The fires continue to burn in Los Angeles. At this point the number of acres that have burned is 55,000 and nearly 16,000 structures have been destroyed. The editors of the Wall Street Journal, less delicate in their sensibilities than I, urge that some “sensible strings” be attached to the aid given by the federal government to California:

President Trump visits California on Friday to survey the wildfire damage, and no doubt he’ll hear requests for federal aid. A relevant question is whether this aid should be conditioned on policies that will reduce future damage.

Democrats want a blank check, and they’re comparing the fires to hurricanes. The fires are horrific and the damage in property and lives enormous. But the fire damage is worse than it would have been if not for the policy mistakes in Los Angeles and Sacramento on water and forest management.

Washington has in the past tied aid to financially troubled cities and Puerto Rico. New York state established a financial control board to impose fiscal reforms on a city that couldn’t muster the political nerve to make changes without outside pressure. The California fires are both a natural and man-made disaster, but California’s political leaders seem incapable of reform. What then should Congress and the Trump Administration ask for?

I continue to think it is ghoulish to dwell on this while the fires are still raging, as they are. I want to limit my remarks to one point.

Wildfires are part of Southern California’s natural ecology. So are mudslides. They cannot be prevented only mitigated and coped with. It may be that global climate change has exacerbated that problem. I don’t know. Certainly local climate change is a contributing factor. But so are poor land management and inadequate infrastructure.

I certainly hope that the federal government can, in a way consistent with sympathy for the suffering of the poor people in Southern California who’ve lost everything, gently nudge California in the direction of practices better than those that prevailed on January 1, 2025.

When St. Louis experience the fire of 1849, it caused the city to ban wood frame houses, required buildings to be built of brick or stone, and motivated them to improve the sewer and water systems. After Chicago went through the fire of 1871 Chicagoans received aid from St. Louis, New York, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Buffalo, and as far away as London and Scotland rather than the federal government. The experts who advised Chicago on new building codes were insurance companies rather than federal bureaucrats. It, too, updated its building codes. I expect something of the sort will happen in Los Angeles and I hope that the city is encouraged in that direction by state and federal governments.

As my wife says, “You can lead a horse to water but that won’t make him into a duck.” There’s a tragicomic quality to Joseph Sternberg’s advice to European leaders in the Wall Street Journal:

Not to jinx it, but Donald Trump’s second term is off to a good start—for Europe. Mr. Trump already has created enormous political and economic opportunities for the Continent if, and this is a huge if, any European politicians have the wit to seize their chance.

Amid the blizzard of executive orders and other actions that began on Monday, four matters are of particular relevance across the Atlantic. The Trump administration is withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate, scrapping Biden-era electric-vehicle mandates, ramping up American fossil-fuel production, and killing off a global corporate-tax agreement.

The first instinct of establishment European politicians and their media enablers is to interpret these steps as affronts to Europe. Which they are. Mr. Trump’s abandonment of the decade-old global climate agreement is as strong a signal as Washington can send that the new administration doesn’t care about an issue that Europeans have come to understand in quasireligious terms. All the promised drilling, and new internal-combustion cars, adds insult to this injury. Withdrawal from the major tax deal negotiated at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development demonstrates that the new administration is indifferent to European governments’ desperate search for new revenue sources.

Note, however, that Mr. Trump at least isn’t perpetuating the far bigger affront President Biden committed against our European friends: lying to them.

and concludes:

Europe can’t afford its climate commitments, whether the cost is measured in subsidies disbursed by cash-strapped governments or economic growth forgone. Yet European voters remain stubbornly committed to the policy goal for which they no longer want to pay. Mr. Trump is offering an off-ramp for politicians struggling to manage this cognitive dissonance. Expect Europe’s reversals on climate policy to be presented—more in sorrow than in anger, mind you—as unavoidable results of the economic pressures arising from America’s own climate-policy shift.

Likewise with the tax pact, which was intended to forestall precisely the sorts of tax reforms European countries need to help revive their flailing economies. By pulling the U.S. out of this attempt at global tax harmonization, Mr. Trump restores tax policy—and, specifically, tax competition—as a lever available to European politicians grasping for new economic-growth strategies.

Those are the sticks, and there are carrots too. An effect of the end of electric-vehicle mandates in America is that the world’s largest economy has again become an enormous market for the internal-combustion autos European companies can manufacture profitably. This is a lifeline to German automakers in particular, even after accounting for the threat of Trump tariffs on Mexico, where many European firms now manufacture cars. Meanwhile, the single most beneficial thing anyone could do for Europe right now would be to revive American energy production, which would boost U.S. economic growth and offer knock-on benefits in global energy markets. And behold, it’s happening.

