Author: wrongologist

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 14, 2023

The Debt Ceiling fiscal cliff is looming. And since there’s offline negotiations going on as in the past, Biden will eventually offer a compromise on spending. It will include some things that Democrats care about, and that will make his base angry. Meanwhile, the few remaining establishment Republicans will be happy to take the deal, while the Freedom Caucus (now the mainstream of the GOP) will be outraged that the deal on the table isn’t what they originally asked for.

They’d rather blow up America’s credit standing if Biden fails to agree to roll back his legislative successes. That will put us back to square one with days to go before default.

If you remember the Debt Ceiling debates in 2013, the Freedom Caucus was willing to shut down the government, put the US credit rating in the dumper and possibly default. In 2013, Obama refused to negotiate with them over the debt ceiling, saying that the previous cuts that had been made through in the “sequester” in 2011 were plenty of compromise.

Both sides extended the Debt Ceiling in small increments over many months before they finally passed a clean bill in 2014. While the media said it was a loss for Republicans, the GOP won the presidency and both houses in 2016. So fasten your seat belts. What probably will happen is that either Kevin McCarthy will let the country default, or he’ll put some kind of deal on the table that will pass with bipartisan votes.

If it’s the latter, one or more of the now mainstream GOP will make a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair and McCarthy will follow John Boehner out the door. On to cartoons.

The state of the union:

The real situation:

Santos indicted:

Trump loses in Court:

Trump supporters need bigger tee shirts:

Wishes for Mother’s Day:

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Saturday Soother – May 13, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Monument Valley, AZ – April 2023 panoramic photo by Rich Vintage Photography

The ripples from Trump’s appearance on CNN continue. Politico reports that: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Nearly under his breath….Trump said that he and…Putin “used to talk about” Moscow’s intention to launch [an] invasion in Ukraine.”

What’s Trump talking about? The invasion happened in February 2022, more than a year after Trump left office. In fact, Russia didn’t even begin massing troops on the Ukraine border until March 2021 while Trump was already at Mar-a-Lago. Russia’s troops were partially withdrawn by June 2021, although the military infrastructure was left in place. The second build-up began in October 2021, lasting until the invasion in February 2022.

Politico says that Trump mumbled at some point, that he and Putin discussed Russia’s intention to launch a second, larger incursion of Ukraine. Was Trump talking to Putin about a possible invasion of Ukraine after Trump left office? If so, what are the chances that Trump shared his news with Biden?

Today, let’s spend a bit more time on one of the reasons why we must rebuild our energy grid. Wolf Richter of Wolf Street writes that in 2022, electric vehicles (EVs) made their first visible dent in US gasoline consumption: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“Gasoline consumption in the US dipped by 0.4% in 2022…(vs.2021) to 369 million gallons per day…. below where it had been in 2002, and down by 5.7% from 2019, and by 5.9% from the peak in 2018, according to data from the Energy Department…”

Wolf reminds us that employment grew in 2022 by 4.8 million. And miles driven by all passenger and commercial vehicles, including those powered by diesel, ticked up nearly 1% to 3.17 trillion miles in 2022, according to the Federal Highway Administration:

Miles driven still haven’t recovered to 2019 levels (-2.8%). That’s probably due at least in part to reduced commuting during the Covid Work From Home times. Now, many office workers are either working from home entirely, or are going into the office on some days and working at home on others.

So the data show that the economy grew and people drove more miles, but they bought less gasoline:

The above chart shows the impact of the various recessions on gasoline consumption.  The deep dip in 2020, and the 2021 recovery only brought gas consumption back to 2002 levels. Then they fell off again in 2022.

The question is why wasn’t there a further recovery in gas consumption from 2021 to 2022? One factor is the rising fuel economy of American vehicles. This started many years ago, and it continues today. But Richter says that the growth in ownership of EVs has dented US gasoline consumption:

“EV sales in 2022 grew to a share of about 7% of total new vehicle sales in the US. In California, EV sales in 2022 accounted for 17% of total sales. These numbers are starting to show up at the gas station as a decline in gasoline sales.”

Still a 7% share of market is small and for now, the impact on gasoline sales is also small in the US.

