Crime in the Cabinet

Most administrations come and go
without credible evidence of a crime by a cabinet official.
There were two this week alone.

In January of 2017, as Barack Obama was getting ready to hand the presidency over to Donald Trump after eight years in office, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky pushed back on the “myth” that Obama had presided over a “scandal-free administration”. Von Spakovsky listed six of what he described as “some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades”.

One — using the IRS to “target political opponents” — was nothing more than a canard that circulated inside the conservative information bubble. (The IRS was skeptical of the tax-exempt status of new political organizations founded to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Most of the investigated organizations were conservative, but that was due to the flow of money rather than specific targeting of conservative organizations. In the end, nearly all of them were recognized as tax-exempt. More importantly: No link back to the White House was ever established.)

Others — Benghazi, government personnel records getting hacked, losing track of guns allowed into Mexico as part of a smuggling investigation, veterans dying while waiting for appointments at the VA — were screw-ups not rooted in any nefarious intentions.

Only one — the Hillary Clinton email controversy — involved any credible accusation of a crime. That was investigated by the State Department during the first Trump administration, and the report found “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” No one was ever charged with a crime, much less convicted.

That’s not unusual. Crime in the cabinet is exceedingly rare. In the history of the United States, no cabinet official was convicted of a crime until 1929, when former Interior Secretary Albert Fall was found guilty of taking bribes in the Teapot Dome scandal. Three Nixon cabinet members and his vice president were convicted of crimes, which is one reason why the Nixon administration is remembered for its corruption.

But the Trump administration has a way of wearing down our standards and making us forget that lawlessness high in the executive branch used to be exceptional. For example, Trump officials violate the Hatch Act (banning government officials from using their offices for political activity) just about every day. Such violations went unpunished in the first Trump administration, so hardly anyone notices any more.

Even so, it was striking to hear two independent credible accusations of crimes by Trump cabinet officials in the same week.

  • DHS Secretary Kristi Noem all but confessed to contempt of court yesterday when she admitted she knew a federal judge had ordered a plane carrying detainees to El Salvador to turn around, but she ordered it to continue.
  • Department of War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave an order to “kill everybody” in an attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean. Two survivors clinging to wreckage were then killed in a second attack. Even if the initial attack were legitimate (which it wasn’t), killing defenseless survivors is a war crime.

The second crime is more serious than the first, so let’s start there.

“Kill everybody”. Since September 2, the Trump regime has launched at least 21 attacks against boats on the high seas that it claimed were smuggling drugs, killing at least 83 people. Friday, that story got even worse, when the Washington Post published a report that Defense Secretary Hegseth had given a “kill everybody” order for the first attack. Two people survived the initial attack and were clinging to the wreckage when a second attack was ordered. It blew the survivors to bits.

If true, that incident is a clear war crime attributed to a specific person, Hegseth.

Horrifying as that is, I think it would be a mistake to lose sight of the larger picture: If we frame this wrong, it might seem as if the air campaign against the boats was fine until helpless survivors were targeted. It wasn’t. Whether Hegseth ever said “Kill everybody” or not, under his command the Department of Defense has committed 83 murders.

No operational consideration justifies the attacks. They are not like the drone attacks that have assassinated terrorist leaders, controversial and morally dubious as those might have been. In those cases, the targets might not have stayed in known locations long enough for a strike team to get there. Or the host country might not have allowed our strike team in. Often, the choice was either to send a drone or let the terrorists go on about their business.

That’s not the case here. These boats were in open seas dominated by our Navy. They could have been seized and could not have gotten away. Whatever drugs they might have been carrying would never have reached American consumers. The crews could have been captured alive, and might have given us valuable information about their suppliers or distributors.

So attacking the boats achieved nothing that couldn’t have been achieved without killing people. Instead, the Trump regime chose to kill 83 people.

Remember: Smuggling drugs is not a capital crime. Even if the alleged smugglers had been captured and given due process, they could not have legally been sentenced to death.

It’s worthwhile to put this in a more familiar context. In Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies, Harry Callahan is a cop who chafes under the legal restrictions that bind him, and that allow criminals to eventually go free. In the first movie, Harry dares a suspect to go for a gun so that he can legally kill him.

But the second movie, Magnum Force, pits Harry against a death squad of rogue cops who start a campaign of assassinations against the city’s underworld kingpins. The squad expects Harry to join them, but rogue assassinations are too much even for him. “A man’s got to know his limitations,” Harry says.

That’s what we’re seeing now: Trump and Hegseth have turned the US Navy into a rogue assassination squad. They see enough evidence to convince themselves boats are smuggling drugs, show that evidence to no one, and kill the alleged smugglers on their own authority.

Even if you’re as tough on crime as Dirty Harry, you shouldn’t approve. A government has got to know its limitations.

The Trump regime gives two justifications: First, the end justifies the means (which is precisely what Dirty Harry’s rogue cops argued). On October 23rd, Trump made the ridiculous claim that each boat blown up saves the lives of 25,000 Americans. (This is the same kind of math that caused Pam Bondi to claim that drug seizures during Trump’s first 100 days had saved 119-258 million lives.) He postulated that if he told the Congress about the operation (not to seek their authorization, which he says he doesn’t need) “I can’t imagine they’d have any problem with it. … What are they going to do, say ‘We don’t want to stop drugs pouring in’?”

Again, those boats could be stopped without blowing them up or killing anybody.

Second, the regime stretches the definition of “war” to cover this operation. The drug cartels, say Hegseth and Trump, are like ISIS or Al Qaeda. This is typical of the way the regime perverts language, so that reminding soldiers of their legal responsibility not to follow unlawful orders is “sedition”, or individuals deciding to cross our border is an “invasion”.

Smuggling has been part of the American economy since before the Revolution, from British tea to Prohibition whiskey to Colombian cocaine. It has never been considered an act of war. Those 83 people on those fishing boats were not soldiers and were not at war with the United States. They’re murder victims.

But just for a moment, grant the claim that these attacks are part of a war. That’s where the Post’s new revelations come in: Once your enemies are disarmed and helpless, it’s a war crime to kill them. If the report is true, Pete Hegseth and those down the chain who carried out his orders are guilty of war crimes.

It appears, at least for the moment, that Republicans in Congress are not going to cover this up.

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and its top Democrat, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, said in a joint statement late Friday that the committee “will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

That was followed Saturday with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, and the ranking Democratic member, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, issuing a joint statement saying the panel was committed to “providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean.”

Hegseth denies giving the order and calls the Post’s report “fake news”.

And before I leave this topic, there is one more dot worth connecting: Military judge advocate generals (JAGs) are supposed to vet these legal issues for the armed forces. But Hegseth purged the JAGs back in February, about a month into his term:

Hegseth told reporters Monday that the removals were necessary because he didn’t want [the JAGs] to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

The plan from the beginning was to give illegal orders and remove all obstacles to carrying them out.

Kristi Noem’s contempt of court. Remember back in March, when a judge ordered DHS not to deport a bunch of Venezuelans to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador, including turning around planes already in the air? And DHS in fact did not turn those planes around, defying the judge’s order?

The judge, James Boasberg, has kept pursuing the question of who is responsible and whether they should be charged with criminal contempt of court. Tuesday, government lawyers answered the first question: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made the call, after consulting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General (now federal appellate judge) Emil Bove, and DHS acting general counsel Joseph Mazzara.

Dean Blundell cuts through the spin and legalese to draw this conclusion: The regime just threw Noem under the bus. Government lawyers say they’ll be happy to answer any further questions in writing, but that “No live testimony is warranted at this time.” In other words: We’ll answer the questions we want to answer with very carefully crafted spin, and we don’t want to give the court or anybody else the ability to frame their own questions or insist on clear answers.

Blundell summarizes:

  • They’re naming Noem now.
  • They’re trying to keep her off the stand.
  • And they’re trying to keep other insiders and whistleblowers from testifying live

Noem responded yesterday in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

KARL: So, I have two questions on that. First of all, is that right? Does the — does the buck effectively stop with you on this? Was this your responsibility? And had you known the judge had ordered those planes to be turned around when that order was issued?

NOEM: Yes, I made that decision. And that decision was under my complete authority and following the law and the Constitution and the leadership of this president, who is dedicated to getting dangerous criminal terrorists and gangs and cartels out of our country. And I’m so grateful that we get the opportunity every day to do that and to make decisions that will keep America safe.

KARL: Did you know about — did you know about the judge’s order when you issued your order for the planes to go (ph)?

NOEM: You know, this is an activist judge. And I understand, you know, we’re still in litigation with this against this activist judge who’s continuously tried to stop us from protecting the American people.

We continue to win. His ridiculous claims are not in good standing with the law or the Constitution. We’ll win this one as well. And we comply with all federal orders that are lawful and binding and we will continue to do that.

But I’m proud of the decision that I’ve made. Proud to work for this president each and every day to keep America safe.

So there you have it: It’s up to the regime, and not the courts, to decide what is “lawful and binding”. She disagreed with the judge, so she ignored his order. If that’s not contempt of court, I don’t know what is.

December 1, 2025 – 10:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s easy to get worn down by the lawlessness of the Trump regime. You hear that they’ve ignored some established legal principle and think, “Oh yeah. That’s what they do.”

But this week has been special and deserves your attention. Yesterday, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem admitted on ABC that she authorized the plane that flew detainees to El Salvador after a federal judge had ordered it turned around. Her justification: James Boasberg is an “activist judge”, and Noem will decide for herself whether her orders are “lawful and binding”. This single incident is contempt of court on its own, but it points something far broader and more threatening: The regime refuses to recognize that it can be bound by the courts.

