Big National Debt

 

America’s gross national debt exceeded $31 trillion for the first time on October 4.  This happened as interest rates on the debt will be going up and as the US may be sliding into recession.  The debt has grown due to huge government spending during the Covid pandemic and to Trump tax cuts.  Until recently the Administration and Congress were spending like there was no tomorrow, and the Fed was cooperating with them by keeping interest rates historically low.  Low interest rates led to assertions that deficits and debts did not matter.  At higher interest rates, they may matter. 

If the Fed gets interest rates back down to 2%, paying interest on the debt may not be too bac, but if inflation remains at 4% or higher, debt payments will be an increasing burden on paying for other government programs, such as defense or Social Security.  Some programs will have to be cut in order to pay additional interest on the debt.  Otherwise the debt grows bigger. 

An article in the Economist said that unless Congress and the Administration work with the Fed by limiting spending, monetary policy (the Fed) eventually loses traction.  Higher interest rates become inflationary, not disinflationary, because they simply lead governments to borrow more to pay rising debt-service costs, i.e., the Fed has  no way to fight inflation alone. 

In the last few years the US has gone on a massive spending spree.  We may now have to pay for it.  We can pay by instituting some sort of austerity, or we can just get on the inflation bandwagon and ride it into the future. 

 

Polls Are Pretty Useless

 

TV news lives on polls, but I don’t think they are accurate.  They show to some extent what some people are thinking, but they don’t necessarily predict the outcome of elections unless there is a substantial spread between the responses.  I would not even trust a 10% differential. 

I think there are many people, like myself, who do not reaspond to poll questions, so the people polled are not representative, and many do not respond honestly.  Those who do respond may strongly favor a candidte and thus tend to respond in wsys they think will help their candidate, e.g. by saying what issues they think are important. 

One big problem is that most pollsters are elite Democrats from left-leaning media or academia.  Conservatives sense this and when these leftist pollsters call, Republicans are not going to cooperate with them, because they see them as the enemy. The pollsters have contempt for the conservatives they interview and the interviewees know that.   Thus, polls tend to confirm whatever the political elite thinks is a likely result.  Pollsters are unable to talk to those who don’t share their opinions. 

Politico has an article by Steven Shepard about the difficulties with polls.  It says:

Pollsters know they have a problem. But they aren’t sure they’ve fixed it in time for the November election.

Since Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory, pre-election polls have consistently understated support for Republican candidates, compared to the votes ultimately cast.

Once again, polls over the past two months are showing Democrats running stronger than once expected in a number of critical midterm races. It’s left some wondering whether the rosy results are setting the stage for another potential polling failure that dashes Democratic hopes of retaining control of Congress— and vindicates the GOP’s assertion that the polls are unfairly biased against them.

“There’s no question that the polling errors in [20]16 and [20]20 worry the polling profession, worry me as a pollster,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll in Milwaukee and a longtime survey-taker in the battleground state of Wisconsin. “The troubling part is how much of that is unique to when Donald Trump is on the ballot, versus midterms when he is not on the ballot.”

After 2016, pollsters said the problem was their samples included too few voters without college degrees. The polls were better for the 2018 midterms, though they were still too Democratic on balance.

Then came 2020 — which was worse than 2016, and for which pollsters have yet to settle on a definitive explanation of what precisely went wrong. As a result, an easy fix has proven elusive. But pollsters have mostly agreed that, particularly in 2020, the surveys missed a chunk of Trump’s voters who refused to participate in polls.

And the New York Times noted that some of Democrats’ strongest numbers are coming in the states that have seen the greatest polling misses over the past few elections.

Partisan campaign pollsters in both parties suggested Trump voters are again difficult to capture in the run-up to this election.

“There is a good chance that a lot of the publicly released surveys are overstating Democratic strength,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster at the firm Public Opinion Strategies.

