The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-12-07)

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, December 7, 2020 |A

More People,

Fewer Problems

One Billion Americans By Matthew Yglesias (Portfolio, 266 pages, $28)

BOOKSHELF| By Barton Swaim

S

ix years ago Matthew Yglesias co-founded the news and policy website Vox. That venture, begun when Obama- era progressivism appeared to have vanquished all before it, was designed not to argue for liberal policies but pa- tiently to “explain” them to a young and receptive online audience. In November Mr. Yglesias announced—because in the era of social media you announce these things—that he was leaving Vox and starting his own venture on Substack, a subscription-based online platform. I am not typically in sympathy with Mr. Yglesias’s views, but he is a lucid writer and enough of a contrarian for even a conservative like me to appreciate and learn from. He is, moreover, one of several journalists on the left recently to leave their employers for reasons of unwanted editorial control. His most recent book, “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger,” contends that the only way the United States can remain economically and culturally “number one”—his term—is to triple the country’s population to a billion. Left-leaning writers ordi- narily take a skeptical view of population increases— more people means more environmental degradation— whereas pro-natal policies are typically associated with the right. It’s noteworthy, whatever else can be said about his book, that so committed a progressive as Mr. Yglesias should take the view that America needs more babies. And he’s right. It does. A de- clining birth rate makes robust economic growth harder to achieve, further strains the government’s ability to pay for social welfare programs and diminishes society’s capacity to flourish in the long term. Progressives, however, tend to worry more that social- welfare programs aren’t generous enough than that there isn’t enough revenue to pay for them. They are also wedded to an understanding of human relations that devalues procreation and the family as an institution at every turn. In this worldview, it’s not unfair to say, marriage is the formalization of emotional attachment, easily rescinded; access to inexpensive birth control is a fundamental human right; and abortion—the literal curtailment of the human population—is the sine qua non of a free society. This outlook has prevailed in Western countries for a long time. It may be good or bad, depending on your point of view, but it is not calculated to yield high birth rates. Mr. Yglesias is not prepared to offer even the mildest regrets for the fruits, or the lack of fruits, of his left-liberal orthodoxy. He is a policy maven and so he believes that a raft of federal and state policies, presumably implemented by smart people like himself, can reverse what it took the sexual revolution half a century to accomplish. Establish universal day care and pre-K education, mandate parental leave, keep schools open year round, and young couples will feel sufficiently at ease to start having lots of babies again. The other way to add more people is, of course, to allow more immigrants. To reach Mr. Yglesias’s goal of a billion U.S. residents would require, under any time frame, escalating current immigration numbers by many orders of magnitude. I found it a little hard to endure his repeated suggestion that “the right” is wholly opposed to increases in immigration levels and substantially in the grip of white- nationalist theories about a “great replacement” of whites by nonwhite immigrants, but leave that aside. Even those of us on the right who favor higher levels of immigration would be obliged to acknowledge the possibility that a sudden and dramatic increase in the number of resident aliens and new citizens is likely to create social and political problems of its own. Mr. Yglesias acknowledges no such thing, which makes me wonder how sincere his contention is.

A cynical reader might suppose Mr. Yglesias’s radical proposal to be a convenient excuse for progressives to get their preferred policy outcomes: vast expansions of the welfare state, sharp upticks in immigration, massive spending on public transportation. But that wouldn’t explain his recommendation to get rid of outdated zoning laws (a recommendation I endorse, though not for the purpose of making room for a massive influx of new residents). Nor would the cynical reading explain his convoluted reasoning on climate change. More people may mean more cars and planes, he concedes, but more people will also foster scientific ingenuity, and by that means we can find innovative solutions to climate change. That argu- ment doesn’t mean much to me, but it does require Mr. Yglesias to distance himself, ever so politely, from the left’s climate alarmism. The problem with “One Billion Americans” isn’t its radical aims but its glib insincerity. Mr. Yglesias is proposing to reorder the entire American economy and effect sweeping changes to its political system and social conventions, but he presents it all as a neat-o solution. “There’s actually nothing hardabout it,” he says. Each big idea he explains in the chirpy style of a Vox.com “explainer” and each objection he dismisses with a quick citation of a social-science study or a flourish of abstract wonkery. One example among scores: He supports the idea, now practiced in Scotland and Finland, of providing new parents, at government expense, with a “baby box,” a starter kit including sheets, toys, diapers, bathing products for the baby and so on. Isn’t this an improvident use of public money, since most new parents can afford these things? Never mind, he says. “Universal provision ensures that middle-class and affluent families with real political voice are invested in maintaining high standards, which ends up helping the relatively disempowered poor.” Well I’m for anything that “ends up” helping “relatively disempowered” people, so let’s try it! The book’s radical claim is the sort of thing a writer might devote a substantial part of his life to, but Mr. Yglesias has moved on. His Substack essays deal with topics unrelated to the book. In the end, “One Billion Americans” is a form of intellectual tourism. The author visits a grand site, takes a few selfies, indulges in some local fare, and leaves. I guess he’s off to the next big idea. Maybe he’ll send us a postcard.

Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.

To stay on top, says a progressive writer, the U.S. must triple its population. Maybeso.Butdoeshemeanit?

Trump Runs the Stacey Abrams Playbook

Atlanta

N

ovember’s election was
the most secure in his-
tory. In Georgia there is
no evidence of widespread
voter fraud and no significant
issues with absentee ballots.
Through three separate
counts, including one by hand,
the outcome in Georgia has re-
mained the same.
The crisis America’s elec-
tions face is not one of secu-
rity, but one of confidence.
The roots of this crisis stretch
back long before the 2020
election. Confidence has been
undermined by politicians and
pundits who tacitly or explic-
itly refuse to acknowledge
their losses and receive a
megaphone from sympathetic
media outlets.
In Georgia, we have seen
this firsthand for years. Gov.
Brian Kemp defeated Stacey
Abrams in 2018, yet Ms.

Abrams still refuses to acknowledge she lost. Establishing a playbook that President Trump is fol- lowing to the letter now, Ms. Abrams refused to concede, announced that she would launch major litigation against

Georgia’s election system, and began collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from do- nors convinced the election had been stolen from her. Ms. Abrams was and is encouraged to continue attack- ing the integrity of Georgia’s election even though the mar- gin of her loss was four times as wide as Mr. Trump’s.

The media has rightly pushed back against the president’s actions and the danger- ous game his legal team is playing. But for the past two years, the media has endorsed and encouraged Ms. Abrams’s campaign to undermine election integrity in Georgia and across the country. Some outlets cast her as some kind of heroine. Many media outlets have rightly highlighted that the Trump campaign has provided precious little proof of its voter-fraud allegations. Yet for two years, few asked the same of Stacey Abrams. Through all this, confidence in the integrity of American elections suffered. It is understandable that many Trump supporters have trouble believing the media when told that the November election was secure and reli- able. For four years, mainstream media outlets put enor-

mous effort into convincing the country that Mr. Trump teamed up with the Russians to steal the election, with no more evidence than the Trump campaign is presenting now. Newspaper pages and cable- news airwaves were filled with unfounded and unsupported claims that the president was a Russian agent. After four years of relent- less attacks on the integrity of elections by the most significant mainstream media outlets and pundits, it should come as no surprise that Americans have trouble believing the results of even the most secure elections. The cumulative effect of these unchecked attacks on election integrity is the confidence crisis America now faces.

Mr. Raffensperger, a Re- publican, is Georgia’s secre- tary of state.

By Brad Raffensperger

Evidence-free charges of election fraud are corrosive no matter who makes them.

OPINION

Waitforit...
any day now
...getready
for the “mul-
tipliers.” You
know, the
idea that a
government
dollar spent
magically
turns into
multiple dol-
lars in the economy. We ought
to start hearing that silly
word again as the lame-duck
coronavirus stimulus negotia-
tions kick in. Expect more
multiplier mumbo jumbo as
the Biden administration be-
gins its tax-and-spend fiesta.
Let’s face it, the Democrats
haven’t had a believable eco-
nomic messenger since Robert
Rubin during the Clinton ad-
ministration. Since then
they’ve presented a cast of
characters—Larry Summers,
Mr. Biden’s adviser Jared
Bernstein, and lately Elizabeth
Warren—who bend them-
selves into pretzels to justify
higher spending and then
higher taxes.
The New York Times de-
scribed this trend during the
early days of the Obama ad-
ministration. The financial
crisis team of Jason Furman,
Tim Geithner and Mr. Sum-
mers were “carrying around
this list of multipliers” taken
from a chart by Mark Zandi,
chief economist for Moody’s
Analytics. Every dollar spent
extending unemployment in-
surance benefits would, the
fairy tale went, boost the
economy by $1.64. Sadly, a
dollar in reduced corporate
taxes would boost the econ-
omy by only 30 cents. But
cheer up, every dollar spent

