I think that Russell Muirhead’s hard-to-excerpt post at City Journal on the future of wealth and work is pretty good. It’s short and I recommend that you read it in full. A few things he says are a bit misleading. So, for example, this:

Last year, General Motors employed about 200,000 people. After making 10 million cars, it earned about $42,000 in income per employee.

GM’s net revenues are about $42,000 per employee. Its gross revenue per employee are about $750,000. Do you know which auto company has the lowest net or gross revenue per employee? Tesla.

I’m not sure what conclusions one can draw from his observations. One clear possibility is that our politics is hopelessly muddled. How can it be otherwise when people who think of themselves as championing the future are actually conservatives desperately trying to preserve the past?

I think the conclusion I’d draw from it that we shouldn’t be propping up either General Motors or the Blackstone Group. We’re doing both. Also, GM doesn’t need Blackstone but Blackstone does need GM. In other words you can still make stuff without a huge, fantastically wealthy financial economy but you can’t have a huge, fantastically wealthy financial economy without making stuff.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Katrina vanden Heuvel, with whom I rarely agree, says some things with which I agree completely:

The bottom line is that opposition to Trump cannot become the same as opposition to common sense. Common sense dictates that we protect our democracy by strengthening our election systems to counter outside interference. It dictates an independent investigation of claims of Russian meddling in the presidential campaign. But it also tells us that we cannot address many of our most urgent challenges — from Syria and climate change to nuclear proliferation and cyber issues — without the United States and Russia finding ways to work together when it serves our mutual interests. We do not have to embrace the Russian government to work on vital interests with it. And we cannot afford a revival of Cold War passions that would discredit those seeking to de-escalate tensions. Efforts to curtail debate could be a disservice to our country’s security.

That’s a realistic view of our relationship with Russia but if politics is war it’s impossible. When you hate your opponents more than you love what you’re striving for, you should re-evaluate your priorities.

I’ve been saying for some time that the present day resembles nothing in American history so much as the run-up to the American Civil War. Now there’s another way it’s like that earlier time. David Faris at The Week observes that the 115th Congress is by most reasonable measures the least productive in 164 years:

Just six months ago, it looked like the Republican Party was about to go on a legislative blitzkrieg, shredding law after law passed by the Obama administration. ObamaCare would be vaporized and replaced with a nickel rattling inside an empty Mountain Dew can. Dodd-Frank was sure to be tossed aside for a transparent giveaway to Wall Street. And Republicans would pass their regressive tax reform, their perplexing border-adjustment tax, and so much more. The GOP hadn’t held total power in American politics since 2006, and the party had become much more conservative in the interim. And instead of George W. Bush, a man who recognized at least some theoretical limits on free market fundamentalism, the new Congress would work with a sub-literate tabula rasa named Donald Trump, a man who could probably be persuaded to inject himself with experimental medication if an important-seeming person whispered “do it” in his ear.

But a funny thing happened on the way to libertarian utopia. Indeed, it turns out that the GOP-controlled Congress can’t seem to pass any meaningful laws at all. Either they have forgotten how, or the divisions in their own increasingly radicalized caucus are proving too difficult to surmount. Whatever the explanation, thus far these GOP legislators are on track to be the least productive group since at least the Civil War.

Now, okay, technically the Ryan-McConnell 115th Congress is so far actually a bit more active than recent Congresses, if you measure by the 43 laws that President Trump has adorned with his garish signature. Obama was at 40 at this point in 2009. George W. Bush had signed even fewer midway through 2001. But sheer number is not the best way to think about how much is being achieved. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out, a majority of the bills signed by Trump thus far have been one page long, meaning many are just symbolic or ceremonial.

Some of this very brief legislation has also been passed under the Congressional Review Act, a previously obscure statute that allows Congress to nullify recently enacted federal regulations. The CRA had been used just once before Trump took office, and yet 14 of the 43 bills signed into law by the president have been CRAs. Most of them roll back Obama-era protections against various kinds of transparent evildoing, like preventing coal mining within 100 feet of streams. They’re not meaningless, but the Voting Rights Act they are not.

If you cast your mind back 164 years there are other parallels. That was the last year that the Whigs were a serious force in the Senate. By 1854 the newly formed Republican Party had secured three seats and it was downhill from there on for the Whigs. The Democrats held a one seat majority in the Senate. Their majority in the House was much larger.
There they outnumbered the Whigs more than two to one.

Here’s my question. If the parallels are as strong as they seem, which of today’s parties is today’s Whigs?

As Obamacare Repeal Dies Again, A Simple Answer 

I don’t know if you’ve heard the story about the shooting of an Australian woman in Minneapolis. It hasn’t received enormous coverage here but it’s front page news in Australia. I want to commend to your attention Mike McDaniel’s remarks about the incident which strike me as informed, reasonable comment. Here’s his summation:

Again, gentle readers, let me stress my limitations in analyzing this case. I know only what media sources are telling me, but experience helps to fill in the blanks. The initial encounter between Damond and the officers, particularly the time frame, is very odd, and certainly will be one of the focuses of any competent investigation.

Most important in this case will be the testimony of the two officers, and particularly that of Officer Harrity. Pity him. He’s caught in the middle of a racial narrative, with negative consequences for lies and the truth. I suspect his testimony will be that he was talking to Damond, and suddenly, his ears were ringing and she was falling. If so, this will likely be the truth. He may have seen nothing at all threatening, which does not mean Noor could not have seen something. It would not be surprising to discover he suffered hearing damage, and some injuries to his face and eyes. It will be interesting to hear what Noor might have said to him, and done, post-shooting. While information is, as yet, inconclusive, it appears Noor fired a single shot.

Read the whole thing.

