DISPATCHES FROM THAT COLD CIVIL WAR.

According to Public Citizen chief propagandist Lisa Gilbert, "Our Democracy Crisis Persists."

“On January 6th five years ago, a sitting U.S. president incited violence against our nation in a shameless attempt to overturn a democratically-held election.This day must live forever in our memory, so that we continue to seek accountability for the perpetrators and work tirelessly to safeguard our democracy from future lawlessness.

”As we reflect on the solemn anniversary of the insurrection, we must grapple with the reality that the same president is back in office. And that his disdain for the rule of law and disregard of the U.S. Constitution are more brazen than ever, amplified by endless incendiary rhetoric and reckless actions. From the unwanted and unlawful military deployments of the national guard to U.S. cities to the indefensible and brazenly unlawful kidnapping of a foreign leader for the benefit of fossil fuel corporations, this president’s authoritarianism is a real and living threat to our democracy and it demands vigilance and resistance from us all.“

You'd think that Public Citizen types might grapple with the reality that the incendiary rhetoric and reckless actions of the Jarrett regency, motivated in part by the impulse to punish any dissent as a threat to democracy, or as guilt-by-association with that futile and stupid gesture, is what brought them more Trump, and that might inspire them to, oh, dial back their incendiary rhetoric.

Now we are engaged in a cold civil war, and the likelihood of that is nil.

On Wednesday, a radicalized woman decided to attempt to run over ICE agents in Minneapolis. What were they doing? Enforcing immigration law. And this woman learned the hard way that when you try to kill a federal law enforcement officer, they will respond with lethal force.

Instead of supporting federal law enforcement, Walz is threatening to mobilize the Minnesota National Guard to keep the federal government out of Minnesota.

Matt Margolis throws Lisa Gilbert's words right back in her face.

The radical left feels entitled to power. When they don't have it, they wage war to get it back. They don't see Trump supporters as fellow citizens with different views. They see them as enemies to be crushed. They don't see federal immigration enforcement as legitimate law enforcement. They see it as an occupying force to be repelled.

Walz's threat to deploy the National Guard against ICE agents is a dangerous escalation in the left’s war with America. It normalizes the idea that the Democratic Party can use military force to nullify federal laws they don't like. That's not how our system works. That's how countries fall apart.

The radical left keeps telling us who they are. They're at war with the United States. Not with Trump. Not with Republicans. With the country itself. Because to them, America is only legitimate when they control it. Everything else is enemy territory.

I don't see any restraint, anywhere. "In an age of rage, the loudest and angriest voice is king."

DICK WOLF CANNOT CONCEAL WHAT PROGRESSIVISM HAS DONE TO CHICAGO.

Yes, that's revisiting an old theme, "I've suggested previously that the Dick Wolf Chicago-based procedurals are NBC's way of acknowledging that the Tragic Vision has some purchase."  Consider what transpired in last night's Chicago Fire.  The show might be available for your streaming pleasure, should you have bought the right kind of subscription.

The plot, though, is the better part of an hour calling attention to the wreckage Brandon Johnson and J. B. Pritzker have made of Illinois.  All those new taxes?  Not enough to spare Firehouse 51, as Engine 51 (in firefighter speak, "engine" refers to the pumper that puts water on the fire) is on the list of rigs to be idled.  But, the One Chicago procedurals being "How far can the cast get away with fishing off the company pier without triggering a sexual harassment investigation?,"  recent widower Dom Pascal, battalion chief at 51, gets the word about the downsizing from Annette Davis, the mayor's chief of staff, who is doing the fishing.  But she comes off as the kind of girlboss that the chief might be better off getting as far away from as practicable.  Maybe a state not run by progressives.

The episode ends with arson investigator, Captain Tom Van Meter, still in a medically induced coma, and Kelly Severeide with an assist from the police still trying to figure out who set a fire with the intent of taking out a high school principal.  During their investigation they encounter a canonical AWFUL with a red-diaper daughter who has already learned enough about the First Amendment to not rat out who the anonymous members of a Facebook group wishing ill on the principal are.  Fortunately, tech support is able to identify possible suspects to be rounded up next week.  Whether Pascal and Davis will go their separate ways is another matter.  The soap opera is the prime directive, remember?

