One of Illinois Gov. Pritzker’s proxies, Quentin Fulkes, has taken to the pages of the Chicago Tribune with an op-ed supporting the governor’s signature agenda item, a graduated income tax for Illinois:

Pritzker’s proposed budget would bring desperately needed stability and revenue to our state, while also increasing much-needed funding for our education system, from preschools to universities — an investment in our children’s futures.

While this balanced budget is an important first step in a multiyear approach to fix the damage done by the devastating policies of the Rauner administration, Illinois can only improve so much with our current tax structure. The regressive tax structure Illinois currently has cannot fix the challenges we still face.

That’s why it is time for Illinois to implement a fair tax.

A graduated income tax will help unburden millions of middle- and working-class families who have disproportionately shouldered the tax burden of our current system for too long. A fair tax will also help eliminate the structural deficit that has dragged this state down for the past two decades, a structural deficit that will only get worse if we continue to stand idly by.

Illinois’s state constitution mandates a flat income tax. Changing that will require a constitutional amendment. My present question is the same as the one I had before the election: how many committed votes does the governor have in favor of amending the state’s constitution? This not a surprise. It was a key plank in the platform on which Mr. Pritzker ran. Without committed votes in both houses of the legislature, he’s just blowing smoke.

Does he have any? Frankly, this puzzles me. Who is the intended audience of this op-ed? Does the governor really think that Illinoisans will pressure their elected representatives to vote for a constitutional amendment? Is the legislature the intended audience? Aren’t there better forums for that than a Trib op-ed?

Mohamed El-Erian’s most recent offering at Project Syndicate is heretical:

Over the years, conventional wisdom has stressed that the best option is to maintain an approach focused on cooperative resolution. This implies negotiations that are best conducted free of actual or threatened punishment such as tariff imposition, and it favors reliance on the rules-based framework established by existing multilateral institutions.

The other approach is that adopted by the US President Donald Trump’s administration. Noting that past efforts to reverse the growth of non-tariff barriers have not worked and will not work, this strategy is more open to the use of tariff penalties to influence behavior modification, and the threat of escalation in response to any and all retaliation by trading partners.

First widely dismissed as an unfortunate policy pivot, more people now are beginning to wonder whether the new US approach – provided it’s not used repeatedly – could in fact serve as a beneficial disruption that helps reset international trade relationships and place them on a firmer footing. It’s a view that is underpinned by evidence (the shift from retaliation to resolution by such countries as Canada, South Korea, and Mexico) and the prospect that, due to its limited options, China will have no choice but to do the same by addressing some of its non-tariff barriers.

Let the auto-da-fé commence! I can almost see the stake being erected and smell the torches being lit, hear the crackling of the flames.

There are some things omitted from his post. The old regime of pretended mutual agreement and toothless multilateral institutions worked fine…for our trading partners. For us not so much. They could erect whatever trade barriers they cared to without consequence, distorting international trade in their own favor. They didn’t need to fear retaliation from us or from the multilateral institutions. After all, free trade is better, isn’t it?

I sometimes think that some of the sources of our government and political problems are the metaphors through which we think about them. In the 19th century nearly everyone was a farmer and, consequently, thinking in terms of agricultural was natural, even inevitable. You prepare the soil, sow the seed, tend the crops, and reap the harvest. It was when people began thinking in terms of machines that problems began to arise because the real world more closely resembles the the vagaries of agriculture than they do building machines. In the real world it is rarely a simple case of buying more components to produce more outputs. Look at the policies and organizations assembled from the 1930s through the 1950s. They are very mechanical and deterministic and very few of the assumptions that were made in constructing them have held true.

In a period of about a century our politics has gone from the retail politics of canvassing, persuading, and encouraging to television (broadcast) to Facebook. You enroll followers. You unfriend those you don’t want. Within the cozy walled garden of your Facebook page you’re talking to people who agree with you which encourages escalation. Continuous feedback is built into the system (it’s one of the factors that keeps you coming back).

None of that has anything to do with the real world. It gives you no insight into what will actually work—just what your followers like. Importantly, it actually conceals from you that there are other people out there who have beliefs and convictions of their own that may well be diametrically proposed to yours and those of your followers.

Like it or not we’re entering a Facebook world. Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

Illinois is carrying out an interesting experiment. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Low-wage workers across Illinois will ring in 2020 with a $1-per-hour raise after Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Tuesday signed a bill that sets the state’s minimum wage on a path to reach $15 per hour by 2025.

Pritzker signed the bill into law Tuesday morning during a ceremony at the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield, making Illinois among the first states to approve a minimum wage of $15 per hour, a goal set by the labor-backed Fight for $15 movement. California will hit that level in 2022, Massachusetts in 2023 and New Jersey in 2024. New York’s minimum wage eventually will reach $15 per hour statewide through a series of increases tied to inflation.

