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I found Rainer Zitelmann’s post at FEE Stories, questioning narratives in the United States about income inequality strangely crabbed. Here’s the core of it:

f a thesis is repeated hundreds of times, many people believe it; if it is repeated millions of times, hardly anyone doubts it. The United States in particular is repeatedly cited as an example of how the “gap between rich and poor” is constantly widening. But two experts from the Office of Tax Analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation have now demonstrated in an almost 50-page essay in the renowned Journal of Political Economy that this thesis is simply not true.

The left-wing French economist Thomas Piketty, who is regarded as the principal proponent of the thesis, calculated that the income share of the top one percent of the wealthiest Americans has more than doubled since 1962. Among other things, he uses this to justify calls for taxes on the rich to be raised as high 90 percent and for all young people to be “gifted” a lump-sum of 120,000 euros in start-up money from the state.

The two authors come up with a figure that sounds far less dramatic. The top one percent’s share of pre-tax income in the United States increased from 11.1 percent (1962) to 13.8 percent (2019), i.e. by 2.7 percentage points. However, after taxes and transfer payments are taken into account, the increase was only 0.2 percentage points (from 8.6 to 8.8 percent).

I don’t believe that the question of income inequality can be discussed intelligently without considering what sort of country we want.

What has happened over the last 50 years is that the aggregate income of people in the top quintile of income earners has risen while those of other quintiles has fallen. If you want a country in which 20% of the people pay the taxes that allow the lowest 20% to receive government benefits that keep them out of dire poverty while the 60% in the middle struggle and the taxes of that top 20% are kept low by issuing ourselves credit, you’re in the right country. That is a country of profound economic and ultimately social and political inequality. Since it’s a positive feedback system, it also cannot work.

That such a large percent of those in that top 20% of income earners are government employees of one form or another makes it just all that much less workable. So, for example, a police officer or fire fighter married to a teacher may well be in that top 20% of income earners. Remember, too, that about half of all healthcare spending comes from government spending. It’s just not a workable system and it would collapse entirely without the ever-rising public debt that keeps it afloat.

I also know that it’s a lot harder for ordinary, hard-working people in the private sector to own houses, buy cars, or send their kids to college than it used to be. Where we’re headed is not really the United States as it has been and an increasing number of Americans don’t like the direction in which we’re heading.

Let me answer the question Inae Oh asks at Mother Jones. Taken aback by Nancy Pelosi’s recent complaints about pro-Hamas demonstrators she declaims:

Some Democrats seem to want it both ways, framing discussions of a horrific war mostly as an election issue. Criticism is unhelpful because to these voters, keeping Donald Trump out of the White House is the paramount issue. But unhelpful to whom? Who could look at “hell” in Gaza and not think beyond 2024?

When you as totally convinced of your own moral rectitude and you so conflate re-election with the good of the country as is the case with long-time officeholders, no, you cannot hear yourself.

I’ve cited Ruy Teixeira pretty frequently here but his co-author John Judis less. In a recent post Mr. Judis proposes a strategy for ending or greatly reducing illegal immigration, expressing skepticism that an effective plan will ever be adopted. There are several aspects of his post that are worthy of attention.

He opens with an explanation of why we should end or reduce illegal immigration:

Over the past decades, undocumented immigrants, largely concentrated among the unskilled and those without higher education, have exerted downward pressure on wages in agriculture, construction, food preparation and meatpacking, building maintenance, retail sales, and the hospitality industry. First generation legal immigrants and black Americans without a higher education have been particularly hurt. Even now, when unemployment remains low, the damage to these workers can be seen in the decline of the labor participation rate among working-age men without a college education.

Let’s phrase it a different way. Accepting or even lauding unlimited illegal immigration without an effective strategy for mitigating the harm they do prior cohorts of immigrants and poor black Americans is an objective statement of indifference to that harm. Training and education are not an effective mitigation strategy. For reasons I’ll explain later curbing illegal immigration is the only effective mitigation.

