The outrage of the day is over President Trump’s allegedly sharing classified information with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. That is either high treason or wholly appropriate, depending on who you listen to.

If those now calling for Trump’s impeachment hadn’t been calling for his impeachment for the last six months, their position would be stronger. As it is, they might just be background noise.

At this point I have no opinion on the material facts or on whether Trump should be impeached over it. I would remind people that building a case for impeachment is not a matter of marshalling objective facts. Impeachment is a political and subjective act.

A “high crime and misdemeanor” is whatever the House of Representatives thinks it is and, contrary to what you might believe, nothing passes the House against the wishes of the House leadership.

As of this morning the RealClearPolitics average of polls on Trump’s approval rating is 40.1% and falling. That’s still not in the danger zone. If it falls below the previous apparent floor of 38% into the 20s, Trump will be in trouble. Otherwise not so much.

I did not vote for Trump. I wish he were not president. I don’t think his shenanigans improve his bargaining position.

However, I don’t believe in government by impeachment and the only advice I can provide to those who do is be careful what you wish for.

The Republican-led Congress didn’t impeach President Obama. That wasn’t because he didn’t provide grounds. It was because his approval rating was too high and impeaching him would have placed the Republicans’ majority and their own jobs at risk.

Trump’s approval rating is dreadfully low. It has both a ceiling of around 49% and a floor of around 38% so far. If that floor doesn’t hold, Trump could be in trouble.

Hal Brands’s article at War on the Rocks on American internationalism in the Trump years is a good one, too. IMO American internationalists have quite a chore on their hands. They’ve got to convince a lot more Americans that internationalism, at least as they define it, is good for them.

How that can be accomplished when immigrants capture a large percentage of the job gains and the wealthiest 1% of Americans capture most of the income gains is hard for me to reckon. A very large number of Americans clearly don’t think internationalism has worked for them. What if they’re right?

When I read this by Paul Katzeff in IBD:

Say you start in your twenties. Forty years later, if your retirement savings account averages a modest 6% annual rate of return compounded quarterly, you’ll have nearly $173,000 from those $20 a week additions to your retirement savings.

I was taken aback. Where in the world has he been getting a 6% return over the last 20 years? He hasn’t been getting it in the stock and/or bond market. In the 20 years from 1991 to 2011, the average investor realized 2.1%.

He didn’t get it from CDs. They’ve been below 5% for the last twenty years and below 3% for much of the last 15 years.

The only way he could get that kind of return on the entire original principal is by taking significantly higher risks. How much risk can a retirement portfolio stand?

Calculating returns over the last 91 years as he does is facetious in the extreme. And over the 20 year period from the mid-1960s to to the mid-1980s there were no gains at all. All of those gains are concentrated in a relatively few boom years. Averages mean nothing under the circumstances.

If that hypothetical investor started saving at age 20, she’s 111 now. The reason not to start your calculation over the last 20 years or even the last 30 years is that most of you’d miss the boom years.

In her most recent Washington Post column Catherine Rampell finally gets around to giving some reasonable reasons to be against the tax cuts proposed by the Trump Administration:

In fact, in a recent paper, University of Chicago Booth School of Business economics professor Owen Zidar looked at changes to the tax code over the postwar period, with an eye toward comparing the economic effects of tax cuts felt by the rich vs. the poor. He found that the relationship between tax cuts and job growth is primarily driven by cuts for lower-income groups and that the economic effects of tax cuts for the top 10 percent are tiny.

A slew of earlier studies on the earned-income tax credit supports this view that tax policy aimed at putting more money in the pockets of the poor and lower-middle-class provides a bigger bang for your buck.

Or maybe you think cutting corporate taxes and capital gains rates would encourage more investment. This argument would be more convincing if companies were not already sitting on mountains of cash that they can’t find sufficient investment opportunities for. Or if the last time we tried something similar there had been any effect at all on corporate investment. (There was none.)

