At Bloomberg Megan McArdle calls for a more coherent policy on immigration:

We can argue about whether or not America has an immigration problem. But it seems pretty clear that Democrats have an immigration problem, one that they’re going to have to fix if they want to effectively oppose Trump, much less regain control of the government.

Josh Barro has laid out at length exactly what that problem is. Briefly: Democratic arguments about immigration mostly aren’t arguments. The party has relied on opposing Trump’s more outrageously exaggerated claims about the criminality and all-around character flaws of immigrants. That’s fine, as far as it goes — but as November showed, it doesn’t go far enough.

I think she errs in implying that the lack of a coherent policy on immigration is solely a Democratic problem when it’s obviously a bipartisan one. Let’s recap how we got to where we are now.

Present policies benefit recent immigrants, Hamiltonians who are always eager for cheap, servile labor, and Wilsonians, well-intentioned as always. They hurt Jacksonians while Jeffersonians stand glumly on the sidelines, pointing out the obvious, as is our wont.

Any rationalization of our policies will hurt recent immigrants, Hamiltonians, and Wilsonians and they will fight them to the death. There will never be acceptance of the obvious, that maintaining or even expanding present policy requires the unworkable notion of a right to immigrate.

Meanwhile, don’t expect coherence from President Trump. He doesn’t do coherence. Presumably, he does deals. What is the deal to be done on immigration? I honestly have no idea.

The editors of Bloomberg have recognized what I pointed out a while ago—that we’re in serious need of a coherent policy with respect to Afghanistan:

In testimony this week before Congress, General John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, called for several thousand additional troops from the U.S. or its NATO partners and a “holistic review” of U.S. relations with Pakistan, which still hosts the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Both ideas are worthy of debate, and it’s hard to argue with initiatives to root out the corruption that saps the Afghan security forces and to bolster Afghanistan’s political stability. Speedily nominating a serious U.S. ambassador would also be a step in the right direction.

But given the commander-in-chief’s previous skepticism, something more is necessary. The White House needs to define a vision for success in Afghanistan and what will be required to achieve it. That plan should recognize both the need for a long-term U.S. commitment and the reality that the U.S. can’t achieve its goals without its NATO allies and cooperation from China, India, Pakistan and, yes, even Iran.

concluding with a pious:

Afghanistan will never be a Jeffersonian democracy. But the U.S. has an abiding interest in seeing that it not degenerate into a failed state.

What they didn’t quote from Gen. Nicholson’s remarks is that the present condition, after more than 15 years and the deaths of several thousand American soldiers, is a stalemate.

The editors of Bloomberg are still clinging bitterly to their illusions about Afghanistan. The problem isn’t preventing “a failed state”; it’s that the people of Afghanistan aren’t sympathetic with the very idea of the modern state, at least not one in which their family, their clan, their tribe isn’t in charge.

And “rooting out corruption”? One of the ways in which Afghanistan will “never be a Jeffersonian democracy” is that in a Jeffersonian democracy official corruption is a perversion of the system. In Afghanistan it is the system.

Cooperation from NATO allies and the listed countries? I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Our NATO allies are demilitarizing as fast as they can and adjacent countries can only be expected to stoke inter-ethnic quarrels.

As I pointed out fifteen years ago, in all of history there’s only been one successful invasion of Afghanistan, that was by Alexander, and that was because he intended for his people to stay there. Try selling that to the American people. Try selling it to the Afghans.

The editors of the Washington Post, urge President Trump to heed a task force study report on China:

Mr. Trump has made no secret of his unhappiness with China over trade. But the task force suggests the larger recalibration must be done with care and should focus on six urgent priorities: restraining North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, reassuring U.S. allies in Asia, righting an imbalance in trade and business relations with China, seeking a rules-based approach to settling maritime disputes, pushing back at China’s repression of civil society and sustaining cooperation on global warming. This is a serious and laudable to-do list.

and lurch uncontrollably into an important word—reciprocity:

The task force usefully points out that while Chinese think tanks, academic institutions and media are allowed to operate freely in the United States, American nongovernmental organizations are being put under tighter police and government control inside China. Beijing is also curtailing U.S. media and Internet companies. This kind of imbalance should lead the United States to demand more reciprocity from China, the task force says.

The key problem in dealing with China and in the U. S.-China relationship is that China’s leaders view the relationship strictly as zero sum. For them to win, we must lose. They want China to assume what they see as its rightful place in the world. For that to happen the U. S. must be diminished.

What would a U. S. policy of reciprocity with respect to China look like?

