The United States military is acutely aware of the possibility that the People's Republic of China on the mainland (the PRC), might try to invade and conquer Taiwan, something that the PRC has repeated threatened to do, although a military conflict with between the Philippines and the PRC in which the U.S. might become embroiled seems more likely in the short term and has resulted in more incidents of low intensity warfare in the last two or three years. I've also explained, elsewhere, why the PRC's reliance on international trade in a wide variety of goods and services to support its economy makes an invasion of Taiwan a much more costly option for it, than a globally unpopular war would be for Russia, whose international exports are dominated by oil and gas, or North Korea, which is very isolated economically from the rest of the world. Further background is available below.
Indeed, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the single largest rhetorical justification used by the U.S. Navy, and to a lesser but still great extent by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, for U.S. military expenditures.
The U.S. Strategy
The U.S. doesn't have any major military bases in Taiwan, unlike its military bases in Japan, South Korea, Hawaii, Alaska, three U.S. territories in the Pacific, and a smaller U.S. military base in the Philippines (which was once a much larger presence), presumably, in order to formally honor its "One China" policy.
But the U.S. has sold a lot of sophisticated U.S. military equipment to Taiwan, and together with its allies, can marshal considerable naval and air forces in the region.
Basically, the plan is for the U.S., Taiwan, and its allies to direct large numbers of anti-ship missiles and when the opponents are very close, Taiwanese artillery and allied naval gun shells at invading Chinese ships and boats, deployed from land, from surface ships at sea, from every manner of aircraft from long range stealth and conventional bombers, to carrier and land based fighter aircraft (some making the trip with the help of aerial refueling), to maritime patrol aircraft, to C-130 and C-17 military transport planes carrying missile launching cargo, to long range drones, to nuclear attack submarines, with the nuclear attack submarines also launching torpedoes. It would use U.S. satellites, high altitude spy planes, surveillance drones, and U.S. signals intelligence resources to identify targets (as well as any human intelligence resources within China available to the U.S. or its allies). Containerized anti-ship missile batteries will soon make it possible for cargo ships, amphibious transport ships, and merchant ships to also carry and deliver anti-ship missiles with ranges in the hundreds of miles.
Long range bombers, maritime patrol aircraft, C-17s, and fighter aircraft that use aerial refueling tankers, can travel thousands of miles and make the trip in about 12-13 hours from Hawaii. The trip from based in Japan or South Korea or Guam or American Samoa or the Northern Marina Islands would be shorter. Surface ships and submarines not already in the area can take several weeks to arrive, rendering them almost irrelevant in a fast developing naval battle, without a great deal of advance warning from satellites and other intelligence that she China mobilizing.
The aircraft and ships and ground batteries firing anti-ship missiles don't have to get particularly close. The aircraft can stay at high altitudes. Even the shortest range fighter and helicopter carried anti-ship missiles have a range of 18-20 miles. Most have ranges from 100 to 600 miles, and the aircraft can get just within range and turn around if the risk of air defenses is great. Modern torpedoes have a range of about 24 miles, although a longer range provides a target a greater opportunity to evade it.
The U.S. and its allies could deposit of small force of mostly light ground troops in the lead up to an invasion and during an invasion, but for the most part, Taiwan would have to rely on its own troops and reserves, and pre-placed equipment for its ground forces, to repel any Chinese troops that managed to cross the Taiwan strait by sea or by air.
The mission of Taiwan and its allies is easier. It need only destroy or mitigate the harm from incoming ships, aircraft, drones, missiles, and naval gun shells (the Taiwan strait is too wide for cannon artillery or all but the longest range artillery missiles on the mainland to cross) with a mix of anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. They don't need to board ships of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and don't have to deliver troops or their equipment in an amphibious invasion. PLAN submarines are effective ways to deny access to the ships of Taiwan and its allies and merchant ships bound to Taiwan, but most are fairly short range coastal submarines that have almost no effectiveness against the aircraft of Taiwan and its allies, and pose only a manageable threat to surface warships of Taiwan and its allies that are not in the Taiwan strait or too close to the island of Formosa.
A carrier with F-35C fighter aircraft, for example, need only be close enough for its fighters to fly to the edge of their 700 (non-nautical) mile combat radius which in turn must be within 150 to 700 (non-nautical) miles of the target of their anti-ship missiles. So, the carrier can strike a ship in the Taiwan strait that is 850-1400 miles away from its, for example, from the vicinity of the Northern Marina Islands, or Tokyo, or South Korea, or the southern most islands of the Philippines.
A carrier group at that distance would also have a decent chance of intercepting long range missiles bound towards it from mainland China, and the range of these anti-ship missiles is greater than all but the most potent anti-aircraft missiles in China's arsenal and would have to be timed to strike the aircraft delivering the missiles only just as the aircraft is about to launch its air to ground missiles or is just returning from doing so. And, of course, if an F-35 is hit by a Chinese anti-air missile, only one pilots life, at most, is lost, and there is a decent chance that the pilot could eject and be recovered by a search and rescue team. The number of Chinese ground troops killed every time a Chinese warship or worse yet, a Chinese troop carrying ship, is sunk, would be profoundly greater.
Certainly, Chinese troops that do manage to reach the Taiwanese shore by sea, or by helicopter or transport plane or as paratroops, as elite soldiers in an massive all volunteer military of professional Chinese soldiers are, on average, going to be better trained and more skilled soldiers, than Taiwanese ground troops at the vanguard of a massive but not terribly ready or elite reserve force. But the Taiwanese troops know their territory, have the support of the locals, have been training for this mission and this mission only, are fighting to protect their homes, and will locally outnumber the modest number of Chinese troops that manage to cross the strait at least at first, if the efforts to Taiwan and its allies to destroy incoming troop carrying ships and transport aircraft is reasonably successful.