Reap what you sow, Chicago, whether in real life or on the small screen.

PALACE INTRIGUE IN PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL.

Is anybody surprised?  Yesterday's round-up of the process that is the league's most important product included

There are seven head coaching vacancies as we publish.  The Ravens are not known for willy-nilly swapping out head coaches, unlike some other teams you might have heard of.  And Mr Harbaugh being available at the relatively young age of 64 is prompting speculation about additional teams making moves.

Sure enough, there is an eighth vacancy now.  "Dolphins fire Mike McDaniel after 4 seasons as coach."

DRIVERS PAY TO BE DISTRACTED?

From Motor Trend, via Insta Pundit, "4 Everyday Car Features That Turned Out to Be Too Smart for Their Own Good."  Doing so sells.  "Automakers keep adding bells and whistles to new vehicles, but they may have gone too far with some once-simple components."

Until it doesn't.

Mission creep sometimes comes from a good place, such as an automaker’s desire to improve upon a long-standing piece of equipment. But more often than not, it’s driven by the twin forces of marketing and design, which are more concerned with convincing customers to hand over their dollars than the actual human impact of altering how we use our vehicles. These bells and whistles can get in the way of getting the job done, and at their most extreme, they actually reduce our safety on the road.

Take multiple-function tailgates.  Please?  "All of the above has served to transform tailgates from simple, reliable mechanisms to complex and heavy equipment that can be a hassle to lift back into position, a puzzle to fold together properly, and a magnet for moisture, dirt, and grime to gum up and eventually corrode its internal works."  Or what author Benjamin Hunting calls "Play Station" steering wheels.  There are buttons on mine that I almost never use, and my car is a relatively simple crossover.  Then, there are heads-up displays, which might be useful on a fighter jet, but in their contemporary incarnation contribute to driver distraction.  Finally, there are key fobs.  I'm not sure, on some cars, why anybody even bothers with a key, you push a button to unlock the door — on some models, all you do is stand near the door — set the fob in the center console (near your cup 'phone, don't get me started), and push a button to start the car.

And yes, all these things start on the high-end models as extra-value accessories that probably lead to more shop time down the road, and cascade to all classes of that make over time.  It's hard, though, to complain about manufacturers offering consumers gadgets that the consumers seem willing to buy, at least until they stop.  Remember push-button automatic transmissions?  These days, the selector lever where the transmission hump used to be is at least a nod to the classic four-on-the-floor.

A LONG-LIVED, ILLIQUID, USEFUL ASSET.

A man's home might be his castle, but financing the acquisition thereof is a problem, particularly if he does not command knights and archers to secure it.

A new idea is making the rounds in Washington: the 50-year mortgage. It is being promoted as a way to make homeownership affordable again by stretching payments over a longer horizon, lowering the monthly obligation.

But like most economic policy shortcuts, and in particular most shortcuts where housing policy is concerned, it treats symptoms and not causes, while making the underlying disease worse.

The logic of the proposal is straightforward: if prices are high and interest rates have climbed, extend the repayment period so people can still “afford” the same house. The problem, however, is that affordability isn’t just a matter of the monthly payment.

True though that might be, the financing of houses has long been leveraged, with various methods in play to stretch out those repayment periods to make those monthly obligations less burdensome.  And the political economy of lending has always been about getting those prime-age workers housed at an early age, the better to be able to give their kiddos some stability.

That showdown between Henry Potter and George Bailey took place sometime in the middle 1920s, when a residential mortgage was fifty percent down, and five years to pay mostly interest, with the balance due as a balloon payment at the end of those five years.

As late as the 1920’s, someone taking out a mortgage to buy a house in the U.S. would most likelyl get a short-term balloon mortgage. Typical terms: 50 percent down, and five years to pay off the other 50 percent. At the end of the five years, it was common to re-finance into another five-year loan.

Then came the Great Depression. Many banks failed, and surviving banks didn’t want to refinance these balloon mortgages. Banks foreclosed. Between 1931 and 1935, a quarter mllion people lost their homes each year.

