Megan McArdle, writing at Bloomberg View, tells a shocking story of running out in France for American food. Offhand I’m guessing you can’t get a decent bagel in Saint-Quentin which, if I’m not mistaken, is in Picardy a few clicks southwest of the Belgian border.

I doubt it could be worse than the Chinese food in Germany.

I want to direct your attention to Charles Lipson’s analysis of James Comey’s testimony yesterday. The way I’d summarize what strikes me as his even-handed commentary is that Mr. Comey’s testimony probably hurt:

• Trump
• Himself
• Loretta Lynch
• The country

I’ve just added his blog, Zip Dialog to my rather selective (and antiquated) blogroll. It’s become a regular read.

The only thing I have to say about this article at Modern Healthcare is that they’re treating health care prices that increase only three times faster than prices in the non-health care economy as an enormous victory.

The trend remains up at a multiple of incomes or production in the non-health care economy. Not only is that unsustainable but the longer it continues the more wrenching it will be when it is brought to an end.

Writing at The Cipher Brief China hawk Gordon Chang questions the prevailing wisdom that China’s influence over North Korea is actually quite limited:

Beijing may not have the power to change Kim Jong-un’s mind—it’s possible no one can do so—but the Chinese could convince regime elements that it was no longer in their interests to stick with either their weapons programs or Kim himself, who, by the way, is not especially popular, after his unprecedented demotions, purges, and executions.

This would be a particularly consequential time for Beijing to act because the North Korean regime looks especially unstable.

I think the situation is actually darker than the one Mr. Chang portrays. I think that the only reasonable conclusion is that, not only does China think that the collapse of the Kim regime would not be in their interests but the North Korea nuclear weapons program is actually in its interest. All of the materiel that the North Koreans have imported to pursue their program has either come through China or with China’s tacit permission.

So China is trying to simultaneously minimize their own risks and maximize their gains. I think their calculation is wrong and that they’ve released an uncontrollable tiger but we’ll know more about that in due course.

At The Strategist Aussie David Ritchie muses over the direction of the West in the era of Trump:

The tone of the lecture President Trump gave fellow NATO leaders in Brussels on the need to lift their defence expenditure was bad enough, although it could scarcely have come as a surprise to other NATO countries. And Trump is right on that point: the European NATO members need to improve their game significantly. His failure to reaffirm NATO’s mutual defence commitments, however, sent a terrible signal to Europe.

The President’s stance at the recent G7 meeting in Sicily on issues such as climate change and trade simply added to this sense of exasperation. Merkel described the US position on climate change as ‘unzufriedenstellend—unsatisfactory’. Trump’s decision since to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement can only have reinforced this. His various egregious comments about Germany being ‘bad, very bad’ for its success in exporting cars to the US also didn’t go down well. The German reaction was to advise the Americans to make better cars.

There is no such thing as “the West” and never has been. The idea was originally a construct with the explicit objective of bringing the United States into Europe’s wars. Then it was used to distinguish Western Europe and the United States from Russia and Central and Eastern Europe. Now it mostly means Germany.

As long as Germany maintains a mercantilist policy, the idea of “the West” will remain under attack. Our interests are vastly broader than theirs and we should pursue American interests as I would expect the Germans to pursue German interests and Australians to pursue Australian interests.

Unlike Germany we’re not essentially landlocked and again unlike Germany we have both Atlantic and Pacific coasts. We actually have more in common with other countries in the Americas including Canada, Mexico, and Brazil than we do with the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

So, what about the British elections? Their being foreign elections and my not knowing anything about the issues or background, I don’t have much to say about them. I welcome opinions from others, however.

The only comment I can make is that the Brits seem to be viewing all of the major parties as “the establishment” these days.

Writing at Bloomberg View economist Tyler Cowen explains why taxing the rich won’t make the poor much better off:

When we make personal decisions, we usually compare a choice to the best possible alternative, not the worst. Imagine if you suggested to your spouse that you go out to the movies, and your spouse asked why that might be a good idea. It wouldn’t be much of an answer to say that the movie is better than the very worst show on television at home. Rather you should focus on comparing the movie to the next best thing you might do, like watching your favorite TV show or going to a new restaurant you want to try.

