Friday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Friday, November 28, 2025
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29 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
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So it is black Friday Will we be discussing current affairs at OTB or be out shopping?
I purchased an external CD Rom/DVD drive. The order is ready for pick up at Best Buy. I’ll probably go there tomorrow. That is the extent of my shopping.
DW is going to the outlet mall after attending morning mass.
Otherwise I’m in between writing books. I’m playing lots of Strat-0-Matic baseball while listening to music. Will it be the Les Miserables or Diana Ross this morning? I will be taking my 91-year-old neighbor Raymond to Publix at 9:30. Since DW and I are leaving on a cruise two days from now, I won’t be getting much groceries.
The book I’m reading right now- The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I just started it but so far so good.
So when a white guy shoots up a synagogue or a school or a nightclub and murders as many people as he can, we must not talk about any of the underlying issues, like racism or easy access to weapons because that would be politicizing a tragedy, and it’s just too soon for that.
When a Muslim refugee shoots a couple of National Guard soldiers, we must immediately use this as an excuse to ram through our desired assault on all non-citizens.
Somehow it’s never “too early” for Trump and Miller.
@Bill Jempty:
Why?
I have the grand girls and some cousins here until Sunday.
A welcome distraction from the rest of the world.
Right now the youngest and I are watching Hilda and eating Oreo cereal, because I am the best Birdie, which is the grandma name they chose for me.
Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.
@EddieInCA: Because I sometimes like to watch DVDs on my computer. It also lets me still have the option of burning cds to my computer hard drive.
Example #79 of why I love my 2005 Toyota Matrix.
When trying to get out of my car this morning, the inner side driver’s side door handle broke off in my hand. For a few seconds I thought I was trapped in my car. Solution- I lowered the window and reached out and opened the door using the outside handle.
2005 Toyota Matrix door levers and the panels around are all brittle and easily break. I’ve had to get these things fixed before but never the handle.
My mechanic is busy and we’re going away next week. So the repair won’t be done till after December 7th. That’s if I don’t just buy a new car. Dear Wife says I should do that. Considering how much I drive the Matrix, 11,000 miles since getting it 6 years ago, do I really need a new one? The Matrix has its quirks but it runs well.
Apparently Trump has admitted, as I’ve suspected, that the real goal for tariffs is to eliminate the income tax. Why? Because Trump pays income taxes, or at least spends a lot of money and effort avoiding them, and that he pays for tariffs seems impossible for him to grasp. Golf courses and crypto schemes aren’t major direct importers. You might ask does this plan make economic sense? No. Does it even make arithmetic sense? No. What’s your point? It’s a Trump plan.
@gVOR10:
He’s been braying about that from the start of his second usurpation.
The math’s easy to do: how much does the US import in total, and what’s the federal budget? Then determine the tariff rate on the first amount to reach the second. The answer is crazy high, even if you discount outlays made from the Social Security fund.
By now “tariff” is a mystic incantation or spell. Other countries pay it! It will eliminate the income tax! It will bring back good jobs! It will let us make “deals” with every country! It will mow your lawn and trim your hedges!
Unfortunately for El Taco, scientists have not invented magic yet.
I tried an experiment last weekend. I figured a sauce that has a strong flavor would go well on top of something, so long as the sauce is used sparingly. So I used more garlic than was needed for the bean sauce. By itself, it tastes too strongly of garlic. On top the stuffed milanesas, it works rather well.
I’ve some left over, so I’ll try on tomorrow’s breakfast.
@gVOR10:
ON the other hand, maybe the tariffs are a strategy to wipe out Mexico’s drug cartels.
I mean, get the tariffs high enough, and maybe the cartels will switch to smuggling European products into the US.
@gVOR10:
Good luck with that cunning plan, Mr Trump.
As total US imports value was $3.850 trillion in 2023, and total Federal individual income tax revenue $2.43 trillion, I forseee problems.
The higher you drive tariffs, the greater the likely import substitution, where replaceable, and the greater the inflation drivers in all areas of import sensitive pricing, substitutable or not.
It’s the economics of a rather dim infant.
@Kathy:
iirc a significant slice of the business some Mafia families were originally based on was smuggling European products back in the 1920’s.
In addition to alcohol, gambling, and “protection” extortion, obvs.
Kathy:
Thanks for the link earlier this week to Michael Green My Life Is a Lie
Much to consider.
