Happy Thanksgiving

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I first posted this in 2011.  I think it bears repeating today.

Today I thought I’d share some thoughts on the matter offered by other folks who are a bit more articulate than I.  In the meantime, be thankful for who we are and where we are: whatever straits in which we find ourselves, we’re orders of magnitude better off than most everyone else in the world.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be — That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks — for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation — for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war — for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed — for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.
-George Washington, 3 October 1789

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God. … No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
-Abraham Lincoln, 3 October 1863

We are profoundly grateful for the blessings bestowed upon us: the preservation of our freedom, so dearly bought and so highly prized; our opportunities for human welfare and happiness, so limitless in their scope; our material prosperity, so far surpassing that of earlier years; and our private spiritual blessings, so deeply cherished by all. For these we offer fervent thanks to God.
-Harry S Truman, 22 November 1950

Perhaps no custom reveals our character as a Nation so clearly as our celebration of Thanksgiving Day. Rooted deeply in our Judeo-Christian heritage, the practice of offering thanksgiving underscores our unshakable belief in God as the foundation of our Nation and our firm reliance upon Him from Whom all blessings flow.
-Ronald W Reagan, 27 November 1986

This Thanksgiving, as we enjoy the company of family and friends, let us gratefully turn our hearts to God, the loving Source of all Life and Liberty. Let us seek His forgiveness for our shortcomings and transgressions and renew our determination to remain a people worthy of His continued favor and protection. Acknowledging our dependence on the Almighty, obeying His Commandments, and reaching out to help those who do not share fully in this Nation’s bounty is the most heartfelt and meaningful answer we can give to the timeless appeal of the Psalmist: ‘O give thanks to the Lord for He is good: for his steadfast love endures forever.’
-George H W Bush, 14 November 1990

And then enjoy yourselves; have plain, raw fun.  That’s not just allowed, it’s a Good in its own right.

Globalism

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New York City Mayor-elect and Progressive-Democrat and Socialist Zohran Mamdani has laid it out quite clearly. In his renewed statement that he would uphold an International Criminal Court (to which the US is not signatory) arrest warrant for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mamdani said this:

I’ve said time and again that I believe this is a city of international law, and being a city of international law means looking to uphold international law[.]

No. New York City is an American city, and so it is bound by American law. And that means that at the city level (at the State level, come to that), international law is irrelevant. In the case of the ICC, this is doubly so. With the US not being a part of the ICC or the treaty that created it, neither the ICC nor any of its warrants or rulings have any standing in the US.

Whatever one thinks of globalism, this is globalism run amok. This is how far to the left the Progressive-Democratic Party has gone.

A Thought on Marjorie Taylor Greene

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The editors of The Wall Street Journal have one take on the Republican Congresswoman from Georgia, and they’re not far wrong.

Consider this riff in the video she taped to announce her early retirement in the New Year: “If I am cast aside by the President and the MAGA political machine and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can never, ever relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.”
There you have the full anti-business, isolationist wing of the MAGA movement in all its efflorescence. Corporations are nefarious and must be politically controlled. Advocates for more defense spending are war profiteers. Donors to the GOP, at least those who don’t donate to her, aren’t real Americans.
And the rest of the world is something to be avoided.

The editors missed one characteristic of Greene, though. She claims she’s resigning from Congress with effect 5 January 2026 in order to avoid inflicting on her “sweet district” a costly and debilitating 2026 primary contest for the Republican Party’s nomination for her district’s Representative.

[I] do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election….

Greene could just as easily could have avoided that hurtful and hateful primary by announcing that she would not run for reelection while she would finish her current term in the House. She chose not to do that.

Greene also is a political coward.

If They Depend on Subsidies…

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…then they shouldn’t be in business. The subheadline laid it out:

Republicans want to shift subsidies away from some of the frailest companies in the industry

In this context, “the industry” is the health care coverage industry, and the subsidies are those paid health coverage providers in the Affordable Care Act. I claim, though, that “private” companies that require government handouts are neither all that private nor deserving of staying in business. If they cannot survive without taxpayer money as anything more than a shortish-term loan to survive a catastrophe, they should be left to go out of business.

