The Empty Spectacle of the U.N. Climate-Change Summit

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, October 21, 2021

 

As President Joe Biden limps into Glasgow, there are only two things holding back his big, showy climate agenda: politics and economics.

 

If you happen to be one of those people who insists that climate change should be “beyond politics,” then you are certainly entitled to the sentiment — but spare us any lectures about “democracy” in the future, because politics is how liberal-democratic societies go about their public business.

 

And the politics here do not favor dramatic action, whatever is said or notionally agreed to in Glasgow.

 

Joe Biden and his Democratic allies face the same problem as other would-be climate saviors throughout both the developed world and the poorer countries: There is very little popular support for radical social and economic change in pursuit of climate goals. Even a sharp-as-a-doorknob goofus such as President Biden understands this, which is why his anti-coal program was the first thing the White House put on the altar when negotiating with Senator Joe Manchin for universal pre-K and tuition-free community college. Climate change, they tell us, is an existential threat, against which bold and radical action must be taken — but not if it means Democrat-voting millionaires in Greenwich, Conn., and Cambridge, Mass., have to pay for their own babysitters.

 

For the same reason, the Biden administration is expected to end up approving more oil-and-gas development on federal lands. You may think that’s a good policy — I think that’s a good policy. But if you believe, as the people we’ll all be hearing from in Glasgow do, that the end is nigh unless there is fundamental change that includes a dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels, then there isn’t any acceptable tradeoff there. The reason Green New Dealers insist on attempting to foist upon us these fantasies that their climate agenda will produce millions of new, high-paying industrial jobs is the unspoken fact at the center of this issue: The Biden administration and other like-minded governments around the world are not going to sacrifice some large share of 10 million energy-industry and energy-adjacent jobs in pursuit of climate goals — especially when U.S. action is expected to have approximately squat in terms of global climate impact without comparable measures from governments no sane person trusts to implement them.

 

You’ve probably seen the polls: Americans say they care about climate change — until it comes time to pay for climate policy. Some 68 percent of Americans — more than two-thirds — say they would not be willing to pay $10 a month in order to fund measures to prevent or ameliorate climate change. They are not going to support paying more for gasoline, for heating and cooling their homes, or for food.

 

Maybe they should. But they won’t.

 

Hence the retreat into climate moralism. “It’s not your fault the world is getting hotter,” the apologists say, “it’s the wicked, naughty 1 percent. So why should you” — we — “be on the hook to pay for it?” You know it’s true — all the fashion magazines say so. The climate doesn’t care if a molecule of carbon dioxide comes out of Jeff Bezos’s tailpipe or if it comes out of the fire over which some penniless rustic cooks his dinner; greenhouse gases are greenhouse gases. But left-wing moral hysterics insist that every issue is, in some ineffable way, every other issue. You’ve heard it all: “Climate is a racial-justice issue. Climate is an economic-justice issue. Climate is a trans-rights issue.” Etc. That’s teapot radicalism, a hobby for bored youngsters in the rich countries, the sort of thinking that produces the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

 

If what you care about is human flourishing rather than gross emissions, then you might consider greenhouse-gas emissions per unit of economic output. But you don’t hear about that very much, because many of the rich countries (Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Norway) do pretty well by that metric, while the worst performers include many poor countries (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Moldova). The United States is not an outstanding performer by that standard (better than Canada, not as good as Germany), but it produces just a little more than half as much carbon dioxide per dollar of economic output as Russia.

 

If you care about both the climate and human prosperity, then, presumably, you’d want a world with policies that look more like those of Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States than like those of Turkmenistan. But ask the climate activists what the real problem is and they’ll tell you it is capitalism. “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism,” Phil McDuff writes in the Guardian. “The fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism,” say the activists at Open Democracy. “We must abolish capitalism,” says climate activist and author Mark Jaccard. In the New York Times, Benjamin Fong writes: “The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid.” What can save the world from climate change? “Only socialism,” says John Molyneux.

 

When I ask what can be done to help with climate change and someone lobs a copy of Das Kapital at my head, the conversation is over.

 

John Kennedy famously declared that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden” in the cause of liberty. In the cause of climate change, Americans are pretty adamant that they won’t bear the cost of two frappuccinos a month. That counsels modesty in our policy ambitions. But at the same time, the hysterics and the moralists have staked out a maximalist position that makes working toward consensus with responsible parties all but impossible. Republicans in the United States don’t want to hear about climate change, but, in much of the rest of the world, the mainstream center-right parties are open to climate action and interested in it. What they aren’t interested in is neo-primitivism, anti-humanism, or Marxism — which are, experience has shown us, ultimately all the same thing.

 

So, expect some real Sturm und Drang in Glasgow.

 

And then expect — not much.

The ORC Invasion

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, October 28, 2021

 

San Francisco

 

‘Bro! Bro! Bro! You want an all-meat sandwich?” The guy with the sandwich is exactly what you are picturing when you picture a guy who says “Bro! Bro! Bro!” — baseball cap, vape pen, in the company of two women producing a slightly less civilized cloud of cigarette smoke — and the object of his benevolence is one of San Francisco’s many addled street people, who accepts the sandwich and waits patiently as his new best friend, Lord Chancellor Sammich, magnanimously explains to him the contents, which are mostly, all within hearing range are assured, beef pastrami. “There might be some pickles.” Pickles, bro! “Uh, okay,” says the beneficiary. “Thank you.” The threesome rolls off into the San Francisco night, in a cloud of complexly blended nicotine vapors. “He always does that,” one of the women says to the other. “I’m so proud of him.”

 

The bum opens up the sandwich and peers inside, like he’s looking for the keys he lost 30 years ago, then throws it on the ground and trundles off, muttering.

 

Even in thrall to schizophrenia or demons or addiction or whatever madness it is that has him sleeping out of doors, this man can get a sandwich anytime he wants. Beer, too, or wine, and toiletries (though those don’t seem to be a top priority at this point in his career), the latest issue of Harper’s, whatever. All he has to do is walk into a store and take it. When I checked in at my hotel, I got a $50 credit at the hotel shop, but this guy does not need American Express — he has a $950 credit at every store in town, because San Francisco has effectively (though not quite formally) decriminalized theft of that amount or less. And the city has shown itself unable or unwilling to prosecute a lot of shoplifting amounting to much, much more than that. What has developed are parallel crime waves: One is good old San Francisco street-level hippie-dirtbag chaos, and the other is organized crime, with packs of shoplifters working for ringleaders and bosses who move the goods through both physical and online distribution networks that turn tens of millions of dollars in profit. There is more to this scene than what you see on San Francisco’s lunatic sidewalks.

 

“F*** your sandwich.”

 

That, too, is a howl, if not exactly Allen Ginsberg’s own. My man here clearly does not need your pity or your pastrami.

 

There are more like him on the surrounding blocks, old-fashioned San Francisco vagrants with prophetic beards and shopping carts piled high with such worldly possessions as they possess. Shopping carts are a real issue in this city. For one thing, people steal them, and, more distressingly for the city’s besieged retailers, they use them to steal other merchandise, filling them up with thousands of dollars’ worth of cosmetics or clothing or packaged goods and rolling them out the door to waiting getaway cars — or just squeaking off into the night, with nothing to slow them down except that one inevitable wobbly wheel. The local Safeways have taken to installing ridiculous long poles onto their shopping carts to keep them from being pushed out the door. Safeway shoppers wander around like anarchically disconnected train cars, towering white plastic pantographs reaching for the pale cyan fluorescent lights above them as they navigate between the frozen peas and the seasonal boxes of Count Chocula. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. Or to howl.

 

The real howling starts after dark.

