Billionaire Democrat J. B. Pritzker has defeated billionaire Republican incumbent Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner in his bid for re-election. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker on Tuesday soundly defeated first-term Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who conceded his re-election bid less than an hour after the polls closed, giving Democrats near total control of Illinois’ state government.

“Voting is an act of optimism that the levers of our Democracy still work,” Pritzker told supporters moments after declaring victory. “You embody that optimism. You light the beacon fire on the hill of history that signals from one generation to another that these are the things that we stand and fight for.”

In conceding defeat, Rauner called for unity after a grueling, bitter race in which the two candidates accused each other of criminal activity. They broke national campaign funding records by tapping their personal fortunes for hundreds of millions of dollars.

“This is a time for us to come together,” Rauner said. “This is a time for us to unite.” The governor called Pritzker before speaking to the crowd at his campaign party and promised a smooth transition, Rauner’s campaign said.

I sincerely wish the governor-elect the best. I am not optimistic. Earlier I characterized the contest as of a governor who couldn’t do anything and a challenger who wouldn’t do anything. I see little reason to change that view.

The reality is that Illinois is completely under the control of Mike Madigan and John Cullerton, Illinois House and Senate leaders. There was never any prospect for compromise between them and Rauner. There will be no need for compromise between them and Gov. Pritzker.

Governor-elect Pritzker based his campaign on two planks: enacting a graduated state income tax in Illinois and an ambitious series of spending initiatives include increases in infrastructure, health care, and education spending, an intriguing choice in a state that can’t pay its bills as it is. Illinois’s constitution mandates a flat state income tax. In the entire course of the campaign not a single reporter asked Mr. Pritzker for a list of Illinois legislators that would commit to amending the constitution. I don’t believe there are any and one of the governor-elect’s signature proposals will die on the vine. Illinois already has the highest sales tax in the nation and one of the highest property taxes. The only place to look for new revenue is the income tax.

I predict that by the end of Gov. Pritzker’s first term another half million Illinoisans will have left Illinois for other states, taking their tax dollars with them. About half of those will be black Chicagoans, sick of violence, rising taxes, and decreasing city services.

As things look now the Democrats have taken the majority of seats in the U. S. House of Representatives. ABC News reports:

President Donald Trump will wake up to a different Washington when Democrats formally take control of the House of Representatives on Jan. 3, as a tectonic shift in power will begin to unleash a succession of new legal and political challenges for his administration.

“I want to look at all the things the president has done that go against the mandates of our Founding Fathers in the Constitution,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who is poised to take control of the powerful House Oversight Committee. “We need accountability, transparency, integrity, and honesty from this Administration.”

Democrats swept to power, having campaigned on the promise of providing a stronger check on the Trump administration. That pledge could initiate bruising legal battles over congressional subpoenas, a stack of demands for documents and testimony from federal agencies — including Trump’s tax returns — and withering investigations into facets of Trump’s personal life, his family business, and his government.

The results have unfolded very much as I have been predicting for months. The Democrats will control the House by 5-10 seats, a narrower majority than the Republican control they will be supplanting. Republicans appear to have netted 2 seats in the Senate.

A number of widely-touted newly emerging Democratic stars failed to secure election including Andrew Gillum in Florida, Beto O’Rourke in Texas, and Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Expect challenges, particularly in Florida and Georgia. They may drag on for years. I also anticipate even more bitter complaints about our present system of representative government. The failure of the “blue wave” to materialize will be blamed on dirty tricks, gerrymandering, and racism. While those are undoubtedly factors, the real cause is that there are genuine differences of opinion.

Democrats and Republicans alike will proclaim victory. It’s already happening with President Trump’s declaring the elections a success. However they paint it winning is better than losing.

Rather than dwelling on the debatable I’d like to focus on what cannot be denied. The Democrats have won the House and picked up some governors’ mansions which will be good for them in 2020. The Republicans strengthened their hold on the Senate.

The new House will have more women in it than any in previous history. It will also be slightly younger than the previous House.

In my opinion advocates will be disappointed with the results. The House and Senate remain firmly under the control of the party leaders, overwhelmingly old and white. More women in the House will make less difference than they might have hoped.

