What do you think of the reports that the Russian troops fighting in Ukraine have experienced 315,000 casualties? (killed and injured) Here’s the Reuters report by Jonathan Landay:

WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) – A declassified U.S. intelligence report assessed that the Ukraine war has cost Russia 315,000 dead and injured troops, or nearly 90% of the personnel it had when the conflict began, a source familiar with the intelligence said on Tuesday.

The report also assessed that Moscow’s losses in personnel and armored vehicles to Ukraine’s military have set back Russia’s military modernization by 18 years, the source said.

I think this is part of that “full court press” I was talking about. i also wonder if they’re not comparing apples to oranges (“90% of the personnel it had when the conflict began” vs. percent who have been involved). Russian social media are not reflecting that level of casualties. Ukrainian social media are.

I genuinely don’t know what to make of it.

There seems to be a full court press going on in the media to get the Congress to pass increased funding for Ukraine. The editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:

Washington is ready to close up shop for the holidays, and so far there’s no deal for more weapons for Israel and Ukraine with changes to border security. The question to start asking is whether the U.S. is really going to let partisan divisions turn into a betrayal of Ukraine.

Hard to believe, but perhaps it is. President Biden warned Tuesday that America is “at a real inflection point in history” that could “determine the future” of Europe. He is right on that point. Without more U.S. weapons, Ukraine will lose to Vladimir Putin. One result would be an unstable Europe. The blow to U.S. power and influence would be on the order of Saigon in 1975.

The media don’t seem to be pulling for the other components of the military spending bill making its way through Congress in quite the same way. There are some signs that they want the U. S.. to decrease funding for Israel and leave the situation at the border alone. That’s all somewhat odd since it at such odds with the views of Americans among whom the majority think we’re providing too much aid to Ukraine, agree with the support we’re giving to Israel, and 2/3s of Americans think the situation at our southern border is either a crisis or a major problem.

I think we should be providing support to Ukraine, should provide military support to Israel is they ask for it but shouldn’t go out of our way to support them, and that the situation at our southern border is one that only returning to the definition of asylum in the Immigration and Naturalization Act and turning back anyone who doesn’t meet that will fix.

However, the media really needs to come to a realistic understanding of our support for Ukraine. We don’t have munitions sitting on the shelf to send to Ukraine and we aren’t producing munitions as fast as the Ukrainians are using them. The best we can do right now is slow the pace at which the Ukrainians run out of ammo.

I agree with the WSJ editors that we’re betraying the Ukrainians but the betrayal took place a long time ago when we encouraged the Ukrainians to think they would be admitted to NATO and supported the overthrow of the legitimately elected but pro-Russian Ukrainian government in 2014.

To save you the trouble of looking it up, “scapulimancy” is the art of reading the future from scapulae, shoulder bones. Today commenters are engaging in something like that to interpret Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s statement of yesterday. It is widely being interpreted as a modest declaration of victory over inflation and the Fed’s pivoting away from increasing interest rates aggressively towards cutting interest rates. The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark:

Mr. Powell is right that he has made anti-inflation progress, but his performance Wednesday will go far to easing the tighter monetary conditions that have produced this progress. The FOMC didn’t change policy this week, and it can always postpone its rate-cutting for longer. But it would be a shame to declare victory too soon.

I think a couple of warnings are necessary. First, the decline of the rate of inflation to 3.1% is still higher than the Fed’s long-held target. That would seem to imply that either the Fed is abandoning that target or that interest rates are not likely to decline as quickly as markets seem to indicate.

More importantly the rate of inflation declining does not mean that prices are declining. Quite to the contrary as Jim Grant put it in an interview with Business Insider:

“Inflation is not transitory,” Grant told the network. “It is permanent in that you never regain the purchasing power you have lost to inflation.”

My salary doesn’t increase with the CPI which I believe is the case for most people. The only people whose pay goes up every year that I know of these day work for the government.

Another risk is that it appears to me that federal spending in excess of the increase in aggregate product was a key component of the rush of inflation the Fed has been fighting. An election year increase in disbursement could see a repeat performance, just in time for the presidential election in November.

