators who started it all.

“I believe what you’re going to find out, you are going to find out a lot of things that were done very wrong,” Trump said. “That’s something you haven’t been writing about. And that has to do with the other side, with this thing called ‘investigate the investigators.’ Let’s see what happens. That’s going to be very interesting.”

It will be. And that’s what elections are for.

The cameras capture every disfluency, every stammer, every wrong choice of words. It’s hard enough to appear statesmanlike even when you are. It’s impossible when you’re not. Advancing age doesn’t help, either.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The House Democrats either need to impeach Trump or shut up. That’s what I took away from the Mueller testimony.

If they can drive Trump’s approval ratings down far enough with impeachment hearings, even if they’re blocked from removing him from office by an uncooperative Republican-led Senate, they may manage to prevent his re-election, hold the House, and get control of the Senate in 2020. So far keeping the ball up in the air has not been successful in driving Trump’s approval down. If they can’t the Democratic candidate may lose in 2020, they may lose the House, and Republicans may hold onto the Senate.

The present intra-party bickering is as great as I can recall.

He either fears his fate too much, etc.

I found Doug Mataconis’s post today at Outside the Beltway about the substantial support for Puerto Rican statehood concerning. Basically, two-thirds of Americans support statehood for Puerto Rico and seven-eights of Democrats.

I don’t think they’ve thought it through. Puerto Rico is a terrible candidate for statehood. The median family income there is less than half what it is in the present state with the lowest median family income (Mississippi). The per capita public debt in Puerto Rico is higher than all but three states (Alaska, Massachusetts, New York). I know of no territory with a violent independence movement that has ever been admitted to the Union. It is culturally more different from the mainland than any state previously admitted. Only 20% of the people there speak English well. The last time we admitted a state with such a big cultural difference was when Utah was admitted to the Union in 1896 and a concession was wrung from Utah as a condition for statehood that papered over the difference. More than 100 years later there’s still a struggle over it.

My preference would be independence for Puerto Rico, accompanied by a very large going away present, say, paying off the commonwealth’s debt.

Congress has the authority to admit new states to the Union without anybody else’s approval. Next time the Congress is controlled by Democrats don’t be surprised if, however bad an idea it is, we gain a 51st state.

I don’t usually do this but I think that this op-ed by Mark Chenoweth and Peggy Little at the Wall Street Journal is sufficiently important I’m going to quote it in full:

The Office of Management and Budget issued a memo recently reminding all federal administrative agencies that “the Constitution vests all Federal legislative power in Congress.” That may seem obvious, but agencies often regulate Americans beyond their lawful authority and without accountability. Our organization—the New Civil Liberties Alliance—has petitioned 18 agencies to adopt a permanent rule prohibiting such unconstitutional regulation.

One agency head, Hester Peirce of the Securities and Exchange Commission, outlined the problem in a bracing speech she delivered days before the OMB statement. She faulted the commission’s staff for abusing tools like “no-action letters” and “guidance” to create “secret law,” free from judicial or legislative review.

No-action letters are meant to clarify to the addressee if its behavior is subject to regulation, but too often agency staff use them to craft law at will. Ms. Peirce noted that when these letters—which are publicly available—are issued in tandem with nonpublic guidance, all the issuances can start to constitute their own obscure and ever changing body of law.

No-action letters are drafted by unelected, politically unaccountable agency staff and even on their own can have wide reaching, deleterious impacts. No-action letters issued in 2004 cleared financial corporations of regulatory liability as long as they cast their clients’ shareholder proxy votes on corporate governance issues according to recommendations from purportedly independent, third-party advisers. Those letters helped create a cottage industry in proxy-advisory firms, which themselves had glaring conflicts of interest, exerted undue influence over corporation policies and governance, depressed returns to shareholders and eviscerated informed voting. These letters were withdrawn last fall, but the damage was extensive and long lasting.