Also, in an era of Chinese demographics where one child families are the norm, even in this nation of 1.4 billion people, the lives of young men serving as soldiers in the PRC's military are no longer cheap and expendable. And, China has not fought any actual hot conflict in which its any significant number of its soldiers and sailors have lost their lives in the living memory of the vast share of the Chinese people. They haven't had much of a chance to come to see these losses as a necessary price to meet its geopolitical objectives, which it has mostly achieved with trade, aid, and diplomacy.
For all of China's bluster, one can seriously doubt whether China really has the stomach to lose the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men, most of its navy, a substantial share of its air force, and many of its coastal military resources, when it can already extract much of what it wants Taiwan for economically as opposed to culturally or politically, through trade.
China has nuclear weapons, but those too are less potent of a threat in a Taiwan invasion. Using on nuclear weapon on the island of Formosa pretty much defeats the purpose of conquering it and would make it an international pariah. But missile defenses are effective enough that ICBMs aimed to the U.S. or its allies might be completely or almost completely thwarted, with any successes threatening massive nuclear retaliation against it.
The Historical And Geopolitical Context And Background
The island of Formosa is about 100 miles from mainland China across the Taiwan Strait.
A typical naval warship can make the trip in about four hours, a very fast one might make it in two or three hours. A helicopter or slower drone could make it in forty-five minutes or less. A subsonic missile or fighter jet or military transport plane can make the trip in ten to fifteen minutes. A supersonic jet fighter can make the trip in five minutes. A hypersonic missile can make the trip in less than two minutes.
The PRC claims the island of Formosa upon which Taiwan is situated is a rebel province which is part of its territory, along with the strait between Formosa and the mainland, despite the fact that the regime has never had any control or authority on the island, and the fact that no mainland Chinese regime has had any control or authority on the island since 1895. The modern Chinese state dates only to the revolution in China in 1911.
Meanwhile, Taiwan, even more laughably, claims to be the legitimate government in exile of mainland China, a territory it lost any remnant of authority or control over from its inception when its regime retreated there after losing the civil war in China that persisted from the end of World War II in 1945 which left a power vacuum there, until the victory of the Maoists and defeat of the Nationalists in 1949, 75 years ago. The Kuomintang party abandoned its claim to be the sole government of mainland China in 1991 in the same year that it ended "emergency rule".
Imperial China ruled the island of Formosa from 1662 when it ousted the Dutch and large numbers of people from mainland China migrated there, until 1895 when the island was conquered by the Japanese Empire. The Japanese ruled it for half a century until the end of World War II in 1945.
After World War II, there was a civil war in China between the Maoist Communists and the Chinese Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek. The non-communist Chinese Nationalist Party eventually lost that civil war and relocated to the island of Formosa in a mass migration of its remaining loyalist in 1949 (the same year that the Maoist PRC regimes was declared by Chairman Mao), filling the post-World War II power vacuum caused by the collapse of Imperial Japan's rule there. The following year, in 1950, now 74 years ago, the PRC conquered Tibet.
Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan as a de facto dictator for twenty-six years until 1975, with U.S. backing against expansion of the Communist PRC as part of the Cold War, running the economy on a capitalist model.
The PRC claimed the island as its territory, even though no mainland Chinese government had ruled there since early 1895, and in 1971, after three-quarters of a century in mainland China had no control or authority there, and despite the fact that the PRC regime had never had control or authority there, in 1971, the U.N. recognized the PRC's claim to the island and expelled Taiwan from the U.N. The PRC terminated its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan in 1978. Today, following the U.N.'s lead, only 13 countries, including the U.S., have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The PRC and Taiwan had their first formal talks with each other again in 2014, thirty-six years after breaking off diplomatic relations but have not reestablished diplomatic ties. Per the BBC link below:
Today, only 12 countries (plus the Vatican) officially recognise Taiwan. The US decision to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 was the turning point. And a richer, more powerful China exerts pressure so more countries do not recognise Taiwan or lend it support. But America remains the island's strongest ally, sells arms to it and has vowed to help in case of a Chinese attack.
The U.S., however, continued to be a strong ally to Taiwan and its military guaranteed its independence from the PRC, and under its influence, Taiwan eventually reformed itself, carrying out land reform to address the feudal era inequalities that led to the Maoist revolution on the mainland, instituting universal public education, modernizing its agricultural and industrial economies, and finally, step by step becoming a democracy. Martial law was lifted in 1987 after 38 years. Four years later in 1991, four decades of "emergency rule" was ended. And, five years after that in 1996, Taiwan had its first direct Presidential election, which the Kuomintang party, the successor to the original Chinese Nationalist Party that had controlled Taiwan for forty-seven years since 1949, won.
The uncontested rule of Chiang Kai-shek's dominant Kuomintang party finally ended in the year 2000, when the leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party won the Presidential election, only for the Kuomintang party to regain the Presidency from 2006 to 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party regained the Presidency, in part, over concerns that the Kuomintang party was to friendly with China and might jeopardize Taiwan's independence. The Democratic Progressive Party still holds the Presidency today. China has gradually stepped up its saber rattling towards Taiwan since the Kuomintang Party lost the Presidency in 2016.
Despite a lack of formal diplomatic relations, 21% of Taiwan's imports are from the PRC and 26% of its exports are to the PRC.
