(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Progress!

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American Affairs, antitrust, Barack Obama, competition, Financial Times, free trade, Jobs, John Maynard Keynes, Martin Wolf, production, Project Syndicate, Robert Skidelsky, stimulus, stimulus package, tariffs, The New York Times, Trade, trade deficit, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I hope you’ll all forgive me for an exercise in self back-patting that (I hope) you’ll read through the end. But the two instances described here of leading economics commentators expressing support for highly unconventional trade policy positions I’ve taken for years are simply too striking to pass up. Even more eye-opening: They appeared within a week of each other!

In chronological order, the first came courtesy of Martin Wolf, the Financial Times columnist who’s more-than-the-average pundit because he boasts both considerable policymaking experience and serious academic chops. As those two bios make clear, he’s also been a strong (though not completely uncritical) supporter of the standard free trade and globalization policies that decisively shaped the entire world economy, including America’s positions, for decades until the CCP Virus’ breakout. (Or did the turning point come with the financial crisis of 2007-08? Oh, well – no need to settle that question right now.)

That’s why I was so amazed to see in his column this past Tuesday the observation that the United States “gains many of the benefits of trade through internal specialisation” essentially because it’s “a large country with a sophisticated economy and diverse resources….”

Wolf’s point may not sound like much. But it not only contradicts the long-standing conventional wisdom – and rationale for supporting the freest possible global trade flows – that emphasizes (1) the centrality of international specialization for maximizing the prosperity of all individual countries and indeed the entire world, and (2) the imperative of exposing national economic activity to global competition in order to force domestic industries continually to improve quality and lower costs.

Wolf has also echoed (unwittingly, no doubt) my own argument that, whatever the validity of these ideas for most countries, there’s no reason for Americans to place any special value on them.

The reason? As I explained in an article in the Summer, 2019 issue of the journal American Affairs, the greatest possible degree of international specialization is advantageous and even crucial for the prosperity of most individual countries because they lack the ability to provide for a critical mass of their essential needs at affordable cost, let alone generate progress.

Any number of reasons or combination of reasons could be responsible. They might lack vital raw materials. Even if they’re wealthy and/or technologically advanced, their domestic market alone might be too small for most forms of economic activity aside from subsistence farming to achieve the scale needed for efficient and therefore relatively low-cost production. Alternatively, this domestic market could be inadequate because most of their people are too poor to be satisfactory customers.

In addition, because they’re so small, inadequate domestic markets have been considered incapable of generating enough competitive pressure needed to force their own producers to keep improving quality, innovating, and to maintain reasonable prices.

Conventional trade thinking has held that these problems could be overcome by individual countries (1) focusing on turning out the goods and services they could provide most efficiently (interestingly, whether in world-leading fashion or not), and (2) selling them where they were in greatest demand (because of other countries’ shortcomings) in exchange for what they themselves required.

Even better, such free trade would continually maximize the efficiency, and therefore the wealth, of all countries, as well as create the conditions for sustainable progress by requiring efforts to enter new, more promising industries to meet global competitive standards.

My own article, however, emphasized that the United States isn’t like most other countries. In fact, it’s uniquely blessed with both the size, the variety of resources, and the economic and social dynamism to supply nearly all its needs and wants from within. In the words of that 1980s inspirational song, in economic term, the United States “is the world.’

As a result, Americans have no inherent need to keep their home markets open, or open them wider, in order to secure adequate supplies of goods and services. And if they’re unhappy with the levels of competition their companies face, because of the country’s gargantuan scale, their best bet for maximizing such competition is resuming the vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws – which, as I documented, had long been largely neglected.

Wolf didn’t accept the policy implications I drew concerning these insights about America’s economic distinctiveness. But since he evidently accepts the basic proposition, it’s legitimate to ask why not.

The second example of a leading economic authority making one of my central points came yesterday on the Project Syndicate website. That in itself is pretty remarkable because, as I’ve previously suggested, Project Syndicate is best described as a digital op-ed page for globalist elites. Just as remarkable, and gratifying, the author of the post in question is Robert Skidelsky, a veteran British politician and venerable academic who’s best known for a highly acclaimed three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20^th century and a scholar whose work still shapes much global economic thought and policy.

According to Skidelsky, one of two major gaps in President Biden’s economic proposals – and especially his stated desire to rebuild manufacturing in America – is its failure to impose tight curbs on imports. Without a plan that Skidelsky (and its originator) calls “compensated free trade,” the author writes that domestic industry won’t be “built back better.”

That’s already nearly identical to arguments I make all the time. But what I found most intriguing was Skidelsky’s principal rationale: America’s still towering trade deficits are bound to permit too many of the job- and production-creating benefits of Mr. Biden’s stimulus spending to drain overseas.

That’s virtually identical to the case that I and a colleague made early during the recovery from the previous U.S. recession. Unfortunately, then President Barack Obama apparently didn’t see our New York Times article, because he ignored the continuing growth of the deficit, and partly as a result, the rebound he presided over was the weakest in American history.

I’m hardly above wishing to have gotten some credit for these ideas.  But progress on the economics of trade (as opposed to the ongoing U.S. policy departures from free trade absolutism bemoaned by Wolf) has been so slow to develop that I’ll take it in whatever form it comes – and of course be keeping an eye out for more.           

Following Up: Welcome Shrinkage of China’s Ties with U.S. News Organizations

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Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, China, China Daily, ChinaWatch, Following Up, Houston Chronicle, journalism, Mainstream Media, news media, propaganda, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Free Beacon, The Washington Post, transparency

Since Memorial Day is – or at least should be – a remembance and tribute to what’s best about America, it seems appropriate to report some good news: Some of the nation’s leading news organizations have cut some not-at-all-trivial ties with China.