Guidance—which refers to a variety of documents that can be issued publicly or privately—can be dangerous on its own. The most notorious example is the Education Department’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, which mandated that universities use a lower burden of proof in sexual-misconduct investigations. Another is the Federal Trade Commission’s use of consent-decree guidance to go after businesses victimized by data-security breaches. Congress has never passed a law to give the FTC this power, and the FTC has never adopted a formal rule outlining data-security duties. Yet for all intents and purposes, the FTC’s consent decrees are binding.

The harder rules are to navigate and understand, the easier it is for staff to expand them lawlessly and capriciously. SEC staff members adjust minimum capital requirements for broker-dealers on an ad hoc, unaccountable basis through phone calls and emails.

Bureaucrats even delegate some of their power to private third parties—such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board—that lack any rule- or lawmaking power at all. Regulators have in effect created a market for private lawmaking. With enough money, private citizens can pay a cadre of lawyers to convince agencies and quasi-private regulators like Finra to establish bespoke regulations that neither Congress nor agencies has formally approved.

This isn’t a government of laws but a body of men making secretive rules for the favored few. “For the sake of integrity,” Ms. Peirce calls for the SEC to examine and reform its practices. Other agencies should follow her advice too.

My opinion is that Congress has been derelict in its duties for generations and if the Congress isn’t willing to put the details into the law the law should be limited to what they are willing to put into the law. Otherwise we do not have a liberal democratic government. We have an authoritarian unanswerable bureaucracy.

I found William Galston’s column on drug prices in the Wall Street Journal interesting. He focuses on insulin:

For the 7.5 million diabetics who use insulin regularly, prices have risen rapidly. A standard measure is total costs—prices paid by consumers plus payments by insurers. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that from 2012-17 the total costs of the three most popular insulin products sold in the U.S.—Humalog, NovoLog and Lantus—had risen by 117%, 118%, and 150%, respectively. To restrain the growth of overall premiums, insurers have increased copayments and deductibles, which helps explain why the out-of-pocket cost of insulin has risen so quickly. These increases cause many patients to use less insulin than the prescribed dose, risking disability and early death.

These trends would be easy to explain if insulin were a new drug protected by patents, but it isn’t. Medical insulin was first produced nearly a century ago. Since then, incremental improvements in safety, effectiveness and convenience have impeded the creation of a generic insulin industry. Generic-drug companies also haven’t considered it worthwhile to invest in the manufacturing techniques needed to produce versions of insulin whose patents have expired. An additional barrier comes from legal and regulatory protections for biologic drugs, including thickets of patents.

Without a generic form of insulin on the market, manufacturers can hike prices for each new version of the drug, even when it represents only modest improvements over versions available decades ago. (An article in the Lancet—a leading British medical journal—points to the lack of evidence on whether the newest products are safer or more effective than the insulins widely used in the 1990s, for which the patents have expired.) And because only three companies— Eli Lilly , Novo Nordisk , and Sanofi —command the lion’s share of the U.S. insulin market—a price increase initiated by one of the companies is often mirrored by the others, denying consumers the benefits of competition.

When I hear this what I hear is that the number of producers is limited, the industry has substantial barriers to entry including regulatory barriers as well as substantial initial investment, and the oligopoly that can produce insulin will not do so unless the price is significantly higher than what would otherwise be the market-clearing price for insulin. That sounds like a classic market failure to me which means that it requires government intervention. It is, like most market failures, a case in which government action is required to offset the consequences of other government actions.

Since I think that we should continue to regulate pharmaceuticals and I don’t think we should subsidize the pharmaceutical oligopoly, that limits the potential solutions. That’s why I ask my question: should the federal government manufacture insulin?

In his New York Times column Thomas Edsall repeats some of the things I’ve been saying around here for some time. Progressives represent a rather small proportion of the Democratic Party and an even smaller proportion of the whole electorate. Black voters are more likely to be moderates or conservatives than they are progressives. Democratic members of the Congress are farther to the left than the party rank and file and, importantly, whether it’s true that the squeaky wheel gets the grease may or may not be true but the media, even more left-leaning than the Democratic members of the Congress, give a lot of attention to the issues favored by the left wing of the party.

