Dan Petrella and Jamie Munks of the Chicago Tribune report that Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker is preparing an infrastructure spending bill to submit to the legislature:

Gov. J.B. Pritzker is set to unveil a six-year, $41.5 billion plan to repair Illinois’ crumbling roads, bridges, public schools and university buildings in a massive proposal that calls for nearly $1.8 billion in new taxes and tax increases, according to documents provided to lawmakers at a Friday briefing.

Dubbed Rebuild Illinois, it would be the state’s first large-scale infrastructure improvement program in a decade and would result in higher costs for everything from ride-sharing to cable and streaming services, as well as a significant hike at the gas pump.

The long-awaited proposal, which comes as lawmakers are working to finalize the state budget before their schedule May 31 adjournment, received a lukewarm response from some of the governor’s fellow Democrats and pushback from some Republicans. The preliminary drafts distributed Friday follow behind-the-scenes negotiations with a bipartisan group of lawmakers. Changes are expected even before Pritzker makes a formal announcement next week.

Anyone who has driven from Illinois into Indiana, Wisconsin, or Iowa cannot help but notice the marked difference between our neighboring states’ roads and ours and a lot of Gov. Pritzker’s plan is, apparently, devoted to roads and bridges. One might want to mull over why Illinois’s roads and bridges are in such obviously worse shape than, say, Iowa’s. I think it’s because every available dollar is being used here to pay present and past public employees.

The governor intends to pay for part of his plan by raising taxes:

Pritzker’s outline includes doubling the state gas tax to 38 cents per gallon from 19 cents; tiered increases in vehicle registration fees based on the vehicle’s age; a $250 annual registration fee for electric vehicles; a $1-per-ride tax on ride sharing; and a 7% state tax on cable, satellite and streaming service.

Other taxes being discussed include a new 6% tax on daily and hourly garage parking, a 9% tax on monthly and annual garage parking, and an increase in taxes on manufacturers and importing distributors of beer, wine and spirits.

but he intends to let future generations pay for most of the cost:

The largest share of the program, $17.8 billion, would be funded through state bonds, while more than $7 billion would come from regular revenue. The plan counts on more than $10 billion in federal funding and $6.6 billion from local governments and private sources.

Let the feeding frenzy begin! Every county and particularly Cook County, Will County, DuPage County, and Lake County will be vying for as much of the spending as they can corral.

How many people will still live in Illinois 30 years from now when the bonds mature?

At the Rand Blog Blas Nunez-Neto proposes four measures to address the crisis at our southern border. I agree with two of them and 50% ain’t bad. Here they are:

1. Expanding the use of non-restrictive detention options for families. This could include large increases in the use of minimally invasive tools that can allow families to be released while ensuring that they can be located and notified about their court cases. It could also include creating statutory guidelines and expanding the capacity to detain families in non-restrictive facilities. These guidelines could ensure that facilities that handle families have humane conditions and feature age-appropriate protections and learning opportunities for all detainees.
2. Ensuring that families have access to counsel. Individuals who have counsel are far more likely to show up for their immigration court cases than those who do not. As part of any reform of the asylum system, Congress could consider whether this benefit outweighs the costs of requiring that all asylum seekers have access to qualified counsel.
3. Creating new processes to allow some of these families to apply for visas to come to the United States while they are still in their home countries. If policymakers believe that these migratory flows are likely to continue, they may consider providing legal mechanisms for families from these countries to come the United States.
4. Adding capacity to the immigration court system. The current backlogs in these courts are the byproduct of a broken and under-resourced system. Congress could closely review the entire system to identify the bottlenecks that have led to these record backlogs and increase the number of immigration judges who are qualified to hear asylum cases.

I agree with #3 and #4. I think that the adverse consequences of the other two are likely to outweigh the intended effects.

They say that acknowledging you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery. I guess that referring to the situation on our southern border as a crisis is a step in the right direction.

Decisions to make the children of people coming into the United States illegally safer have had the perverse consequence of endangering them. At CNN Priscilla Alvarez reports that DNA testing of “families” suspect of being nothing of the kind has found an alarming percentage of frauds:

The Department of Homeland Security is considering next steps in DNA testing on the southern border, following a pilot program that concluded last week.

