Monday, April 7, 2025
Nutnick
[ed. Ugh. Our so-called Commerce Secretary. I'd say this guy is the absolute worst but there's too much competition. Remember when he told us his mother-in-law wouldn't complain about missing a monthy Social Security check because only "fraudsters" would? What isn't shown here is his next few words..."and it's going to be automated. And the trade craft of America, is going work on them and fix them." Robots presumably. You can view the video here if you can stand it.]
One Agency That Explains What Government Does For You
Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired recently, and more may be in danger of being let go.
Umair Irfan — a climate change, energy policy, and science correspondent for Vox — has been specifically focused on layoffs looming over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of late. His reporting presents a great lens for understanding the firings, and he and I discussed what the NOAA can tell us about the effect federal reductions have on everyday Americans. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Umair, what’s NOAA and why is it so important?
NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s tasked with developing weather forecasts for the United States, conducting oceanographic and atmospheric research, and developing long-term climate and weather models. It’s also in charge of fisheries and promoting commerce, particularly in the oceans, which means it does a lot of navigation and mapping work for shipping, and for offshore oil and gas drilling. [ed. and providing scientifc support to the Coast Guard during oil spills].
There have been reports that as much as half of NOAA staff might be dismissed. What would everyday Americans lose if that happened?
NOAA has a staff of about 12,000 people, most of them scientists and engineers. If you lost half of that, you’d lose a lot of people doing the research that informs our weather forecasts and our understanding of weather, as well as a lot of the data that industry players rely on for things like aviation and air travel. We’d also lose a lot of our emergency forecasting capability for extreme weather.
NOAA is one of the reasons that air travel is so safe, and one of the reasons that we’ve seen fewer people dying in natural disasters in the US: It has done the work of putting satellites into space, of having scientific ships on the ocean, and aircraft that fly into hurricanes, and has used its decades of data gathering to develop excellent forecasting capability — and one that, through continual work, is improving all the time.
If we lose all those capabilities, we lose a lot of progress that has been made. Extreme weather will stay dangerous, however, and our ability to drive the risks involved with weather down over time will eventually diminish if we don’t continue to invest in that.
NOAA obviously isn’t the only agency that’s facing cuts here. Do Americans gain anything by shrinking the government the way Trump has been?
Current and former agency staffers and leaders I talked to say the cuts aren’t going to help agencies accomplish their missions, and will actually run counter to any goals of efficiency, because remaining employees will have to try to fulfill the functions of their fired colleagues in suboptimal ways.
That said, there’s always going to be room to optimize a big institution like the government. But we need to do so thoughtfully, stepping back and seeing what our needs are, and what our expectations are from government in general.
Specifically looking at an agency like NOAA, it’s about looking carefully at exactly how its core functions are being met, where they’re falling short, and where they can be augmented. So far, we really haven’t seen that level of exploration and interest in how these agencies function from the current administration.
Big picture, what do you think Americans should learn from the case of NOAA?
I think it’s easy to forget that the federal government is everywhere in our country — 80 percent of federal employees are not in DC.
NOAA is one of those agencies that has a very far-flung footprint, because it has to do a lot of the local research and data gathering on site, and because its mission is to protect the whole country.
And NOAA, like all agencies, is very closely linked to people’s lives in ways they may not expect. You may not have a NOAA app on your phone, but very likely the weather app you do have, and the forecast that you’re getting from your local TV meteorologist, are informed by NOAA’s satellites and data gathering.
While there may be layers in between the products you consume and the government, it does provide the foundation for things we take for granted. If agencies like NOAA go away, we would definitely lose things we might not expect.
by Sean Collins and Umair Irfan, Vox | Read more:
Umair Irfan — a climate change, energy policy, and science correspondent for Vox — has been specifically focused on layoffs looming over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of late. His reporting presents a great lens for understanding the firings, and he and I discussed what the NOAA can tell us about the effect federal reductions have on everyday Americans. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Umair, what’s NOAA and why is it so important?
There have been reports that as much as half of NOAA staff might be dismissed. What would everyday Americans lose if that happened?
NOAA has a staff of about 12,000 people, most of them scientists and engineers. If you lost half of that, you’d lose a lot of people doing the research that informs our weather forecasts and our understanding of weather, as well as a lot of the data that industry players rely on for things like aviation and air travel. We’d also lose a lot of our emergency forecasting capability for extreme weather.
NOAA is one of the reasons that air travel is so safe, and one of the reasons that we’ve seen fewer people dying in natural disasters in the US: It has done the work of putting satellites into space, of having scientific ships on the ocean, and aircraft that fly into hurricanes, and has used its decades of data gathering to develop excellent forecasting capability — and one that, through continual work, is improving all the time.