 

But, mostly, the streets of San Francisco are quiet this evening. On Broadway, a few tourists nose around outside the seedy topless bars. A few PBS tote bags in hominid form paw through the inventory at the City Lights Bookstore, and there’s nothing there that they can’t get from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but they have come to pay their countercultural respects — the shop’s founder, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died in February at the age of 101 — and to sing the old songs and maybe pick up some Kerouac or Kesey for the DWR coffee table back home, Sometimes a Great Notion, maybe, because Paul Newman was so good in the movie. The shop is full of creaky old lefties who gave up proletarian politics for pinot grigio years ago, and they are not here to shoplift — they are here to buy copies of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel, the fictionalized memoir covering “two years in the life of a young, hip writer who is trying to both not be a bad person and find some kind of happiness or something,” as the marketing copy has it. As a young man, Ferlinghetti was shipped off to an expensive private school in New England after being arrested for shoplifting, and the security measures in his store today are gentle but insistent. The signs reading “No Exit” are not advertising the works of Jean-Paul Sartre — they are directing shoppers to the cash register.

 

So much for the anti-capitalist vanguard. But San Francisco has always been about getting paid. The 1960s, the beautiful people, Flower Power — good money in all that. The gentlemen at City Lights will be happy to sell you a tourist tchotchke ballcap with “Howl” emblazoned over the bill.

 

Walking through San Francisco, I kept thinking of the words “global capital flows.” And “flow” seems just right: There is a sense that all that big new money just washed over this rickety old city, a rising tide that lifted a hell of a lot of boats but inundated a few others, before the waters of big new global money did what all such waters do and began to recede. There are a lot of Teslas on the streets here, but a lot of U-Hauls, too, and while the Google/Facebook/Andreessen Horowitz party is still going strong in much of the rest of the Bay Area, the city of San Francisco is grim, ravaged by COVID-19 and wretched misgovernance. It is easy to forget that there is a thoroughly ordinary city here underneath all the madness and quaintness and money and glamour and grime. Tesla employs fewer people in the Bay Area than does Sutter Health, and Kaiser Permanente employs three times as many locals as Facebook. Sure, there’s a pretentious vegan café in the airport, but this is a city that needs CVS, Walgreens, and Target.

 

And those stores are under siege, falling one by one, closing up shop.

 

The ORCs are here.

 

* * *

 

First it was the razor blades and the cologne. Those were the first things in the all-night pharmacies and convenience stores to go behind locked cabinet doors. But at this CVS in San Francisco’s financial district, it’s damned near everything: booze, of course, though not all the booze, pistachios, mixed nuts, dental floss, toothpaste, lotion, deodorant, hair-care products, pain medicine, multivitamins — mostly not things that the vagrant and semi-vagrant members of the sandwich-philanthropy-receiving population are looking to scoop up for their own use, though a few hours before I got there one free spirit did apparently walk out with a bottle of white wine, the weather being fine and life being one long picnic.

 

If you want to buy some toothpaste or a Slim Jim, you have to press a little call button, like you are summoning the attendant on an airplane — and, of course, you’ll have about as much luck. A clerk earning minimum wage can wait out almost any shopper. It depends on whether you want that Benadryl bad enough.

 

Some of the stats say property crime is actually down in San Francisco, but that is probably a reporting issue, because some store managers have stopped bothering to waste their time filing police complaints. There’s a uniformed security guard here at CVS, but these guards are not allowed to touch thieves, so all they can do is try to reason with them — which, you know, best of luck with that. If they do call the police, the police will take half an hour or more to show up, if they show up at all, which they often don’t. One store clerk says that thieves will sometimes boost a few beers, walk out the door, and stand right there and drink them in front of the store, fearlessly enjoying their afternoon cocktails alfresco. Locals trade videos of thieves filling up their backpacks as security guards speak sternly to them:

 

“I’m calling the police!”

 

“Okay, whatever.”

 

It’s the old asymmetry at work: Enforcing the law on the law-abiding is relatively easy, but enforcing the law on outlaws is hard work. My taxi driver says he thinks it’s stupid that he and his riders are required to be masked at all times even though they are separated by a plastic partition, but he says drivers have been fined and had their licenses threatened for carrying passengers without masks. It’s an easy offense to prosecute, and masking here in this most progressive city is a powerful symbolic and ritualistic issue, a declaration: “We are not red-staters!” even if Elon Musk now is, along with many other Golden State refugees. Arresting shoplifters at Walgreens is a different kind of symbolic issue, and the Powers That Be in San Francisco just won’t do it. During the bloody and fiery summer of 2020, progressives around the country — including some Democratic prosecutors and police leaders — refused to protect retailers from looters and arsonists on the theory that thievery and destruction were moral reparations for racial injustice. As BLM Chicago organizer Ariel Atkins put it: “I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store because that makes sure that person eats. That makes sure that person has clothes. That is reparations. Anything they want to take, take it, because these businesses have insurance.” That was not an uncommon sentiment: “Our futures have been looted,” read one placard. “Loot back!”

 

(And for only $15, you can still buy a poster depicting an overturned police car and a Molotov cocktail with the caption “Lives Over Property” — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and PayPal all accepted.)

 

San Francisco has a civic culture that is as schizophrenic as any of its street people: The city is a playground for the private-jet-setters enjoying their Google money and their Facebook money and their Apple money, but CVS and Walgreens — where Uber drivers stop in to buy Red Bull and aspirin — are embassies of Wicked Naughty Capitalism.

 

The thing is, we are talking about real money — organized-crime money — not chump change from a little freelance pilferage. Operation Proof of Purchase, a multiagency law-enforcement effort organized by CVS, turned up more than $8 million in stolen goods from a single location — there was $1.6 million in stolen razor blades alone. And that $8 million worth of goods was only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions in goods believed to have been boosted by a single Bay Area ORC — that’s “organized retail crime” operation. When police served a warrant at the Concord, Calif., home of suspected ORC ringleader Danny Drago and his wife, Michelle Fowler, they found high-speed bill counters and $85,000 in cash. Bundles of $100 bills were found at the home of an associate. Millions of dollars of goods stolen from Bay Area retailers were recovered from a number of storage and processing facilities — goods that were bound for resale on eBay and Amazon, headed back into the retail market via corrupt distributors, or destined for overseas markets. The scale of the criminal operation is vast, and so is the scale of the law-enforcement response: Operation Proof of Purchase involved the efforts of more than 100 law-enforcement personnel spread from the California Highway Patrol to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, along with the sprawling and presumably expensive private-sector effort led by CVS.

 

CVS declined to comment on this story. In fact, there was a lot of declining, also including that of the National Retail Federation, which did not accept an interview request. Naturally, businesses are hesitant to talk about ongoing investigations and litigation (retailers are seeking $50 million in damages from the alleged ringleaders after Operation Proof of Purchase).

 

There also has been political pushback in San Francisco, where the local political bosses have been embarrassed by reports of store closures and reduced hours — Target closes at 6:00 p.m. these days — inconveniencing shoppers and causing some retail workers to see their hours cut or their jobs eliminated entirely. There have been plenty of dumb and dishonest denunciations of “corporate greed” as retailers work to slow down the rate of pillage.

 

Then there’s the spookiness factor. CVS executives have talked about the role of “intelligence” in these wide-ranging investigations, but they have been less eager to say what that means — e.g., the widespread use of facial-recognition technology. For years, the dogma among anti-shoplifting professionals was that organized crime played only a minor role in retail theft. But that dogma has been challenged by research undertaken by biometric-data firms such as FaceFirst, which found that the majority of shoplifters (at least 60 percent) entered two separate locations of the same chain and a fifth of them entered three or more. Investigators have traced merchandise from those stores with repeat boosters through the black-market distribution chain, showing that these items are being stolen for resale rather than for personal consumption. “Unfortunately for retailers, shoplifters are incredibly loyal to their favorite brands,” FaceFirst CEO Peter Trepp told Loss Prevention Media. “Until now, it’s been nearly impossible to prove beyond anecdotal evidence how pervasive and strategic recidivism is.” That data came from a survey covering December 2017 to May 2018. Nobody thinks shoplifting has become anything other than more prevalent and more organized since then.