DHS ran the DNA pilot program to help identify and prosecute individuals posing as families in an effort to target human smuggling. The Rapid DNA testing, as it’s known, involves a cheek swab and can, on average, provide results in about 90 minutes.

“We’re continuing to analyze the results of the DNA, analyze where we think it’d be appropriate in the processing line,” said Alysa Erichs, acting executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations.

ICE has briefed acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan on the DNA testing, Erichs said.

Before the DNA pilot program, ICE Homeland Security Investigations personnel had been deployed to the border in April to investigate human smuggling and the use of fraudulent documents to “create fake families.” There are now 130 Homeland Security Investigations personnel at the border.

As of Friday, Homeland Security Investigations teams, which consist of agents and specialists, had interviewed 562 families who presented some indication of fraud. Homeland Security Investigations identified 95 fraudulent families through interviews and 176 fraudulent families through fake documents.

The administration has argued that the limit on how long migrant children can be held in detention is a pull factor because it guarantees release, prompting some individuals to pose as families.

The prospect of an interview or, more recently, a DNA test has led some migrants posing as families to concede that they are not related, Erichs said. In cases where migrants have conceded that they have no familial connection, ICE has referred the adults for criminal prosecution and turned over the minors to the care of the Health and Human Services Department.

In other words when it becomes known that travelling with a child eases your way into the United States, inevitably more people seeking to enter the United States travel with children. DNA testing has now demonstrated that some of the children with whom these people are travelling are not their own.

What will become of these children once these “families” are admitted? Will they be abandoned? Sold? Given to relatives already in the United States? How could we ever know? This entire situation has left us in the position in which there’s a moral imperative to keep families together and a moral imperative to separate them.

At The American Interest Matthias Küntzel says that the Germans are being naïve about Iran:

As early as 1995, when President Bill Clinton prohibited American firms from trading with Iran because of the regime’s nuclear ambitions, it was Germany that systematically counteracted the American efforts to impose international sanctions. Hossain Mousavian, then the Iranian Ambassador in Germany, wrote that Tehran was “aware in the 1990s of Germany’s significant role in breaking the economic chains, with which the USA had wrapped Iran . . . Iran viewed its dialogue and relations with Germany as an important means toward the circumvention of the anti-Iranian policies of the United States.”

Washington, however, persisted in its efforts. As former Secretary of State Warren Christopher detailed in his memoirs, “We constantly prodded them [the Germans] to distance themselves from Iran and to suspend trade, as we had done . . . Unfortunately, the struggle to stop our allies from doing business with Iran has not yet succeeded.”

When I was working in Germany in the 1970s I was surprised by the array of Iranian goods in German stores. They were something not seen in the United States. The relationship between Germany and Iran goes back even farther:

In the mid-1920s, Germany was the founder of Persian industry, providing Iran with the backbone of its industrial infrastructure and the trained personnel needed to run it. Between 1933 and 1941, according to the scholar Yair P. Hirschfeld, the Nazi share of Iranian imports rose from 11 to 43 percent while the German share of Iranian exports rose from 19 to 47 percent. (Another aspect of the Nazi period, which continues to be important in Iran, was pointed out in 1996 by Iranian President Rafsanjani: “Our relations have always been good. Both [peoples] are of the Aryan race.”)

In 1952 West Germany again became Iran’s leading trading partner, a position it held almost continuously until 1979. After the Islamic revolution, West Germany’s trade with Khomeini’s Iran rebounded from 2.8 billion Deutsche Marks in 1980 to 7.7 billion in 1983. “It is striking to see how Persia’s new rulers are specially favoring German firms with orders, given that German business leaders and politicians had kowtowed to the Shah with special fervor,” wrote Der Spiegel at the time.

In the following years, Germany remained not only Iran’s most important high-tech partner but also its most trusted one.

I don’t think the Germans are naïve at all. I think they’re cynical, amoral. Without the Germans the Iranians would never have gotten their nuclear enrichment program off the ground, the Pakistanis would never have developed a nuclear weapon, and German technology formed the basis of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons program. The Germans are convinced with a confidence born of experience that the United States will do nothing about their misbehavior and, indeed, will come to their aid if they get in trouble.

