The second piece I want to remark on is Shira Ovide’s recent Bloomberg piece on developments at Amazon:

Investors haven’t paid a princely sum for Amazon stock all these years to have profits improve but revenue growth slow sharply. Investors waited for plumper profits for years. Now that the company has started to deliver, investors may be disappointed that some of that amazing growth has leeched away.

That Amazon would be able to produce the sort of growth that would justify its outlandish stock price has always been fantastical. Amazon began as an IPO looking around for a business model and prospered as that for longer than anyone can possibly have imagined. Now it has a business model, mostly based on retail services. We’ll see whether that satisfies its investors.

This morning I’m going to comment on two pieces at Bloomberg each of which is summed up handily in a single paragraph. The first is Tyler Cowen’s op-ed in which he expresses his skepticism about the Democratic presidential candidates’ plans to increase marginal tax rates on the wealthiest or impose a wealth tax:

Anyone promoting a wealth tax is in essence saying that there aren’t many ways of improving society within current resource constraints. That is a brand of pessimism which Americans voters have not often rewarded.

Let me summarize my views:

1. An extremely unequal America in which the top 10% have much more and get better everything than the rest of the people does not comport with my idea of the U. S. I’d like to be living in.
2. Failing to control immigration will inevitably promote greater inequality. People without educations, marketable skills, or a command of the English language will always be at a grave disadvantage. If you disagree with that assessment, please state what you plan to change to make it otherwise because that’s certainly the case now.
3. The present emphasis on higher education is a flop. It only applies to a minority of the American people, we aren’t producing enough jobs that require a college education to make it worthwhile, and India produces a lot of people with bachelors and masters degrees, too.
4. The only economy that will provide decent livings for most Americans is one that engages in more primary production and manufacturing.

It may be that the candidates are sincere in their views. I doubt it but it’s possible. I think it’s far more likely that the higher income taxes and wealth taxes they’re promising will die with the campaign or that they won’t accomplish the objectives they claim for them. But I’m willing to give them a chance. That’s why I say they should lay out their plans in detail. I think that these promises will follow the PPACA model: an enormous, complicated piece of legislation with lots of loopholes for specific groups whose shortcomings will be blamed on the compromises they needed to get Republican support that never materialized.

As I have tried, probably unsuccessfully, to explain from time to time I do believe that human action plays a role in global climate change and I think it’s possible even likely that greenhouses gases are implicated. I am, however, highly skeptical that the plans that have been put forward to deal with the situation will actually accomplish what their proponents think they will, largely due to assumptions of linearity which just won’t pan out.

However, for those of you who are interested I’d like to show you a couple of graphs that you may find eye-opening or at least interesting. The first illustrates U. S. manufacturing jobs:

and the second illustrates carbon emissions:

Look at the year 2001. That was the year that China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. If you have any doubts about the impact of that event not only on U. S. manufacturing but on carbon emissions, that should allay them.

Also, look at how little U. S. emissions changed.

I’m not going to go through the complicated analysis and number-crunching that would be required to prove it but to my eye it’s obvious that if we really wanted to reduce global carbon emissions we should be repatriating manufacturing jobs from China to the U. S. That would reduce carbon emissions more and faster than any foreseeable carbon tax or adoption of wind and solar power.

My favorite television spot for a Chicago mayoral candidate has got to be one of the spots for Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board. I’d embed it but it doesn’t appear to be available on Youtube which looks like an un-media savvy thing to me.

In the spot several earnest-sounding ordinary Chicago types make glowing statements about Board President Preckwinkle and she chimes in with modest support for their praise. One of them chortles “She was a CPS teacher!” and BP Preckwinkle adds “So I believe in more teachers rather than more jails.”

I guess that’s fine if you don’t examine it too closely but isn’t the more apt comparison between teachers and police officers rather than teachers and jails? I mean why do you need police officers to arrest people if you don’t plan on jailing them? If she’s actually running against adding police officers, it would certainly distinguish her campaign—everyone else is running on adding police officers. (Just for the record Chicago already has the highest number of police officers per 100K population of any major U. S. city and I know of no empirical evidence that more police officers reduces the incidence of crime. Indeed, the only pseudo-controlled study of which I’m aware found no correlation.)

So, what do you do if you lay off police officers, hire teachers, and you come home at night to find your apartment ransacked by burglars? Call a teacher? The entire thing is goofy.

