The editors of the Wall Street Journal have lurched uncontrollably into the same observation I made a few days ago. We import more when the economy is growing:

The trade deficit grew 12% last year to $621 billion as imports rose $218 billion and exports climbed $149 billion. Excluding services, the gap increased to $891 billion.

This is not bad economic news. Imports grew faster than exports as the U.S. economy accelerated and much of the world slowed. The dollar grew stronger as capital flowed into the U.S., and the trade deficit grew to offset the larger capital inflows as it must by definition under the national income accounts.

Imports of industrial supplies rose $68.4 billion and capital goods increased $52.7 billion, which helped fuel a pickup in commercial construction and manufacturing. Fixed investment in structures and equipment climbed 5% and 7.5%, respectively, last year as businesses took advantage of lower corporate tax rates and 100% capital expensing.

Consumer goods imports also increased $46 billion, half of which came from pharmaceutical products. This isn’t surprising since the consumer spending share of GDP ticked up 2.6% last year amid rising incomes and falling unemployment. Most Americans also paid less in taxes, which enabled them to spend more on foreign household goods ($3.4 billion), clothing ($2.4 billion), cell phones ($2 billion) and toys ($2 billion). Note: Higher sales of iPhones assembled in China will benefit U.S. employees and shareholders of Apple , which is investing $1 billion in a new Austin, Texas campus.

Note too that the trade deficit expanded in 2018 even as the U.S. unemployment rate fell. This gives the lie to the common political claim that a higher trade deficit means lost American jobs. Capital investment matters more to job creation than trade flows do.

My concerns are more about the nature of the imports than their increase. I don’t mind when we import more raw materials. I do mind when we’re importing manufactured goods and consumer goods while people remain underemployed in the United States. My concerns are not assuaged by growth in the number of minimum wage jobs.

Before they do unto you. In her latest Wall Street Journal column Peggy Noonan wonders if there isn’t more than a whiff of the Cultural Revolution here in the United States, complete with Red Guards and “struggle sessions”:

The Chinese Catholic Margaret Chu, a medical-lab assistant, was dragged into the office of her labor camp in 1968 and made to answer invented charges. “Their real motive was once and again to force me to admit all my alleged crimes,” she wrote decades later. “ ‘I did not commit any crimes,’ I asserted.” She was accused again, roughed up. She denied her guilt again. “Immediately two people jumped on me and cut off half my hair.”

She was tortured, left in handcuffs for 100 days, and imprisoned for years. While being tortured she sometimes prayed for death so her suffering would stop.

The Cultural Revolution lasted roughly a dozen years and died with Mao in September 1976. In time a party congress denounced it as what it was: ruinous.

So I ask you to entertain an idea that has been on my mind. I don’t want to be overdramatic, but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely. “Contention is better than loneliness,” as my people, the Irish, say, and they would know.

The air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don’t try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence.

The spirit of the struggle session is all over Twitter . On literary Twitter social-justice warriors get advance copies of new books and denounce them for deviationism—as insensitive, racist, appropriative, anti-LGBTQ. Books on the eve of publication have been pulled, sometimes withdrawn by authors who apologize profusely. Everyone’s scared. And the tormentors are not satisfied by an apology. They’re excited by it and prowl for more prey.

A few weeks ago a young woman on Twitter thought aloud: “What if public libraries were open late every night and we could engage in public life there instead of having to choose between drinking at the bar and domestic isolation.” This might get people off their screens and help them feel “included and nourished.”

A nice idea. Maybe some local official would pick it up. Instead there was a small onslaught of negative reaction. “Libraries are already significantly underfunded and they struggle to make do with what they’ve got.” “Before you suggest this understand that librarians are maxed out—our facilities are understaffed, we’re underpaid.” The idea would only work in “mainly affluent urban & suburban communities with already well-funded libraries whose wealth insulates them.” A woman soon to marry a librarian warned of “what this would do to the lives of the people who work there.”

