The View from Right Field

Biden Said No One Advised Him to Keep Troops in Afghanistan. Top Generals Say They Did.

Joe Biden said, back in August, that, as far as he could recall, his military advisers did not recommend to him that we should keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.  Yesterday, top generals, including Gen. Kenneth "Frank" McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, testified before Congress that they recommended that exact thing to President Biden.¹ 

Obviously, I could see Donald Trump doing something like this.  That is one of the reasons he needed to lose last November.  But Joe Biden wasn’t supposed to do this kind of thing.  He was supposed to be better than former President Trump. 

Universal Preschool: “Investing” Versus “Spending”

Among the pieces of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion package of social programs is a big “investment” in preschool education.  I think preschool education is really important.¹  When our children were little, we sent them to a local Montessori school starting when they were three years old.  We kept our daughter there until first grade, even though there was a public kindergarten, and we kept our son there until third grade.  We were more than happy to use our own money for our kids’ education, whether you call it “investment” or not.

What I am concerned about, however, when it comes to the Democrats’ plan for universal preschool is whether it is going to be “investment” in children or “spending” for more public education bureaucracy and staffing, etc.

Big Changes Coming?

Monday is the Democrats’ self-declared day of decision, the day Democratic leaders in Congress have set as their deadline for passing a huge package of new social programs.  Whether it is going to pass – and/or what’s going to be in it – is unclear, but Monday is supposed to be the day. 

The programs include things that European countries already have, so we should have them, too, we are told.  Of course, Democratic leaders don’t explain that Europeans get these benefits because they, i.e., the middle class, pays more taxes than we pay in the United States.  Joe Biden has said that all these new benefits are “free,” by which he means “free” for the middle (and upper middle) class, because taxes are being raised on corporations and the rich and not the middle (and upper middle) class.

Vaccine Equity

It’s interesting how ideas bounce around the world.  Back in February and March, the stories in the United States were about how hard it was to get the vaccine and whether shots were being distributed “equitably”.  There were complaints that minority communities were not getting their fair share of vaccines and that whites were getting shots that “belonged” to minorities.

Much the same thing happened earlier this month in New Zealand.  David Seymour, the head of ACT New Zealand, a right/libertarian party, got in trouble for publishing a “Priority Access Code for Maori” for Covid vaccinations.  But as Mr. Seymour explained, his publishing of the code had no practical effect.  The code wasn’t private; other people knew it; and the people giving the shots were vaccinating anybody who showed up anyway.  Plus, New Zealand has had fewer than 2,000 cases of Covid and just two deaths since January 1, so it really doesn’t matter the exact order in which people get shots.  The key is getting them vaccinated.

Who’s Worse on Foreign Policy: Biden or Trump?

Donald Trump did a bad job on foreign policy.  I talked about that a lot, though, eventually, I got tired of saying it over and over, so I mostly stopped.¹  Even though I felt that way about former President Trump, I did not vote for Joe Biden because, in Illinois, I did not need to.  President Biden was going to win Illinois.  And I was very concerned about President Biden’s domestic policy – or, rather, the domestic policy of his supporters.  Still, when President Biden won, I was hopeful American foreign policy would be better than it had been under former President Trump.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been.

On February 19, President Biden told the Munich Security Conference that “America is back.”  That was the hope: President Biden would restore, or at least start to restore, America’s credibility and reliability around the world.  But the way we left Afghanistan was a disaster.  Obviously, President Biden was handed a terrible mess in Afghanistan.  President Trump signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020, under which we were to leave on May 1, 2021.² 

Designing Things For the People Who Use Them

Tim Harford wrote recently about the problems he had interpreting the instructions for a mail-order Covid test.¹  It was, he said, a matter of what behavioral economists call “the curse of knowledge,” i.e., “the difficulty a well-informed person has in fully appreciating the depth of someone else’s ignorance.” 

As Mr. Harford notes, “[a]nyone who has assembled a Lego set can attest that, with enough care, it is possible to provide clear instructions even for complex tasks.”  The problem is that too often people don’t take “enough care.”

September 11 – 20th Anniversary

Lots of people will be writing lots of words about the 20th anniversary of September 11.  President Biden will probably talk, inter alia, about how victory over al Qaeda and the death of Osama Bin Laden meant we could get out of Afghanistan.  The Taliban will be talking about how their victory forced us to get out of Afghanistan.  And I am sure former President Trump will have something to say, too.

I will just link to two posts, one that I posted on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, mostly about our visit to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in 2006.  The other is something I wrote about the movie “United 93” after seeing it, also back in 2006.

The Diversity We Are Missing Today

In of his new book, Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy, Jeffrey Garton writes about the meetings at Camp David on August 13 to 15, 1971, when Richard Nixon and small group of advisers¹ broke the link between gold and the US dollar (i.e., “closing the gold window”), instituted wage-and-price controls, and more.²  In describing the meeting Mr. Garton emphasizes there was a real diversity among those present.  It was not, course, a diversity of race or sex.  They were all white men.  (It was, after all, 1971.)  But there was a diversity of viewpoints.  Coming into the meeting, some opposed wage-and-price controls (President Nixon had always opposed them because of his experience in the Office of Price Administration in 1942); some were okay with them.  Some thought we needed to close the gold window immediately; others wanted to do the rest of the program and then wait and see.  The investment tax credit, which had recently been repealed, was to be reinstated.  The key was that a number of people with different viewpoints met, talked, and in a weekend came up with a set of policies to change the world economic system.³

When You Go to a Baseball Game, There Is Always a Chance You’ll See Something You Have Never Seen Before

Which may have happened at the Cubs-Pirates game last night.  Let me set the scene: The Pirates took a 3 to 0 lead in the first inning.  The Cubs got five in the seventh to take a two-run lead, but the Bucos tied it in the top of the ninth.  Nobody scored in the tenth or top of the eleventh.¹  In the bottom of the eleventh, the Cubs had runners on first and third with one out.  Ian Happ was batting right-handed, his weaker side.²  Ian hit a really high pop up to the infield – and the second baseman totally missed it!  Sergio Alcantara scored, and the Cubs won.  Here’s the play (see at 7:40):