At Washington Examiner Karl Polzer makes a plea for new federal programs to enable more people to save for their retirements:

America has a retirement savings system, but it is letting down millions of workers and families who aren’t wealthy. This is a very big problem that will affect everyone.

It’s also an opportunity for Congress to include all Americans in the benefits of our market economy.

Despite the existence of IRAs and 401(k) plans to encourage retirement savings, almost half of Americans have no net assets at all, and little or no retirement savings. Many of them have no money to save and no retirement account to put it in. Unfortunately, the tax benefits of the private retirement system are heavily concentrated among top earners. The failure to include lower-income earners is widening the wealth gap.

I can only speak for my own circumstances but for me the greatest impediments to saving more come in the form of state and local tax increases. My state and local taxes are increasing in double digits every year. Chicago has the highest sales tax in the nation and the pushback on attempts to increase it even farther have been enormous. That’s as it should be considering how regressive sales taxes are.

Illinois pays the highest property taxes in the country and at least in my neighborhood property taxes are increasing well into double digits every year. The likely next governor is running on a platform of increasing the state’s income tax.

And, of course, the present low interest rates impose a further tax on savings, the earnings on which are already being taxed at federal and state levels.

I would think that before new programs are considered federal, state, and local governments might consider removing some of the impediments to saving, many of which stem from their actions.

Maybe Mr. Polzer’s plans are simply a stalking horse for eliminating the Social Security system on which so many Americans depend for retirement income. As I’ve written extensively in the past at present interest rates saving for retirement is meaningless for most of us. To eliminate or curtail the Social Security system more will be necessary than just changing incentives.

Ryan Craig and Monica Herk makes so many good points in their op-ed in Fortune on the discriminatory impact of degree-based hiring that I recommend that you read it in full. Here are their opening paragraphs:

As hordes of college graduates flood the labor market, their demographics reflect a troubling trend. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 42.1% of whites ages 25-29 have bachelor’s degrees, compared with just 22.8% of blacks and 18.5% of Hispanics. Minority students attend college at far lower rates than their white counterparts do—and when they do attend, they are far less likely to graduate.

Sadly, higher education’s diversity problem is magnified in the world of work at a time when degrees are being required for entry-level jobs that haven’t historically required them. Just 25% of insurance claims and policy processing clerks, for example, had bachelor’s degrees in 2014, yet half of the open positions at the time required one. That means the millions of Americans who haven’t donned a cap and gown have no chance to prove themselves worthy of the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder.

Actually, that understates the gravity of the problem. There’s a sort of arms race going on. Jobs that once required no more than a high school education and whose actual work requirements should need no more than a high school education now require a college degree. And for some jobs that once required a bachelors degree, don’t even bother applying with less than a masters. It may not be too far in the future that those jobs require doctorate along with the commensurate expenses in time and money. The enormous volume of educational debt isn’t increasing due to spontaneous generation.

Other countries including India (!) and Europe are already moving away from college degrees as the first prerequisite for employment. The irony of this is that it will be harder for the U. S. to do this because of the labor laws put into place to prevent discrimination:

Such a shift may, however, be decades from occurring in the U.S., where employers risk running afoul of 1970s-era labor law if such assessments have an adverse impact on members of a legally protected group. The rule of thumb on adverse impact comes from the 1978 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Uniform Guidelines, which established the 80% rule: if the hiring rate for any subgroup is less than 80% of the rate for the group with the highest hiring rate, that assessment or practice has an adverse impact—regardless of the employer’s intent. Protected classes currently include those based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (over 40), disability, and genetic information.

While the EEOC has historically been the enforcer on adverse impact—sending tens of thousands of letters annually to U.S. employers—under the Obama administration the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) became an even more aggressive watchdog. While the EEOC can’t initiate action until a job applicant files a complaint, the OFCCP is empowered to launch “desk audits,” in which it reviews hiring records in search of adverse impact.

Our higher education sector is presently enormously overbuilt and, difficult as it may be for underpaid adjuncts and associates to believe, overpaid. Over recent decades most of the increase in the cost of higher education, which has been enormous in real terms, has been due to the growth of staffs not faculty pay.