These ties concern their decision to stop distributing with their print editions and posting on their websites a Chinese government propaganda vehicle called ChinaWatch. As I wrote more than two years ago, their decision to present ChinaWatch and the form of this presentation created two problems. First, although the Constitution’s First Amendment should authorize giving even possibly genocidal, increasingly hostile dictatorships the right to present their material in the United States, journalistic ethics and (I believe) the law should require the clear labeling of any such material as foreign government products.

I argued that neither the Chinese government nor the news organization’s carrying their material met these obligations.

Second, since ChinaWatch was paid advertising, it became a source of revenue for the news organizations that featured it, and because these news organizations covered the Chinese government, its appearance raised conflict of interest questions that at least should have – but weren’t – have been forthrightly acknowledged. Importantly, some news organizations have received millions of dollars from Beijing – not decisive sums in terms of the overall finances of some of them, but not trivial, either.

Happily, these problems have now been reduced, although not eliminated. The New York Times said about a year after my post that it had stopped accepting such material from all state-run media. According to this Tibetan dissident publication, the same goes for The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post says it has not run or distributed ChinaWatch specifically since 2019.

Official U.S. government lobbying records show, however, that multi-million dollar relationships still exist between several major U.S. news organizations and Beijing’s propaganda machine. As reported last week by the Washington Free Beacon, over the last six months,

“China Daily [the parent organization of ChinaWatch] paid more than $1.6 million for advertising in Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, and Foreign Policy magazine, according to disclosures filed with the Justice Department. The Beijing-controlled news agency paid another $1 million to American newspapers, including the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, and Houston Chronicle, to print copies of its own publications.”

And unlike the The New York Times, the Post, and the Journal, the Free Beacon observes,

“Many of the newspapers [still] working with China Daily face severe financial problems. The Los Angeles Times furloughed workers last year as advertising revenue cratered during the coronavirus pandemic. Papers like the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe have failed to turn a profit for years.”

The nation’s news organizations have more than enough credibility problems these days (see, e.g., here and here). Severing all official ties with Chinese and other foreign government media, or at least making every effort to publicize them to their readers, could only help them regain some of that trust.

Im-Politic: Our Dysfunctional Watchdog of Democracy

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Anthony S. Fauci, Barry Meier, Biden, Buzzfeed.com, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, democracy, Donald Trump, facemasks, Im-Politic, journalism, lockdowns, Mainstream Media, masks, Russia, Steele dossier, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Thomas Jefferson, Trump-Russia, Wuhan virus, Yellow journalism

A New York Times article posted this past weekend strongly reinforces a suspicion that I’ve held for some time about the title of most worrisome – because largely neglected – existing threat to American democracy. It’s not demagogues who get elected to high (or even the highest) public office. It’s not white supremacists or Antifa. It’s not voter fraud or voter suppression. It’s not Russian leader Vladimir Putin. It’s not even the kind of disinformation and misinformation and even election interference that he and other foreign dictators (like China’s Xi Jinping) have engaged in.

Instead it’s our own Mainstream Media – including the gargantuan social media platforms that have come to play such a huge role in determining what news Americans see, watch, and hear.

Why are these news organizations so dangerous? For two main reasons. First, their democracy-subverting activities are much more subtle and therefore harder to identify than those of the above culprits. Second, their ever-growing partisanship and arrogance is destroying what has long been relied on as the nation’s fail-safe mechanism – a watchdog press.

To be fair, this idea has always been problematic, even though throughout U.S. history, prominent Americans have made statements like “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost” (Thomas Jefferson) and “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (the Washington Post).

Yes, despite the bedrock Constitutional system of separation of powers, it’s been essential for some influential force outside government to “guard the guardians.” But embedded in the very consequent need for private ownership (to ensure that the press can independently monitor the government) is the danger that these owners will solely or mainly use their power to further their own particular interests, not society’s.

All of which is to say that we’ve long had a national conundrum to deal with. But it doesn’t seem unreasonable to conclude that, once journalism clearly exited its sensationalistic “Yellow” phase and (probably in the years following Wold War II), started acting like a profession that needed to embody and uphold standards of accuracy and objectivity, the major media met its watchdog responsibilities fairly well – over both government and the private sector.

What the author of the Times piece, former journalist Barry Meier, makes clear, is that there’s not only more reason than ever to fear that the commitment to objectivity is rapidly weakening (and these fears have been amply justified lately, as I’ve reported here). There’s also more reason than ever to fear that the kind of commitment to accountability watchdogs must accept – inevitably entailing an acknowledgement of legitimate outside criticism and the imperative of correcting mistakes – seriously is fading as well.

These worries have been triggered by two specific observations made by Meier about the Mainstream Media’s handling of the charges that former President Trump colluded with Russia to ensure victory in the 2016 election. As Meier recounts, these accusations were supercharged by reports that a former British super-spy had uncovered evidence that Trump’s personal misbehavior had exposed him to Russian blackmail, and resulted in his turning into a latterday Manchurian Candidate who would be forced to do Moscow’s bidding.

The infamous “Steele dossier” that supposedly made this case was published by a website called Buzzfeed.com in January, 2017 – shortly before Trump’s inauguration – and although no serious efforts at confirmation or even finding any supporting evidence were made, “countless articles, television shows, books, tweets and blog posts about it appeared.” (The dossier also formed part of the basis of the FBI’s request to a special U.S. court to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016, and Bureau Director James Comey’s March, 2017 disclosure that this investigation was continuing poured additional fuel on the Trump Russia fire.)

By 2019, Meier goes on, the Steele dossier had been exposed as a bogus hatchet job. But by that time, of course, the collusion firestorm had dominated the Trump presidency, along with equally offbase news coverage of his administration, and surely compromised its ability to govern effectively.

Why this prolonged media focus? In large measure, as Meier explains, because “It was easy for many journalists to believe that Mr. Trump would do anything to win, even — given his stance with…Putin — collude with Russia.” Indeed, as the author observes, they picked up this ball and ran with it even though “Steele said that his information needed to be confirmed….”