Europeans may never learn to love Mr. Trump, but if they’re smart, they’ll learn to take “yes” for an answer when he offers it.

I need to remind Mr. Sternberg of German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s observation to the effect that European politicians know what needs to be done, they just don’t know how they’ll keep their jobs if they do it. They can’t reverse course without confessing they’ve been pushing the continent in the wrong direction for twenty years and they can’t do that without acknowledging they’ve been wrong. So they won’t.

It will be up to some other group of European leaders which is why there’s so much ferment in Europe right now.

In a piece at The Next American Century Richard Vigilante makes the counterintuitive to me argument that the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can, indeed, cut $2 trillion from the federal budget:

DOGE should function not by cutting spending to save money, but by cutting spending to improve performance.

It’s not hard. Eliminate any agency that does not, on net, make more of the thing for which it is named.

That is followed by a list of departments that, per Mr. Vigilante, fail to make the grade: Energy, Education, Agriculture, HUD, Commerce, Homeland Security, HHS, etc. The small problem with Mr. Vigilante’s rubric is that each of these departments has its own empowering legislation which would need to be repealed and/or modified and constituency which would oppose eliminating their favored programs.

I hasten to point out that Ronald Reagan who actually won a landslide victory and ran on eliminating specific departments did not eliminate a single department.

As much attention as President Trump’s flurry of EOs and other actions has received since his inauguration, equally notable is the vigor of newly-confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio. At RealClearPolitics Philip Wegmann observes:

Shortly after taking the oath of office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable to every U.S. diplomatic and consular post worldwide. The stark message from the new diplomat: Sweeping changes are coming to a department that had mistakenly emphasized “ideology over common sense” and “misread the world.”

The lengthy cable was sent shortly after Rubio arrived at his new post in Foggy Bottom and was obtained exclusively by RealClearPolitics. It signals a fundamental shift in foreign policy and a realignment of all diplomatic efforts toward putting American needs first.

Toward this end, President Trump’s new diplomat promised to focus on mass migration, terminate DEI policies within the department, end the “censorship of the American people,” and pursue “energy dominance.”

Rubio was confirmed unanimously by the Senate the day before and is the first of Trump’s Cabinet nominees on the job. Previously, he was a senior senator from Florida, and he served on the Foreign Relations Committee for more than a decade. He developed a reputation as a China Hawk and a fierce critic of the neoliberal foreign policy consensus that emerged after the Cold War.

Read the whole thing. This quote from Secretary Rubio’s “cable” to his department is particularly telling:

“Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions,” Rubio wrote. “The questions: Does the action make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous?”

I’m sure that some will see that as outrageous but the reality is it’s exactly what our notional allies, particularly France and Germany, have been doing for the last 80 years if not longer.

There’s a profile of the new Cook County States Attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke, by Ted C. Fishman at Chicago:

A ew days before Eileen O’Neill Burke would be elected the new Cook County state’s attorney, the top prosecutor in a jurisdiction of 5.1 million people, she tells me a story about her great-grandparents. We’re sitting in her campaign office on North Dearborn Street, where O’Neill Burke has laid out 15 old family photos on an otherwise bare table. Among them are antique studio portraits of her forebears, a snapshot of her as a young girl with her older brother outside their home in Edgebrook, and a recent picture of her with her lawyer husband, John, and their four children, in their teens and early 20s, all beaming. Two of O’Neill Burke’s top staffers crane over the table to see the photos for the first time.

Modern political strategies put family histories and personal struggles at the center of campaigns?—?the more bittersweet, the better. Yet O’Neill Burke did not run on her personal story. For over a year in candidate mode, she rarely mentioned the people or chapters that forged her morals or mettle. Instead, her pitch was her record as a lauded judge and her outrage over a justice system that she argued was enabling too much theft and violent crime. The photos, though, reveal another wellspring for her yearnings to help the region: her own family’s century-and-a-half history in Chicago. For O’Neill Burke, 59, that history hardly feels distant. It lives on inside her. She relates it with the emotional intensity of someone recapping her own story of love and heartache.

I wish her well. Her experience as an appellate court judge should serve her well in dealing with the judiciary. As I’ve said before one of the major improvements we need is for the police, the public prosecutors, and the judges all to be pulling in the same direction. The last states attorney clearly would have preferred the title “Public Defender at Large”. Rescinding Kim Foxx’s directive not to prosecute retail thefts under $1,000 as felonies is a step in the right direction.

