The editors of the Washington Post exemplify both the right and proper responses to natural disasters and the wrong ones in their editorial on the response in Houston to Hurricane Harvey. Here’s the right response:

AFTER THIS, “Houston” and “Harvey” will be synonyms for a deluge of unfathomable proportions. Floodwaters crept up to the thresholds of homes at one minute; at the next, people were fleeing, knee-deep in muddy pools, surrounded by fire ants and snakes. In all the misfortune and misery of this storm, one positive note stands out: the stories of how first responders, neighbors, strangers and just plain folks threw their all into the rescue effort.

On roads that had turned into rivers, rescuers in kayaks and fishing boats searched for victims trapped in cars and on rooftops. A television reporter saw a man stuck inside the cab of a truck and called in help. A preacher up to his waist in muddy water checked marooned cars for victims trapped inside. Neighbors grabbed neighbors and heaved them to safety.

While Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) declared that “the cavalry is coming” with thousands of National Guard members, 20 helicopters and 60 boats and high-water vehicles, the storm was far bigger than they could manage alone. Emergency 911 services were overwhelmed, while the National Weather Service announced: “This event is unprecedented & all impacts are unknown & beyond anything experienced.” With nothing more than their own courage, good people ventured into the rushing gullies and culverts, risking their lives to save others in the unrelenting rain. As of Monday, there were more than 2,000 people rescued and hundreds more waiting for help.

Our hearts go out to the people of Houston and all of those affected by the hurricane. Emergency assistance should be extended to them and we should offer what we can.

But here’s the wrong response:

Lest anyone breathe a sigh of relief, this storm promises to upend lives for years to come. Already, 30,000 people have been forced to flee to shelters; they may not return home for some time. Rebuilding and restoring the region is going to require billions of dollars. The federal government, with help from Congress, needs to respond generously and without partisan rancor, hard as that is to imagine in today’s environment.

Rebuilding and restoring the region, if it is to be done, isn’t a federal matter. It is a local matter, up to the city of Houston, Harris County, and the state of Texas to remediate.

People who live in Minneapolis and Chicago expect cold and snow. We have higher heating bills in the winter time. We pay for snowplowing services and salt to keep the roads clear. Our roads are subject to wear and tear that’s not a factor in more temperate climes. Sometimes a snowstorm exceeds expectations and people die. We shouldn’t be compensated for it by taking money from other people. Similarly, people who live along the Gulf Coast (and New Jersey!) should expect hurricanes. They are facts of life there, just as the cold is here and earthquakes are in California. It shouldn’t be up to the people of Illinois or Colorado or New York to pay for land development in Texas or California but that’s what the editors of the Washington Post are calling for.

Are my ears plugged? It seems to me that most of what I’m reading these days about Afghanistan boils down to if I had some ham I could make a ham sandwich if I had some bread.

At Bloomberg View Clive Crook neatly summarizes the state of American politics:

There are two main theories of Trump’s support. One is that a large minority of Americans — 40 percent, give or take — are racist idiots. This theory is at least tacitly endorsed by the Democratic Party and the mainstream liberal media. The other is that a large majority of this large minority are good citizens with intelligible and legitimate opinions, who so resent being regarded as racist idiots that they’ll back Trump almost regardless. They may not admire the man, but he’s on their side, he vents their frustration, he afflicts the people who think so little of them — and that’s good enough.

The former group are presently deploying the strategy of continuing the beatings until morale improves. I can only concluded that they believe that by mobilizing large numbers of non-existent voters they can prevail. Maybe time is on their side. I suspect that’s probably how it looks from California.

I want to ask a question. Is it moral to capitalize on catastrophes to achieve political objectives that will do little to reduce the losses of the present catastrophe or deal with its aftermath?

I think it can be only justified on instrumental grounds and instrumentalists have the problem that they do not have enough information to make the judgments they must make.

I think it’s immoral because it makes persons into means rather than ends.

The article on the spate of naval collisions lately at Military Times should warm the cockles of your heart:

The problem is years in the making. Now, the current generation of officers rising into command-level billets lacks the skills, training, education and experience needed to operate effectively and safely at sea, according to current and former officers interviewed by Navy Times.

“There is a systemic cultural wasteland in the SWO community right now, especially at the department head level,” said retired Navy Capt. Rick Hoffman, who commanded the cruiser Hue City and the frigate DeWert and who, after retirement, taught SWOs ship handling in Mayport.

“We do not put a premium on being good mariners,” Hoffman said. “We put a premium on being good inspection takers and admin weenies.”