This flagrant anti-Trump bias was bad enough. Much worse, though was the media’s response once the dossier had been debunked. In Meier’s words:

“[A] few reporters who had written about the dossier had backed away from it. ‘Some people have wanted to maintain that the dossier is checking out when, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t,’ said Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. He was in the minority. When Erik Wemple of The Washington Post wrote a series of columns about the media infatuation with the dossier, most journalists he contacted either defended their work or ignored his inquiries.”

Even though Meier, Isikoff, and Wemple all work for Mainstream Media organizations themselves, these revelations are more disturbing because they cast doubt on these news organization’s willingness, either individually or collectively, to admit that a major preoccupation of theirs that shaped American politics for years was an utter crock. And in a similar vein, they’re grounds for great skepticism that these same media will produce accurate post-mortems on the actual actions by governments or by individual politicians that conformed with this Get Trump obsession.     

The reason for this reluctance is obvious: Their credibility – their most precious asset, even in this hyperpartisan era – would be devastated. But if these powerful companies won’t self-correct or correct the records of others – and in some systematic, comprehensive way that can make a difference, not in dribs and drabs – especially on a matter of this importance, then their watchdog reputation gets thrown out the window.

And as far as I’m concerned, good riddance. But if the big national media can’t be relied on to play this role responsibly, who or what can? And can a democracy worthy of the name long survive without actors that can credibly set the record straight before the archives are fully open to historians years and even decades from now?

Moreover, we’re getting an example of how such flawed Mainstream Media performance could be a literally fatal flaw – and on mass level.  Specifically,  evidence has appeared throughout the CCP Virus pandemic that sweeping lockdown- and mask-wearing-centric mitigation strategy pursued in most of the country at the behest of the public health establishment was completely and tragically mistaken. (See, e.g., here.)  America’s major national news organizations have obviously bought in to the stay-at-home and mask-up claims, as shown, for example, by their near canonization of leading lockdowns proponent Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s head immunologist and now President Biden’s top medical adviser. 

I’d like to believe that if conclusive evidence emerges invalidating this virus-fighting approach, and supporting measures with potentially greater effectiveness during future pandemics, the news would be trumpeted all over the Mainstream Media even if the federal government tried to hush it up.  But as of now, expressing the hope that the real story might become known looks like nothing so much as practicing quackery.  

Following Up: Gun Sense Still Lacking in the Crime/Violence/African Americans Debate

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African Americans, Arionne Nettles, Barack Obama, Chicago, crime, Following Up, gun violence, guns, homicides, law enforcement, police reform, policing, poverty, racism, The New York Times

Everyone (like me) worried about the metastasizing influence of race-panderers can give thanks that so many are so completely, and indeed stupefyingly, incompetent. Otherwise, merchants of division like Northwestern University journalism faculty member Arionne Nettles and her enablers at The New York Times might be overwhelming favorites to tear the country apart for good. All the same, the more they push claims (I’m getting fed up with the pseudo-sophisticated term “narrative”) that are not only flagrantly phony but transparently contradictory, the more they obscure genuine and important failures and inequities that need fixing.

Nettles and The Times editors who considered her piece on African American victims of “gun violence” worthy of publication in this form took only a paragraph and a half to blow up their own case that big cities across the United States have seen a recent “rise in gun violence – perpetrated both by civilians and police officers” that’s taken an especially heavy toll on black children and teenagers.

They’re of course right about these tragedies and their scale. But the obvious insinuation that “civilians and police officers” share even remotely comparable blame is demolished by the observation that

“In one especially alarming spree last summer, Chicago police officers shot five people in just two months. And shootings and murders in the city were up more than 50 percent overall in 2020 compared with 2019; 875 people died from gun violence – a record high. A majority of the city’s victims (78 percent) were Black.”

Let’s assume that every one of the five Chicago police shootings mentioned here was totally unjustified. Let’s also state categorically that unjustified shootings by police are way more disturbing than other types of shootings because law enforcement must be held to a much higher standard. Are Nettles and The Times still seriously contending that the two categories of violence are on anything like a par, even as threats to African American lives?

More important, these and similar passages – along with Nettles’ interviews with African American mothers who have lost children to such violence – add powerfully to the evidence that, as I’ve argued before, the overwhelming problem here isn’t “gun violence” at all. Instead, it’s a culture of violence and broader irresponsibility that’s gained a strong foothold in too many Black neighborhoods, and whose importance keeps being ignored by supposed champions of American minorities.

A handful of data points from recent (2018) national (FBI) law enforcement statistics clinch this case. First, of the 328.24 million total U.S. population estimated by the Census Bureau that year, 76.3 percent were white and 13.4 percent African American. That’s a ratio of nearly six-to-one. Yet that year, reported Black homicide offenders in one-on-one incidents actually slightly outnumbered their white counterparts in absolute terms (3,177 to 3,011).

Almost as stunning: Of the 2,925 Black homicide victims that year, nearly 89 percent were killed by other Blacks. Nearly 81 percent of the 3,315 white homicide victims in 2018 were killed by whites, so it’s clear that American killers principally go after members of their own race. But relatively speaking these figures – combined with Nettles’ accurate observation that Blacks are much likelier to die in firearms incidents than Whites – reveal not a gun violence crisis afflicting so many African American communities. They reveal an African American violence problem.

No one can reasonably doubt that racism’s legacy and the resulting lack of economic opportunity and poverty play a big underlying role. As I (and many others) have written, the racial wealth gap alone is yawning, owes much to discrimination, and generates affects that have lasted generations. It should be just as hard reasonably to doubt, however, that something other than poverty is responsible.

