Month: August 2018

Senate Votes to Extend Federal Flood Insurance Funding

The Senate voted 86–12 this week to keep funding the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) until November. The House passed the same bill last week, so it’s now on its way to the president’s desk.

Too bad. When Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) voted against the bill, he rightly called it “fiscally unsustainable” and “structurally unsound.” It’s also a handout to the rich.

When Congress created the NFIP in 1968, it was trying to shrink the role of federal aid in disaster-prone areas by offering incentives to undergo risk mitigation. But instead of reducing the need for federal dollars, the program done the opposite. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the NFIP is around $30 billion in debt.

Lee tried to mitigate the fiscal blow with an amendment that would have capped the payouts at $2.5 million, but the measure failed to get enough support. Meanwhile, other legislators called for rushing the bill through. “We need to reform this program, but we also need to keep it alive through the end of hurricane season,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). The NFIP insures more than five million properties; failing to reauthorize it would amount to “scaring” the policyholders, Kennedy said.

But the people who benefit from the NFIP do not tend to be impoverished Americans looking to rebuild their lives after hurricanes. Homes covered by the insurance program are, on average, more expensive than those not covered by the programs.

A Cato Institute report last year found that the median value of a subsidized coastal property was $402,768, while the median value for an unsubsidized property on the coast was a much smaller $339,842. Another study—this one from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth—found an “inverse relationship” between property values and premiums: The owners of higher-value properties paid a smaller premium than the owners of lower-value properties. In effect, taxpayers across America are subsidizing the lifestyles of rich people with waterfront homes.

Congress may want to create incentives for risk mitigation, but artificially low flood insurance premiums incentivize people to live in riskier areas. People should be free to choose where they want to live, but it’s shouldn’t be the role of the government—especially a government $21 trillion in debt—to take bail out wealthy citizens’ risky decisions.

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New Age Fiscal Stimulus Is Unprecedented – And Ominous

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

In a normal business cycle, the economy expands for a while and businesses hire lots of new people at somewhat higher wages, generating enough tax revenue to shrink the government’s budget deficit – and in rare cases produce a surplus. So, for a while, the government borrows less money.

Not this time. The current recovery is nearly ten years old and the labor market is so tight that desperate companies are trying all kinds of new tricks to attract workers – including higher wages.

Yet the US just announced its intention to borrow $1.3 trillion in this fiscal year, the most since the depths of the Great Recession.

And this isn’t a one-shot deal. Trillion-dollar deficits are now projected for as far as the eye can see:

What does this mean? The US has decided that since we’ve borrowed a lot of money in the past and are still here, debt must not matter.

Voters don’t care, the markets don’t care, so why not spend money we don’t have on cool stuff in the here-and-now. A new generation of super-weapons? Sure. A wall across 3,000 miles of southern border, check. Tax cuts for people who already more than they’re able to spend? Why not?

But here’s the problem – or the short-term one, anyhow: Using debt to push an expansion beyond its natural lifetime (this one is approaching the longest ever) makes the imbalances that normally end expansions much, much worse. The aforementioned labor shortage, for instance, will only become more extreme if the economy keeps growing. Interest rates, already rising, will keep going up.

So think of the current bout of late-cycle New Age fiscal stimulus as an experiment in the style of QE and ZIRP. That is, something that hasn’t been done in the past but – given the alternatives – seems like the least risky option.

And as with QE, the US isn’t alone. Japan has given up trying to balance its budget and is now looking for new things to buy with fresh-off-the-press yen. China, faced with a manufacturing slowdown and incipient trade war, is “going for growth” via a domestic infrastructure program – after a decade of the biggest infrastructure build-out in world history.

It’s useful to note that even Keynesianism, generally the most debt-friendly (or debt-oblivious) school of economic thought, views deficit spending as a cyclical stabilizer. That is, in bad times governments should borrow and spend to keep the economy growing while in good times governments should scale back borrowing – and ideally run surpluses – to keep things from overheating.

But now we seem to have turned that logic on its head, with fiscal stimulus ramping up in the best of times, when unemployment is low, stock prices high and inflation stirring. New Age fiscal policy seems to call for continuous and growing deficits pretty much forever.

As I said, unprecedented and definitely ominous.

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Secret Surveillance of Americans Traveling by Air Found Nothing, Will Continue

Airport arrival boardFederal air marshals have secretly stalked about 5,000 Americans since March. None of these people were suspected of any specific criminal or terrorist activities, and the surveillance didn’t turn up any evidence of criminal or terrorist activities.