About 70% of the Taiwanese people are Han Chinese, another 25% or so are from another Southern mainland Chinese ethnicity, about 2-3% of the Taiwanese people are indigenous Formosans who speak sixteen different languages once of which is the ancestral language of the Austronesian family of languages spoken from Easter Island and Oceania, to Southeast Asia, to Madagascar, with a small percentage of people of other ancestries. Mandarin Chinese, and two other Chinese topolects (one of which has several dialects) are the predominant languages of Taiwan. But even Chinese languages like Mandarin which are present in both Taiwan and the mainland have developed distinct Taiwanese accents that are perhaps as distinct from their mainland counterparts as American and Canadian English dialects, in their spoken versions, in the non-logographic written versions of them, and in subtleties of meaning and pronunciation of their shared Chinese characters.
Over the last thirty years or so, however, the people of Taiwan have increasingly come to identify themselves as Taiwanese, or as both Taiwanese and Chinese. About two-thirds identify as Taiwanese only. Almost a third identify as both, and only one or two percent now identify only as Chinese.
Taiwan's religious makeup reflects the pre-Maoist religious mix of China, with 42% adhering to Chinese folk religion (a close cousin of Japanese Shinto practice), 27% identifying primarily as Buddhist, 13% identifying as Daoist, 7% identifying with East Asian "new religions", 6% as Christian, and the remainder as non-religious agnostics, although these religious movements are not nearly so mutually exclusive as Western religious denominations and sects.
Taiwan controls a territory of about 13,900 square miles, while the PRC controls about 3.7 million square miles, which is about 2660 times as large.
Critically, the PRC of today is not the PRC of 1949. While the PRC doesn't adhere fully to the extreme version of capitalism found in the United States and has high levels of state involvement in the economy, its record economic growth for many decades has been made possible only through market based economic reforms, soft recognition of property and contract rights, and sufficient openness towards ideas from the world outside of China to allow it to gain the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for it to rapidly catch up to the developed world.
The assimilation of Hong Kong into China has meant even more growing pains for both sides.
China is still astoundingly authoritarian, but it is also not the raw, unpredictable cauldron of violence that it experienced in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution.
Despite being nominally communist, China has its fair share of billionaires and there is a great deal of overlap between its political elites and its economic elites. In other words, China's rules are also among the very wealthiest people in the entire country, which makes a return to an extremely leveling brand of communism that eats the rich unlike to recur there, even if it is quite a dangerous thing to be a billionaire or centi-millionaire in China that can lead to your untimely demise in a usually not officially acknowledged manner if the cross the wrong people or offend the sensibilities of leaders in the Chinese Communist Party.
So far, China has liberalized economically in a gradual manner, rather than all at once as the Soviet Union did in what turned out to be a chaotic and sudden mess that transformed the country from Soviet style communism or crony capitalism run by oligarchs in less than a quarter of a century, with intense societal and governmental pain along the way. This lesson schools Chinese Communist Party leaders to be cautious in their reforms, and had discouraged a relaxation of its authoritarian political model.
But the expectations of continuous fast economic growth that they have developed for themselves puts pressure on them to adopt policies that work to continue that as much as possible and at some point, China's authoritarian rule will have to be relaxed to sustain that, particularly as China starts to have to rely on new innovations of its own, rather than copying proven global economic and technological models to achieve new economic growth. Also, non-economic freedom is, to some extent, one of the luxuries that people in economically prosperous societies crave and desire. The more affluent the Chinese people become, the more they are going to be willing to face significant personal risk and sacrifice and economic resources to escape authoritarian rule. And, there are enough wealthy Chinese people who have traveled abroad to less authoritarian counties, or who have access to less censored international media, that they can know that it is possible to leave in a freer and more democratic world (and the people of Hong Kong have demonstrated that this can work even for ethnically and culturally Chinese people), that it is an enjoyable and desirable intangible luxury to have, and that there are ways of achieving and sustaining it that they can learn and copy as they did less political foreign technologies. It isn't clear how smooth or rocky the path to that end will be, and in the near term, transitioning from China level authoritarianism to Singapore level authoritarianism, or something like it, may be an intermediate step. But it is hard to see a trajectory in which China becomes more insular and authoritarian, rather than less so, in over the next several decades.
This is all to say, then, that it an invasion of Taiwan can be discouraged for a sufficiently long period of time, that eventually mainland China may eventually catch up with Taiwan (which has only enjoyed more or less full democracy and social freedoms for thirty years or so itself), at which point a merger of the PRC and Taiwan might not be so problematic anymore.
Military Capabilities
Taiwan is quite militarized, with 169 thousand active duty military personnel, 1,657 thousand reserve troops, and a defense budget of $16.2 billion. But this is dwarfed by the PRC's 2,035 thousand active duty military personnel, 650 thousand reserve troops, and $242.4 billion USD defense budget. Taiwan has 26 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 4 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels. China has 92 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 59 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels and is expanding its fleet rapidly. Taiwan's air force has 405 jet fighters. China has more than 1,628 jet fighters. Taiwan has 650 tanks. China has 4,800 tanks.
Unlike the United States and Russia, which have large "blue sea Navies", China's ships rarely venture more than 400 miles from its Pacific Coast (although China has deployed as many as a dozen naval ships to suppress pirates in the Indian Ocean right up to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and has an ample merchant and fishing fleet that is sometimes pressed into paramilitary service), and Taiwan's navy stays even closer to home.
There has never been a bigger divide between the two main political parties in the U.S. and the right choice in the Presidential race is crystal clear because the Trump-Vance ticket is just so bad, while Harris-Walz is basically decent, serious, well-meaning, and relatively speaking vastly more honest.
