Worth a Shot

President Donald Trump (R) is looking to sign an Executive Order lifting in large part sanctions currently extant on Syria. The sanctions were levied when Bashar al-Assad still reigned; he has since been tossed by an ex-Daesh terrorist middle manager and his cohort that had been operating in Syria after that middle manager had estranged himself from Daesh.

It may be that that ex-middle manager and now Syrian strong-man Ahmed al-Sharaa has, in fact, renounced his terrorist ways of his past and truly wants a more stable political and economic environment for the Syrian peoples [sic]. That remains to be seen.

This move may blow up in our face, just as welcoming the People’s Republic of China into the WTO and granting it US Most Favored Nation status ultimately blew up in our face. Or it might be a sound move, easing friction throughout the Middle East, supporting opportunities for prosperity for the several peoples resident in Syria, and reducing Israel’s security risks.

It’s worth a shot, although its value would be increased were it far more easily reversed should the move fail than has been reversing our coddling of the enemy nation, the PRC. Nominally, the Executive Order may well be more easily reversed than those moves regarding the PRC.

An Easier Solution

The Progressive-Democrat Governor of Delaware, Matt Meyer, and his State Health Care Commissioner, Neil Hockstein, objected, in their Wednesday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, to the Senate’s intention to cut Medicaid funding for illegal aliens. Their objection centered on the relative cost of the State funding, through Medicaid, medical care for illegal aliens compared with illegal alien care in hospital emergency rooms, with the hospital footing the entire bill.

Consider that outpatient dialysis costs about $90,000 a year, while emergency inpatient dialysis can exceed $300,000 annually. That extra cost falls on hospitals, state budgets and, ultimately, the taxpayer.

The answer to that is not to foist the medical costs of illegal aliens, who have no business being here in the first place, off onto the good citizens of the State, or by Federal transfers onto the good citizens of our nation at large. The better solution is to go ahead and treat the illegal alien the one time in the hospital’s Emergency Room, and then shortly after stabilization, discharge, and departure from the hospital, round up the functionally self-identified illegal alien and deport him so he no longer is a drain on our medical services or costs.

Hard hearted? It might seem so, but it pales in comparison to the hard heartedness of an American citizen being denied an Emergency Room hospital bed because those beds are occupied by illegal aliens. It pales in comparison to the hard heartedness of spending the tax dollars us average Americans send to the Federal government on services for illegal aliens when those dollars are better spent on making health care—especially including expensive treatments like dialysis and especially especially including preventive health care programs for Americans on the bottom rungs of our economy—more broadly available and cost effective for us citizens.

Yeah, And?

The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are moving to reduce the supplementary leverage ratio that big banks, and only those big banks, must maintain. The ratio is the amount of money those specifically-selected-by-government banks must maintain over and above their regular capital requirements against times of “market turmoil.” The reduction would make available much more money for those banks to lend into our economy.

Fed governor Michael Barr, once the Fed’s top bank regulator is opposed to the move. He’s cited by The Wall Street Journal as saying that the proposal would “significantly increase” the risk of a big bank failure.

To which I say, so what?

The failure of a “big” bank would be disruptive in the short term and potentially damaging to the particular bank’s creditors—depositors and others lending money to the bank—but in the intermediate- and long-term, such a failure would be net beneficial to our economy.

A big bank failure—without government bailout—would go a long way toward mitigating, even eliminating, the market distortions of an enterprise in our private economy—which is the economy outside of the government—being held as too big to fail and so guaranteed our taxpayers’ dollars being used to keep it alive, despite that lousy management having, over an extended period, brought the enterprise to that strait.

Reducing the supplementary leverage ratio also is a way of injecting more money into our economy without it being government tax money being injected. Our economy’s money supply would be increased, or not, based on sound business decision-making rather than on flawed political decision-making.

Fewer market distortions, less tolerance of bad performance in our market place, and reduced special treatments of particular businesses, would only make our market economy freer and more efficient and more prosperous for us all.

More Progressive-Democrat Disingenuosity

Brad Lander, Progressive-Democratic Party Comptroller for New York City and Party candidate for Mayor, wrote to The Wall Street Journal‘s Monday Letters section to brag about his arrest by ICE agents as those agents attempted to take into custody (ultimately successfully so) an illegal alien. Lander wrote

…Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents aggressively arrested me for the heinous act of…walking alongside a frightened asylum seeker and asking to see the warrant law enforcement was using to justify his arrest.

Lander did far more than that. Lander had his hand holding onto the illegal alien’s shoulder, impeding the ICE agents’ ability to move their charge along, and Lander actively and directly moved to block the agents themselves. He wasn’t just verbally demanding to see a warrant. Then, when the agents moved to arrest him for his obstruction, Lander strongly physically resisted his arrest.

Lander’s broad distortion of the facts of his obstruction and subsequent arrest is one more demonstration that we cannot trust the current crop of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians.

NATO’s Promises

A NATO pledge. President Donald Trump (R) appears close to getting NATO nations to pledge to raise their NATO-related defense spending to 5% of each nation’s GDP, which would be a marked increase in those nations’ spending.

I question the value of those nations’ promises. Fully a third of NATO’s member nations already have, and are, welching on prior commitments to spend money on NATO-related expenses, for all that Trump’s open questioning of the value of the alliance over its freeloading on American treasure and blood has contributed to an increase in the number of nations that spend adequate amounts on NATO (from five or six!) to the current roughly two-thirds.

The value of a new, and replacement, arrangement centered on the US and the Three Seas Initiative nations is looking better and better.