Foolish

Posted on by
Reply

But a matter of little choice and less practical change.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has—reportedly—dropped his insistence on a path to NATO membership as a condition to an end of the war that Russia has inflicted in his nation. Instead, Zelenskyy has said that he would be open to a security arrangement that has

Washington and European states offering security guarantees in the event of another invasion, according to the Financial Times. “We are talking about bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the United States—namely, [NATO] Article 5-like guarantees…as well as security guarantees for us from our European partners and from other countries such as Canada, Japan, and others,” he said.

Zelenskyy had little choice in making this offer, since Ukraine had little chance of joining NATO for all the pre-war favorable talk about such a thing. The acceptance of a new member requires the unanimous agreement of the existing members, and too many members, out of timidity, ego, or being too close to Russia would say no to the accession.

The offer represents even less as a practical matter. Many of the same nations that would guarantee Ukraine’s national security in the event of another invasion are the same signatories to the Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed Ukraine’s national territory and sovereignty and who promptly betrayed Ukraine over 10 years ago when Russia invaded and occupied Crimea and first invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Still, Zelenskyy has little choice but to make such an offer, regardless of its practical foolishness. That’s the outcome of the West’s collective decision to withhold from Ukraine the wherewithal to defeat the barbarian and drive him back out of Ukraine, a victory that Ukraine almost certainly could achieve were it not being held back.

Contradiction in Terms

Posted on by
Reply

This time, regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) move to remodel and expand the White House East Wing so that, among other things, important diplomatic events involving large groups of dignitaries, their significant others, et al., can be held indoors inside a facility fitting for the occasion rather than outdoors, in the White House’s back yard, in tents.

Leftist critics, of course, object. One of their more risible objections is this:

Critics say Trump barreling through bureaucracy to reshape an iconic piece of American history reflects a wider disdain for democratic norms.

Never mind that giving an unelected bureaucratic authority functional veto power is what violates democratic norms.

Republicans and Health Care

Posted on by
Reply

Republican Congressman Jen Kiggans (VA) laid out the problem and in the process exposed an all too typical Republican timidity:

We run on this every time, there’s not an election that comes up where we don’t get beat up on healthcare[.]

Republicans far too routinely cower away from directly addressing healthcare, identifying who’s responsible for the problem, or what to do about it.

Some party elders now say Republicans’ best strategy might now be to avoid the issue altogether.

They’ve had this hide-under-their-desks posture ever since their one serious attempt at health care coverage reform went down in flames via ex-Senator John McCain’s late night showboating No vote killing a bill that would have rescinded Obamacare and restored the then-status quo ante.

A few days ago, Republicans in the Senate (which the press routinely and dishonestly characterizes as “Republican controlled”) offered a bill that would have redirected expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies to individual taxpayers’ Health Savings Accounts, which the bill also expanded explicitly to accommodate those payments. The bill failed on a cloture vote as the minority Progressive-Democratic Party’s Senators bloc-voted against it (thereby demonstrating that a majority of Senators does not confer on that majority party “Senate control”).

Asides aside, what’s shamefully cowardly is that, both during the Republican proposal’s runup to the vote and since the vote, all of those Republicans have been silent on one Critical Item: the Progressive-Democrats’ constant demand for subsidies for the ACA proves how unaffordable is their health care coverage program and how desperately that program needs reform. True, a few Republicans mentioned that the Progressive-Democrats had designed their subsidies to expire at the end of this month, but those were just occasional afterthoughts in other conversations.

It would be good for Republicans, and it would be good for our nation, if Republicans individually and as a political party—including at the State level as well as national—would but screw their courage to the sticking place, and they’ll not fail—not at health care reform, not at getting elected and reelected, and not at maintaining their majorities.

It’s clear that Obamacare/ACA is an utter failure at making health care coverage affordable—even with those taxpayer-funded subsidies, too many premiums in the government’s health coverage market are sky high, and deductibles and the out-of-pocket costs (even capped) are significant fractions of the incomes that the government defines as poverty-level. It’s also clear that Medicaid is rife with fraud and abuse (and waste, but the other two are the most rampant).