Another way to look at this is that while gas consumption declined, electricity sold to end-users in the US broke out of 15 years of stagnation and set a new record. The chart below shows that electric utilities have been a no-growth business for more than a decade, but now the volume of electricity sold is suddenly spiking:

Wrongo isn’t sure if these trends will continue, but continued growth in the number of EVs on America’s roads seems undeniable. EVs have lower energy costs and lower maintenance costs. That economic reality seems guaranteed to be sustained in the coming decades. The battery cost curve will continue to decline and the rare metals required in EV batteries are beginning to be helped by both new supply and changing battery chemistry.

Still, Wrongo isn’t a fan of EVs. Perhaps when EV charging stations become ubiquitous, he will reconsider. And there will be a place for the ICE engine for a very long time.

That’s enough for this week. It’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we disconnect from the crisis du jour and spend a few relaxing moments before charging headfirst into whatever next week brings. Here at the Mansion of Wrong, we’re off to the garden store to find vegetable plants for our puny garden.

It looks like a beautiful weekend in the northeast, so grab a chair outside and watch and listen to Manuel De Falla’s Danza from “La Vida Breve” (Life is Short or The Brief Life). It is from Falla’s 1905 opera. Here it is performed live at the ancient Roman Theatre in Cartagena Spain, by Paola Requena and Isabel MartĂ­nez who perform as the CarmesĂ­ Guitar Duo:

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About The Energy Grid

The Daily Escape:

Coyote Gulch, Escalante, UT – May 2023 photo by Chirag A. Patel

Wrongo and Ms. Right watched the Knicks vs. Miami and Ted Lasso rather than dipping into the political rally for Trump held by CNN. But other news outlets reported on it. Apparently, the live audience gave him a standing ovation as he entered the set. They laughed when he called E. Jean Carroll “a whack job” and belittled her claim of sexual assault:

Trump suggested that the US should default on its debt if Biden didn’t agree to the cuts that House Republicans want. He pledged to pardon many of those convicted in the Jan. 6 attempted coup. He refused to back Ukraine in its war against Russia.

For those who think that there’s an opening in 2024 among GOP partisans to either vote for someone other than Trump or gasp!, vote for a Democrat, you are sadly mistaken.

A big part of the press (obviously including CNN) just can’t bring itself to admit the truth about the current state of the Republican Party. And they don’t really see it as their job to engage in such denunciations, even to protect the nation.

America is chockfuckingfull of Republicans who are, as Hillary said, “deplorables”. And they’re not all in New Hampshire. It’s way past time for the press to acknowledge this sad fact.

But today, let’s talk about the US energy grid. Our transition from fossil fuels to a green energy future will require a huge investment in our current electric grid. This probably means we’ve understated the costs of America’s energy transition. From Haley Zaremba, at OilPrice: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In order to keep up with the expansion of renewable energy production capacity, the United States will have to more than double the current size of the electric grid. Stimulus from both the public and private sectors are hitting their intended mark, and the clean energy sector is booming. However, much of the potential environmental benefits of electrification will be completely wasted if we don’t have the power lines and grid capacity to transmit that power from where it’s being produced to where the demand is concentrated.”

Zaremba quotes McKinsey, who say that building sufficient wind and solar farms to power the clean energy transition will require overcoming three major hurdles: Finding enough land at an affordable price, building up the power grid to support the influx of electricity, and fixing the archaic and inefficient permitting process that governs these processes.

America needs massive investment in our national energy simply to stand still, regardless of the source of electricity.

But it’s important to identify today the key energy sources of the future because that determines how we specify and build the upgraded grid. A grid based on renewable sources requires a denser network and more long distance direct current lines, while conventional grids need a relatively small number of very high capacity short distance alternating current lines (i.e. from a cluster of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to the nearest city).

Either option is expensive and each brings its own set of regulatory issues. Zaremba notes that:

“Building power lines alone is an enormous bureaucratic hurdle that can take years to gain approval. The  average review of renewable energy projects takes about 3.5 years, but there are cases in which a single transition line took over a decade to be completed…”

According to the US DOE, the country will need 47,300 gigawatt-miles of new power lines by 2035. That represents a 57% expansion of the existing grid. And the real issue is the glacial pace of the bureaucratic review processes which underlie permitting and oversight of clean energy projects as well as grid expansion.