This said, there are grass-roots aspects on the left that aren't perfect, which admittedly, is natural, because the Democratic Party has been forced to have such a big tent.
* The left leaning conspiracy theories about the two Trump assassination attempts are just as bad as the many right wing conspiracy theories.
* The dismissal of the media or other institutions as a source of credible information about the world, which is shared by the far right.
* The far left nihilistic attitude that there is no difference between the two major political parties is myopic and troubling.
* Stubborn refusal to understand that in our political system, support for a third-party candidate helps whichever candidate is most unlike that third-party candidate in terms of policy. In a better electoral system, this wouldn't be the case, but in our current one, third-party candidates are simply treasonous con artists.
* Excessive reliance on qui bono (who benefits) as an explanatory tool for how the world works. More often than not, this isn't a good explanation.
* Denial that IQ is a real thing.
* There are a variety of left leaning Luddite-like policy movements that I don't support: opposition to nuclear energy, the excessive fear of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, distrust of vaccination, and the movement for local food and making your own food and other daily needs yourself. At its worst, some of these ideas spill into general anti-science sentiment.
* Support for small and family owned businesses and farms just because they are small, and opposition to big businesses and farms just because they are big.
* The tendency by some to pit veterans and other sympathetic groups of citizens against foreigners and immigrants.
* The refusal to acknowledge legitimate generational conflicts, and that Millennials and Gen Z really are up against steeper hurdles than Boomers faced.
* A tendency to make the best the enemy of the good.
* The tendency, in reaction to Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, to dismiss just how truly bad military organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are, and a failure to recognize how much they have provoked the treatment that they receive.
Color me skeptical. I don't believe that polarization at the grass roots was nearly as polarized forty years ago as it is today.
We develop a new method to endogenously partition society into groups based on homophily in values. The between-group differentiation that results from this partition provides a novel measure of latent polarization in society. For the last forty years, the degree of latent polarization of the U.S. public has been high and relatively stable. In contrast, the degree of partisan polarization between voters of the two main political parties steadily increased since the 1990s, and is now converging toward that of underlying values-based clusters. Growing partisan polarization in the U.S. is a reflection of partisan views becoming increasingly aligned with the main values-based clusters in society.
Klaus Desmet, Ignacio Ortuno-Ortin, Romain Wacziarg, "Latent Polarization" (May 2024).
Yesterday, seven weeks before the 2024 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had a Presidential debate, that, by all accounts, Harris performed well in (in stark contrast to the debate between Trump and President Biden that triggered Biden's withdrawal from the Presidential race).
Harris used this rare moment with the eyes of the nation on her and Trump to go on the attack and to show, as much as tell, the audience that Trump is a weak and small man who has lost his marbles, by baiting him into rants that prove this point.
The Race Is Close
Terrifyingly, this Presidential race is extremely close. Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona are all polling within one percentage point of a tied race. Harris has a 1.7 percentage point lead in Michigan and a 2 percentage point lead in Wisconsin. Trump leads by 4.4 percentage points in Florida. One candidate or the other leads by at least 5.3 percentage points in every other state or electoral vote granting Congressional District.
Harris leads in national polling by 2.8 percentage points, which given the inherent bias of the Electoral College against Democrats relative to the popular vote, is just barely enough, or maybe not quite enough, to win.
Worse yet, polling was consistently and decisively biased against Trump in both 2016 and in 2020, mostly because of low response rates from Trump supporters relative to supporters of the Democratic candidates. So, notwithstanding the narrow lead in the polls that Harris has, and the efforts of pollsters to address this problem, Harris may be doing worse than the polls are letting on.
This makes no sense.
If you look at the race from a rational, logical perspective, as Democrats are prone to do, this makes no sense.
The fundamentals of the U.S. economy and the state of the union are strong.
- Unemployment has been low on a sustained basis for a record length of time.
- Wages have been rising.
- Gas prices are below average and the current rate of inflation is low.
- The stock market and the gross national product have been growing tremendously.
- Crime rates are at close to record lows.
- The teen birthrate has never been lower.
- Opioid overdose rates have finally stabilized after growing relentlessly for decades.
- We are a nation as close to at peace has we have been for decades. The war in Afghanistan is over. The Iraq War is over.
Trump should be a uniquely weak candidate.
- Trump lost the 2020 election and a lot of Americans are sick of him.
- Trump's speeches are routinely rambling, almost incoherent word salad that are riddled with multiple factual assertions that are not true every single minute, alternating with just bizarre, inexplicable claims.
- Trump is a former Democrat, who lived most of his life in New York City, is married to an immigrant, and claims to be a billionaire who started out in life with a $400 million inheritance back when that was worth a lot more than it is today. He has very little in common with his based in any way.
- The departure from Afghanistan was chaotic and ugly because Trump cut a deal with the Taliban shortly before he lost the 2020 election, that undermined the U.S. backed regime there, Afghans who backs U.S. forces, and U.S. forces.
- Roe v. Wade was overturned, in an immensely unpopular decision, because he appointed three ultra-conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court. Public confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court has never been lower.
- Trump has taken the side of long standing U.S. enemies like Vladimir Putin and King Jung-Un, and has shown open admiration of China's authoritarian leader.
- Trump stands convicted of 34 felonies for which he will face sentencing after the election and before the inauguration.
- Trump is still dealing with three more criminal cases where he was indicted, all of which are tangled up in appeals unrelated to the merits of whether he committed the crimes.
- While the Colorado Supreme Court's decision that Trump was not allowed to run for office because he engaged in an insurrection was not upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, this decision was reversed without disturbing the determination of the Colorado courts that Trump had engaged in an insurrection.