Friday, The Washington Post reported that Defense (not War) Secretary Hegseth ordered the Navy to “kill everybody” in its September 2 attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the open ocean. After the first attack, two survivors were clinging to the wreckage. So a second attack was sent to blow them to bits.

In the featured article “Crime in the Cabinet”, I’ll look at these two incidents and put them in the context of US history: Crimes committed by members of the cabinet are very rare. That we learn of two in one week is completely unique. That should be out around 10 EST or so.

The weekly summary is left to cover the confusing back-and-forth of Ukraine peace proposals; the shooting of two National Guard members near the White House, and Trump’s disproportionate response to halt the processing of all asylum applications; the end of the James Comey and Tish James prosecutions; and a few other things, before closing with a piano-playing octopus. I’ll try to get that out by noon or so.

December 1, 2025 – 8:42 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Don’t Believe It

At some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent.

– US District Judge Sara Ellis,
commenting on ICE and Border Patrol testimony
contradicted by their body camera footage

This week’s featured post is “The Vibecession and the AI Bubble“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. A judge found that federal agents in Chicago repeatedly instigated violence against protesters, then lied about it in reports that painted the protesters as violent.
  • Climate change. According to Grist, the COP30 conference in Brazil closed with “no new agreements to wind down fossil fuel use or curb deforestation”.
  • Gaza. Ostensibly there’s a ceasefire, but there are still attacks and people still die. The famine conditions have abated but “the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) reports that a quarter of households in Gaza are eating just one meal daily”.
  • Ukraine. Representatives of Trump and Putin put together a 28-point peace plan, which Trump has given Zelenskyy until Thursday to accept. It comes at a time of internal Ukrainian weakness, and amounts to a demand for surrender. It’s currently being revised in talks with Ukraine and Europe, who were left out of the original formulation.

This week’s developments

This week Trump did a lot to raise your outrage

Maybe it comes from the sting of his defeat on the Epstein Transparency Act, or from worsening dementia limiting his ability to control himself, but Trump has said and done outrageous things recently at a pace that is unusual even for him. It’s hard to know how to cover them. It would be easy to fill the entire Sift with nothing else, and several hour-long news shows I watched on the rechristened MS NOW did precisely that. But I’m torn.

On the one hand, these incidents only reinforce things you already know:

  • Donald Trump is a disgusting human being.
  • He regularly gets away with outrages that would have ended the career of any previous president, or just about any previous American politician. We’re a long way from the era when Obama could spark outrage by wearing a tan suit or putting his feet up on the Resolute Desk.

Meanwhile, substantive things have been happening in foreign affairs, in the economy, in the courts, and so on. Being drawn into Trump’s Crazytown antics removes us from the world of events that have lasting consequences for our lives and for the future of our nation.

On the other hand, ignoring these persistent outrages makes us complicit in normalizing them. American presidents have never acted like this before, and no one should want this kind of behavior to become acceptable.

So here’s my compromise: I’m going to list the three biggest outrages and link to longer accounts of them, because you should know what happened. But I’m also not going to let them take over and drive out all other news.

  • He threatened six Democratic lawmakers with arrest, trial, and death for making a video repeating the standard Defense Department doctrine that soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders. (No one seems to remember the origin story of the right-wing Oath Keepers after President Obama took office: “More specifically, the group’s members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful”. Right-wingers considered that position patriotic in 2009.) Trump has since denied that he was making a death threat, but who knows how his more rabid followers might interpret his statements? If somebody actually does shoot at (rather than just threaten) one or more of the Democrats, it will be a textbook case of stochastic terrorism. Notably, one of the Democrats is Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly, whose wife Gabby Giffords has already survived a shooting.
  • He called a female White House reporter “piggy”. A week ago Friday, Catherine Lucey from Bloomberg was part of a press gaggle on Air Force One. She asked the kind of hard, direct question reporters are supposed to put to presidents: “if there’s nothing incriminating in the [Epstein] files”, why was he blocking their release? Trump pointed to her in a threatening way (see photo above) and said, “Quiet, quiet piggy.” The White House press secretary later defended this response as “frank and honest“.

This wasn’t an action of Trump himself, but falls into the same outrage category: The Coast Guard briefly considered reclassifying swastikas and nooses as “potentially divisive” rather than hate symbols. Public outcry made them walk that back.

Meanwhile, we still haven’t seen the Epstein files. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the Justice Department 30 days to produce the files. Trump says his DoJ will because there’s nothing to hide, but we’ll see what happens.

The Trump-ordered sham investigations into Epstein’s links to prominent Democrats opens the possibility that DoJ will claim it can’t release information related to an ongoing investigation.

It bears repeating that Trump could have ordered the files released at any time and still could. He didn’t need an act of Congress to force his hand. It’s absurd to claim that you support doing something that you could have done a long time ago and chose not to do.

The best people to deal with absurdity are comedians, so here’s The Daily Show’s take on the situation, where Jordan Klepper applies “Occam’s Giant Fucking Machete“. The whole routine is amusing, but if you’re pressed for time skip ahead to about the 12:30 mark.

and Marjorie Taylor Greene

It’s been interesting these last few months watching MTG become estranged from the Trump regime on issues like Medicaid, ObamaCare subsidies, and the Epstein files. In every case, she has taken the path consistent with Trump’s base and the promises he made them, while Trump has done something else. Just before he flipped back to the release-the-files side (sort of), Trump branded MTG as “Marjorie Traitor Greene”, which MTG claimed (believably) resulted in death threats.

Sadly, like Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, and others before her, MTG decided not to stand and fight. Friday night she released a video announcing that she will resign from Congress on January 5 (coincidentally, just after her pension vests).

Her video is worth watching, mostly because of how well she describes the people she claims to represent. There’s some Christian-right stuff in there about abortion and trans rights, but mostly she’s talking about working-class people who have seen their prospects diminish and who have little hope for their children to have a better life. She’s not wrong about that, and Democrats have to figure out how to speak to and for these people.

Two places in the video stand out for other reasons. Around the 6:30 mark, she has just finished outlining all the ways she has fought for Trump and the Trump agenda in Congress before differing with him on a few issues. But then she says:

Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interests, because our job-title is literally “representative”. … Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for.

Around 9:15, she compares her relationship with Trump to a broken marriage:

I refuse to be a battered wife, hoping it all goes away and gets better. If I am cast aside by the President and the MAGA political machine and replaced by neo-cons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, military-industrial war complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can never ever relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.

But there was real news about Ukraine

Thursday, Axios published a leaked draft of a 28-point peace plan worked out by representatives of Trump and Putin, without input from either Ukraine or its European allies. The plan is shockingly one-sided. Ukraine gives in to Russia’s demands: limiting the size of its army, rewriting its constitution to outlaw NATO membership, and even surrendering more territory than Russia has conquered. In exchange it gets only nebulous commitments without clear enforcement mechanisms. Timothy Snyder goes through the proposal point-by-point.

Snyder points to something others have noticed: The plan’s curious phrasing suggests that it was translated from Russian. In other words, Trump’s peace plan was really just Trump’s name attached to Putin’s demands. Much of the plan is in the passive voice, like “Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.” Exactly who is doing this confirming is never specified. Treaties and other agreements are not written like this.

At first it wasn’t clear whether this was a final product, but Trump quickly got behind it and insisted that Ukraine accept it by Thanksgiving. “He’s going to have to approve it,” Trump said of Zelensky, who is politically weak right now because of a corruption scandal in his administration.

Europe pushed back, and Trump fumed. But today it looks like a second draft will happen after consultation with Europe and Ukraine. Probably Russia will reject this, and we’ll be back to square one.

and the AI bubble

That’s covered in the featured post.

and the regime’s bad week in court

Thursday, US District Judge Sara Ellis ordered ICE and Border Patrol thugs to stop brutalizing the people of Chicago. But an appeals court stayed her order, claiming it was too broad. Then she released 233 very damning pages of her findings. Specifically, federal agents and their leader Greg Bovino repeatedly lied, submitting reports that didn’t match what their body cameras recorded.

After reviewing all the evidence submitted to the Court and listening to the testimony elicited at the preliminary injunction hearing, during depositions, and in other court proceedings, the Court finds Defendants’ evidence simply not credible. … Defendants specifically directed the Court to certain videos and timestamps “to aid the Court in its review of those videos.” Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. But a review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claims that their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”

Quite the opposite, the videos repeatedly show federal agents as the provocateurs, introducing violence into otherwise peaceful protests:

For example, Defendants directed the Court to two videos of agents outside the Broadview facility the evening of September 19, 2025. In those videos, agents stand behind a fence preparing to leave the facility’s gates and disperse what Defendants described as an unruly mob. The scene appears quiet as the gate opens, revealing a line of protesters standing in the street holding signs. Almost immediately and without warning, agents lob flashbang grenades, tear gas, and pepper balls at the protesters, stating, “fuck yea!”, as they do so, and the crowd scatters. This video disproves Defendants’ contentions that protesters were the ones shooting off fireworks, refusing orders, and acting violently so as to justify the agents’ use of force.

Or this:

Defendants also highlighted an October 3, 2025 video, presumably to show that agents driving the streets faced constant danger from cars ramming them on purpose. But instead of leaving this impression, the video … suggests that the agent drove erratically and brake-checked other motorists in an attempt to force accidents that agents could then use as justifications for deploying force.