Look at Chicago. In 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, its Black poverty rate was 26.3 percent – that’s much higher than the overall poverty rate for the city (16.4 percent), or the national African American poverty rate (18.8 percent). So even though there seems to be a Chicago-specific problem on top of a poverty problem, even in Chicago nearly three fourths of the Black population lives above the poverty line. That hardly means affluence, but it’s hardly destitution, either.

Moreover, the Chicago Black poverty rate is down considerably from 2010’s 33.6 percent (although the city’s overall poverty rate fell faster during this period). Yet the city’s numbers of homicides and its homicide rate have roughly doubled during the subsequent nine data years, and in Chicago, the vast majority of the killers (as with the victims) are African American.

As suggested above, moreover, Nettles’ ham-handed treatment of the “gun violence” and homicide issue is all the more inexcusable because the author’s interview subjects do a decent job of reinforcing the case that there does exist a serious race-based policing problem in this country. Not that the African American women with which the author spoke are entirely free of denialism about what’s plaguing their neighborhoods. There’s Shanice Steenholdt, who seems to believe that Australia-like gun control laws would turn her city of Houston into a replica of the small Australian town in which she lived for a time where she “didn’t feel like [she] had to worry about gun violence.” There’s Chicago’s Diane Lasiker, w appears to think that the big problem in her city is that it seems “to want to keep the Police Department separate from the community.” Her fellow Chicagoan Chez Smith and Flint, Michigan’s Marcia McQueen put much stock in “offering conflict resolution techniques” to their communities’ youth.

But the story told by Atlanta’s Cora Miller of her husband’s arrest (in Minnesota) reinforces the case that it’s much too common for completely innocent African Americans to be mistreated by police. As I’d written last August, I’ve heard first-hand accounts of such episodes from Black friends who have experienced it first hand – on top of South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott’s experiences with Capitol police. If these individuals – who are all highly successful by any reasonable definition – can be harassed for no good reason, imagine how often everyday folks just trying to get by face these indignities and indeed dangers.

So let’s by all means get policing up to snuff. Let’s by all means identify the most effective ways in which government and business can help foster opportunity in needy Black (and other) communities. But let’s also never forget a voice who has passionately argued that

“no matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose or how many government programs we launch — none of it will make a difference, at least not enough of a difference, if we don’t seize more responsibility in our own lives.”

In case you’re wondering, his name is Barack Obama.

Im-Politic: How Social Media Could Really Fight Misinformation

Tags

censorship, Facebook, Fox News, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, media bias, misinformation, NBC News, social media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Twitter

During the last three weeks alone, major national news organizations have issued important corrections admitting that they’ve gotten two front-page stories completely wrong, and another has been caught red-handed in a comparably important misstep.

Contrary to two New York Times reports, the Biden administration has confirmed that there was never any credible intelligence indicating that Russia was paying Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan bounties for killing American soldiers – and therefore no good reason for former President Trump to raise the issue with Russian officials. Contrary to claims in the Times, the Washington Post, and NBC News, the FBI never warned former New York City Mayor and Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani that he was being “targeted” (i.e., “used”) in a Russian misinformation campaign. And contrary to Fox News, the Biden administration has no plans to require Americans to reduce their consumption of red meat sharply.

And it’s not like these are the only badly dropped balls by such news organizations in recent years – or even close. Moreover, since there are no evident penalties for such incompetence or bias (or both), there’s no reason to suppose that the media’s performance will impove significantly. Indeed, it’s clear that the most troubling kinds of “Who guards the guardians?” questions are being raised by these incidents, since it’s the news organizations themselves who – sensibly – are supposed to serve as our democracy’s watchdogs over its other main instit utions. Unless you want any government agencies, at any level, stepping in to play this role?

But perhaps not all hope is lost – at least in principle. For there are powerful actors in America who have tried to stop the spread of misinformation: Facebook and Twitter. As widely known, they’ve taken it on themselves to identify cases of misinformation, label them for users, and on a regular basis punish the perps by limiting their access to their enormous and influential platforms. Why can’t they apply the same policies and practices to journalists and even entire news organizations that admit major mistakes, or whose mistakes have been admitted by politicians or others who have made or benefited from consequent allegations?

Any number of criticisms can be made about how these social media giants currently go about fighting misinformation, ranging from their questionable expertise on subjects they rule on, to the biases they bring to these exercises, to the broader matter of whether most of the transgressions they’ve spotlighted are misinformation at all – as opposed to expressions of opinion or interpretations or analyses of events or data that are completely legitimate.

But when it comes to journalistic retractions or corrections, none of these problems should arise – because the error has already been acknowledged. Similarly, it should be easy for such technologically advanced companies to track and tag repeat offenders, whether individuals or entire organizations, with contemporary versions of (truly deserved) Scarlet Letters.

Equally easy should be justifying suspending them or kicking them off for good if they don’t mend their ways. Indeed, it would be a valuable service to the reading, viewing, and listening public, and because the use of social media is so crucial to news organizations’ business models, would create powerful incentives for journalists to use anonymous sources in particular much more responsibly.

Ideally, in a free market system, quality news would eventually and consistently prevail over the alternative by customers rewarding the good performers with bigger audiences that fattened their bottom lines, and penalizing the bad performers by tuning them out. But for whatever reason or combination of reasons (like growing partisanship or more general political polarization, and the resulting tendency of news consumers to follow only ideologically congenial news outlets), it’s not happening. And when news organizations do report on their industry critically, they rarely shine the spotlight on themselves – and wind up in “Coke versus Pepsi”-like dogfights, or thinly disguised ideological vendettas.

Since in theory, anyway (yes, I keep using this kind of qualification), the social media companies aren’t competing directly with either legacy or on-line news organizations, their misinformation monitoring needn’t be so self-interested. And if they stuck to calling out admitted corrections and retractions or other unmistakably debunked scoops, they’d steer clear of any genuine controversy.