My primary reaction to Farhad Manjoo’s latest New York Times column:

It’s the cuts at BuzzFeed that sting most. You may regard the site as a purveyor of silly listicles and inane quizzes. I think of it as a relentlessly experimental innovator: It’s the site that gave us The Dress and published The Dossier, a company that pushed the rest of the industry to regard the digital world with seriousness and rigor.

More than anyone else in media, BuzzFeed’s founder, Jonah Peretti, bet on symbioses with the tech platforms. He understood that the tech giants would keep getting bigger, but to him that was a feature, not a bug. By creating content that hooked into their algorithms, he imagined BuzzFeed getting bigger — and making money — along with them.

At the least, the layoffs suggest the tragic folly of Mr. Peretti’s thinking. Google and Facebook have no economic incentive for symbiosis; everything BuzzFeed can do for them can also be done by the online hordes who’ll make content without pay.

So where does that leave media? Bereft.

in which he leaps to the defense of Buzzfeed is that it shakes any confidence I might have had in our present naturalization process.

There is no right to earn a living as an opinion writer. If there is one thing that has been demonstrated over the period of the last 15 years it is that 99.999% of opinion writing isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on. I would go farther and suggest that paid opinion writing is an artifact of the giant media conglomerates he criticizes. Ben Franklin wrote a lot of opinion but he wasn’t paid for it. He was a professional printer and an amateur opinion writer. He did his opinion writing while waiting for a paying job to come in.

Vibrant, diverse, interesting, high quality opinion writing predates the major media outlets and will survive after they’re gone. The biggest threats to quality opinion writing aren’t layoffs at Buzzfeed. The larger threats are illiteracy and loss of attention span.

The connecting thread that I see uniting many of this morning’s opinion pieces and our politics more generally is a general reluctance for the authors to say what they actually mean. So, for example, in Max Boot’s Washington Post plea for the U. S. to continue its military activity in Afghanistan and Syria, here’s what he says:

Advocates of retreat will argue that an open-ended deployment is not sustainable. But that’s not true. U.S. troops are volunteers. As long as they aren’t taking many casualties, the public isn’t opposed to their deployment. U.S. forces have suffered six fatalities in Syria and 66 in Afghanistan since 2015 — an average of 18 a year. Those losses are tragic, but in 2017 the U.S. military lost 80 service personnel in training accidents. Training is now four times deadlier for U.S. forces than combat. Nor are these conflicts financially ruinous: The war in Afghanistan accounts for less than 10 percent of the defense budget. If Trump chooses to pull out, it will be his choice. Unlike Richard Nixon in Vietnam, he will not have been compelled to exit by public pressure. There are no antiwar protests in the streets.

These kinds of deployments are invariably lengthy and frustrating. Think of our Indian Wars, which lasted roughly 300 years (circa 1600-1890), or the British deployment on the North West Frontier (today’s Pakistan-Afghanistan border), which lasted 100 years (1840s-1940s). U.S. troops are not undertaking a conventional combat assignment. They are policing the frontiers of the Pax Americana. Just as the police aren’t trying to eliminate crime, so troops are not trying to eliminate terrorism but, instead, to keep it below a critical threshold that threatens the United States and our allies. This isn’t as satisfactory as pursuing unconditional surrender, but, as we may discover before long, it beats the alternative.

but what he rather clearly means is that withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria threatens the American imperium that he wants. The European settlers believed they had a right to the land. That’s why the “Indian Wars” persisted. So did the British with respect to the North West Frontier. Conviction of a right to the land is a necessary component of such protracted campaigns.

The question I would ask is that, if the proponents of invading Afghanistan had stated the intention of staying and fighting there forever, would we have invaded at all? I do not think we would have and, in particular, I think that Sen. Obama would not have been bamboozled into thinking that if we just put a few more troops there the situation in Afghanistan could have been readily resolved and we would not have lost thousands of our young men and women and degraded our equipment as we have. That will result in our spending billions that would not otherwise have been spent to restore our military readiness.

I would add that, contrary to Mr. Boot’s implication, I do not believe that most American soldiers are soulless mercentaries. I think that many if not most believe that they’re defending their country and the people they love back home. I do not think they’re fighting for American empire. Good luck on your recruiting goals with that sales pitch.