The evolution of mortgage contracts on detached houses in thickly-settled areas started with similar contracts on agricultural land.  Economists David A. Price and John R. Walter of the Richmond Fed  provide an Economic Brief, "It's a Wonderful Loan: A Short History of Building and Loan Associations," detailing that history, and showing how Frank Capra's movie accurately showed the workings of a local building and loan association.  That essay began,  "Prior to the advent of modern home mortgage markets in the United States, markets in which mortgage-backed securities and government-sponsored enterprises now play significant roles, prospective homebuyers had to rely on other mechanisms of home finance."  Heather Hennerich of the St. Louis Fed provides additional briefing on the way building and loan associations worked.  Where commercial banks of the era could only offer five year mortgages, building and loan associations could extend credit for up to eleven years.

Dear reader, do you notice how institutional changes emerge in response to difficulties with existing institutional arrangements?  Five years is too short a time to pay off a large mortgage?  Extend the term to eleven years at the building and loan, or to fifteen years, or thirty, or fifty, and make the mortgage self-amortizing to get rid of those nasty balloon payments.  Those made an unpleasant return during the heyday of variable rate mortgages.  A house is an illiquid asset, and foreclosing on one in a depressed area isn't going to get the principal back?  Create a portfolio of mortgages, and let the portfolio manager worry about the foreclosures.

AFTER FURTHER REVIEW.

Football: episodic violence interrupted by committee meetings.  It used to be that only the players would have those meetings, now the officials inject themselves into the delays.  It should not come as any surprise that a sport that has trouble defining what a "catch" is and yet in all earnestness can speak of "completing the process of the catch" can bog down in process worship worthy of a faculty meeting.

Consider, first, how the simple act of winning a game might not be sufficient to break a tie and get the team winning the game into the playoffs.  That came up Saturday and Sunday when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeated the [North] Carolina Panthers in their final game, on Saturday.  That gave both of those teams an identical, sub-0.500, record, but a third team in that division had a shot at the same record.  "Why the Saints and Falcons Will Decide Whether the Bucs or Panthers Win the NFC South."  Sports Illustrated offer a straightforward explanation.  Red State's Jerry Wilson sees the humor in the situation.

Should the Buccaneers beat the Panthers on January 3 and the Falcons beat the Saints on January 4, Tampa Bay, Carolina, and Atlanta will all finish the season at a robust 8-9. (Slight tinge of sarcasm there.) The Panthers would then win the division because they beat the Falcons twice and the Buccaneers once during the regular season, thus having the best record against the other two teams. However, if Tampa Bay and New Orleans both win, the Buccaneers win the division because they have a better record against common opponents than the Panthers. Glad we could clear that up for you, although I am now in dire need of an aspirin.

The league has contemplated contingencies more convoluted than a three-way tie for the lead, or for teams qualifying as a wild-card (meaning you start on the road and probably don't have a home playoff game) and after reading through those, something stronger than aspirin might be in order.

COME UP WITH A BETTER VALUE PROPOSITION.

Passenger Rail advocate Theo Anderson thinks he's being provocative.  "You Really Expect Me to Drive to Louisville?"

I was on a Chicago L train recently, staring at a picture of a glass of bourbon, when I blurted out: “That’s crazy.”

An ad for Louisville, running along the top of the railcar, provoked the outburst. The tag line said “Short Drive. Tall Pours.”

It makes sense to pitch Louisville as a getaway destination for Chicagoans. It’s a fine city. It has an “urban bourbon trail” that the city’s tourism website calls it a “curated collection of local bars and restaurants,” with “some of the city’s largest collections of Bourbon and in most cases even Bourbon-infused cuisine.”

That’s great. But it’s crazy to call the nearly 300-mile, five-hour car trip to Louisville a “short drive.” It’s even crazier that you can’t take a train from Chicago to Louisville. There’s barely even service from Chicago to Indianapolis. You can take an Amtrak train twice a week and arrive downtown in the middle of the night.

To be fair, Indiana is the main source of this insanity. The state’s governor cut the $3 million annual subsidy for Amtrak’s Hoosier State line in 2019, which killed the only usable train service between Indianapolis and Chicago. But even that train ran just three days a week.

Sadly, Indianapolis has never been serious about offering passenger-train service, despite being right in the heart of the most railroad-dense region in the nation and 200 miles from Chicago—with a major research university, Purdue, halfway between.

In a related post, he makes the argument that there's no "convenience" in being able to drive from Chicago to Indianapolis, let alone to continue to Louisville.