I see no basis whatever for a more businesslike Congress, eager to get to the work of the American people. I’ll be surprised if anything whatever is accomplished over the next two years other than a continuing stream of fruitless investigations.

At Outside the Beltway Doug Mataconis makes his predictions for the midterm elections:

Taking all of that into account, here’s my prediction for the House:

Current makeup of the House:

Republicans — 235 seats
Democrats — 193 seats
Vacant — 7 seats

Makeup of the House after Election Day:

Democrats — 230 seats
Republicans — 205 seats

Net Democratic gain +37 seats

while for the Senate he predicts no net change.

That’s essentially what I’ve been predicting for months now although I think the Republicans will probably do slightly better than he does, gaining a seat in the Senate and losing the House more narrowly than he predicts.

However, as pundits chastened by their own poor predictive performance in 2016 have been saying, anything can happen. Democrats could pick up 60 seats in the House and a half dozen in the Senate; Republicans could pick up several seats in the Senate and hold the House. It depends not just on how many voters show up to vote but whose voters show up and on that the polls may just be flat wrong.

I found this reflection about the “collision” among the interests of people in three different parts of the world by Samir Saran at World Economic Forum very interesting. Here’s a snippet:

For the past seven decades, the world has been moulded by a strong, transatlantic relationship with the US and EU underwriting the terms of peace, stability and economic prosperity.

The success of this order has created its own existential challenge. Its rising beneficiaries in Asia and elsewhere increasingly challenge the validity of these arrangements and the efficacy of rules that have managed global affairs. While the historian John Ikenberry described the liberal world order as a “hub and spoke” model of governance, with the West at its centre, it is now clear that the peripheries of the system are developing wheels and engines of their own.

Indeed, the rise of Asia as a whole is recasting the physical and mental map of the world. Proliferating transnational relationships and new flows of finance, trade, technology, information, energy and labour have created three new strategic geographies which are already escaping the shadow of transatlantic arrangements. They essentially represent the collision of erstwhile political constructs – and their management requires new ideas, nimble institutions and fluid partnerships.

Frankly, I think he’s underestimating the importance that sub-Saharan African countries will have during the coming century pretty drastically. But the article did cause me to think about the role of geography in the unfolding developments in the world.

I’ll leave you with one thought. IMO China’s situation is very precarious. On the one hand its present position in the world depends on a relationship with the U. S. that is at the very least not hostile. By its geography and the network of relationships, built over a century, with European and Asian countries it has cultivated the U. S.’s vigilant and expensive oversight of global trade is completely understandable. Because of its own geography for China to maintain even its own foreign trade completely on its own would be, if not prohibitively expensive, an expense that China would prefer not to bear. Consequently, it must tread lightly or risk its own prosperity.

But treading lightly is increasingly unworkable with its zero sum view of international affairs.

It’s a puzzle.

In a thought-provoking piece at RealClearPolicy Richard V. Reeves and Katherine Guyot propose four policies intended to “help the middle class” along with ways to pay for them. Their four proposals are:

1. A worker tax credit funded by a carbon tax.
2. A tax credit for first-time home buyers unded by eliminating the mortgage interest deduction.
3. Provide paid family leave with a payroll tax.
4. Child savings accounts for college paid for by taxing large inheritances.

While I think they are to be commended for even entertaining the possibility of paying for proposed programs, I wonder what the net effect of their proposals would be? Would they actually help the middle class or would they just transfer money from one portion of the middle class to another?

What struck me about their proposals was that each picked winners and losers. The rich would be winners and the poor losers. Spenders would benefit while savers would lose out. Those with children would benefit at the expense of the childless. College administrator, professors, and lawyers would benefit at the expense of people who wanted to go to college or their parents.

Those are the same policies that have failed over the period of the last 30 years. Here’s a radical proposal. Do more for the middle class by doing less. The most important thing we can do to help the middle class is to create more jobs that pay salaries that enable people to lead middle class lives. That can be done by reducing the subsidies we’re paying to jobs that pay a lot more. Reduce health care costs. Stop subsidizing big banks. Return to the executive compensation rules that prevailed in 1992. Stop subsidizing the stock market. Stop importing skilled workers to replace the workers who are already here.