But something that occurs to me:
A similar pattern of eating up nominal incomes by soaring non-food costs has happened all across the OECD since c.2000.
Housing costs have rocketed (especially in the UK).
And even where healthcare has been moderated by national schemes, or childcare subsidised, or college level education, it seems other costs have risen to eat up real incomes.
There seems to be general pattern (perhaps related to rising labour costs and capital scarcity?) way beyond just the US and it’s own particular factors.
Which is helping to drive the politics of the far-right (and to a lesser extent, the far-left) in many countries.
Green’s analysis is a useful starting point.
But I suspect there’ someting more fundamental going on.
Perhaps relating to the increasing capture of profit by capital in addition to Baumol-mode “cost disease”.
And the hangover from the end of the 1945-1970 period of cheap energy and massive productivity gains from optimising maechanised manufacturing?
Combine these factors with a lot of “consumer goods satiation”, the end of the fossil fuels econonic model, the aparrent end of “Moore’s Law” as a driver, and the current AI tech craze looking more and more like a tulip awaiting a frost, and the current global economy (not just in the OECD, but also China, Russia, Gulf, etc) looks in dire need of quite fundamental restructuring.
The experience of history is that those currently doing very well out the current model (tech-bros, fossil fuel investors, the CCP, the sheikhs, the oligarchs) are going to to do their damndest to ensure either the the continuance of the current model, and/or they can parlay current positions into future advantage.
@JohnSF:
It’s like sin taxes. When they pass, the politicos crow about how it will drive down consumption and raise lots of revenue. What happens is some consumption goes down and some new revenue comes in, but neither in the amounts predicted.
@JohnSF:
High tariffs and other import barriers are huge incentives for smuggling. In Mexico up to the 90s, when we joined the WTO and signed NAFTA, smuggling stuff from the US was big business. From Europe, too, but to a lesser extent. Far easier to smuggle by land than by sea or air.
The drug cartels were small then. I don’t know if any group or groups dominated the business. I know there were a lot of small freelancers. I knew several.
On the topic of smuggling, a crime that the mere suspicion of which now carries a death sentence.
Pete “Kill Them All!” Hegseth might one day find himself in trouble for this.
@Bill Jempty:
I have an external DVD/CD drive for similar reasons.
In my case, I have literally thousands of music CD’s, that in a suprising amount of cases are not available via streaming services, and I want to rip to a network drive.
Getting round to doing them all keeps tending to fall off the bottom of the “to do” list, though.
@Kathy:
In the EU the end of tariifs and frontier duties have killed of a lot of smuggling trades.
By no means all: diffrences in eg state alcohol tax still prompt a lot of “private enterprise” esp re Scandinavia.
@dazedandconfused:
And this is why the UK, Dutch, and French, who are still significant players in the Caribbean, are now refusing to share intel with the US on drug smuggling.
They do not want to risk domestic legal liability on assisting US “summary executions”.
@JohnSF:
Thanks, But actually the link was provide by @Modulo Myself
What I wonder is that just about every western country, including many in Latín America, had their version of a post war Trente Glorieuses. I know in the US this began to deteriorate in the 70s (see Nixon’s price controls and the infamous oil shocks), which brought about changes that made things worse (ie broad deregulation, lower corporate taxes, lower taxes on the wealthy, etc.)
Now, one explanation I’ve heard about the US in particular, is that the country had little competition from Europe and Asia, as these regions suffered heavy damage in WWII and had to rebuild first.
Makes sense. But why then the Trente Glorieuses in much of western Europe?
What I think is clear, is that focusing on share value, and the accumulation of capital in a few hands, are not the way to go.
@dazedandconfused:
I don’t think it’s legal in a war or combat situation to order people killed when they pose no threat. I’m 99% sure it’s against the various Geneva conventions. Don’t the US armed forces have a duty to take prisoners?
@JohnSF:
To this day, certain US cigarette brands are smuggled into Mexico for sale in the informal economy. A very popular one are Camels without filter.
@Kathy:
My aplogies to Modulo Myself
My feeble old brain fails again, lol.
The rebuilding after WW2 was a massive part of it, first for US exports (and low cost imports) then for the European and Japanese recovery booms, and the massive transition of the European economies enabled by the EEC, which both enabled internal growth (the transition of much of the European peasant hinterland to commercial prosperity was enormous) and massive gains for US trade and investment.