Cars are superior to trains and transit, so the theory goes, because they offer freedom. But a couple of times a year, when the bus doesn’t work out, I actually drive the Chicago-Indy route. It’s then, when I’m behind the wheel, that the madness and absurdity of this idea becomes horribly clear.

You can set your own schedule, sure. But cars subvert freedom in so many ways. The loan payments and the cost of gas, repairs, and insurance, for starters. And then the endless stresses of the road. The stretch of Interstate 65 that connects Indianapolis and Chicago ranks 58th of the 100 “most loathed” highways in the U.S. The whole route is jammed with semi trucks. And northern Indiana is especially prone to wind gusts. Lanes are often closed for repairs and construction for long stretches. And that’s the least of it, in some ways. Because getting to I-65 means navigating the stop-and-go traffic on the highways that wrap around Chicago.

When you’re stuck in Chicago traffic or, even worse, going 75+ mph in a narrow construction zone, pinned between concrete barriers on one side and a semi on the other, you have to wonder: If we can’t make trains work here, can we make them work anywhere?

I confess that whenever my travels take me anywhere that involves Indianapolis, it's easier from DeKalb to proceed by way of Interstate 39 south from Rochelle and via Interstate 74 southeast from Bloomington.  That gripe he makes about the semis on Interstate 65 (my bypass routing gets its share as well, there are a lot of fleet operators who don't mind going a few more miles around to avoid the tollways) could be material for a separate stock-taking post, about the railroads leaving the retail intermodal money on the table.

All the same, I'm not sure Passenger Rail advocates make a case for more trains by appealing to their own experience.  Over the Festive Season, the latest issue of Trains hit the Cold Spring Shops mailbox, with an article about the busiest Amtrak stop in Iowa.  That would be Osceola, which is a convenient, by Iowa standards, drive from Ames (Iowa State University) and Des Moines (the state capital).  Chicago and North Western gave up on Ames sometime after 1960, while the Rock Island Line was finished west of the Quad Cities early in the 1970s.  That article noted one friend of Amtrak who admitted to prefer the one slow, not reliable, California Zephyr, for Chicago trips rather than endure the fatigue of driving and the traffic jams and parking charges.  Another noted that a coffee shop in the station would make more sense — there currently is none — with a few more trains on the route.  Yes, up to Amtrak day, there was the overnight Denver Zephyr and a long-distance day train, the former Nebraska Zephyr for and from Lincoln, and frequency and connectivity matter.

That noted, I call for Passenger Rail advocates to come up with a better value proposition because "avoid the strain, take the train" was a losing argument sixty years ago.  Yes, that was an actual tagline.  Note when those trains serving Ames and Des Moines quit.  Our British cousins had a comparable slogan.  In those days, WGN Radio had a traffic helicopter or two (eventually aerial spotters of traffic jams proved to be expensive and hazardous to pilots) and a few of their rush-hour reports were sponsored by Chicago and North Western, operating their air-conditioned, Bi-Level Commuter Streamliners.  Their tagline: "Go North Western, it's the very best way to go."  One of the messages had a patter song about the joys of being stuck in traffic.  "Brake.  Accelerator.  Brake.  Accelerator.  Pound your fist upon the dashboard."  For all the good it did.  Your Northwest Side Grabowski could be listening to the WGN traffic reports, and, indeed, watch the Commuter Streamliners rush by while he was doing the brake-accelerator-pound sequence during rush hour on the Northwest Expressway.  And yet he, and all the other Northwest Side Grabowskis, would be right back in the traffic jam the next day, and the next.

SEVENTEEN RESOLUTIONS TEAM TRUMP WILL LIKELY BREAK.

Reason's Ryan Bourne offers "Seventeen Ways Politicians Can Make Things Cheaper, Starting With Food, Health Care, and Appliances."  I'll simply list them and suggest you read the article for the elaborations thereon.

1.  End Sugar Quotas.
2.  End Tariffs on Food.
3.  Expand Agricultural Immigration Visas.
4.  Expand the Scope of Independent Health Care Practices.
5.  Allow More Over-the-Counter Medicines.
6.  Recognize Foreign Drug Approvals.
7.  Scrap the Tariffs.  (The extension beyond appliances is straightforward.)
8.  Relax Licensing Requirements for Repairmen.
9.  Release Land for Building.
10.  Upzone.
11.  More By-Right Permits.
12.  Approve More Pipelines, More Quickly.
13.  End Tariffs on Goods Needed for Electrical Grids.
14.  Repeal the Jones Act.
15.  End the 'Chicken Tax'.
16.  Allow Direct Sales of Motor Vehicles.
17. End or Ease Buy American Rules.