Nevertheless, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) says the program should and will continue.

The Boston Globe reported over the weekend that the TSA’s program, called “Quiet Skies,” tracks fliers who weren’t even on terror watch lists, based on a vague concept of suspicious behavior. The air marshals themselves object to the program, and their union would like them assigned elsewhere rather than having to follow these people around. Some members of Congress have complained too, saying they weren’t been informed about the launch of this program. So this week, TSA officials have been having closed-door meetings with various lawmakers.

The TSA wouldn’t acknowledge the program existed until the Globe revealed it. Now that it’s been publicized, they’re quick to defend it. Spokesman James Gregory said Monday, “The program analyzes information on a passenger’s travel patterns, and through a system of checks and balances, to include robust oversight, effectively adds an additional line of defense to aviation security.”

It has other defenders, too. The Washington Post‘s editorial board gave it a quasi-stamp of approval with the “If it’s done right” disclaimer, noting that this system would allow the TSA to deploy air marshals to keep track of suspicious people rather than sticking them on large airliners to keep tabs on entire flights even when there’s no sign that anything may happen:

Among other things, the marshals employ behavior detection techniques similar to those that TSA agents use to evaluate all passengers at security checkpoints, such as watching for signs of excessive nervousness. Since airliners are spaces where no one expects privacy, it is unlikely the marshals’ scrutiny constitutes an illegal search. If the 90 days pass without incident, the scrutinized passengers are removed from the list and their files are closed and later purged, the TSA spokesman said.

The editorial highlights a behavior that the average person would find suspicious—”excessive nervousness.” But in practice, the TSA “behavior detection techniques” can find just about any behavior that anybody normally exhibits at an airport to be suspicious. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted on Monday, suspicion can be triggered by such behaviors as boarding late, sleeping on flights, or simply sweating.

ReasonTV pointed out the absurdly contradictory triggers in the TSA’s behavior detection systems. The short version: We’re all potential terrorists no matter what we do at the airport. But the longer version is funnier to watch:

In any case, the fact that this secret surveillance of 5,000 Americans uncovered nothing actionable is a sign that it is not, in fact, being “done right.”

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“F*ck The Police”: NYT’s Newest Hire Also Hates Cops And Men, Not Just White People

The New York Times‘ newest editorial board member, Sarah Jeong, was outed as a bigot yesterday after dozens of tweets from less than four years ago were unearthed, revealing extreme hatred of white people. 

The Times, in response, claimed to have known about the tweets – and said they were simply Jeong imitating racists. 

“Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment. For a period of time she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.” -NYT

Except this was quickly dispelled when several tweets of Jeong’s in which she drops casual bigotry such as “fuck white women” out of the blue were caught by other Twitter users. 

Now, as the Daily Caller‘s Amber Athey reports, Jeong’s Twitter history also reveals hatred for cops and men.

The NYT claimed that Jeong was “imitating” the behavior of people who harassed her online, but this does not explain why she was tweeting “fuck the police” and encouraging people to “kill all men.”

A search for “cops” and “police” on Jeong’s Twitter reveals an extensive history of anti-cop sentiment and a lack of sympathy for police who are injured on the job.

In one tweet from 2014 she wrote, “let me know when a cop gets killed by a rock or molotov cocktail or a stray shard of glass from a precious precious window.”

“Cops are assholes,” she said in 2015.

“If we’re talking big sweeping bans on shit that kills people, why don’t we ever ever ever ever talk about banning the police?” a tweet from 2016 asserts. –Daily Caller

Jeong also fantasized about killing men, joking that even if only “bad men” were killed, it would still include all men. 

It all makes perfect sense, right?  

Of course, the MSM is already starting to cover for Jeong – as evidenced by journalist Tim Pool’s observation that the BBC “stealth edited” an article to change the word “racist” to “inflammatory” without noting the update:

The BBC also added quotation marks to the phrase “Racist Tweets” to suggest they aren’t actually racist.

Nothing to see here folks, just the NYT hiring and then defending a bigot who openly hates white people, men and cops. Of course, the Times also said of ABC’s decision to cancel Roseanne: “The network’s decision to cancel “Roseanne” over a racist comment will cost it. But when people decide to let racism slide, it costs the rest of us.” 