I also wanted to comment on the breast-beating about Moore v U. S. soon to be decided by the Supreme Court. The central question is whether the Congress has the power to tax unrealized income. I don’t think that a trivial question. Here’s the wording of the 16th Amendment:

The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

The question is whether the Congress has the authority to levy taxes against income that has not be realized. I think the answer is obvious (it doesn’t) but lots of other people think it does.

Previous to the 16th Amendment the Congress only had the authority to levy taxes on a per capita basis not on the basis of income. Our modern tax system would be impossible without it.

It seems to me that the basic reason that there is any question about this at all is that some Americans really, really, really want us to have a civil code system rather than the common law system we have. Under a common law system if the law and previous decisions do not determine that a law applies to the specific case under consideration, it doesn’t apply. Under a civil code system the law always applies to every situation. It’s up to jurists to determine how it applies.

Under our common law system if the 16th Amendment actually means “income” where it says income, then the Congress does not have the authority to levy taxes on unrealized income. If we had a civil code system the courts might decide that “income” didn’t actually mean income but applied to pretty much anything.

If the SCOTUS finds that “income” means income, that kills a wealth tax without amending the Constitution. I doubt that such a tax would end with a “billionaire’s tax”. Eventually, it might apply to everything you own.

There is a flurry of commentary from multiple sources about the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and University of Pennsylvania to Congress a week ago. I don’t care to single out any particular piece of commentary the sheer volume of commentary prompts me to make some observations of my own.

First, the clumsiness of the three college presidents makes me wonder if they are actually suited for their jobs or, more precisely, what they think their jobs are. I think the job of a college president is to a) raise money and b) avoid controversy for their institutions (see the previous). If anything they accomplished the opposite of that.

Second, and more importantly, I don’t think that institutions of higher learning can devote as much time and money as they have to whinging about microaggressions and creating “safe spaces” as they have over the last half dozen years or so without getting completely fair charges of favoritism and, conversely, prejudice when they do not extend the same protections to all racial, ethnic, national, or religious groups equally. It’s a case of being hoist by their own petard to use Shakespeare’s coinage.

They should have confined themselves to saying that their institutions stand for freedom of speech and inquiry and they condemn calls for the killing of any group on the basis of their race, etc. and otherwise maintain a modest silence.. Their reluctance to do that has gotten them in sufficient hot water that one of the three has resigned while the president of Harvard is getting statements of support from the university, student body, etc.

I also think that the entire microaggressions and “safe spaces” posture is a strategic error. IMO people have the right to believe and say what they care to short of incitement to violence however heinous; others have the right to disagree. Congress, other legislatures, and prospective donors have a complete right to deny the institutions funding or grants on the basis of the positions they’ve staked out.

I thought that Philip Pilkington made a very good point in a piece at UnHerd. Maybe China’s economy is doing just fine and the Western press is continuing to print the story that the Chinese economy is flagging when the evidence doesn’t actually support that conclusdion:

Open a Western business newspaper and one would probably come away thinking that the Chinese economy is doing poorly, or perhaps even on the verge of collapse. While it is true that the country’s economy continues to suffer from structural problems, this perception is not just wrong but risks undermining the credibility of Anglophone publications and the capacity for our policymakers to make rational decisions.

Last week Chinese price data showed mild deflation, a data point out of which the Western financial press made hay. “China’s deflation worsens as economic pressures mount”, read the Financial Times headline. Bloomberg ran with “China’s consumer price drop worsens, fuelling deflation fears”. The mild deflation that is taking place in China does indeed stem from structural problems in the economy — especially the fact that it is overly reliant on investment spending and insufficiently reliant on consumer spending. But, at a certain point, the negative press becomes outright misleading.

Two other data points were released last week which show the Chinese economy growing robustly. The first came from the private sector Caixin Services Purchasing Managers Index survey, which showed stronger than expected growth in the very sector about which bearish commentators have raised concerns.

Interestingly, the private sector surveys of the Chinese services sector show it expanding quicker than the official Chinese government studies which showed a mild contraction in November. Those who accuse the Chinese of inventing economic statistics would do well to explain why government surveys are more conservative than their private sector equivalents. Whatever way one looks at it, the Chinese services sector is now expanding.