Zaremba closes with:

“Fixing the presently nightmarish permitting and approval system will be integral to decarbonizing the US economy…and making sure that the efforts already underway to decarbonize the nation’s energy mix are not squandered. It’s great that wind and solar capacity are being added at a record-breaking rate, but it’s all a waste if, once completed, there’s no permit allowing them to plug into the grid – or if there’s no grid at all.”

As if on cue, on Wednesday Biden signed on to Sen. Manchin’s (D-WVA) plan to speed the approval of some fossil fuel projects and to hasten the construction of new transmission lines. The NYT quotes John Podesta, Biden’s senior adviser for clean energy innovation:

“Right now, the permitting process for clean energy infrastructure, including transmission, is plagued by delays and bottlenecks…”

Manchin’s bill has some holding their noses because it is so pro-fossil fuel. But should it become law, perhaps the US government will be able to speed up approval for at least some of the green energy projects.

In summary, there’s lots to do and no sure way to get it all done.

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Is Default Preferable To Compromise?

The Daily Escape:

Wild Ocotillo blooms with Agave buds, Anza-Borrego Desert SP, CA – May 2023 photo by Paulette Donnellon

Yesterday, Biden met with the leadership of the Congress to discuss the debt ceiling and the dangers of default. Wrongo is writing this before we know what if anything concrete, comes out of that meeting.

This is the third time in twelve years that a Republican House majority has tried to use the debt limit to extort a Democratic president into adopting policies that the GOP failed to enact through normal political means. This time around, like the past two times, Republicans say they want spending cuts, but as Nate Cohn wrote in the NYT:

“The 2022 midterm campaign didn’t show evidence of a resurgent conservative passion for spending cuts either. The debt-deficit issue had such a low profile in the national conversation that a question about it wasn’t even asked in exit polling.”

But absent real news, let’s take a look at the Republican position as outlined in the bill McCarthy and the GOP passed in the House. They’re pushing to pair $4.5 trillion in spending cuts over a decade with a one year, one time, $1.5 trillion increase in the debt limit. Their plan achieves most of its savings with spending caps for discretionary spending — the part of the yearly budget that isn’t automatic (like Social Security payments) — but it doesn’t say which discretionary programs should be cut and which should be spared.

Their plan caps government spending at last year’s levels. This would be a decrease of ~ 9%. A yearly increase is capped at 1% annually for the next 10 years. This action would save approximately $3.2 trillion. They haven’t offered any detail about where the cuts would come from, and there is no inflation adjustment to the spending cap.

But since the GOP has said it plans zero cuts in the defense budget and that there will be no cuts for veterans or for border security, cutting everywhere else will be very deep. The NYT estimates that if those programs remained untouched, the GOP plan would cut the balance of federal spending by an amount of a 51% cut across the board.

Seems unrealistic.

Social Security checks could still be issued because a 1996 law provides a means of circumventing the debt limit. It allows the Treasury Department to pay Social Security benefits, along with Medicare payments, even if there is a delay in raising the debt ceiling. It allows for the Social Security and Medicare trust funds to be drawn down to keep those benefits flowing until the debt limit is raised, and the trust fund replenished. It also prohibits those funds from being used to pay for any other government programs.

In the past, the usual political rhythm of fiscal crises is that the GOP House stumbles around for a while, and then, right before the deadline, Senate Republicans and Mitch McConnell come off the sideline. They cut a deal with the Democratic president and pass the deal in the Senate with a big bipartisan majority. They then leave town with the hot potato squarely in the Speaker’s lap.

It’s questionable if this will happen in May, 2023.

Biden should address the nation after the Tuesday talks. How about an oval office address that lays out the facts, along with a call to action: Call your representatives and tell them to pass a clean debt limit bill. He could detail for the American people the cuts the GOP are demanding in return for raising the limit. He could also say that he is willing to negotiate in good faith on the budget with House Republicans as long as the debt ceiling is a separate matter.

The compromise might be to have a temporary debt ceiling increase to allow both to move forward together. Sadly, for McCarthy and the House Republicans, default seems to be preferable to compromise.

This is zero-sum politics with the highest stakes. At the end of the day, all paths lead to the same place: The US will need to find a way to pay the bills it has incurred as they mature.

The question is how much damage will have happened along the way.