Unless it’s one of their own… 

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Sarah Jeong Probably Doesn’t Hate White People, But Mocking Them Is an Easy Way to Prove You’re Woke

JeongHaving delved a little deeper into the controversial tweets of recent New York Times hire Sarah Jeong, I no longer entirely buy the rationale that Jeong provided to The Times: that she was merely “imitating” the rhetoric of people harassing her. If she was trolling her harassers, I would have expected her to quote-tweet or reply to them, but many of the tweets seem to be generated by nothing other than Jeong’s own thoughts, or by items in the news.

I understand that she was experiencing a deluge of harassment at the time. That’s the internet: an ugly place for everybody, but especially for women of color (Jeong was born in South Korea). It’s awful, and people ought to think long and hard about how they might have handled such a situation. Have you ever lashed out in anger after someone was being mean to you? Do you think this should make you unemployable?

I still don’t think she should be fired, and further efforts to mine her old tweets for content that runs afoul of right-wing political correctness—oh no, she said bad things about the police, how dare she—play directly into the hands of a bad-faith smear campaign. Over the last 24 hours, it’s been incredible to watch an army of right-of-center Twitter users gleefully demand Jeong’s head out of some misguided sense of fair play—of forcing the left to “live by its own rules.” A much more productive use of their time would be to defend Jeong while pointing out leftist hypocrisy when warranted.

Speaking of which, the reaction to Jeong’s tweet among some left-of-center folks is a powerful reminder of a harmful lefty belief: that racism against white people is impossible. National Review‘s David French and New York‘s Andrew Sullivan (both, alas, white people—and men!) have both written articles about this reaction, which was evident for anyone paying attention to the Jeong news cycle on social media.

Most people probably define racism as harboring negative views about people based on their skin color or national origin, or treating them differently, or prejudging them, or making broad, stereotypical assumptions about them. But for the left, racism has to involve a structural power imbalance to count. White people as a group have never been oppressed, the argument goes, so they cannot suffer racism. White people can still experience oppression if they are female, gay, trans, disabled, etc., but they can’t experience racism. That’s how intersectionality works.

One easy way for a person to indicate that she is on the left—that she’s woke, she gets it, etc.—is to make remarks that disparage white people. While these remarks seem ugly and offensive to most people, folks on the left who understand that anti-white racism is impossible are able to recognize the disparager as one of their own.

Ultimately, I suspect that’s what Jeong was really doing. She doesn’t actually hate white people; she was demonstrating that she subscribes to The Cause. Of course, it says something about this strain of leftism that one of the easiest ways to prove you’re a devotee is to make mean-spirited, troll-ish generalizations about other people.

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ICE’s No Tolerance Policy is Wreaking Havoc on Families and Clogging the Immigration System: New at Reason

Early on a Sunday morning in late May, Jose Garcia was walking to his car to grab a coffee mug when several armed agents in bulletproof vests approached and told him he was under arrest.

The arrest was part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweep that had picked up 162 people, including at least eight green-card holders like Garcia, who had lived in Southern California for more than 50 years and provided for his family by working three jobs.

ICE targeted Garcia based on a 17-year-old domestic violence misdemeanor, which he says happened when a neighbor called the police after overhearing an argument between him and his wife. The courthouse didn’t retain any documents describing the incident in any further detail, but Garcia’s guilty plea made him eligible for deportation.

Garcia’s ordeal happened at the height of the media storm around family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border. Thanks largely to the efforts of his daughter Natalie Garcia, his case received national attention. His Los Angeles–based attorney, Mackenzie Mackins, believes it was this media attention and the ensuing community support that led to an unusually quick resolution. After three weeks, a judge granted Garcia’s case and released him from county jail to return to his family.

“Mr. Garcia’s case is just one of many where members of our community, hard workers, have been picked up by ICE and targeted for reasons that are beyond comprehension for most Americans,” says Mackins.

Mackins also represents Sergio Quiroz, a 23-year-old college student whose mother brought him over the border from Mexico when he was seven months old. He hasn’t returned since.

Quiroz ran into trouble with ICE after a fight with an ex-girlfriend in 2017. He says he threw and broke her iPhone during an argument. She called the police, and he pled to the misdemeanor of simple battery. It’s not a deportable offense in itself, but it put him on ICE’s radar. The agency then used a detainer to pick him up from county jail, move him to a federal detention center, and put him on track for deportation.