The question is which group will flee Illinois faster, low-wage workers because they can’t get jobs or the more prosperous because they’re paying higher taxes? If employment is downwards inelastic, as many proponents of higher minimum wages seem to assume, the state is due to get a windfall of higher tax revenue from more income tax from the workers being paid a higher wage and from increased sales due to increased personal consumption.

My money would be on population and tax revenues continuing to decline.

It’s not difficult to conclude what the countries of Central America need most from this litany of their problems from the editors of the New York Times:

Plagued by corruption, violence and gang terror, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras need stronger and more honest judges and police officers, better schools and economic development. Elites control much of the land and avoid taxes, even at some of the lowest tax rates in Latin America. Bribery is rampant, and too often leaders lack the interest, competence or will to manage such problems.

Over the years, the United States has contributed to instability by supporting autocrats in civil wars and tolerating corruption that has bred criminality. In 2017, Washington recognized the results of the Honduran presidential election days after the Organization of American States called for new elections because of voting irregularities.

The United States has also invested in Latin America for decades to promote democracy and economic and social development. But the Trump administration has begun to place “more emphasis on preventing illegal immigration, combating transnational crime and generating export and investment opportunities for U.S. businesses,” according to a report last month by the Congressional Research Service, which does nonpartisan research for Congress.

They could use better government. So could we.

Left unsaid is that mass immigration promotes social unrest. That, after all, was one of the messages of the movie, Roma, which garnered several Academy Awards this year from the tone-deaf Academy. I also agree that we should provide more aid to the countries of Central America.

The question is what sort of aid would be most effective? Small-scale and local—not something at which the United States federal government excels. NGOs, particularly faith-based NGOs, are better at it than federal aid workers albeit not as well paid. Micro-loans. There are policies we could change. For example, we could reduce or eliminate our own agricultural subsidies and negotiate mutual reductions in trade barriers between the U. S. and the countries of Central America.

And we could stop bolstering their militaries. They are predominantly inwards-facing.

Fred Hiatt expresses shock in his Washington Post column that Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman did not rush to the defense of his fellow-Muslims, the Uighurs being “re-educated” by the Chinese:

China is a leading oppressor of Muslims, so it should come as no surprise that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia — the kingdom that views itself as defender of the Islamic faith — would visit Beijing to deliver a stern rebuke.

After all, China has penned an estimated 1 million Muslims into concentration camps in western China. It has sent ethnic Han Chinese to live with Muslim families and report on anyone who refuses to eat pork or shave his beard. It is wrenching children from parents to reprogram them away from their faith and culture in mass orphanages.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must have had a lot to say when he met Chinese President Xi Jinping late last week.

Wait, what’s that you say? The prince had nothing to say on behalf of China’s Muslims? In fact, he defended what China calls an effort to fight extremism?

Allow me to explain. For MBS Islam is a tribal religion. His tribe is, first, Saudis, then other Arabs. That Saudis barely consider other Arabs Arabs at all is hardly a state secret. How much farther down in the scale are the Uighurs or Turks? How much farther down are we? In addition the Turks are the Saudis nearby geopolitical foes. After all the last caliph was a Turk.

In his latest New York Times column David Leonhardt is on the warpath against the ultra-rich, the top .01% of income earners:

Have upper-middle-class Americans been winners in the modern economy — or victims? That question has been the subject of a debate recently among economists, writers and others.

On one side are people who argue that the bourgeois professional class — essentially, households with incomes in the low-to-mid six figures but without major wealth — is not so different from the middle class and poor. All of these groups are grappling with slow-growing incomes, high medical costs, student debt and so on.

The only real winners in today’s economy are at the very top, according to this side of the debate. When Bernie Sanders talks about “the greed of billionaires” or Thomas Piketty writes about capital accumulation, they are making a version of this case.

His proposed solution, not surprisingly, is tax increases.

The post is dominated by an eye-catching graphic, illustrating the enormous degree by which the incomes relative to GDP of the top .01% of income earners have outstripped the rest of us. It’s too big to show here; I encourage you to use the link above to see it because the rest of my remarks relate to it. A number of conclusions can be drawn from it of which only the most facile is that the ultra-rich are too rich.

The first of these additional conclusions is that there are two economies: the financial economy, the economy of money, and the real economy, the economy of goods and services. Most, nearly all, of the changes in our economy over the last 50 years are due to the divorce between the financial economy and the real one. A little noodling for yourself will show you that’s the case.

The second is that the incomes of all groups is increasing.

The third is that the more closely your income is tethered to the real economy, the more slowly your income has grown. Since the ultra-wealthy leave most of their gargantuan incomes within the financial system, it is able to grow practically without limit, leaving everyone else behind.

The fourth requires a little more insight and understanding. Look at line depicting the incomes of the top 90-99% of income earners. It is tracking per capita GDP very closely, so closely, indeed, that one might be tempted to think it is an artifact. Which it is.

What our system actually does is tax the top income earners in order to subsidize the professional class. That is why merely increasing marginal tax rates on the top income earners will accomplish very little. It will be used to increase the subsidies paid to the professional class which will go back into the financial economy and around and around.