I’ve mentioned before the many strategies that news media use to cultivate public opinion, repeat not merely reporting the news but grooming public reaction to the news. This story has just about all of them including what the media report, how they report it, and what they don’t report.

I encourage you to read this post at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, “Modern Lovecraftian Elder Gods”. These new gods are Gthoogle, Yog-Fomo, Mh’eme, Faek-Newsgurath, Shub-Mra, and the obligatory Donald J. Trump. Here’s the description of Yog-Fomo:

An amorphous blob of darkness that enters its victims, driving them to the virtual dimension in an attempt to fill the void Yog-Fomo has created. Yog-Fomo’s victims pathologically scroll endlessly through social media for fear they will miss something important, when in reality they are falling further into the pit of Yog-Fomo as their life slips away.

I think the author is onto something.

At Divergent Options Paul Butchard presents two options for the Afghan Taliban’s future course of action: negotiate with the Afghan government or continue their insurgent war:

Given the territorial degradation being suffered by Daesh in Iraq and Syria and the presence of a Daesh affiliate in Afghanistan, the Taliban may once again find itself in the crosshairs of an international anti-terrorism coalition. There are also increasing levels of international training and advisory support being given to the Afghan government[2] to counter the Taliban. These developments raise the prospect of United States and international re-engagement in Afghanistan. As such, the Taliban must constantly assess their future direction should they hope to survive and thrive.

I think there’s a third alternative, a variant of option #2. Maintain a low profile. Just wait. Here’s the key sentence of Mr. Butchard’s piece:

By continuing military operations, the Taliban risk attracting the attention of the United States military, which may soon turn to combating the Daesh presence in Afghanistan more directly after the Daesh territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria are eliminated.

However, by reducing military operations without negotiating with the Afghan government, the Afghan Taliban might encourage the U. S. to withdraw further or completely. At that point consolidating or extending their holdings in Afghanistan in opposition to a fragmented and ineffectual Afghan government should be relatively simple.

If you hadn’t been aware of it, the State of Illinois’s increase in the state’s personal income tax rate isn’t the only tax in the news hereabouts. There’s been quite a kerfuffle about the steep tax on soda and other sweetened beverages approved by the county board here last November. The retailers complained bitterly about the tax and got a judge to agree with them. A stay of the tax was ordered and now Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County Board President, is whining about the impact of the absence of the revenues expected from the tax.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune remark:

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is frustrated. She can’t implement the new tax on soda and other sweetened beverages that the board approved last November. The tax is on hold due to a last-minute court challenge, sinking Preckwinkle’s budgets — this year’s and the one she’s drafting for 2018 — into the red.

After warning that a delay in the scheduled July 1 launch of her soda tax would mean layoffs, on Friday she announced pink slips for some 300 county workers and the closing of another 600 vacant positions. She said more job cuts are expected, all because the Illinois Retail Merchants Association is fighting the soda tax in court and has won the first round.

In other words, Preckwinkle blames the retailers’ association for the loss of county jobs.

No, no, no. The retail group is leading the charge in court, but anti-tax rebellion is a trend Illinois politicians should be noticing by now. Five years ago, a soda tax might not have provoked an insurgency. Today is different.

Taxpayers, particularly in Chicago and Cook County, are sick and tired of being nickeled-and-dimed. And they’re not dumb. They know the soda tax is only the latest string of spaghetti Preckwinkle tossed at the wall to see if it would stick.

It joins the pasta bowl of amusement tax hikes, most of which got dropped in favor of a hotel tax hike in 2016, which followed a sales tax hike in 2015. Remember how Preckwinkle got elected in 2010 on a pledge to eliminate then board President Todd Stroger’s 1-percentage-point hike in the sales tax, only to reinstate it?

That’s classic Cook County. Chicagoans see their property taxes on the rise (don’t forget, your payment is due this month). They notice higher water bills, emergency service tax hikes, parking taxes, cable taxes, you name it.

Chicago also has a tax on streaming services—a Netflix tax. To place all of this in context Chicagoans already have the highest sales tax of any major city in the country. Property taxes are rising sharply—mine went up by 10% from last year to this.

I would also be willing to bet that the county board didn’t take run-on effects into account when they were calculating the revenues from the soda tax. A dollar less spent on soft drinks doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers will spend that dollar somewhere else in the store. In Philadelphia and New York and other places that have imposed a comparable soda tax sales of the taxed beverages declined by 30-50% while sales of bottled water increased by 10%. That’s far from a dollar-for-dollar swap. And that means reduced sales taxes for the county.

That loss in sales is the reason the retailers pushed back against the tax. I don’t know the precise figures off the top of my head but I do know that grocery stores operate on very small margins—around 1%. Their markup on dairy products is around 20%, most other products around 10%, but the markup on soft drinks is higher. I’ve seen reports of as much as 30%. Of course the retailers pushed back.

And the tax is a regressive tax. Of course consumers will push back.

The larger point is that government at all levels needs to get its arms around the idea that there are limits to how much tax revenue they can collect as a percentage of incomes. That means they’ll need to learn to say “No” both to the people in their jurisdictions but to public employees as well.

That’s not politics. In Cook County you practically need to form a search party to find a Republican. It’s mathematics. And psychology.

The Congressional Republicans continue to reveal their political hamhandedness in their approach to dealing with the Affordable Care Act. Some time after their 25th vote to repeal the ACA during President Obama’s term of office they should have realized that they wouldn’t be able to just repeal the law. At that point they should have just tried to reduce expectations as the ACA collapsed of its own weight and blamed it on Obama and the Democrats.

As it is they’re caught on the horns of the dilemma of needing to repeal the ACA lest they face a political backlash from their own voters and the impossible complexity of enacting a replacement that appeases all of the Republican senators.

Sometimes a do-nothing Congress is the best case scenario.

As Will Rogers put it the difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse when Congress is in session.