Category: Politics

The impending United States Government Debt Ceiling Default Crisis raises an interesting question: is this more like the Y2K crisis or like the bank run leading to the Great Depression. It all depends upon who you think Uncle Sam is.

Let me explain, first off: the debt ceiling is a legislative fiction; it is not real. It is imposed by the government on itself, and so the government can just as easily undo it. For example, the Congress can pass and the President can sign an increase in the authorized debt, or even a law that simply suspends enforcement. The Treasury can finagle revenues coming in and payments going out to extend when the debt ceiling is exceeded. Some have even suggested the Treasury could mint a so-called trillion dollar coin, in effect a non-negotiable trick to say, “here’s the money, so we don’t have any debt.” That last one is arguable, but serves to make the point how artificial this crisis is.

Second, the Democrats and Republicans have driven wildly toward the debt ceiling cliff many times, and always find a way to swerve or hit the breaks in the end. One time it may be different, but there is much history supporting more of the same.

No one knows exactly what the consequences of a debt limit default would be. The real inability to pay off debt–for a country or a person–is a serious thing. But the debt ceiling is not that. Most agree the stock markets would drop, as they fear uncertainty, and just the fact that the political parties didn’t avoid a technical default is a higher degree of uncertainty. But the markets are a difficult sign to read. Some investors believe the government will service their bonds first, so they will continue to get paid (as revenues come in). Others are short-selling, predicting a big market correction from which they would make millions.

But none of that is permanent. Would it send the economy into a recession, since all the other fundamentals don’t change? Would it change the willingness of Saudi Arabia, Japan, and China to buy US government debt? Remember, it’s a technical default: the US government and the Gross Domestic Product remain the same, and the US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency. So no one knows how it will play out. Am I worried? No, but I am prepared. Why? If a technical default occurs, I am sure things like federal pay and pensions will be among the first things that don’t get paid; social security, medicare, and military pay will all come first, although even those will be at risk. There simply isn’t enough revenue coming in monthly to pay the bonds and the entitlements and everything else.

Let’s use a personal metaphor. Imagine Elon Musk, he of an enormous fortune, is sailing on his yacht in the remote South Pacific when he hits a perfect storm, his boat sinks, and he washes ashore on a remote island as the sole survivor. Being incredibly lucky, this island has a small, non-cannibalistic population, and the first thing Elon sees is a small palapa with a “restaurant” sign! He wanders in, sits down, and waves to the waiter. The waiter, a vaguely Samoan-looking character who appears as if he could play nose tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals, takes one look at the soaking-wet, disheveled man and thinks “not another drunk tourist!?!?” but hands him a menu. Elon slams down several glasses of water, then some fresh fish, all the while amazed at his good luck. The waiter brings the check, and Elon realizes his wallet and his credit card holder are gone. He finds his iPhone in a special secured pocket, but it’s a sodden paperweight. He starts to explain about who he is, why he is there, but the waiter, certain it’s time to launch another drunk, is having none of it: he doesn’t know an “Elon Musk” from a “Musk Ox.” As he drags Mr. Musk by the collar towards the door (the palapa may have no walls, but it does have a door!), a woman, the restaurant owner, walks in and does a double take. “Elon Musk? Really?” she stammers. It seems Mr. Musk’s good luck has returned. The waiter re-deposits him at his table, and Elon recounts his story to the owner. He offers to invest in her restaurant, gives her an IOU for $50,000 dollars, and agrees to do a selfie for her to post on social media.

Fun story, what? But what does this have to do with the debt ceiling crisis? Elon Musk is Uncle Sam: fabulously wealthy, but out of available cash at the moment. The waiter is the market, which isn’t sure about anyone or anything, hates uncertainty, looks at the immediate situation and starts to react. The restaurant owner is the rest of the investing world. They see the situation in front of them, but they also recognize the larger implications, and they react differently. Which is why you shouldn’t worry (too much) about the debt ceiling crisis.

Imagine our shipwreck scenario again, only the survivor is Donald Trump. He of at least four bankruptcies, a tendency to overstate his wealth and litigate any debt. If you’re the restaurant owner, do you give him a pass? That’s the US if it ignores the debt (not debt ceiling) problem. Maybe they all decide enough is enough, and the global economy crashes. We don’t know whether we’re Elon Musk or Donald Trump in the eyes of the world’s investors. Which is a reason to worry.

The real problem is not the debt ceiling, but rather the debt itself. The US government owes tons of money. . . literally. It owes $31T as in Trillion dollars: 31,000,000,000,000. That’s over 34,ooo tons of dollar bills. Is that a lot? Well, just like for a person, it only matters if they can’t pay it.

The US Gross Domestic Product (GDP, a measure of the total resources available to the country) is over $25T, so we’re a little over-leveraged. Of course the all the debt never comes due at once, but the government can’t access all the GDP, either.

Add in to that the credit history of the United States: from the original debt of the 13 colonies, through the Union (not Confederate) Civil War debt and the enormous federal expansion during World War II, then the Cold War and creation of the New Deal social welfare state, the US Government has always, ALWAYS, paid off its debt on time and in full. And as any creditor will tell you, that counts for a lot.

Finally, in addition to its tangible assets, like the ability to raise revenue and print money, the US government has intangible but important assets, like the world’s greatest military. What’s it worth? When you need it, priceless!

So far the debt monster is undeniably large, but seems manageable. Now let’s look at how the US Government finances that debt. The US can run large annual deficits (the difference between revenues coming in and payments going out) because it issues bonds: federal IOUs that pay interest, which are bought by investors. These IOUs are highly sought after, because of America’s stability (we don’t devalue our currency, we don’t nationalize other people’s assets) and payment history. When you have cash and you want to it to grow while being protected, nothing works like US bonds. Which is why China, and Japan, and Saudi Arabia hold so much of this debt. It’s not necessarily a bad thing being “in hock” to foreign governments. We took their dollars and gave them paper, which is only worth something as long as the US is around. Yes, they could try selling it all at once to harm the US, but that would involve destroying all their investments at the same time. It’s mutually beneficial, so it works. Banks, investment firms, insurance companies, pension plans and private investors all buy US debt, too, for all the same reasons.

Another big holder of US debt is (wait for it) the US government. What? The two largest government holders of government debt are the Federal Reserve (aka the Fed) and the Social Security Trust Fund. The Fed started large-scale buying of debt during the 2008 financial crisis. It didn’t have to, but it bought up federal debt from banks and others to keep the markets liquid (flowing) and prevent a depression. In effect, it “created money” just like the Treasury does, except the Treasury prints it while the Fed just creates it digitally. The Fed can decide when to sell those bonds and is starting to do so gradually, so as not to upset the markets.

All that money they take out of your paycheck under the heading OASDI (Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance)? That’s your input into Social Security. The Social Security Trust Fund takes the extra left-over after paying out benefits and buys US government bonds. So the Trust Fund is full of IOUs, not dollars. But that’s not a problem, because the US government always pays off its IOUs on time. Right now, the amount the Trust fund pays out is about the same as it takes in, but as the baby boomers continue to retire, and there are fewer workers out there paying OASDI, the Trust Fund will need to cash in its IOUs. Current estimates (and they change annually) say that the IOUs will be all used up by 2034. At that point, most of the Social Security payments will have to be appropriated, since the Trust Fund can’t send you (as a social security recipient) a government IOU, what you want is a dollar.

