What Is The Biggest Problem Facing The United States?

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If you were asked to identify the biggest problem facing the United States today, what would be your answer? I think that the answer is obvious: out-of-control entitlement spending that threatens to bankrupt the country.

Reasonable people might differ about this assessment. For example, some might cite the threats posed by international strategic adversaries, like China or Russia or Iran. Or the threat of a rogue power like North Korea or Iran getting, and maybe using, nuclear weapons. I’m not saying that these aren’t serious problems, but just that there’s not much that can be done about them that we aren’t already doing. Also, I don’t think the chances of any of these guys doing something really stupid, like launching an unprovoked nuclear strike, are very high.

By contrast, the entitlement funding problem is gigantic, and obvious, and by no means imaginary, and currently nobody is doing anything about it whatsoever. The bonded national debt — currently around $20 trillion and about 100% of annual GDP — is often cited as a big problem. But the unfunded future liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare programs are far higher. The 2018 Trustees’ Reports for the Social Security and Medicare programs put their 75-year unfunded liabilities at approximately a combined $50 trillion (approximately $13 trillion for Social Security and $37 trillion for Medicare). And many analysts give credible reasons why those figures represent substantial low-balling of a much bigger problem. For example, James Capretta of the American Enterprise Institute, in a June 2018 post following release of the Trustees’ Reports, points to highly optimistic assumptions about ability to control future Medicare costs (“the Medicare projections assume deep, permanent, and ongoing cuts in payment rates for physicians and hospitals that are difficult to believe will be implemented”), as well as equally optimistic birth rate assumptions. Other credible observers think the shortfalls, particularly on the Medicare side, could easily be double or more the government’s official projections. For example, from Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute in 2015 (“[I]f we return to double digit health care inflation, we could see Medicare’s liabilities swell to more than $88 trillion.”).

You may recall that President George W. Bush made a serious effort at least to begin to address this problem. During his first term, he appointed a Commission to come up with some solutions on the Social Security side, and the Commission proposed a series of reforms. None of them went anywhere in Congress. W did not try again in his second term. President Obama, and now President Trump, have showed no interest in this subject.

Anyway, I mention this subject today because not only is nobody paying any attention whatsoever to the huge problem, but over on the Democratic side, with the 2020 presidential sweepstakes just getting started, there has suddenly erupted some kind of a bidding war as to who can offer the most grandiose and completely impossible set of proposed expansions to the existing entitlement state.

It was Bernie Sanders, of course, who laid down the original marker for the bare minimum list of new entitlements for a true “progressive” Democrat to embrace. Bernie’s list in his campaign for the 2016 nomination included the following:

  • Medicare for all.

  • Social Security benefit increases

  • Infrastructure program

  • College affordability (free tuition for all!)

  • New paid leave fund

  • Bolster private pension funds

  • Youth jobs initiative

In a September 2015 article, the Wall Street Journal put a ten-year price tag on that list of $18 trillion. Others put the figure at $30 trillion or more. Whichever it is, Bernie’s list has turned out to be merely the small opening bid in what is quickly becoming a much grander game.

Credit new “it” Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with launching the advocacy for what she calls the “Green New Deal.” We’ll eliminate all fossil-fuel energy within 10 years! With government spending and subsidies tossed out left and right, of course. Next thing you know, the presidential candidates are lining up to get on the bandwagon: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris. Do any of them have a clue how much this might cost, let alone how it could be engineered? Not a chance. A recent study by Roger Andrews at the site Energy Matters put the cost of batteries alone for a wind/solar/battery system just for California at about $5 trillion. Multiply by about 8 to get a cost for the full U.S.: $40 trillion. As you know from your cell phone, the batteries would need to be replaced every few years. The cost of the wind turbines and solar collectors is extra.

Where to from here? Ms. AOC is never short of other bright new ideas. How about “Housing as a human right”? She must be inspired by the great “success” of the New York City Housing Authority — an infinite sink for about $2 billion a year in federal funds and in desperate need of some $30 billion for capital repairs. Multiply those numbers by about 30 if you want to replicate on a national scale. Oh, and the 170,000 units of NYCHA housing somehow never make a dent in the “homeless” problem.

And then there is the proposal for “reparations” for black Americans, most prominently pushed by Representative Maxine Waters. She has recently become the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Any price tag for that? It’s whatever you want it to be. Make your bid!

These are people who talk endlessly about “sustainability.” They just have a different definition of the word than I do.

The January Climate Follies

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In my last several weeks out of the country, I have not been keeping up with the ridiculous “climate” follies. What has been going on? Let’s check a few data points.

You will not be surprised to learn that the state of Minnesota aspires to be a green energy leader. After a big push since 2000, Minnesota has gotten its percent of electricity generation from wind on an annual basis up to almost 19%. Sounds great! Then, yesterday and today, the temperature in much of the state plunged to -20 deg F and below. Yesterday in St. Paul, the wind was completely calm for much of the day, and very light the rest of the time. Isaac Orr at the Center of the American Experiment took the occasion to write a piece headlined “It’s Negative 24 Degrees and the Wind Isn’t Blowing.”