A Stimulus Dollar Is Only a Dollar

on food stamps would spur a $1.73 increase in gross domes- tic product. Mr. Zandi called it “bang for the buck”—the pro- verbial free lunch. It’s more like “dud for the dollar” because it didn’t work. It never does. Multipliers are a canard, a Keynesian conceit. The economy grew after the Great Recession, as it does after every recession. The stimulus didn’t stimulate. Shovel-ready projects weren’t ready. Many complained that the stimulus wasn’t big enough. More hooey. The Obama administration’s high taxes and heaps of regulation held the economy back. Is spending driving today’s re- covery? Think back to the He- roes Act 2.0, Nancy Pelosi’s $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill. Economic growth in the third quarter of 2020 was 33% as lockdowns were lifted, de- spite—or because of—that gi- gantic stimulus packagenot becoming law. The theory of multipliers is based on the Keynesian view that poorer consumers tend to spend a large amount of in- creased income, and the rich less so. But multipliers are half a story. Someone has to put up the original money that allegedly gets multiplied, taking it away from the private sector and negating whatever dwindling chain of transactions are hypothesized. It’s like two waves canceling each other out—you can’t just do the math on the additive public wave and ignore sub- tracting the private. This de- mand-side theory omits the principle of productivity, the real driver of economic growth and prosperity.

But no matter, expect multiplier talk to, er, multiply. The Biden team already has gnomes busy at work sharp- ening their pencils finding new and innovative ways to raise taxes to spend on green and other favored projects, without having to pass new laws in a potentially divided Congress. Mr. Biden’s secret weapon is a guy named Ben Harris, who apparently knows his way around budget models and tax tables. The New York Times quotes the University

of Pennsylvania’s Rich Prisin- zano saying Mr. Harris and the Biden team have a plan to “tax the same people and the same income as Warren and Sanders”—who want to im- pose wealth taxes—“they just do it through the existing tax code.” I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts the justification is multipliers. They don’t work. “Why the Fiscal Multiplier is Roughly Zero” is the title of a 2013 pa- per by Scott Sumner for George Mason University, summarizing the Obama stimulus. The key line is that “esti- mates of fiscal multipliers become little more than forecasts of central bank in- competence,” meaning the Federal Reserve’s job of maintaining stable monetary con- ditions should actually require

it to fightagainststimulus. I’ve also read papers from the International Monetary Fund (a better sleep inducement than melatonin) that support Keynesian multipliers, and others that say multipliers are a lot smaller in reality than theory. Actually, if you want to see a real multiplier in action, take Amazon. Since it began, it’s had $47 billion in invested capital, equity and debt. It’s worth a tad more than that now. Just sayin’. What else will be justified with multipliers? Maybe na- tionalizing the 5G network and reinstating net neutrality. The pesky private sector can’t be trusted, the reasoning might go. This isn’t voodoo economics, it’s froufrou or even tutu economics: dressed up to look good but only a fa- cade. About the only government spending that might actually multiply in the real economy is basic research—pure, fundamental research. Not enough, and you become a Third World has-been. Too much and you get Solyndra. Sure, I’d like to see money spent on basic research for nuclear fusion, advanced arti- ficial intelligence, and ge- nomic drug development. But keep it research; don’t add in development as in R&D. And please don’t slap a multiplier on the money spent, a number pulled out of thin air. How long will it be before Mr. Bi- den’s pick for Treasury secre- tary, Janet Yellen, who stud- ied under the Keynesian James Tobin, uses the M- word? Write to [email protected].

Democrats devise magic ‘multipliers’ to justify spending, but the returns never show.