“That’s why so many states and localities do not cooperate with ICE detainers,” says Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “They see ICE detainers as a way to cast a wide net to pick up people who should not be deported.”

Despite policy changes designed to increase deportations, the Trump administration has yet to match the deportation numbers from the early years of the Obama administration, during which Barack Obama earned the moniker “Deporter-in-Chief.”

Five days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing ICE to begin targeting “all removable aliens” living in the country. The Department of Homeland Security released a memo rescinding much of the discretion that ICE agents, prosecutors, and judges were previously allowed to exercise.

“The administration has basically unshackled ICE, given it free reign to do what it wants, and basically said no group is off-limits,” says Nowrasteh. “It’s sort of an effort to roll back the clock, in a sense, to go back to the way immigration enforcement was during the first three to four years of the Obama administration.”

The number of immigrants ICE has arrested and detained from the interior of the country has increased by about 30 percent between 2016 and 2017, but arrests at the border and the rate of deportations have slowed, while the backlog of pending cases has spiked. Mackins says that the lack of discretion emanating from the executive order and the DHS memo is causing a system overload.

“When you make everyone a priority, nobody is a priority,” says Mackins.

Activists and a couple of prominent Democrats have called for the complete abolition of ICE. But Nowrasteh thinks such a move would do little in itself to solve the immigration crisis.

“The abolish ICE movement is mostly an optical one of propaganda and slogan,” says Nowrasteh. “The problem is that if you abolish ICE now and do now change any of the other immigration laws that are on the books, another law enforcement agency is just going to do the same thing in about the same way, and you’ve really accomplished nothing.”

Instead, Nowrasteh suggests abolishing criminal prosecutions of unauthorized border crossing, instead treating such an act as an infraction on par with something like a parking ticket. He would also abolish Enforcement and Removal Operations, a branch of ICE, and shift all interior enforcement to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which should be tasked to focus only on serious violent criminals and national security threats.

“One hundred percent of ICE resources should be focused on removing national security, violent, and property criminals,” says Nowrasteh.

Sergio Quiroz and his mother continue to fight his removal order. As for Jose Garcia, he’s back with his family but plans to finally obtain full citizenship to protect himself going forward.

“This is my country. I love it, and I want to stay here for as long as I can. I want to be buried here when the time comes,” says Garcia.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller.

Camera by Paul Detrick, Lorenz Lo, and Weissmueller.

“Flashing Runner” by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial International License: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) Source: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/Resolute/Flashing_Runner Artist: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions

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Here Is The Full List Of US Products That Will Be Hit With New Chinese Tariffs

Stoking the flames of the relentless trade war between the US and China, earlier today Beijing unveiled a list of $60 billion of some 5,207 goods imported from the United States that will be taxed with extra tariffs ranging from 5 to 25%, should the U.S. follow through on a plan to impose duties on $200 billion of Chinese goods as early as next month.

Here are some facts and figures about the products (via BBG):

  • Taxation breakdown:
    • 2,493 products fall under the 25% category;
    • 1,078 products will be taxed at 20%,
    • 974 at 10%
    • 662 at 5%
  • Liquefied natural gas to be taxed at 25%
  • Agricultural products may face levies between 10% and 25%
  • Machinery is mainly taxed in 20%, 10% and 5% categories
  • Mining, mineral and metal products face tariffs of 10%-25%; natural and synthetic chemicals are taxed under all four brackets
  • Sports equipment is mainly taxed under 10% and 20% categories
  • Motor vehicles, together with their parts and accessories, fall mostly within the 5% bracket

Will this be the final trade war salvo? Certainly not: in response to China’s sanctions announcement, earlier today Larry Kudlow told Bloomberg that Trump will keep pressing China for trade concessions as the administration views China’s $60BN response as “weak” although together with the last tariff rounds, it pretty much exhausts the amount of imports that China takes from the US in any given year, and so China can’t impose further sanctions even if it wants to.

“We’ve said many times: no tariffs, no tariff barriers, no subsidies. We want to see trade reforms. China is not delivering, OK?,” Trump’s top economic advisor Larry Kudlow said. “Their economy’s weak, their currency is weak, people are leaving the country. Don’t underestimate President Trump’s determination to follow through.”