Which is not to say Social Security is the problem. There are other entitlements (which for God’s sake, don’t ever complain about this word, as it means it is a legally required payment, not optional, and it has nothing to do with being “entitled” in popular usage) like Medicare and Medicaid which have similar issues, not to mention our federal tax code which is larded with tax breaks for corporations, wealthy investors, and homeowners. It is never one thing, it is always every thing, together.

As you already know, the larger circle is expenditures, the smaller is revenues, meaning the US once again ran a deficit. The administration points out the deficit was reduced last year, and I guess in these extraordinary times, that’s something. But it’s like a drunk telling you he only drinks half-a-bottle-of-whisky-a-day now: relevant, but not addressing the fundamental problem. Look again at Social Security, Medicare, Income Security, and Net Interest; these are mandatory budget items, requiring no Congressional approval. Most of these programs increase every year. For example, we still have ten more years of ten-thousand baby-boomers retiring every day, and as they apply for Social Security, that expenditure will steadily increase. Only about a third of the federal budget is discretionary spending, and it includes things like defense and education spending. Eventually (like in a decade or two), the entire federal revenue stream will be eaten up by mandatory spending if nothing changes.

What does it matter if institutional investors (countries and firms and people) will keep buying US issued debt? It doesn’t. The US can keep going on running an annual deficit, selling bonds to finance the debt, and nothing changes. But that willingness to buy US debt is built on a fragile, psychological base: the US is a stable, growing, responsible payer of debt. As we get to the point where we can’t pass a budget without huge increases in taxes or drastic reductions in spending (including benefits), who will continue to believe that? And once that trust is gone, it’s very difficult to reacquire.

The thing is, a series of small changes could place the US federal budget on a firmer path for many decades. Simply removing the cap on Social Security taxes (they stop collecting the tax above $160,000 income), means-testing payments for the very wealthy, and delaying the retirement age to 70 help a great deal. Creating a sovereign wealth fund to invest in market securities and help pay for entitlements is another great idea, or allowing the Social Security Trust Fund greater leeway in investments is another. A national sales tax is another good idea. And before you clutch your pearls (I’m thinking of the White House here), if it’s so regressive how come nearly all the progressive social democracies use it? Plus, the government could exempt groceries, for example (under a certain limit; we don’t need to have tax-free foie gras, as much as I like it!). Perhaps a separate value-added tax on items costing over $100k and a small financial transactions tax on securities would be nice additions. I’m open to any suggestions on consolidating (not cutting) federal welfare programs, where any savings would come from eliminating bureaucracies, not reducing benefits.

As things stand now, Republicans are for cutting entitlements and taxes, while Democrats appear to want to raise both. Neither approach will resolve our growing debt problem. When the two sides do compromise, like during a recent debt ceiling crisis in the Obama administration, they mostly compromise on revenue-neutral provisions, which don’t add to the deficit, but don’t reduce it either. That also fails the test, because soon we still run out of discretionary spending.

If you would like to play around with fixing the deficit/debt yourself, check out this website where you can tweak the variables and see how you do. I got within $50B (chump change with respect to the federal budget) of stabilizing the debt at 90% of GDP. It’s actually not that hard, if you try. The larger point is we don’t need to produce a balanced budget (which is practically impossible at this point), we only need to show we’re willing to reduce spending and raise revenue.

In the meantime, our political leaders (both sides) seem content to posture and pretend there is no problem, other than the opposing party. One side or the other will claim to “win” the debt ceiling default crisis. If the President agrees to cuts, the GOP will crow; if the Speaker agrees to raise or suspend the ceiling without cuts, the Democrats will do so. But nobody wins here, because the day after this ends, the debt still looms. It won’t really be a problem until it is, and then it will be too late.

Ernest Hemingway, when asked “how did you go bankrupt?” said, “gradually, then suddenly.”

The partisan hype machine geared up after the Trump, then Biden, now Pence “Oops I forgot I had classified documents” scandals. I fully expected some partisans to get whiplash as they excused, then excoriated, then well, what do you do after you’ve already taken every contradictory position on an issue? Stay quiet? Never!

But the steady drip of revelations also brought out another tired old set of talking heads: the “there’s too much classified information” group. Some of these are so-called democracy promoters who claim secrets are antithetical to democratic government, or we should spend much more de-classifying than we do now. Some are journalists who crave access and hate the fact they can’t have it, or small-government advocates who see an easy target in the always-growing national security establishment, one which often does not respond publicly to criticism. Some are politicians who are looking for a scapegoat. Let’s tackle these objections, shall we?

First, all forms of government have secrets, and even Western democracies (and I hate that term, but permit me) all have intelligence organizations. George Washington personally ran spies as a General. Benjamin Franklin, as Post-Master General, oversaw secret communications and intercepted enemy ones. Part of the consent of the governed is to accept that there are reasons to withhold information. Why? To protect lives and avoid wasting resources. Classified information sometimes contains names of people (“sources”) who provided it, and should they become public, bad things would ensue. Wonder why some government files about the Kennedy assassination are still redacted or classified? In it are names or descriptions of people who provided information, and those people or their immediate families are still alive. What do you think happens in Cuba when somebody’s family name appears in a CIA file? You think Havana forgets or forgives what granddad did?

Likewise, classified information may include clues as to the technical way it was collected (“methods”). Let’s say there is a super-secret satellite which can detect and analyze someone’s breath, allowing us to track individuals and determine their health and activities. Even a document which simply states “Kim Jong-Il is out drinking again” as its bottom line would reveal we have a real-time ability to monitor this situation. If released, the other side can begin researching how we do it, and ways to defeat our capability. And billions of dollars in research, production, and operations would go down the drain, not to mention we’d be totally surprised the next time Kim showed up drunk!

This “sources and methods” problem is like a web, where every document must be scrutinized for how its release could jeopardize national security. The original decision to classify something is easy (more on this later): there are rules any analyst, collector, or official can consult and apply. When agencies are asked to de-classify something, it’s much harder. How does one determine whether all of a source’s relatives are dead or safe? How much of a give-away about the technical method is too much? What if the document has multiple references from multiple agencies? Each must consider and rule on it.

Most agencies treat de-classification as an additional duty for employees, and it is one widely hated by the workforce. Why? It’s hard, time-consuming and nobody gets a bonus for a record number of de-classifications, but woe-be-it to you if you release something that should not have been released. Like being a gate-guard, there is no upside for being lenient. So we’ll never spend much on de-classifying, plus, what’s the relative benefit to the American public? Documents which have high classifications based on sources and methods often have an analytic line that is simple or even obvious. De-classification results in a “so-what?”

The second complaint comes from journalists, and you can see a prime example here from Fareed Zakaria, who should know better. He cites the amount of classified, when he knows this is a canard, and even throws out the old ‘information classified because it is embarrassing’ idea which is specifically prohibited under Executive Order 12356. Let’s focus on the amount of classified. 99.9% of classified information exists not as documents or photos, but as digits in a secure classified computer system. It is physically inside vaults and SCIFs (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities) which are monitored and secured. The computer systems themselves are encrypted and monitored both by systems and people. How much classified is there? Nobody knows, any more than you can say how much info is in your cloud storage right now. The government generates enormous amounts every day. Take the breath-sensing satellite I made up: it circles the globe, taking sensings, and every unique sense of a location is classified, because if you had it, you might be able to figure out what the capability was. So the sensing over your favorite bar is just as classified as the one over the Kremlin, not because of the target, but because of the capability. And the gigabytes of sensings are stored in the classified system. How much are they and is it too much?

It’s only count-able when you produce it as a document, photo or other “thing.” 99.9% of such classified “things” are produced and kept in those same vaults and SCIFs, and only leave them when people properly trained and authorized to do so take them out to show them to whomever needs to see them (sometimes senior officials), but more often that not other intelligence personnel. So the overwhelming majority of classified info exists and is secure, regardless of how much there is. The problem is not the amount, it’s that people get involved.