If we lose all those capabilities, we lose a lot of progress that has been made. Extreme weather will stay dangerous, however, and our ability to drive the risks involved with weather down over time will eventually diminish if we don’t continue to invest in that.
NOAA obviously isn’t the only agency that’s facing cuts here. Do Americans gain anything by shrinking the government the way Trump has been?
Current and former agency staffers and leaders I talked to say the cuts aren’t going to help agencies accomplish their missions, and will actually run counter to any goals of efficiency, because remaining employees will have to try to fulfill the functions of their fired colleagues in suboptimal ways.
That said, there’s always going to be room to optimize a big institution like the government. But we need to do so thoughtfully, stepping back and seeing what our needs are, and what our expectations are from government in general.
Specifically looking at an agency like NOAA, it’s about looking carefully at exactly how its core functions are being met, where they’re falling short, and where they can be augmented. So far, we really haven’t seen that level of exploration and interest in how these agencies function from the current administration.
Big picture, what do you think Americans should learn from the case of NOAA?
I think it’s easy to forget that the federal government is everywhere in our country — 80 percent of federal employees are not in DC.
NOAA is one of those agencies that has a very far-flung footprint, because it has to do a lot of the local research and data gathering on site, and because its mission is to protect the whole country.
And NOAA, like all agencies, is very closely linked to people’s lives in ways they may not expect. You may not have a NOAA app on your phone, but very likely the weather app you do have, and the forecast that you’re getting from your local TV meteorologist, are informed by NOAA’s satellites and data gathering.
While there may be layers in between the products you consume and the government, it does provide the foundation for things we take for granted. If agencies like NOAA go away, we would definitely lose things we might not expect.
by Sean Collins and Umair Irfan, Vox | Read more:
Image: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. I've worked with NOAA scientists throughout my career. Some of the most impressive people I've met.]
Shingles Vaccine Could Help Stave Off Dementia
According to a study that followed more than 280,000 people in Wales, older adults who received a vaccine against shingles were 20 percent less likely to develop dementia in the seven years that followed vaccination than those who did not receive the vaccine.
“If you’re reducing the risk of dementia by 20 percent, that’s quite important in a public health context, given that we don’t really have much else at the moment that slows down the onset of dementia,” said Dr. Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford. (...)
This could be a big deal. There are very few, if any, treatments that can prevent or slow down dementia, beyond good lifestyle habits like getting enough sleep and exercise. The possibility that a known, inexpensive vaccine could offer real protection is enormously meaningful. We have good reason to be confident in the findings: While this study is perhaps the most prominent to show the protective effects of the shingles vaccine, other studies of the vaccine have come to similar conclusions.
Beyond the promise of preventive treatment, the new study adds further evidence to a growing body of research raising the possibility that we have been thinking about neurodegenerative diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s all wrong. It’s possible these horrible conditions are caused by a virus — and if that’s the case, eliminating the virus could be enough to prevent or treat the diseases.
How the study worked
To understand why the new shingles vaccine study is such a big deal, it helps to know a little bit about how medical studies are carried out. (...)
The new study... took advantage of a quirk in Welsh health policy to do something better. Beginning on September 1, 2013, anyone in Wales who was 79 became eligible to receive a free shingles vaccine. (Those who were younger than 79 would become eligible once they turned that age.) But anyone who was 80 or older was not eligible on the grounds that the vaccine is less effective for the very old.
The result was what is known as a “natural experiment.” In effect, Wales had created two groups that were essentially the same — save for the fact that one group received the shingles vaccine and one group did not.
The researchers looked at the health records of the more than 280,000 adults who were 71 to 88 years old at the start of the vaccination program and did not have dementia. They focused on a group that was just on the dividing line: those who turned 80 just before September 1, 2013, and thus were eligible for the vaccine, and those born just after that date, who weren’t. Then, they simply looked at what happened to them.
By 2020, seven years after the vaccination program began, about one in eight older adults, who by that time were 86 and 87, had developed dementia. But the group that had received the shingles vaccine were 20 percent less likely to be diagnosed with the disease. Because the researchers could find no other confounding factors that might explain the difference — like years of education or other vaccines or health conditions like diabetes — they were confident the shingles vaccine was the difference maker.
A new paradigm in dementia research?
As Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times, the research indicates that the shingles vaccine appears to have “some of the strongest potential protective effects against dementia that we know of that are potentially usable in practice.”
But this is a vaccine originally designed to prevent shingles. Why does it also appear to help with dementia?
Scientists theorize it could be related to inflammation. Shingles, or herpes zoster, is caused by the same virus responsible for chickenpox, which lies dormant in nerve cells after an initial infection and can reawaken decades later, causing painful rashes.