After being batted about, the young woman apologized: “I made insensitive tweets abt public libraries & the individuals that staff them. I apologize for those tweets. I have much to learn abt the difficult challenges public librarians face, the services they provide, & how much they strive to meet the needs of communities they serve.”

She abased herself for having had a pretty idea. But that is dangerous when thought-cops are out there, eager to perceive insufficient class loyalty.

I think that by far the most benign way of addressing this trend is to ensure that young people see themselves as having something to lose. When the most permanent quality of their lives is debt, they may not see it that way. Marriage rates, and rates of home ownership are all way down among Millennials while rates of depression and other mental health issues are at an all-time high among them.

I have been cautioning Americans about this for decades but little did I realize that the canary in the coal mine would turn out to be the United Methodist Church. The shortest statement of the issue that I can come up with is that as society becomes more global it will become more socially conservative.

Let me quickly summarize events for you. In the United States the UMC has been losing members at the rate of about 100,000 per year while in Africa it has been gaining members at an equal rate. With increasing membership has come increasing influence over church policy. Most recently that has taken the form of a rejection of a liberalizing plan at the recent meeting of the denomination’s general conference last month.

Now I’ll turn it over to Methodist layman Mark Tooley, from his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

The surge in African growth has flummoxed America’s liberal Methodist elites. Ascendant for 100 years, they long assumed their denomination naturally would follow Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists and others in liberalizing on sexuality. But every quadrennial conference since 1972 has affirmed sex as permissible only between husband and wife.

Liberals sometimes defy church law when making local personnel decisions. In 2016 United Methodism’s U.S. Western Jurisdiction elected a lesbian bishop married to a woman. The church’s top court ruled her election illegal but claimed to lack the power to remove her. In response to events like this, bishops called last month’s special conference to adjudicate a final church settlement on sexuality.

Most U.S. bishops touted the “One Church Plan,” which would have let local churches choose their own policies on same-sex marriage. This proposal resembled other liberalizing denominations, which have suffered schisms and accelerated membership losses after such moves. The Methodist delegates defeated this measure 55% to 45%.

In its place, by a vote of 53% to 47%, U.S. conservatives joined international representatives to pass the “Traditional Plan.” It enhances enforcement of current church teaching and allows liberal regions and churches to leave with their property if unwilling to abide. But it isn’t that simple: The United Methodist denomination owns its congregations’ buildings. Parts of the new plan, including the exit provision, may have to be refined next year at a conference in Minneapolis.

If we want the sexual, social, political, and economic mores we’ve been cultivating over the last century or so to flourish, it will need to be in a walled garden. Most of the world and particularly the parts of the world that are growing and from which we should expect our immigrants to come for the foreseeable future do not view them as good, right, or the way they think that anybody should live.

A globalized America will more closely resemble the worlds of Islam or conservative Christianity than it does Sweden. Increasingly, Sweden looks a lot less like Sweden.

Some details of Illinois Gov. Pritzker’s graduated income tax proposal have emerged. The Chicago Tribune reports:

If voters approve an amendment, Pritzker proposes lowering the tax rate to 4.75 percent for the first $10,000 of income for single and joint filers. Income between $10,000 and $100,000 would be taxed at 4.9 percent, and the rate would remain 4.95 percent for income between $100,000 and $250,000.

From there, the top rates would be 7.75 percent for income up to $500,000, 7.85 percent for income between $500,000 and $1 million, and 7.95 percent for all income if someone earns more than $1 million.

The governor also proposes increasing the current property tax credit by 1 percentage point, from 5 percent to 6 percent. He also would create a per-child tax credit of up to $100 for individuals earning less than $80,000 and joint filers earning less than $100,000.

Similar measures have been proposed in the past. None has ever gotten as far as the ballot because they’ve failed to garner the required three-fifths vote of each house in the legislature. I’m still waiting, as I have since the subject was first broached, for Gov. Pritzker to release the names of legislators who’ve committed their votes to the required amendment. I don’t think he has any.

Meanwhile, here’s a proposal that I do not believe would require an amendment to the state’s constitution. End the exemption to the state’s income tax for public employees receiving more than $150,000 in pensions from the state. That doesn’t run afoul of either the flat tax provision or the enforceability clause in the state’s constitution.