He continues by explaining the legislation presently being discussed and why the apparent Democratic strategy of goading the Republicans to oppose any legislation and blaming the chaos at our southern border on them is unlikely to be effective:

But it may too late for Biden and the Democrats to claim the issue. If you look for a Democratic proposal that counters H.R.2 or that of the Senate Republicans, you won’t find it. Search on the internet for “Democratic immigration plan” and you’ll be directed to the Democrats’ 2020 platform that called for a dramatic expansion of the asylum system and path to citizenship for undocumented migrants. These proposals, voiced by Biden during his first year, inspired the huge wave of illegal immigration that began in 2021 and that many Democrats now recognize as a genuine problem. And look more closely at the Republicans’ H.R. 2, and you’ll discover that some of its provisions are not unreasonable, and one of them should be part of an effective plan to curb illegal immigration.

He also explains what I’ve been complaining about in the Biden Administration’s approach to asylum:

According to the Refugee Act of 1980, migrants could apply for asylum based on “a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” But Biden widened these criteria. Under Biden, applicants could seek asylum if they were threatened by gang or domestic violence. One applicant applied and was judged credible on the ground that he was a victim of extortion by criminals. Another got through because a policeman had knocked out his tooth.

The administration also relaxed the standards for application from “well-founded fear” to credible fear including generalized fear. Not to put to fine a point on it but practically anyone outside of Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States could qualify for asylum under the present far too low and relaxed standards. Poverty or fear of generalized crime or violence should not be causes for asylum. We need to return to the standards of 1980 if not more stringent ones.

He continues by reviewing the history and effectiveness of E-verify. He cites the studies of E-verify that have found it effective:

They found that the programs “appear to lead to better labor market outcomes among workers likely to compete with unauthorized immigrants. Employment rises among male Mexican immigrants who are naturalized citizens in states that adopt E-Verify mandates, and earnings rise among U.S.-born Hispanic men.”

The very reason that E-verify especially when effective is opposed by both Republicans and Democrats is that it is effective. Business interests want to continue to push wages down; activist groups want to continue to attract large numbers of migrants.

There are several issues that Mr. Judis does not address in his piece and I’ll remedy that here. In addition to the adverse effects on the wages of prior cohorts of immigrants and poor black Americans, an effectively unlimited supply of new low-skill workers distorts the U. S. economy. We have too many jobs paying at or below minimum wage and too much investment in sectors that produce such jobs, crowding out investment in sectors that produce better jobs that pay more. That also has the effect of aggravating the bifurcation of society into a small groupof “the rich” and a very large group of “the poor”. My definition of “the rich” is anyone who earns more than one standard deviation higher than the median is rich.

There is another reason we should be curbing immigration. Plainly speaking, we can’t afford it. A family of four in Chicago requires roughly $50,000 in taxes regardless of the family’s income. There is no realistic prospect for a migrant family to produce $50,000 in state and local taxes. Somebody has to pay it. More low-wage immigrants will merely make matters worse.

There are basically four possible solutions to the problem of affordability:

• Limit the number of low wage immigrants coming into the country using a combination of controls at the border and strictly enforced E-verify with sizeable penalties for violations (the $5,000 fine proposed is a pittance).
• Impose a head tax on employers for each employee. Small businesses must be included and the head tax would need to be sufficient to pay for the shortfall due to low-wage workers. Think in terms of five figures, indexed.
• City workers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, healthcare workers, etc. could take a pay cut.
• “The rich” could be willing to pay taxes at the level necessary to pay for the migrants.

Of those I find the first by far the most effective and humane strategy that is possible including both physical and political possibility.

]The graph above is from FRED, the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It illustrates the total civilian employment and the subsectors that have been responsible for most of the growth in employment over the last decade or so: leisure and hospitality, government, retail, and construction. I omitted the last fast-growing sector because FRED doesn’t include it in a straightforward way: healthcare services.

BTW, in each of those sectors the growth has tended to come among the lowest paid. Take construction, for example. When we say “employment is growing” we don’t mean that the number of master plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. is growing but that the number of workers paid at or below minimum wage is growing. When considered in that light it isn’t particularly surprising that wages have been stagnating for decades.

No particular point to all of this. I just wanted to have a record of what I’ve been thinking about.