The news writer at the link made a big deal out of the need for the subsidies to those coverage providers in order to hold down the prices—the premiums—the customers pay for the policies, jerking tears especially for the lower income customers. What he does not address, though, is the deductibles and the out-of-pocket caps those Obamacare policies have. The deductibles and caps each separately represent significant fractions of those lower income customers’ income. They, especially, had better not get sick. If they do, their strait is not much different from that of those folks who are uninsured at all.

The subsidies paid into their hands directly would at least give them a little relief, but that’s only a stop gap. The real solution is to eliminate the ACA altogether and free up the health care coverage industry, restoring it to a health insurance industry in a free market with policies marketable nationwide, rather than limiting them to intrastate sales with the permissions and regulations of fifty different States.

Companies providing health care coverage or insurance should see their prosperity in how well they treat their customers and how well they serve them. Their prosperity should not come from government handouts—transfers from us taxpayers who don’t use their services.

Affordability

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What is this thing, “affordability?” Greg Ip, in his Sunday Wall Street Journal piece, correctly noted that it’s more than just the inflation spike of the Biden administration or an outcome of that spike.

What started as a serious but short-lived spike in inflation from 2021 to 2023 has evolved into something broader and more amorphous. Like the climate crisis or the crisis of democratic legitimacy, the affordability crisis has become an umbrella term for countless loosely connected phenomena.

As a campaign issue, such amorphosity is useful. For us average Americans, though, and for those charged specifically to solve the problem, that’s a useless characterization. A problem needs a specific definition, or its constituent pieces each need a specific definition. That’s where Ip made his own error. He was suitably specific, but in the wrong way.

Strictly speaking, affordability means having the resources to pay for goods and services at current prices. By that standard, the simplest metric is real (i.e., after-inflation) incomes. Real incomes fell behind when inflation shot up, then recovered as inflation receded and wages caught up. Real personal income was up 2.3% in the year through August, and real hourly wages climbed 0.8% in the year through September, both in line with the 19-year average.

None of us spend these mythical “real” dollars, though; they only exist in overall measures of economic questions. “Real” dollars also exist, especially in Ip’s (and my) context, only as a nationwide calculation. All of us, wherever we are in the real (not “real”) world, spend the dollars in our pockets—nominal dollars, the dollars we receive in our paychecks or welfare payments. That’s a fairly steady level for employees of national companies, but it varies widely from region to region for the smaller employers that fit into the “mid-sized” company category; the mom-and-pop wages vary from locale to locale.

Neither do any of us face the nationwide price level that is the outcome of inflation (or deflation); we pay the nominal prices that occur in the specific area where each of us lives. That’s true even for the goods and services that are sold nationwide rather than regionally. California’s prices for energy, for instance, isn’t the same as New York’s, or Texas’, or Nebraska’s, or….

What each of us does do is pay those local or regional nominal prices with the nominal dollars we have. Thus: affordability—usefully specific and accurately defined affordability—is regional and nominal: the relationship between the dollars each of us has and the prices each of us faces in the locale or region in which we live. The military gets at this with the Cost of Living Allowances it adds to members’ paychecks: that’s an addendum intended to cover some of the gap between the nominal dollars servicemen and women receive and the nominal prices they actually face where they’re stationed. Social Security payments get annual adjustments related to the “cost of living,” but those adjustments are nationwide, based on the national inflation rate; they are not adjusted according to where any of us live. Some make out like bandits in their local market places and prices, others are still left well short, most see only most of the gap filled.

Until that is understood, what to do about affordability—if anything—cannot be determined. When real affordability gets addressed, any solutions will have to be at least as finely done as regional. “Affordability” is another area where one-size-fits-all doesn’t fit any.