And the European transition from coal to a oil/gas/nuclear based economy.
And the massive latent consumer demand.
But that model has run out of road.
And as you say, quartertly based shareholder value optimisation and elite capital accumualtion is also now sub-optimal.
To the extent that it beginning to eat itself in valuation bubbles and obvious capital misallocation.
imho, lower regulation was useful in the context of the times (late 1970’s to c. 2010?) but expecting the same approcah to continue to be useful in very different current contexts of growing consumer satiation, static energy costs, and lack of massive material productivity gains, is like expecting trees to grow to the sky.
@Kathy:
And Japan.
I think both Thomas Piketty and Peter Turchin see our situation as a cycle of wealth/power accumulation. Middle and lower wages have not kept up with productivity growth.
Because electricity rates are not high enough
You know, state control of industry is called COMMUNISM!!
Although, to be fair, fascist states like Adolf Muxk’s Germany were also fond of ordering private business around.
TL;DR: El Taco’s order to keep a coal burning electricity plant open in Michigan is driving up costs for utilities in various states part of that grid. even though the owners were about to retire the plant, even though it doesn’t work at capacity because the grid has excess power.
On top of that, there’s this gem:
@gVOR10:
It’s all a similar pattern.
Europe and Japan had both been heavily damaged by WW2.
But also both had HUGE potential consumer demand, and productive potential, that a period of relatively free trade, fairly cheap energy, massive investment capital, and generally applicable manufacturing productivity gains could unlock.
Now we have a none of those things in the OECD countries, and to make it worse, Trump tariffs wrecking the trade assumptions, and a capital misallocation crisis due to AI, and to state deficits eating funds and failing on the infrstructure investment basis.
Plus the gobbling of “middle class” consumption and savings capacity by the generalised “basic costs crisis”.
It brings to my mind the way the Medieaval economy “hit the wall” of agrarian expansion, and in much of Europe solidified into the legally exploitative neo-feudalism of the ancien Regime.
By a quirk of fate, Britain avoided that and instituted an agricultural/commercial/industrial alternative (that was often even worse for some, but …) and opened an escape hatch.
The point being: existing dominant groups always tend to seek ways to continue dominance, even if in retrospect they were being bloody stupid, even from a basis of their own longer-term advantage.
The task of sucessful governance is, quite often, to slap the elites upside the head and make them realise they are doing themselves no favours.
See British politics of the 19th century, US re FDR, etc.
@gVOR10:
And perhaps more impotantly, with various costs.
As I said above, it seems to be a general phenomenon across the OECD.
Housing cost have soared.
And even where eg healthcare costs are socialised, other costs have increasingly eaten up the margin of disposable income.
For a variety of reasons, there seems to be a general pattern of cost v income erosion over all OECD economies.
And this seems to be driving political silliness in various countries.
@Kathy:
Besides it being beyond cowardly to kill helpless people, it’s poor LE. He should’ve wanted the survivors alive to question for intel.
@dazedandconfused:
Unless, of course, what they might tell contradicts the adminstration narrative.
I have been told of cases, by participants, from WW2, in both Europe and Asia, where enemies were killed without much compunction, for various reasons.
But they were in rather diffrent contexts.
Killing persons in the water out of political expediency is really quite sickening,
@dazedandconfused:
Intel? Hegseth doesn’t want intel, he has plenty of intel saying what he wants. What he doesn’t want is survivors who might contradict his intel.
@Kathy:
It’s quite silly.
Fossil fuels are obviously becoming economically uncompetive for most electrical generation purposes.
Mea culpa, I was rather sceptical about solar/wind as both baseload and surge; but the massive cost reductions in PV plus batteries seem to be sorting that.
(And there is always good old Carlo Rubbia’s option of massive molten salt storage, lol)
And my previous inclination for nuclear as baseload looks likely to be undercut by “neo-geo”
All told, we are looking at a massive rapid relegation of hydrocarbons to rather marginal use cases for energy (such as aircrat), and as chemicals feedstocks.
There is no way that Trumponomics pandering to hydrocarbons rights owners can halt this trend.
There is likely lot of money still to be made from fracked gas, etc.
But coal is dead.
(Best case is “in seam” thermal extraction for chemical feedstocks, though that seems v. unlikely to be competive with using methane sources for a long time)