That reactivation creates intense inflammation around nerve cells, and chronic inflammation is increasingly recognized as a major factor in cognitive deterioration. By preventing shingles, the vaccine could indirectly protect against the neural inflammation associated with dementia.
What about the amyloid and tau protein plaques that tend to be found in the brains of people suffering from Alzheimer’s, which have long been thought of as the primary cause of the disease? It’s possible that these may actually be the body’s response to an underlying infection. That could help explain why treatments that directly target those plaques have been largely ineffective — because they weren’t targeting the real causes.
Beyond the promise of preventive treatment, the new study adds further evidence to a growing body of research raising the possibility that we have been thinking about neurodegenerative diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s all wrong. It’s possible these horrible conditions are caused by a virus — and if that’s the case, eliminating the virus could be enough to prevent or treat the diseases.
How the study worked
To understand why the new shingles vaccine study is such a big deal, it helps to know a little bit about how medical studies are carried out. (...)
The new study... took advantage of a quirk in Welsh health policy to do something better. Beginning on September 1, 2013, anyone in Wales who was 79 became eligible to receive a free shingles vaccine. (Those who were younger than 79 would become eligible once they turned that age.) But anyone who was 80 or older was not eligible on the grounds that the vaccine is less effective for the very old.
The result was what is known as a “natural experiment.” In effect, Wales had created two groups that were essentially the same — save for the fact that one group received the shingles vaccine and one group did not.
The researchers looked at the health records of the more than 280,000 adults who were 71 to 88 years old at the start of the vaccination program and did not have dementia. They focused on a group that was just on the dividing line: those who turned 80 just before September 1, 2013, and thus were eligible for the vaccine, and those born just after that date, who weren’t. Then, they simply looked at what happened to them.
By 2020, seven years after the vaccination program began, about one in eight older adults, who by that time were 86 and 87, had developed dementia. But the group that had received the shingles vaccine were 20 percent less likely to be diagnosed with the disease. Because the researchers could find no other confounding factors that might explain the difference — like years of education or other vaccines or health conditions like diabetes — they were confident the shingles vaccine was the difference maker.
A new paradigm in dementia research?
As Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times, the research indicates that the shingles vaccine appears to have “some of the strongest potential protective effects against dementia that we know of that are potentially usable in practice.”
But this is a vaccine originally designed to prevent shingles. Why does it also appear to help with dementia?
Scientists theorize it could be related to inflammation. Shingles, or herpes zoster, is caused by the same virus responsible for chickenpox, which lies dormant in nerve cells after an initial infection and can reawaken decades later, causing painful rashes.
That reactivation creates intense inflammation around nerve cells, and chronic inflammation is increasingly recognized as a major factor in cognitive deterioration. By preventing shingles, the vaccine could indirectly protect against the neural inflammation associated with dementia.
What about the amyloid and tau protein plaques that tend to be found in the brains of people suffering from Alzheimer’s, which have long been thought of as the primary cause of the disease? It’s possible that these may actually be the body’s response to an underlying infection. That could help explain why treatments that directly target those plaques have been largely ineffective — because they weren’t targeting the real causes.
by Bryan Walsh, Vox | Read more:
Image: H. Rick Bamman/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News
[ed. See also: Shingles Vaccine Can Decrease Risk of Dementia, Study Finds (NYT):]
***
The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that people who received the shingles vaccine were 20 percent less likely to develop dementia in the seven years afterward than those who were not vaccinated.“If you’re reducing the risk of dementia by 20 percent, that’s quite important in a public health context, given that we don’t really have much else at the moment that slows down the onset of dementia,” said Dr. Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at Oxford. (...)
Several previous studies have suggested that shingles vaccinations might reduce dementia risk, but most could not exclude the possibility that people who get vaccinated might have other dementia-protective characteristics, like healthier lifestyles, better diets or more years of education.
The new study ruled out many of those factors. (...)
They also examined medical records for possible differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. They evaluated whether unvaccinated people received more diagnoses of dementia simply because they visited doctors more frequently, and whether they took more medications that could increase dementia risk.
“They do a pretty good job at that,” said Dr. Jena, who wrote a commentary about the study for Nature. “They look at almost 200 medications that have been shown to be at least associated with elevated Alzheimer’s risk.”
He said, “They go through a lot of effort to figure out whether or not there might be other things that are timed with that age cutoff, any other medical policy changes, and that doesn’t seem to be it.”
The study involved an older form of shingles vaccine, Zostavax, which contains a modified version of the live virus. It has since been discontinued in the United States and some other countries because its protection against shingles wanes over time. The new vaccine, Shingrix, which contains an inactivated portion of the virus, is more effective and lasting, research shows.