C’mon, governor. Put a down payment on your proposed reforms.

I have a riddle for you this afternoon.

Q: What do Chinese imports and illegal immigrants have in common?

A: They both tend to increase when the U. S. economy is growing.

My preference would be to reduce both of those without relying on a poorly performing economy to do it for us. We can reduce Chinese imports by doing more primary production and manufacturing here even if we have to subsidize them. We can reduce the incentives for illegal migrant workers the same way the Canadaians and Australians do—by making it difficult for those without the proper authorizations to work.

There’s an intriguing post on how the U. S., Russian, and Chinese militaries are approaching artificial intelligence at Foreign Policy. Here’s a snippet:

China, the United States, and Russia are each negotiating this fraught landscape differently, in ways responsive to their unique economic and military situations. Governments are motivated to pursue leadership in AI by the promise of gaining a strategic advantage. At this early stage, it’s tough to tell what sort of advantage is at stake, because we don’t know what sort of thing AI will turn out to be. Since AI is a technology, it’s natural to think of it as a mere resource that can assist in attaining one’s goals, perhaps by allowing drones to fly without supervision or increasing the efficiency of supply chains.

But computers could surpass humans in finding optimal ways of organizing and using resources. If so, they might become capable of making high-level strategic decisions. After all, there aren’t material limitations restricting the intelligence of algorithms, like those that restrict the speed of planes or range of rockets. Machines more intelligent than the smartest of humans, with more strategic savvy, are a conceptual possibility that must be reckoned with. China, Russia, and the United States are approaching this possibility in different ways. The statements and research priorities released by major powers reveal how their policymakers think AI’s developmental trajectory will unfold.

Since I was in grad school, “artificial intelligence” has been a grab bag of not particularly related technologies. Artificial neural networks have been around for nearly 80 years. Pattern matching algorithms for at least 60 years. Inference engines and expert systems for around 50 years. Data mining, too, is around 50 years old (although the term “data mining” is only around 30 years old). Indeed, there hasn’t actually been a lot of basic innovations in artificial intelligence.

What has changed is the cost of hardware and the ability of computers to share information. Many unsophisticated people confuse applying old technology using new hardware with new technology. Even some sophisticated people do that.

I think that a lot of how any country applies artificial intelligence to its military depends on two things: what it thinks of its military and how concerned they are about not getting there first. If you don’t think much of your military and you’re very worried about somebody else getting there first, I think you’ll use the strategy that China is. If you think highly of your military but aren’t as worried about somebody else getting there first, you’ll use the strategy that our military is.

Article II, Section 2 of the U. S. Constitution defines the primary roles and responsibilities of the president:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

to which should be added the first sentence of Article II, Section 1:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Numerous things are not listed among the responsibilities of the president including:

• Ensuring that all Americans have health care
• Being an inspiration in times of national tragedy
• Leading his political party

Those and many, many other things are accretions to the presidency, like barnacles on a boat. The things at the top of this post are the actual responsibilities of the president. They are the things I keep in mind when cast my vote for president. They are the reasons I voted for Barack Obama rather than John McCain in 2008. I disagreed too profoundly with McCain’s “national greatness” approach to foreign policy. They are also the reasons I did not vote for Barack Obama in 2012. He was egregiously wrong too much of the time on foreign policy.

That’s why I approve of these observations from William Galston in his Wall Street Journal column:

A presidential campaign is an audition for the most challenging job in the world. But the Democrats vying for their party’s nomination don’t seem to understand what that job really is. People with White House experience know that presidents spend more than half their time—often much more—dealing with foreign policy and national security. Thus far, Democratic candidates have had little to say about these issues.

and

Two decades of war without end have exhausted the patience of the American people. Mr. Trump has used this sentiment to attack the entire postwar consensus of American foreign and defense policy, and he has twisted anti-interventionism into a zero-sum choice between domestic and foreign interests. If working- and middle-class Americans are struggling, he argues, it is the fault of foreign trade, foreign wars and foreign invaders streaming unchecked across our southern border.