So does the US government keep spending more all the time for this classified information? Yes. We get better at collecting and using it, and we acquire more. Does it cost a lot? Depends. As any info tech geek will tell you, storage is the cheap part. The government even eventually realized that and outsourced some of its classified holdings to cloud-storage firms like Amazon and Google, because they can operate at extreme orders of magnitude. The expensive part is acquiring the data, and do you want the national security system working with more and better, or less and worse, data?

The third complaint comes from those looking for a scapegoat: someone else to blame. Politicians have a love-hate relationship with classified information. They love it when a secret gives them an advantage in a negotiation, or prevents a crisis, or helps win a war. They hate it when they are told what they can and cannot say in public, for obvious reasons, or when they have to turn in their classified documents before leaving for the day. They also dislike being subjected to background investigations (as do we all). A security clearance is not a right, it is a privilege, so one can be denied for a host of reasons for which a politician might not feel they should be penalized: extramarital affairs, suspicious foreign links (business or family), past drug use, lewd and lascivious conduct, lying (this one scares them the most), bankruptcy. The standard is not a legal one; it’s whether you have weaknesses or vulnerabilities which would make you an opportune target or desperate enough to trade classified info.

Things get especially sticky when it comes to Congress. Remember that most classification comes from Executive branch guidelines, so it does not apply to the co-equal Legislative branch. Congress Members (both House and Senate) have security clearances by virtue of being elected! Their staff must submit to background checks. Furthermore, Members like to go before the cameras and opine, but if you access classified info, there may be things you can’t say publicly. In general, Congress Members and staffs are more rigorous about handling classified, since they in effect must police themselves. Watch carefully the reactions of Democratic Senators to news that classified documents (more than 14 years old) from Senator Biden’s service were found in his home. The degree of shock and concern was much greater than the original case.

Congress created two committees (the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, SSCI or “Sissy”, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, HPSCI or “Hipsy”). Both were originally quite bipartisan and worked primarily to provide oversight on secret matters, especially as intelligence budgets climbed during the Cold War. Afterwards, the HPSCI became very partisan and worse so over time. The most important role these committees have (in my opinion) was to control the flow of classified info in the Congress. There was no need for every Member to see everything; the rest of the Members in effect gave the committees a proxy to tell them “it’s ok.” Which the committees did. Everything revealed by now-Russian citizen Snowden was briefed to and authorized by the committees. It pains me (and many others) when they ran from responsibility with a “What? Gambling in this establishment? I’m shocked!” response.

(brief aside: I had to chuckle when someone was defending Rep. Swalwell–and whether he should be on the HPSCI–by saying “he hasn’t been charged with anything!” Gosh, that’s a great thing. No, he just exhibited horrendously bad judgment by having a relationship with a woman who turned out to be a Chinese agent. Who knows what she has about him? He should have been turned out of the HPSCI by Speaker Pelosi. In the good ol’ days, both parties policed their own when it came to the intelligence committees.)

As to the current cases, Trump can’t really use a scapegoat defense, since he claimed the documents are his and he de-classfied them. No one saw President Biden with the documents, so it’s possible an assistant put the documents where they didn’t belong. But that means it was multiple assistants putting multiple things in multiple wrong places over a decade and a half. Or just Joe. Apply Occam’s Razor here. Finally, Pence has the strongest scapegoat argument, as he denied having documents, he probably did not box them up himself and send them to his home, and they were unopened. But we’ll see. Every politician wants a scapegoat; it’s their favorite pet.

There is no dichotomy between secrets and accountable government of the democratic or other sort. There are more secrets than ever, because there is more information available than ever. No, you and I can’t see them, and there are good reasons for that. Yes, the Congress can see them, and does with great regularity. Yes, senior government officials of both the executive and legislative branches misbehave and mishandle classified information. And everybody should own a scapegoat.

Bear with me if I meander a little today.

I have watched with some amusement the recent accusations of mishandling classified documents leveled against the sitting and former Presidents. My amusement stems not from the possible charges themselves: classified information is a serious thing, and anyone mishandling it should be dealt with accordingly. No, my amusement comes from the way the incidents are portrayed by partisans on both sides and the media (both sides). These people are digging deep into law and regulation to either confirm the similarities or deny the differences. What’s really quite clear to me is the cost not to national security, but to our national sanity.

Classified information, even of the highest nomenclature, is mishandled every day. That is not because, as some suggest, too much is classified. It is because there are very strict rules for who can see what, where they can see or keep it, how it can be transmitted or carried, how it is to be referenced, maintained, and stored. I’ve heard there are a million people with security clearances, and probably a terabyte (10¹²) of classified information: you do the math, it means somebody is breaking the rules every day.

When that happens, there is an investigation, determining “was it espionage?”, then “was it intentional?”, “was it repeated?”, “who might have accessed it?” and finally “what is the effect of a possible compromise?” In the classic case of someone accidentally leaving a briefcase of classified material in their car parked on a secure compound for a few hours, the answers are all “no/none” and the culprit gets a harsh tongue-lashing. Any answers of “yes” incur ever-increasing punishment, up to and including prison.

Depending, of course, on who the culprit is. See a Marine Lieutenant who leaves a classified document in his car at the Base Exchange is probably looking at a career-ending Article 15 or worse. A CIA Director who releases reams of classified info to his paramour might see a $100k fine, probation, and resign. A Secretary of State who directs her staff to pass classified info over an unsecured server gets a stern rebuke in the middle of a Presidential campaign. And a President? Well, the President is the ultimate classification authority, the “god” of classification, so one can hardly charge a sitting President with misuse of that which he alone controls.

Why the disparate treatment? The punishments are harsher for the more junior personnel because they are designed to keep the legions of lower ranking security clearance holders from making ANY mistakes. When someone junior starts thinking classified material is no big deal, or worse yet someone like Reality Winner or Edward Snowden starts thinking it’s their job to correct US national security policy, very bad things happen. But for very senior people in each administration, it IS their job to do so, so they are handled differently. Frankly, if we treated everyone the same, we would run out of senior personnel pretty fast. No, it’s not fair, but it is the system as it exists, and everybody who is “in” the system knows it.

So former President Trump either took (or directed to be taken) many classified documents which were then stored at Mar-a-lago. He has claimed he declassified them, which is possible, but for which he has produced no proof. What if, as he claims, he could just “think” to make them declassified? Perhaps, but why not follow up and complete the process? And they were still Presidential Records, and thus would still be a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Note that there is no criminal penalty for violating same. So what do we have here, in light of my earlier questions to be answered when there is a mishandling of classified info? There is no public evidence he was trying to sell or give the documents away (we await the FBI report). He seems to have admitted it was intentional, since his “declassified” argument suggests so. It was one, albeit very large, incident. While his storage area at Mar-a-lago was not appropriate for classified documents, it was not generally open to the public and there is little chance anyone accessed them (again, we’ll wait for the FBI report). What this demonstrates is former President Trump’s legendary disdain for the rules, an intentional, highly inappropriate, and casual handling of serious material.