Maybe just as important: If Facebook and Twitter won’t reorient their content policing to focus on or even simply add this relatively simple task, everyone will be entitled to wonder whether their main concern all along has been fighting misinformation, or simply the kinds they don’t like.

Im-Politic: Why Progressives (& Mainstream Democrats) May Ditch American Workers For Good

Tags

Bernie Sanders, Biden, budget deficits, Democrats, Donald Trump, economics, Elizabeth Warren, Im-Politic, Immigration, imports, manufacturing, Modern Monetary Theory, productivity, progressives, Stephanie Kelton, The New York Times, Trade, wages, working class

If you want to start a (hopefully verbal only) fight about American politics, one good way is to tell a Democrat that his or her party – and especially its powerful progressive wing – has been abandoning the country’s private sector working class in favor of what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat just called “the winners of globalization, from wealthy suburbanites to Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites….”  (Here’s some polling evidence for this proposition.)

So it’s more than a little interesting that if you take this position, you’ve recently gotten some devastating ammunition from no less than one of progressivism’s leading intellectual lights – economist Stephanie Kelton.

Kelton has achieved renown for her pioneering “Modern Monetary Theory” take on economic policy. As she has explained, it holds that “Governments in nations that maintain control of their own currencies — like Japan, Britain and the United States, and unlike Greece, Spain and Italy — can increase spending without needing to raise taxes or borrow currency from other countries or investors.”

Naturally, Democrats of most stripes have seized on this argument to varying extents to justify running much bigger federal budget deficits to deal much more ambitiously with a whole host of national problems – to engineering an adequate recovery from the CCP Virus-induced recession to remedying major social and economic ills that they believe dangerously plagued the economy before the pandemic.

One aspect of Kelton’s views, though, has been widely ignored, and it’s this stance that led her last week to support explicitly measures with proven records of harming domestic U.S. private sector workers but with which the increasingly elitist Democratic Party has grown increasingly comfortable over the last decade or so – on trade and especially immigration policy.

The ignored Kelton stance: on inflation. As she has specified (in the column linked above), “Politics aside, the only economic constraints currency-issuing states face are inflation and the availability of labor and other material resources in the real economy.” And in the author’s latest column, she argues that it’s precisely the appearance of these threats today that require the Biden administration to embrace unfettered trade and mass immigration policies.

As Kelton puts it, the combination of (1) President Biden’s massive spending plans and (2) undeniable contraints on the nation’s capacity to supply all the new demand that they’ll create will produce worrisome inflationary pressures. Too many customers will be chasing too few products to buy, thereby forcing up the prices of the latter and possibly generating more economic problems than this new consumption solves.

Among the solutions she offers? Enabling the economy much more easily to satisfy all the new demand by accessing productive capacity from abroad. Thus she suggests both

“Repealing tariffs would make it easier and cheaper for American businesses to buy supplies manufactured abroad and easier for consumers to spend more of their income on products made outside of our borders, draining off some domestic demand pressures” and

“loosening legal-immigration policies, so that even once America nears full employment there would still be an adequate labor pool to meet the increased demand for workers.”

These arguments are entirely consistent with more conventional schools of economic thought – which have long insisted that the freest possible worldwide flows of goods, services, and people will lead to the greatest possible degree of prosperity for the world as a whole.

The problem, though, is that recent decades have taught that when the United States opens its economy wide to a world full of countries that still tightly protect their own markets, and when it opens its borders wide to enormous foreign populations with much lower living standards, American workers take major hits. Abundant research even in the mainstream economics community, for example, has documented the devastating impact of the “China shock” on trade, and the Trump years showed that when immigration curbs helped U.S. labor markets tighten to unprecedented levels, wages for low-income workers, who overall compete directly for employment against illegal aliens, rose especially strongly.   

For many years, Kelton’s fellow Democrats and progressives have been increasingly determined to deny these immigration realities – even when employment levels have been less than stellar. And although private sector labor union-oriented Democrats and even progressives like Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont still champion what might be called America First trade policies, the party’s rank and file has grown much more enthusiastic about the pre-Trump version of economic globalization — as indicated by the below survey results from the Pew Research Center.

Even more curious, and troubling for the economy as a whole: Kelton sorely neglects the concept of productivity, and the importance of continually boosting the economy’s efficiency in order to boost living standards in sustainable, as opposed to bubbly, ways.

Kelton does write that “Over time, the Biden plan’s investments in our physical and human infrastructure will enhance our economy’s productive capacity, leaving us with a better educated and more productive work force, more efficient railways, less congested roadways, improved technologies and much else.”    

But she also adds, crucially, “this can’t happen overnight. It will take years.”  Presumably, then she’d be OK with dropping the open trade policies at least to some degree.  What she misses, however, are the (further) productivity-killing effects bound to emerge during that period of re-enabling imports in sectors like manufacturing – which are central to the nation’s hopes for retaining sufficient productive capacity. 

Indeed, she seems unaware that those manufacturing sectors that have been heavily dependent on artificially cheap imports have been major productiviy laggards. (The same holds for parts of the economy that have leaned heavily on the comparable crutch of immigrant labor – especially low-wage, low-skill immigrant labor).

Kelton of course is only one Democratic party thinker, and as she complained in her latest Times column, too many Democratic leaders – including the President – are still clinging to their supposedly outmoded views on spending and taxing and promoting U.S.-made manufactures.  And as mentioned, even within progressive ranks, her views on trade may not prevail against the Warren and Sanders perspective.

But it’s just as reasonable to believe that progressives hold the whip hand among  Democrats today on many issues, and Kelton played the biggest role in turning their spending-happy views into virtual party orthodoxy.  If her immigration and especially trade positions take the same course, the Democrats’ once unchallengeable identity as “the party of the common man” will become an example of transparently false advertising.       

P.S. Special thanks to my Twitter friend who goes by the handle @RocCityBuilt for first alerting me to the trade and immigration material in Kelton’s latest article.   