Above all, use an evidence-based approach to policy-making. Give every transfer program an expiration date to make it easier to abandon programs that aren’t working and replace them with programs that might actually work.

Napoleon Bonaparte famously noted that the only forces that unite human beings are fear and interest.

If your experience is anything like mine, you’re being inundated with political advertising in the form of TV spots, radio spots, newspaper ads, and frank mail. I can only imagine what it’s like in districts that are actually competitive or states with senatorial elections.

The advertisements of Republicans, what few of them I receive here, rely on fear—fear of immigrants, fear of increased taxes, and fear of Democrats unleashed. The advertisements of Democrats rely on both fear and interest. The phrase “they want to take aware your health care” is an appeal to fear while the impressive array of additional services in health care and education are appeals to interest.

The lack of self-awareness continues to be astonishing to me.

I found this article at CNN interesting:

(CNN)Scientists have zeroed in our genetic code to better determine why some people develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the Alzheimer’s-like disease associated with repeated hits to the head. In a new study, researchers at Boston University’s CTE Center say that a variant of the gene TMEM106B may influence why some people experience more severe forms of the disease than others.

“Among people who have CTE, people with this [genetic] variation are 2.5 times more likely to develop dementia,” said Dr. Jesse Mez, assistant professor of neurology at Boston University’s School of Medicine. Mez was a co-author of the study, published Saturday in the journal Acta Neuropathologica Communications.

Mez said the findings, though early, are a step toward better understanding of the disease. “It helps us better understand biologically, mechanistically, what is going on in the brain in CTE.
“In understanding the mechanism and in identifying this genetic risk factor, we have new potential targets to develop therapies,” he said.

The authors point out that their findings need to be further investigated in a larger group and replicated to make any definitive conclusions.

My interpretation of all of this is that CTE is multifactorial in its causes and that as our tools become better that is likely to be the case for all sorts of ailments that are presently thought to be caused by pathogens or lifestyle diseases.

I doubt that will save football, however. I strongly suspect that within a decade youth football (pre-high school) will largely have vanished and that high school football won’t be far behind. That will have a cascade effect on professional football.

It occurs to me that I’ve written a lot about immigration without repeating often enough what I think we should do. I’ll remedy that. I think we should keep the total percentage of immigrants in the United States below 15% for reasons of social stability. I think we should make English the official language of the United States. I think that we should be accepting fewer immigrants only capable of taking low-wage jobs than we are presently. Our present population with whom they compete for those jobs just doesn’t need the competition.

I also think that we should greatly increase the number of work visas for which Mexicans are eligible. I think that we should continue to accept refugees and asylum-seekers, carefully and in limited numbers but we should limit refugees and asylum-seekers to actual refugees and asylum-seekers, both of which under present law require more stringent requirements than “things are bad at home”.

I think the Congress should act to further limit birthright citizenship. For example, “obstetric tourism” is an obvious abuse. Perhaps we should adopt rules more like those of most other countries in which at least one parent must be an American citizen. But those are for Congress to decide.

Those objectives would mean changing present law pretty substantially. We’d need to eliminate sponsorship and diversity quotas. We’d need to monitor travel and education visas much more closely than at present. And we’d need to enforce our laws more aggressively than at present.

I think that employer-level enforcement would be more effective than Trump’s wall.

Josh Boak at the Associated Press complains that the towns that Trump is visiting “don’t look much like the US”:

Trump has largely eschewed the big metropolises for smaller cities. He has been to Tampa, Nashville, Cleveland and Houston — where the arenas could accommodate his crowds. But he’s primarily been jet-setting to smaller places such as Elko, Nevada (population 20,078). Or, Mosinee, Wisconsin (population 4,023). Or, Belgrade, Montana (population 7,874).

The places he is visiting are smaller, poorer, and whiter than the country is as a whole.

I thought it was interesting that he failed to mention three cities that look very little like the United States from the standpoint of race, age, education, and income: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

I suspect that it might surprise Mr. Boak and most Americans that statistically the “most normal” city is New Haven, CT but I find that suspicious since it’s a college town. How “normal” would it be without Yale? The second most normal is the Tampa-St. Pete-Clearwater metro area and the most normal state is Illinois. Meanwhile the least normal state is California.