I find myself in the position of Omar Sharif's Dr. Zhivago, agreeing with most of that list, if for reasons that are subtle.  I am old enough to remember how European agencies approved a sedative called thalidomide rather quickly whilst staff in the Food and Drug Administration asked for more evidence of that drug causing birth defects when administered to pregnant women.  Apparently that formula has use as a cancer treatment.  I also fear that Mr Bourne is insufficiently familiar with soldering irons and wrenches.  "Easing burdensome licensing for routine HVAC tasks and relaxing it for basic plumbing, in favor of simple registration and insurance requirements, would increase competition, shorten wait times, and push down the cost of keeping the kit in your home running."  The stories I have heard over the years from skilled tradesmen about the do-it-yourself stuff they've sometimes had to fix!

That noted, Mr Bourne is correct in diagnosing many of our "affordability" crises as failed attempts to manage crisis that somehow spill over into continuing the crisis, and the intrusion of Our Political Masters.

A serious affordability agenda would take aim at child care, clothing, and dozens of other essentials. Even in the areas covered here, there's more that could be done. The guiding principle is clear: Trade liberalization and deregulation can unleash supply, expand consumer choice, and improve affordability—sometimes through lower prices, sometimes by making room for cheaper, lower-frills options. Even when prices don't drop much, greater efficiency boosts wages.

In the long run, what people care about is how far their money goes. This requires economic growth. But after an inflation shock has jacked up prices, consumers aren't in the mood to wait. Officials should respond by letting markets work, not by stumbling into price controls and costly subsidies.

And maybe next time, Washington could try not overstimulating the economy through reckless monetary and fiscal policy in the first place.

But, but, but, I can hear the advocates for Government that Does Something scolding all and sundry about how Something Had Gone Wrong and There Was A Problem and Those State Actions were Intended To Solve Problems.

Let's open the new year with another reminder that voters returned Donald Trump and a Republican majority to Washington, known faults and follies all, because the most recent attempts to have a Government Doing Something brought us fiscal incontinence and a debacle in Afghanistan and corona tyranny and dangerous cities and personnel policies where competence was second or third to identity or ideological conformity.

FOOTBALL IS A COLLISION SPORT.

A month ago, the Green Bay Packers were in a position to secure first place in the Black and Blue Division.  There are worse ways to lose a game in Denver than have a very good defensive back intercept a first-down pass intended as a knock-out score after the defense records a three-and-out to open the second half.  Later, as Denver rallied, Packer defender Micah Parsons suffered a season-ending injury.  The anterior cruciate ligament gets stronger only in geologic time, while player speed and mass increase in a generation.

As we posted our final Advent meditation for the Festive Season, we were anticipating a showdown between the Packers and Bears with that first place being held by the winner with two games to play.  But for some foolish penalties on the defense in what could have been the final Bear possession and yet another failure of the special teams to cover an on-side kick that everyone in the stadium knew was coming, the Packers might have had that division lead.

A SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL.

In the language of The Old Farmer's Almanac, 2026 is, until Independence Day, the 250^th Year of American Independence.

It is off to a lively start.  Somebody has to be the grownup.  Warm collectivism always ends cold.

Everything else is elaboration thereon, and there will be opportunities to elaborate thereon as the year continues.

MARKING OFF.

It has long been my custom to post a Festive Season video, featuring vintage, or sometimes modern-retro, tinplate trains under the tree.

As was the case last year, this video features only the vintage trains in the sun room, running in a moderate tempo.  Feel free to enjoy them with a glass of hot tea, properly provided with a podstakannik, or a glass of mulled wine or perhaps egg-nog enlivened with a splash of bourbon or rum.

Rest assured, there are videos in preparation showing the scale model railroad rolling stock going through their paces, as well as showing tinplate trains chasing their tails at high speed the way children of all ages flock to see.