When the inevitable realignment takes place, it won’t be pretty.

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead takes note of something I’ve been pointing out for some time. China’s economic future necessarily requires it to expand its internal market. Its mercantilist policy of export-driven growth has some negative repercussions and not just for the United States:

China’s chief problem isn’t U.S. resistance to its rise. It is that the internal dynamics of its economic system force its rulers to choose between putting China through a wrenching and destabilizing economic adjustment, or else pursuing an expansionist development policy that will lead to conflict and isolation abroad. Lenin thought that capitalist countries in China’s position were doomed to a series of wars and revolutions.

Fortunately, Lenin was wrong. Seventy years of Western history since World War II show that with the right economic policies, a mix of rising purchasing power and international economic integration can transcend the imperialist dynamics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But unless China can learn from those examples, it will remain caught in the “Lenin trap” in which its strategy for continued domestic stability produces an ever more powerful anti-China coalition around the world.

There is no workable substitute for an internal market as the engine of China’s future economic growth. That in turn has implications that China’s ruling class apparently does not wish to face.

Is Indonesia abandoning its reputation as a country with a Muslim majority but without extremism? Consider this op-ed by Benedict Rogers in the Wall Street Journal:

ndonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, has long stood as a role model for religious pluralism. That’s changing. Political Islam and violent extremism have been taking root in society and may soon do so in the government. President Joko Widodo’s choice of Ma’ruf Amin, a 75-year-old cleric, as his running mate in next year’s election marks an ugly turn for Indonesian politics.

Religious minorities had regarded Mr. Widodo as their defender. His rival, retired general Prabowo Subianto, was expected to play the religion card, questioning the incumbent’s Islamic credentials and building a coalition supported by radical Islamists. By choosing Mr. Amin, the president’s defenders argue, he not only has neutralized the religion factor, but might have prevented it from spilling over into violence against minorities. In office, they believe, Mr. Amin will be contained.

Yet Mr. Subianto is unlikely to be deterred from playing identity politics, and rumors that Mr. Amin is reaching out to radical Islamists for support are troubling. Mr. Amin has a history of intolerance. He signed a fatwa that put a Widodo ally, Jakarta’s former Gov. Basuki Tjahaja “Ahok” Purnama, in jail on blasphemy charges. Ahok, who is Christian and ethnically Chinese, was a symbol of Indonesia’s diversity, and as a popular governor was expected to be re-elected. Instead he lost after rivals told Muslims not to vote for a non-Muslim.

Mr. Amin also signed the anti-Ahmadiyya fatwa in 2005, which led to severe restrictions and violence against the Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect some Muslims regard as heretical. I met recently with Ahmadis in Depok, a Jakarta suburb, where their mosque is closed. The previous week they were visited by 15 local officials ordering them to stop all activities.

Mr. Amin has been behind other repressive measures, including restrictions on the construction of places of worship, proposals to criminalize homosexuality, support for female genital mutilation and local Shariah laws.

If true this would be a very bad development.

There is an interesting post at Bloomberg by Christopher Balding which considers the incipient “trade war” between China and the United States from a somewhat different perspective. China and the United States are in the midst of an ugly divorce. Divorce proceedings weren’t initiated by Trump. They were initiated long before Trump became president in 2015 when the Chinese announced their “Made in China 2025” initiative, the summary of which is that China actually wants to reduce its imports, particularly imports of high margin manufactured goods or services in favor of producing them internally.

Seen from this perspective the tit for tat tariffs are just steps along the path to the breakup.

So how will they decouple? There’s little historical precedent to consider how this might look. Two major powers have never been so closely intertwined. However, there are some patterns emerging. First, alliances are slowly evolving into more cohesive forms. Just as the new U.S.-Mexico agreement (likely to include Canada) seeks to divert more trade into Nafta, other countries have started reconsidering their reliance on Chinese telecom-equipment makers for the rollout of 5G wireless networks.

Second, there’s a reassessment of where key products should be made. The second batch of Trump’s tariffs focuses on low-end intermediate exports with the intention of reducing China’s role in the global value chain and pushing reshoring to the U.S. and other locations, as a recent Natixis report noted.