As for the sitting President, much less can be authoritatively said. His personal lawyers found classified documents (from his time as Vice President) when clearing his office at the Penn-Biden Center, a think tank. This raises three questions: Why were his lawyers (lawyers, not gophers) clearing his office six years after he left it, why were there classified documents there at all, and who had access to the empty office? The additional classified material (also allegedly from his time as Vice President) at his home in Delaware presents the same last two questions (the first being answered by the point the FBI agreed to have the President’s lawyers conduct that search). No one knows if then-Mr. Biden brought the documents to either location, or ever had them in his possession. The President has expressed only surprise at the fact of, and the discovery of, the classified information. There is little chance the information was accessed by anyone. What this case demonstrates is classified information was left unsecured at two locations for six years, which is negligence, gross or otherwise. We don’t know who committed it, yet.

Trump-partisans are braying at the hypocrisy of treating the cases differently, but there are differences, most notably, the intentionality of Trump’s case and the willingness to cooperate of Biden’s case. But the very nature of the comparison is what I want to highlight (I know, you’re thinking “Pat, you took me through all that, and NOW you’re getting to your point? Who do you think you are, Arlo Guthrie?”).

I read the Washington Post and the New York Times daily. I watch ABC Nightly News and FoxNews with Bret Baier. I get feeds from the Economist, the Atlantic, the New Republic, the Federalist, the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal. It is rare to read a report about the recently-discovered Biden case that does not give equal time to the Trump case. Oftentimes, more on Trump and the differences than on the news about Biden itself.

Why? Why compare them? If there is a grizzly murder, does the judge compare it to yesterday’s murders? “My bank robbery netted much less than the one last week, your honor” will never be heard in a courtroom. The events stand on their own, and should be judged that way. In my mind, and with only the facts on hand, Mr. Trump deserves a stiff fine and a public admonishment. Somebody (still to be determined) but possibly President Biden, deserves the same. Why? They both sat atop the classification hierarchy and did not respect it. In neither case is there likely to be damage to national security. One case is short, intentional and adversarial, the other accidental and cooperative but negligently long.

Of course the MAGA hat-wearers are claiming “foul.” Why give them their due? Why diminish in any way the seriousness of the latter Biden case, if it proves to be serious, because Trump is so much more offensive? This has been the case from the beginning with the Trump candidacy, then presidency, and even now once again as a candidate. The investigations, the impeachments, the need to respond to every Trump tweet. At one point in the campaign, I recall candidate Kamala Harris saying “if Donald Trump says to take (the vaccine), I’m not taking it.” Hyperbole, yes, but since it’s Trump, well, ok. Apologies to my MAGA friends and Trump haters everywhere, but everything does not need to be about, or compared to, Trump.

President Biden even set himself up, taking the bait in a 60 Minutes interview when asked what he thought about former President Trump’s stash of secret documents at Mar-a-lago:

This aired in September, but why would the President say such a thing? Why even comment on an open DOJ investigation? Because it’s Trump. So one just has to notice it, be offended by it, comment on it, and denounce it.

Trump is famous for breaking not only the rules, but also the norms of civilized behavior. But here’s a little secret: the first person to ignore a norm does not destroy it. The norm only falls when everyone else says “well he did it, so now . . . “. The reflexive need to put everything into a Trump context ratifies his behavior as the new norm. Which means our norms (like a President taking care of classified material even if he can’t be charged with anything) get replaced with “was it fewer documents than Trump had?”, “were they less classified?”, “did we cooperate more?”, and “were we antagonistic?” Which are lousy norms. Think I’m exagerating? Yesterday, the President of the United States said he has “no regrets” about the classified documents found after being unsecured for six years. None. Zero. Nada. That’s a breathtaking assertion, but hey, it’s not as bad as Trump, right?

Neither of these cases look good for the alleged offenders. Both are serious, but neither (probably) resulted in any damage to national security. Trump is attacking the investigation, belittling the process, and making outlandish claims: par for the course. It appears to me that President Biden will employ a version of the “doddering grandfather” defense (“what? documents? where? huh!”), which would be dismissed as typecasting in Hollywood. We should treat them separately, based on how a former President or Vice President should act with respect to classified information. That is all. Our norms need a rest.

In my last post, I covered the various aspects that make immigration a problem for the United States. It shouldn’t be a problem, it should be an opportunity. We have a great historical record with immigration, and still have the largest number (over fifty million) of immigrants of any country in the world. Almost one-fourth of all immigrants on the planet are in America. America accepts about one million legal immigrants every year, and somewhere around one- to two-million illegal immigrants, too (the second number is difficult to pin down for obvious reasons). None of these numbers are overwhelming to a land as vast and populated (>330 million) as America. And America remains the top desired location among global immigrants, even those who have no chance of going there. To borrow a sports analogy, the US could conduct an expansion draft of the world’s people, choosing just who we want and need, every year. Instead, US immigration policies are a twisted mix of hysteria, lunacy, and laissez-faire. What might work better? Well, almost anything, but I would like to propose a series of compromises emphasizing a combination of tightening illegal entry and loosening legal immigration.

Why a compromise? Because while immigration is overall a net positive for the US, it has complications in real life. It upends families, it changes neighborhoods and towns, it challenges local schools and governments. It makes people uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean we refuse all these people who want to partake of the American dream; it just means we control how it happens. Which, you’ll recall from my last post, is the first duty of a national government. For starters, the US should:

• Adopt an immigration point system favoring skills and education, with each applicant getting a score. Allow businesses, charities, and family members to sponsor applicants, giving them extra points. Set and enforce strict time limits for disaster refugees, letting them know they’re expected to return home, and only allowing them to apply (with a point bonus if they did well while here) after they return to home countries.
• Set a target of three million legal immigrants per year in the near term. Clear the family list in two years, which currently has almost four million people already approved, but kept out, because of quotas. Then scrap the family list altogether: having family in the US gets you extra points, not a special status list.
• Allow states to compete for immigrants and receive extra federal funding for establishing programs to accept and integrate them. If a state doesn’t want to participate, it doesn’t have to. Of course no state can refuse to accept immigrants, since immigrants would have the same right to live where they want as all Americans. But no state would be forced to welcome them; they would be insane not to, but that’s a position each state will have to determine.
• Aggressively negotiate “safe third country” agreements with Mexico and all Central America. These agreements (under international law) make asylees stop in the first safe country they arrive in, rather than continuing along to the final destination of their choice. Transit countries don’t want to be stuck with refugees, but the goal here is not to stick them with anyone, but rather to decrease the dangerous, unregulated mass movement of people. Why would Mexico or anyone else agree to this change? The US must tie development and trade assistance to national acceptance, as well as quotas for a renewed guest worker program. The US had a successful guest worker agreement (the Bracero program) with Mexico, which enabled tens of thousands of Mexican workers to come north to do seasonal farm work and other manual labor. These workers neither wanted nor sought to be American citizens; they just wanted to work and send money home. It ended back in the Kennedy administration; we should re-create the program. Finally, the US should propose an amendment to international law favoring asylum resettlement in nearby and culturally-appropriate nations. Mass migration is an international phenomenon, and the US should exercise leadership in resolving it.
• On a more controversial note, end birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship (if you’re born here, you’re a citizen regardless of why you’re here) is a legacy of colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. It exists because the newly independent nations of the New World wanted to encourage immigration, so they made it easy to have children who were citizens. It makes little difference in most countries, but it does complicate things in the US. So-called “anchor babies” (pregnant women travelling to the US just to have “instant-American citizens”) are rarely a thing, but why do we allow it to be a thing at all? Meanwhile, end all the unnecessary drama and legalize all the “Dreamers,” children who know nothing of their original home country and were brought to America illegally by their parents. Again, this should never have required more than a minute of discussion to fix.
• Finish the border with a combination of high-tech/virtual and real barriers, and beef up enforcement. The US- Mexican border is never going to be the DMZ, nor should it be, but we can make it much more likely you’ll get caught if you try to cross illegally. And that is where the next point becomes essential:
• Enforce biometric verification on all illegal border crossers along with a new “three-strikes-and-your-out” policy. Everybody apprehended will have biometric data taken. The first time you are caught, we say “shame on you!” and deport them. The second time we use harsh language (see the movie clip) and a severe warning of what is to come. The third time, they get a mandatory prison sentence followed by deportation and a lifetime ban on ever being allowed to enter the US under any circumstances. We don’t even need a name; we can tell who’s who by the biometric data.