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Tuesday Wake Up Call – May 9, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Wild Azaleas at sunrise, Blue Ridge Mountains, VA – May 7, 2023 photo by Susan Anton

Wrongo and Ms. Right spent most of the weekend in NYC where we saw two Broadway plays, “New York, New York” and “Fat Ham”.

New York, New York is set at the end of WWII. The story is about a down-on-their-luck cast of characters who have come to NYC to  chase their dreams. It has some really strong points: Loved the choreography, the highlight of which is seeing a group tap dancing on the steel girder of an unfinished skyscraper. There’s also a nighttime snowfall in Central Park, and multicolored umbrellas seemingly floating in a rainstorm. The dancing scenes reminded Wrongo of “An American in Paris” which he saw in London and loved.

The scenery, dominated by towering fire escapes is very interesting and evocative of NYC. However, the male lead Jimmy, played by Colton Ryan, doesn’t have a voice that’s up to the role, although he is a versatile musician and has a nice sense of physical comedy. The female lead, Francine, played by Anna Uzele who played Catherine Parr in “Six” has a very good voice and was truly the star of the show.

The play doesn’t meet musical expectations. Despite having songs written by the legendary John Kander (“Cabaret” and “Chicago”) and co-written with Lin Manuel Miranda (you know, “Hamilton” and “In the Heights”). The tunes simply don’t deliver any real emotion to the audience.

It finishes with a rousing big band version of the signature tune that has the audience singing along. Sadly, for Wrongo, that was the highlight of the show.

Fat Ham by comparison, is a winner. It’s a contemporary riff on “Hamlet” set in a backyard somewhere in an unidentified part of the American South. This Black family includes a gay young male college student who is unsettled by his mother’s decision to marry the brother of her recently deceased husband, who was murdered in jail.

Some of the themes in Shakespeare’s play are quickly evident. But the play uses comedy and a few plot twists to challenge the family’s history of violence. In winning the Pulitzer, Fat Ham was described as:

“…a funny, poignant play that deftly transposes ‘Hamlet’ to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility and honesty.”

All of the above. The actors frequently break the fourth wall, letting the audience know how they feel about the drama being acted out on stage. Fat Ham refers to its main character: Juicy is queer, Black, and is taking online classes at the University of Phoenix.

Juicy’s father Pap appears as a ghost just before the cookout celebrating his mother’s marriage to the father’s brother Uncle Rev. Pap tells Juicy that he was killed in prison on the order of Uncle Rev and tells Juicy to kill Uncle Rev in revenge. Like Hamlet, Juicy is moody and sarcastic, but he isn’t particularly committed to murdering Rev. He acts like his father has asked him to do a chore he never plans to get around to.

Ultimately, Rev conveniently chokes to death on a pork rib, so Juicy didn’t have to lift a finger.

The play is about secrets that stay hidden because of guilt or shame. The ones that you keep for fear of ever being found out to be what you think is a more disgusting version of yourself.

It turns out that in the end, everyone acknowledges that several family members in addition to Juicy are gay. They come to terms with their failed expectations of each other as well. Ultimately they’re all liberated from the personal stories that keep them from being happy. The play ends with a splashy finale, including a confetti cannon, with one character channeling Rick James.

Wrongo recommends seeing Fat Ham if you are able to get to NYC.

One quibble is that all of these characters appear to have lived their whole lives with unfulfilled dreams that largely get fulfilled at the very end of the play.

Only on Broadway do we see people who can be released from their personal conflicts so easily.

Time to Wake Up America! We’re already a few days into what promises to be a difficult week. There’s a lot going on, and it can be hard to focus on just one thing. But Wrongo thinks we should be focusing on the Debt Ceiling and whether those bums we’ve elected have any interest in solving the problem.

As the clock ticks down to the moment when the US suffers a politically engineered default on its debt, let’s hope that the President and the Congress can defy partisanship and come up with something.

To help them wake up, here’s “Manic Monday”, written by Prince. It was a hit for the Bangles in 1984. Here they perform live in 2008:

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – May 7, 2023

(The Monday Wake Up Call will be published on Tuesday this week.)

America has been waiting for more than a year for the Federal Reserve to get control over inflation. In that time, they’ve jacked up interest rates to over 5%. A year ago, raising rates that high seemed unthinkable, but here we are. Wages have also risen.