Since I think that the intertwining of the Chinese and U. S. economies was grossly premature, injurious to the United States and, in the long term, injurious to the Chinese as well, I’m not opposed to the retrenchment. I wish this way of looking at things were being considered more seriously by those dedicated to free trade. We’re not the aggressors here.

Reorganizing the relationship between China and the United States is going to be complicated and two countries and economies as large as ours take a lot of time to change course. There will be many difficult steps along the way.

Although I don’t agree with the tone of their editorial, I agree with the assessment of the editors of the New York Times about the decision of the Senate Judiciary Committee to conduct hearings on the allegations about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh:

The Senate Judiciary Committee is right to reopen hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation after a claim of sexual assault.

The Senate is a political institution not a judicial one and it is politically necessary, for the sake of the Senate, Republicans, Brett Kavanaugh, and his accuser that the Committee be seen to be taking the allegations seriously.

As to what happens then, as I noted yesterday, much depends on Judge Kavanaugh’s temperament, about which I know nothing.

The editors of the Washington Post have a more tempered response:

The FBI should interview all relevant players and look into the extent to which any witnesses can corroborate Ms. Ford’s account or Mr. Kavanaugh’s denial.

The Judiciary Committee should then hold a hearing. Ms. Ford’s lawyer has said Ms. Ford is willing to testify, and so is the nominee. Monday night Senate officials said such a hearing would take place next Monday, which might be fine — but only if the FBI investigation is complete. The bureau should be given such time as it needs.

The shortcoming of this suggestion is that the FBI has already had months to investigate Judge Kavanaugh and it gave him a clean bill of health. Merely reopening the FBI’s investigation should call either the FBI’s, Sen. Feinstein’s, Judge Kavanaugh’s, or his accuser’s probity into question or possibly all four.

Any FBI investigation should be highly focused. It should concentrate on a single question: is there any independent corroborating evidence for the accuser’s claims? There should be brief Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, a public spectacle should not be allowed, and, in the absence of corroborating evidence, Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination should be brought up for a vote. Let the Senate decide.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, favor a more combative approach:

GOP Senators should understand that the political cost of defeating Mr. Kavanaugh will likely include the loss of the Senate. Democrats are already motivated to vote against Donald Trump, and if Republicans panic now their own voters will rightly be furious. They would be letting Democrats get away with the same dirty trick they tried and failed to pull off against Clarence Thomas.

It would also be a serious injustice to a man who has by all accounts other than Ms. Ford’s led a life of respect for women and the law. Every #MeToo miscreant is a repeat offender. The accusation against Mr. Kavanaugh is behavior manifested nowhere else in his life.

No one, including Donald Trump, needs to attack Ms. Ford. She believes what she believes. This is not he said-she said. This is a case of an alleged teenage encounter, partially recalled 30 years later without corroboration, and brought forward to ruin Mr. Kavanaugh’s reputation for partisan purposes.

Letting an accusation that is this old, this unsubstantiated and this procedurally irregular defeat Mr. Kavanaugh would also mean weaponizing every sexual assault allegation no matter the evidence. It will tarnish the #MeToo cause with the smear of partisanship, and it will unleash even greater polarizing furies.

Sadly, that horse has already exited the barn. If there is a way of taking accusers seriously while not tarnishing the reputations and blighting the lives of the innocent, I don’t see it.

Under the ancient Chinese system of jurisprudence those who accused others of crimes falsely were subjected to the punishments that would have applied to the accused had they been guilty. I don’t think we’re capable of taking such draconian steps. For one thing increasing the risks involved in making accusations would be seen by many as an enormous step backwards.

As I read this op-ed by Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, at the Washington Post, urging students to take “impractical humanities courses”:

But the case for the humanities can also be understood in less transactional terms and more as a foundational preparation for a life well lived. Since Socrates, thinkers have extolled the vital role a humanities education plays in encouraging citizens to lead an examined life. It cultivates critical thinking, self-reflection, empathy and tolerance, the usefulness of which only becomes more apparent as one navigates life’s challenges.