Then there is Chinese export data, which showed exports expanding for the first time in seven months. Combined with the service sector data, this shows a broad-based expansion of the Chinese economy. Not a veritable economic boom, it must be stressed, but continuous growth that is consistent with the IMF’s own projections. These show that Beijing will comfortably meet its 5% growth target this year — a projection China bears seem to ignore when they pass judgement on the economy.

I wish the Chinese people well but I don’t actually care whether China’s economy is growing, shrinking, booming, or collapsing and I don’t honestly know how we could tell. I think we need to formulate policy based on U. S. needs and U. S. interests rather than on what may or may not be happening in China. Furthermore, I think those needs and interests tell us that we need to buy less from China not more and we should take steps to accomplish that regardless of the state of the Chinese economy.

At 1945 Michael Rubin raises an interesting point—is the United States holding Israel to a higher standard than it has held itself?

The Islamic State did not level Raqqa; American bombardment did. Syrian Kurds fought alongside U.S. troops, going block-by-block to rid the town of the Islamic State.

Because of their sacrifice, life had started to return to Raqqa. A youth soccer team scrimmaged in the stadium that just a couple years previously the Islamic State used as a prison and torture center. Some stores in the market had opened, selling falafel and fruit, wedding gowns, toys, and school supplies.

Mosul was in bad shape, too. Again, it was not the Islamic State that destroyed the city, but rather the urban fighting necessary to liberate it. Aerial bombardment, artillery barrages, and door-to-door fighting destroyed more than 130,000 houses. The Islamic State was ruthless. Several houses bore the telltale signs of suicide bomber detonation.

At the height of the Battles of Raqqa and Mosul, civilians trapped in both cities suffered. Food and water were in short supply. There was little medicine. Electricity was out for days. Neither residents nor the international community demanded the Syrian Kurds, Iraqi Army, or their American partners stand down to allow international organizations to establish humanitarian corridors. Momentum mattered. To allow Turkey to ship emergency supplies would mean helping the Islamic State at the expense of the civilians the group terrorized. Even a cease-fire would allow the Islamic State to regroup, reorganize, and seize human shields.

I don’t know the answer to his question. I’m more concerned with the reluctance of some people in the U. S. or the United Nations to hold Hamas to any standard at all.

I agree with Gary M. Galles’s conclusion about the state of the Social Security trust fund:

It is time we realized that there is no fair way out from government Social Security commitments that exceed the funds available. A history of overpromises means everyone has a plausible fairness claim on their side. Yet something must give. The closest we can come to being fair is to avoid making any new over-commitments, to search for ways to make the program more sustainable (to reduce future unfairness problems), and to look seriously at the contentious issue of which of the options will minimize the adverse impacts of unfairness that cannot be avoided altogether.

and the urgency of reform in his post at American Institute for Economic Research although I suspect we agree on little else. What puzzles me about his analysis is that he doesn’t seem to recognize a simple reality: the Social Security program is suffering severely from a failure of its assumptions. I’ll just present one simple example of that here.

Median individual income in the United States in 1970 was around $8,740. Now it’s around $31,000. $8,740 is around $68,000 adjusted for inflation which, coincidentally, is right around the median household income. Nowadays the majority of households have more than a single income and many of the remainder consist of single women head of households. Additionally, today the majority of women work outside the home. Those are not the contours of the society envisioned by the framers of the Social Security program. Their assumptions have failed.

I should add that the phenomenon of people working at two or more full-time or near full-time jobs concurrently is another factor distorting policy.

I don’t know how Social Security should be reformed to suit it to the society we have now but I’m convinced that the present mismatch is part of our problem.

I have just performed some maintenance tasks I have been putting off for a long time. I have backed up my site and upgraded to the latest supported version of PHP.

Given the age of the site (more than 20 years) backing up was a nailbiter for me as was the version upgrade. Everything seems to be working but you never can tell.

Over the last month or so I have received some feedback of problems posting comments. I am hoping that this upgrade resolves that issue.

Update

One of the problems that has been bedeviling me for some time now seems to have been resolved. I was unable to use some of my blog categories. After the PHP version upgrade I now appear to be able to use categories I could not use before the upgrade. That gives me hope for the comments problem.