Walter Russell Mead urges Republicans to think in the longer term:

The Republicans have fallen into a trap. The problem with American healthcare isn’t the way it is paid for, at least not in the short term. The problem is that our bloated system is too inefficient so that it costs too much no matter how we pay for it.

Thus, healthcare policy has to involve two things: A short-term system to help people navigate the current disaster, and a plan to make the system sustainable over time. Obamacare “repeal” should be about temporary reform of the worst features of the law—especially regulations that are unnecessarily cementing bad things into the system.

The long-term cost problem wasn’t created by Obamacare, and it won’t be undone in a single piece of improvised legislation keeps the law’s structure but makes the taxes and transfers less progressive.

In national politics two years ahead is long term thinking. It brings to mind what a boss of mine once said: “If I start engaging in that kind of long term thinking, next month there will be somebody else at this desk thinking in the short term.”

As I read John Gray’s reaction at NewStatesman to the terror attack in London the other day, it reminded me of a line from a play. Was it Cactus Flower? “The most important thing in the world to me is freedom. After I’ve eaten.”

Mr. Gray speculates that in the United Kingdom at least attention is turning to the “primary function” of government—providing security:

The ideal liberal order that was supposedly emerging in Europe is history. The task of defending public safety has devolved to national governments – the only institutions with the ability to protect their citizens.

The progressive narrative in which freedom is advancing throughout the world has left liberal societies unaware of their fragility. Overthrowing despots in the name of freedom, we have ended up facing a situation in which our own freedom is at stake. According to the liberal catechism, freedom is a sacred value, indivisible and overriding, which cannot be compromised. Grandiose theories of human rights have asserted that stringent limitations on state power are a universal requirement of justice. That endemic anarchy can be a more intractable obstacle to civilised existence than many kinds of despotism has been disregarded and passed over as too disturbing to dwell on.

I can’t speculate on how Germany, Belgium, or the United Kingdom will deal with their security problems. They should respond in the ways that are culturally and politically consistent with their own needs.

Here in the United States we face challenges of our own. We can keep foreigners out but, increasingly, Islamist terrorist attacks aren’t being perpetrated by foreigners. The idea that any foreseeable increases in federal, state, and local governments’ use of force will actually make us safer is far-fetched.

Another line that comes to mind, this one from Casablanca: “… there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.” Our society and our problems are different so our solutions will inevitably be different.

I have to admit that I’m skeptical about Colin P. Clarke’s conclusion in his post at the RAND Blog on the continuingly changing face of Al Qaeda in Syria:

Six years into the conflict in Syria, al Qaeda’s presence in the country has never been stronger. And while most dismiss the notion of al Qaeda as a political entity in Syria, the same was said 30 years ago about Hezbollah — the Shia group that now holds seats in Lebanon’s parliament and maintains a vast military wing. If jihadist groups linked to al Qaeda in Syria can succeed in rebranding themselves, they can take steps toward positioning themselves as political players if or when negotiations to end the civil war in Syria gain traction.

To my eye treating Middle Eastern Islamist groups as though they were Western corporations is just as misleading as Orientalism. Let’s try another analogy. What if, rather than “rebranding” themselves as a strategem, is it possible that many of these Islamist groups are familial or tribal in nature and the dizzying variety of organizations and names just represents larger groups fracturing along lines of family, clan, or tribe?

There’s a snippet from Hassan Hakimians’s post at Project Syndiate considering why economists did not predict the “Arab Spring” that I found very intriguing:

According to the American sociologist James C. Davies’s so-called J-curve theory, revolutions – such as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Egypt’s revolution of 1952 – occur when periods of prolonged economic and social development are sharply and suddenly reversed. In other words, it is not straightforward economic hardship, but rather frustration with the disparity between expectation and reality that awakens the masses.

And people wonder why I’m worried about the United States.

The editors at Bloomberg point out a good feature in the Republican tax reform plan—treating debt and equity the same for the purposes of taxation. I’ll let them explain it:

One of the biggest defects in the U.S. tax code is that it encourages companies to finance themselves by borrowing rather than by issuing equity. Correcting this bias should be a top priority for President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress as they merge their plans for tax reform.

The tax preference for debt over equity is neither new nor confined to the U.S., but that doesn’t make it good policy. Many governments treat interest on debt as a deductible expense, so payments to creditors don’t get taxed while payments to shareholders do. This tilting of incentives has no good justification and can be dangerous.

Highly leveraged enterprises are much more likely to fail in an economic downturn. This fragility is what turns isolated asset bubbles into major catastrophes. It’s why the subprime boom of the 2000s, financed largely with credit, was so much more damaging than the equity-fueled dot-com craze of the 1990s.

While the best approach would be to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely, if you’re going to maintain a corporate tax system (which appears to be a political necessity), allow companies to deduct the equity issued as an expense.

That sounds good to me but I’m no expert on corporate finance and would appreciate any commentary by people who are.

