This is local news but you may not have heard of it. At WGN Jenna Barnes reports:

DOLTON, Ill. — Mayor Tiffany Henyard’s grip on the reins of Dolton is loosening after the village’s board of trustees voted to freeze spending on village credit cards Monday night.

“That was the main goal — To cut off her access and other operators in the municipality,” said Burt Odelson, one of the attorneys representing the Village of Dolton’s Board of Trustees.

According to attorneys representing Dolton’s trustees, moving forward, expenses on village credit cards will be limited to those approved by the board for the village’s Director of Administrative Services to make.

“This village has so many people with so many credit cards, they’re swiping like crazy and that’s why it had to come to a complete halt,” said Michael McGrath, another attorney representing Dolton’s trustees. “There’s thousands and thousands of dollars for Amazon purchases, for PayPal, for Target, for Walgreen’s, for Jewel [Osco] in the hundreds and thousands of dollars.”

McGrath said that a snapshot of just five-to-six months of spending was revealed in the last couple of weeks by Henyard’s top aide, Keith Freeman, who is now cooperating with the village’s board of trustees.

Freeman has pleaded not guilty to a federal bankruptcy fraud charge and is considered by some trustees to be a potential whistleblower.

At present this is our favorite soap opera. We can hardly wait to tune in to WGN News at 9 to learn the latest development.

I think that black voters expect a certain amount of corruption in government but there is a level of blatant corruption that is simply too much and the people of Dolton have apparently reached it. Dolton is a small town of about 20,000 people, 20% of whom are in poverty. Its population is 90% black. The town is starting to sell off assets to pay its bills.

Update

We can’t wait for the next installment. Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot will present her findings on the situation with Dolton’s government today.

Speaking of weird, in 1790 90% of the labor force in the United States were dedicated to farming. By 1850 that percentage had declined to about 70% and by 1900 it was less than 50%.

These are the occupations of my ancestors during that period:

Lawyer
Saloon owner
Vaudeville entertainer
Judge
Chiropractor
Engineer
Butcher
Milk broker
Cooper
Laborer
Cigarmaker
Cowboy (as in cattle drives on trails in the West)

That’s pretty different from normal people.

Then we had Biden vs. Trump. Then Not-Biden vs. Trump. Now we have Not-Biden and Not-Vance vs. Trump and Vance.

IMO Gov. Walz was a pretty good pick for VP Kamala Harris’s running mate. He balances her in many ways (race, gender, experience) while being quite compatible with her ideologically. I doubt that he will be as much help in carrying Midwestern states as some are speculating. Minnesota has been safely Democratic since 1976. That is quite different from other Midwestern states. He also brings more firsthand knowledge of China than any president or vide president since, I guess, Herbert Hoover.

I have no idea who will be elected president and I doubt that anyone else actually does, either. The election will be an interesting test several things including the importance of getting out the base.

In a piece at The National Interest Daniel L. Davis has words of caution for the United States:

Israel has an obligation to take actions that ensure its security. If Israeli leaders take risks that result in more attacks against Israel, they must be prepared to deal with that situation. What should not happen, however, is for Tel Aviv to expect the United States Armed Forces to fight alongside the IDF. Washington should not be a party in engaging in military operations that run counter to its national security objectives and could draw it into a new Middle Eastern war.

There is nothing for us to gain and everything for us to lose in fighting a war against Iran. It should be a priority for the White House only to risk losing American servicemen and women if U.S. security is put at risk, not because a foreign government, regardless of how friendly, takes action that is likely to prompt an enemy military response. We must stop choosing war—or one day, it may cost us more than we can imagine.

The second paragraph in particular pretty much encapsulates my views.

The Associated Press reports that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been picked as Vice President Harris’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election:

Vice President Kamala Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, looking to strengthen the Democratic ticket in Midwestern states.

My wife reminded me that I had predicted that Gov. Walz would be VP Harris’s running mate shortly after President Biden endorsed her. He’s well-aligned with her politically, has experience in areas in which she is could use some bolstering, and, at least notionally, shores up her Midwestern support.

In a pseudo-Rose Garden campaign in which neither the presidential nor vice presidential candidate gives interviews or even appears publically much, he’ll be fine. In a more, shall we say, dynamic campaign there’s a risk that Gov. Walz will outshine VP Harris.