As I’ve said before, those who think that cutting the marginal personal income tax rate will do much to stimulate the economy are engaging in nostalgia. They’re thinking of an economy very unlike the one we have now in which so many consumer goods are made in another country or an increase in retail will result in hiring more employees in brick and mortar stores. Retail is already over-capacity.

Although I support cutting the marginal business income tax it’s for very narrow reasons. The business income tax is inefficient. The burden of high rates falls on employees. Our having higher rates than other OECD countries incentivizes inversions which prompt decreases in higher-paying jobs here.

The cut in personal taxes most likely to stimulate the economy would be a cut in the payroll tax but that would need a change in the way that SSRI is thought of and funded. Mustn’t have that. The people it would help most are too deplorable.

In the nervous aftermath of the most extensive ransomware attack to date, the assignment of blame is already beginning. CNet reports that in a rather obvious attempt at pre-emption Microsoft’s chief counsel is calling the attack a “wakeup call”:

Microsoft is criticizing government agencies for hoarding software flaws and keeping them secret, calling a massive, new ransomware attack a “wake-up call” to the problem.

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s chief counsel, said Sunday in a company blog post that by keeping the vulnerabilities secret from vendors, governments open up users to attacks like Friday’s WannaCry hack in which malware locked down computers worldwide while demanding hefty sums for freedom. He also compared WikiLeaks’ release of US spy agencies hacking tools earlier this year to a theft of weapons from the US military.

“An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen. And this most recent attack represents a completely unintended but disconcerting link between the two most serious forms of cybersecurity threats in the world today — nation-state action and organized criminal action,” he said.

“The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call. We need governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits.”

That’s almost a perfect example what I call a “reverse Voltaire”. I agree with what he says but I don’t think he’s in any position to say it. The personal computing monoculture created by Microsoft is one of the main sources of today’s tremendous vulnerability. I also feel the need to point out that cyber-security is almost the diametric opposite of physical security. The advantage is almost completely on the side of the attacker.

So, what are the takeaways from the WannaCry attacks? The first few that occur to me are:

1. Very few companies are capable of maintaining a serious security policy.
2. Neither is the federal government.
3. The only real solution is active measures.
4. That would require a complete change in attitude on the part of the federal government.

Consequently, I expect things to get much, much worse but they become even a little better. If ever.

At Bloomberg View David Gluckman and Peter Orszag present their findings about business executives’ expectations of health care reform:

We’ve just finished a study involving 300 senior health-care executives from leading companies in health-care services, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical devices, along with top investors in the field. And it’s clear that they see big changes in the years ahead, driven largely by pricing pressure across the industry.

The pricing pressures, in turn, are expected to drive innovation. Interestingly, in the coming years, changes in how health-care payments are made are expected to be the most important form of innovation, though scientific breakthroughs will also play a critical role. What’s more, these leaders expect health-care companies to engage in new partnerships and collaborations — including with nontraditional competitors in the technology world, such as Google, IBM, Apple and Fitbit.

Most surprisingly, we found strong expectations that value-based payments for medical care will displace the traditional fee-for-service model, transforming the industry over the next five to ten years.

What’s driving these expectations? I can’t find any rational basis for them. They seem to be based on the “it just has to” hypothesis—the belief that because something is obviously out of whack and needs change that change simply must occur and not only occur but occur along certain lines.

Are Democrats calling for an end to fee for services? Are Republicans? Are providers? Are patients? Here’s a telling part of the findings:

About 30 percent of respondents in medical devices and health-care services said nontraditional players will transform the industry over the next few years, but only 14 percent of pharma and biotech respondents agreed.

In other words only one in seven of those on the frontlines in the arenas most at risk for disruption by “nontraditional players” think it will occur. Would anyone care to place a small side wager that they’ll exert substantial efforts to avoid being disrupted?

At The Conversation Timothy Callaghan outlines three reasons that the United States doesn’t have a national health care system:

1. The United States is uniquely more individualistic.
2. Interest group opposition.
3. It’s hard to us to enact entitlement programs.

and concludes that a national health care system is unlikely in the United States for the foreseeable future:

Its culture is unusually individualistic, favoring personal over government responsibility; lobbyists are particularly active, spending billions to ensure that private insurers maintain their status in the health system; and our institutions are designed in a manner that limits major social policy changes from happening.