I doubt that we have by far the largest and most expensive military in the world to produce more “admin weenies”. But that would be consistent with the rest of our government at all levels. We don’t need to spend more money. We need to get more for the money that we spend. For that there will need to be a change in incentives and culture and that will take time, sustained attention, and energy. Translation: it won’t happen.

Update

This article at Defense News on the other hand points the finger directly at something I’ve mentioned in the past as a possible culprit—operational tempo:

In 2015, the Government Accountability Office reported that the high pace of operations was taking a heavy toll on ships forward-deployed to Japan.

Among the findings was that the break-neck pace of operations was robbing those ships of needed training and maintenance. Ships stationed in Japan spent on average 42 more days out to sea than their stateside counterparts, the GAO found.

“GAO … found that the high pace of operations the Navy uses for overseas-homeported ships limits dedicated training and maintenance periods, which has resulted in difficulty keeping crews fully trained and ships maintained,” the report read.

And that wear-and-tear has taken a significant toll on the condition of the ships that come back to the states from Japan after a rotation forward.

It could be both. We need to right-size our military for what we’re willing to spend, get more for the money that we do spend, and constrain what we ask our military to do. All at the same time.

I want to commend a post at Pat Lang’s blog by long-time diplomat and scholar William R. Polk on the history of Korea from about 1920 to the present to your attention. It certainly present a dramatically different view than the one you’ve been deluged with on practically a daily basis. It’s long and the first of two parts (the second part hasn’t been published yet). The abbreviated version is that there are no clean hands in this story.

The only part of the Wall Street Journal editors’ editorial on President Trump’s premature pardon for Joseph Arpaio with which I can agree wholeheartedly is the last sentence:

The Arpaio pardon is a depressing sign of our hyper-politicized times.

I think that outrage on all sides about it has been highly selective. I don’t think that Trump should have issued the pardon but I find the concerns expressed over it exaggerated and hypocritical. I look forward to the proposed legislation put forward by a presumed Democratic Congressional majority and submitted for a Democratic president’s signature to amend the Constitution to limit the president’s pardon power.

In his regular Washington Post column Robert Samuelson makes a pitch for driving the last nail into the coffin of the economic expansion by raising taxes:

The truth is that we need higher, not lower, taxes. When the economy is at or near “full employment,” the budget should be balanced or even show a slight surplus. At 4.3 percent, the jobless rate is surely close to full employment, while the deficit for fiscal 2017 is reckoned to approach $700 billion, about 3.6 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). Both figures are expected to increase, despite continuous (assumed) economic growth. The gap can’t be blamed on the business cycle.

We are undertaxed. Government spending, led by the cost of retirees, regularly exceeds our tax intake. In the past, I have advocated a carbon tax — introduced gradually to minimize any recession risk — as a pragmatic way to pay for the government we want, while trying to cope with global climate change. Letting the federal debt buildup continue is an exercise in self-serving optimism. It presumes that the possibly adverse consequences (the crowding out of private investment, a currency crisis) will never materialize.

He’s right that tax cuts don’t necessarily cause economic growth to increase but the converse is not true. Tax increases practically by definition reduce private sector economic growth while expanding the public sector will increase deadweight loss. No carbon tax proposed by anybody to date would make our tax system less regressive over all. Quite the opposite in fact.

No foreseeable increase in income taxes will bring revenues into balance with spending, especially not one that falls only on the top 1% of earners.

With an economy so dependent on consumer spending as ours is a national sales tax in any form, especially one on top of the income tax rather than a replacement for it, will have catastrophic results.

What is really needed is a Wayback Machine. We’ve made some bad choices. The time to increase taxes is before you’ve entered what’s called “the mature” part of an expansion and such an increase needs to be lot more adroit than anything our system has ever managed.

What our economy needs is higher wage growth for ordinary people rather than for just the top 3% of earners. No proposal presently on the table will accomplish that.

So we’ll have increasing debt as far as the eye can see. That, too, will decrease real private sector economic growth but it will do so more silently and invisibly.

For the last day we’ve been in frequent contact, via text, with friends in Houston. Initially, they’d decided to ride the hurricane and the rains that followed it, out. Boats came to evacuate their next door neighbors a little while ago and they’re reconsidering that decision.

I fear that Houston is just beginning its travails. Much of the Houston area is quite low—20 feet or lower above sea level—and marshy. When it was first developed in the 1830s and 40s it wasn’t a natural port. It was built on a bayou which in some parts was filled in and in others dredged to form the Port Of Houston.

Consequently, even after the rains end it may be some time before the water is cleared.

Our thoughts and prayers are with our friends and all of the people of Houston.

Update

They tell us the waters are receding and they’ve decided to hang in.