 

Facial recognition is not only being used to study old security footage — it is now being deployed for real-time analysis of customers entering stores. The idea is to spot thieves as soon as they come in, and, especially, to flag the violent ones. “Face recognition makes it possible to stop crimes before they start,” Trepp added in the LPM interview. This raises some pretty obvious red flags for privacy, something that might not be entirely welcome for people wandering into CVS at 1:00 a.m. to buy condoms and Monster energy drinks.

 

Facial-recognition systems and other biometric technologies are controversial. During the George Floyd riots, it was learned that law enforcement was conducting facial-recognition surveillance. After receiving bitter criticism, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM stopped selling facial-recognition software to law-enforcement agencies, with Amazon and Microsoft promising to extend the moratorium until Congress enacts comprehensive regulation, which Congress has so far declined to do, while IBM quit the business entirely. (The European Data Privacy Board has called for “a general ban on any use of AI for automated recognition of human features in publicly accessible spaces, such as recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioural signals,” according to an agency statement.) All around San Francisco, modest shops and restaurants have signs reading “Smile! You’re on Camera!” But there is a world of difference between detectives reviewing security footage and an AI-managed biometric surveillance network that essentially runs a spot background check on everybody who enters a shop.

 

For the moment, COVID-19 has given professional shoplifters something very valuable: a mandate to wear masks in public. For years, California maintained a prohibition on public mask-wearing, but that law was overturned after a challenge from Iranian expatriates in California who wished to cover their faces while protesting the abuses of the ayatollahs’ regime. (The University of California at Berkeley has a policy prohibiting the wearing of masks by people for the purpose of “intimidation” — unless the masked parties are affiliated with the university.) Now, California maintains only a generally unenforced prohibition on wearing a mask while committing a crime. For comparison, New York State maintains a prohibition on “being masked or in any manner disguised” in public and has sometimes arrested people on those grounds, in some cases at the Occupy Wall Street protests. But the AIs have learned to read signs other than faces — “gait analysis” is another tool in the surveillance toolbox.

 

Criminals will find it difficult to hide. But in San Francisco, the victims are more interested in protecting their identities than are the criminals, who often are brazen, with no apparent concern for having their faces recorded. Store owners, on the other hand, are terrified, because these often are violent crimes as well as property crimes. An elderly woman operating a small shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown was exasperated by a thief who brazenly stole cellphone accessories and then returned a few hours later to “return” them for cash. She chased him off but a few hours after that he returned again to steal some more. That time, a shopper stopped him. A few hours later, the thief returned once more, but not to steal — he pepper-sprayed the shopkeeper as a warning not to interfere with him again. Others interfering with shoplifters have been beaten, stabbed, and shot. Unless storekeepers are actually murdered, city officials have almost no discernible interest in these cases. There have been few convictions or even prosecutions resulting from them.

 

So, there’s your super-appealing choice: sci-fi corporate surveillance state or Mogadishu in the Tenderloin.

 

* * *

 

You can’t tell this story without mentioning Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s left-wing-nutter district attorney.

 

Boudin is the son of terrorists: Both parents were convicted of murder after a Weather Underground armored-car stickup in which two police officers and one security guard lost their lives. Those terrorists being in prison, he was raised by different terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, also veterans of the Weather Underground. Boudin is also a Rhodes scholar and a graduate of Yale’s law school.

 

Boudin is not personally responsible for California’s redefining theft of $950 or less as a misdemeanor — that was a ballot proposition — but he is responsible for making it the publicly stated policy of his office to ignore the everyday crimes that affect ordinary people in San Francisco. “We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes,” he promised in a campaign speech. “Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted.”

 

Some 50 lawyers have left his office since he took over in 2020. One of the most recent departures, left-leaning prosecutor Brooke Jenkins, confesses that Boudin is too much even for a dyed-in-the-wool San Francisco progressive such as she. “Chesa has a radical approach,” she told a local television reporter, an approach “that involves not charging crime in the first place and simply releasing individuals with no rehabilitation and putting them in positions where they are simply more likely to re-offend.”

 

But this isn’t really Chesa Boudin’s story. He’s one in a long line of overindulged, miseducated Ivy League white guys working out whatever weird guilt and sins-of-the-fathers-and-mothers-and-foster-fathers-and-foster-mothers-while-we’re-at-it stuff he has on his conscience. He is a fool, but an ordinary fool.

 

The real villains of the story are — “Bro! Bro! Bro!” — Lord Chancellor Sammich and a million others like him, those enlightened and worldly souls who tolerate, accept as normal, and thereby contribute to the environment of disorder, vagrancy, violence, and low-level menace that marks American urban life, dramatically in San Francisco but in a similar way everywhere from Philadelphia to Austin to Portland. These are the people who voted to effectively legalize looting the local Walgreens. These are the people who elected Chesa Boudin. These are the people who feed the bears and then act surprised that there are bears everywhere. The thing is, there is no second law of thermodynamics for societies. Where there is entropy, someone will impose order: mafias, cartels, gangs — or, in the case of the San Francisco retail ecosystem, ORCs.

 

Hey, Bro! Bro! Bro! We’re trying to save a civilization here, bro. F*** your sandwich.

Cheering Enes Kanter

National Review Online

Sunday, October 21, 2021

 

The National Basketball Association would appreciate it greatly if everyone involved with the sport would remain quiet enough about the continuing atrocities in China for its international development team to complete its work without interruption. Unfortunately for the NBA — but fortunately for everybody else — Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter is declining to play along.

 

Of late, Kanter has been on something of a crusade. Unwilling to remain silent like his bosses in pursuit of a grubby market share, Kanter has been blunt about the sins of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whom he describes as a “brutal dictator,” and of the CCP, which, among other things, oppresses Tibet, relies upon slave-labor, and has imprisoned up to 2 million Uyghurs in concentration camps. Kanter argues that Americans should not ignore this. “Don’t forget,” he said this past week of consumer goods produced with coerced labor, “every time you put those shoes on your feet, or you put that T-shirt on your back, there are so many tears and so much oppression and so much blood behind it all.” In particular, he points to “Uyghur forced labor,” which he describes as “modern day slavery” that is “happening right now in China.”

 

On the hypocrisy of the American sports industry, Kanter is scorching. “Nike,” he pointed out recently, “remains vocal about injustice here in America, but when it comes to China, Nike remains silent.” Indeed it does. For that matter, so does the NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, who, when pressed, tends to utter euphemisms about China questions being “complicated” and to babble nervously about the need for “soft power” and “cultural exchange.” The same is true of Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, who came under deserved fire last year for his unwillingness to remark upon reports that participants in the NBA’s Chinese training academies were physically beaten and deprived of education — a reticence that, when compared to his outspokenness decrying gun violence and racial injustice in the United States, struck many as peculiar.

 

Kanter’s horror at the conduct of totalitarian regimes comes in part from personal experience. In 2016, he criticized the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, describing him as the “Hitler of our century.” In response, his father was first removed from his position at a Turkish university and then charged as a member of a terrorist group, while Kanter was banned from the country, had his passport canceled, and was charged in absentia with terrorism. Some people would have responded to this by shutting up. Kanter has taken the opposite course. “XI JINPING and the Chinese Communist Party,” he tweeted this week. “Someone has to teach you a lesson, I will NEVER apologize for speaking the truth. You can NOT buy me. You can NOT scare me. You can NOT silence me.”