- Several dozen of Trump's senior close associates have been convicted of felonies.
- No living former Republican President endorsed Trump, and only a handful of senior officials from his administration have done so, while many former official in his administration have endorsed Harris.
- Trump's personal lawyer has been disbarred and is bankrupt from sanctions imposed upon him for his misconduct fighting the 2020 election results. Many other lawyers who helped him in connection with that were also disbarred or had their licenses to practice law suspended. Some of the people who pushed that losing fight are in prison.
- About a thousand people involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the capital to overturn his losing electoral vote outcome have been convicted of crimes, many of which were serious.
- Fox News had to settle a defamation case related to its election outcome fraud for about $800 million. Several other conservative news commentators who backed him have lost defamation suits that sent them to bankruptcy and/or lost their jobs.
- Trump's Truth Social conservative social media outlet has seen its stock market price tank.
- Trump lost a civil fraud lawsuit resulting in a judgment against him for hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Trump lost a pair of defamation and civil sexual assault lawsuits, resulting in a civil finding that he sexually assaulted a woman.
- Trump is 78 years old and starting to show strong signs of dementia in his public speeches.
- The media not longer hesitates to call out Trump for his non-stop lying about every factual matter under the sun.
- Trump's mismanagement of the COVID epidemic cost hundreds of thousands of Americans, disproportionately Republicans, their lives.
- Trump ran up the deficit tremendously, and not just from COVID related spending. A lot of that deficit comes from huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich that did little or nothing to help the economy.
- The fact that Trump had an affair with a prostitute while his wife was pregnant with his youngest child, and then paid her $100,000 of hush money.
- Trump has had five children with three wives and indisputably cheated on all three of his wives, including his current one.
- Both Trump and his wife are former pornography actors.
- Trump rarely, if ever, attends church and lacks even surface level understanding of the Bible or Christian doctrine.
- Trump's older children have profited handsomely from selling their relationship to him for the corrupt reason of their apparent political influence and Trump himself received immense improper personal financial gain during his Presidency. Their misconduct with a charity that they were involved in has caused them to be barred from running charities in New York State.
- Trump's businesses, have gone bankrupt six times, including a casino.
- Trump University was a dismal failure that he had to settle for a huge sum because he personally participated in fraud promoting it.
- Trump has a long history of losing or having to settle racial discrimination lawsuits and his father was a literal Nazi and KKK member.
J.D. Vance isn't helping his ticket.
- Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, has also repeatedly put his foot in his mouth, and plays to the MAGA base, not to swing voters.
Biden's departure should help.
- Joe Biden's advanced age had been a major talking point in the Presidential race. Now that talking point has been turned on its head with Harris replacing him in the race.
- Joe Biden did little campaigning, wasn't very effective at it when he did, and did miserably in the first debate.
Walz helps his ticket.
- Governor Walz from Minnesota is a very decent guy and a military veteran (like Vance) who is moral in all of the ways that Trump and Vance are not.
Republicans in Congress are dysfunctional.
- The Republican Party holds a razor thin majority in the U.S. House but has been plagued with infighting, struggled to elected a speaker in the first place, replaced their speaker, and struggles to pass even basic appropriations bills without Democratic party backing.
- Maverick gadflies in the House GOP have more power than they should because the GOP majority is so thin, and they have repeatedly embarrassed their party on a national stage, while undermining their own majority coalition.
- There is a real possibility that the government will shut down on October 1, 2024, a little more than a month before the election, because House Republicans can't agree on a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning.
- In the U.S. Senate, a rogue Senator from Alabama has single handedly impaired the functioning and good order of the U.S. military by blocking defense department related appointments.
- The Republicans have not been very effective in achieving their goals in the U.S. Senate despite the fact that two Democratic Senators have left their party midterm (and will not be re-elected in 2024).
- For example, Biden has appointed new federal judges at roughly the same rate that Trump did.
Why is Trump so greatly over performing in face of all of the factors that should make this race a landslide for Harris?
* At the federal level at least, partisan divides have never been bigger. There is not a single Democrat who is more conservative than a single Republican in Congress. There are very few moderates of either party in Congress. The magnitude of the gap between the parties is as big as it has ever been since the eve of the U.S. Civil War.
* The amount of split ticket voting in 2020 was a record low and all but about 8% of voters have a clear partisan preference which they always back in every election.
* The deep partisan divide reflects a deep economic and cultural divide between "red counties" and "blue counties". Biden won less than 54% of the popular vote in 2020, but the counties he won account for 71% of the nation's GDP. Trump won a little more than 46% of the popular vote, but the counties he won account for only 29% of the nation's GDP.
* Red America is less educated, less affluent, more religious, less diverse, and more rural, than Blue America. Red America has participated very little in the last 50 years of economic growth.
* The economic weakness of less educated white men in Red America has caused them to fail as economic providers resulting in them less often getting married, usually having children out of wedlock, and getting divorced when they do get married early and often at unprecedented rates. Their failure as providers has also driven deaths of despair, and caused many of them to have their parental rights terminated for abuse or neglect, or to have their parental rights marginalized in custody fights, and driven lots of domestic violence criminalizing them.
* Red America has interpreted its failing families as caused by moral failure, gay rights, abortion, and feminism resulting in backlash against "wokeness", when the real problem is that the economy no longer needs many uneducated, unskilled, socially rough around the edges men, leaving them with regular bouts of unemployment and low wages.