INSIDE
VIEW
By Andy
Kessler

At a West
Point cere-
mony in No-
vember 2018,
the U.S. De-
fense Depart-
ment con-
ferred the
Legion of
Merit on Mex-
ico’s then-sec-
retary of na-
tional defense, Gen. Salvador
Cienfuegos. Less than two
years later, on Oct. 15, the re-
tired Mexican four-star was ar-
rested in Los Angeles on drug-
trafficking and money-
laundering charges.
A grand jury in the Eastern
District of New York had
handed up an indictment of
Gen. Cienfuegos on Aug. 14,
2019, for crimes allegedly com-
mitted between December
2015 and February 2017. The
indictment remained sealed
until his arrest.
On Oct. 16, requesting a
“permanent order of deten-
tion,” Acting U.S. Attorney
Seth D. DuCharme alleged be-
fore the New York court that
“while holding public office in
Mexico, the defendant used his
official position to assist the
H-2 Cartel, a notorious Mexi-
can drug cartel, in exchange
for bribes.”
U.S. prosecutors insist they
had what they needed to con-
vict Gen. Cienfuegos, who was
an active member of the Mexi-
can military during the six
years (2012-18) he held the
cabinet-level post in the gov-
ernment of President Enrique
Peña Nieto. But on Nov. 17, At-
torney General William Barr

The Curious Case of Gen. Cienfuegos

dropped the case. The general was released and on Nov. 18 returned to Mexico, where the government has said it will in- vestigate the charges. The odds of that happening are pretty long. Chalk up one more loss for the futile, half-century-old U.S. war on drugs. In this case, the circular logic out of Wash- ington is that keeping Mexico as a U.S. partner in fighting transnational crime trumps actual crime fighting. The good news for the drug-war bureaucracy is that its jobs program is secure. Gen. Cienfuegos is innocent until proven guilty, and the Drug Enforcement Administra- tion’s case against him, using intercepted BlackBerry Mes- senger communications that he supposedly sent to the ca- pos, has provoked skepticism. Some are asking why a high- ranking government official, well-versed in intelligence, would recklessly risk a presti- gious career. On the other hand, institu- tional corruption is a problem in Mexico, while the American legal system guarantees the general due process. To re- move the case to Mexico under pressure from Mexican Presi- dent Andrés Manuel López Ob- rador (a k a AMLO) reeks of cynicism on both sides of the border. It is unclear if the DEA in- formed its counterparts—the Defense Department’s North- ern Command, the Central In- telligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Council and

the director of national intelligence, to name a few—of the evidence against Gen. Cienfue- gos and built consensus for his arrest. The DEA may have sensed the risk of being overruled and decided it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. As one source close to diplo- matic circles of both countries told me, “It’s hard to under- stand how the DEA would have gotten the green light to arrest him, and then the Justice De- partment would send him back to Mexico.”

Word around Washington is that some of the alphabet-soup bureaucracy was unhappy at being left out of the loop. But that was nothing compared with the outrage from Mexico’s military. While AMLO was ini- tially blasé about a DEA bust of a former top official, he did not remain so when the army made its fury clear. Mexico’s rules for the DEA inside the country require agents to share intelligence regularly with Mexican author- ities. The Mexican military, it is said, felt humiliated and be- trayed by what it saw as a vio- lation of the spirit of engage- ment and cooperation between the two countries. At this AMLO sprang into action,

sending a message, via his for- eign minister, to the gringos that south of the border, trust had been broken. With extradi- tion and Mexico’s willingness to allow DEA agents to remain in the country at risk, the general was set free. The Pentagon may have played a role too. After two de- cades working to convince the Mexican armed forces to mod- ernize the relationship between the two sides, there has been substantial progress. Joint field training exercises at U.S. Northern Command in Colorado, for example, demon- strate a shared sense of the importance of North American perimeter security. Was prose- cuting the general worth los- ing all that? AMLO has put the army at the center of many of his pet projects, from developing a new international airport to taking over management of the country’s seaports. Yet while it is also charged with combating the transnational crime ravaging Mexico, it has achieved very little. It would be nice to know why. The Cienfuegos release was meant to salvage bilateral cooperation. But what sort of cooperation is it if Mexico’s pri- ority is to bury this matter rather than get to the bottom of whether the general is guilty or was set up? The drug-war game of cops and robbers will return to the script but the case against Gen. Cienfuegos suggests a more serious problem is brew- ing. Write to O’[email protected].

The former Mexican defense minister is released in another loss for the drug war.

AMERICAS
By Mary
Anastasia
O’Grady

The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-12-07)

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