 

As a rule, we are not prone to celebrate artists or athletes for their political stands, many of which involve the comfortable recitation of things that cost them nothing among their friends and patrons. But the NBA’s suppression of dissent on the question of China is so unnerving and so complete that it is refreshing to see someone break through, swimming against the tide of self-interest. Enes Kanter deserves plaudits for his candor. The NBA and its partners would do well to heed his warnings.

The Global War on Terror Comes for Joe Biden

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

 

On Monday evening, U.S. officials casually announced that a hostile foreign power was responsible for a “complex, coordinated, and deliberate” attack on an outpost operated by American soldiers.

 

According to the Pentagon, as many as five drones armed with explosives targeted a Syria-based garrison last week where U.S. forces and Syrian opposition fighters are stationed. The drones were Iranian in origin. The attack was encouraged and materially supported by Iran. And the targeting of this base has disrupted the U.S. mission in northwestern Syria to deter and contain the Islamic State in the Levant.

 

Just hours later, Colin Kahl, undersecretary of Defense for policy, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan represent a threat to the United States that is all but imminent. “I think the intelligence community currently assesses that both ISIS-K and al-Qaeda have the intent to conduct external operations, including against the United States,” Kahl said. Current estimates indicate that the Islamic State in Central Asia could mount attacks on the U.S. homeland anywhere from six to 12 months from now. As for al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the nation’s history will again be able to hit the homeland within a year or two.

 

These two episodes might appear unrelated, but only to those who have forgotten the objectives outlined by George W. Bush at the outset of the West’s Global War on Terror. That enterprise was never limited to non-state actors. That war was to be conducted against terrorists and their state sponsors—“any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism.” Afghanistan is once again just such a nation. Iran always was.

 

This is all terribly inconvenient for Joe Biden. The president has commanded the tide of Islamist terrorism to recede, but the tide refuses to budge. Biden’s heedlessly ordered and shambolically executed withdrawal from Afghanistan has transformed that country back into the locus of transnational terror. His desire to extricate U.S. forces from both Syria (which is presently under review, ongoing U.S. operations aimed at neutralizing high-ranking terror operatives in that country notwithstanding) and Iraq (also in negotiations) appear unchanged despite the Afghan debacle. But the president is about to encounter the consequences of his commitment to America’s unconditional retreat.

 

The strategic consequences for the United States should Islamist elements once again manage to conduct spectacular attacks in America of the sort we’ve managed to prevent in the 20 years since 9/11 are self-evident. Islamist groups and their self-radicalized adherents all over the world will proliferate, the United States will have to reengage militarily in the regions it is desperate to abandon, and America’s position in the world will deteriorate more than it already has. The political consequences, however, are even more dire from a Democratic perspective.

 

Barack Obama didn’t want to reintroduce U.S. forces into Iraq just three years after he executed a campaign pledge to extricate troops from the country. He had no choice. Yes, the ostensible rationale for the reintroduction of troops was the Islamic State’s imminent threat to the Yazidi people, who were surrounded and days away from genocidal eradication. But the impetus was the strategic threat posed by ISIS’s acquisition of vast swaths of resource-rich territory in the heart of the Middle East, and the political will was provided by Americans who would not tolerate the beheading of their fellow citizens on camera. Those deaths, though few and far away, forced Obama’s hand.

 

A successful foreign-directed terror attack on U.S. soil during Biden’s first term would prove a catastrophic political debacle for this president and his party. It would expose the foolishness of his withdrawal and reveal the extent to which “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism operations are a fantasy without ready assets and reliable intelligence in the region (as if more proof was needed). Biden’s own administration has already told anyone willing to listen that the threat is metastasizing as we speak. When that threat reaches the point of maturity, the White House will not escape blame.

 

Joe Biden has a choice: Reengage with the global anti-terror war now in a visible, verifiable, and (most important) preemptive way or be compelled by calamitous circumstance to reengage later at a time and place not of his choosing. That would seem to most rational observers like no choice at all, but Biden fancies himself a peacemaker. He might think he can avoid the worst. Or, at least, that the worst won’t happen on his watch. But there will not be peace while Biden projects weakness to our adversaries. And if that weakness invites dire consequences that Americans won’t be able to ignore or dismiss, it will discredit retrenchment as a political project for years to come. It really is as simple as that.

Don’t Buy the U.N. Climate Change Conference’s Scary Stories

By Jakob Puckett

Saturday, October 30, 2021

 

Starting tomorrow, on Halloween, government leaders from around the world will meet in Glasgow, Scotland, for the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference, which this year will feature some of its scariest stories yet.

 

The only problem is that when you take the mask off the harrowing claims that climate change poses an imminent existential threat to humanity, they don’t hold up.

 

The most dire climate-change predictions, which fuel the apocalyptic discourse that surrounds the issue, stem from a climate model known as RCP 8.5. According to RCP 8.5, by the year 2100, the Earth will warm 4.3 degrees Celsius, causing sea levels to surge and making many countries too hot to inhabit. But models are only as solid as the assumptions on which they rest, and RCP 8.5’s assumptions are wild, to put it mildly.

 

The model assumes that, despite coal’s declining market position and usage, and despite projections that it will continue to decline, worldwide per capita coal use will rise three- to six-fold over the next 50 years, coming to once again power our economies and heat our homes. It assumes that liquefied coal will even fuel our cars. It assumes that the rebirth of the coal industry will power so much growth that, by 2100, the poorest country on Earth today will have a higher GDP than today’s wealthiest countries currently do (while paradoxically also being too hot to inhabit). And it assumes that economic growth will be much less energy-efficient than it is today, which would represent the reversal of a decades-long trend.

 

It should go without saying that none of these are even remotely safe assumptions.

 

Similarly, many dire predictions about climate change’s effects on weather patterns are overwrought. It is true that the latest report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change notes that fire weather, heavy precipitation, ecological and agricultural droughts, and heat waves are increasing in frequency. But it is also true that while heat waves have become more frequent since 1960, the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the peak period of extreme heat in the U.S. Similarly, while weather conducive to wildfires has become more frequent, the global land area burned by wildfires has steadily decreased since the early 1900s, and much of the recent damage has been due to poor forest-management practices.

 

What’s more, there’s plenty of good news that can’t be fit into a spooky climate-change story. The IPCC’s most recent report notes no discernible long-term increase in flooding, hydrological and meteorological droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, winter storms, extreme winds, thunderstorms, lightning, or hail. And humanity is better protected than it once was from those natural disasters that do happen: A recent study published in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that economic losses caused by climate-related disasters dropped 80 percent from 1980 to 2016.

 

If you can ignore the overblown rhetoric, there are fundamental truths to be reckoned with: Climate change is real, and human activity does indeed contribute to it. But irresponsible fearmongering only makes the problem harder to address.

 

According to the best evidence, the world is on track to hit emissions and warming levels that, as of a couple of years ago, would have been considered a success. For instance, according to leading industry publications, energy-related-emissions projections are in line with the (much cooler) climate model RCP 4.5, which the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment heralded as a low-emissions policy-success scenario. It’s likely that global “peak per capita CO₂ emissions” were reached several years ago. Major independent energy-research organizations such as the International Energy Agency predict that annual per capita CO₂ emissions will decline in the decades to come, and it’s likely that global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels are on the brink of a long plateau. The best computer models predict that by 2100, the Earth will be 2.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 1850. That will certainly cause environmental changes, but it doesn’t constitute an existential threat.

 

Nor are we humans without tools to ameliorate the problem. Adaptive engineering, carbon–offset and water markets, and the continued growth of more environmentally conscious ways of producing the goods and services needed for modern life can all lessen climate change and its effects.