After listing other examples and alluding to many others, Ellis conclude:

[A]t some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent. … Overall, after reviewing all the evidence, the Court finds that Defendants’ widespread misrepresentations call into question everything that Defendants say they are doing in their characterization of what is happening at the Broadview facility or out in the streets of the Chicagoland area during law enforcement activities.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern quotes Skye Perryman to respond to the objection that none of this matters because the Supreme Court will knuckle under to Trump anyway:

Listen, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing in the district courts. We are fully aware that somewhere down the line we can lose. But this is the place where the fog of war doesn’t enter the room. What enters the room is people telling the truth and the judge making findings. That is the story we tell, and it’s what we can do to hold the line right now. … [I]t’s frustrating that this order has been stayed. In other words, this changes nothing on the ground. But it is important to have the judge who ordered agents to wear bodycams now make findings in which she says: You just lied. And I think that is the value of all this.

Also Thursday, US District Judge Jia Cobb ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to DC was probably illegal. Her preliminary injunction gives the government until December 11 to get the troops out of DC.

And the prosecution of James Comey continues to be a comedy of errors. Recall: The career prosecutors found no case worth bringing to a grand jury, so Trump fired the US attorney and brought in Lindsey Halligan, his former personal lawyer. She couldn’t get any other lawyers in her office to accompany her, so she went to the grand jury alone. Having never prosecuted a case before, and trying to move quickly before the statute of limitations ran out, she made a botch of it.

Law-fare’s Benjamin Wittes comments:

It is actually hard to keep up with the pace of developments. Multiple times a day, documents land on this docket that contain new inanities, new abominations in the sight of the law, new factual revelations, new reasons to wonder not whether this case will collapse but only how. At the hearing the other day, Judge Michael Nachmanoff seemed to be struggling with exactly this question, asking an attorney for Comey—in effect—which motion he wants the judge to dismiss the case based on.

US District Judge James Boasberg will hold hearings next week to determine whether contempt charges are justified in the case where administration officials refused to turn around a plane deporting detainees to El Salvador.

and you also might be interested in …

One of the week’s great mysteries is why Trump’s Oval Office meeting with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani was such a love-fest. In the photo above, Trump is wearing the expression that South Park uses when Trump looks at his lover Satan.

The NYT is staying with the Kash Patel abuse-of-government-perks story. There are two pieces of it: use of his government jet for personal travel (something he criticized previous FBI Director Christopher Wray for), and assigning FBI SWAT agents as a protection team for his country-singer girlfriend.

and let’s close with something to be thankful for

I’ve long thought that the Fox News canard of a “war on Christmas” had it backwards: Christmas is the aggressor and is rapidly advancing against all our other holidays. As soon as Halloween was over, Christmas decorations started appearing, and the deluge of Christmas music can’t be far behind.

If you want to try to hold the Thanksgiving line, though, Country Living has a playlist of Thanksgiving songs you can use.

November 24, 2025 – 12:40 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (10)

The Vibecession and the AI bubble

Depressed consumers and record-setting stock markets don’t usually go together.
Why are they both happening now?

I recently came across these two facts:

Those two puzzle pieces are hard to fit together. Naively, you might think the S&P 500 and the Index of Consumer Sentiment measure the same thing: optimism about the economy. But apparently the economy looks very different depending on where you stand: Investors are optimistic, consumers pessimistic.

Statistics. Government statistics paint a mixed picture: GDP growth for the first half of 2025 was 2.1%, which is about what it’s been averaging for years now, and is neither good nor bad. At 4.4%, unemployment is higher than it’s been lately, but relatively low by historical standards. (It was more than twice that high during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and briefly peaked at 13.2% early in the Covid lockdown.) Inflation is running at about 3% — rising somewhat recently and higher than the Fed target of 2%, but well below the 7% of 2021, not to mention the 13.3% of 1979. Interest rates are in similar territory: A 30-year mortgage is running around 6.11%, which is neither exceptionally high nor exceptionally low, compared to, say, 3.15% in 2021 and 7% in 2023, not to mention 16% in 1982.

For a few years now, economists have been scratching their heads and talking about the “vibecession“, an economy that feels worse than the data justifies. (Paul Krugman has written several paywalled articles on this, beginning here.) In 2024, the Biden administration was fighting consumers’ pessimistic vibes, and now the Trump administration is. (The public’s assessment of Trump’s handling of the economy is deeply negative: 40% approval vs. 57% disapproval, according to the RCP polling average.)

Stocks. The stock market’s euphoria is somewhat easier to square with the ho-hum economic numbers: The record gains don’t represent a broad optimism about the economy, but instead are concentrated in a handful of stocks that have something to do with artificial intelligence (AI). For example, a flagship consumer company like Proctor & Gamble that has little to do with AI has seen its stock fall this year, from 180 in January to about 150 now. Pepsi was at 165 early this year and is at 146 now. Target is down from 145 to 87.

Understand that I have cherry-picked those companies to make a point; most stock prices have increased somewhat this year. But a J. P. Morgan analyst wrote in September:

AI related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

The poster child for the AI boom is Nvidia, which you may not realize has recently become the most valuable corporation in the world, with a market capitalization (i.e., stock price per share times number of shares) that briefly topped $5 trillion at the end of October. Even more impressive: It didn’t cross the $1 trillion mark until sometime in 2023. The stock (adjusted for splits) was below $15 at the beginning of 2023 and hit $212 a few weeks ago.

Other AI heavyweights include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Broadcom, IBM, Oracle, and a few other corporations. Not all of their stocks have soared as far and as fast as Nvidia’s, but their investors have been doing quite well.

Why don’t consumers identify with this boom? It’s simple: AI hasn’t really affected everyday life much yet, so it doesn’t feel like we’re in the middle of a generation-defining revolution. I know lots of people who have played with ChatGPT or some other AI app, and I’ve gotten used to the AI summary at the top of Google searches (though I don’t trust it yet). But I know very few people who either buy significant AI-related products or use AI tools to produce products they couldn’t produce otherwise.

At the moment, AI’s significance in the economy doesn’t justify its significance in the stock market. We’re at a point with AI similar to where we were with the internet in 2000: Most of us could check weather.com or order a cheap book from Amazon, but our lives had not yet significantly changed. Like the Internet stocks in 2000, AI stock valuations are based on visions of a future that is still to arrive.

Is AI in a bubble? That gap between investor’s visions and current reality raises a question: The Internet bubble popped, with great losses to many investors and an impact on the broader economy. Is AI also a bubble, and what will happen if it pops?

I’m currently reading 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin. I’ve also lived through the internet bubble of 2000-2001 and the subprime-mortgage real estate bubble of 2008. One common characteristic of bubbles is that accounting departments get a bit creative near the end. Everyone is convinced the market will keep going up, and a rising market can hide a lot of corner-cutting. (As legendary investor Warren Buffet once put it: “It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked.”)

That kind of questionable accounting is happening inside the big AI-related companies today. This post by Shanaka Anslem Perera is a bit wonky, but puts the puzzle pieces together, focusing on Nvidia.

Wednesday evening, Nvidia reported its third-quarter earnings, which were up and looked excellent. The stock surged. And then a combination of human and (ironically) machine intelligence started digging into the footnotes of that report: Nvidia was booking sales that its customers were slow to pay for. In short, it was delivering chips, but not raking in a corresponding amount of cash. Second, its inventories were growing, which contradicts the common belief that Nvidia benefits from insatiable demand.

A third tell-tale sign is the incestuous flow of capital among the various AI corporations.

Perera writes:

The structure extends throughout the AI ecosystem. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI committed $50 billion to Microsoft Azure cloud services over five years. Microsoft uses those committed dollars to purchase Nvidia GPUs for Azure datacenters. Nvidia books the GPU sales as revenue.

Oracle announced a $300 billion, five-year cloud infrastructure partnership with OpenAI. This partnership requires Oracle to deploy Nvidia GPUs. Oracle has pre-ordered $8 billion in Blackwell architecture chips from Nvidia. OpenAI’s ability to fulfill its $300 billion Oracle commitment depends on OpenAI generating revenue that currently runs at $3.7 billion annually—a gap of $56.3 billion per year.

The total network spans $610 billion in circular commitments, according to an analysis of SEC filings, venture capital deal databases, and disclosed partnerships. The money flows in loops: Nvidia invests in AI startups, startups commit to cloud spending, cloud providers purchase Nvidia hardware, Nvidia recognizes revenue, but the cash never completes the circuit because the underlying economic activity—AI applications generating profit—remains insufficient.

That’s a complicated diagram, and AI is an intimidating subject. But a parallel example from a more mundane industry makes the pattern easier to grasp: How Boston Chicken went broke in the 1990s.

In a nutshell, the Boston Market formula worked like this: the company raised money in the stock market and then loaned it to large, sophisticated franchisees (known as “area developers”), who used the funds to open lots of Boston Market stores in a short time.

These developers then paid the company a franchise fee for each new store, royalties on food sales and interest on the loans. So right away, the Boston Market operation looked hugely profitable. That boosted the stock, which gave the company yet more cheap capital to lend to developers, to open yet more stores.

Even if the individual Boston Market franchisees were hemorrhaging money, that would have no impact on the parent company’s bottom line. The franchisees’ costs and losses were their own problem.

As a whole, the Boston Market corporate/franchisee operation wasn’t profitable, but the corporate side of it looked profitable by pushing its losses off on the franchisees. Ultimately, the loans the corporation had made to the franchisees couldn’t be repaid, and the whole scheme unraveled.

Something similar is happening with Nvidia: It raises money on the stock market and invests it in companies like Open AI and Coreweave, who send it to Microsoft or Amazon, who in turn use it to buy Nvidia’s products. Eliminate the middlemen, and Nvidia is essentially buying its own products. You can’t make money doing that, no matter what your earning statements say. What’s missing here is the consumer: Who’s going to buy enough AI-related products to make everyone involved profitable?