In an article at Foreign Policy, Robert Kagan is panic-stricken over the new new new world order that appears to be emerging, actually more an old world order—spheres of influence:

For the United States to accept a return to spheres of influence would not calm the international waters. It would merely return the world to the condition it was in at the end of the 19th century, with competing great powers clashing over inevitably intersecting and overlapping spheres. These unsettled, disordered conditions produced the fertile ground for the two destructive world wars of the first half of the 20th century. The collapse of the British-dominated world order on the oceans, the disruption of the uneasy balance of power on the European continent as a powerful unified Germany took shape, and the rise of Japanese power in East Asia all contributed to a highly competitive international environment in which dissatisfied great powers took the opportunity to pursue their ambitions in the absence of any power or group of powers to unite in checking them. The result was an unprecedented global calamity and death on an epic scale. It has been the great accomplishment of the U.S.-led world order in the 70 years since the end of World War II that this kind of competition has been held in check and great power conflicts have been avoided. It will be more than a shame if Americans were to destroy what they created — and not because it was no longer possible to sustain but simply because they chose to stop trying.

What’s the alternative? Increasing our economic ties to China as a means of liberalizing the country politically and forestalling any aggressive moves by it is a complete flop. As I pointed out the other day we’re running a massive trade deficit with China. How much more can we increase our economic ties? China is more aggressive now than at an time in the last 40 years.

Cooperation with our allies to enforce an order that we prefer? We abandoned SEATO long ago. Can you imagine the members of the erstwhile Rio Pact standing shoulder to shoulder to oppose Chinese aggression in the South China sea? Me, neither.

NATO would seem to be the likely candidate but other than the United States our NATO allies are actually spending less on defense, both in real terms and as a percentage of their economies, to the point where most are unable to project force at all. Even the most powerful—France and the United Kingdom—have little ability to carry on extended operations with the U. S. propping them up.

Should the U. S. go it alone? We’ve been at war now for more than 15 years. The American people are tired of war without end, particularly when they don’t see an American interest in it. What, precisely, is the American interest in Georgia?

In an article at Atlantic Andrew Bacevich asks some hard questions:

Killing people and bombing things has become a substitute for policy and indeed for thinking. Where there should be strategy, there is a void. Will a president who looks to the likes of Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn for advice fill that void? I don’t think so.

The operative question is not: Why did last week’s raid in Yemen fail? Instead, it is: What are U.S. forces doing there in the first place? How, at this stage of the game, is further expansion of the conflict once known as the Global War on Terrorism advancing the basic security interests of the United States? All that Mr. Trump is doing is to embrace the legacy of his predecessors: perpetuating what has become an open-ended war of attrition.

I would ask some others. Why did we invade Iraq? Why did we connive at the removal of Moammar Qaddafi? Why are we still in Afghanistan? Why are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria to bring down Syria’s government?

The ability to wage war and a casus belli are not enough to go to war. While we should be prepared to go to war if we must, we should never do so just because we can.

As I read this article at The Mercury News in the rise of high deductible healthcare insurance programs:

Double-digit premium hikes are jolting millions of Americans who get their coverage through the Affordable Care Act, but just the opposite is happening to Ryan Lemburg.

Like most Americans who get their health insurance through their employers, the Tracy school teacher has seen his annual premiums creep up at a historically low pace since the country’s controversial health care law, Obamacare, was passed six years ago.

Good news, right? So why doesn’t it feel that way? Behind that stability in premiums for many of the country’s 150 million workers is a trade-off: they’re being shifted to high-deductible health plans, which companies are increasingly championing as a way to hold down their own health care costs. While employees may see less coming out of their paychecks, they’re on the hook for more out-of-pocket costs before their insurance coverage kicks in.

I tried to relate that to the experience with the insurance plans offered in the exchanges under the Affordable Care Act. Trends in both seem to be towards plans with punishingly high deductibles. It reminded me of a description I heard long ago about Social Security to the effect that in the Social Security system a regressive tax and retirement benefits that are too small come together to become the third rail of American politics.

What end game is envisioned for healthcare insurance, whether private or offered under the auspices of the PPACA? Increasingly, it looks as though my description of the PPACA given way back in 2009 that it would become Medicaid for all appears to be correct.

Is it a fully-socialized system like British National Health? An end of healthcare insurance? Catastrophic care plans only? I think that many of the ardent supporters of the PPACA envisioned it as the first step in the road to a single-payer system but a single-payer system for what? To my eye what we’re moving towards does not seem to be a system worth having.