There was some damage: A few horribly managed banks collapsed. A couple of auto dealer-lender chains that specialized in selling overpriced used cars to subprime customers collapsed. And there were some fiascos in commercial real estate.

All of that has led the Fed to indicate that there could be a “soft landing” for our economy. But with the latest jobs growth numbers, maybe the Fed will have to keep circling the airport. In April, 253,000 jobs were created. There are now a record 155.7 million payroll jobs. Over the past 3 months on average, 222,000 jobs were created per month. So is a soft landing ahead?

Please raise your seat tables to the upright position and pass your trash to the attendant. On to cartoons.

Coronations aren’t just for the Brits:

(Wrongo watched the coronation of King Charles III yesterday. Seventy years ago, he also watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II  on a 9″ black & white Philco television. Yesterday’s was on a 55” Samsung.)

The reality about the GOP:

What to expect after the GOP talks with Biden about the Debt Ceiling:

Proud Boys found guilty, but who pulled the strings?

Kremlin complains:

Justice Thomas needs to be taller to take the ride:

Time to buy more cards:

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Saturday Soother – May 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Adams sunrise with orchards in bloom, WA – May 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

(Wrongo and Ms. Right give a group hug to family member Bob W. His mother has a grave health crisis. We’re thinking of you Bob.)

There’s a book called “A Terrible Country” written in 2018 by Keith Gessen. It’s about life in Russia a few years before Russia became a pariah in Europe. But the title could easily describe the US in 2023. If you doubt that, maybe you aren’t aware of the video of a NYC subway rider choking a homeless man to death last week. The video lasts for four minutes.

The NYT describes the video:

“The homeless man, Jordan Neely, is seen writhing, trying to get free from the arms and legs of the other subway riders who are pinning him down. As the minutes tick by early Monday afternoon on a northbound F train in Manhattan, Mr. Neely visibly weakens as the arm wrapped around his neck stays tight.”

After he stops moving, the riders hold him down for about another 50 seconds. Neely was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. Jordan Neely was homeless. He was a Michael Jackson impersonator. Neely’s race (Black) and that of his killer (White) are a depressingly familiar story. What’s different is that his assailant wasn’t a cop and didn’t use a gun.

What’s also familiar is that the assailant has not been charged by the NYPD.

What’s also disturbing is that the subway car held bystanders most of whom remained bystanders, watching a former Marine choke the life out of Neely for (apparently) behaving erratically.

After the fact, we learned that Neely had more than 40 arrests including an open warrant for punching a 67 old woman. No one should portray him as simply a misunderstood soul. But did he deserve to die in that subway car?

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that there’s been news nearly every day about Americans being killed over mundane, mostly non-threatening actions, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The NYT’s Roxanne Gay:

“We are at something of an impasse. The list of things that can get you killed in public is expanding every single day. Whether it’s mass shootings or police brutality or random acts of violence, it only takes running into one scared man to have the worst and likely last day of your life. We can’t even agree on right and wrong anymore.”

How did the country get this way? Why is there so much fear and paranoia about the “other”? Why do select elements of our society cultivate this fear by marketing it?

Neely’s killing is partly an outcome of the relentless political rhetoric that has contributed to the public’s false beliefs about actual crime levels in America’s cities. And NYC’s Mayor and NY’s Governor wouldn’t even condemn the killer. Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The Atlantic:

“This process, through which mundane uncomfortable situations are transformed into terrifying ordeals by…incidents of random gun violence…is one means by which a healthy community becomes a violent society. Nobody looks forward to encountering people behaving erratically on the subway…but killing a mentally ill man on a train….represents the loss of a peaceful commons, the absence of compassion, and the overwhelming fear we have come to accept in our culture of violence. This is the country we have become.”

Yep, we’ve become a terrible country. Back to Roxanne Gay:

“There is no patience for simple mistakes or room for addressing how bigotry colors even the most innocuous interactions. There is no regard for due process. People who deem themselves judge, jury and executioner walk among us, and we have no real way of knowing when they will turn on us.”