Patterns like this can resolve in one of two ways: Either the industry as a whole starts making money, i.e., the AI-to-consumer link suddenly develops in ways that produce boatloads of cash to pay for Nvidia’s chips, or the whole thing collapses on itself.

For historical perspective on this kind of thing, one classic read is Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. The book is 1931’s view of the roaring 1920s. By 1931, the Depression was deepening and all the investment booms of the 20s had gone bust. But the striking thing about them (from our point of view, which Allen could not foresee) is that the narratives behind those booms were not wrong: The story of the Florida land boom was that Northerners were going to start retiring to Florida. Suburban real estate bubbled because automobiles would make it possible to move away from the crowded cities. Even the stock market boom that ended in the crash of 1929 had good narrative sense behind it: The Nvidea of the late 1920s was RCA, because radio was going to change everything. Also: chains like Sears and Montgomery Ward were going to out-compete the Mom-and-Pop stores. The automobile market still had a lot of growth in it. Aviation was a field with a big future. And so on.

The visions that inspired the booms of the 1920s nearly all came true, but not until the 1950s, long after the original investors were bankrupt. That happened again in the internet bubble: The internet did change everything, but not as fast or as easily as the boom companies needed it to. Something similar could happen with AI. The seers of an AI-dominated future don’t have to be wrong, they could just be too optimistic about timing.

What happens then? The larger economy is always harmed when a bubble pops, because a large quantity of capital appears to suddenly vanish. Actually, it went away gradually over a period of time as people made investments that weren’t going to pay off within the time horizons they needed. But the bubble obscured that reality, so when it pops the loss seems instantaneous. Loans that seemed to have adequate collateral suddenly don’t, and companies that had seemed healthy are suddenly insolvent. Bankruptcies lead to other bankruptcies like falling dominoes — I can’t pay you back because I was counting on other people to pay me back.

Because I’m losing money in one area, I need to sell my investments in other areas to raise cash. So the losses spread. (Tech investors also tend to be cryto-currency fans, expect to see Bitcoin prices collapse first, before a widespread banking crisis. That’s already started.)

Even people and businesses that are solvent stop spending, just from the sheer uncertainty of everything. Eventually governments have to step in, both by spending to prop up demand and as a lender of last resort to keep the banking system from collapsing.

None of that is inevitable. But it looks increasingly likely.

November 24, 2025 – 9:51 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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Obliviousness

Urbana is basically the country club and the ghetto, and neither group has any idea that the other group exists.

– Beth Macy, Paper Girl,
on returning to the Ohio town where she grew up

This week’s featured post is “Beth Macy Goes Home Again“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Post his election disaster, the shutdown, and the growing threat of the Epstein files, Trump’s coalition is showing some cracks.
  • Climate change. The COP30 international conference is happening in Brazil, without the US. Everyone is frustrated by the world’s slow progress in addressing climate change.
  • Gaza. The UN is voting today on a US-sponsored resolution to establish an international Gaza stabilization force.
  • Ukraine. As the weather gets colder, the drone war moves to center stage. Russia blew up an oil tanker in Odessa; Ukraine hit an oil refinery.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the shutdown aftermath

No one is happy with how the shutdown came out. It lasted a record 43 days, during which a lot of people worked without pay, saw their government services delayed, or perhaps even went hungry. But in the end it turned out to be an almost entirely symbolic fight, as Democrats got no concessions on their central issue: keeping ObamaCare premiums from skyrocketing in 2026.

The question is whether a better deal could have emerged later. Fundamentally, the Democrats’ problem is that you can’t play chicken with somebody who’s not afraid to wreck their car. As much as Americans were suffering, and as much as they were blaming that suffering on Trump, it’s not clear that Trump cared.

As Politico notes: SNAP benefits will start again soon, if they haven’t already. But meanwhile, millions of Americans will lose their benefits, due to “work requirements” that seemed designed to trap people into disqualifying themselves.

and whether Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes

Last night, Trump flipped on releasing the Epstein files. After unsuccessfully trying to badger Republicans like Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert into removing their names from the discharge petition to bring the Epstein Transparency Act to a vote in the House, and facing an overwhelming defeat when it finally will be voted on later this week, Trump reversed course, announcing that “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files” because “we have nothing to hide”.

Probably this means that he is confident the Senate will block the bill, but we’ll see.

I have to confess that when the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal got sucked into Q-Anon’s crazy theory of a world-ruling pedophile cabal, I lost what little interest I had. Surely this was just another conspiracy theory, blown way out of proportion by a cult of lunatics. (After all, if Democrats were synthesizing some eternal-youth elixir out of the blood of children, why did Joe Biden and Bill Clinton look so old? This was just one of the many bits of cognitive dissonance even a cursory glance at the theory raised.)

But lo and behold, there’s a kernel of truth at the center of all that nonsense. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell either induced or forced hundreds of under-age (or barely above the age of consent) girls into offering sexual services to their friends, who appear to have been some very powerful people. Rather than just internet rumors, there are real victims speaking out publicly, providing evidence strong enough to strip Prince Andrew of his title, send Maxwell to prison for sex trafficking, and get Epstein arrested and held in federal prison, where (the government says) he hung himself before a trial could happen.

In addition to trying to block release of what the Justice Department knows, various other facts make Trump look guilty of something:

There’s certainly a lot of smoke there, but whether Trump himself is in the fire has not yet been proved. This week we got even more smoke, as the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 emails it obtained from the Epstein estate. Trump was mentioned thousands of times in the emails — more than anyone else — and the emails strongly imply that Trump knew what Epstein was doing but stayed quiet about it. In one, Trump is described as a “dog that hasn’t barked”.

Epstein victims made a one-minute video pushing to have all the Justice Department’s files released.

OK, just for a moment assume the worst: Trump is shown to be an Epstein client; he’s abused underage girls. Does it make a difference?

Tim Whitaker argues that for Trump’s Evangelical supporters, it won’t. His argument has two main points: First, none of Trump’s previous sexual scandals (which Whitaker lists) have dented the MAGA/Evangelical alliance.

Despite these realities White Evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for him in 2016, 2020 and 2024 choosing instead to ignore or explain away what is an obvious reality: Trump already IS a sexual abuser. He doesn’t need to be on a client list for that to be demonstrated. His words, actions and court cases prove that he is.

Second, Evangelical churches have tolerated vast amounts of sexual misconduct in their leaders. Even if a big-time preacher loses his position in scandal, before long he’s been rehabilitated and is leading somewhere else.

Megan Kelly is already lining up how she’ll defend Trump if he turns out to be a participant in Epstein’s crimes: Epstein wasn’t really that bad.

Kelly went on to allege that she knew “somebody very, very close” to the Epstein case “who is in a position to know virtually everything.” She claimed the unidentified individual “told me, from the start years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”

“He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this,” she continued. “I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”

OK, let’s start here: A 15-year-old isn’t “barely legal” in most states. At best she’s barely illegal. Here in Massachusetts, the age of consent is 16 — and the only reason it’s that low is to avoid criminalizing 16-year-old boys. If somebody wanted to raise the age-of-consenting-to-men-over-25 to 18 or higher, I’d be for it.

Additionally (as I’ve observed before about Israel and genocide), when you start listing technical distinctions in the definition of a word like “pedophile”, you’ve already gone far astray.

meanwhile, Trump’s coalition begins to crack

In the most plausible American-democracy-survives-Trump scenario, a Democratic sweep of the 2025 elections is followed by elected Republicans claiming independence from their president. It’s too soon to say that’s definitely happening, but there are signs.

One of the biggest factors enabling Trump’s rising autocracy in the nation as a whole has been that he had already achieved autocracy in the Republican Party. Combined with narrow Republican control of both houses of Congress, his complete domination of elected Republicans has allowed him to usurp congressional powers and avoid investigations of the most blatant corruption.

Recently, though, cracks have been forming. Trump’s cover-up of the Epstein scandal and the Big Beautiful Bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP have allowed Marjorie Taylor Greene to get between Trump and his base. This week that dissension erupted into outright schism, as Trump withdrew his support of MTG, called her “Wacky” and “a ranting Lunatic”, and dangled an endorsement to tempt some Trump-loyal Republican to challenge her in a primary.

Tucker Carlson has also been increasingly critical of the regime lately, most recently claiming that the FBI is hiding something about Thomas Crooks, the gunman who tried to assassinate Trump during the 2024 campaign. Previously, he had denounced the post-Kirk-murder crackdown on free speech as well as the Epstein cover-up and the attack on Iran. (Isolationism is another issue where a Republican can out-MAGA Trump. Look for resistance to Trump’s escalating threats to Venezuela.)

When Trump demanded that Senate Republicans end the shutdown by scrapping the filibuster, Majority Leader John Thune calmly said no. Indiana just refused to accede to Trump’s redistricting demand. And former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels published an op-ed that appears to be even-handed, but contains some veiled criticism of Trump. He offers this hope for the future:

At some point, the public could tire of playground insults and asinine nicknames, and start asking for a little more substance from those elected to serve them. Interminable stalemate, especially when the country enters a stretch of serious economic or national security difficulty, could trigger a collective demand to “Grow up.”

It’s not a revolt yet, but Trump’s levers of power are becoming unreliable. A would-be autocrat’s most important asset is the belief that his power cannot be resisted, that everyone must either give in or be run over. That’s slipping.

Jack Hopkins is always more cynical and speculative than I am. Now he’s assessing signs that the powers behind Trump are already choosing their new champion.

and you also might be interested in …

Following up on last week’s featured post: The Washington Post spells out how the Trump administration is allowing junk insurance back into the market.