I wish the article had expanded on what SA O’Neill Burke sees as “root causes”. I don’t think that the root causes of crime in Cook County are guns, poverty, race, or racism. The real root cause is gangs and that is downstream from dysfunction in black urban society. Sixty years ago that was probably an outcome of racism but, well, that was sixty years ago and the dysfunction remains. I don’t think addressing that is within the states attorney’s scope.

But enforcing the law is as is ensuring that the police department understands that the law should be enforced and convincing judges that the law should be enforced.

At Illinois Policy Ravi Mishra and Lauren Zuar propose three non-starters for balancing Chicago’s budget:

Chicago’s annual budget process is typically a desperate scramble that leaves taxpayers wounded when it could be a measured, responsible process if city leaders would just do three things: cut non-essential staff, cut non-essential projects and push government pension reform.

Although Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was forced to abandon his plans for a $300 million property tax hike, his 2025 budget adds $181.6 million in other tax and fee increases. It does little to fix enduring structural issues contributing to the city’s big budget deficit.

Cutting non-essential staff and non-essential projects is a completely reasonable idea which no Illinois politician will support. Pension reform has been fully litigated and a constitutional amendment that would allow it has already been proposed and rejected by Illinoisans. That even as the pension liability per Illinoisans continues to mount.

While we’re spinning fantasy strategies, why not think big? We could save billions by shuttering the Chicago Public Schools entirely and contracting the education of Chicago’s children out to the Chicago Archdiocese. They spend half as much per student as does the CPS.

The CPS’s budget has soared over the last 30 years even as the number of children enrolled has languished. The increased spending has not resulted in sufficiently improved performance, either.

This another report that saddened me, this one by Jeff Cox at CNBC:

In an early sign of an intensified focus on trade, President Donald Trump said Monday that tariffs could be levied against Mexico and Canada as soon as early February.

“We’re thinking in terms of 25% (levies) on Mexico and Canada, because they’re allowing a vast number of people” over the border, Trump said. The president called Canada “a very bad abuser” and said a target date for the tariffs would be “I think Feb. 1”

The remarks were made to members of the press as the newly minted chief executive offered a slew of executive orders aimed at everything from regulations to free speech to immigration.

While it’s been no secret that Trump plans on implementing across-the-board duties on U.S. trading partners, the timing and extent has been in question. There had been some speculation that the tariffs could be delayed and might be targeted at certain essential items rather than being more broad-based.

In his remarks, Trump provided no further details on how and when the tariffs could come.

While I understand the idea of raising the ante, I don’t think that imposing tariffs on imports from Canada or Mexico is the way to do it. The main effect of that will be to raise consumer prices in the United States, a perverse outcome. A lot of those imports are oil.

China is a special case. A Pigouvian tax in the form of a tariff is an appropriate remedy. Canada and Mexico not so much.

This report by Jonathan Landay at Reuters saddened me:

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (Reuters) – Nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared by the U.S. government to resettle in the U.S., including family members of active-duty U.S. military personnel, are having their flights canceled under President Donald Trump’s order suspending U.S. refugee programs, a U.S. official and a leading refugee resettlement advocate said on Monday.
The group includes unaccompanied minors awaiting reunification with their families in the U.S. as well as Afghans at risk of Taliban retribution because they fought for the former U.S.-backed Afghan government, said Shawn VanDiver, head of the #AfghanEvac coalition of U.S. veterans and advocacy groups and the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

I have been predicting this for some time. Phony refugee claims poison the well for legitimate ones and screen Afghan claims certainly sound legitimate to me.

I haven’t looked at all of President Trump’s executive orders yet but I did want to comment on a few that look controversial. The first of these is his granting pardons to individuals convicted of offenses committed on January 6, 2021 in or near the Capitol. Although some of those pardons may be warranted, I have already expressed my opinion of blanket pardons—I’m against them and that doesn’t matter which president is granting them. I suspect that some people are being granted pardons who don’t merit them.

Perhaps the most controversial is President Trump’s executive order purporting to end the birthright citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment:

The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

I think that eliminating so-called “birth tourism” (the second item above) is correct and within the meaning of the amendment. It is my understanding that the other declaration has already been brought to the court’s attention. It’s an interesting theory but I suspect the courts will not uphold it.

Also controversial is withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. One of the claims in the EO is that the U. S. is paying far too much of the organization’s budget:

In addition, the WHO continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO.

I’m not so sure about the math, either the WHO’s or the White House’s. Here’s what Statista says were the relative assessments in 2022:
You will find more infographics at Statista

I don’t know what our 2024 assessment was or whether we paid it. I think it’s reasonable to ask whether we’re getting value for our money but IMO withdrawal from the organization is an extreme step.