• In conjunction with that, we must address the main source of illegal entry, which are visa-overstays. Right now, more people are coming to the US on legal visitor visas (and then simply staying after the visa expires) than crossing the border illegally. Extend the biometric verification concept to this crowd; when they apply for a visa, they must provide the data. But make it a two-strike rule; why? Most border-crossers are poor and desperate; most visa-overstays are wealthier and by-choice. First strike, you get a huge fine and a waiting period before you can re-enter; second strike, a massive fine and a ban. When people visit, it is their responsibility to check out (at the departure point) with US immigration (this happens all over the world, except the US). Yes, we’ll need some new commercial-friendly policies which enable the easy travel of business people; so be it.
• Speaking of visas, tie the visa application by nation to cooperation with US immigration policy and identification of challenges (terrorists, criminals, spies, etc). If a nation cooperates, make it easier for that nation’s people to travel to the US; if they resist, make it hard. If they simply fail, prohibit them from coming. Of course we can make exceptions for people fleeing political persecution.
• And just to be especially controversial, target the open-borders crowd. These are the pro-immigration advocates who go abroad to encourage illegal migration to the US. They are promoting the violation of US law, and they do so with impunity today; end that. Charge them, try them, convict them. If they operate as groups, go after them with the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes to seize everything they have. Expect our foreign partners to support our efforts.

Finally, just to clear the possibility of courts overturning all these delicate compromises, Congress and the President can enact a change which limits Supreme Court review of immigration and border policies. This is very edgy, I admit, but the courts have participated in the unraveling of our border and immigration policies, and a grand political compromise requires both sides agreeing not to use the courts to undermine it.

What do I foresee from this compromise? Greatly reduced border crossing. Increased legal immigration. A more welcoming atmosphere. Fewer bizarre cases like anchor babies, Dreamers, or repeat border-crossing offenders. What we have now is ridiculous: cities and states declaring themselves “sanctuaries;” politicians bussing people around; border towns overwhelmed; and while some of these measure have an increased cost, we’re spending plenty now for no tangible results. Money well spent in my mind!

Is all this hard? No, it isn’t. There’s a way forward and its pretty obvious. You may not agree with everything (anything?) I wrote, but you can’t deny it would change the dynamic at the border for the better! As for me, like Hyman Roth, “I’m just a retired investor living on a pension.” What do I know?

Yet another occasional series to inform, provoke, and perhaps even illuminate. In this edition, I’ll spend an initial post describing an issue in terms of what the problem is, and then in a subsequent post posit a solution. Why? Because the one lesson I learned in all the engineering courses West Point foisted on me was: First, Define the Problem. If you get the problem wrong, you’ll get the solution wrong, too. So often, people skip problem definition and jump to solutions. Or they assume everybody agrees with what they think the problem is, then they are amazed when others question their preferred solution.

Our first challenge? Immigration, specifically the unapproved movement of large numbers of people across the southwest US-Mexican border. Why is it a problem? According to international law, the first prerequisite for being a state–that is, to be recognized by other states as an equal–is to control one’s territory. This in turn requires demarcating a border and controlling it. If you can’t control some defined territory, you’re not a state. There are various ways to control territory and demarcate a border, from putting up barbed wire and laying mines to just drawing a virtual line: it all depends upon whether someone is contesting the boundary. No one doubts where North Korea is; you’ll get shot if you try to cross in either direction. If you’ve visited Rome, you doubtlessly crossed the line between Italy and the Vatican City (a different, sovereign state under international law) many times without knowing it. No one contests that line (certainly not the Pope nor the Italian government) so it’s not even drawn on the ground, but it still works. On the other hand, many thousands of people contest the southern US border every day by crossing it without permission. So that is a problem.

But how big a problem is it? By historical standards, you might think it’s not much of a problem.

Looking at the blue line, we currently have a 15% immigrant share of the population, much as we did in the distant past, when the country’s population was much smaller. After all, we are “a nation of immigrants” as some are fond of saying. But look closely: no American alive today has experienced this level of immigration. You have to go back to 1910 to find equal data. So everyone is experiencing a steadily growing immigrant share of the population. But is that a problem? Depends upon where the trends are headed.

It is always dangerous to simply draw out existing trends, but note that the immigrant population even grew during the Trump administration. Right now, it is soaring, and there is no policy in place to change that. But don’t we need immigrants to keep our population growing, since Americans are having so few children?

It’s true that many US entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are predicated on the notion of an ever-growing population. This was the case when the programs were created (Social Security in 1935, Medicare in 1965), and it was a reasonable assumption. Some critics call these programs “ponzi schemes,” which is incorrect: a ponzi scheme makes the creator rich at the expense of everyone else. Social Security and Medicare transfer money from working-age adults to assist the elderly and infirm. The problem is, the math requires a high population growth rate, which isn’t the case any more. And the immigration numbers are nowhere near large enough to offset the aging of the baby-boomer generation. Demographers agree the US would need to double or triple its immigration numbers to make a dent in the funding problem; those are numbers beyond the ken of even the most fervent open-borders advocate.

Finally, in all immigration discussions, one must consider the “who” of immigration: what is the profile of the people entering the country? Many countries use a point system to evaluate immigrants as more or less beneficial as prospective citizens. Most countries accept some number of refugees or asylum seekers; the idea here is to mitigate natural disasters or political upheaval for some period of time as a humanitarian response. And all countries accept some (usually small) level of desired immigration: people permitted to enter simply because they want to.

Except the United States of America. Due to haphazard legislation, judicial rulings, and a general lack of consensus on whether there is a problem and what it might be, the US has no effective policy on who crosses our southern border, how long they stay, or what to do when they arrive here. How incoherent is it?

• Under the Trump administration, border agents were forcible separating families at the border, in an (publicly-admitted, immoral, yet effective) attempt to dissuade migrants from arriving. Now, in the Biden administration, border agents are directed to admit unaccompanied children (also publicly admitted, just as immoral, more ineffective), so of course, families are sending their children to the border in hopes it all turns out well on the other side.
• Until the end of the Obama administration, Cubans who arrived on dry land in the US were automatically admitted, but those who attempted to land via boat were returned to Cuba. This policy (in effect for decades) was known as the “wet foot/dry foot” policy to keep Cubans from piling into rickety boats and attempting to cross the dangerous Florida Straits. Now, Venezuelans who arrive at a land border are told to stay in Mexico, but those that apply online and fly into the US are admitted.
• Migration proponents sponsor educational programs throughout Latin America, explaining how to exploit one interpretation of international law in order to gain asylum status in the United States. Worse still, the numbers of such asylum requests have sky-rocketed, swamping the courts which have a multi-year backlog of cases. Nearly all asylum refugees show up for the hearing; almost 80% are disapproved, but almost none show up for the subsequent deportation hearing. The end result is an elaborate judicial charade with no effect on who enters the country.
• Refugees are often admitted to the US as a result of natural disaster or political upheaval. Unlike other countries, the refugees are usually grandfathered into some sort of permanent status, and the children they have in the US automatically become US citizens, further complicating the problem. While these numbers are small, the UN estimates the number of climate emergencies will greatly increase in the coming years, increasing the demands for developed states to accept greater numbers of such refugees.