All of that having been said I think the recent saber-rattling against the Iranians is misplaced. We should make our notional allies aware that, if they’re threatened by the Iranians, they’re on their own. They need to come to their own modus vivendi with the Iranians. IMO prudence would dictate that they impose and enforce economic sanctions of their own against the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard and certainly not enable the Iranians.

I have reservations about this piece at The Forge on matters of peace and war:

The peace-war spectrum is the current framework used in Australian Defence Force doctrine. It is a polar framework with the level of violence differentiating the two ends. A variation of this appears as the peace-instability-war spectrum in Australian Army doctrine. These frameworks matter as they steer our thinking in a particular way. For example, the peace-war spectrum tends to bias our thinking to the dichotomies of peace and war, binary conditions of loss and victory, and gradual and linear escalation of violence.

Grey zone and hybrid warfare do not sit neatly within the linear peace-war spectrum, suggesting that this doctrine may be inhibiting our thinking rather than enabling it. It is also evident that other state and non-state actors have ignored this spectrum and, in doing so, have found ways to defeat or merely bypass our concepts and strategy by pursuing their goals aggressively, but not violently. General Joseph Dunford warned in 2018 that ‘our adversaries don’t abide by our doctrine, with its clear distinction between war and peace and its tidy phases of escalation’.

I don’t think there’s a spectrum involved at all. I think that when you’re killing people and breaking their stuff it’s war and when you aren’t it isn’t. The present tendency to make it more complicated than that is a desperate attempt at finding reasons to justify going to war when we shouldn’t or, in some cases, not going to war when we should.

The College Board, the organization that administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test, has been in existence for just about a century and from its very start was dedicated to promoting meritocracy in the United States, particularly by providing ammunition for Ivy League schools to admit students with high achievement and abilities to gain admission to that exclusive club that would otherwise have been denied them. This week there has been quite a bit of bitching, moaning, and complaining about the addition of an “aversity score”. Michael Nietzel’s plaint at Forbes is one example of the genre:

The College Board has revealed that it will calculate an “adversity score” for every student taking the SAT. According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s an attempt to address evidence that children of wealthy, college-educated parents score higher on the SAT than less privileged students. At least in theory, the adjusted scores will help colleges more objectively evaluate the academic abilities of all applicants. The undergraduate admissions dean at Yale, one of 50 schools that participated in a test run of the new scoring system, told the Journal that it has already helped diversify the freshman class.

The adversity score will be a number ranging from 1 to 100, calculated from 15 factors such as neighborhood crime rates and poverty levels. A score of 50 will be the average; scores above 50 reflect increasing levels of hardship, and scores below indicate higher degrees of privilege. SAT officials indicated that students would not be informed of their adversity scores, but colleges will have access to them as they make admission decisions.

and

What should we make of the new SAT adversity score? Will it increase fairness in college admissions? Will it help increase the diversity of enrollments? Or will it backfire, adding to Americans’ skepticism about the fairness of college admissions? Will it be viewed as an algorithm for political correctness, or worse, a form of handicapping that brings students with high scores more harm than good in the long run?

I think that the critics of the adversity score fail to recognize what the College Board is trying to do. They’re trying to add a new category of merit that schools may use. Previously, there was scholastic achievement, scholastic aptitude, and the non-scholastic things that an individual student has accomplished. The adversity school will provide the opportunity to supplement those measures of individual merit with one of group merit or, said another way, they are promoting the tendency of “merit” to become an auto-antonym.

There’s plenty of bickering going on in the media over what some are characterizing as President Trump’s “trade war” with China and those more favorably disposed to the president are calling “negotiations”. Rather than dig into all the complaining, I’ll put the issue on the floor. How should our issues with China be resolved?

My preference would be for China to live up to all of the obligations it undertook to gain membership to the World Trade Organization, make its currency convertible, privatize its state-owned enterprises, eliminate its export subsidies and import quotas, stop engaging in hacking and piracy of the intellectual property and trade secrets of American companies, and generally liberalize its trade with us. I don’t think it can actually do any of those things and anything less should be unacceptable to us. I also think that the Chinese authorities see trade as warfare by other means—a zero sum game in which they win and we lose.