Glad I Didn’t Say That! A Weird NY Times Definition of “Polarizing”

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, experts, Florida, lockdowns, Mainstream Media, MSM, politics, polls, public health, reopening, Ron DeSantis, The New York Times, Wuhan virus

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis “has become a

polarizing leader in the resistance to lengthy pandemic lockdowns,

ignoring the advice of some public health experts in ways that have

left his state’s residents bitterly divided over the costs and benefits of

his actions.”

– The New York Times, April 10, 2021

Latest two DeSantis Florida approval ratings: 53 % & 60 %

– Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, March 2, 2021 and The Florida Times-Union, March 4, 2021

 

(Sources: “Could Ron DeSantis Be Trump’s G.O.P. Heir?  He’s Certainly Trying,” by Patricia Mazzei, The New York Times, April 10, 2021, Could Ron DeSantis Be Trump’s G.O.P. Heir? He’s Certainly Trying. – The New York Times (nytimes.com); “New poll shows 53% of Florida voters approve of DeSantis, a big increase from July,” by Zac Anderson, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, March 2, 2021, https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/politics/state/2021/03/02/florida-governor-ron-desantis-approval-rating-sees-big-increase-covid-pandemic-anniversary/6877677002/; and “UNF poll: Gov. DeSantis approval at 60 percent,” The Florida Times-Union, March 4, 2021, UNF poll: Gov. DeSantis approval at 60 percent – News – The Florida Times-Union – Jacksonville, FL )

Im-Politic: Why Democrats’ Latino Problem is Much Bigger Than They Think

Tags

conservatives, David Shor, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2016, election 2020, Equis Research, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latino men, Latinos, New York magazine, Populism, progressives, racism, Republicans, Ruy Teixeira, sexism, The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, xenophobia

You know that “Wow!” emoji, with the wide open mouth and eyes? Here’s some political news genuinely deserving that reaction. Remember how all the presidential election exit polls last November showed significant gains by Donald Trump among Latino voters? And how so many analysts attributed this progress to the former President’s “macho” appeal to Latino men – an appeal that was so strong that it overrode Trump’s supposedly obvious anti-Latino racism and xenophobia?

Well, at the beginning of this month, a major survey of Latino voters found that, actually, the Trump Latino vote was driven by women.

“Big deal,” you scoff? Absolutely. Because the results indicate that these voters’ backing for Trump didn’t stem mainly from his personality traits, which are not only pretty peculiar to him, but which repel at least as many voters of all kinds as they attract. Instead, the findings suggest that Latinos’ growing Trump-ism owes more to support for his economic message and record (including on immigration) – which signals big opportunities for other Republican/conservative populists not saddled with Trump’s often -putting character, but who focus on issues that will remain crucial to much of the Latino and overall electorate long into the future.

Examples of the “macho” theory include this piece from the New York Times and a later article in the Washington Post Magazine. And they nicely illustrate how it also reenforced the impression of Trump voters generally as “deplorables” that’s been spread relentlessly by the former President’s opponents of all stripes, and that conveniently strengthens the case for seeking to ignore and marginalize them.

It’s true that both these analyses recognized that Trump’s own business experience and the state of the economy for most of his presidency also attracted many Latino males. But their greater emphasis was on how these voters liked the fact that, as the Times piece put it, Trump is “forceful, wealthy and, most important, unapologetic. In a world where at any moment someone might be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and does not bother with self-flagellation.”

The Post Magazine article was much more nuanced and even-handed, but the author nonetheless described a not-trivial number of Latino men (using his own father as an example) as “archconservatives” and “conservative talk radio” fans. He also presented plenty of analyses from supposed experts likening them to low-status males desperately clinging to any patriarchical life-saver to preserve their remaining self-esteem, and consequently as prime suckers for any “self-made man” and any other bootstraps-type myths contributing to the brand Trump cultivated.

The Post Magazine piece also contrasted these Latino male views with

“the experiences of Latinas, many of whom are running their households, managing child care or employed as front-line and domestic workers — nurses or caretakers for the elderly. ‘They are making sure their kids are prepared for Zoom school,’ [one expert] explains. ‘I think there’s a fundamentally different experience that Hispanic men and women have in both what they experience day to day and what information they consume.’”

In other words, Latino men: kind of neanderthal and delusional. Latino women: nose-to-the-grindstone essential workers and heroines who are not only staffing the front lines at work, but keeping ther households together. Therefore, even if you were willing to hold your nose and wanted any opponents of conservative populists to reach out more effectively to Latino men, you’d have to admit that many are too unhinged to be reachable.

Significantly, the new findings – by a data firm called Equis Research – don’t dispute that Trump did better among Latino men than among Latino women. Equis did, however, generate data showing that, between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the Trump Latino male vote grew by three net percentage points, but his Latina vote grew by eight percentage points. That’s what’s called “statistically significant.” And poll skeptics should note that Equis interviewed 41,000 Latino voters in battleground states, and studied voter file data, precinct returns, and focus groups.

Equis didn’t endorse any explanations for this Latina shift, although a Democratic analyst named David Shor believes that “the concentration of Trump’s gains among Latinas is consistent with his hypothesis that ‘defund the police’ influenced Hispanic voting behavior since, in his polling, women rank crime as a more important issue than men do.”

But to me, the new findings matter most for a more fundamental reason:  They further debunk claims from Never Trumpers in both parties that Trump’s Latino gains resulted from appeals to some Americans’ worst (i.e., most sexist) instincts (as mentioned above), or from simple misinformation, or from the Democrats’ alleged failure to court Latino voters ardently enough – that is, from problems that either shouldn’t be fixed, or that can easily be solved without compromising the party’s strong shift to the hard Left on issues across the board.