Finally, there are some aspects of the immigration problem that are not, in fact, relevant to the problem at all. These need to be summarily discussed and dismissed, if only to clear the table for the real challenges:

• The link between drug-smugglers and refugees. This is a wild tangent that should be ignored. Drug smuggling is a multi-billion dollar operation that handles large volumes and evades the government. Refugees carry the clothes on their backs and, due to the ridiculous nature of existing US policies, try to find a border officer to whom to surrender. Sure, somewhere there is a refugee carrying a brick of cocaine, but that’s not the problem. Drug smugglers sometimes use their capabilities to smuggle people, either for human-trafficking or just for refugees who can pay. But it’s a side business at best, and does not affect the overall flow of drugs or people across the border.
• Terrorists crossing the border. You’ll see some news outlets stating “100 people on the terror watch list were caught crossing the border.” Stop and ask yourself: if we caught 100 terrorists at the border, where are the prosecutions? Certainly DHS or the FBI would be trumpeting this success! There are no prosecutions, because there are no apprehensions of terrorists at the border, because there are no terrorists at the border. There are over two million names in the Terrorist Screening Data Base (TSDB), the master list the US government uses to screen people. The list includes aliases, fictional characters, dead people, any name which has been associated with someone who was a terrorist. Osama Bin Laden is still in the TSDB, because some new terrorist might decide to claim his name in his honor. So what those news reports are really saying is “one hundred people who have names like ones in the TSDB were caught at the border.” And since none of them were prosecuted, we know that the appropriate government agents looked at the individual, and the list, and said “nope, not the guy or gal we’re looking for.” End of story.
• Refugees are the result of US meddling in other countries. There are a small number of cases where you can tie US involvement directly to refugee status: Vietnamese and Cambodians after the war in Southeast Asia, and Afghanistanis today, for example. But the overwhelming number of refugees have absolutely no (or a tenuous at best) connection to “US meddling.” We’re dealing with Venezuelans and Nigerians and Mexicans, Cubans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans and Romanians. Even the people from the “golden triangle” (Guatemalans and Hondurans and Salvadorans) are refugees from violent, crime-riddled societies that America last politically cared about forty years ago. This argument doesn’t hold up.
• The US has a moral obligation to accept the world’s refugees, regardless of why they might be refugees. You might see this as an outlandish exaggeration (a straw-man argument, if you will), but I include it since there are very real pro-immigration groups who believe it and profess it. It would seem irresponsible (if not immoral) to me to encourage desperate people to begin the perilous journey to our southern border, to send their children alone across that border, or to place themselves in the hands of coyotes to do so. Yet it happens, all the time. People making this argument do so primarily not to the American public, who would decisively reject it, but they make it to the most vulnerable people in the world. Shame on them.
• “Chain migration,” the sponsoring of relatives by existing green card/naturalized citizens, is a major problem. This policy, which has been around for over fifty years, was once considered a no-brainer. New would-be immigrants who already had family in the US were considered to be stronger candidates for successful integration, so they were favored. Unfounded stories of distant “cousins” given green-card status caused some to question it, but the statistics say otherwise. The list of relatives is limited, as is the overall number for any year (or from any country). In some cases, the list of potential applicants is decades-long! The policy has a sound basis, and it isn’t a major source of immigration.

After all that, I conclude there is an immigration problem. It is not the relative size of the immigration flow, but its uncontrolled nature. The US does not encourage immigrants that it should, nor discourage others in a coherent way. Our policies make a mockery of the rule of law (always a bad thing), are expensive, and have little effect. External factors (like the pandemic, or the health of the Mexican economy) are far more important determinants of US immigration than US immigration policies.

Next post? Immigration solutions based on this problem definition.

As I sit here the morning after the mid-term election, I can’t help but comment on politics in the States. I found the results of the election oddly comforting, for they proved several things of which I sensed but was unsure. To whit:

1. “Democracy” is not dying. The Democratic party refrain was always overwrought in my opinion. Supposedly the Republicans had gerrymandered themselves from a minority party into a permanent majority who would suppress all other votes and question all unfavorable results. Turns out that voting turn-out was up, if not record-breaking in States which had adopted what President Biden called “Jim Crow 2.0”. And most losers of both parties are accepting the results. More on those deniers later. People were involved, informed, and voted. The Republic remains secure.
2. The US electorate remains deeply divided, both politically and geographically. Politically, issues appear to break down almost exactly 50-50, if one tries to get to the heart of any matter. You can assemble a majority on almost any issue by clever poll wording, or by staking out an extreme position for people to respond to (see the GOP on abortion). People started moving from politically diverse areas into areas more consistent with their beliefs, and now there are densely- packed cities flush full of Democrats, surrounded by vast swaths of small towns filled with Republicans. Suburbs remain the battleground. While gerrymandering is an unfortunate feature (not a bug) of our system, some of what is called gerrymandering is just a result of the very real demographic distribution. All this bodes ill for future elections, as they will likely remain close, which breeds needless suspicion (for the GOP that the elections are rigged, for the Democrats that they are gerrymandered).
3. At the moment, we don’t know who controls the US House and Senate. Here’s a hot take you won’t see anywhere else: it doesn’t matter. The last two years have demonstrated that when the margins are small, as they will be this time, neither party has the discipline to do much. Sure, if the GOP takes the House, life for Hunter Biden, Anthony Faucci, Chris Wray, Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland gets immeasurably worse. But there’s not much the GOP can do with just the House, or even with both the House and Senate. Gridlock remains the prescription, although I retain hope having the GOP in both the House and Senate would bring out the bipartisan side of Joe Biden, since having the opposite definitely pulled him left. But that doesn’t look likely.
4. The US voting public knows exactly what it does not want. It does not want a second Biden Administration, nor a Harris presidential campaign. Neither does it want a Donald Trump revenge tour. Nobody is passionate about either of the ticket-mates for the Democrats; even most Democrats in exit polls don’t want the President to stand for re-election. That said, Democrats will enthusiastically vote for anyone to forestall any more of “the Donald.” Most Republican politicians remain deeply afraid of Trump and willing to appease him at almost any cost. MAGA true-believers remain so, but even with some lukewarm support from others, they won’t get much above 40% of the electorate anywhere in the States. He’s a loser, to borrow some of his language.
5. Demography is destiny, but only for demographic issues. What? The phrase “demography (the study of population characteristics) is destiny” is popular and true. For example, the number of native-born, twenty year-old white females in California was determined twenty years ago. Yes, the total can get smaller if more people die, but not larger. When adding in immigrants, you can change the macro-dynamics, but generally only at the margins. Democratic strategists started citing “demography is destiny” about twenty years ago, suggesting that since Latino immigrants voted overwhelmingly Democratic, the growing numbers of such immigrants would make the Democratic party an inevitable and unchallenged majority. Except voting is not a demographic issue, and the term Latino (not, for God’s sake, Latinx) is a theoretical grouping, not an identity. People change. When I was young, one political adage went something like “if you’re twenty and a Republican, you don’t have a heart; if you’re forty and a Democrat, you don’t have a brain,” which suggested people get more conservative over time. Maybe so, maybe not, but people do change. Immigrants change as they join the “melting pot” (yes, I still use and believe in that metaphor). It’s not that the GOP is going to start winning the Latino vote, but that even a slightly larger share of the vote for the GOP completely undermines the “Democratic demography destiny” argument. This election cycle gave further evidence for this trend.
6. Here’s a bold prediction: victory in the 2024 Presidential election will go to whichever party breaks free first from its current leadership. Any Republican not named Trump will beat Biden in 2024. Any Democrat not named Biden or Harris will defeat Trump in 2024. If Biden and Trump go head-to-head, it will be a nail-biter, with Biden probably winning as long as he doesn’t give the electorate some irrefutable evidence of advancing senility. Anyone want to take that bet for the next two years? Me neither. The more likely a Trump candidacy becomes (and it’s bordering on inevitable), the harder it will be for Biden to back away, as being the man who slayed the Bad Orange Hair Man is Biden’s best bet for a legacy. When Trump announces his candidacy, Republicans face a moment of truth for which they have so far proven unworthy. But I contend that the first party to make the break will win, probably in a landslide.
7. The red-wave/MAGA revolution was not televised, because it did not happen. Trump’s support to candidates was mostly branding (so much of what he does is only branding) and he was mild with financial support. He successfully pushed through MAGA-friendly candidates in the Republican primaries, who then failed to win in the mid-term election. How bad was it? The party out of power in the White House generally gains twenty House seats in the midterms. The last twenty years it’s been more like fifty or more seats. The GOP may not get ten, or even five. MAGA candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election got shot down all over the country in State and local contests. Much like Trump was the reason the GOP lost the twin runoffs in Georgia (and thus the Senate) back in 2020, Trump single-handedly dispersed the red wave in 2022. That’s powerful, but not in the way Trump thought.
8. We won’t know for a while whether the political re-sorting which began in 2016 continued or abated. Democrats were increasingly becoming the party of blacks and college-educated whites, while Republicans were locking on to the not college-educated crowd and making in-roads with South Asians, some Latinos and blacks. That sort of detail is not readily available yet, but if you’re interested in where the parties are going, look for it in the next few months. It will be telling.
9. It seems to me that the subtext in this election–like all since 2016–was Trump. Trump wasn’t on the ballot, but Biden was wise to call out “ultra-MAGA Republicans” as fears of this group appear to have energized moderate and independent voters to vote Democratic in the midterm despite serious concerns about his leadership. I still believe this was simply a good tactic rather than a real concern, but in the end that doesn’t matter: it worked. Both parties face a tough choice. For the GOP, it’s cling to Trump and go down to disastrous-but-boisterous defeat, or shut him out and risk losing the MAGA wing. For the Democrats, it’s sideline a sitting President or roll the dice and hope Trump is the opponent and Joe’s brain holds up. Rarely does “primary-ing” a sitting President go well (see Jimmy Carter and Teddy Kennedy), but the alternative presents the possibility of a second Trump administration. Seeing as how the Democrats were willing to fund MAGA Republican candidates in the GOP primaries this go round (despite the “danger to Democracy”), perhaps they’ll risk it again in 2024 by staying with President Biden. And here I started off this post with such a positive vibe!

