The View from Right Field

How Long Can We Continue With This Deficit and This Debt?

In last Tuesday’s Financial Times, Martin Wolf did an excellent job explaining how various global imbalances interact and how one country trying to address its imbalances may have consequences on others, perhaps especially the United States because its economy, and imbalances, are so big.¹

Among the biggest of these imbalances is the global savings surplus and the US federal deficit, which, at this point, rather balance each other off.  The question is, if the United States actually reduced its fiscal deficit, what would happen to those with savings surpluses.

Was Abraham Lincoln Really a “Country Lawyer” Who Missed a Chance for Peace?

According to Harold Holzer’s review of 1861: The Lost Peace, by Jay Winik, in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Mr. Winik apparently views Abraham Lincoln as a “country lawyer” who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the necessary compromises to avoid war.  Given that such compromises would have allowed the further expansion of slavery and its continuation for who knows how long and until who knows what might happen, we are left with the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:

“[I]f God wills that [this mighty scourge of war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

and the question of whether the ultimate civil war would have been even worse.

Are Things Really the Worst Ever?

In an editorial yesterday about the events in Los Angeles and elsewhere entitled “MAGA morphs into Make America Cruel Again,” the Chicago Tribune “wondered how on God’s green earth this country can hold it together for three-and-a-half more years of this level of presidential overreach, this amount of hatred and division.”  My response is simple: Does the Tribune remember the 1960s?  Consider just 1968.  Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April.  The ensuing riots all over the country make what is happening in LA look minor.  You can still see the effects of those riots in parts of Chicago today. 

Two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.  Then came the Democratic convention in Chicago.  I assume the Tribune remembers that.

What Is Donald Trump’s Governing Philosophy? Does He Have One?

It is fascinating, and perhaps sort of funny, to see so many articles trying to come up with an overall policy or logic for Donald Trump’s statements and decisions.  The authors try to fit President Trump’s decisions into some kind of overall theory that explains both the decisions themselves and how they fit together.  It’s normally right-wing or conservative writers who are doing this because they are the ones who like Trump or at least like some of his decisions.  The ones on the left, and maybe some part of the center, dislike Trump so much that they cannot say anything about him other than that he is horrible, stupid, etc..

I say it is fascinating to see these people try to do this because it is so hard to come up with a theory that is able to tie these things together with some kind of consistency.  On the other hand, it’s a little bit funny to see them try to do this because, in addition to being hard, there is always the possibility that President Trump will say or do something the next day that blows their whole theory apart.