Monthly Archives: January 2024

Why Donald Trump Shouldn’t Get a Second Term

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Or so advise the august Editors of The Wall Street Journal. They only consider one side of the question. My august self considers some additional sides.

Start with the fact that Mr Trump would be an immediate lame duck. He can’t serve more than one more term, and if he does win it will be narrowly with little political capital.

This is a wash. If Biden is reelected, he’ll also be a lame duck with little to no political capital.

If the first term is a guide, Democrats will oppose anything Mr Trump proposes that isn’t one of their priorities.

And if Biden is reelected, he’ll most likely face a similarly split Congress and get nothing passed that isn’t a Conservative/Republican priority. Another wash.

The internal opposition will still be implacable, the leaks unending, the press relentlessly hostile.

It may well be that one of things Trump has learned is how to get rid of the internal opposition that puts their whims ahead of their duties as administration employees—including leakers, who are intrinsically dishonest regardless of which party they claim to favor.

Aside from that, while there are reasons to oppose a Trump Presidency, moving to stop him simply because internal opposition will still be implacable, the leaks unending, the press relentlessly hostile would simply be to vindicate those groups’ dishonesty and encourage further obstructionism.

It also isn’t clear Mr Trump could attract first-rate advisers.

He eventually figured that out in the latter stages of his term. Biden has already demonstrated that he has no first-rate advisors; there’s no reason to believe that he could find any for his second term.

A Death Penalty Revival

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Former President Donald Trump (R) revived the use of the death penalty after a hiatus of some duration, and President Joe Biden (D) has moved to deprecate the death penalty anew, even if inconsistently so.

I confess to being conflicted regarding the death penalty. There are some crimes so heinous that they cry out for execution of the criminal. Rape, especially of children, and premeditated murder come to mind for me, along with mass and serial murder.

However, the error rate in getting convictions for these crimes is high enough to give me pause. Some errors are the result of police error in the investigation, police or prosecutorial misconduct in the runup to trial, prosecutorial or judicial error during trial, or prosecutorial misconduct during trial. These instances are very rare, but they happen. Another reason for my reluctance is improving technology. Increasing ability to analyze DNA data—even the basic ability to handle DNA as evidence at all—reveals what becomes erroneous trial and conviction today even when those convictions of yesterday were correctly obtained given the evidence then available.

Thus: it’s easy enough to execute a criminal tomorrow. But if he’s executed today, and tomorrow we learn that he was wrongly convicted, we can’t undo his execution.

It’s maddening, on the other hand, for the survivors of the criminal’s crime to suffer the delays defense attorneys and “liberal” Others throw up to obstruct and delay an execution, and those delays deny justice for those survivors.

One at least partial solution would be to streamline the death penalty appeals process. Require attorneys bringing a case for delay or sentence reduction to something less than execution to present all of their objections in a single case, to include consolidation of all of the several separate lawyer cases into a single, class-action if you will, case. Perhaps, allow a single additional appeal based on truly newly developed evidence.

That won’t address the errors later discerned with improving technology. However, we can’t allow heinous criminals to escape the death penalty on the basis of inherently speculative potential future technology advances.

India vs PRC

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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece comparing the People’s Republic of China’s economic future with India’s. In the second paragraph (the semi-lede?), there’s this:

The country’s population surpassed China’s last year. More than half of Indians are under 25.

A couple of graphs from the CIA World Factbook put the two nation’s population structures in sharp relief, and at this stage of the two nations’ economic development, those structures are their future.

This is the structure of India’s population (scroll down a skosh):

This is the structure of the PRC’s population (again, scroll a tad):

India’s population of new workers is growing, so the nation’s economic capacity is capable of growing. The PRC’s population of new workers is shrinking. Not only is the PRC incapable of growing very much, economically, it’s becoming and will continue to become increasingly difficult to support its old folks, even as that portion of the nation’s population continues to grow.

Bank Capital Requirements

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The Federal Reserve is looking hard at increasing the amount of capital that banks must hold in the Fed’s effort to boost bank liquidity, or their ability to handle sharply increased withdrawal rates.

There is pushback against this proposal, including objections that it might make it harder for banks to lend to folks on the lower economic tiers, even that it might make American banks less competitive than foreign competitors. That last often (not always) is just political Newspeak for “be more like Europe.”

However, the problem can be preempted—or at least pushed a considerable way down the road, allowing for more thought—by doing something different that IMNSHO is a better move, anyway.

Rather than increasing capital requirements, require all banks to mark to market (semiannually? quarterly?) all of the debt instruments the banks hold in satisfaction of existing capital requirements.

Then leave that requirement in place for some period of time (5 years, say) in order to get a serious look at how well, or poorly, that requirement supports bank liquidity during economic downturns.