Pundits are up in arms; talking heads are spouting feverishly; activists have taken up their #s. The Supreme Court has simply lost its mind, gone blatantly partisan (or even worse, Catholic!), and has to be reined in. “Our Democracy” (sic) is fundamentally at risk.

Dobbs overturning Roe and Casey? While that seems to be the judicial crisis du jour, if you read this blog (and you do, because you are), you heard the reasoning in Dobbs explained last November! The momentous decision out of the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) I want you to be aware of is West Virginia vs EPA (the US Environmental Protection Agency). It might have gotten lost in all the toing-and-froing over abortion rights, praying coaches, and state funds for religious schools. It’s the decision environmental activists characterize as ensuring climate change will end all human life as we know it. But the decision is far more important than that (sarcasm intended)!

The case was unusual for several reasons. First, it adjudicated a rule that never went into effect. Usually, when the facts of a case change during the judicial process (for example, there is a settlement, or a prosecutor drops a prosecution or the government changes a contested policy), higher courts call the case moot and end it without judgment on the merits of the case. The Supreme Court is especially fond of this outcome, believing a case must be “ripe,” that is, fully formed before it merits a SCOTUS decision. Second, it enforced the “major questions” doctrine. This concept restrains the powers the legislative branch (i.e., the US Congress) can delegate to the executive branch (i.e., the President and the administrative departments). Both have major implications for how the US governs itself. So you need to understand it.

First, the facts of the case. The Clean Air Act of 1970 granted the EPA the right to control power plant emissions. The concept was simple: power plants emit pollution, America had polluted skies, the Congress and President passed a law to reduce pollution by controlling the pollution from several sources, especially power plants. It worked, amazingly well. The Clean Air Act is the main reason the skies over US cities do not look like that over Guadalajara most days (brown and scuzzy, for the record).

The EPA’s regulatory authority changed little over the next forty years. It measured how much each power plant emitted, determined what a safe level of pollution was, and fined plants producing too much pollution. Under the Obama administration, the EPA desired to take on the challenge of climate change, so it issued a new set of guidelines called the Clean Power Plan. This plan went a step further: rather than measuring and fining individual plants (which prevented polluted skies but did nothing to combat climate change), the EPA now proposed rules which would gradually phase out coal and natural gas as sources for electicity generation (those sources generate almost 60% of US electicity, so this was a huge change) by reducing the allowed pollution emissions.

Several states sued the EPA saying this rule went beyond the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court stayed the implementation of the new EPA rule pending rulings on the merits of the case in lower courts. So it was still an issue in question: one side wanted the rules enforced, the other side wanted them overturned. Then the Trump administration came into office. Now the EPA ruled it had violated its authorities, and withdrew the Clean Power Plan. Other states now sued the EPA to keep the standards, and to force the EPA to implement it. Lower courts agreed. And thus the case ended up finally on the SCOTUS docket in 2022.

If you read the hysterical press, the headlines went something to the effect that ‘the Supreme Court sides with climate change catastrophe.’ Let’s take that up at the end. What did SCOTUS actually say? First, they held that this was an important issue, and since the plaintiffs and respondents had reversed during the course of the case, there was every likelihood the suits would continue until SCOTUS issued a ruling. In effect, they held they couldn’t rule it moot, as that just restarted the case.

Next, SCOTUS codified something called the major questions doctrine. Why? Over the course of decades, the federal government has issued more and more regulations: it’s what government does. Anybody who has seen the original federal tax form (it was one-page long, both sides) knows how this goes. Congress does not like to be too specific when issuing laws, so they often include language authorizing the executive departments to issue guidelines on how to implement the general goals of the law. Like the Clean Air Act, which had a goal of less pollution but let the EPA determine how much pollution for each plant. Some called this leaving it to the experts, and it is that, to some extent. This was the crux of the issue. The law said the EPA could set limits by individual plant, but could they set nation-wide emission limits effectively eliminating coal and natural gas plants? The court ruled that setting individual limits was within the EPA’s authority, but setting nation-wide limits, especially ones which eliminated certain types of plants, was actually a “major decison” that only the Congress and the President could and should make.

Here’s a clear example of why that’s true. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is a federal agency under the Department of Transportation that regulates traffic on interstate highways, among other things. This is their charter. Large amounts of data confirm that highway deaths vary directly with speed, that is, the faster you drive, the more likely you are to have an accident and cause a fatality. NHTSA was called upon during the days of the “federal 55 mph speed limit” to justify it, and did so on this basis (it was also to save gasoline). Additionally, traffic emissions are a major source of carbon dioxide and other causes of global warming. What if NHTSA’s experts said tomorrow, “highway traffic deaths are an unnecessary tragedy, and climate change is an immediate threat. Starting today, the national speed limit on interstate highways is 40 mph, and it will decrease 5 mph every year until it hits zero.” Zero mph equals zero interstate traffic fatalities and zero emissions. Right?