That said there is some hope for a ceasefire: U.S. and Chinese officials have held “hardly any conversations” in the past month, but there’s “some hint” the Chinese may be warming to the idea of negotiations, Kudlow said. There’s recently been some communication at the highest levels, he also told reporters outside the White House, although with neither leader willing to appear weak, it is virtually certain that unless both parties agree on a ceasefire at the same time, the trade war will continue.

Meanwhile, Chinese authorities – bracing for economic fallout – have taken a range of measures in recent weeks to bolster the economy. On Friday officials stepped in to cushion the yuan, which has been battered by trade tensions and was approaching the key level of seven to the dollar, and the PBOC announced it would impose a reserve requirement of 20% on trading of foreign-exchange forward contracts, making it far more difficult to short the yuan.

Commenting on the Yuan devaluation, which many saw as greenlighted by Beijing, Kudlow said the weaker yuan indicates that investors have questions about the strength of China’s economy, adding a lack of intervention to prop up the yuan is helping cushion the impact of the trade war for China, although that clearly changed in the course of the day.

“Some of the currency fall though, I think, is just money leaving China cause it’s a lousy investment and if that continues that will really damage the Chinese economy,” Kudlow said.

Of course, China’s intervention, apart from being seen as a from of soft capital controls to prevent any further capital flight from the nation by keeping the yuan stable, will also have the result of putting further pressure on the Chinese economy which will no longer be able to offset US tariffs via a weaker currency, effectively providing an easing of monetary conditions for the US.

The full list of US products subject to 25% tariffs is shown below. Unfortunately, China’s Ministry of Finance saw it fit to only provide a non-English version.

 

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Eskimo Yells “I Hate White People” While Punching White Woman; Judge Rules Not A Hate Crime

A Calgary indiginous woman who knocked out a white woman’s tooth on November 1 while yelling “I hate white people” did not commit a hate crime, according to privincial court Judge Harry Van Harten. 

The victim, Lydia White, was standing outside a Calgary pub talking to another person whne Crowchief walked up and yelled “I hate white people,” before punching White in the face – knocking out a tooth. Upon her arrest, Crowchief told police “the white man was out to get her,” according to the Calgary Herald. 

Yet Judge Van Harten didn’t see any racial motivation whatsoever…

Provincial court Judge Harry Van Harten, in a written decision, said Tamara Crowchief’s motivation for striking Lydia White was not related to racial bias.

Crown prosecutor Karuna Ramakrishnan, who had sought a sentence of 12 to 15 months, argued Crowchief’s unprovoked attack last Nov. 1, amounted to a hate crime.

But Van Harten agreed with defence counsel Adriano Iovinelli that there was insufficient evidence to establish Crowchief attacked White because of the colour of her skin.

“There is no evidence either way about what the offender meant or whether . . . she holds or promotes an ideology which would explain why this assault was aimed at this victim,” said Van Harten during his ruling. “I am not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that this offense was, even in part, motivated by racial bias.”

At a court hearing earlier this year, White said she’s still confused by the assault.

“I still get angry when I think about it,” she said. “I don’t understand why this woman did this. I never did anything to her. Never even spoke to her.”

Crowchief, who had been in jail over six months before Trial, was given 12 months probation “and ordered her to get psychological and psychiatric counselling, as well as counselling for substance abuse,” the Herald reported. She is also banned from drinking or going to a business that specializes in the sale of alcohol. 

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Trump’s Trade War Leaves the Future of the Blue Jean Industry to Hang

|||Ludmilafoto/Dreamstime.comPresident Trump’s trade war has hit an American fashion staple: blue jeans.

Bloomberg has interviewed Victor Lytvinenko of Raleigh Denim Workshop, a blue jeans company based in Greensboro, North Carolina. After Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum went into effect in June, the E.U. responded with a 25 percent tariff on several American goods, including bourbon, corn, and jeans. The European market accounted for $31 million worth of America’s jean sales—16 percent of the industry’s global exports. Lytvinenko is already losing European customers.

He’s not the only one suffering. Roy Slaper—owner of Roy Denim in Oakland, California—tells Bloomberg that the tariffs are “another blow” to an already fading industry. (In California, an increase in the minimum wage has already prompted apparel factories to either close or move elsewhere.)

And the jeans industry is hardly alone. This week U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer revealed plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, about half of the country’s imports to the United States. That’s more than double the previous rate of 10 percent. The proposed list of affected goods includes food, tobacco products, electronics, and even paper.