CBS hasn’t been completely MAGAfied yet. Last night 60 Minutes focused on one of Trump’s corrupt pardons:

Last month, President Trump granted a pardon to a billionaire felon, after the felon’s company enriched a Trump family business. The pardon went to Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born businessman, who was accused by the Justice Department of causing, quote, “…significant harm to U.S. national security…” The president says he does not know Zhao. Our reporting shows that Zhao’s company supported a Trump family firm at critical moments leading up to the president’s pardon.

Trump’s feds seem to be pulling out of Chicago. The next American city for them to invade is Charlotte. This is the first swing state Trump has invaded, and I suspect he’ll regret it in 2026.

The reason global air temperatures don’t go up every year is that some years the oceans soak up more of the extra heat. But that energy doesn’t go away. An article in Grist explores what happens when oceans start expelling heat rather than absorbing it.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted overwhelmingly for a statement critical of Trump’s immigration policies.

We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement. We pray that the Lord may guide the leaders of our nation, and we are grateful for past and present opportunities to dialogue with public and elected officials.

In some previous week, we saw that Kash Patel was using an FBI plane to go to his girl friend’s concerts. This week we find out that he has given her an FBI security detail.

Something I wonder about: With all the federal agents doing stuff like this, or trying to find dirt on Trump’s enemies, or working on deporting nannies and landscapers, is anybody actually trying to catch criminals any more?

The regime didn’t start blowing up boats it claims were smuggling drugs until September, but apparently Emil Bove, who was acting attorney general at the time and has since become a federal appellate judge, was describing the policy back in February.

So far, 20 strikes have killed about 75 people, and the regime has offered no evidence for its claims that the boats were smuggling drugs.

Ignoring the morality of killing people because you suspect them of a crime, the attacks are also bad strategy. When you capture people, you can flip them to get information. You can also capture their phones and other information devices. When you blow the boat up, you can’t do any of that.

“All this strategy is doing is killing people and the same amount of drugs is getting into the U.S.,” the former senior DOJ official said. “You didn’t save anybody or increase the number of people you’re saving in the U.S. It’s extraordinarily shortsighted and I don’t think it gets you the goal you want.”

November 17, 2025 – 12:49 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (15)

Beth Macy Goes Home Again

The author of Dopesick goes back to her small Ohio home town and wonders: Could a troubled teen do today what she did decades ago? Maybe. But the hurdles to jump are higher now.

In the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, a minor character sings a poignant song about hope and hopelessness in the serving class. In “The Miller’s Son“, the verses argue with the chorus, as a kitchen maid alternately dreams of a better life and realizes that the only pleasures available to her are momentary ones that lead nowhere.

Her opening thought is that “I shall marry the miller’s son, pin my hat on a nice piece of property.” Each verse lets the fantasy run a little wilder: “I shall marry the businessman, five fat babies and lots of security”, and then “I shall marry the Prince of Wales, pearls and servants and dressing for festivals.” Of course, if the pleasures of the moment lead to a pregnancy, none of that is possible. But was it ever possible? She ends by bitterly repeating “I shall marry the miller’s son”, recognizing that for her such a match is no more likely than the Prince of Wales.

Beth Macy is 60-something now. She came from a poor family with an alcoholic father in the small town of Urbana, Ohio. She studied hard in school and was a good if unspectacular student. She went to college on a Pell Grant, became a journalist, and (eventually) an author of several best-selling books — one of which, Dopesick, about how corporate greed led to an opioid crisis in small-town America, was made into an Emmy-winning miniseries.

Her life, from one point of view, is the quintessential American rags-to-riches story we like to tell children: Work hard, don’t give up, and you can make something of yourself, no matter how unlikely that may seem at the moment. Abe Lincoln went from a log cabin to the White House; you can too.

But in her new book Paper Girl, Macy goes back to Urbana and (over a period of years) interviews everyone from her relatives to troubled high school students to the mayor. The main question on her mind: Is the path that she walked still open today? Along the way she learns a lot about hopelessness in the White working class, its turn to the political right, and political polarization in general.

Getting a degree. The quick answer to Macy’s original question is: The path is still open, but much narrower and more treacherous than it was in her day.

She follows several of Urbana’s young people who grew up in difficult circumstances, and runs into the same story again and again: They have the talent and ambition to get out of poverty and possibly make it in the wider world, teacher and other mentors are rooting for them, but something comes up. Juggling a job, school, and ongoing family trauma gets to be too much. Or some close relative needs care and has no one else to provide it. Or maybe it’s something as simple as a car repair they have no money to cover; the fifty miles to the state university turns into an insurmountable obstacle.

Almost as bad as the immediate problems is the fatalism they lead to: Of course something would come up. People don’t actually walk the path to education or training and a secure future any more. It was never in the cards for them to marry the miller’s son.

What reminded me of “The Miller’s Son” was how the get-educated path can sound just as improbable as the make-the-NBA or become-a-rap-star path. People have done it, but could you do it? Is it worth making sacrifices (and asking others to make sacrifices for you) to keep that dream alive?

Politics. So what changed between the 1970s and 80s and the 2020s? Part of it is political: As a society, we stopped investing in education. When Macy got her Pell grant, it was a free ticket to college, but it no longer is. Once, Pell grants were how we made real the promise of America, and we told ourselves (truthfully) that a college grad’s increased lifetime earnings would lead to income tax payments that more than reimbursed the government for its generosity. But during the miserly years of the Reagan revolution (and Clinton’s ratification of much of that course change), poor young people in college became just another kind of welfare queen.

And as federal support was drying up, colleges themselves have gotten more expensive, largely because states pay a much smaller part of the costs of their state university systems. Financial aid shifted from grants to loans, so that a graduate might start a career with six-figure debts. And if you didn’t graduate — if, say, something came up that knocked you out of college — you’d have almost as much debt but not the degree to help you pay it off.

Piling on further, the degree itself is not worth as much in the job market. Even a STEM degree might not help you if the job market is looking for some other kind of STEM degree the year you graduate. (For example, the freshmen who chose a computer science major four years ago may not have realized they’d have to compete with AI algorithms for entry-level jobs.)

I’m not sure anybody is asking this question, but they should: What kind of program would it take to make the promise of America real today?

Family. Macy quickly notices the symptoms that students’ lives have changed: High school graduation rates are down. Attendance is down. Ohio’s liberalized homeschooling laws make even those numbers look better than they actually are, as parents who can’t get their children to school and are sick of dealing with truant officers sign a paper saying their child is being homeschooled. No one checks that the child is actually getting an education.

Meanwhile, public schools are losing funds to Ohio’s private-school voucher program, which makes private schools less expensive for the well-off without truly making them accessible to the poor.

Of course, homeschooling only works if home is working. And here we run into the opioid crisis Macy chronicled in Dopesick. She tells stories of teens who either couchsurf or are homeless through high school, because one parent is a drug addict and the other is in jail. It’s hard to say whether there is more sexual abuse than in Macy’s teen years, but there is certainly a lot of it. Paying attention to trigonometry or Shakespeare is probably not at the forefront of many students’ minds.

Many teachers, counselors, and coaches try to step into the breach, but it’s too much for them. A gay man who runs a teen center wrangled a grant out of the state, but couldn’t get the local government to sign off on it because of homophobic fears that he was “recruiting” teens into the gay lifestyle.

Community. In Macy’s day, Urbana was a more integrated community, at least in the sense of class. One way she coped with her dysfunctional family was by spending a lot of time with friends whose families were thriving. But increasingly, Urbana is siloed into the haves and have-nots.

Urbana is basically the country club and the ghetto, and neither group has any idea that the other group exists.

So a present-day Beth Macy may not know about those thriving families or be invited into their homes. She might not hear friends’ professional-class dreams and wonder “Why not me?”

A journalist herself, who began her career writing features about local characters for local newspapers, Macy sees great significance in the decline of local journalism: Urbana’s main local news outlets are Facebook pages and advertising sheets that publish press releases rather than news stories. How do Urbana’s people hear about folks unlike themselves? How do they find out about events happening outside their silo?

The results are twofold: On the one hand, Urbana’s citizens have lost their town as a source of identity, causing them to seek identity in politics or religion. On the other, they have lost a sense of their fellow citizens as Us, and have a corresponding willingness to accept conspiracy theories about Them.

Polarization. Urbana, and in particular its working-class population, is among the victims of globalization. The family business that once was the town’s major employer was long ago sold off, and most of its jobs have gone overseas. When Bill Clinton was pushing NAFTA and similar once-Republican free-trade policies, the promise was that new jobs would replace the old jobs, and that the overall benefit to the American economy would allow us to invest in retraining the displaced workers.

That never worked out. The new jobs weren’t where they needed to be, and the retraining rarely prepared the displaced workers adequately. Most of them wound up working in places like WalMart and never regaining the financial stability the old jobs had offered. Many found ways to retire early or claim disability.

So when Trump tells such people that they’ve been forgotten, he’s not wrong. Much of what he tells them after that is false; the Haitians in nearby Springfield were never eating the local dogs and cats. But having seen them and offered at least some explanation of their situation gets him in the door. When he offers to deport the immigrants who are “stealing their jobs”, that’s at least a plan of some sort.

Now connect that with the sense of hopelessness in the young people: They can’t hope to get the jobs their parents or grandparents had. Getting post-high-school training and going on to land the good jobs that still exist — that seems like a pipe dream, not a realistic plan. Parents can’t look forward to their children having a better life than they did.

One of the questions “Make America Great Again” always raises is “When was the great age that ‘again’ promises to restore?” The obvious answers raise issues of racism and sexism: Was America great during Jim Crow? Was it great when women couldn’t get a credit card without their husbands’ signature? When gays had to be in the closet? When?