[W]ind is  producing only four percent of electricity in the MISO region, of which Minnesota is a part. . . . Coal, on the other hand, is churning out 45 percent of our power, nuclear is providing 13 percent, and natural gas is providing 26 percent of our electricity. This is exactly why the renewable energy lobby’s dream of shutting down coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants and “replacing” them with wind and solar is a fairy tale. . . .

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Should The U.S. Use Coercive Means To Oust Socialist Dictatorships?

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As noted in my post on Cambodia a couple of days ago, when Pol Pot seized power in that country in 1975, the U.S. took no military or other coercive action to stop him. And over the next several years, as he conducted his monstrous genocide — in which about a third of the entire population of the country was either directly murdered or intentionally starved to death — the U.S. continued to sit totally on the sidelines and just let things play out. This, even though somewhere in the U.S. government (CIA?), at least some people clearly knew, at least in a general way, what was going on. By the end of its brief dalliance with communism, Cambodia had not just lost a third of its population, but had seen its entire economy devastated, and almost all educated people slaughtered, such that the ability to start rebuilding was set back decades until an entire new generation could come along. As a result, Cambodia is only now starting the long climb up from desperate poverty into a modern economy.

It would be completely fair to ask: How could the U.S. be so completely heartless and inhumane? For some mere several billions of dollars of expenditures, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of military casualties, couldn’t we have obviated the slaughter of millions of people and rescued all of the Cambodians from multiple generations of needless extreme poverty?

These questions take on particular relevance in light of the events currently transpiring in Venezuela. There, the socialist dictatorship continues its brutal repression, with hundreds of new arrests of regime opponents just in the past several days, and millions starving and/or fleeing the country. Why, you might ask, is it not the moral obligation of the U.S. to step in immediately with whatever force is necessary to stop the suffering and restore democracy?

The answer lies in the incredible power of the socialist delusion. . . .

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Report From Cambodia

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I have now moved on from Việt Nam to Cambodia. Slow and sometimes no internet service have made it difficult to keep up with my usual type of posts about domestic U.S. issues; but we can look upon that as an opportunity to record some information and observations from half way around the world.

Here in Cambodia, the focus of tourism is mainly on two things: (1) the incredible 9th to 13th century temples and other structures located among the jungles in the center of the country, going by the general name of Angkor Wat, and (2) the story of the “killing fields” genocide of 1975 to 1979. For photos of several of the better-known of the temples, go to Mrs. MC’s Instagram posts at DenieDM. I will focus on the story of the killing fields.

Perhaps because of the original application of the word and as a result of its etymology (“geno” derives from the Greek for “race”), we tend to think of genocides as involving the mass killing of people of one race or ethnicity by those of another race or ethnicity. Prominent examples include the holocaust (murder of Jews by German Nazis in the early 1940s), the Rwandan genocide (murder of Tutsis by Hutus in or about 1994), the Armenian genocide (at the hands of the Turks in the period of about 1915 to 1920), and so forth.

The Cambodian “killing fields” genocide of 1975 to 1979 was not one of these. . . .

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Report From Việt Nam -- Part VI

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Report From Việt Nam -- Part VI

While Mrs. MC has been busy taking beautiful and artistic pictures on our trip (follow her at DenieDM on Instagram), I’m making it my business to get a few pictures of things you will not see elsewhere. I don’t do Instagram or Facebook, so why not post a few of these here?

For example, you are probably dying to see what Việt Nam’s electricity infrastructure looks like. We were told that about 25% of the people in the country continue to lack access to electricity; but those 25% are located mostly in remote and mountainous areas. In the cities, and also small villages in the Mekong delta, electricity service was generally available, although many small homes in the villages did not appear to be hooked up to it. But even in the major cities the system looked like it was put together with chewing gum and duct tape. . . .

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Report From Việt Nam -- Part V

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Apologies for the lack of posts for the past several days. I have been out of internet range. I will try to make it up over the next several days.

Here is some history of agricultural production in Việt Nam. My source is the book “Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present” by Ben Kiernan. Kiernan is a professor at Yale. The book was published in 2017.

When Ho Chi Minh’s communists gained control of the northern part of Việt Nam in the early 1950s, one of their first significant projects was a systematic “land reform” that included evicting the pre-existing landlords and collectivizing agriculture in the Stalinist model. From Kiernan (page 431):

Led by then-[Việt Nam Workers Party] secretary general Truong Chinh and backed by Ho Chi Minh from the start, [“land reform”] involved two major processes. The first comprised land reform proper, the redistribution to poor peasants of lands held by landlords, “rich peasants,” and even many middle peasants. . . . [T]he results [came] with a high level of violence. Landlords and rich peasants had not merely lost their lands. Thousands were killed, including some of those who formerly comprised 29 percent of the membership of village party committees.

Kiernan provides fewer details, but a similar process took place in the South both before and after the communist victory in the early 1970s. How did that land redistribution and agricultural collectivization work out? . . .

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