... DOGE’s
savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the
maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning
all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can
far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.
Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.
“That’s
the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000
credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’”
said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law
studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s
been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.” ...
1958 was a close second place drinking low year at 55% as their parents realized "My God, what have we done?" ha ha ha.
Seriously now, 71% drank in 1976, 1977, and 1978, the Baby Boom Bender.
Prior to 1984, many states like Wisconsin had lowered the drinking age to 18 from 21 because the voting age had been changed to 18 in 1971 by the 26th Amendment.
The National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 turned this back the other way again by withholding federal highway funds from states that did not raise
their drinking age back to 21, which Wisconsin finally did in 1986. Wisconsin had a tiered system between 1984 and 1986 where the drinking age was 19 for beer and wine and 21 for liquor.
... “The
hope was that he would pick someone . . . who people would have trust
in and could lead the BLS in an appropriate way, with relevant
experience and, ideally, not hyper-partisan,” said Stan Veuger, senior
fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think-tank.
“EJ Antoni is really the opposite of that.”
“Even the people who may be somewhat sympathetic to his economic policy views don’t think he’s qualified,” added Veuger. ...
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former PresidentJoe Bidenwent further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that,$8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would takea 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” authorDan Wangwrites: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems.Barry Naughtonof the University of California, San Diego has documented howChina’s rapid growth since 1979has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leaderXi Jinpinghas reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020,Alibabaco-founderJack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulatorscanceled the initial public offeringof Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventuallyfined it $2.8 billionfor anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
... his emergency control is set to expire after a maximum of 30 days,
according to the statute. That can be extended, but only if Congress
passes a law authorizing it.
While Trump has frequently complained
about crime in the district, violent crime there has fallen to a
30-year low as of January, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. ...
... Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically
incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no
knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the
ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the
Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more
poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend
to end the American experiment in self-government and individual
freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he
knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system
where he does not have total control. Character counts, as
conservatives once insisted,
and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius,
is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit. ...
I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe
Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a
constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it
happened. And Americans rewarded it four years
later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy.
That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as
democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want
an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one
twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called
the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who
no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and
no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they
despise. ...
Andrew Sullivan intimately knows all about not governing oneself. If only the Democrats did, who relentlessly persecuted and prosecuted Trump while in office and out. That's why we are here.