 

So, as Halloween arrives amid the U.N. Climate Change Conference this year, leaders should ditch the Grim Reaper costumes and don more reasonable attire. With level heads and the right policies, they can both protect the environment and provide a better life for billions around the globe.

Cackling Kamala

By Kyle Smith

Thursday, October 28, 2021

 

Mayday, Code Red, and SOS! As fires bust out everywhere on the Hindenburg of vice presidents, Democrats are sending out dire cries of emergency, not via radio but using their own signaling systems: Politico and Axios and the Washington Post. “How do you solve a problem like Kamala?” the Democrats who demanded a woman of color on the 2020 presidential ticket are asking themselves. Who would have guessed that, as a moss-brained 78-year-old president stumbles around aimlessly through half a dozen crises of his own making, the Halloween screams in the Democratic Party are mostly about the president’s heir apparent?

 

Kamala Harris is a heartbeat away from becoming the first woman president, the first Asian president, the first woman-of-color president. Big wins all around, right? So why are the Democrats so nervous? They appear to be on the verge of calling in the Henry Wallace treatment and dumping Harris before Joe Biden runs for president again, this time with the election weeks before his 82nd birthday, in 2024. “People think she’s f***ing up, maybe she shouldn’t be the heir apparent,” one Democratic operative told Axios. White House aides use earthy language like “sh**show” to describe Harris’s “poorly managed” office. It’s “an abusive environment,” a staffer “with direct knowledge” told Politico, adding, “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like sh**.”

 

What if Biden should decline to run for reelection as an octogenarian? Harris, as his lady in waiting, would almost have to be the party’s designated successor because she is black and female. To replace her, according to the party’s prevailing thought codes and its media enablers, would be racist and sexist. Yet the prospect of riding into battle behind Kamala Harris’s generalship has every Dem in D.C. reaching for the Maalox, if not the Ativan or maybe the hemlock.

 

Dems including “many current senior administration figures,” says Axios, do not think she could beat any potential foe, from Lord Voldemort to Ernst Stavro Blofeld to Donald Trump. If the options facing the American voter on a future ballot turn out to be “Kamala Harris” and “Literally Anyone Else,” Harris is going to be not just an underdog but a longshot. She’s a lady whose trademark gambit — the deranged cackle, which she Jokerishly emits anytime she can’t answer a question — makes Hillary Clinton seem as lovable as a litter of golden-retriever puppies. Unlike Hillary, Harris does not make people feel sorry for her for having been ritually humiliated in her marriage to an intern-abusing lech. Unlike Hillary, Harris doesn’t make people think “She earned it” or “She paid her dues.” Madam Cankles looks like a redoubtable candidate compared to Madam Cackles.

 

The voters understand that Harris is in the position she currently occupies for a completely unearned reason. She is a woman of color, Biden promised Dem primary voters he’d run with a woman, then a woman of color, and this wild-eyed, tone-deaf, unbelievably toxic and yet somehow colorless candidate was the best he could grab from a very limited menu of offerings. As a political candidate venturing anywhere less safe-spacey than the Democratic Party of California, Harris couldn’t beat gravel pizza or tinfoil breadsticks. She couldn’t beat head lice or swamp fever.

 

Ted Kennedy famously couldn’t answer the question why he wanted to be president. Kamala Harris can’t answer any question, at least not with words. Sneak peek at a transcript from October 2024:

 

“Hey, Kamala Harris, why does everyone hate you?”

 

[Weird, loud cackle.]

 

“Could it be the cackling?”

 

[Hysterical, sustained, lunatic cackling.]

 

Keeping track of the gaffes, miscues, and cluck-ups by our vice president is like counting the grains of sand in Dune, or the dollars that Democrats propose to spend on social programs. So this list may be outdated a few days from now when it’s published.

 

In October alone, Harris posted an unbelievably tone-deaf tweet that showed her getting out of a limo and climbing onto her gigantic jet for the purpose of flying all the way out to Nevada to yak about climate change. She ruined the optics of her own fake surprise birthday party two days later when she entered a room by calling out “Surprise!” She was so embarrassing in a video promoting NASA to kids that the clip went viral among right-wingers for its unintended comic valence, drawing eleven times as many dislikes as likes on YouTube, where comments were disabled to forestall rude discussion.

 

Harris’s biggest blunder of the fall came when this not notably soulful politician made a “souls to the polls” video message for airing in black churches in Virginia. Ordinarily, simply reminding black churchgoers to vote is the standard play, but Harris went much further, urging Virginians to check a box for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Old Dominion, which happens to be illegal given that churches’ tax exemption is conditional on their not taking partisan political positions. (Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Democrats who run both the permanent bureaucracy and the elected branches of the federal government to take an interest.) “If this is legal, then it’s surprising to me,” former Democratic governor of Virginia Doug Wilder, the nation’s first black governor, told the Washington Examiner.

 

Before that, in her electronic sequel to the Potemkin village, Harris sat with a group of child actors who fake-enthused over her dull remarks on space exploration so that the White House could post the video purporting to show Harris winning over a cross section of random American kids. That’s right: Kamala Harris’s team has to pay children to act like kids around her. (The video was produced by Sinking Ship Entertainment, in a blast of symbolic mojo that couldn’t have been worse for Kamala if it had been filmed by Cacklin’ Jackal Productions.)

 

In that instantly notorious ten-minute NASA outreach video, the gathered kids seemed to be around 13 — so naturally Harris spoke to them as though they were five-year-old slow learners. “You guys are going to see, you’re gonna literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes,” she told them. “With your own eyes, I am telling you!”

 

“Oh my goodness!” the children chimed in dutifully, as the thought balloons over their heads read, “Why does she think we want to look at moon craters when season two of The Baby-Sitters Club just dropped?” Kids of this generation have grown up able to see anything they can think of on their phones, their attention spans move at hyperspeed, and the vice president coaxed them to D.C. for the purpose of . . . looking at some divots on the moon?

 

“It is going to be unbelievable, so that’s one of the things we can do here too which makes it so exciting,” Harris told the kids in the video that begins with an astronaut saying to the young folks, “I challenge you to go outside and look at the moon.” Has any less enticing offer ever been made to kids in the guise of a treat? “Hey, kids, let’s watch water evaporate!” “Hey, kids, have you ever thought about how dust settles?!”

 

In that video — the typically clunky title appears to be “Vice President Kamala Harris and an Astronaut? What a Day! Get Curious with Vice President Harris” — five overly emoting demographically and geographically diverse adorable stage children (“Where’s the library? Maybe it’s down here.” “Guys, there it is!” “Whoa!” “Oh my gosh!”) come to the Naval Observatory to tell whatever audience might be watching that an astronaut “told us that [a telescope] works by using lenses on both ends of the tube.” Exciting, if true.

 

While a soupy, have-you-considered-term-life-insurance musical score plays aggressively on the soundtrack, the kids feed the veep such extremely scripted lines as “I may not always be fast to take my parents’ advice, but what is the best advice your parents have given you that perhaps you can share with us today?” You can tell these are not spontaneous exchanges because none of the kids asked an actually interesting question, such as, “What is your favorite swear word?” The answer, Politico informs us, is “motherf***ah.”

 

Staffers in Harris’s office later pretended­ — surprise! — that they didn’t know these kids who were obviously reciting bad dialogue were actors, but even Team Kamala is not that dumb. Despite running less than ten minutes, the show credits not one but two Hollywood screenwriters (their other credits include the Hulu sci-fi series Endlings). If Harris were having an “unscripted” chat with “actual kids,” you wouldn’t need “professional screenwriters.” Though it’s hard to imagine Kamala didn’t just improvise her lines. She shares such insights as “The Earth is kinda small” and “I just, I don’t know what it is about those craters on the moon [cackles].”