* White religious people, living in an increasingly secular society in which they are not thriving economically, and are constantly losing out to educated knowledge workers (an increasing share of whom are non-white women), have ceased to trust the mainstream media, educational institutions at all levels, and the government. Together with the rise of social media and niche Internet media sources, this has left them exposed to ridiculous lies about almost everything going on in the world, which they embraced, initially, to protect their religious worldviews that are at odds with science and reality.
Trump's Messaging
- Trump's campaign has tried, with considerable success, to blame Biden for the short but intense period of high inflation post-COVID, even though it was driven by factors beyond Biden's control (like Ukraine War driven oil price surges and big corporate profit taking greed). This, and Biden's failure to regularly tout his economic successes, means that many conservatives don't realize how strong the economy is doing.
- Trump did his best in the debate, and has in all of his campaigns, tried to demonize immigration and hasn't hesitated to resort to bald faced lies to back that effort. In part this is playing to economic fear, that Red America sees waves of low skilled workers as competing with them in a zero sum game for unskilled work. But more than that, he is focusing on immigrant driven crime (which is contrary to reality because crime is low and because even undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than native born Americans) and on immigrants undermining a white Evangelical Christian nationalist vision for America and its culture. He's also tried to fan completely unsubstantiated claims that fraudulent voting by immigrants who aren't allowed to vote is depriving his backers, the "true Americans" of their rightful control of their country. Never mind that immigrants are particularly scarce in many of the places where Trump's message is most warmly received, like West Virginia.
- The MAGA movement isn't about governing. Trump himself is mostly only weakly interested in policy despite the nefarious and terrifying Project 2025 agenda that has been prepared for him by right wing think tanks. Conservative wonks in think tanks want to govern in a way that transforms the nation with hard core conservative policies to fit their minority vision for the country. But, the MAGA movement and Trump himself, are about persecuting their enemies for disloyalty and out of spite, and about burning down the entire institution of the federal government (and a lot of state and local government) which they believe has failed them and they don't trust.
- A fair amount of the MAGA movement is about older, disgruntled white people in places that have failed economically who mostly aren't thriving themselves, trying to hold onto white male Christian hegemony in an economy where you can be prosperous without education or skills, as the nation steadily becomes less Christian, less white, more educated, and has given more power and rights to women. They want to roll back cultural change including gay rights and feminism. They want to deny the existence of things like climate change.
- They want everyone to buy American and forego international trade. Trump is pushing big new tariffs in his tax proposals. His vision for America is isolationist and anti-globalist.
-They are attracted by the certainty and manliness of authoritarian leaders internationally. Trump touted support from far right Hungarian leader Mr. Orban in the debate.
- Trump's message is a message of fear and division. Harris is trying to go back to Obama's message of hope and unity.
- The Democratic party's left wing has to some extent fallen for the trap that Trump has created for them, threatening to back third-party candidates due to disillusionment with Biden over issues like Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians that isn't salient to many voters, and focusing on the negative long term perspective on the economy rather than the good news from Biden's administration compared to Trump's administration.
Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have so much corruption that it would head towards collapse. This is why conservatives cannot build scientific institutions, and only a very small number of credible journalistic outlets. Right-wingers are discriminated against in academia and the media, but they mostly aren’t in these professions because they select out of them, since they lack intellectual curiosity and a concern for truth. If it doesn’t make them money or flatter their ego in a very simplistic way — in contrast to the more complicated and morally substantive ways in which liberals improve their own self-esteem — conservatives are not interested.Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump. As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, EHC is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist. A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.
Google AI says this about U.S. barge traffic (of freight) by commodity type:
Here are some commodities that are transported by barge in the United States:CoalIn 2007, coal was the primary commodity moved by barge, accounting for 29% of all tonnages.PetroleumPetroleum was the second largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 27% of all tonnages.Crude materialsCrude materials, such as forest products, sand, gravel, ores, scrap, and salt, were the third largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 18% of all tonnages.Food and farm productsFood and farm products were the fourth largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 12% of all tonnages.GrainCorn and soybeans are the major bulk grain commodities moved by barge along the Mississippi River.FertilizerFertilizer is another farm product that is moved by barge.Heavy bulk commoditiesHeavy bulk commodities, such as cereal grains, processed agricultural goods, animal feed, fertilizer, and sand and gravel, are commonly moved by barge in the rural area of the Mid-America Port Commission Region.Machinery and equipmentLarge and bulky pieces of machinery or equipment, such as giant cranes, steam generators, automobile plant presses, military vehicles, and rocket boosters, are also transported by barge.
eMachines was a brand of economical personal computers.eMachines was founded in September 1998 by Lap Shun Hui as a joint venture of South Korean companies Korea Data Systems and TriGem. The company sold PCs at prices [intially] ranging at $399 or $499, not including a monitor. By March 1999, the company was ranked fourth in U.S. computer sales, with a 9.9% market share.In 2004, it was acquired by Gateway, Inc., which was in turn acquired by Acer Inc. in 2007. The EMachines brand was discontinued in 2013.
In the Ukraine War, Russia has so far lost about 2/3 of its major army military systems like tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and artillery batteries, in two and a half years of fighting.
Some of its losses are being replaced with vehicles left in boneyards, but Russia is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel even there, putting tanks from the 1960s and 1970s back in service, sometimes as stationary pillboxes or filled with explosives and converted into crudely controlled unmanned ground vehicles full of explosives and used as rolling bombs. A thousand of its early T-72 tanks are too far gone and have too complex autoloading systems to restore at all.