Instead, Equis’ report adds to the case that  a huge part of the problem is the shift itself – and with Americans of all races, colors, and creeds.

Special thanks to old friend Ruy Teixeira, a distinguished opinion analyst in his own right, for calling this news to my attention. And for a very good summary and analysis of the findings, see this piece from New York magazine (in which you’ll find David Shor’s arguments).

Im-Politic: An Open Borders Mainstay Shoots His Cause in the Foot

Tags

Biden administration, Border Crisis, Central America, Donald Trump, drug cartels, Emma Lazarus, human trafficking, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Jorge Ramos, Latin America, Mexico, migrants, Open Borders, sovereignty, Statue of Liberty, The New York Times, Univision

The current crisis on the U.S.’ southern border is President Biden’s fault. His predecessors’ immigration policies were working. The new administration’s reliance on stemming the migrants’ tide by Building Back Better in Central America won’t work for the foreseeable future, if at all. When folks like Mr. Biden talk about “fixing a broken system,” they really mean reorienting that system to maximize immigration. And – most damning of all – bolstering America’s well-being and security shouldn’t be the main aims of U.S. immigration policy.

Don’t take my word for it. Take that of Jorge Ramos. Because these dangerously radical and indeed – in one instance, un-American – points were exactly what the Univision anchor and long-time supporter of Open Borders by Any Other Name just admitted openly in a column in last Friday’s New York Times.

On responsibility for the current border crisis? According to Ramos:

“‘The border is not open,’ the U.S. secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, told me in an interview. ‘What we have discontinued,’ Mr. Mayorkas promised, ‘is the cruelty of the previous administration.’”

“Well, apparently, in Central America, people only heard the bit about ‘cruelty’ being over, which is why so many migrants are heading north toward the border. Tens of thousands of asylum seekers, mostly from Central America, have waited for over a year in Mexican border towns and they will not waste this opportunity.”

Don’t think for a minute, incidentally, that the small Central American countries will be the only sending countries – even in the Western Hemisphere. The polling organization Gallup has recently determined that no fewer than 42 million Latin Americans want to move to the United States permanently. And as Ramos makes clear, no one should be startled in the least:

“It should come as no surprise that this [migration flow] is happening along a border that divides one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world from one of its most economically unequal regions. Latin America’s poor and vulnerable — struggling amid a pandemic, the devastation of climate change and the violence of their homelands — are moving north to a safer, more prosperous place. It’s that simple. And this will keep happening for a long time.”

On the effectiveness of President Trump’s policies, Ramos writes that they “reduced annual net immigration to its lowest levels since the 1980s.” It’s true that he denounces them as “racist,” “anti-immigrant,” “inhuman,” and “repressive.”

But as long as he’s being so candid, he and others of his ilk need to ask “compared to what?” As Ramos himself reports,

“According to the head of the U.S. Northern Command, 30 percent to 35 percent of [Mexico] is under the control of ‘transnational criminal organizations.’ This means that any migrants traveling north through Mexico are in immediate danger.”

Indeed, the present U.S. immigration system is now “a dangerous system that encourages human trafficking controlled by drug cartels and other organized crime networks.”

What should U.S. immigration policy aim for? What could be clearer than Ramos’ answer that it “must involve accepting many more authorized immigrants”?

Or than Washington must “create a system that can legally, efficiently and safely absorb more of these immigrants and refugees. They will keep coming; there is no other solution”?

Or than “[T]he United States should start accepting between one and a half and two million authorized immigrants every year. Entry into the United States must be legalized and optimized….”? (At the same time, given the powerful forces Ramos describes as fueling continuing hemispheric migration to the United States, what makes him think that such a U.S. quota would prevent much greater migrant flows from continuing to come to America’s doorstep?)

Nor does Ramos evidently think much of the near-term potential of turning Central America into the kind of place people wouldn’t seek to flee in the first place:

“The $4 billion investment in Central America that President Biden has promised is a good starting point for tackling the origins of migration in the region: poverty and a lack of opportunity. That project, however, will take years to yield results.”

But the key to understanding Ramos’ position, and possibly those of many other supporters of more lenient U.S. immigration policies, is recognizing that U.S. interests – safeguarding the nation’s security and prosperity – isn’t his top priority.

Thus the author’s argument that “It’s clear that America’s immigration system is broken and outdated” because “it doesn’t reflect the new needs of the United States or its southern neighbors.” And why else would he emphasize that “all along the U.S.-Mexico border, the aspirations of new immigrants are colliding with a country reluctant to revamp its way of welcoming and absorbing newcomers.”

Ramos doesn’t neglect the case that ramping up immigration is in America’s interests, too, focusing in particular on familiar arguments that many more newcomers are needed “to support the nation’s beleaguered economy, replace its growing population of retired workers and make up for the country’s low birthrate.”

Although I and others have repeatedly debunked these claims (see, e.g., here and here), they’re entirely legitimate to debate. So is the insistence that America has a moral duty to accept more of the world’s tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free – to paraphrase the (justly) famous Emma Lazarus poem at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

But the judgment about the economic impact of greater immigration flows, and about the country’s moral obligations, must be made by Americans alone. Otherwise, kiss goodbye the country’s sovereignty and independence. Ramos’ suggestion to the contrary should go far toward intellectually (though not legally!) disqualifying him from the American immigration policy debate.

Except he’s did such a great job in this Times column of unwittingly confirming some of the strongest indictments of lax immigration policies and the worst fears of border realists about the agendas of their backers. In fact, to paraphrase a classical Greek general’s reported lament after a costly victory, another such column (or a couple), and the Open Borders cause may be undone.

Im-Politic: Race-Mongering and the Hell of No Intentions

Tags

Asian-Americans, Biden, Capitol riots, critical race theory, Donald McNeil, hate crimes, Im-Politic, Jay Caspian Kang, Kamala Harris, race relations, racism, The New York Times, white privilege

It’s bad enough when self-appointed – and then government- and/or business- and university-endorsed – experts on racism spread the claim that intentions don’t matter at all when it comes to identifying the forms of bigotry that have harmed various American minorities throughout the country’s history, and that continue holding them back today.