As long as the reasons above remain, there is little reason to expect universal coverage in America anytime soon.

Let me suggest some other reasons that a national health care system is unlikely in the United States.

1. The U. S. is too large and diverse for the idea of a national health care system to gain much traction. No country of 200 million or greater in population has a national health care system (press releases to the contrary notwithstanding).
2. The U. S. is geographically too large for a national health care system. Canada’s system is administered by the provinces. Russia’s system is national. Do we really want to compare ourselves with Russia?
3. Path dependency. Other OECD countries adopted their systems a long time ago when health care was much less expensive and represented much less of their economies than it does now. We might have been able to implement a national health care system 60 years ago (when such a system was vehemently rejected by the AMA). Now?
4. Proponents of reform insist on a national system. That’s the Great White Whale. Try Vermont (or Hawaii) first.

It would be helpful if proponents of reform stopped comparing us with Denmark or Singapore. The latter is a city; the former is the size and population of one of our counties. Such comparisons just make them seem ridiculous. The comparisons should be to Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, India, or China.

The reality is that the U. S. is sui generis and systems for it need to be adapted to it and the unique conditions that obtain here.

At the progressive journal Democracy Jonathan Blanks speaks out in praise of the bracero program:

And as my colleague Alex Nowrasteh has written, a large reason we have so many unauthorized immigrants in the first place is that the government shut down programs that allowed people to come and work legally. Among these was the Bracero program that allowed seasonal migration for labor…

as I’ve been saying for years. That we need a guest worker program in the United States is obvious and I can only speculate about why such programs are resisted so vehemently.

However, other than that he’s opposed to Trump’s wall (so am I) and doesn’t like enforcement of existing law, he doesn’t elaborate on what he thinks a “sane immigration policy” would be.

I can tell you what my idea of a sound immigration policy would be: a guest worker program specifically tailored for Mexican workers, strict workplace enforcement of the laws, and requiring employers to pay prevailing wages or higher for workers brought into the country. I also like the idea of a central clearing house that employers would be required to advertise on before being given H-1B visas to bring workers in from outside the country.

At the Washington Post Kim Soffen and Scott Clement report that Trump’s victory in November was not due to a higher turnout from uneducated white voters as had been speculated:

White non-college-educated people were no more likely to vote in this presidential election than in the previous one. Trump’s victory was not due to a spike in turnout among his base supporters.

But there were significant changes in turnout in other demographics. Significant drops in black and Hispanic turnout in some states may have cost Hillary Clinton some previously blue states.

Turnout among blacks plummeted from 66 percent in 2012 to 59 percent in 2016 — similar to where it was when John Kerry was on the ballot. No other racial group saw such a substantial change between the elections.

When you break those numbers down further, a peculiar trend emerges: White people without college degrees turned out at just under 58 percent, less than a percentage point higher than in 2012.

In other words the reason that Obama won in 2008 and 2012 was due to the high black turnout in those election years. This year Obama wasn’t on the ballot and that black vote did’t materialize.

The effect was apparently particularly pronounced in Midwestern states:

The other states that flipped between the elections saw no meaningful change in white non-college-educated turnout. For many of them, what made the difference was the drop in black or Hispanic turnout. In Ohio, where Clinton lost by 8.6 points and Obama won by 2, black turnout dropped from 72 to 65 percent.

And in Michigan, where Clinton lost by a mere 0.3 percent and Obama won by 9, Hispanic turnout may have dropped by half, according to Census Bureau estimates. That number has a significant margin of error —14 points — but the drop is nonetheless significant.

I’m not sure what to make of those results but they can’t be comforting to Democrats. Will another black candidates be able to garner the support among blacks that Obama did? Will a black vice presidential candidate be able to supply the magic?

I also wonder if there’s been a sort of reverse Great Migration. Are all of those expected black voters in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin still there?