At the Wall Street Journal William Galston writes about Sen. Minority Leader Charles Schumer’s unenviable chore:

Sen. Schumer’s overriding political imperative is to prevent Republicans from widening their Senate majority next year. To maximize his chances, he will have to allow endangered Democrats to go their own way on votes that could be used to bolster their opponents. This means defending them when they break with blue-state Democrats while doing his best to forestall debilitating primary challenges from disgruntled progressives. The formula for Democratic victory in North Dakota and West Virginia is very different from Vermont and Massachusetts, a reality that the supporters of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren must be persuaded to accept.

This is Mr. Schumer’s thankless task, which he cannot evade, whatever the short-term impact on the support he enjoys from his party’s left wing. The alternative—an ideologically driven purge of Democratic moderates—could consign the party to minority status for a generation.

That echoes Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s remarks to the effect that Democrats need to pick up some more seats and “chill out”, one of the relatively few times in which I have been in strenuous agreement with him.

Democrats should be thinking about reapportionment as well and redistricting as well. Stoking the flames may bring out rioters. Whether that will bring out more people to vote for moderate Democrats in Missouri, North Dakota, and West Virginia remains to be seen.

Consider the chart above. Note that our balance of trade with many if not most of our trading partners isn’t horrendously lopsided. Except one. Now read this report from the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. logged a $502.25 billion trade deficit in 2016, the largest in four years and a gap President Donald Trump is setting out to narrow to bolster the U.S. economy.

The new president faces obstacles in the coming months and years, including the potential for a stronger dollar, larger federal budget deficits and low national saving rates compared with much of the rest of the world, all of which could force trade deficits to widen.

As in past years, the 2016 gap reported Tuesday by the Commerce Department reflected a large deficit for U.S. trade in goods with other countries, offset in part by a trade surplus for services. The gap in terms of goods only was $347 billion with China last year, $69 billion with Japan, $65 billion with Germany and $63 billion with Mexico.

For December, the total trade gap decreased 3.2% from November to a seasonally adjusted $44.26 billion. Exports rose 2.7%, including increased sales of civilian airplanes and aircraft engines. Imports were up 1.5% in December, including a rise in car imports.

The huge trade deficit we run with China isn’t because we don’t produce anything that the Chinese want. We do. It has several causes: 1) China needs dollars to purchase oil with; 2) China uses the excess dollars it receives in trade to purchase Treasuries rather than goods or services; 3) China intervenes actively to prevent the importation of more of the stuff that we produce.

We have enormous unused capacity here in the United States, particularly in primary commodities. We could be producing lots more rice, wheat, chicken, pork, coal, iron ore, and so on and so on—all things the Chinese need. And producing more of those things would create lots of jobs that ordinary people could perform.

Why do we tolerate China’s mercantilist strategy?

My only criticism of Martin Feldstein, Ted Halstead, and Greg Mankiw’s plan for reducing carbon emissions, laid out in the New York Times:

Our plan is built on four pillars.

First, the federal government would impose a gradually increasing tax on carbon dioxide emissions. It might begin at $40 per ton and increase steadily. This tax would send a powerful signal to businesses and consumers to reduce their carbon footprints.

Second, the proceeds would be returned to the American people on an equal basis via quarterly dividend checks. With a carbon tax of $40 per ton, a family of four would receive about $2,000 in the first year. As the tax rate rose over time to further reduce emissions, so would the dividend payments.

Third, American companies exporting to countries without comparable carbon pricing would receive rebates on the carbon taxes they’ve paid on those products, while imports from such countries would face fees on the carbon content of their products. This would protect American competitiveness and punish free-riding by other nations, encouraging them to adopt their own carbon pricing.

Finally, regulations made unnecessary by the carbon tax would be eliminated, including an outright repeal of the Clean Power Plan.

is that I believe that they and we will be disappointed with its effectiveness in actually reducing emissions. I believe that everyone, from poor to rich, will just pay the tax. The bottom 70% of people will have their tax increases cancelled out by their $2,000 stipends and the rich, whose behavior is most in need of change to reduce carbon emissions, will just ignore them. It might even have the perverse effect of increasing the carbon emissions of the poor, depending on how they spend their stipends.

What it will be highly effective in doing is raising revenue which will make it increasingly attractive to anyone with a pet project. And who in the House or Senate does not have a pet project?

I don’t believe that any neo-liberal scheme to reduce carbon emissions will be effective for the reasons outlined above and efforts should be concentrated at remediation rather than wasting time and energy on pseudo-market based schemes that can’t work.