 

The Biden administration seems at a loss about what to do with Harris. Everything she touches crumbles to dust. When Biden made her “border czar” in March and COVID-infected illegal immigrants began flooding into the country, she laughed and informed interviewers that she was in no hurry to go down and see things for herself. When Lester Holt of NBC pressed her on the question of why she hadn’t gone to the border, she famously replied, “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t — I don’t understand the point that you’re making.” Laughing dismissively, responding with a non sequitur, and then confessing she doesn’t understand the rudiments of politics (even the easiest rules, such as the one about appearing to take problems seriously while photographers snap away): Kamala Harris is the lady who lines up a three-inch putt but then manages to shank her Titleist off a tree.

 

She didn’t even bother with a perfunctory toe-touch in El Paso until June, and the crisis continues to boil over. Several high-level Biden-administration officials, including the attorney general, the secretary of state, and the head of DHS, attended a border-security meeting in Mexico City on October 8; Harris spent the day posing for photos at a day-care center in New Jersey.

 

In September, giving a speech at George Mason University, she bungled an exchange with an Israel-hating student who told her that U.S. funding of the Iron Dome defense system amounted to a contribution to “ethnic genocide.” Harris told the student, “Your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth cannot be suppressed.” Harris’s office later had to clean up that mess. In observing Colum­bus Day, she said of our European forebears, “Those explorers ushered in a wave of dev­astation for tribal nations — perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spread­ing disease.” Because none of those things happened before white people arrived.

 

Attempting to retreat to safer ground by reminding us all that she’s got two X chromosomes going for her, on October 22 Harris began promoting a 42-page block of unreadable committee-written verbiage dubbed a “Nati­onal Gender Strategy” whose goals include “promoting gender equity in mitigating and responding to climate change,” encapsulating the Demo­crats’ incoherent view that we are facing an existential global climate emergency that should be dealt with by maximizing the usual Democratic patronage schemes.

 

Recalling The Onion’s November 4, 2008, headline about the first black president ­– “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job” — activists have been complaining that the first black vice president was essentially handed a bag of garbage and told to make party favors out of it. “You give someone a portfolio that’s not meant for them to succeed,” CNN political analyst and ally Bakari Sellers said at a panel discussion hosted by Wash­ington’s Pol­itics and Prose bookstore. Keith Boy­kin, a former White House official, added at the same event, “I think she’s in a bad, bad position. . . . I don’t think she’s going to be very successful in 2024 or 2028 and in reaching out to black voters if she’s tied to a Biden administration that is incapable of accomplishing anything for black people.”

 

Team Kamala thinks Biden doesn’t want competition from his No. 2. So Joe Biden is setting her up to fail? If so, that would appear to be Biden’s one unambiguous success.

A European Welfare State Requires a European Tax Regime

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, October 28, 2021

 

Is it time for a 50 percent tax increase on the American middle class? What say you, Senator Warren?

 

You’ll know that American progressives are serious about adopting European-style social-welfare policies when they start talking about adopting European levels of taxation on the middle classes instead of pretending that Jeff Bezos and cigarette smokers can pay for the Danish welfare maximalism they fantasize about.

 

Until then, it’s pretty much all piffle.

 

The current tax posture of our progressive friends is partly irresponsible, partly ignorant, and partly dishonest. If you compare Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose ignorance and arrogance are mutually reinforcing) with Elizabeth Warren (deeply informed, deeply mendacious), what you’ll see is that the more Democrats know, the less honest they are able to be in this matter — a clear and frank account of the situation would be very bad politics for progressives.

 

Unlike many U.S. conservatives such as my colleague David Harsanyi (author, most recently, of Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent), I am relatively well-disposed toward what we think of as the European model of government and civic life. “European” is too broad a term — what American admirers mainly mean by “European” is rich Western Europe and squared-away Northern Europe, such prosperous and contented countries as Germany, France, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, etc. I don’t think that we could as a practical matter graft the best of European policy onto American life, partly because of the force of culture (Switzerland is full of Swiss people, while the United States is full of guys who get charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for tossing an alligator through the drive-thru window at Wendy’s), and partly because governing a small, rich country such as Denmark is very different from governing a large, rich country such as ours.

 

That being said, it isn’t entirely obvious to me that Germany or the Netherlands is a dystopian hellscape, and comparing Stuttgart with Detroit or Zurich with San Francisco suggests to me that there is something to be learned from Europe. Marseille is a high-crime city by both French and wider European standards, with a murder rate that is . . . about one-third that of Omaha, Neb., and about 4 percent of St. Louis’s. Switzerland’s GDP per capita is a third higher than that of the United States. The Spanish and the Italians live longer than do Americans. Etc.

 

Very high-income people in much of Europe pay higher taxes than they would in the United States — sort of. Compared to the United States, countries such as Sweden and Switzerland have relatively high income taxes across-the-board. But these places are nonetheless very attractive to very wealthy and high-income people, including cosmopolitan billionaires who have a great deal of choice in where they reside and pay taxes. Sweden has an unusually large number of billionaires relative to the size of its population, owing in no small part to its very entrepreneurial and open economy. But while it has high income taxes, it has no taxes at all on inheritance or residential property, and it has a relatively low corporate-tax rate. Switzerland has no taxes on capital gains. (Switzerland does have a small wealth tax, with the rate set and the tax collected at the cantonal level, which produces about 3.5 percent of all tax revenue. The Swiss manage to collect this without a surveillance apparatus of the sort Joe Biden dreams of — culture, again.) So, the income-tax rate doesn’t tell the whole story.

 

In fact the income-tax rate doesn’t even tell the whole story about income taxes, because there can be dramatic differences between a taxpayer’s marginal rate (the rate he pays on that portion of his income that falls into the highest bracket) and his effective overall rate. Think of a very simple tax system in which income under the $100,000 mark is taxed at 0.00 percent and income over the $100,000 mark is taxed at 90 percent. If you earn $100,001, then your marginal rate is 90 percent, but your effective overall tax rate is basically nothing, far less than 1 percent. Like those sky-high statutory tax rates in Eisenhower-era America (when federal tax revenue as a share of GDP was a little less than it is today), the high top rates in Norway and Denmark don’t entirely capture the tax reality.

 

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) makes comparisons between countries based on what it calls a “wedge.” This takes into account income taxes and payroll taxes, including those notionally paid by the employer, as well as preferential tax policies, to get a fuller account of real taxes on labor income, making meaningful county-to-country comparisons possible. This is a pretty useful tool. As the OECD runs the numbers, the tax on the average single worker with no children in the United States was 28.3 percent last year, significantly below the OECD average of 34.6 percent. Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom came in slightly below the OECD average.

 

On the other hand, the European countries that our progressives propose to emulate — Germany, Austria, Sweden, France — come in quite a bit higher, at the 45 percent to 50 percent level. The average Belgian worker labors under a rate just north of 50 percent, as the OECD figures it. Even taking into account “benefits to families with children through cash transfers and preferential tax provisions,” a married single-income couple with two children in Sweden will pay an average tax on labor income that is about twice what their American counterparts would pay.

 

As Adam Michel of the Heritage Foundation runs the numbers, a middle-income single worker in Europe pays a tax rate that is on average about half-again as much as his American counterpart, 43.8 percent for the European vs. 28.5 percent for the American. That is a 51 percent increase in the tax rate.

 

There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with any of this. There are many different ways to organize and fund the social-welfare programs maintained by every advanced nation. Denmark makes its system work, and Singapore makes its radically different system work. But in any case you have to make the math work out, and our class-war progressives can’t do that with their “1 percent” policies. The top 1 percent of U.S. households collectively earn about $2.5 trillion a year. The federal government spent $6.6 trillion in 2020. Even if the top 1 percent paid every penny of their income in taxes (and assuming, arguendo, that they did not change their behavior in response), the great majority of tax revenue would have to come from the rest of the population.