At UnHerd David A. Bell considers a very interesting question: does conquest convey a right to territory? His opening raised some red flags for me:

The two expulsions took place only a few years apart. In the first, starting in 1945, the Soviet Union took the lead in driving as many as 12 million ethnic Germans from territories that had previously belonged to Germany. They largely ended up in what became West Germany, their places taken principally by Czechs and Poles. In the second expulsion, in 1948-49, the newborn state of Israel drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from their homes, while hundreds of thousands of others fled what had become a war zone. All in all, well over 700,000 were forcibly displaced.

The problem is that during the period he’s addressing there were actually three expulsions: the expulsion of ethnic Germans from territories conquered by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the newly-created land of Israel, and, the expulsion he fails to mention, the expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Muslim lands of North Africa and the Middle East. Omitting that expulsion elides over something pretty basic.

Without digressing too much, I suspect that there aren’t 1,000 people alive today who are living where their ancestors have lived for the last 1,000 generations. Everybody is from somewhere else. They are where they are now because their ancestors took the land from somebody else whose ancestors took the land from somebody else, whose etc. It may be distasteful but if there is no legitimate claim of ownership via conquest then no country has any legitimacy or, more precisely, the only way to claim any legitimacy is by drawing some arbitrary line in history labelled “This Far and No Farther”. Somehow such lines have a tremendous tendency to be self-serving in one way or another.

There is another way of looking things which goes back to a Scottish saying: possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Walter Russell Mead does quite a bit of throat-clearing before finally getting to the point of his most recent Wall Street Journal column:

The Middle East is on fire today because the Biden administration’s core regional strategy—to reach some kind of détente with Iran—has catastrophically failed. Iran, closer every day to nuclear weapons, is at the point of upending the regional balance of power even as its Houthi proxies have largely blocked trade through the Red Sea. Meanwhile, the Taliban’s humiliation of the U.S. in Afghanistan, the shock of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the success of jihadist movements across much of Africa have combined to breathe new energy into global terror networks.

The past 50 years teach that strategic failure in the Middle East destroys presidencies. As the White House scrambles to respond to Iran’s latest attack on American forces, let’s hope it recognizes how high the stakes have become.

I don’t believe that any strategy or any negotiation with any country can be successful without taking several things into account:

• We have interests
• They have interests
• Those interests are inconsistent
• We cannot simply dismiss Iran’s interests even when they’re in conflict with ours

What are Iran’s interests? It has nationalistic interests, of course. The mullahs wish to preserve their authority and they want to exert influence in the Muslim world, the Middle East in particular.

What are our interests? I think nearly all of our interests in negotiating with Iran simply dismiss Iran’s interests.

At Responsible Statecraft Paul R. Pillar calls for the U. S. to withdraw its troops from Iraq and Syria:

The drone attack on Sunday that killed three U.S. service members at an outpost in Jordan near the Syria border is more likely to increase rather than decrease U.S. military involvement in the region.

This is unfortunate, and doubly so coming at a time when the Biden administration was showing signs of considering a withdrawal of the 900 U.S. troops in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq. Just last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin intimated that a joint U.S.-Iraqi review might lead to a drawdown of at least some of the troops in Iraq. Other reporting points to discussions within the administration about possibly removing the troops now in Syria.

It is unclear why the administration chose this time to consider what was already a long-overdue withdrawal of these troops. The answer probably involves the upsurge in regional violence stemming from Israel’s devastating assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and associated anger against the United States for its backing of Israel. Since the Israeli assault began, U.S. military installations in Iraq have been attacked more than 60 times and those in Syria more than 90 times.

The attacks underscore how much these residual U.S. deployments have entailed costs and risks far out of proportion to any positive gains they can achieve. They have been sitting-duck targets within easy reach of militias and other elements wishing to make a violent anti-U.S. statement. Even without deaths, U.S. service members have paid a price, such as in the form of traumatic brain injuries from missile attacks.

concluding:

Combating ISIS is a shared interest of Iran and the United States, as illustrated by the United States reportedly sharing — quite properly, in conformity with the duty to warn — information about the planned ISIS attack in Kerman. It would be in U.S. interests to have Iran continue to do the heavy lifting in holding down ISIS — and to have Iran, not the United States, risk any resulting terrorist reprisals.