Russia has perhaps 1,750 tanks in operation with perhaps 2,000 more fifty to sixty year old tanks that are salvageable to some extent from its bone yards. It has lost about 3,000 tanks, including the lion's share of its most advanced ones. It has lost about 10,000 artillery pieces leaving a bit more than 4,000 left. It can build only about 100 new tanks a year. It is already having to ration artillery shells, despite its depleted supply of artillery pieces, because it can't make new ones fast enough. Russia's supply of guided missiles is dwindling and can't easily be replaced. It is getting new armed drones from Iran but can't procure them as fast as it is using them.
At the rate that Russia is taking losses, by the third anniversary of the conflict it will have lost 3/4 of it army's major military systems. A year after that it will have lost 90%. Russia doesn't have enough major military equipment to keep fighting for another two full years from now.
Russia's naval and air force losses have been less severe, but it has lost about half of its Black Sea fleet, including its flagship, its headquarters in Crimea, and two submarines. At the current rate, its Black Sea fleet could be 75% depleted by the third anniversary of the war, Russia could be down to a dozen ships and armed boats or less out of an original eighty or so, by the fourth anniversary of the war. This isn't a huge blow to the overall Russian navy, although surely the Ukraine war must at least be causing Russian resources to be diverted from maintaining and expanding the Russian navy to the war (notwithstanding claims by Russian leaders that it is expanding its navy). The fact that Russia has suffered these Black Sea fleet losses from an opponent without a navy of its own and with only a limited air force also underscores how vulnerable the rest of Russia's navy is in a near peer war where its opponents have modern anti-ship missiles and modern air and sea drones.
Russia has lost more than 300 aircraft and is losing about 50 more every six months. This isn't negligible, but it also isn't crippling. But Russia's air force has been largely impotent in this conflict due to its inability to gain air superiority in the face of Ukrainian air defenses. This example also provides a roadmap for other countries wondering how to thwart Russia's immense on paper air force. And, the pace at which Ukraine is damaging Russian air assets is rising.
After some quick territorial gains relative to the 2014 status quo, it lost much of that, and there is been little progress territorially for either side since then. There is no reason to think that Russia will make any meaningful territorial gains in these time periods, indeed, Ukraine recently occupied some of its own territory.
Russia has already sustained more casualties (only about 5-6% fatal) so far, probably 500,000 to 600,000, than the entire size of its active duty military less its navy and air force, of about 400,000 ground troops, when the war began two and a half years ago. At the current rate, it will sustain perhaps 120,000 more casualties between now and the third anniversary of the conflict. By the fourth anniversary of the conflict it is on track to have suffered more than 800,000 casualties with perhaps 50,000 lives lost. Russia's losses can and have been backfilled with green conscripts and with reserve soldiers who were former conscripts or retired and have a lower level of readiness. It may have only something on the order of 50,000 group troops who haven't suffered casualties and were part of the active duty Russian army when the Ukraine war started.
These losses involving such a large percentage of the soldiers deployed to the war have a corrosive effect on morale and unit cohesion. It has, or soon will, have too few experienced soldiers at a high level of readiness to hold the new conscripts and reservists pressed into action together and functioning effectively.
Indeed, assuming that Russia suffers losses at current rates is optimistic. It has fewer major military systems and the ones it has less are inferior older models or in ill-repair. Its troops are getting steadily less skilled. Its logistics systems are being degraded. The Western supplies that Ukraine is getting are becoming more advanced, like longer range MLRS artillery missiles and F-16s.
So, while the current situation in the Ukraine war is frustrating, the current territorial stalemate and war of attrition ultimately works in Ukraine's favor because it has more access to new resources from the West than Russia does from its allies. Russia, realistically, only has the ability to continue for fight for six to eighteen months. And, of course, every month that Russia suffers more losses reduces the conventional warfare threat that it presents to NATO.
Also, as Russia's ground forces grow more depleted, the time becomes ripe for would be insurgents in ethnic minority reasons to rise up again into civil wars in their regions, knowing that Russia has only very limited military resources available to put them down. There mere threat that this could happen discourages Russia from trying to fight down to its last man and last tank in Ukraine.
There is one major content based categorical fair use exemption from copyright. It is for parody. I would propose at least two others:
1. Advocacy. People who are advocating for a view or position want their works to be widely distributed and aren't creating content for the purpose of making a profit. Infringement of copyrights for works of advocacy should be categorically classified as fair use.
2. Scholarship. Academic scholars likewise want their works to be widely disseminated, so long as their works are properly attributed, and earn most of their incomes from salaries as professors or researchers, not from royalties earned on their academic work. Infringement of copyrights for works of academic scholarship that give attribution to the authors should also be categorically classified as fair use.
Today is Labor Day. As usual, there is much discussion of what can be done to help workers. But few focus on the one type of reform that is likely to help more poor and disadvantaged workers than virtually anything else: increasing labor mobility. In the United States and around the world, far too many workers are trapped in places where it is difficult or impossible for them to ever escape poverty. They could vastly improve their lot if allowed to "vote with their feet" by moving to locations where there are better job opportunities. That would also be an enormous boon to the rest of society.