As was the case a year ago, I'm taking time away for a few football games, for a long winter's nap, for some tidying up around the house, and for some serious work down cellar.

Thank you for looking in.  Enjoy the Festive Season.  Posting will resume next year, some time after Three Kings.

SILVER BELLS ABOVE THE BUSTLE.

Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien correctly suggests, "Christmas was never Christmas without Downtown."

Well, yes.

Yes, with the kids making their list and checking it twice.  "Some of that was still in place in the last days of The America That Worked^(TM), it being a family ritual, come early December, for everyone to scrub up, spiff up, and head Downtown to do the Christmas shopping, and enjoy a meal at the Boston Store restaurant."  Mom, Dad, grandparents, siblings, schoolteacher, school gift exchange, check, check, check.

My boyhood Christmas shopping was in downtown Milwaukee, after the streetcars. Mr O'Brien's Pittsburgh still had its Pennsylvania-gauge PCCs.

Pittsburgh never had actual street vendors, but Downtown was filled with these small, warm places that would kick their doors open and even crack the windows to let some of that wintery cool air in, and the beautiful smells of a griddle and a coffeemaker out. Add to that, ubiquitous cigarette and cigar smoke, and the ever-present overcast, courtesy of the town’s steel mills, and you had air that refused to be a bit player in the Downtown experience. All was not sugarplums and lollipops, but it didn’t get any more real.

Red Christmas bells lit up every pole along every street in Downtown. Everyone was going somewhere in a hurry, and they were happy. You could feel it. My mom was happy, I was happy, my brother was happy.

Where your bus stop or streetcar stop was determined whether you were a Gimbel’s family, a Joseph Horne’s family, or a Kaufmann’s family. The department stores were the anchors of Downtown retail and were located in such a way that those of us from the east side of town got off the streetcar closest to Gimbel’s.

The toys were on the 11th floor, and the way to get there was on a narrow (even for a kid), rickety wooden escalator. Once you got to the 10th floor and stood at the base of the escalator to the 11th floor, you could look up to the top and see an overhead miniature train track. If the train was operating, that meant Santa Claus was in the house. If not, he wasn’t. That’s how the store communicated.

I was conditioned. Just like Ralphie and his little brother in the film A Christmas Story. The Downtown department store Santa was the only Santa. At no other time in my Christmas season did I ever cross paths with the man in the red suit. Only in Gimbel’s, so for me, that was like a visit to the North Pole.

Milwaukee's Gimbel's had the same sort of narrower, wooden-step escalators on the upper two or three floors, including to the toy department on the top floor.  No overhead miniature train.  There was a kid-sized monorail orbiting above the Boston Store toy department.

LET THE GRADE-GRUBBING BEGIN.

Inside Higher Ed's Johanna Alonso compiled her favorite Festive Season greeting videos from assorted institutions of purportedly higher education.  My favorite is Louisiana at Monroe's Twelve Days of Finals.

I hope those twelve days of finals are finished before Festivus, which is 23 December, because once the grades are in comes the airing of grievances from students to faculty.  Yes, I could tell stories, but in the spirit of the Festive Season it might be better to say nothing a-tall.

Northern Illinois University conducted a contest, inviting students to submit designs for an official holiday card, to use their locution.  As far as I know, there's no greeting video, although headquarters put together the newsworthy moments of 2025.

The Inside Higher Ed compilation does not skew as woke as one might expect given the source.  Wellesley's compilers of student memories missed an opportunity, however: reunite surviving members of the Class of 1948 going sledding to do a send-up of a famous Amazon commercial.

IV. ADVENT.

Our first view of the Earth, live and in color, came Christmas Eve of a very difficult 1968.

That the view, and the astronauts' humility upon seeing it, might have inspired people to take better care of their environment is in its own way a blessing.  Good night to all of you on the good earth.

A STORY LINE TOO CRAZY FOR DOSTOYEVSKY.

On Saturday, we learned of an economics review session at Brown University that ended with shots fired.  When Cold Spring Shops resumed posting on Monday, law enforcement was still looking for their suspect or supects.  Providence authorities were not inspiring much confidence, at least among Militant Normals.