Democratic presidential candidates are not free to ignore this narrative. Whatever their strategists and pollsters may say, every presidential candidate should deliver at least one major speech answering some basic questions:

Do you think America’s longstanding alliances serve our national interests? If so, what will you do to preserve and strengthen them? How will you counter threats from Russia and Iran, as well as a surging China rapidly translating its economic growth into diplomatic clout and military might? Is the Middle East still vital to our interests, or is our engagement there a diversion from more important matters?

Is America’s military the right size, and does it have the right shape, to address core threats to national security? What is the relationship between national security and international trade? If the global democratic tide is receding, how much should we care and what are we prepared to do about it?

In domestic policy, voters often issue specific orders to their elected officials. In foreign policy, they give the president broad permission to act on their behalf. As they examine aspirants for our highest office, they are asking themselves, “Can I imagine this person as commander in chief?” Democratic candidates should give voters some basis to answer this question.

There will be many lessons to be learned from the Trump presidency but here are some that I hope will be learned. We can no longer delegate the prosecution of justice to the Justice Department. We can no longer delegate our foreign policy to the State Department. They cannot be trusted with those responsibilities. We need to elect someone to the presidency who can be trusted with those responsibilities and we won’t accomplish that by electing someone who simply isn’t interested in foreign policy. Foreign policy is something that happens to presidents. It’s the nature of the job. It cannot be escaped.

I agree with the editors of the New York Times about this:

Senator Charles McC. Mathias, a Republican from Maryland who was a chief sponsor of the legislation, called President Gerald Ford’s signing of the bill “a historic act of relinquishing powers of the presidency” and envisioned it would be a tool for “restoring constitutional democracy.”

But in the more than 40 years that the National Emergencies Act has been in effect, it’s been subject to few checks and balances. That Congress has never invoked its own authority under the act to rebuke a president until now is a sign of the statute’s weaknesses.

The resolution now before Congress serves mainly to nullify Mr. Trump’s border emergency declaration. But further reforms are called for to protect the nation from future excesses.

For one thing, the National Emergencies Act doesn’t define what an emergency is — a loophole that Mr. Trump took advantage of by declaring that there’s a crisis at the border, contrary to all evidence. Congress could set clearer parameters, allowing a president to declare emergencies only when threats to the national interest are imminent and based on observable facts.

The current law also lets the president extend emergencies for years on end, simply by notifying Congress. Lawmakers would be wise to vest in Congress, rather than the president, the ability to extend an emergency. And even then, the time period for an emergency ought to be capped — no more semi-permanent emergencies of the sort that are still lingering on the books from as far back as the late 1970s. If a crisis becomes a nonemergency still requiring legislative action, Congress can address it the best way it knows how — by passing a bill.

The current standoff also shows that the law must be clarified to explain that being denied congressional funds toward achieving a policy goal is not, in fact, grounds for declaring an emergency.

It is clear, at least to me, that the president’s ability to declare a national emergency that will never end on his sole authority for any reason he sees fit is an affront to our constitutional system and to the rule of law. Regardless of what motivated those who enacted the National Emergencies Act in the first place they clearly did not go far enough. It is long past time to remedy that. It’s already taken 40 years too long.

At the Chicago Tribune Dahlene Glanton makes a similar point to the one I did about the Chicago mayoral primaries:

Voters on the South and West sides overwhelmingly supported Willie Wilson, a black self-made millionaire who never had a real chance of winning citywide support. But Wilson won 14 predominantly African-American wards.

Here’s the bottom line: In a race that drew only 34 percent of the registered voters to the polls, white people in Chicago decided that it was time to have an African-American female mayor. That has never happened in our city.

In other words Chicago’s black voters cast their votes for the real non-establishment candidate, Willie Wilson. Chicago’s white voters cast their votes for better known but not-quite-so-anti-establishment candidates. Who happened to be black.

That’s quite a change from the “Council Wars” Harold Washington days.

But it also is a warning shot across the bow for Democratic leaders. Take note!