And that touches only on the trade issues and not the geopolitical ones.

How should our trade issues with China be resolved?

I think that the Washington Post editorial on the laws greatly restricting or even effectively abolishing legal abortions being introduced or in some cases passed in state legislatures pretty much covers my view:

ANTIABORTION ACTIVISTS in Alabama may have overplayed their hand in successfully pushing for legislation that would effectively ban all abortions in the state and criminalize the procedure for doctors who perform them. So extreme — to the point of cruelty — is the measure that some national Republican leaders are trying to distance themselves from it. So patently unconstitutional is the measure that it is unlikely to ever take effect or, as its architects hope, be taken up by the Supreme Court.

None of that, though, makes the legislation any less dangerous. It — and laws banning abortion as early as six weeks after gestation passed by other states — open up a new front in the nation’s long-running battle over women’s reproductive rights. Buoyed by how the Supreme Court has been reshaped by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s appointment, abortion opponents are adopting increasingly aggressive tactics.

To my eye all of the handwringing I have been seeing to the effect that “we are one Supreme Court decision from outlawing abortion” ignores something important: that has been the case since 1973. The real message in these laws is that you shouldn’t rely on the Supreme Court to accomplish your political goals for you.

Let me propose some guidelines for accomplishing durable political solutions to difficult problems.

• Figure out what you want.
• Persuade those with whom you generally agree to support that.
• Persuade enough of those who disagree with you and preferably a supermajority to enact legislation effecting what you want.
• If you can’t accomplish the above, you probably need to narrow your goal.
• Once you have accomplished your goal, don’t capitalize on it to expand beyond your initial goal.
• Don’t undermine stare decisis.
• Don’t rely on the Supreme Court to realize your goals for you.
• If, after the Supreme Court effects your goal for you, over time a supermajority of the people don’t come around to your point of view, the story probably isn’t over.

The Supreme Court has overruled its prior decisions more than 140 times in our history. In other words although that’s actually a pretty good record, Supreme Court decisions aren’t graven in diamond. They aren’t eternal. In the first century of the country’s history the Supreme Court overruled itself five times. In the last 10 years it has overruled itself ten times.

I’ve got to confess that Eugene Ludwig’s column at The Hill frosts me a bit. The column explores the frequently mentioned claim that middle and lower-income Americans have not “shared in the economy’s economic advances”:

Most middle- and lower-income Americans have not shared in the economy’s economic advances over the last several decades. If the economy slides off with job losses, many middle- and lower-income Americans will face financial difficulties that could be even more extreme than those in 2008.

Yes, the market is up, and unemployment is the lowest it’s been in nearly 50 years. But education, health care and, in many places, housing are much more expensive than they once were, even as wage growth has fallen flat.

The broader economy may be steaming ahead, but consumer borrowing, particularly student debt is at an all-time high.

Today, 40 percent of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 in the face of a crisis, with many choosing to sell something or take a loan to come up with the cash.

Many Americans, particularly those living in America’s heartland, exist on the knife’s edge. Aggregates and averages obscure the economic turmoil that’s opened wounds in places like Dearborn, Mich., and York County, Pa.

and I think there’s a kernel of truth in that. But I don’t know how you can explore that subject in a meaningful way without mentioning health care prices, education prices, taxes, or immigration.

Consider, for example, the graph at the top of the page. In rough terms health care spending has risen ten-fold in real terms since 1970. That means that unless your income has risen ten-fold as well which is not true for most people you’re probably spending more of your income on health care and health care insurance than you (or the you-equivalent) was in 1970. That is unlikely to be changed by Medicare For All or any other likely health care reform. Those are only like to change who pays not how much is paid. It’s just moving the deckchairs around.

The same is true of education and taxes, both of which have increased substantially faster than incomes. Public benefits have risen sharply, too. Rather than just looking at incomes he should be looking at total compensation including benefits.

He also ignores the loss of job security so many Americans feel. Other than at the very top just about everyone is constantly looking over his or her shoulder, wondering whether she or he will be replaced by a worker from a staffing company like Tata. It’s no coincidence that business services is one of sectors in which the number of jobs is increasing fastest.