In a piece at the Star-Tribune Fareed Zakharia remarks on what apparently was a pretty lugubrious meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos:

The leaders of several smaller countries (all of whom insisted on staying off the record) described the world as adrift and lacking in any collective purpose, with only voices about narrow self-interest and conflict being heard. “When the Americans are engaged, we have a sense of direction,” one of them said to me. “We might disagree on some points, but at least there is a larger conversation, some efforts at cooperation. Now the only energy is negative — worries about retreat, trade wars. That’s not a world in which it is easy for us to move forward. We are all stuck.”

This, then, is the post-American world. Not one marked by Chinese dominance or Asian arrogance. Not an outright anti-American one, but in fact, one in which many yearn for a greater U.S. presence. One in which countries are freelancing, narrowly pursuing their own interests, and hoping that the framework of international order remains reasonably stable. But with no one actively shoring up the international system, the great question remains: In a world without leaders, will that system over time weaken and eventually crumble?

Once again, the irony seems to be lost on Mr. Zakharia. Can you think of any example over the period of the last 25 years in which the world has followed the lead of the United States on anything? I can’t. To my eye for European countries the U. S. has mostly served as a foil and now it’s not even that.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has divided the world into two camps: enemies and friends. Enemies are to be opposed or subverted with economic, diplomatic, and military power. Friends are weak and passive. The great exception to that strategy is frenemy China. China won’t let itself be weak and passive but it also is not being opposed. There’s just too much good money to be made from cozying up to it.

We are seeing the fullness of the strategy of infantilizing your friends. At first it was okay. Then they became like a bunch of rebellious teenages—openly defiant but still happy for three squares and a roof over their heads. Now they’re like a group of seven year olds on a rainy day.

I also wonder how a man who unquestionably thinks of himself as a winner will deal with what certainly seems to be a defeat? That regardless of how the government shutdown was resolved it would have been portrayed as a defeat for Trump is irrelevant. At this point it is a defeat. I suspect we haven’t heard the end of Trump’s wall. As George Santayana said, only the dead have seen the end of war.

The entire notion of a government shutdown is an artifact, a political strategy. Without omnibus spending bills or continuing resolutions there would be no government shutdowns. We should amend the Constitution to prohibit omnibus spending bills or continuing resolutions and to mandate single-subject bills written in plain language. Anything else is a formula for corruption.

I wonder if the dreadful irony of people celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday by judging people based on the color of their skin rather than the content of their character is lost on people? And we’ve had an awful progress in humor over the years. First, irony became the only recognized form of humor. Now we’re incapable of recognizing irony and humor is virtually being driven away.

There’s an old story about a comic who tells a friend that he’s started seeing a psychiatrist. On their first appointment the psychiatrist tells him to lie down on the couch and tell him what’s bothering him. The friend asks “Did it do you any good?” The comic responds “I haven’t been able to get another appointment since. He’s doing my act in Philadelphia.”

Inspired by this analysis at MarketWatch from Greg Leiserson on the implications of a wealth tax in the United States, I thought I would make a few remarks.

First, as I noted previously, any notion that a wealth tax would only fall on the top .1% of those who hold wealth is whistling past a graveyard. If such a tax were constitutional and were enacted, it would quickly be extended to the top 1% (40% of wealth) and then to the top 5% (65% of wealth).

Second, we already have a wealth tax in the United States at the state and local level. It’s called the “property tax”. In most states and localities of which I’m aware it is regressive and unfair.

Third, although there would be a serious political battle over whether to impose such a tax the real donnybrook would be over what would be included as wealth and how its value would be determined.

Consider the implications. Should the primary residence be included as taxable wealth for the purposes of the tax? How about pensions? If you think the screams about limiting the deductibility of taxes paid to other jurisdictions were bitter, wait until you hear the complaints about those.

The Federal Reserve (PDF) has produced an interesting white paper on the relationship between the increasing level of student loans and the relatively low rate of home ownership among Millennials. Here are their two main findings:

To estimate the effect of the increased student loan debt on homeownership, we tracked student loan and mortgage borrowing for individuals who were between 24 and 32 years old in 2005. Using these data, we constructed a model to estimate the impact of increased student loan borrowing on the likelihood of students becoming homeowners during this period of their lives. We found that a $1,000 increase in student loan debt (accumulated during the prime college-going years and measured in 2014 dollars) causes a 1 to 2 percentage point drop in the homeownership rate for student loan borrowers during their late 20s and early 30s. Our estimates suggest that student loan debt can be a meaningful barrier preventing young adults from owning a home.

and

According to our calculations, the increase in student loan debt between 2005 and 2014 reduced the homeownership rate among young adults by 2 percentage points. The homeownership rate for this group fell 9 percentage points over this period (figure 2), implying that a little over 20 percent of the overall decline in homeownership among the young can be attributed to the rise in student loan debt. This represents over 400,000 young individuals who would have owned a home in 2014 had it not been for the rise in debt.