And yes, MAGA has always been tainted by a background scent of bigotry. But fundamentally, “again” appeals to the feeling among White working-class families that Americans like them used to have hope. Those dim memories make them feel entitled to hope, and to recognize that they don’t have it now.

Someone must have taken it from them.

That’s the opening that Q-Anon and other conspiracy theories exploit. Macy recounts many conversations with relatives or high school friends who have bought some form of conspiracy theory. When Macy tries to offer facts, she is told “You can’t trust the media.” And she replies “But I am the media.” If this provokes any cognitive dissonance in people who ought to trust her, it’s not enough.

That disconnect is, I think, typical of the college/non-college divide. If you went to college, and even moreso if you went to graduate school, you have a sense of the accessibility of expertise. I may not know Anthony Fauci, for example, but I know biologists who understand infectious diseases. There was a point in my life where I could have gone into biology or climate science or a discipline at the center of some other alleged conspiracy. When would the conspirators have read me in? Why don’t my friends ever tell me about such moments?

But if you didn’t go to college, those disciplines may seem so distant that literally anything could be happening there.

Privilege. I think I also understand now why the MAGA working class is so hostile to any “woke” talk about White privilege or male privilege. Again, racism and sexism probably play some role, but maybe not the main role.

It’s always been the habit or ruling classes to rob Peter to pay Paul. If a ruling class has a debt, chances are it will steal from someone else to pay it, like the United States taking Liberia to offer to freed slaves. I mean, God forbid that those who profited from slavery should shoulder the cost!

Integration of public schools followed a similar pattern: Well-to-do Whites thrust that social experiment onto working-class Whites, while either moving to upscale suburbs or sending their own children to private schools.

So if recognition of privilege takes hold, who will be asked to pay the debt owed to the un-privileged groups? White or male MAGAts anticipate being handed the bill themselves, and not being able to pass it on to the billionaires. And they’re probably not wrong.

How to win them back? For too long, Democrats have tried to depend on Truth to win out: Climate change is real. Privilege exists. Immigrants benefit the economy. Cutting rich people’s taxes never works out for those who aren’t rich. And so on.

What we miss is that Truth will not win out if the Truth is hopeless. If the Truth is: “You’re screwed. Try to get used to it”, that Truth will not win elections for us, even if the other party offers transparent nonsense.

We need to recognize the hopeless parts of America and begin speaking to them. We need to begin offering plans for them and their children and their communities to have futures they can believe in.

November 17, 2025 – 11:23 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s been one of those weeks where I have to wonder which news stories are supposed to distract me from which other news stories, and whether I’ve taken the bait. But OK, I largely fell down the Epstein rabbit hole this week, watching the twists and turns that last night finally caused Trump himself to urge House Republicans to vote to release the files.

To balance that, I was also reading a book of long-term significance: Paper Girl by Beth Macy. Macy returned to her small Ohio hometown asking how easy it would be for a present-day Beth Macy to escape small-town poverty and build a professional-class life for herself. Along the way, she uncovered a lot about the roots of MAGA in the White working class and the sources of our present polarization.

The featured post will go into the lessons I learned from Macy’s book. It should be out between 10 and 11 EST.

The weekly summary will go into this week’s Epstein developments, with an eye to whether they show Trump’s bid for autocracy faltering. I’ll also discuss the aftermath of the government shutdown, what’s been going on in Chicago and Charlotte, the week’s legal news, and a few other things. I hope to get that out about noon or slightly after.

November 17, 2025 – 8:33 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Law and Order

Our residents have been attacked by a lawless entity, and we can’t just stand by and pretend this is acceptable.

– Mayor Daniel Biss of Evanston,
commenting on Border Patrol attacks on Evanston residents

This week’s featured post is “What would a Republican healthcare plan look like?” I feel good about this post. Even if you usually skip the longer articles, you might want to read this one.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Tuesday’s elections show that the clock is ticking on Trump’s bid for autocracy. If he allows fair elections in 2026, he’s going to lose control of Congress. Meanwhile, his thugs continue to abuse the citizens of Chicago.
  • Climate change. The COP30 summit is meeting in Brazil this week, with no US participation.
  • Gaza. The next step in the Gaza peace plan is to assemble a “stabilization force” of peace-keeping troops from other Muslim countries. The UAE has opted out. Turkey wants in, but Israel is dubious. Meanwhile, Netanyahu pledges to enforce the ceasefire “with an iron fist“.
  • Ukraine. The Russian advance continues, but it’s very slow and costly.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the Democrats’ sweeping election victory

Every major contested race — Virginia’s and New Jersey’s governors and other statewide offices, NYC’s mayor, the California’s Prop 50 — went the Democrats’ way, usually with high turnout and by unexpectedly large margins.

Many words have been written and spoken about what this means. To me, it comes down to this: In the rosy scenarios where the Trump autocracy fails and American democracy survives, winning big in 2025 was a key step. An autocrat’s biggest strength is the myth of his invincibility. You go along with what he wants because there seems to be no other choice.

Certainly that has been the case inside the Republican Party. For 10 months, Congress has virtually ceased to be a factor in American government, because the Republican majorities are so cowed by Trump. The Senate approved cabinet nominees (like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr.) that everyone knew were unqualified and probably dangerous. Both houses have sat mutely while Trump usurps Congress’ power of the purse and its war powers. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill needed near-unanimous Republican support to pass, and got it — despite the fact that it will take Medicaid coverage away from millions of Republican voters. The House has simply gone home for six weeks rather than vote on subpoenaing the Epstein files.

After Tuesday, Republicans in elected offices have to wonder if they’re committing political suicide by following Trump so blindly.

The big message comes from New Jersey, where Trump’s 2024 gains among Hispanic and Asian voters vanished. Passaic County is 43% Hispanic, according to the 2020 census. But it went for Trump by 7% in 2024. Tuesday, it went Democratic by 26%.

Statewide, Trump lost New Jersey by less than 6%, but Mikie Sherill won by more than double that margin. A similar 6% swing in 2026 elections could flip a lot of Republican seats to the Democrats.

Of course, there is a downside to these results as well: Now that’s it’s obvious that MAGA candidates won’t hold control of Congress in free and fair 2026 elections, the pressure to steal those elections grows.

I think it’s important not to get caught up in the Democratic polarization narrative the mainstream media is pushing. Yes, Mamdani won as a Democratic Socialist, while Sherill and Spanberger won as moderate Democrats. I don’t see this as a problem.

The unifying principles are to be authentic, to recognize that a large percentage of the electorate feels poorly served by our economic system and left out of our politics, and to say to those people: “I see you, and I want to do specific things to help you.”

The specific policies, and whether they are leftist or centrist, are far less important.

Above all, don’t get caught up in the Socialism vs Capitalism argument, as if these were two Manichean forces inevitably at each other’s throats. We are all socialists and we are all capitalists. Do you support your town having a public fire department? To that extent, you’re a socialist. Do you want your town’s restaurants to compete on price and quality, letting the local market decide which ones thrive? To that extent, you’re a capitalist.

The issue is where to draw the line between the public and private sectors. That’s a serious and important question, but it has many viable answers and many opportunities for compromise that you’ll miss if you see nothing but capitalist/socialist polarization.

A lot of people are angsting over the conflicting poll results: Trump’s approval continues to sink, but the public’s opinion of the Democratic Party hasn’t improved. I don’t think it’s that mysterious: In most of the country, you can’t win just by being a generic Democrat. People don’t connect the Democrats with any particular message, so you have to bring your own message. You also have to be an individual and project a personality people identify with.

We might go into next November with the polls still close on whether people want Republicans or Democrats to control Congress. But if Democrats do their job right, people will look at the Democrat running in their district and find something they like or are even excited by.

Too much fun to pass up: A kindergarten teacher responds to Trump’s tantrum after losing Tuesday.

and the shutdown

Which will probably end in a few days as the longest in history, breaking the record from Trump’s first term. Senate Republicans got the exact number of Democrats they needed to pass their “compromise”, which amounts to Democrats surrendering without getting anything meaningful in return.

The deal:

  • funds the full government through January 30
  • funds the Departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs for the full fiscal year (i.e., until October 1)
  • funds SNAP (i.e. food stamps) for the full fiscal year
  • gives federal workers fired during the shutdown their jobs back and prevents further layoffs through January 30
  • grants backpay to all federal workers furloughed or working without pay during the shutdown

What it doesn’t do: anything to help the tens of millions of Americans whose ObamaCare premiums are going to skyrocket for 2026. Majority Leader Thune has promised a vote on a bill to preserve the subsidies that kept those plans affordable, but that’s a political concession rather than anything real. Even if the Senate passes that measure, Speaker Johnson has said it won’t get a vote in the House. So basically, the Senate vote will frame the issue, positioning Democrats as the ones who voted for it and Republicans as the ones who blocked it. But it won’t actually help anyone pay for health insurance.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, one of the eight Democrats who voted for the bill, exemplified the defeatist attitude Democrats so often bring to negotiations: “This was the only deal on the table.” The Republican position is what it is, and Democrats just have to adjust to it.

The Democrats’ surrender came in spite of all indications that they were winning the political battle of the shutdown: Polls showed Trump and the Republicans were taking more of the blame, and Democrats overwhelmingly won Tuesday’s elections.

Josh Marshall recognizes all that, but finds this silver lining:

When the time came Democrats fought. They held out for 40 days, the longest shutdown standoff in history. They put health care at the center of the national political conversation and inflicted a lot of damage on Trump. At 40 days they could no longer hold their caucus together. And we got this.

That’s a sea change in how the congressional party functions. And that’s a big deal. Many people see it as some kind of epic disaster and are making all the standard threats about not voting or not contributing or whatever. That’s just not what I see. It’s a big change in the direction of the fight we need in the years to come that just didn’t go far enough. Yet.