But some Democrats are daring not just to believe in the polls — but hoping that the party may actually overperform in November, pointing to two special congressional election wins last month in Alaska and New York, where polls showed Republicans ahead going into Election Day.

“You just saw the polls underestimate the victories in both Alaska and in Upstate New York,” Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview at a POLITICO Pro Premium Roundtable event earlier this month. “So, if anything, the polls may be showing a conservative bias right now.”

 

Founding Fathers Feared Pure Democracy

 

The Founding Fathers were not enthusiastic about pure democracy.  In his excellent book, The Quartet, historian Joseph Ellis describes James Madison’s views on a democracy that represented the direct choices of “the people.” 

 

“Madison’s experience at both the state and the federal level had convinced him that “the people” was not some benevolent, harmonious collective but rather a smoldering and ever-shifting gathering of factions or interest groups committed to provincial perspectives and vulnerable to demagogues with partisan agendas. The question, then, was how to reconcile the creedal conviction about popular sovereignty with the highly combustible, inherently swoonish character of democracy. Perhaps the most succinct way to put the question was this: How could a republic bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty be structured in such a way to manage the inevitable excesses of democracy and best serve the long-term public interest?  

 

“Madison’s one-word answer was “filtration.” He probably got the idea from David Hume’s Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth (1754), an uncharacteristically utopian essay in which Hume imagined how to construct the ideal republican government from scratch. Ordinary voters would elect local representatives, who would elect the next tier of representatives, and so on up the political ladder in a process of refinement that left the leaders at the top connected only distantly with the original electorate and therefore free to make decisions that might be unpopular. A republic under this filtration scheme was a political framework with a democratic base and a hierarchical superstructure that allowed what Madison described as “the purest and noblest characters” to function as public servants rather than popular politicians.”

 

 

Originally there was no direct election of Senators, and Presidents were (and are) elected by the electoral college.  In 1913 the 17^th Amendment changed the process to allow for direct election of Senators.  Prior to the 17^th Amendment, Senators were elected by state legislatures.  Madison’s idea was that there would be different levels of voting.  “The people” would vote for the lowest level of legislators, hopefully electing the highest quality men (no women) that they knew.  That level would elect the next level, again hopefully electing the best people they knew, and so on.  Political parties and the primary system have perverted the system the founders envisaged.  The electoral college still exists, but in today’s world, few people know the candidates running to be members of the electoral college.  In general, they are party hacks, not outstanding members of the community as the founders intended. 

The Constitution gave to the states the right to determine who could vote in elections.  Most states originally limited the right to vote to property-owning or tax-paying white males.  Over the years, more and more classes of people have been granted the right to vote, so that elections are now pretty much the voice of “the people, ” which Madison feared would lead to the election of demagogues and other poor leaders. 

 

We Can't Stop Global Warming

 

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change said that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels should be held well below 2 degrees Celsius.  It called for efforts to limite the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

We will not achieve this goal. 

Achieving this goal would require strenuous efforts by all the countries of the world, particularly the rich, industrialized countries.  Very few, if any, countries are making the required effort.  This means that we are likely to pass the limits set by the agreement, with the accompanying disruptions of the climate – storms, droughts, heat waves, floods, polar melting, sea level rise, etc. 

Achieving the goal is further complicated by the energy crisis brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the reduction of Russian energy exports to Western and Central Europe.  The European energy crisis is forcing Europe to turn to polluting fossil fuels – even coal --  that increase global warming. 

Renewable energy sources, mainly solar and wind, will not come on line fast enough to replace fossil fuels.  Nuclear plants also take a long time to build and need a long lead time to come on line.  In the short term we will continue to rely on fossil fuels that increase global warming. 

According to the NOAA climate.gov website, the 2021 surface temperature was 0.84 degrees Celsius warmer than the twentieth century average of 13.9 degrees Celsius and 1.04 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial period (1880-1900).  The earth’s temperature has been increasing by 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade recently.  So, we don’t have many years to go before we reach and pass the limits set by the Paris Agreement.