Let’s be very clear about this. Present policy constitutes a transfer from present homeowners, builders, people who work in the construction trades, and retailers to people who work in education and landlords. In addition since educational loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy it also constitutes a subsidy to bankers and financiers and increasing concentration of wealth.

In my opinion in the absence of policies encouraging the formation of more jobs that require college education that is not a prudent policy, increasing deadweight loss. Policies targeted at incrasing subsidies to higher education have the same flaws.

In her weekly Wall Street Journal column Peggy Noonan deplores the absence of the State of the Union message:

Nancy Pelosi’s original excuse for disinviting Mr. Trump, security concerns, was lame and disingenuous, and being obviously those things it was also aggressive.

And all because she didn’t want to sit behind him and stare at his hair. She didn’t want to sit through an hour of listening to him while looking at the back of his head, which is what speakers do. If the speech had taken place as usual, Mr. Trump, being Mr. Trump, likely would have used the moment to put her on the spot—making some plea for agreement, having his Republicans jump to their feet in applause, turning around, pausing, daring her not to nod to his good-faith idea.

That would have been rude. He is rude. And now he has been punished. No speech! I’m not sure we fully appreciate that for a speaker of the House to tell a president of the United States that he is not welcome to make a State of the Union address is a shocking violation of norms. And it will lead to nothing good. A new precedent will have been set: You can disinvite a president if you hate him. And the future won’t be short of hate.

I’m hearing a lot of “good riddance” about the speech, but that’s shortsighted and historically ignorant. Yes, the event has devolved into kabuki in which stupid applause lines prompt rote cheering. Yes, it’s too often a laundry list. The language has become phony as it attempts to be elevated: “Let us follow those better angels.” My urging to speech-givers has been to hold the let-us. Plain, straight and honest is the way to go, and if you have a little wit that won’t hurt either.

What’s being overlooked is that the speech has a high policy purpose. It’s not a celebration of the imperial presidency. In fact, it puts the president on the spot. The Founders were not stupid and knew what they were doing when, in the Constitution, they instructed the chief executive to report to Congress on the condition the country is in.

The speech is a public acknowledgment that America is both a democracy and a republic. Somehow we’re never reminded. But that’s the chief executive going down the street to Congress’s house, asking to enter, and trying his best to persuade that coequal branch as the judiciary looks on.

The fact of the speech forces a White House to concentrate on what it thinks. Suddenly it must determine and put into words its priorities for the coming year. Suddenly it has a deadline. Suddenly it has to take its own sentiments seriously. The speech forces the president to decide, to focus, and not to take shelter in the day-to-day and whatever crisis just came over the transom.

The president is forced to take stock. He must state with at least some measure of credibility that “the State of the Union is . . .” Is what?

Harry Truman in 1949 was plain, unadorned: The state of the union is “good.” Gerald Ford in 1975 was blunt to the point of downcast: “The State of the Union is not good”—too many people out of work, inflation too high. Ronald Reagan in 1985 congratulated the American people for producing “a nation renewed, stronger, freer, and more secure than before.” George H.W. Bush in 1992 didn’t characterize the historical era but an event: “I am not sure we’ve absorbed the full impact, the full import of what happened. But communism died this year. . . . By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” Woodrow Wilson in December 1913: “The country, I am thankful to say, is at peace with all the world.” For Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1945, the subject was the war: “Everything we are and have is at stake. Everything we are, and have, will be given.”

It matters what they say! Not only to the moment but to history.

The problem with her column is that it is nearly self-refuting. For example these:

My friend Jeremy Shane, who worked in the George H.W. Bush administration, speaks of the thrill of the door’s opening. “It was hard not to get goose bumps when the sergeant-at-arms bangs on the floor and announces, ‘Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!’ ” And modest Landon Parvin, one of the great speechwriters of our era, remembers watching the speech as a child. “When I was growing up, State of the Unions were special occasions, like the queen opening Parliament and giving her speech. They were, in effect, occasions of state.”

are examples of how the SOTU instantiates the imperial presidency. All of her examples of memorable moments from SOTUs of old are more than 30 years in the past. She is, in effect, making a strawman argument, comparing what has been in the past to what would inevitably be today.

Every State of the Union of the last 30 years has been a banal, meaningless laundry list. The SOTU has devolved into nothing more than imperial flourishes and a banal, meaningless laundry list, full of trial balloons that even the president is unwilling to fight for.