And on Thursday, four of the Proud Boys, among paranoia’s finest, were convicted of committing vigilante justice against our democracy. Let’s leave the final words to Gay, who says we’ve become:

“…a people without empathy, without any respect for the sanctity of life unless it’s our own…”

Or fetuses.

Time for Wrongo to wash up after digging in this cultural dirt. It’s time for our Saturday Soother where we try to forget about whose drones hit the Kremlin, and try to center ourselves before another demanding week begins,

Here at the Mansion of Wrong, Wrongo and Ms. Right are spending the weekend in NYC seeing two musicals.

But as a public service to the rest of you, grab a seat outdoors on what looks like a beautiful day in the northeast. Now watch and listen to ErzsĂ©bet Pozsgai play the first movement of “Spring” from the “Four Seasons” by Antonio Vivaldi on solo violin, live in Budapest in 2013:

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Prepaying Taxes? Don’t Be Stupid

The Daily Escape:

Saguaro in bloom, Gold Canyon, AZ – May 2023 photo by Karin Ingebrigtsen Hetsler

In the discussion about the Debt Ceiling, it’s become clear that America has a problem with tax collections, which are running behind what was forecast. While tax receipts were always expected to be below 2021’s robust levels, they are even weaker than forecast, down around 35% so far.

That means absent a deal between the Parties, we will hit the Debt Ceiling sooner than we thought. This is largely due to a weaker stock market and lower economic growth than the country had in 2021.

But it’s also true that America has an enormously complicated tax code, built by decades of lobbyists working with the Congress to carve loopholes into the Code to provide legal tax avoidance strategies to their corporate clients.

Imagine a world where corporations and individuals didn’t try to weasel out on their tax obligations to the government…Impossible, you say?

Well, consider Ukraine. We’ve been told that Ukraine is rank with corruption and a large informal economy. Both may be true but read what The Economist has to say about tax receipts during their war with Russia: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“After Russia invaded in February last year, Ukraine’s finance minister, Serhiy Marchenko, braced…for government revenues to “plummet”. He says he expected them to fall by roughly as much as economic activity. That did not happen. Although Ukraine’s GDP plunged by 29% in 2022, the state pulled in just 14% less than the year before.”

Of course the war led to drops in tax revenues from imports and tourism. Blackouts caused by Russian attacks on power plants and the grid disrupted automated reporting of taxable transactions. More from The Economist:

“What, then, is behind the state’s “unique results”, as an official puts it, in wartime revenue collection? One explanation is that firms and taxpayers, eager to support their country’s defense, are paying more tax than required.”

Still more: (brackets by Wrongo)

“According to Ukraine’s finance ministry, in March last year such donations came to 26b[illio]n hryvnias ($880m), rising to 28b[illio]n in May.”

Why are Ukrainian businesses and individuals motivated not to avoid taxes like in the US, but to make donations and pay taxes in advance? The Economist quotes a tax partner with Price Waterhouse Coopers, with responsibility for Ukraine:

“…if Ukraine wins, you’ve got your country; if Russia wins, thuggish authorities will take your money anyway, so why not help out now?”

A lawyer at a Ukraine law firm says that many of his corporate clients have asked for guidance on how to prepay taxes. And now a year later, the lawyer says that nearly all the 100-odd clients he serves have begun to prepay. According to the lawyer, efforts to seek loopholes to lower tax bills have decreased.

Finally, The Economist reports that Ukraine’s State Tax Service continues to receive payments, through its online portal, from the territories occupied by Russia (except for Crimea). Despite the pressure to pay Russian taxes, apparently, last year 2.3 million individuals and organizations in occupied areas paid $9.5 billion in taxes to Ukraine.

They are doing this despite the risk of retribution from their Russian overlords. Can you imagine anything like this happening in the shell of a country we call the United States?

There are other factors at work. Taxes on gas production were raised last year. The Economist quotes Danil Getmantsev, chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s Committee on Finance, Taxation and Customs Policy, who says that a crackdown on corruption also may have had something to do with it.

No one should think that Wrongo is saying that Ukraine is a better place to live and work than is the US. The key point is they are demonstrating that in a country that was thought to be barely unified before the war, it now acts as one. Try to imagine how, under similar circumstances what it would take for companies and citizens in the US to freely prepay their taxes. (Wrongo knows about the need in the US for some Americans to file quarterly returns, which is a form of prepayment).