Sometimes it's prudent to hold off on any speculation until the evidence is in hand.  But Providence authorities are not doing much to clear the fog of war.  This story broke Saturday just after Navy sang second, with early reports of a "person of interest" questioned and released, and a second "person of interest" detained and questioned Sunday and ultimately released.  There was security camera tape available.  "The footage showed the gunman walking calmly down a street near campus, dressed in all black with his face covered."  The difficulties Providence authorities are having identifying the real suspect do not please Town Hall's Matt Vespa.

Monday evening came news of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology fusion researcher sustaining a mortal wound, shot in the foyer of his condominium in Brookline, Massachusetts.  Dear reader, it is prudent to hold off on speculation, between the news networks and the internet were all sorts of assurances that the professor's murder had nothing to do with Brown or it might have been the jihad presenting itself and who knows what I might have missed paying attention to Aaron Rodgers doing Aaron Rodgers things on Monday Night Football.

FIRST WIN, THEN ATTEMPT TO GOVERN.

I had been hoping for most of this year to be able to put together some longer-focus stock-taking mini-dissertations on topics of more than passing interest to me that might be more durable than your typical social media fare.  Unfortunately, events have generally dictated otherwise.

One such topic has been the ongoing tussle between the communist and corporatist wings of the Democrats, particularly since one Donald Trump returned to the White House.  That the Jarrett regency took the White House under false pretenses and rubbed Normal noses in a Weimar freak show for four years might have had a lot to do with the second Trumpening.

Oh, expensive gasoline and the corona tyranny doubtless contributed.  The recriminations over the past year don't really call for a stock-taking post as those tussles have involved the usual suspects shouting from their usual corners, and the arguments of the past year are very much like the arguments that came to my attention more recently.

It was Regent Emeritus Barack Obama who offered the suggestion that inspired the title of this post.

Obama told the lawmakers to "focus" on winning back the Republican-controlled House in the 2026 midterm elections, indicating that after that the party could work more through those ideological divisions.

"Because I promise, when that gets done, we have enormous talent, and we are then going to be in a position, as the next presidential campaign ramps up, to sort through some of the differences," Obama said, according to excerpts of his remarks obtained by ABC News.

At best, we have gridlock, which might be the voters' preferred outcome, particularly when once noble-sounding words like "consensus" and "compromise" mean, respectively, the political class wins and the taxpayers get fleeced, and the faction requesting compromise gets three-fifths of what it wants.  What the former president wants might involve another political food fight.

He also told House Democrats that while the short-term goal is to win back the House, the longer-term goal is to "tell a story" to "bring [Democrats] back in." But, he added, they won’t be able to bring those people back in "if we don’t win the House of Representatives."

He's referring to voters who ticked the Trump box or stayed home.  The story to be told, though?

LIFE AT THE MARGIN.

In economics, does the concept of a "representative firm" in competitive market equilibrium make sense?  It's easy to draw up on the chalkboard, but in a world of identical firms and full information, thinking of all the price-taking firms as identical provides the class wiseacre with the opportunity to ask questions such as "in the case of a permanent adverse demand shock, which firm quits first?"  Thus, to the extent people teach the dynamics of competitive markets in any extended way, the idea of an "equilibrium firm," meaning one that under current conditions of supply and demand is indifferent between participating and not participating.  That leads to another set of opportunities for wiseacres, e.g. "why do the inframarginal firms have lower costs than the equilibrium firm, and what prevents the equilibrium firm from being more like an inframarginal firm?"  Good times.

There's an even more neglected actor in economics, namely the equilibrium consumer.  If we speak of an equilibrium of supply and demand, doesn't that suggest there is an equilibrium consumer, one who is, at the margin, indifferent between buying a little more of that good or not buying it?  We get so soon old and so late smart, the implications of being the equilibrium consumer dawned on me only after I took my pension.  "[Consider] a world that feels very much out of equilibrium, or one in which it appears that the equilibrium, thanks to returns to human capital and to smart machinery, feels more like Marx or Dickens than like the Treaty of Detroit."  And yes, academic economics has considered the way in which making decisions at the margin to do without present themselves.  I recall a line from one of my price theory texts in the Chicago or U.C.L.A. (motto: On! Wisconsin) tradition that goes something like "My wife says we need something and I respond 'Of course we need it.  What do we want to do without?'"  Yeah, that's likely to get you hauled before Student Affairs for some sæcular sin.  Or, less controversially, how many readers, particularly those of the Baby Boom era, recall asking for something only to hear Mom or Dad say "we can't afford that."  It's easier to instill the notion that stuff is expensive in youngsters than to get into a discourse about optimizing along margins and thinking through what, exactly, the kiddos would be willing to give up to have that Next Big Thing (which in the American High, involved more real dollars for fewer features than most of what's at Target or Best Buy these days).