 

So the 1 percent solution is no solution at all. What about “the rich” more broadly? As it stands, the top half of income-earners pay virtually all of the federal income tax, while the bottom half pay almost nothing. The top 1 percent pay about 40 percent of all federal income tax, which is about twice their share of all income. Lower-income households do pay other taxes, including federal payroll taxes and state and local taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, etc. — and few of them will tell you that their tax burdens are not high enough. But there really isn’t any plausible way to pay for what progressives propose without getting into the pockets of households well under Joe Biden’s preferred $400,000-a-year mark.

 

Europeans fund their welfare states through relatively high income taxes, including relatively high income taxes on middle-class and low-income workers, along with a variety of other instruments, notably the value-added tax (a kind of national sales tax), which also tend to fall relatively heavily on the middle classes. For the most part, they do not fund their social programs the way our reality-denying progressives propose to: taxes on large inheritances, taxes on the incomes of the top 1 percent, confiscatory taxes on investment income, etc.

 

There are good reasons for this: There isn’t nearly enough money in inheritances or CEO bonuses to make much difference in the budget of a country with a modern economy; the very wealthy make mind-blowing sums as individuals, but still make up only a relatively modest share of a wealthy nation’s economy; taxing investment income in many cases means taxing retirement income, as it would in the United States, which puts more pressure on the very social programs that taxes are meant to fund. And there are larger issues, too: Taxpayers respond to financial incentives, which is why high-earning Americans often find ways to take their income as capital gains rather than as salaries or bonuses, forms of income that are taxed at higher rates; the “corporate inversions” that were all over the news a few years ago (through which some large firms legally relocated their headquarters abroad for tax purposes) were driven mostly by relatively high U.S. corporate-tax rates and the threat of even higher rates.

 

And while it is easy to roll one’s eyes at the doings of a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk, a very small number of enormously successful firms — including the famous FAANG quintet comprising Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google — have accounted for a wildly disproportionate share of both stock-market returns and overall economic growth in recent years. Because it is impossible to know in advance which firms will be super-performers, the most intelligent way to proceed is to try to maintain a broad national portfolio of established firms and startups, which requires a policy environment that is generally friendly toward capital, investment, and profits. That is why the “socialist” Swedes (who are actually anything but socialist) do not in reality lean too hard on the kinds of taxes that American class-war progressives prefer.

 

There is much to like and admire about European practices. And perhaps even David Harsanyi would admit that people who wish that Cleveland were a little more like Vienna are not obviously insane. But if you want a European welfare state, you have to pay for it with something like a European tax regime. We could have a useful and interesting debate about that — maybe even make it the central issue in an election! — if there were anybody in the Democratic camp willing to make the honest case.

 

Don’t worry — I’ll wait. 

The Constitution Thwarts Joe Biden

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 29, 2021

 

It is a glorious day in America: President Joe Biden has suffered an ignominious defeat.

 

In the near term, it is important to defeat President Biden because he is Biden. In the long term, it is important to defeat President Biden because he is president.

 

Biden had hoped to get his big spending bills through Congress before doodling off to Rome for the G-20 meeting and then on to Glasgow for the big UN climate conference. Congress has proved admirably disagreeable, at least for the moment.

 

Enjoy the moment.

 

Like so many presidents before him, Biden conflates the prospects of the nation and its system of government with the prospects of his political agenda. Speaking in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, he said it was necessary for Congress to act on his agenda in order that he might show the Russian and Chinese strongmen, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, that democracies can get things done. But Congress has just proved that it can get important things done, and one of those important things is telling the president: “No.” Or, “No, not quite,” or “No, not now.”

 

It has happened to better men than Joe Biden.

 

In the days before Congress’s self-respect was eclipsed by its self-importance, George Washington sent the Senate a note saying that he would be at the chamber “at half-past eleven tomorrow,” with tomorrow underlined for emphasis, to discuss a certain Indian treaty. President Washington did indeed show up, and the Senate told him — wait. The Senate was not ready to consider the treaty and referred it to committee. President Washington, the senators said with all due respect, could come back when they were ready. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Washington never did return, instead conducting his business with Congress in writing from that point forward, as his successors generally have.

 

It was a little thing, but the senators knew what they were doing: Washington hated to be kept waiting — his relationship with Alexander Hamilton had been severely strained by the younger man’s once having failed to drop everything and attend to him immediately — and the Senate wanted to let Washington know that he was not a species of king, that Congress and the president were equals at least, and that the republican spirit of the young nation would be ill-served by having the president summon and command the Senate.

 

Biden is no George Washington, to say the least.

 

And Biden does not have the status in the United States that Xi has in China or Putin has in Russia. And that would be the case even if he were a much greater man than he is, because the American president is not meant to be a figure such as Xi or Putin. We are a nation of laws, and to be governed by the law is to be governed by lawmakers. Matters of taxing and spending involve congressional powers rather than presidential ones, and they are the especial domain of the House of Representatives. President Biden can dream up a deadline and underline it, and lawmakers can — bless their pointy little heads! — ignore him.

 

The tussle between left-wing Democrats in the House and centrist Democrats in the Senate is an example of precisely how our government is supposed to work. The House, with its smaller districts and elections every two years, is the theater for popular passions, and the Senate, with its more exclusive membership and longer terms, is where popular passions go to cool off. The House is the accelerator, and the Senate is the brake. The demagogues and vulgar democrats are outraged: “Biden won the election,” they say, “so he should be able to have his agenda enacted.” But Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won their elections, too. So did Mitch McConnell, who seems to be taking his ease for a moment as the Democrats joust with one another. We are one nation under God, not one nation under the president.

 

We do not have a hereditary monarch, as the British do, nor do we have an elected king, as some of our ancient forebears did. We do not have a king at all. Even in this degraded period of presidential idolatry and presidential caesaropapism, the American president is not a god-emperor — and he isn’t a gangster such as Putin or an autocratic party boss such as Xi, either. He is not the national lawgiver.

 

Our laws are instead made by an unruly assembly representing distinct and often rivalrous interests. It is because those interests really are distinct and rivalrous that we are always being lectured by presidents about “unity” and always being stampeded by politicians who insist that we are in a state of endless emergency — where there are many distinct interests, one must negotiate. Xi Jinping doesn’t negotiate with his subjects. Neither does Putin. It is very difficult to cure American presidents of their autocrat envy.

 

(One of the virtues of George W. Bush was that he was unusually resistant to that, probably as a consequence of the way he was brought up and educated.)

 

Being gentlemen of the 18th century, our founders could not possibly have imagined life in these United States in the 21st century. And the political forebears of our progressives were denouncing the Constitution as outmoded while the ink was still wet. Yet all these years later it still manages to function, in a surprising number of ways, more or less as intended. As John Adams might have predicted, it is precisely when our constitutional order is at its best that the people least appreciate it. It is frustrating, because it is designed to frustrate.

 

It may irritate Joe Biden, but it is a glorious thing to see at work. Enjoy the moment — while it lasts.

Democrats’ Spending Monstrosity

National Review Online

Thursday, October 28, 2021

 

After months of negotiations, President Biden on Thursday unveiled a rough outline of the latest iteration of his “Build Back Better” agenda in hopes that it would grease the wheels for House passage of the companion infrastructure bill. While the proposal is pared down from what Democrats had been promising earlier in the year, in its current form, it is still large enough to be fiscally irresponsible and economically destructive.