What policy really needs to accomplish is to increase how much is being produced by the real economy. That alone will result in increasing the incomes of those who aren’t in the top 10% of income earners and it requires a much more subtle strategy. We need to de-emphasize college educations, encourage the top .01% to invest their trillions in the real domestic economy, discourage them from leaving those trillions in the financial economy, import less, refocus regulation so as not to discourage real domestic production, and hold the line on the subsidies being doled out to the professional class. That in turn will require a careful, painstaking redefinition of capital gains.

My bet is that we won’t do that but will merely use the meat-axe approach of increasing marginal tax rates and in ten years the same graph will look much, much worse. And more politicians will enter the top .01% of income earners.

The Chicago Tribune quotes David Axelrod about Tuesday’s election in Chicago:

“I don’t think there’s any mathematical way, looking at the field and the number of candidates, that there wouldn’t be a runoff,” political strategist David Axelrod told the Tribune last week. Underscoring the slim possibility of a final decision Tuesday night, he said: “I mean, meteorologically there’s a way to get hit by lightning, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

Axelrod, the architect of former President Barack Obama’s political rise, said he thinks Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle likely will secure one of the two runoff spots with the backing of two powerful labor groups: the Chicago Teachers Union and Service Employees Union International. He recognizes, too, that she’s been politically damaged during the campaign, without mentioning her connections to 14th Ward Ald. Edward Burke, whom federal prosecutors last month charged with attempted extortion as part of a public corruption investigation at City Hall.

“The thing about this race, all the margins and polling you’ve seen, no outcome would be surprising other than Neal Sales-Griffin being in the runoff,” he said of the low-key tech entrepreneur who’s been a virtual ghost in the campaign. Preckwinkle “has the best chance to get in the runoff,” said Axelrod, who now runs the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. He says former U.S. Commerce Secretary Bill Daley has a shot, as does Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, ex-federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot, businessman Willie Wilson and public policy consultant Amara Enyia.

I’ve already said that I don’t know what to do on Tuesday. I’m not nuts about any of the alternatives. Contrary to what some analysts have said I think that the only candidate who has a chance of avoiding a runoff is Bill Daley. If there’s a runoff between Toni Preckwinkle and Bill Daley I really won’t know what to do. I don’t want to leave my house and neighborhood and I can’t take it with me.

The kernel of Andrew A. Michta’s post at The American Interest on the sources of the decline of the West are in these two and a half paragraphs:

The re-engineering of the Western cultural narrative over the past 50 years, first in our educational systems and media, and now within politics writ large, has effectively deconstructed the foundations of our shared Transatlantic civilization. In America—and increasingly also in Europe—colleges and universities produce cohorts of indoctrinated political activists with little or no knowledge of the foundational texts of our political tradition, the greatest works of Western literature, or the most enduring political debates that have shaped the Western democratic tradition. That heritage carried the West to victory through cataclysmic world wars and laid the foundations for the seven decades of peace and prosperity that followed.

Today the very bedrock of the Western political tradition is under assault. In addition, for at least three decades immigration policies across the West have shifted away from acculturating newcomers to the now regnant multiculturalist ideology, which has resulted in unintegrated “suspended communities.” In the process, in a growing number of democracies the larger national identity, which was historically tied to the overarching Western heritage, has been subsumed under ethnic and religious group identities. We are not quite there yet, but once the sense of belonging to a larger shared Western cultural community has been abolished, we will have reached the tipping point: The Transatlantic alliance that has preserved, protected, and promoted democracy since 1945 will be effectively undone, regardless of whether or not NATO continues to exist.

The cultural unmooring of the West that is now well underway is the result of more than a misguided immigration policy; rather, it flows from the larger ideological transformation of America and Europe. It is not my purpose here to recount the number of times I have encountered undergraduate students who have never read The Federalist Papers or have no idea why the Framers insisted on divided government as the backbone of our political system. Suffice it to say that members of the rising generation increasingly see democracy as either so abstract a concept that it seems to have little direct connection to their experiences or as obstacle to the necessary wholesale transformation, or even abolition, of our obsolescent political systems.

The sole problem I have with it is that the very concept of “the West”, defined as Europe + the Anglosphere, is, was, and always has been a device for drawing the United States into Europe’s wars and having us pay for their defense so they can devote their resources to domestic spending. If we and the Europeans are genuinely worried about Russian aggression, why do the European countries spend 2% or less of their GDPs (Germany 1.2%; United Kingdom 1.8%; Italy 1.5%; France 2.3%) on defense while we spend 3.5%-4% of ours? (Depending on who you ask.) The German military’s rifles don’t even fire reliably. Everything in the Germans’ conduct suggests they think there is no threat. Why does NATO matter any more?

In my view the real message here is that culture matters and the reality is that while U. S. culture is derived from Europe’s it began to deviate from Europe’s half a millennium ago and we’re growing farther away from them every day.