First, the numbers. Democrats can be divided into three groups, roughly equal in number:

The first two groups are made up of those who say they are “very liberal” and those who say they are “somewhat liberal.” Both groups are two thirds white and have substantial but for the Democratic Party below average minority representation. They are roughly a quarter African-American and Hispanic.

Those in the third group are Democratic primary voters who describe themselves as moderate to conservative. This group has the largest number of minorities; it is 26 percent black, 19 percent Hispanic, 7 percent other nonwhites, and it has the smallest percentage of whites, at 48 percent.

Overall, the Pew Research Center found in 2016 that Democratic voters were 57 percent white, 21 percent black, and 12 percent Hispanic. The remaining voters were Asian-American and other ethnicities.

A separate Brookings study found that 2018 Democratic primary voters were 54.6 percent white, 24.1 percent black, 9.0 percent Hispanic, with the rest Asian-American, American Indian and others.

The Brookings number feels right to me but that might be regional. Now the issues:

The three ideological groups favor different sets of policies. On the left, the very liberal voters stress “the environment, protecting immigrants, abortion, and race/gender,” Khanna emailed me, while the moderate to conservative Democrats are “more concerned with job creation and lowering taxes.”

You might find this interesting:

In addition, Khanna continued, there is a “real differentiation by reported ideology on the question about federal health care for undocumented immigrants.”

In this case, the very liberal group was in favor, 75-25, the somewhat liberal Democrats split, 52-48, and the moderate-conservative group distinctly opposed, 61-39.

or this:

Furthermore, Goldberg writes, black and Hispanic Democrats are more likely to part ways with white liberals “when it comes to contemporary social and gender-identity issues, including views of the #MeToo movement.”

Finally, Mr. Edsall adds support to what I’ve been saying about taking one set of positions for the primaries and another for the general election:

In March 2012, Eric Fehrnstrom, a spokesman for Mitt Romney, was asked if the candidate’s conservative stands in the primaries “would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election?”

Fehrnstrom famously replied:

Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

In practice, though, with virtually everything a candidate says now recorded for posterity, it has become increasingly difficult to evade past statements.

Read the whole thing.

He doesn’t even get into the other major bifurcation in the party—between technocrats and ordinary machine politicians.

At first I thought that Francis Menton’s post at Manhattan Contrarian in defense of Trump’s tweets heard ’round the world might be promising but it almost immediately descended into gibberish. Here’s where it fails:

No mention of race there, of course. Sounds to me like an invitation to the radical Congresswomen to start behaving like grown-ups and taking some responsibility for the absurd policy proposals that they throw around so recklessly. The Green New Deal for Somalia? I can only think it would take the impoverished Somalis from mere poverty to total destitution and starvation.

Somalia’s per capita emissions of carbon dioxide are already among the lowest in the world. Less than 1% of U. S. per capita emissions. Somalia doesn’t need a Green New Deal. The Somalis are already living it. Rhetoric is being substituted for reason. Not only that but Mr. Menton is arguing against his own position.

Somalia is a great example of all sorts of things. Low carbon emissions. The implications of anarchy. What happens under radical Islam. A country practically anyone would be eager to flee.

Somalis, too, make excellent examples or at least object lessons. Despite the best efforts of that most socially conscious of cities, Minneapolis, the Somali refugees it has so graciously hosted remain terribly poor. Their unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, largely the result of cultural difference. One-third of adult Somali women do not work outside the home compared with about a fifth of adult non-Somali women. Somali poverty in Minneapolis cannot be attributed to poverty. If anything the bigotry goes the other way.

I do not care for the expression “people of color” since I think it fundamentally consists of white people wrapping themselves in the cloak of oppression that black people, the descendants of slaves, can rightfully claim. I’m not the only one who thinks that. Many blacks think so as well. While it may result in a tactical victory I think it will inevitably result in a strategic defeat, at least for black people.

I also find it outrageous that there are people embracing the “one drop” view of race, formerly the province of the most racist of whites.