I’ve seen nearly a dozen opinion pieces today either whining about or in support of Joe Biden. I don’t think that they’re interpreting the challenge that Joe Biden poses for the party correctly. If they can’t persuade Joe Biden, notionally the frontrunner, to remove his name from consideration quickly, it will tear the party apart.

When I saw the caption of Thomas Edsall’s latest New York Times column, “‘Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?’”, my immediate reaction was how fast does light propagate through the aether?

I see that there’s a movement to split downstate Illinois from the Chicago area. However dissed the downstates feel that wouldn’t leave a viable state. Of Illinois’s ten largest cities, six are part of the Chicago metropolitan area and an even larger share of the state’s domestic product. Outside the Chicago metropolitan area, the state’s largest city is Rockford at 150,000. Downstate would not be Indiana. It wouldn’t even be Iowa.

If the people living downstate really want to leave Chicago to its own devices, they should divide the state into small chunks of which part would federate with Iowa, part with Wisconsin, part with Missouri, part with Indiana, and part with Kentucky. If I still lived in Missouri there’s no way in hell I would accept East St. Louis.

Lori Lightfoot has been elected mayor of Chicago. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Lori Lightfoot won a resounding victory Tuesday night to become both the first African-American woman and openly gay person elected mayor of Chicago, dealing a stinging defeat to a political establishment that has reigned over City Hall for decades.

After waging a campaign focused on upending the vaunted Chicago political machine, Lightfoot dismantled one of its major cogs by dispatching Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, whose candidacy had been hobbled in part by an anti-incumbent mood among voters and an ongoing federal corruption investigation at City Hall.

With roughly 97 percent of the city’s precincts reporting, Lightfoot had swept all 50 of Chicago’s wards, winning 74 percent of the unofficial vote to 26 percent for Preckwinkle, a 28-year officeholder who prior to her eight years as the county’s chief executive served 19 years as a Hyde Park alderman.

Make no mistake: the voters of Chicago have voted for change. Mayor-elect Lightfoot won every ward by an overwhelming margin. My own ward voted in higher proportions for Lightfoot than the city did as a whole. We’re tired of being used as a piggybank.

Now we’ll see if she can deliver. I have my doubts. The mayor’s office is just the beginning of the machine. It extends through every city department and every public employees’ union and any reform will be fought to the death.

Rahm Emanuel, armed with name recognition from years in Washington, money largely raised from outside the city, and endorsements from machine politicians, waltzed away with his first mayor’s election and walked into a buzzsaw. Chicago is a city that has had decades of incompetent management and has tremendous ingrained bad habits. After three terms of Emanuel as mayor, that buzzsaw is even bigger. Every problem has become worse.

My ward elected a new city councilman, too. Political newcomer Samantha Nugent defeated Robert Murphy 53% to 47%. That was a change, too. For the first time in 54 years someone not a member of the Laurino family will represent us in the City Council. We’ll see if she’s up to the task. I wish her the best.

The problems of the 39th Ward are thorny, too. Property taxes are rising to confiscatory levels and Chicago’s higher sales tax makes it hard for retailers to survive. We’re just steps from the city limits. And it’s not just a matter of taxes. The real problem is that we’re not receiving value for what we’re paying. Planes are being rerouted over our homes, every city project in the ward is bungled, and, increasingly, crime is coming right to our door.

Update

To show you how complete Mayor-elect Lightfoot’s victory was, she didn’t just carry every ward.
She carried all of Chicago’s 2,069 precincts with the exception of a handful of precinct’s in Toni Preckwinkle’s home 4th Ward.

I went to vote this afternoon, arriving at my polling place around 5:00pm. Judging by the number of voters that had already voted in my precinct and typical voting patterns the total turnout should be around 50%. Early voting and absentee voting may push it a little higher. The citywide turnout is anticipated to be around 30%.

That is incredibly disappointing. Thirty years ago 90% turnouts citywide were not unheard of. I don’t know how to interpret such a low degree of civic engagement. I don’t know whether it’s just plain disinterest, being overwhelmed with the coverage, phone calls, etc., or despair. Maybe some of all three.

I also don’t know who that low a turnout will benefit.