Or imagine people willingly donating to the government in an effort to keep us free.

Nope. We’re addicted to fiscal gimmickry. Anything to pay less to the government. After all, Trump said not paying taxes showed that he was a smart guy.

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Immigration Reform Has To Happen

The Daily Escape:

Eastern Sequoia Canyon NP viewed from Mt. Whitney trail, CA – April 2017 photo by Peerman Craft Photography

The federal government is expecting a surge in migrants at the southern border after next week’s lifting of Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that has allowed the US to refuse to process asylum claims on public health grounds. In anticipation, the Biden administration is preparing to deploy an additional 1,500 troops to the southern border for 90 days.

Those troops are on top of about 2,500 who are serving there currently. None of the soldiers are armed. They are largely performing administrative tasks that free up Customs and Border Protection (CBP) staff to handle the anticipated surge of migrants.

This could be a critical political moment for Biden, who’s just launched his 2024 reelection bid. We seem to be on the verge of another potential border crisis, which brings the certainty of new attacks by Republicans. The GOP has been hammering the administration, saying Biden’s immigration plans are too little too late.

When Title 42 is lifted, CBP will rely on the existing Title 8 law, under which any individual who is deemed ineligible to be in the US faces a five-year ban on readmission – and criminal charges if found crossing illegally.

On Wednesday, US and Mexican officials agreed on new immigration policies. Under the agreement, Mexico will continue to accept up to 30,000 migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua who are turned away at the US border; and up to 100,000 individuals from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador who have family in the US will be eligible to live and work in Mexico.

The US is accepting 30,000 people per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela for two years and offering them the ability to work legally, as long as they enter legally, have eligible sponsors and pass vetting and background checks. We’re continuing to turn away migrants from those four countries who cross the border illegally.

We’ve been following the same ad hoc approach to immigration for the past several administrations: We find a temporary solution that can handle a surge in migrants while not providing an open door for all who wish to enter the US.

We share this problem with most other rich countries. On Tuesday, the World Bank’s latest World Development Report said that about 184 million people across the world now live in countries where they’re not citizens. About 37 million of the total are refugees, a number that has tripled over the last decade.

Most of the transit happens through Central America before migrants reach the southern US border. Border security isn’t rigorous enough there to stem the northward flow. Recognizing that problem, the administration announced that it will set up regional processing centers for migrants to apply to come to the US. These centers will be located in Colombia and Guatemala, two countries migrants often pass through on their way to the US-Mexico border.

Deciding who gets to stay in the US is a bigger challenge when the migrants have few job skills and they’re not seeking asylum. We differentiate between asylum seekers and economic migrants. With a current backlog of 1.3 million asylum cases to be heard (equal to 4.25 years), the system is clearly broken.

The question is what should we do to stop/slow the flow of hundreds of thousands of migrants attempting to cross our southern border? Bloomberg shows the scale of the problem:

What’s the answer to this? Wrongo doubts that there is ONE answer.

Do we create a kind of reverse Berlin Wall like Trump tried to do? If it became a militarized border, we could surely cut down on the migration and the southern border would be controlled. This is the wet dream of the anti-immigration hawks. But the cost of building and manning the wall with soldiers would be ruinous, and to date, militarized borders aren’t who we are as a country.

Do we undertake nation building in Central and South America, hoping that those countries can become more attractive to their potential migrants? America’s track record with nation-building is terrible. And think about the cost, which could be far greater than the cost of a militarized wall. Think about how much money would be skimmed into the pockets of local politicians.

But we can’t just leave our borders open. Open borders are a sign of a government that has lost control of its geography. It would ultimately lead to a reality that no American wants. This is the specter that instills fear into most Americans about the growing migration problem.

It appears that we’re going to continue using an orderly throttling and vetting process at the southern border to decide who among this new surge of migrants is allowed into the country. The bigger question is what should our immigration policy be going forward?  We haven’t had immigration reform since the 1980s. We’re unlikely to have reform any time soon.

Biden and the Democrats are vulnerable if they can’t articulate a plan (that they can back with numbers) that shows the American people what we’re doing to control immigration. Developing a clear position on immigration could draw significant public majority support.

There are plenty of Democrats and Independents who are strongly against migration. So Biden needs to show progress soon by demonstrating that we’re controlling the problem.