California Sen. Kamala Harris is presently, apparently, backpedaling from her remarks about dumping the entire health care insurance industry, to be replaced by a single-payer system. I thought that was one of the major benefits of a single-payer system and its main source of funding. Was I wrong? She should be proud of it.

What’s the complete, unvarnished plan for reducing carbon emissions to the level you say is necessary for survival? How much of New York’s sea coast will be obscured by the offshore windmills that will be required to accomplish Gov. Cuomo’s objective of reducing carbon emissions via wind power? What’s your plan for improving the lives of the tens of millions of Americans who will never realize the benefit of higher education while bringing in tens of millions of unskilled workers to compete with them? How do you plan to raise the effective tax level on the highest income earners? Or tax their wealth?

The key point here is that the American people should be allowed to make their decisions based on information as complete as possible rather than on sugar-coated rosy scenarios. I think the people can handle the truth. It’s the politicians who can’t.

At what point does the Mueller investigation become a self-licking lollipop? I don’t doubt that the various Trump Administration and campaign officials lied to the FBI. I think they’re a bunch of creeps and lowlifes who are incapable of uttering a simple declarative sentence without lying. But based on my understanding every single crime with which they have been charged emerged from the investigation, i.e. would not have occurred but for the investigation.

I have been steadfast in my determination to let the Mueller investigation run its course and remain so but I find the nature of the crimes that are being prosecuted unsettling.

Tribune editorial board member Kristen McQueary remarks on the departure of people with the means to do so from Illinois:

Pritzker and a Democrat-led House and Senate plan to introduce a graduated income tax proposal that would, at least initially, hit upper-income earners in Illinois. Candidates for Chicago mayor, including Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, have proposed a new tax on million-dollar property transactions. Aldermanic candidates, including Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, have floated the idea of a separate city income tax for wealthy Chicagoans. And mayoral candidate Bill Daley is open to a tax on commuters who live outside the city but work in Chicago.

Reality check: The number of residents fleeing Illinois for other states jumped to 93,704 in 2014 from 68,204 the previous year. It increased in 2015 to 106,544, and in 2016 to 109,941. More exodus in 2017 of 114,779 and last year, another 114,154.

Who do you think is leaving Illinois? For the most part, it’s people who have the means to do so.

Which brings us to the broader problem: How did we get to a place where wealth, success and entrepreneurship are shame-worthy? And where giving back by these same individuals is largely ignored?

Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts often becomes folly for the income-equality crowd. Yes, he’s a rich guy. Yet due to his generosity, thousands of kids on the South Side can enjoy a new indoor sports center in Pullman. Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, who knows the value of kids playing sports, reached out to Ricketts to invest in the struggling Pullman neighborhood. Ricketts enlisted Cubs Charities to donate $500,000 to the Pullman Community Center, a state-of-the-art indoor recreational complex that opened in November in Beale’s ward. Other sponsors stepped up too.

This is just one of many, many examples of high-income earners giving back. You don’t hear about it enough, though.

“I am more interested in what’s in your heart than your wallet,” Beale said of his efforts to raise private money for the center. “I believe this was in (Ricketts’) heart. He wants the Cubs to be a Chicago team, not just a North Side team.”

Left-leaning politicians bash people like Ricketts and want to tax them more to solve budget problems. But remember: Ricketts didn’t vote on those unbalanced budgets, year after year. He didn’t accumulate mountains of debt. He didn’t vote to underfund worker pensions. He didn’t vote to borrow more money instead of cut spending.

The Democrats in Chicago and Springfield did that. So when you hear the wealth-bashing, make no mistake who’s really responsible for the budget mess we’re in. It isn’t the Ricketts family.

In fairness I don’t think that Gov. Pritzker, Board President Preckwinkle, or Ald. Dowell actually think that wealth, success, or entrepeneurship are shameworthy. They have big plans, they need money to realize them, and, well, they want to tax the rich for precisely the same reason that Willie Sutton is said to have robbed banks: it’s where the money is. That a declining population, particularly a declining population of the rich, means it will be that much more difficult for the hardy few or us who remain to fund their dreams or even service the debt they’re incurring does not seem to occur to them or, if it does occur to them, to matter.

Here are my suggestions for a Chicago film festival:

Ice Station Zebra
Nanook of the North
The Big Chill
The Thing
2012
Snowpiercer
Chilly Dogs

For context: “Today’s about as cold as it gets in Chicago”.