But I don’t think I agree with him entirely. First, I think we should distinguish between the troops we have in Iraq and those we have in Syria. Those we have in Iraq are there at the request of the Iraqi government. Those in Syria are not there at the invitation of the Syrian government. IMO their presence in Syria other than in hot pursuit from Iraq is illegal and unjustified. Those troops should be withdrawn.

I think that the troops we have in Iraq should be retained there as long as a) the Iraq government wants them there and b) they are accomplishing worthwhile, measurable objectives. I’m not sure that condition b is there but I could be convinced. I don’t think our troops should be left in Iraq to be there.

In the wake of the SCOTUS decision finding that President Biden had the authority to direct federal officers to remove the barriers the State of Texas had installed on its border with Mexico, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s letter to President Biden (PDF), demanding that he enforce the border is pretty chilling. It opens with:

The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now. President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration.

and closes with:

The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense. For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.

I do not believe that Gov. Abbott is entirely right but I don’t believe he’s entirely wrong, either. In particular I think that relying on the argument that these are asylum seekers rings hollow. Most are not asylum seekers.

Arguing that it’s all just politics rings hollow as well.

In particular does presidential discretion extend to ignoring his Constitutional responsibilities?

To my ear that sounds closer to a threat of rebellion than anything I have heard recently.

How is Gov. Abbott right and how it he wrong?

Update

Fully supporting my concern all Republican governors appear to be backing Gov. Abbott.

Several Democrats have called for President Biden to nationalize the Texas National Guard enforce the SCOTUS stay. I think that nationalizing the Texas National Guard would be a very, very bad idea. He’d be better off nationalizing the Illinois National Guard and deploying them to Texas.

A quote of JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon by John L. Dorman at Yahoo!Finance caught my eye:

JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon said that former President Donald Trump was “kind of right” about NATO and immigration and urged Democrats to “be a little more respectful” of voters who are backing the ex-president’s 2024 campaign.

During a CNBC “Squawk Box” interview conducted in Davos, the site of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, Dimon on Wednesday said that Americans who adhere to the Make America Great Again movement were fond of Trump’s policies and not necessarily backing the former president’s personal conduct as they head into ballot booths.

“When people say MAGA, they’re actually looking at people voting for Trump, and they think they’re voting — they’re basically scapegoating them, that you are like him. But I don’t think they’re voting for Trump because of his family values,” Dimon said.

“He’s kind of right about NATO. Kind of right about immigration,” the chief executive continued. “He grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.”

Trump during his presidency was highly critical of NATO; last year, Congress passed a Pentagon funding bill that effectively bars any president from unilaterally leaving the intergovernmental military alliance.

Dimon, similar to comments he made in November 2023, reiterated that he wanted to see Democrats “think a little more carefully” when they speak about MAGA and again pointed to his belief that Trump has been correct on a range of issues.

That has some resonance with this observation of Minnesota Democratic Congressman Dean Phillips:

And I’ve got to tell you guys, I went to a Donald Trump rally a couple nights ago. Never been to one. I had an event across the street. I saw the line of people waiting in the cold for hours and I thought, what the heck, you know, I’m going to be a leader who actually invites people, doesn’t condemn them, Met probably 50 Trump people waiting in line. Every single one of them, thoughtful, hospitable, friendly, all of them so frustrated that they feel nobody’s listening to them but Donald Trump. A diverse crowd. People who had never been to a Trump event before. My party is completely delusional right now, and somebody had to wake us up. And if that’s my job, so be it.

I wonder if President Biden understands the risks of the “democracy is in the balance” campaign he’s been running. There are several two of which are mentioned above—it says nothing about policy and it may alienate the very people you want to vote for you. Here’s another. When your claims are that the other guy is a fascist, a would-be dictator, and you want to preserve democracy it means you’ve got to not be a fascist or would-be dictator and you must be democratic. Nothing says “democracy” like the steps, for example, the the State of Illinois’s Democratic Party has taken to keep anyone not named “Joe Biden” off the list of Democratic candidates for president here.