I couldn’t help but think he’s suffering from a fundamental misconception. Higher education may serve serve different functions for several different groups of people. For the lucky few it leads to a richer, happier life. For others it enables them to meet other people of their social class, contacts that will last them for a lifetime or find and marry suitable partners. For most it is vocational training and, if I had to give an estimate, I would guess that two-thirds of students look at it that way to the exclusion of all else. What else would you expect when you make higher education a prerequisite for any job with more responsibility than bagboy?

To point out, as he does, that individuals whose parents earned upper middle class incomes and who have IQs northwards of 130 will lead richer, better lives if they immerse themselves in knowledge of a broad-ranging sort is blithe but unhelpful. Most students aren’t trying to be Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom dropped out of college because they didn’t think that Harvard was more capable of helping them lead richer lives than they were themselves.

No, most students are trying to avoid poverty and they see the way to do that as being as qualified in their chosen fields as they possibly can be and to the exclusion of all else. Put in another way, would you rather be treated by the physician who majored in 18th century French art of the one who majored in biology?

A lot of students, realistically, see their competition as Indian or Chinese students who weren’t hounded by academics into pursuing courses of study outside their career area.

Mr. Daniels’s argument isn’t actually with students. It’s with employers and with the federal government and he should target his arguments more narrowly to those audiences. Google: stop quizzing your prospective employees on their programming ability. Ask them about Kant instead. My understanding it is that Google is actually starting to do this, likely a sign of a company that has lost its bearings. Johns Hopkins med school: ignore your candidates’ MedCats. Take their knowledge of Anglo-Saxon literature more seriously instead. Legislators: stop putting our young people in competition with the best, most focused students in the world.

Now that the woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of misconduct when he was a teenager has stepped forward, it seems to me that the Senate leadership has no reasonable alternative but to conduct hearings on the allegations. Due diligence requires it.

I do not know whether the allegations are truthful but they deserve to be heard and reviewed. I’m also not sure what other than showing due diligence hearings would accomplish. Judge Kavanaugh has denied them. The other individual named in the allegations has already come forward denying them. Scores of women who were acquainted with Judge Kavanaugh contemporaneous to the timeframe in which the actions alleged took place have already come forward testifying to his character.

Basically, the harm has already been done. True or not Judge Kavanaugh’s reputation has already been sullied as have any future actions of his as a Supreme Court justice. I wouldn’t be surprised if Judge Kavanaugh withdrew his nomination. That depends on his temperament.

I won’t speculate any farther on what might happen. I think this whole episode is yet another step along a path we will deeply regret taking, an assault on collegiality in the Senate. Sen. Feinstein should have come forward with the accuser’s letter when it came to her attention. The accusations were either material to the nomination or they weren’t.

Rather than comment in detail on JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s remarks to ABC News of which this is a sample:

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told ABC News’ Rebecca Jarvis that some in the public see it as unfair that banks, which helped to spark the crash through high-risky lending, got a federal bailout while many ordinary people suffered.

“Some [banks] caused the problem and I understand that the American public looks at it and it’s unfair, and it was,” Dimon said in an exclusive interview for “This Week.” “They look at it like the elite Washington banks… kind of got bailed out [while] they suffered. And there’s some truth to that. They didn’t see Old Testament justice. So I understand why there is a lot of anger out there.”

The crisis, the worst financial downturn since the Great Depression, was triggered by bursting of a bubble in housing prices that had been fueled in part by increased risk in mortgage lending. Housing foreclosures soared and unemployment reached 10 percent. But despite allegations of irresponsible lending and wrongdoing by some big banks, the U.S. government helped to bail out some of the largest financial institutions and no bank executives were prosecuted.

“All the banks — banks got help — I mean I think the government did the right thing, I want to give full credit,” Dimon said. “But not all the banks needed that. And all those banks including JPMorgan continued to lend money every day to all their clients nonstop around the world.”

other than to make a couple of simple observations. First, in the ten years that have followed he has received as compensation something between $150 and $250 million.

Second, he probably knows what “moral hazard” means better than I do. What was the moral hazard in the bailouts that his bank and the other big banks received? How have they responded since then?

Sounds like he’s running for president to me.