I need to disagree with the editors of the Wall Street Journal on this one. They write, in criticism of President Trump’s recent remarks on abolishing FICA:

Does anybody in politics understand tax policy these days? The Biden-Harris Democrats want to raise tax rates to Thomas Piketty French socialist levels. Republicans want to cut taxes, but they want to do so for specific groups to buy their votes. They’ve all lost the growth plot.

Mr. Trump’s tax fumbling is especially disappointing because his 2017 cut in tax rates was the policy foundation for the strong pre-pandemic U.S. economy. But so far in this campaign he’s proposing hugely expensive tax cuts for different voting groups that won’t do much for growth.

My specific disagreements are:

1. That there was a boom at all between 2017 and the 4th quarter of 2019 and
2. That cuts in the personal income tax had much to do with GDP growth

Courtesy of the St. Louis Federal Reserve here’s a graph of GDP growth:

and here’s a graph of private investment:

What I see in both of those graphs, noisy as the BI graph is, is a continuation of trend. That’s even clearer when you look at GDP in constant dollars:

It’s even more obvious when you look at real personal consumption expenditures:

Back in 2017 I argued in favor of the cut in the corporate income tax but against the cut in the personal income tax and my reasoning at the time has been completely borne out. The really interesting thing in the graphs above is that the Trump tax cuts did not produce more inflation than they did. Could that be because of the shutdowns?

If your plan is to increase GDP by injecting money into the economy (and producing inflation), why does it matter whether (from an economic standpoint) whether the money is going to the elderly or to the highest income earners?

Like, I think, many Americans I am very discouraged about politics right now. Far too many Republicans persuaded themselves that Donald Trump was someone he wasn’t. Now the Democrats are just as eagerly persuading themselves that Kamala Harris is someone she isn’t. If she is elected, expect a rerun of the major media outlets avoiding covering the White House critically as assiduously as possible while defaming any outlets that do.

I plan to avoid writing any posts in opposition Vice President Harris but I won’t write any in support of her, either.

I wanted to make an observation about the Venezuelan election but rather than try to work it into a longer post I’ll just make the observation

Was Hugo Chavez not democratically elected? His election was certified as free and fair by international observers including the Carter Center. I would submit that when you elect a military dictator to the presidency of your country, you should anticipate that it is likely to be the last free and fair election your country will hold. Complaining that Maduro cheated is about 25 years too late.

Let’s turn to the United States. What do Americans, particularly the U. S. press expect us to do? Our choices are to intervene presumably forcefully whenever any country makes what we consider a bad, undemocratic decision whether that decision is made by democratic means or not or accept that other countries will occasionally do stupid, undemocratic things.

If you choose the former, congratulations, you’re an imperialist. If you choose the latter, bad things will continue to happen. There’s a corollary to our acceptance that people in other countries sometimes make bad choices. We shouldn’t subsidize those bad choices. When you subsidize something you get more of it. Letting Venezuelans cut into the line for immigration is a subsidy.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Bjorn Lomborg summarizes my views pretty accurately:

There is ample evidence that man-made emissions cause changes in climate, and climate economics generally finds that the costs of these effects outweigh the benefits. But the net result is nowhere near catastrophic. The costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse. All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies prevent each year.

Scare tactics leave everyone—especially young people—distressed and despondent. Fear leads to poor policy choices that further frustrate the public. And the ever-changing narrative of disasters erodes public trust.

Telling half-truths while piously pretending to “follow the science” benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps climate-concerned politicians rally their bases. But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.

It’s easier for me to suggest some things we shouldn’t do than to tell you what we should do. We shouldn’t cripple our own economy to fend off a catastrophe that always seems to recede into the future faster than mitigation measures can be implemented. We shouldn’t be buying as many manufactured goods from China or India as we are let alone buying more. We shouldn’t impose a carbon tax. It is regressive—it falls most heavily on those least able to pay.

Probably the cleverest approach to reducing carbon emissions was Elon Musk’s: make an all-electric vehicle chic, stylish, and expensive enough to be a good status symbol. That encouraged the wealthiest to reduce their carbon emissions and they are responsible for a disproportionate amount of emissions.