… Meanwhile, keep purging all the folks who can’t get with the new program. If a senator is from a comfortably Blue State and wasn’t vocally in favor of fighting this out, primary them — toss them overboard. After March, Dick Durbin realized he needed to retire. Let’s see some more retirements. But don’t tell me nothing has changed or that this is some cataclysmic disaster. It’s not. This accomplished a lot. It demonstrated that Democrats can go to the mat when the public is behind them and not pay a political price. It dramatically damaged Donald Trump. It cued up the central arguments of the 2026 campaign. It just didn’t go far enough.

Meanwhile, passing the House is not a done deal yet. It’ll be interesting to see how many Democrats hold out, and how many Republicans think even this victory isn’t big enough.

And the House will have to come back into session to end the shutdown. Will Johnson find some new excuse not to seat Adelita Grijalva? Will he violate House rules to avoid a vote on subpoenaing the Epstein files? Expect a lot of soap opera in the next few weeks.

and Trump’s violent thugs

Don’t miss this interview, where Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss talks to a woman who was victimized by Border Patrol agents in an Evanston incident that has gone viral. “They’re more afraid of us than we are of them,” she says.

What they — ICE and the Border Patrol — are afraid of is not violence, but people following their vehicles, blowing whistles around their agents, and making videos of what they do. Biss was also interviewed by Democracy Now (the link at the top of the page) in a segment that included video of major ICE abuses in Evanston.

Well, on Friday, which was, by the way, Halloween, ICE and CBP were all over Evanston. It was a terrifying day. I couldn’t go two minutes without a notification coming up on my phone: They’re at this corner; they’re at this corner; they’re grabbing this landscaper, and so forth. And they were doing what they usually do these days, which is drive around town looking for someone working on a lawn whose skin is not white, and grab that person and abduct them. And so, the rapid responders were out in force, and there was a lot of activity, and I was driving around trying to do what I could.

And then, in the early afternoon, the following thing happened. The vehicle, which was driven by a CBP agent, for whatever that’s worth, that had been driving around the region and was being followed by residents — which is what happens all the time because our community is rising up against this invasion — they decided they don’t want scrutiny, they don’t want to be followed, they don’t want to be observed, they don’t want to be videotaped, and, most of all, they don’t want to be criticized. They appear to have acted deliberately to cause an accident. They jammed on the brakes right after going through an intersection and to force the car following them to rear end them, which, of course, created a scene. And there were people who gathered, who were watching and who were yelling at them and blowing their whistles and screaming. And then they appear to have just started beating people up for no reason. And folks may have seen these videos, that have gotten a lot of attention, including one where they’ve got this young man on the ground, and his head is on the asphalt, and they’re literally punching him in the head. And then, after a while of this, they jammed three people into their vehicle, abducted them, drove them around, and eventually, later on, released them.

If you’re not familiar with the Chicago area, you may not realize how incredible this whole scene is. Evanston is the lakefront suburb just north of Chicago. It is the home of Northwestern University, and in general is very upscale. It’s not a place where ICE or CBP should be looking for “the worst of the worst”, as Trump promised during the 2024 campaign. So if you look at what Trump’s thugs are doing and say, “That would never happen here, in my town”, think again.

and the Supreme Court’s tariff hearing

I have been deeply skeptical of this Supreme Court’s ability to defend the Constitution against Trump. In particular, I’ve doubted they will apply the same standards to Trump that they did to Biden. They invented the “major questions doctrine” and greatly expanded the “non-delegation doctrine” precisely to limit Biden’s executive authority. Now, those same standards clearly apply to Trump’s sweeping tariffs, but I’ve doubted the Court will bother to notice.

I’m less sure about that skepticism now. Wednesday’s oral arguments showed some of the conservative justices — especially Gorsuch — worrying about major questions and non-delegation. The issue in a nutshell is that tariffs are taxes, and the taxing power belongs so intrinsically to Congress that it can’t be delegated to the President.

Gorsuch raised the question of whether Congress could also delegate its power to declare war, and later wondered what a more liberal president could do with the tariff power: Suppose a Democratic president declared a climate emergency and tariffed the importation of internal combustion engines?

You can’t always deduce justices’ final opinion from the questions they ask, but I expected the conservative justices to be creating room for themselves to give Trump what he wants, as they so often do. I didn’t see that.

The Court also won’t be reversing its same-sex marriage decision this term.

and you also might be interested in …

Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement from Congress when her current term ends in January.

By any standard, Pelosi is a giant in congressional history. She was the first female speaker, and the most effective speaker of either party in my lifetime. She took criticism from the left because of her broadly centrist policies, but I can’t remember her blocking any liberal proposal if the votes were there to pass it.

Retirement, like death, is one of those moments that calls for a magnanimous response. But of course, Trump doesn’t have a magnanimous bone in his body. He responded to the news by calling Pelosi an “evil woman” and saying that “she did the country a great service by retiring”.

I’m going to display my own lack of a magnanimous response by commenting on the death of Dick Cheney. I won’t rehash all the things I fault him for, but I regret that now he will never stand trial at the ICC in The Hague.

When 60 Minutes asked Trump about pardoning crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, he claimed not to know who Zhao is. The company Zhao founded has made deals with the Trump family’s crypto venture, but that couldn’t have anything to do with the pardon, could it?

I’d like to ask Speaker Johnson which option is worse: that Trump is lying about a corrupt pardon, that he signs pardons without knowing who the people are, or that his dementia has progressed to the point that he can’t remember the decisions he makes.

Here’s a cartoonist’s take on how media coverage has changed in the last 50 years:

and let’s close with something natural

The Guardian has a spectacular gallery of nature photography.

November 10, 2025 – 12:49 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

What would a Republican healthcare plan look like?

The government can cut healthcare spending if it tempts people into gambling with their lives.

The longest government shutdown in American history came down to one issue: healthcare. Republicans have been persistent about dismantling the ObamaCare model, claiming that they have a different approach that will yield better care for less cost. And so the subsidies that kept policies on the ObamaCare marketplace affordable have been allowed to lapse for 2026 policies. Democrats tried to reverse that as a condition of reopening the government, but appear to have failed.

Of course, Trump has been promising to spell out a “beautiful” healthcare plan since 2015, and we’ve still seen nothing. Critics say Republicans don’t really have a plan, which is true in the sense that they don’t have a written piece of legislation that can be compared to the Affordable Care Act, apples to apples. (They also have nothing that could take effect in time to replace the 2026 ObamaCare policies they have now made unaffordable for millions of Americans.) Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene makes an even stronger claim, that even within the Republican House conference, Mike Johnson has not yet presented “a single policy idea”. Speaker Johnson counters that Republicans have “pages and pages and pages of ideas of how to reform healthcare”, and has pointed to a report the Republican Study Committee wrote in 2019.

It’s natural and probably appropriate to be cynical about that claim, but for a few minutes let’s take Speaker Johnson seriously. What’s in that report? It’s 58 pages, most of which are spent criticizing ObamaCare. But it does get around to presenting some ideas on pages 32-50: things like health savings accounts, allowing a wider range of choices in insurance, changes to the way employer-paid premiums are taxed, and so on — enough individual notions to get you confused about the overall picture. But basically it comes down to this: They want you to gamble with your life and health.

In order to understand their proposals, let’s lay out the context: starting with the pre-ObamaCare situation, then what ObamaCare did, and then the ways Republicans have broken ObamaCare since.

Before ObamaCare. When the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, about 16% of Americans — 48 million in all — did not have health insurance, and the number was growing every year. Tens of millions of others (the exact number depends on your definitions) had some form of “junk insurance” — a policy that worked just fine for relatively minor things like a broken arm, but would leave you in a lurch if you developed some really expensive condition.

People were uninsured for a variety of reasons: Some couldn’t get insurance because they had pre-existing conditions like cancer or heart disease that made them bad risks. Others were young and healthy and saw no reason to pay significant amounts of money for care they believed they would never use. (I did this myself at age 21 in the summer between my undergraduate and graduate-school coverage. Looking back, I feel foolish about that gamble, but I got away with it.) For others, health insurance had to compete with rent and food for their limited resources. Or perhaps their health was not so bad as to make them uninsurable, but bad enough that the rates they were offered were astronomical.

Junk insurance came in a variety of forms. Maybe, if you had survived some expensive illness like cancer, it would specifically exempt any condition related to a return of that illness. Maybe it would have an annual or a lifetime cap on what it would pay out. (If you had a debilitating disease like MS, or a child born with significant birth defects — as my college roommate did — you might go over that lifetime cap in just a few years. Then you’d be uninsurable.) Maybe it would have to be renewed every year or two, giving the insurance company a chance to drop you if it wasn’t making money on your policy.

In short, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of Americans lived with the worry that if they needed significant medical care, they wouldn’t be able to pay for it.

The roots of ObamaCare. This healthcare anxiety is a uniquely American problem, because other rich countries don’t regard medical expense as a personal responsibility, and instead pay for it through some national system. Statistics argue in favor of that approach: Among wealthy nations, the US stands out both for its per capita spending on health care, and for its low life expectancy. So we pay more, but get worse results.

But national healthcare is “socialism”, which is anathema to American conservatives. So in an attempt to stop the US from opting for a European-style national health system, the conservative Heritage Foundation created a different model in a 1989 report. The basic idea was that you achieve 100% coverage through a private-insurance system by

  • mandating that individuals have insurance
  • forcing insurance companies to cover everybody who wants their coverage
  • subsidizing insurance for those who can’t afford it

That model was the basis for the RomneyCare plan that Massachusetts adopted in 2006 under Republican Governor Mitt Romney. RomneyCare in turn begat ObamaCare in 2010.