Economists estimate that eliminating legal barriers to migration throughout the world would roughly double world GDP—in other words, making the world twice as productive as it is now. A person who has the misfortune of being born in Cuba or Venezuela, Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, is likely condemned to lifelong poverty, no matter how talented or hardworking he or she may be. If they are allowed to move to a freer society with better economic institutions, they can almost immediately double or triple their income and productivity. And that doesn't consider the possibility of improving job skills, which is also likely to be more feasible in their new home than in their country of origin.The vast new wealth created by breaking down migration barriers would obviously benefit migrants themselves. But it also creates enormous advantages for receiving-country natives, as well. They benefit from cheaper and better products, increased innovation, and the establishment of new businesses (which immigrants create at higher rates than natives). Immigrants also contribute disproportionately to scientific and medical innovation, such as the MRNA Covid-19 vaccines, that have already saved many thousands of lives around the world.
barriers to labor mobility also harm workers within the United States. Exclusionary zoning prevents many millions of Americans—particularly the poor and working class—from moving to areas where they could find better job opportunities and thereby increase their wages and standard of living. Recent evidence suggests that the problem is even worse than scholars previously thought. Occupational licensing further exacerbates the problem, by making it difficult for workers in many industries to move from one state to another.Breaking down barriers to labor mobility is an oft-ignored common interest of poor minorities (most of whom are Democrats), and the increasingly Republican white working class. Both groups could benefit from increased opportunity to move to places where there are more and better jobs and educational opportunities available.
The latest op-ed by Paul Krugman, entitled, "The Political Rage of Left-Behind Regions" (NYT) explains the single most important factor in the gains of the far-right in the U.S., in modern Germany, and elsewhere.He notes that:There were local elections in several German states a few days ago, and the results — a strong showing by the Alliance for Germany or AfD, a right-wing extremist party — were shocking but not surprising. . . . In some important respects Thuringia, the German state where the AfD won more votes than any other party, resembles West Virginia. Like West Virginia, it’s a place the 21st-century economy seems to have left behind, whose population is in decline, with younger people in particular leaving for opportunities elsewhere. And West Virginia strongly supports Donald Trump and his party, whose doctrines bear considerable resemblance to those of the AfD. . . .MAGA’s rise does seem connected to the economic decline of much of rural and small-town America. This decline has happened in many parts of the country, including, for example, much of upstate New York, but it is concentrated in what Benjamin Austin, Edward Glaeser and Lawrence Summers have called the “eastern heartland.” In what follows I’ll focus on numbers for West Virginia, which is arguably the heart of that heartland, and epitomizes both the economic and political problems of left-behind regions.So what stands out when you compare West Virginia with other parts of America is the number of men not working. I say “men” because even now, despite the rise in the percentage of women in the paid labor force since 1970, our expectation that adults of working age will, in fact, have jobs is stronger for men than for women.Here’s a comparison between West Virginia and New Jersey. Why New Jersey? I’ll explain in a moment.
The chart shows the percentage of adults ages 20 to 64 who didn’t have jobs in 2019 (before the pandemic):Credit...American Community Survey
Adults of both sexes were much more likely not to be working in West Virginia, although the gap was larger for men (67 versus 43 percent).Why is not working a problem? Obviously, it means you aren’t earning wages, but it goes deeper than that. Jobs are a source of dignity, a sense of self-worth; people who aren’t working when they feel they should be — a problem that, like it or not, is even now bigger for men than women — feel shame, which all too easily turns into anger, a desire to blame someone else and lash out.So the lack of jobs for men helps extremist political movements that appeal to angry men. In Germany, the AfD has much stronger support among men than women. Polls show a large advantage for Kamala Harris among women in the United States, while Trump leads among men. Places where there are many men without jobs are fertile ground for MAGA, which is trying to court the “manoverse.”Why are jobs, especially for men, so hard to get in West Virginia?Despite what you may hear from the likes of JD Vance, native-born West Virginians aren’t losing jobs to immigrants because the state hardly has any immigrants — only 1.8 percent of the population is foreign-born, the lowest in the nation, while the corresponding number for New Jersey is 23.5 percent, close to the top.The parallel between economic and political developments in the United States and Germany also rules out the idea that the heartland is suffering because trade deficits are undermining our manufacturing sector. For while America has indeed been running trade deficits, Germany has been running huge surpluses — yet is experiencing similar discontent and anger[.]. . .
The most likely story is that the 21st-century economy is driven by knowledge-intensive industries that flourish in metropolitan areas with highly educated work forces. This has led to a self-reinforcing process in which jobs migrate to places with lots of college graduates, and college graduates migrate to the same places, leaving less-educated places like West Virginia stranded.
Is the solution, then, for the regions that have benefited from this process to provide aid to those on the losing end?
No, he answers. As it stands, the federal government subsidizes West Virginia to the tune of 12% of its GDP in federal spending less federal taxes from the states, due to progressive taxation and programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and also benefits greatly from Obamacare.
Credit...Rockefeller Institute, Bureau of Economic Analysis . . .
Credit...KFF
West Virginia has seen its traditional mining and logging jobs collapse, while its health care, education, and social service jobs have grown.
Credit...FRED . . .
What is true, and may partially explain political rage in left-behind regions, is that many of the jobs federal aid creates tend to be female-coded, certainly more so than coal mining — which may in turn explain why the problem of adults without jobs appears to be worse, at least in terms of its political weight, for men than for women.That said, the Biden-Harris administration has been making a serious effort to promote manufacturing as part of its industrial policies — an effort that seems to be disproportionately helping heartland states.The odd thing is that the politicians angry heartland voters support — Trump received more than twice as many votes in West Virginia as Joe Biden in 2020 — oppose the very programs that aid these depressed areas. Trump tried, in effect, to kill the Affordable Care Act. Not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping to create manufacturing jobs in the heartland.But then Adam Tooze, who does know something about German political economy, tells us that while the AfD talks a lot about “social distress” in lagging regions, this “does not translate into a platform that supports greater state spending.”In Germany as in America, then, voters in left-behind regions are, understandably, angry — and they channel this anger into support for politicians who will make their plight worse.
