The View from Right Field

How Dumb Does J.B. Pritzker Think Illinois Voters Are?

In his proposed budget for 2024-25, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is proposing to eliminate the 1% state sales tax on food.  The Governor and the legislature did this before, on a temporary basis, when they were all running for election in 2022.  This time, however, the repeal will be permanent – except.

As is normal with Illinois government, there is always an “except”.  When the state got rid of this tax temporarily in 2022-23, the state made up the revenue that local governments lost because of the suspension.  The state did this because the money from this tax goes to local government.

“If you want to be good at this kind of job, you have to be willing to lose it”

Paul Ryan said this in 2011 when he was trying to reform entitlement spending.  Ultimately, he couldn’t get it done, though he tried and he didn’t let the possibility of losing his job stop him from trying.  He did get significant tax reforms passed in 2017, maybe not as many as he would have liked, but a lot more than anybody else had accomplished in a long time or has accomplished since.  In 2018, then-House Speaker Ryan decided to retire.  Perhaps he felt he couldn’t “be good at this kind of job” anymore. I don’t know.  In any case, he was good at it while he was there.

Unfortunately, we don’t have enough people in the Republican Party like this anymore.  Instead, they are voting against aid to Ukraine, which would help our national security, too, and voting for silly motions to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security because they don’t like President Biden’s border policies.  It doesn’t matter whether they are doing this because they are scared of Donald Trump or because they think they would lose a primary to the people who tend to vote in primaries.  If they are more worried about losing their job than they are about being good at it, then maybe they should find a new job, which they could be good at.

Avoiding “The Coming Constitutional Crisis of 2024”

Supposedly the voters don’t want a repeat of Trump-Biden (or is it Biden-Trump) in November.  I wonder.  While most voters don’t want Trump, it might be that a majority of Republicans do – or at least they think he is inevitable.  As for Biden, while his overall approval ratings aren’t good, it could be that a majority of Democrats want him, especially if the Republican alternative is Trump. 

But, if it is Biden and Trump again in November, well, I wrote about “The Coming Constitutional Crisis of 2024” last December.  As I said then, and I think it is pretty clear, if Trump loses a November rematch, he and many of his supporters won’t accept it.  It won’t be pretty.

On the other hand, if Biden loses, while he might accept it, I wonder about his supporters.  I raised this question in December and talked about it even more in January: If Trump is as big a threat to democracy as Biden says, how can Biden’s supporters accept him? 

Who Lost Ukraine? While Biden Isn’t Good, Republicans Seem to Be Worse.

Back in the 1950s, one of the big political issues was “Who Lost China?”  The Chinese Communists had won the civil war against the Nationalists in 1949 (Chiang Kai-shek retreating to Taiwan), and then North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950.  The Republicans spent a good part of the 1950s accusing Harry Truman (and Dean Acheson, George Marshall, et al) of “losing China”. 

I am not going to go into that debate.  What I am going to do is suggest we think about what the answer to “Who lost Ukraine” might be if we don’t start getting weapons and ammunition to Ukraine and, ultimately, they can’t hold on.  President Biden started out pretty good, but he hasn’t been nearly as good as he could have been.  We have wrung our hands about fears of escalation way too much,\; we have not delivered the weapons we needed to as quickly as we should have; and we have put too many limits on the use of the weapons we have delivered.

The Economy Is Growing and the Deficit Is Up, So Let’s Cut Taxes

The federal deficit for the first quarter of Fiscal Year 2024 (i.e., October through December of 2023) was $507 billion, so what did the Republicans and Democrats in the House of Representatives do?  They passed a tax cut, of course.¹  They can’t agree to help Ukraine beat Russia (which would help the US, too) or do anything about the situation¹ of hundreds of thousands of people illegally crossing the border each month.  But cutting taxes when we have record (or near-record) deficits during a period of a growing economy and full employment; that’s something they can do.  Because, after all, there is an election coming up and spending our grandchildren’s money (they are the ones who are going to have to pay for this) is fun – and the best way to get reelected.
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¹ By a 357-70 vote; a true partisan accomplishment.
₂ I call it a “situation”, instead of a “crisis”, because many people don’t call it a “crisis” until the migrants (or whatever you call them) show up in their city.

Biden’s Foreign Policy Just Isn’t Working – And It’s Not Deterring Anybody

At one point during the first Trump administration¹, I gave up (or at least cut back) on complaining about what he was doing both because it was becoming too time consuming and because the Democratic alternatives weren’t any better.  Well, I think I am just about there on Joe Biden’s foreign policy.  It’s bad, and I have no reason to think Trump 2.0 would be any better.

It has now been four days since an Iran proxy group killed three U.S. soldiers with a drone attack on a base we have in Jordan.  It may be that the Biden administration already has an appropriate response in process, and we don’t know about it yet.  I hope so.²  Because, if we want these attacks to stop, we need to respond in a really big way.  Iranian proxies, and others, have been attacking us for months.  Before Sunday, we were able to knock the drones or missiles down or they only injured people, they didn’t kill them.  So we didn’t respond (at least very much).  We just said: (i) if you kill any of our people (as opposed to merely injuring them), we’ll respond; (ii) we don’t want to escalate or to widen the war/conflict/tensions; and (iii) we don’t want World War III.  Which apparently didn’t scare anybody and probably encouraged some groups to keep attacking us  - because they did.