So this is an important thing to understand about the politics of healthcare: Republicans have had a hard time coming up with a healthcare plan because Obama stole their plan. He left them with a difficult choice: They could have declared victory, but that would have meant joining forces with the Black guy in the White House, which was unimaginable.

I have occasionally wondered how Mitt Romney would have fared in 2012 if he could have run on his record as the Father of ObamaCare and general solver-of-impossible-problems. But this was not to be.

What Obama did. In addition to the Heritage Foundation’s mandate-and-subsidize idea, Obama and Romney recognized the patchwork way that most Americans were already covered: If you were old, you had Medicare; if you were poor, you had Medicaid; children got covered under CHIP; veterans had the VA; people with good jobs got coverage through their employers. American healthcare was like a big bed with a lot of small blankets that covered most people, but not everybody.

So a second fundamental idea of ObamaCare was to make the blankets bigger: Insist that companies employing more than 50 people full time had to offer health insurance, expand Medicaid so that it covered the working poor as well as the destitute, and so on.

Even the bigger blankets wouldn’t stretch to cover everybody, so the ObamaCare exchanges were created: marketplaces where individuals could buy their own policies, without regard to their previous health record, and with a sliding scale of subsidies depending on income.

The mandate-and-subsidize system only works if the term “insurance” actually means something, so ObamaCare also defined what private insurance had to cover. In particular, this made junk insurance illegal. Annual and lifetime caps were gone, as were provisions not to cover certain common problems. Many people who had junk insurance didn’t realize the risks they were taking, and resented the fact that their cheap policies were now illegal. This is how Obama’s claim that “If you like your plan you can keep” got picked out as the Lie of the Year for 2013. (Personally, I liked my employer-provided insurance, and I kept it.)

And it all sort of worked. As you can see in the graph above, the number of uninsured began to drop after 2010, dropped more when the exchanges came online in 2014, and didn’t start rising again until Republicans began breaking the system during the first Trump administration. And these numbers don’t give the ACA credit for the number of people whose junk insurance was replaced by real insurance.

John McCain turns thumbs-down on repealing the ACA with no replacement.

How Republicans have sabotaged ObamaCare. Republicans have tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act again and again ever since it was passed — at least 63 times in all. Their effort always foundered on the same point: Repealing the ACA would instantly create about 20 million uninsured Americans, and the Republicans had no plan for dealing with them. The closest they came was in 2017, with the slogan “Repeal and Replace”, where the “replace” half was always left vague. That vote came down to John McCain’s famous thumbs-down moment.

But failing to repeal didn’t mean failing to sabotage. The most obvious bit of sabotage was the ultimately successful attempt to end the individual insurance mandate, which assessed a penalty on people who went uninsured. At first they tried to undo it through the courts, and nearly succeeded. The Supreme Court overturned decades worth of interpretation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to find that it didn’t allow the penalty. But John Roberts saved the individual mandate by reinterpreting its penalty as a tax.

But Roberts also sabotaged the system by not allowing the federal government to withdraw all Medicaid funding from states that refused to expand Medicaid. This created a two-tier system where some states expanded Medicaid and others didn’t. Gradually, even red states like Oklahoma and Missouri expanded their programs, but 10 states are still holding out.

Republicans finished killing off the individual mandate in the Trump tax cut of 2017, which didn’t eliminate the penalty, but set it to zero. This created a hole in the system: If you’re healthy right now, you can save money by going uninsured, remaining confident that you can get insurance after you develop some health problem.

The RSC’s 2019 report castigates ObamaCare for this hole in the system, which the Republicans created themselves.

Unfortunately, because the ACA created a perverse incentive for people to forgo insurance until they developed an illness, costs across the board rose dramatically, which required higher premiums on the existing plans in the individual market exchanges. Not surprisingly, the premium spikes further repelled healthy individuals.

How Republicans want to “fix” ObamaCare. If you don’t think ObamaCare is working, the obvious way to fix it continues to be a universal single-payer healthcare system, like Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All. Countries with such systems continue to spend less on healthcare than Americans do, while getting better results in terms of life expectancy.

But Medicare for All is still socialism, which is still anathema. So what can be done?

The report is full of wonderful-sounding words like “choice” and “freedom”, but the essence of it comes down to this: The healthcare system can save enormous amounts of money if it exposes people to more risk.

I’ll give a personal example here: In 2023 I had a scary incident where I lost vision in my right eye for about five minutes. It was like looking at a gray screen. Afterwards, I returned to normal, as if nothing had happened. I’ve had no recurrences in the two years since.

All indications point to this incident being just one of those annoying brain things without long-term significance, like migraine headaches. But it could have been a stroke or a blood clot or a tumor. Medicare spent an huge amount of money checking all that stuff out. I didn’t keep track, but I’m sure it’s well into the tens of thousands.

And it all could have been saved if someone had said, “It’s probably nothing. Let’s ignore it and see if it happens again.”

Now, if some government or insurance bureaucrat says that, it’s horrible. They’re telling me to gamble with my life. But (from the Republican point of view) if I say it, that’s great. So that’s the heart of the Republican program: incentivize people to gamble with their lives.

They do this in a lot of different ways. For one, junk insurance is back.

[I]n order to provide Americans with health insurance options that fit their individualized needs and do not add unnecessary expenses, the RSC plan would undo the ACA’s regulations on essential health benefits, annual and lifetime limits, preventive care cost-sharing, dependent coverage, and actuarial value. … The cumulative effect of these changes would result in Americans being provided with more insurance choices that are personalized to their needs and available at affordable rates.

(“Actuarial value” is essentially a limit on the insurance company’s profit margin.) So if you have a strained budget, a cheaper plan that risks your future if you wind up with some expensive condition is “personalized” for you. It “fits your individualized needs”.

Several provisions are designed to promote individual plans that can be “personalized” in this way. The biggest is to change the tax laws that allow employers to deduct what they spend on employees’ health insurance. With ObamaCare’s employer mandate also gone, this will have the effect of ending a lot of employer-supplied health insurance, pushing all those people into the individual market.

The other big “personalization” tactic is to emphasize Health Savings Accounts. Lots of people have those now for medical incidentals like glasses. But under the Republican proposal, HSAs are cut loose.

Under current law, health savings accounts plans cannot be used in conjunction with plans that are not a “qualified high-deductible health plan.” This unnecessarily hamstrings the ability for millions of Americans to access this important savings tool. Accordingly, the RSC would eliminate this requirement to allow health savings accounts to be utilized even if a person does not have a health insurance plan.

So you can go without insurance and pay your own health expenses out of an HSA. This is the ultimate individualization: Imagine me with an HSA instead of Medicare. My vision blanks out for five minutes, and I’m left with a choice: Do I want to drain my HSA checking out things that probably are OK? Or do I want to just risk it?

The limits of freedom. The unexamined issue in the Republican plan is class. Yes, you have “choices”, but only if you can afford to pay for them. The poorer I am, the more likely I am to risk a junk policy to save money, and the more likely I am to forego testing or treatment if I think it probably works out for me. Those are “choices”, in the same way that poor people “choose” to save money on rent by living in their cars.

Of course, when you’re talking about 350 million people, “probably” leads to many, many cases where the improbable happens. So these personalized decisions will lead to large numbers of medical bankruptcies, and some non-trivial number of unnecessary deaths.

The other thing “freedom” doesn’t take into account is the burden of making good decisions, especially decisions about big issues that involve many details that only experts in the field really understand. As we saw in the real-estate crash of 2008, “freedom” in the mortgage market led to people signing documents they didn’t really understand and losing their homes. More recently, “freedom” from vaccine mandates is allowing diseases like measles and polio to come back.

And if we are all making these decisions as individuals, the success of insurance or healthcare-providing companies depends on their ability to influence those decisions. Think about all the ads you see this time of year boosting “Medicare Advantage” programs (which provide enormous advantages to the companies offering them). That kind of marketing could be round-the-clock for every kind of medical decision. Just as the system forced us to make more decisions, all the corporate powers of persuasion would be focused on manipulating us into choosing badly.

All that marketing would cost an enormous amount of money, which ultimately would have to be reflected in the prices we pay. Would it eat up all the “savings” that result from taking bigger risks with your life? Maybe.

November 10, 2025 – 11:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The two big stories of this week are difficult to reconcile: Democrats won handily in nearly all of Tuesday’s elections, and so Senate Democrats surrendered Sunday night in the shutdown battle.

One thing the 40-something-day shutdown did accomplish was to frame healthcare as the major difference between the parties. Democrats either want to keep patching up ObamaCare or push for a more complete national healthcare system, while Republicans want to junk ObamaCare in favor of some “cheaper, better” care system that somehow never quite comes together into a proposal that could be voted on and implemented.

This week’s featured post takes seriously Speaker Johnson’s claim the Republicans have “pages and pages” of healthcare ideas, which were contained in a 2019 report by the Republican Study Committee in the House. I read that report and I’ll be abstracting what I see as the underlying principles: (1) You can save money on healthcare if you gamble with people’s lives, and (2) that gamble is OK if you incentivize people to place the bets themselves.

In order to make sense of the RSC report’s proposals, I’ll have to summarize a lot of context, including the pre-ObamaCare problems and how ObamaCare tried to solve them. It’s going to be a long read, but I hope you’ll find in illuminating. That post should be out between 10 and 11 EST.

The weekly summary will of course cover the elections and the shutdown. I’ll also look at what’s been happening in Chicago, the Supreme Court’s discussion of Trump’s tariffs, and a few other things. It should be out before 1.

November 10, 2025 – 8:30 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)