I’m sorry to say that I found the prescriptions Micah Goodman’s piece at Atlantic, “Eight Steps to Shrink the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, terribly dissatisfying. The only conclusion I think one could take away from it was that the author believes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be “shrunk” by actions on the part of the Israelis alone. I guess that’s right—the conflict would be “shrunk” to that part of the conflict for which Palestinians are responsible. The author does not even suggest the possibility that the measures he wants to be put in place are a consequence of bad behavior on the part of the Palestinians rather than their cause.

What do you think would happen if all of the measures he proposes are implemented in full? Would it reduce the number of terrorist attacks against Israelis by Palestinians? Would it reduce the number of missiles being lobbed at Israelis? I don’t believe that for a second.

What would happen if the Palestinians ended their campaign of violence against the Israelis? I think that over time the Israelis would relax the restrictions they’ve imposed and over time Israelis would come into ownership of Gaza and the West Bank by purchasing them.

Nathan Lewis explains his “magic formula” for promoting prosperity at Forbes:

Economics is easy. You just have to get two things right: Low Taxes, and Stable Money. Get this right, and everything else tends to follow with relative ease. Get it wrong, and the endless problems and difficulties that ensue will prove insoluble.

I like to call it “the Magic Formula.” If it seems obvious, that’s because it is. Capitalist economies don’t really work very well when taxes are high or money is unstable. Nevertheless, the Magic Formula is often ignored. Taxes today are not very low; money is not very stable; both might get worse, not better. This has consequences.

I think his formula is broken. It assumes a higher level of consumption relative to income for the wealthy than presently exists and lower importants than we presently have. Otherwise the formula may bring prosperity—just not here.

Most incremental income has been going to the wealthiest for decades. The wealthiest aren’t spending their money bigger houses, more cars, or large staffs of servants or, more precisely, they aren’t just spending their money on bigger houses, more cars, or large staffs of servants. They put their money into stocks, bonds, T-bills and other financial assets. Very little of that seeps into the real economy of goods and services so none of us ever see it.

And when much of what you consume (other than health care and education) is manufactured somewhere other than the United States, consumption does not have as great a multiplier effect here as when we made things here.

For the “magic formula” to start working again it will take more than low taxes and stable prices. It will altering the distribution of income and imposing the same costs due to labor and environmental regulations on goods made elsewhere as apply to good made here.

I’m not opposed to low taxes and stable prices. I just want the prosperity that they will promote to be spread around a little more.

At The Hill Nolan Rappaport outlines some measures that would be more effective at stemming the tide of migrants from Central America to our border. His first point is one that had not occurred to me—remittances going to Central America are far larger than our foreign aid to Central America:

In 2017, migrants from the Northern Triangle who work in the United States sent billions of dollars home to their families. These remittances totaled more than $5 billion for El Salvador, $4 billion for Honduras, and $8.68 billion for Guatemala. This was 20.1 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in El Salvador, 17.4 percent in Honduras, and 11.5 percent in Guatemala.

What is the aid supposed to do?

In 2016, the United States gave $131.2 million in aid to Guatemala, $98.3 million to Honduras, and $67.9 million to El Salvador, and Congress has appropriated about $2.1 billion for the program since then.

I’m skeptical that our foreign aid to Central America is doing much good for the people there. I think it’s mostly being siphoned off by elites in those countries.

Other measures proposed by Mr. Rappaport include:

• Appeal the Flores Settlement Agreement to the Supreme Court. The Flores agreement is what prohibits the administration from holding migrants in detention longer.
• Process persecution claims outside of the U.S.
• Eliminate the exploitation magnet, i.e. tighter workplace enforcement of labor regulations.

In other words the primary effect of cutting aid may be to put pressure on elites to curb emigration. If it’s tight enough it may be worthwhile. I continue to believe that a bigger, stouter wall will only be of limited effectiveness, mostly serving to change the composition of the migrants rather than to prevent illegal entry.

But there are other, more cost-effective measures that deserve consideration.

Charles Blow is walking dangerously close to calling all Chicagoans racists, conservatives, or both. The reason that I have posted on the subject is simple: I’m being deluged by the story by the local news. Smollett defrauded the City of Chicago, imposing substantial costs on us. I am now waiting for him to file suit against Cook County or Chicago or both, another assault. The national media have jumped in, further disparaging Chicago.

Do you know why New Yorkers aren’t obsessed by Smollett? Because he didn’t stage his hoax there. It can happen there and he could have. If it had, since the national media are concentrated in New York, the entire country would have been obsessed with the story whether they wanted to be or not.