Republicans need to talk about health care loudly, frequently, and in specific terms, naming both the outlandish health coverage expenses and the politician they’re campaigning against who favors those expenses and favors keeping Americans dependent on any government they run. Republicans also need to explain in clear, no uncertain terms, that the cuts to Medicaid and the rules for eligibility that they passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act actually make things better for legitimate Medicaid recipients. Those reforms cut out those ineligible, like illegal aliens in sanctuary States; add income caps to eligibility; and require the able-bodied to work, actively seek work, train for work, or volunteer. Those reforms make more money available for those truly needing Medicaid.

In parallel, Republicans need to push a specific, concrete health coverage reform package that drastically modifies ACA or outright replaces it. This one requires the Chaos Caucus and the entrenched leadership to get off each other’s throats and coalesce around a specific, concrete package.

Republicans have wasted enough time bickering among each other under their collective House/Senate desk.

Another Progressive-Democrat Foolish Lawsuit

Posted on by
Reply

Blue State AGs don’t like President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order imposing a $100,000 fee on H1B visa applicants.

A group of Democratic state attorneys general on Friday filed a challenge to President Donald Trump’s imposition of a $100,000 fee to apply for an H-1B visa.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, lead AG on the case, based it on this:

Oregon’s colleges, universities and research institutions rely on skilled international workers to keep labs running, courses on track and innovation moving forward. This enormous fee would make it nearly impossible for these institutions to hire the experts they need, and it goes far beyond what Congress ever intended. This threatens Oregon’s ability to compete, educate, and grow.

It may make colleges, universities, and research institutions efforts to hire certain skilled workers more difficult. That, though, is a business model question, not a legal one. No enterprise has an inherent right to pursue the business model of its choice, and government has no obligation whatsoever, to comport laws or regulations to the requirements of any business model. Those entities must alter their business models to accommodate changing legal environments, just as they must with changing market environments.

The only thing threatening [Oregon’s] ability to compete, educate, and grow is those institutions’ insistence on their entrenched models as they are, rather than adapting them. The question of whether the EO goes beyond Congressional intent is a separate matter, and the AGs’ claim of that is wholly conclusory.

This frivolous and foolish lawsuit is just another instantiation of Party’s dislike of all things Trump, independent of merit or lack regarding a Trump move.

Dueling Mischaracterizations

Posted on by
Reply

David Kennedy, Stanford University Emeritus Professor, responded to The Wall Street Journal‘s Holman Jenkins in Kennedy’s Letters letter in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Kennedy said Jenkins mischaracterized his book regarding Franklin Roosevelt’s handling of government during the Great Depression.

Mr Jenkins has me arguing that “Franklin D Roosevelt didn’t end the Depression, he used it to enlarge the federal government.” True enough but too reductive.
Roosevelt didn’t simply “enlarge” the federal government; he right-sized and reformed it for the conditions of modern society. His initiatives rescued and dramatically upgraded capitalism, as witnessed by the unmatched performance of the US economy in the post-World War II decades. The New Deal gave to the exceptionally fortunate “greatest generation” a scaffolding of institutions and practices that reduced risk in sector after sector of American life, brought stability and predictability to millions, nurtured the shared prosperity and consequent trust that ended the Jim Crow era, and positioned the US for world leadership to century’s end and beyond.

Kennedy’s own mischaracterizations begin with his Roosevelt didn’t simply “enlarge” the federal government; he right-sized and reformed it for the conditions of modern society. This is his cynical arrogance of presenting that claim as though it’s received fact rather than the matter of opinion that it so plainly is.

Kennedy’s other serious mischaracterization is his risible claim that Roosevelt’s New Deal created the conditions for US leadership in producing global prosperity and stability. This is a just-as-cynical omission of the simple fact that in the aftermath of WWII and the war’s global destruction of assets and of lives (the latter far beyond the merely killed), during those decades of the Greatest Generation, the US was the only economy in the world that could function. Nearly any “scaffolding” would have put us in the global economic driver seat.

How much better could we and the world have done without Roosevelt’s wage and price controls, still intact today in one form or another (minimum wage laws directly controlling wages, and price controls indirectly in place with Roosevelt-populated Supreme Court rulings like Wickard v Filburn, which made it illegal for farmers to grow for their personal (and so wholly intrastate) consumption without counting it in their interstate commercial production, a ruling that also called a farmer’s strictly intrastate commercial production a part of interstate commerce)?

Roosevelt’s expansion both artificially created jobs for a bloated civil service, it straitjacketed our free market capitalist economics.