Yes, and crazy! But the question is not is this crazy, but is this legal? If the EPA could stretch its authority to effectively outlaw coal and natural gas as sources of electricity, why couldn’t NHTSA do the same? Why couldn’t Health & Human Services outlaw sugary drinks? At least the Temprance Union had the guts to take Prohibition to the Constitution via an amendment!

What does the SCOTUS decision mean to you & me? It really does make our response to climate change harder, because it pushes it from the administrative state back up to the Congress and President, which have proven ineffective thus far. But going around the separation of powers in our federal structure is never a good idea. More importantly, the SCOTUS decision puts the administrative state on notice: do what the law prescribes. While there is some leeway, don’t automatically take things to the limit, regardless of how good you think your intentions are. I doubt anybody thinks the administrative state has demonstrated too little power in the last fifty years. If you do, imagine a President you dearly oppose in charge of that same apparatus . . . it will give you pause.

In the long run, the major questions doctrine could have far more effect on how the US governs itself than Dobbs (which kicked abortion down to the States), Kennedy or Carson (the latter two continued a string of rulings stating the government cannot establish a religion, has to be neutral bewteen religions, but cannot be antagonistic to the concept of religious activity). West Virginia vs EPA will be cited in many upcoming government cases, and the theme of the decisions will be “if the government wants to do that, it better have a law which specifically authorizes that.” However you feel about that, now you know why!

Subtitled “A scientist’s guide to our past, present, and future,” this NY Times best-seller was written by Vaclav Smil, a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst. His has authored deep studies in energy and agriculture, but he excels in interdisciplinary studies and describing complex problems without lapsing into confusing jargon. As I used to tell my analysts, “anybody can show how complex a problem is; your job is to make all that complexity instantly understandable.” Smil, the Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, provides just enough data while wading through vast quantities of the same across multiple fields of endeavor to show why some policies are possible in the real world, and others are not.

Take the synergy between food and oil, for example. Smil details how even if we abandon fuel for automobiles, oil and its products were essential to the earlier green revolution in agriculture, and cannot be replaced (easily) in airplane fuel, fertilizer, or plastics. In the absence of technological advances to replace these products (technological advances which are not being seriously sought), there is no way to feed the current eight billion people on the planet, let alone assumed population growth. Reducing waste, changing diets, and investing in research can get us about halfway there, but would leave us returned to a world where half the population faces imminent starvation: hardly a desirable state. Thus Petroleum, Oil, and Lubricants (POL) remain essential products for the foreseeable future (say, fifty years), regardless of how many of us drive electric cars. De-carbonization is a non-starter, as long as we value eating.

Smil takes a rhetorical axe to several sacred cows beside de-carbonization, including globalization, climate change, artificial intelligence (AI), and space colonization. He is not a polemicist or a denier; he just insists on scientific facts in place of assumptions, tweets, and narratives. For example:

• He shows how globalization has come in waves (the first when Rome ruled, another during the early 20th Century, a third in the 1980s, all driven by a combination of technological and political change. It is neither a “force of nature” (pace President Clinton) nor inevitable, and it can and has waned recently. He demonstrates how the economic wisdom of relying on a single source of medical protective gear (China) left the entire world vulnerable during the covid pandemic, and also led to the ridiculous point that Canada, a nation with the world’s largest supply of usable forests, imports nearly all its toothpicks and toliet paper from China, a place with few such resources. Globalization is a policy choice which has winners and losers, not a wave which cannot be resisted.
• Smil turns things on its head when he professes his complete acceptance of the “science of global warming” while criticizing the “religion of climate change.” He has no time for climate deniers: he demonstrates that the relationship between carbon and global temperature was first identified by American scientist Eunice Foote in 1856, and the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius correctly identified how much and where the warming would occur in 1896! None of this was especially controversial until the science of global warming evolved into the public policy debates and the catastrophic predictions of climate change proponents. Note Smil is certain we need to both reduce carbon sources and mitigate its effects; yet he brooks no fools. His take down of Emmanuel Macron’s famous tweet (“Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rainforest–the lungs which produces (sic) 20% of our planet’s oxygen–is on fire.”) points out that (1) lungs don’t create oxygen, they use it, (2) plants in general use as much oxygen as they make, and (3) at current rates of consumption, it would take 1500 years to reduce Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere by three percent (the equivalent of moving from New York City to Salt Lake City).
• Smil is a true environmentalist, but he will not succumb to hyperbole or exaggeration for effect. He points out that all of our increasingly complex climate models have barely changed Arrhenius’ 1896 forecast, and that the key driver of increasing atmospheric carbon content was the rise of China. In a single generation China moved almost a billion people from near-starvation to owning automobiles and air conditioners, at the cost of huge increases in atmospheric carbon. India and Africa are now poised to make the same ascent: how do we deny them? Or what do we do to accommodate them?
• Regarding the replacement of real things (like concrete, ammonia, plastic and steel, what he calls the four pillars of modern civilization) with virtual things, Smil can barely conceal his contempt. He shows how modern civilization is based on the former four, while the latter is a recent offshoot which also requires enormous amounts of silicon and energy. The virtual world relies on this invisible connection, and while the virtual world can change quickly, it is entirely dependent on the less-easily changed real world. Thus the real world always trumps the virtual one.
• As to the growth of artificial intelligence, he asks how that played out during the pandemic (answer: it didn’t). In the end, “the best we could do is what the residents of Italian towns did in the Middle Ages: stay away from others, stay inside for 40 days, isolate for quaranta giorni.” And the singularity (when artificial intelligence merges with and replaces human intelligence)? He views it as a weird, metaphysical bit of wishful science fiction. The recent claim by a Google engineer that its LaMDA chatbot model was sentient is a case study: while it can hold elaborate conversations that are eerily human, it also cannot correctly answer a question like “when did Saturn pass through the Panama Canal?” Any six-year old can quickly discern the conceptual impossibility of a planet passing through an earthly canal, but these are only words to the best AI we have.
• Finally, space travel and colonization, even of nearby Mars, faces so many staggering challenges that it only serves to underline the necessity of safeguarding the one planet and one environment in which our species is uniquely suited to thrive.

His final chapters on risk (like how likely you are to die from visiting a hospital versus being killed by a terrorist) are instructive, and he even delves into how we understate risks where we feel we have control (driving a car) and overstate those where we apparently don’t (a plane crash). Smil even shows how our successful effort to increase longevity created a larger pool of older people vulnerable to a pandemic, and true enough, the elderly were vastly overrepresented in the covid death rolls.

As you might imagine, Smil is something of an iconoclast. He lives a frugal, thoughtful life embodying his beliefs in less consumption and reduced energy use. He debunks conservative and liberal shibboleths alike (he shreds the notion there is nothing America can do about gun violence, for example). He doesn’t argue for inaction; he says we face serious challenges and need to act, but we need to understand what we’re doing first, and avoid simplistic solutions (like de-carbonization). He does discuss reasonable changes in diet, better ways to improve agricultural production, increases in insulation and water use that could make a huge difference.

As you can probably tell, I enjoyed his book immensely. The statistical presentation (using scientific notation frequently, like 1 x 10^-2 for example) gets a little annoying over time, but it is forgivable and necessary. At the beginning, throughout, and in the end, he reminds the reader he is neither a magician nor a prophet, just a person who seeks to understand things before leaping to policy conclusions. That’s refreshing!