The SOTU should be consigned to the past. If we were going to have a SOTU for the 21st century it would not be written—that’s just so 19th century. And it wouldn’t be a televised live speech—those are relics of the 1950s. It would be a multi-media spectacle, largely visual in nature, filled with charts and graphs and animations. That would be amusing but it’s not something we need.

I have said before that the reason (singular) that Ted Kennedy was in the Senate was to prevent a wealth tax from being brought up. Presumably, some found that cryptic. Now I have a bit of corroborrating evidence for my claim. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who presently holds the seat previously occupied by the late Sen. Kennedy, has broached the subject of a wealth tax. From Jared Bernstein in the Washington Post:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has just introduced a tax idea this country desperately needs: a tax on high-end wealth. It’s an idea that’s well-crafted for our time, one that promises to add fairness to an unfair tax code, raise significant, much-needed revenue and push back on the historically high level of wealth concentration in the United States.

Here’s the plan, which, for the record, is extremely simple to explain, an advantage when it comes to tax policy: Wealth over $50 million would be taxed at 2 percent; wealth over $1 billion would face an extra 1 percent tax. “Wealth” is defined as net worth — the value of assets minus any debts.

That’s it. It is projected that the tax would raise about $2.75 trillion in revenue over 10 years. To get a sense of that magnitude, recall that the Trump tax cuts lost less revenue (just under $2 trillion) than this tax allegedly gains. That’s a lot of tax progressivity pushing back on the highly regressive Trump cuts.

I’m skeptical of the justification for a wealth tax and I question the constitutionality of a wealth tax. The U. S. Constitution empowers the Congress to levy fees and what amount to head taxes but there is a substantial body of legal opinion over the course of the 19th century that suggests that a wealth tax would be unconstitutional. The 16th Amendment legalized a federal income tax but was limited to taxing income.

I’ll make the following predictions about a wealth tax in the U. S. if such a thing is ever enacted into law:

1. It would not be limited to the ultra-wealthy or at least would not remain so. The federal income tax was initially limited to the wealthy. It did not remain so for long.
2. The revenue resulting from a wealth tax would do little to ameliorate income inequality. It would end up being a massive transfer from the wealthy to the merely well-to-do.
3. It would decrease economic growth.
4. It would increase deadweight loss.

My preferences would be to remove the subsidies available to the ultra-wealthy or reinstitute the inheritance tax, curtailing the use of trusts for purposes of intergenerational transfer.

I was going to write a post in reaction to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler’s fact-checking of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks on wages and inequality but I decided that would break my long-standing aversion to criticizing other people’s choices. The people of the Bronx are entitled to elect any tomfool candidate they care to and that’s that.

I did notice that James Joyner’s reaction was that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is another step on a slippery slope of fact-free or even fact-averse politics. I’m not sure that’s what’s happening. I suspect it’s more that in an increasingly visual culture decreasingly able to understand abstract principles or follow logical arguments, that’s what you get. You can’t even discuss morality because there’s just no common ground. Are they deontological or teleological thinkers? I think neither. The standard of morality is whatever seems right to them.

The best explanation of the English rationale for Brexit that I have seen which also explains why the Scots, for example, oppose it, comes from John Lloyd and is published in the Irish Times. Here’s his conclusion:

England – Britain – voted Brexit not because its citizens regretted the loss of empire, thought it could be re-assembled, believed that the commonwealth could take its place or saw the EU as a sadomasochistic monster. They wished to be governed by a parliament and an administration that they understand, and on which they have a direct influence through their vote.

Nor were their impulses those of 1960s racists. Lisa Nandy, the Labour MP for Wigan and a remainer, wrote in the New York Review of Books that her “leave-voting constituents have been called stupid, racist little Englanders. The truth is nothing of the sort . . . when people were asked if they wanted to leave the EU, it was an opportunity to push back against one of the most vivid symbols of a political system that is faceless, unresponsive and unaccountable, where decisions are made by people hundreds of miles away”.

England – Britain – has not gone mad. The chaotic scenes in parliament and the thousands of arguments up and down the country bear witness to a deeply democratic and civic culture. Those who prefer politics to be the smooth management of the people by an elite mistake it for dementia.

Read the whole thing. What many including Americans, Brits, and Germans fail to understand is that government in England is less centralized than in Germany but more centralized than in the United States. The English want to preserve their way of doing things in the face of opposition from the French and Germans for whom highly centralized government is the natural order of things.

The U. S. is a great outlier. What I fail to understand is the ardor of Americans to impose European-style centralization on the United States. Most of those making that argument would have little problem moving to France or Germany. Why don’t they? My only only supposition is that there must be a buck in their staying here.