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Monday Wake Up Call – May 1, 2023

The Daily Escape:

The Schooner Surprise, built in 1918, is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, Camden Harbor, ME – April 2023 photo by Daniel F. Dishner

A few words about Biden, McCarthy and the Debt Ceiling. We all know that the clock is ticking on a US default of our debt sometime in June. There are multiple opinions in DC about who has the leverage in the coming debate between the House GOP, Senate Dems and Biden.

The institutionalist view is that McCarthy and the House GOP have taken the Debt Ceiling hostage and they plan a hostage negotiation with Biden. Some think that McCarthy is doing it badly. Others take the darker view that the Republicans are actually trying to crash the economy so that America blames Biden and returns the GOP to power in 2024.

If you think, based on what we’ve seen so far, that the GOP doesn’t plan to negotiate, that like terrorists, they will kill as many hostages as possible until their terms are 100% met, what they’re doing makes sense.

The NYT reports that McCarthy has been open about the fact that this is not a real bill:

“This bill is to get us to the negotiations….It is not the final provisions, and there’s a number of members who will vote for it going forward…say there are some concerns they have with it. But they want to make sure the negotiation goes forward because we are sitting at $31 trillion of debt.”

For the umpteenth time, we’re watching a game of chicken about raising the debt limit. There are something like 45 days until the Debt Ceiling must be raised. You know the “or else” sentence that follows: Or else, the US will face potentially calamitous economic consequences.

McCarthy’s bill may get the Republicans a seat at the table in the negotiations over raising the debt limit, but Biden’s position remains: “Send a clean debt limit bill, or pound sand.”

Has McCarthy overplayed a bad hand? If he had failed to get anything passed he would have looked completely incompetent. Nevertheless, passing a bill filled with devastating cuts and manifestly unpopular positions that will be difficult to defend except to the Party faithful, it is arguably worse than getting nothing done at all.

If the Dems are smart they will take the GOP’s messaging bill and come up with a message that has broad appeal that can be used to hurt the GOP in swing districts for the next two years. McCarthy’s bill shows that Republicans’ ultimate goal is to gut health care, food stamps and education, and even veterans benefits. The Vote Vets organization is out with a message:

“And now, it is the fringe MAGA party that voted for a budget that would gut health care and support for our Veterans. 217 of them voted for it, and just 4 against. They talk tough when it comes to Military action, but go AWOL when it’s time to take care of those who served.”

This bill isn’t intended to pass. Republicans had an opportunity to aim a productive salvo at swing voters to convince them that GOP majorities can deliver normalcy, and give them some sign that the Party was tacking away from the extremist positions that alienated voters in the last midterm elections.

Instead, their message is that the Party is about owning the libs and slashing aid for veterans and the poor. The GOP can’t even fake being a Party interested in governing anymore. That’s bad news for McCarthy, the man chained to the GOP canoe that’s heading over the falls. As Succession’s the late Logan Roy would say “You are not serious people.”

Instead the GOP’s message to the world is that America’s commitment to paying its debts is contingent on an underlying political negotiation about the size of the budget deficit.

  • Republicans believe they can win the political standoff by making Biden and Democrats look petty by refusing a basic negotiation.
  • Democrats also seem to be betting that Senate Republicans will step in as more mature political actors and defuse this situation.

The NYT quotes Sen. Chuck Schumer, (D-NY) and majority leader:

“Discussion of spending cuts belongs in talks about the budget, not for bargaining chips on the debt ceiling….The speaker should drop the brinkmanship, drop the hostage taking, come to the table with Democrats to pass a clean bill to avoid default.”

Time to wake up America! This kabuki play will run through at least mid-June. It’s a DC big boy fight. And we the little people, will have no say until November 2024 when we can escort the GOP flame throwers out of the House. To help you wake up, watch Crowded House perform “Don’t Dream It’s Over” from their first (of three) farewell tours, played at the Sydney Opera House in November 1996:

One of the greatest songs of the 80s and it still hits hard today.

Sample Lyrics:

There is freedom within, there is freedom without
Try to catch a deluge in a paper cup
There’s a battle ahead, many battles are lost
But you’ll never see the end of the road
While you’re traveling with me

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