 

For those following media accounts, the $1.75 trillion cost of the new framework is portrayed as a significant compromise from the $6 trillion originally favored by Senator Bernie Sanders, or the $3.5 trillion bill that has been discussed for much of the year. But keep in mind that the $1.75 trillion comes on top of the $1.9 trillion that Democrats passed in March and the $550 billion they hope to pass in a practically linked infrastructure bill. So if Biden gets his way, even a smaller bill would mean that in the first year of his administration, Democrats will have enacted $4.2 trillion worth of new spending. That spending comes on top of the $4 trillion that Congress authorized in the final year of the Trump administration in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

From the get-go, the conversation surrounding Biden’s agenda has been farcical. There has been no real debate over actual policy, many details of which were only known through media leaks. In this sense, the debate has been even more bizarre than the one over Obamacare, in which Democrats had a relatively clear goal — expand insurance coverage — and worked toward it, however poorly. In this case, the idea was to figure out how much spending Democrats could convince Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to support, and then try to cram as much of the left-wing agenda as possible into the final bill.

 

The climate portion of the proposed framework includes $550 billion in spending on various initiatives to subsidize clean energy and promote its use. Hearkening back to the New Deal, it would also create a Civilian Climate Corps meant to send thousands of eager young Americans around the country doing various environmental projects. The plan would also spend hundreds of billions of dollars on other Democratic initiatives, such as housing, post-high-school education, and “equity” investments.

 

But the more troublesome parts of the proposal would expand, extend, or create new government programs. The bill that Democrats passed in March started sending parents monthly checks of up to $300 per child. The framework would extend that program for an additional year in hopes that it would eventually become permanent.

 

On the health-care front, the bill would expand Obamacare by pumping more money into insurance subsidies, a change meant to offset the damage the law did to insurance markets by triggering a massive spike in premiums. With Medicare trustees warning that the core hospital program would run out of money in 2026, Democrats responded by adding a hearing benefit to Medicare. The bill would further expand the welfare state by spending $400 billion on universal pre-K (which has been found to offer no long-term academic benefits) and on child care.

 

With the economic recovery from COVID-19 stalling, Democrats propose to pay for this by raising nearly $2 trillion from increasing taxes and beefing up IRS enforcement. This involves $800 billion in corporate-tax hikes (including what will effectively be an AMT for corporations) and another $650 billion in tax hikes aimed at higher-income individuals. When all the various surtaxes are added up, it would result in a 49 percent top rate once income goes above $25 million that will also hit midsized family businesses. Democrats also claim $400 billion in money from increasing IRS enforcement, which dramatically exceeds plausible estimates of how much could be raised from chasing tax cheats.

 

House speaker Nancy Pelosi keeps trying to argue that the bill is “about the children.” With debt as a share of the economy at the highest level since World War II, adding trillions in new obligations is irresponsible, whether or not it is offset by tax increases. Whatever resources are tapped to support new spending are resources that are no longer available for debt reduction.

 

A month ago, Manchin released a statement claiming, “spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity.” He was right then. If he meant what he said, he should reject this monstrosity.

Ron Klain Is Making a Fool of Joe Manchin

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, October 29, 2021

 

I wrote earlier in the week about the yawning chasm between what Joe Manchin says he is doing, and what Joe Manchin is actually doing. Yesterday on Twitter, Joe Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, highlighted that chasm, by tweeting that:

 

It's twice as big, in real dollars, as the New Deal was. This can be the Congress that goes from 12 years of universal education to 14 years; the makes the largest investment in fighting climate change ever; that cuts what families pay for child care in half.

 

There is simply no way of squaring this description of the bill with what Joe Manchin has said he’s prepared to accept. As the Washington Post‘s Paul Kane has noted, one of Manchin’s red lines is “additional handouts or transfer payments” and new programs that “will never go away” — by which, Kane explains, Manchin means “the biggest liberal goals in the legislation, such as universal pre-K.” Manchin has gone on the record that he is opposed to “spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare.” Indeed, he has described doing so as “the definition of fiscal insanity.” If he is serious about this, then he absolutely has to be opposed to a bill that is, per Klain, “twice as big, in real dollars, as the New Deal was,” that “goes from 12 years of universal education to 14 years,” that “cuts what families pay for child care in half,” and that blows past Manchin’s own (absurd) “topline” of $1.5 trillion.

 

Talking to reporters recently, Manchin said, defiantly, “I’ve never been a liberal in any way, shape or form.” This is a nice soundbite, and it presumably plays well in West Virginia, but if it is to mean anything concrete, then Manchin will have to show it by cutting the “additional handouts,” “transfer payments,” and programs that “never go away” that he insists he opposes. As I write, Ron Klain is running around Washington insisting that the president’s framework represents permanent transformational change that is larger in scale than what FDR achieved during the Great Depression. If, after all he has said, Joe Manchin happily signs onto it, he will have shown himself to be a fraud.

Democrats’ Rotten Billionaires Tax

National Review Online

Thursday, October 28, 2021

 

The Democrats have left no stone unturned in their effort to fund their ever-shifting, now roughly $2 trillion spending plan.

 

They proposed a financial-surveillance regime that would give the IRS access to data on virtually every American’s bank account. Following widespread backlash, Senate Democrats quickly walked back that idea. Meanwhile, Senator Kyrsten Sinema objected to proposed increases in the corporate and individual tax rates. So, Democrats have revealed another trick up their sleeve: a so-called billionaire tax. The brainchild of Senator Ron Wyden, the proposal would tax the unrealized capital gains of those deemed “billionaires” by the federal government.

 

Under the current system, asset owners pay taxes on capital gains only when they sell their holdings. If the asset has depreciated in value, the taxpayer can deduct the loss from future income taxes. Capital-gains taxes are designed this way because financial assets regularly fluctuate in value. A gain one year can turn into a loss the next, and asset owners receive no income in the meantime.

 

The Wyden proposal would upend this system by taxing capital gains annually for the ultrawealthy, whether or not they have sold any assets. Leaving aside the possibility that it violates the 16th Amendment, the scheme would impose arbitrary, unpredictable tax burdens and generate significant market distortions.

 

Start with the year-end cutoff for calculating tax burdens. Suppose John Doe, the founder of a large technology company, sees his wealth increase from $1 billion to $1.25 billion in 2021, and then to $1.5 billion in 2022. He would owe a cumulative $119 million under the plan. Jane Smith, the CEO of a competing company, sees her wealth increase from $1 billion to $1.5 billion this year, but then fall to $750 million the next.

 

Because of annual write-off limits, Jane would owe roughly the same amount as John despite the blow to her net worth. And both could be forced to liquidate assets to come up with the cash to pay the IRS, eroding their alignment with shareholders. Otherwise, they might take measures to artificially reduce the value of their firms at year-end.

 

The volatile tax bills would create an incentive for the wealthy to move capital into illiquid assets not subject to the annual tax, such as private equity, real estate, and art. Entrepreneurs would think twice about taking their companies public in a system where private ownership confers tax benefits. The “billionaire tax,” therefore, would move money into alternative assets — accessible only to wealthy, accredited investors — and reduce investment opportunities for the middle class.

 

The arbitrary nature of the tax also makes it a poor funding mechanism. With revenues tied to fluctuations in the fortunes of some 700 Americans, the government could not reasonably rely on the Wyden plan for consistent funding.

 

The plan is so impractical and wrongheaded that one wonders why Democrats proposed it in the first place. The answer is that Biden has promised trillions in new spending while maintaining that he will not raise taxes on the middle class. So he is resorting to increasingly convoluted schemes in a last-ditch effort to salvage as much of his reconciliation bill as possible.

 

As with the IRS proposal, the rule appears unlikely to make it past Senator Joe Manchin. It comes as a relief that a select few senators will likely stop the measure from passing. It is less comforting that a slightly larger Democratic majority would very likely pass it.