It’s that much worse when they and the nation’s leaders casually throw around terms like “white privilege” – which insist, inter alia, that the very denial of bigoted beliefs is proof of their existence – and even turn them into firing offenses. And it’s worse still when the President and Vice President explicitly agree that actions should be treated as proof of racism in the absent any evidence of racial motivation.

That’s why the weekend comments on the recent Atlanta spa killings by President Biden and Vice President Harris are so dangerously divisive for a country that isn’t exactly short of dangerous divisions these days. I’m talking about the former’s statement that

“Whatever the motivation [for the Atlanta killings], we know this: Too many Asian Americans have been walking up and down the streets worrying. They’ve been attacked, blamed, scapegoated and harassed”;

and the latter’s more detailed declaration that

“Whatever the killer’s motive, these facts are clear. Six out of the eight people killed on Tuesday night were of Asian descent. Seven were women. The shootings took place in business owned by Asian-Americans. The shootings took place as violent hate crimes and discrimination against Asian-Americans has risen dramatically over the last year or more.”

The only possible silver lining could be their prompting of some serious national attention to the real relationship between intentions and events before the situation gets completely out of hand. So here’s an initial effort.

Let’s start off with what’s presumably still common ground. I trust that every thinking person understands that good intentions alone don’t guarantee results that would widely be recognized as positive, either in terms of public policy or private behavior. Well-meaning words or deeds can easily overreach or backfire in all sorts of ways, especially if not well-informed or carefully thought through. They can also easily – and often rightly – be deemed offensive, especially when the well-intentioned hold more power than the the objects of their supposed largesse. And let’s not forget that good intentions per se can be difficult to distinguish from cynical, narcissistic, or simply hollow virtue-signalling.

Every thinking person surely also agrees on condemning well-meaning words that clash with deeds – that is, hypocrisy. When public officials are guilty, that’s legitimate news and they should pay a price. In both the public and private sectors, the same goes for deeds that violate the law, whether they’re inconsistent with any words spoken or written by the perpetrator or not. And when public and influential private sector individuals may be involved, certainly journalistic or other investigation and presentation of any relevant information is warranted.

Nor should it be overly difficult to recognize what’s right and wrong in more complicated circumstances – like those involving insistence that significant and/or official racism has vanished in America because segregation laws have been eliminated, or because affirmative action programs have been in place for decades, or because an African-American has been elected President, and that ignore the lingering effects of government-produced or government-tolerated discrimination. (Basing public school funding heavily on property taxes is a glaring example of the former; housing red-lining is an example of the former turning into the latter.)

Whether such ignorance is willful or genuine, it’s certainly never admirable. At the same time, should such holding beliefs result in careers being damaged, or personal reputations being trashed in public – with innocent family members being victimized in the process? That strikes me as opening the door to the totalitarian practice of prosecuting thought crimes – which all too easily lead to conviction because by definition no tangible or visible evidence would be required to establish guilt. And who actually wants America to turn into a society that would, therefore, inevitably be dominated and psychologically paralyzed or worse by fear of indictment? And who actually wants to hand unscrupulous individuals such extraordinary power to intimidate and injure, an outcome that also seems entirely plausible. Unless you believe that all men and women are angels?

The Biden and Harris Atlanta comments go even further toward severing the link between words and thoughts on the one hand, and deeds and results on the other. And don’t underestimate the impact of presidential versions of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. In particular, they threaten to boost the likelihood that evidence-free claims will suffice to produce actionable findings of racism or other forms of bigotry, to make the sensibilities of even the most fragile personality or prejudice-mongering individual the determinant of guilt, and to trigger all the aforementioned consequences and increased fear and self-censorship.

If you’re skeptical, check out what happened to a veteran New York Times reporter who was forced to leave his job because students that he led on a Times-organized educational tour of Peru complained that he used both the N-word and other racially insensitive language in their presence. The reporter, Donald McNeil, claimed that the context of these comments revealed no bigoted tendencies whatever, and according to his detailed account of the episode – which hasn’t been challenged – he has the facts on his side.

But what’s most important is that when the paper announced McNeil’s departure to the staff, it specificied that these facts – including the context – didn’t matter. “We do not,” the Times said, “tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”  (See here for the full story.)

Such troubling disregard for the facts themselves – as opposed to how they bear on issues of intent – is also clear from the Biden and Harris remarks. In the first place, despite all the press coverage they’ve received, it’s far from clear that any surge in hate crimes against Asian-Americans has even taken place. As pointed out by – Asian-American writer – Jay Caspian Kang, an at-large contributor to the magazine section of that same New York Times, these claims

“largely rely on self-reported data from organizations like Stop AAPI Hate that popped up after the start of the pandemic. These resources are valuable, but they also use as their comparison point spotty and famously unreliable official hate crime statistics from law enforcement. If we cannot really tell how many hate crimes took place before, can we really argue that there has been a surge?

“There have also been reports that suggest that these attacks be placed within the context of rising crime nationwide, especially in large cities. What initially appears to be a crime wave targeting Asians might just be a few data points in a more raceless story.”

So it’s entirely reasonable to worry that the slighting of intent issues by the nation’s two top elected leaders could also encourage the rapid proliferation of all encompassing and never-ending searches for racial or other bigotry-related dimensions of any events involving different categories of people – even normal, every day life interactions.

I can’t imagine a more effective formula for encouraging much of the nation to walk on eggshells in understandable fear of retaliation from all manner of racial justice vigilantes armed with the unprecedented naming and shaming power of social media – and for stoking countervailing variants similar to those that reared their own ugly head on January 6.