All of that by way of a long prologue to a recent discussion, I think originating with Michael Green's "My Life Is a Lie," characterizing the national government's "poverty line" as "a broken benchmark" that "broke America."

This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, I came across a sentence buried in a research paper:

“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.”

I read it again. Three times the minimum food budget.

That calculation seemed logical in 1963, when Henry Aaron was a rising star with the Milwaukee Braves.

The formula was developed by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration. In 1963, she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries. Since pricing data was hard to come by for many items, e.g. housing, if you could calculate a minimum adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply by three and establish a poverty line.

Orshansky was careful about what she was measuring. In her January 1965 article, she presented the poverty thresholds as a measure of income inadequacy, not income adequacy—”if it is not possible to state unequivocally ‘how much is enough,’ it should be possible to assert with confidence how much, on average, is too little.”

She was drawing a floor. A line below which families were clearly in crisis.

For 1963, that floor made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income, as we’ve discussed. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little (Blue Cross coverage averaged $10/month). Childcare didn’t really exist as a market—mothers stayed home, family helped, or neighbors (who likely had someone home) watched each other’s kids. Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. With few luxury frills, the neighborhood kids in vo-tech could fix most problems when they did. College tuition could be covered with a summer job. Retirement meant a pension income, not a pile of 401(k) assets you had to fund yourself.

There's all kinds of Cold Spring Shops material in that excerpt: restrictive zoning, increased labor force participation by married women, Medicare and Medicaid, student loans, frugal Depression babies, including those parents of Baby Boomers saying "we can't afford it."

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Regular order appropriations are the last thing Washington politicians want.  "It's as if nobody in Washington wants to be bothered with regular order appropriations."

VALUE ADDED AT THE CHECKOUT COUNTER.

I admit to preferring self-checkout at the grocery store, particularly when it works.  The incompetence tax I sometimes have to pay dealing with store cashier or takeout counter staffer reinforces that preference.  But when the self-checkout machinery doesn't work right, that makes working with it as difficult as dealing with the staffed checkout stations, which in principle are for dealing with more complicated transactions.

DONALD TRUMP, PRAGMATIST?

Yale historian Greg Grandin complains, "Trump Wants to Carve Up the World. It’s a Blueprint for Disaster."

One wonders what goes on in the minds of the architects of President Trump’s foreign policy. It seems as if they have all taken time to study the classic history books on the causes of the world wars — Margaret MacMillan’s “The War that Ended Peace,” or E.H. Carr’s “The Twenty Years’ Crisis” — and then said to themselves: That’s exactly where we want to take the world.

Mr. Trump, both in his first term and now during the first eleven months of his second, has made clear that the bipartisan post-Cold War consensus — by which the United States oversaw an economically integrated world order governed by common laws regulating property relations, trade and conflict — has outlived its usefulness. In its place the White House offers a vision of the world carved up into garrisoned spheres of competing influence.

This month, the White House issued its National Security Strategy report, which sought to codify this transition. The report hits all the notes associated with aggrieved America First nationalism: It denounces globalism, free trade and foreign aid, rejects nation-building, and calls on NATO members to spend a greater portion of their G.D.P. on defense spending. The United States, the report warns, will no longer “shoulder forever global burdens” that have no direct connection to its “national interest.”

The heart of the report is a pledge to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence.” In the past, militarists invoked the Monroe Doctrine largely out of habit, a recitation of a well-worn catchphrase. Here, though, it plays a more substantive role in defining what an America First future world order might look like.

For the uninitiated, the Monroe Doctrine is neither treaty nor law. It began life as a simple statement, issued by President James Monroe in 1823 recognizing the independence of Spanish American republics and warning Europe that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits for “future colonization.”

Common Dreams stringer Brad Reed links to the article, quoting the juiciest Trump-bashing passages for the amusement and edification of his fellow moochers and sponges.