The National Retail Foundation has just released a statement decrying the proposed tariffs, which is says will “hurt U.S. families and workers more than they will hurt China.” It adds: “A broader, long-term strategy is needed that will bring about fair trade without punishing the wrong people. And those people are American workers and their families. They deserve better.”

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Pat Buchanan Asks “Would War With Iran Doom Trump?”

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

A war with Iran would define, consume and potentially destroy the Trump presidency, but exhilarate the neocon never-Trumpers who most despise the man.

Why, then, is President Donald Trump toying with such an idea?

Looking back at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, wars we began or plunged into, what was gained to justify the cost in American blood and treasure, and the death and destruction we visited upon that region? How has our great rival China suffered by not getting involved?

Oil is the vital strategic Western interest in the Persian Gulf. Yet a war with Iran would imperil, not secure, that interest.

Mass migration from the Islamic world, seeded with terrorist cells, is the greatest threat to Europe from the Middle East. But would not a U.S. war with Iran increase rather than diminish that threat?

Would the millions of Iranians who oppose the mullahs’ rule welcome U.S. air and naval attacks on their country? Or would they rally behind the regime and the armed forces dying to defend their country?

“Mr Trump, don’t play with the lion’s tail,” warned President Hassan Rouhani in July: “War with Iran is the mother of all wars.”

But he added, “Peace with Iran is the mother of all peace.”

Rouhani left wide open the possibility of peaceful settlement.

Trump’s all-caps retort virtually invoked Hiroshima:

“Never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the like of which few throughout history have suffered before.”

When Trump shifted and blurted out that he was open to talks – “No preconditions. They want to meet? I’ll meet.” — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo contradicted him: Before any meeting, Iran must change the way they treat their people and “reduce their malign behavior.”

We thus appear to be steering into a head-on collision.

For now that Trump has trashed the nuclear deal and is reimposing sanctions, Iran’s economy has taken a marked turn for the worse.

Its currency has lost half its value. Inflation is surging toward Venezuelan levels. New U.S. sanctions will be imposed this week and again in November. Major foreign investments are being canceled. U.S. allies are looking at secondary sanctions if they do not join the strangulation of Iran.

Tehran’s oil exports are plummeting along with national revenue.

Demonstrations and riots are increasingly common.

Rouhani and his allies who bet their futures on a deal to forego nuclear weapons in return for an opening to the West look like fools to their people. And the Revolutionary Guard Corps that warned against trusting the Americans appears vindicated.

Iran’s leaders have now threatened that when their oil is no longer flowing freely and abundantly, Arab oil may be blocked from passing through the Strait of Hormuz out to Asia and the West.

Any such action would ignite an explosion in oil prices worldwide and force a U.S. naval response to reopen the strait. A war would be on.

Yet the correlation of political forces is heavily weighted in favor of driving Tehran to the wall. In the U.S., Iran has countless adversaries and almost no advocates. In the Middle East, Israelis, Saudis and the UAE would relish having us smash Iran.

Among the four who will decide on war, Trump, Pompeo and John Bolton have spoken of regime change, while Defense Secretary James Mattis has lately renounced any such strategic goal.

With Israel launching attacks against Iranian-backed militia in Syria, U.S. ships and Iranian speedboats constantly at close quarters in the Gulf, and Houthi rebels in Yemen firing at Saudi tankers in the Bab el-Mandeb entrance to the Red Sea, a military clash seems inevitable.

While America no longer has the ground forces to invade and occupy an Iran four times the size of Iraq, in any such war, the U.S., with its vastly superior air, naval and missile forces, would swiftly prevail.

But if Iran called into play Hezbollah, the Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq, and sectarian allies inside the Arab states, U.S. casualties would mount and the Middle East could descend into the kind of civil-sectarian war we have seen in Syria these last six years.

Any shooting war in the Persian Gulf could see insurance rates for tankers soar, a constriction of oil exports, and surging prices, plunging us into a worldwide recession for which one man would be held responsible: Donald Trump.

How good would that be for the GOP or President Trump in 2020?

And when the shooting stopped, would there be installed in Iran a liberal democracy, or would it be as it was in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, with first the religious zealots taking power, and then the men with guns.

If we start a war with Iran, on top of the five in which we are engaged still, then the party that offers to extricate us will be listened to, as Trump was listened to, when he promised to extricate us from the forever wars of the Middle East.

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