OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
Search Results for: economic growth
Dan Drezner, last seen regressin’ to the mean like a motherf*cker
O rare Dan Drezner!1 Oy vey, Dan Drezner! Just last week I was falling all over myself with praise for Dan’s all too acute post The war in Ukraine is going badly for everyone, which Dan then followed up with another depressingly acute corker, What is the plan behind sanctioning Russia?, pointing out that the…
Good Dan Drezner, Bad Dan Drezner
What would life be without Dan Drezner? Dan is an ever-flowing cornucopia of ideas, most of them irritating, but not a few thoughtful and worthy of consideration. Let’s start with the good, a double surprise, really, because not only is Dan’s column from a few months back, Free Trade With Benefits a good one, for…
President Biden proposes a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package. What could go wrong? Well, I can think of a few things.
Sure I can. For example, suppose we spend that $2,300,000,000,000 and end up with 1,000,000+ $2,000,000 bike shelters, like the one at the East Falls Church, Va. Metro station. Since that shed, the time that I visited it, was only utilized to, you know, 2% capacity, a lot of people—mostly Republicans, of course—might think we…
The Billiard Ball Causality of Francis Fukuyama, Together With Other Considerations
I have recently finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s excellent book, Identity The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, published back in 2018, trying to explain why the world isn’t behaving the way Francis and I think it ought, and not doing a bad job of it at all. I’ve written round and about Dr….
Some “conservatives” are whistling past the graveyard of American democracy; others are busy swinging a shovel
I like to keep track of what the “responsible right”, as I like to call them, is up to, a task that I perform by rounding up the usual suspects—Ross Douthat, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Ramesh Ponnuru, David French, and Jonah Goldberg, among others—finding most of them at either the National Review or the American…
Ramesh Ponnuru is a great big jerk! Why? Let me count the ways.
Yeah, I could have said “Ramesh Ponnuru is a disingenuous dipshit”, or “Ramesh Ponnuru is a Jesuitical jive-ass” (because he’s Catholic), but I like to keep it classy. My latest bitch-fest regarding Mr. Ponnuru is occasioned by a recent post of his in Bloomberg, Trump Tax Cut Was Neither Bane Nor Boon, which I was…
Paul Krugman is smarter than I thought!
Okay, perhaps I should have said “Paul Krugman has a far more sophisticated grasp of the uniquely divided nature of the American working class than he had demonstrated in many of his previous public comments”, but heads like that don’t get the clicks, and I don’t have to tell you that “Literature R Us”, frequently…
Are we having fun yet? Why living at the end of history has become the living end
When I went to first grade, I learned to print my name and hide under my desk in case of a nuclear blast. When I went to the movies, I saw news reels of U.S. above-ground atomic weapons tests in Nevada. (Nobody worried about fallout then.) In 1968, my parents could stand on their front…
Robert Kagan writes an interesting essay, with some stretchers, and not a few omissions
In one way, Robert Kagan’s recent “long-form” (7,000 words) essay in the Washington Post, “The strongmen strike back”, is an honest, intelligent examination of the rise of illiberalism in the modern world, a phenomenon as incontestable as it is dispiriting. In another way, Bob’s latest and longest is a bit of a con job, and…