The upshot is that we should compare anti-poverty programs to other anti-poverty programs, and favor only the prioritized ones. But just how much of a priority does a program need to be?

One way to proceed is to ask: If we expand some programs, what is the most likely political response? It could be either lower spending in some other program or, in fact, raising taxes on the wealthy. But the evidence on the “fiscal gap” — the space between what the government owes and what it collects — suggests that the opportunity cost of expanding one transfer program is likely some government spending elsewhere, rather than expensive handbags for the wealthy.

My skepticism has slightly different grounds. Rather than comparing the status quo with imaginary programs we should be comparing likely outcomes with today’s reality.

The largest single transfer program, one that transfers money from taxpayers to beneficiaries, is SSRI, Social Security, and it’s slightly regressive, i.e. although the poor get money from it they get slightly less back from Social Security than they’ve put in. Practically all of the other federal programs transfer money from the rich to the merely merely well-to-do, the slightly less rich. Notionally, it’s on behalf of the poor but somehow the well-to-do receive their checks regardless of the actual benefits to the poor.

Consequently, with a confidence founded in experience we can say that any expansion of federal programs is likely at best to be slightly regressive and at worst to give the merely rich a leg up on the extremely rich. But, hey, it’s all good as long as it keep bureaucrats in office, amiright?

I don’t have anything substantial to say about James Comey’s testimony yesterday. The entire thing is surreal. Lately Scott Adams has has been saying that Trump’s supporters and detractors are running different movies in their minds and I think that’s an apt metaphor. Everybody things that they, their side, their guy is Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart when they’re actually Claude Rains or Edward Arnold. What’s a more modern comparison? They all think they’re Tom Hanks when they’re actually Ian McDiarmid.

To my ear we learned absolutely nothing yesterday. Donald Trump is an arrogant jerk who doesn’t understand the office of president. James Comey is self-serving. We knew all of that before.

Despite all of the reaction pieces one way or another at this point I think that the odds that Donald Trump is still in the Oval Office in a year are higher than the odds that James Comey is not in jail. The answer is that it still remains the case that although Trump acted improperly and probably foolishly he didn’t act illegally but James Comey did. Some twisting of case law may clear Comey but that will be bad for all of us—a return to the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover.

In a good article at Reason on technological unemployment I found an interesting tidbit:

You can think of this another way: The average American worker today would only have to work 17 weeks per year to earn the income his counterpart brought in 100 years ago, according to Autor’s calculations—the equivalent of about 10 hours of work per week. Most people prefer to work more, of course, so they can afford to enjoy the profusion of new products and services that modern technology makes available, including refrigerators, air conditioners, next-day delivery, smartphones, air travel, video games, restaurant meals, antibiotics, year-round access to fresh fruits and vegetables, the internet, and so forth.

But if technologically fueled productivity improvements boost job growth, why are U.S. manufacturing jobs in decline? In a new study published in April, Bessen finds that as markets mature, comparatively small changes in the price of a product do not call forth a compensating increase in consumer demand. Thus, further productivity gains bring reduced employment in relatively mature industries such as textiles, steel, and automobile manufacturing. Over the past 20 years, U.S. manufacturing output increased by 40 percent while the number of Americans working in manufacturing dropped from 17.3 million in 1997 to 12.3 million now. On the other hand, Bessen projects that the ongoing automation and computerization of the nonmanufacturing sector will increase demand for all sorts of new services. In fact, he forecasts that in service industries, “faster technical change will…create faster employment growth.”

One of the implications of that is that the greater your efforts to prop up “mature markets” the more you will suppress the growth of new jobs.

Do you remember that picture of my nephews and nieces I posted a while ago? Most of them have jobs that didn’t exist 25 years ago and I believe that only one or two of them have jobs that existed a century ago.