While I agree with the gist of what Megan McArdle has to say in her recent piece about reforming the U. S. health care system at Bloomberg View:

Why are memes like this so compelling? Because they’re easy. But the whole truth is not so easy. And solutions for Americans’ health-care complaints? Those are really hard.

which is that reforming our system is hard, I’m not completely in agreement with her about everything. There are many complications including:

• Insurance is not care.
• Care is not health.
• Health is dependent both on factors that can be affected by changes in care or government policy and factors that can’t, e.g. genetics, individual personal behavior, or at least can’t without grave difficulty.

One of the dirty little secrets about health care is that spending is lower and health is better in some OECD countries in which the people, for various cultural reasons, don’t seek as much care as Americans tend to, e.g. Japan. Praise is often lavished on Singapore’s system. If Americans sought as little care as Singaporans do, our system would be less expensive, too. And, shazam!, places in the United States that are more like Singapore than they are like, say, Indiana, e.g. Hawaii, also spend less on health care.

And then there’s the most serious complication: one person’s spending is another person’s income.

Here’s the kernel of Jacob L. Shapiro’s post at Geopolitical Futures on the “frenemy” relationship between the United States and China:

The U.S. and China do not see eye to eye in three areas: Chinese territorial claims in the South and East China seas, how to deal with North Korea, and the parameters of the U.S.-China trade relationship. The last one is the most important to both sides. While both countries are dependent on each other, their relationship is heavily weighted in the U.S.’ favor. China needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China, and many of China’s current moves, particularly regarding North Korea, attempt to develop as much leverage with the U.S. as possible. These were the same issues the administration of former President Barack Obama faced with China, the only difference being that the Trump administration means to push even harder on the trade issue than its predecessor.

A tremendous flaw in our negotiations with China is that neither American leaders nor American diplomats seem to recognize that the U. S. is negotiating from a position of strength.

In my view that’s the heart of the matter. American leaders have been weak-minded and weak-willed; Chinese leaders have been strong-minded and strong-willed. That more than compensates for China’s material position of weakness. The joke is on us.

There’s a lot of stewing about the World Happiness Report and that the people of the United States, apparently, aren’t as happy as they used to be. At Bloomberg View Leonid Bershidsky remarks:

Wealth is easy to quantify, so many governments concentrate on fixing this variable. That appears to be Donald Trump’s intention in the U.S., too. But the experience of the small European nations at the top of the table shows that once a certain level of wealth is achieved, growth isn’t as important to happiness levels. As long as per capita GDP is relatively stable, the other factors do their job, and if there’s a problem with them — for example, health care becomes less accessible or deteriorates, the social fabric starts fraying, people grow more selfish or freedom erodes — people tend to feel unhappy despite an unchanged comfort level.

I think that they need to start looking at the United States differently. Here are the report’s ten happiest countries:

1. Norway
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Switzerland
5. Finland
6. Netherlands
7. Canada
8. New Zealand
9. Australia
10. Sweden

The U. S. is fourteenth.

Those countries have some things in common. With the exception of Finland they’re all mostly speakers of Germanic languages (as is the U. S.). They’re all small and quite homogeneous. Many are culturally Lutheran.

The United States is the only really populous, racially and ethnically diverse country among the twenty happiest countries. So, two cheers for us.

Not only are we large and diverse but we’re able to keep it together. Rather than moaning (or chuckling) that the U. S. isn’t the happiest country, maybe other countries should be wondering about the secret of our success.

I had a problem with Ruopeng An and Roland Sturm’s article at the RAND Blog on myths about American obesity:

There are lots of theories about what’s causing the epidemic of obesity in America. Already, two in three Americans are overweight or obese. If current trends continue, some people believe a majority of Americans will be obese in another decade or so.

A few years ago we teamed up to crunch the data looking for possible policy solutions. We used national studies and government databases to search for ways to combat the epidemic. To do that we needed to look for evidence of what was driving Americans’ weight gain. Was it neighborhood “food deserts” where it was hard to find healthy food? Is healthy food just too expensive? Are Americans exercising too little? Drinking too much sugary soda?

Along the way, we found out that the data don’t support many of the popular theories about what’s causing obesity to increase so dramatically. And we reached one indisputable conclusion: We’re all getting fatter.

The problem I had was with their conclusion:

The hard truth is simple: If we want to stop getting fatter, we have to start eating less.

The authors obviously continue to believe in the simple thermodynamics theory of weight gain, despite the evidence against it.

In my own case I consume about 1,800 calories a day and exercise more than 150 minutes a week. I’m definitely not sylph-like but I’m not sloppy fat, either. According to the tables I’m overweight. Some of that is undoubtedly because I’m built on a different scale than most people. My shoulders are broader, my chest is deeper, I’m more muscular, and my legs are shorter.

I believe that weight gain is multi-factorial including not just not getting enough exercise and eating too much but also age, genetics, and overuse of antibiotics resulting in an imbalance in the gut flora just to name three other factors. I wish more scientists relied on science on this subject.