A study last year by Dr. Harrison and colleagues suggested that Shingrix may be more protective against dementia than the older vaccine. Based on another “natural experiment,” the 2017 shift in the United States from Zostavax to Shingrix, it found that over six years, people who had received the new vaccine had fewer dementia diagnoses than those who got the old one. Of the people diagnosed with dementia, those who received the new vaccine had nearly six months more time before developing the condition than people who received the old vaccine.
The new study ruled out many of those factors. (...)
They also examined medical records for possible differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. They evaluated whether unvaccinated people received more diagnoses of dementia simply because they visited doctors more frequently, and whether they took more medications that could increase dementia risk.
“They do a pretty good job at that,” said Dr. Jena, who wrote a commentary about the study for Nature. “They look at almost 200 medications that have been shown to be at least associated with elevated Alzheimer’s risk.”
He said, “They go through a lot of effort to figure out whether or not there might be other things that are timed with that age cutoff, any other medical policy changes, and that doesn’t seem to be it.”
The study involved an older form of shingles vaccine, Zostavax, which contains a modified version of the live virus. It has since been discontinued in the United States and some other countries because its protection against shingles wanes over time. The new vaccine, Shingrix, which contains an inactivated portion of the virus, is more effective and lasting, research shows.
A study last year by Dr. Harrison and colleagues suggested that Shingrix may be more protective against dementia than the older vaccine. Based on another “natural experiment,” the 2017 shift in the United States from Zostavax to Shingrix, it found that over six years, people who had received the new vaccine had fewer dementia diagnoses than those who got the old one. Of the people diagnosed with dementia, those who received the new vaccine had nearly six months more time before developing the condition than people who received the old vaccine.
Sunday, April 6, 2025
World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing Takes Shape in Los Angeles
Image: Caltrans
The plot is a native wildlife habitat that connects two parts of the Santa Monica mountain range, with the hopes of saving creatures – from the famous local mountain lions, down to frogs and insects – from being crushed by cars on one of the nation’s busiest roadways.[ed. Wow, this is crazy. What are they connecting to, exactly? And what are the numbers/science that support this? I and a few other biologists in my department (Alaska Dept. Fish and Game) pioneered wildlife crossings back in the 70s when North Slope oil fields were just starting to get developed. Most of you probably don't remember all those magazine and tv ads from industry back then boasting about their deep commitment to the environment and sensitivity to wildlife? Haha... well, not quite. It was a constant fight to get even a few caribou pipeline crossings installed so that thousands of animals could have continued access to feeding and calving areas along the coast. Too expensive and unnecessary, wouldn't work. Of course, once those crossings were installed and found to be effective, companies were only too happy to take credit. And these were just 30-40 foot gravel pads. In later years near Anchorage, when moose/automobile collisions started becoming epidemic (as the city started expanding highway lanes in outlying areas), more of the same fights, this time with the military whose lands the highway transited, and state DOT who again objected to 'wasting' money. Cost and effectiveness issues, as always. So, a compromise - fencing, one-way gates, and underpasses instead. Which worked amazingly well, and continue to do so today. Which isn't to say that some overhead crossings aren't warranted in some places (we have one here in Washington over I-90 that works well for large and small mammals). But something like this California project would have been a non-starter back in the old days unless there's some critical importance for that particular spot, which isn't mentioned in the article. Definitely more than the occasional mountain lion, frogs and insects. But it's California, who knows.]
Benefits of ADHD Medication Outweigh Health Risks, Study Finds
The benefits of taking drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outweigh the impact of increases in blood pressure and heart rate, according to a new study.
An international team of researchers led by scientists from the University of Southampton found the majority of children taking ADHD medication experienced small increases in blood pressure and pulse rates, but that the drugs had “overall small effects”. They said the study’s findings highlighted the need for “careful monitoring”.
Prof Samuele Cortese, the senior lead author of the study, from the University of Southampton, said the risks and benefits of taking any medication had to be assessed together, but for ADHD drugs the risk-benefit ratio was “reassuring”.
“We found an overall small increase in blood pressure and pulse for the majority of children taking ADHD medications,” he said. “Other studies show clear benefits in terms of reductions in mortality risk and improvement in academic functions, as well as a small increased risk of hypertension, but not other cardiovascular diseases. Overall, the risk-benefit ratio is reassuring for people taking ADHD medications.”
About 3 to 4% of adults and 5% of children in the UK are believed to have ADHD, a neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms including impulsiveness, disorganisation and difficulty focusing, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).
Doctors can prescribe stimulants, such as methylphenidate, of which the best-known brand is Ritalin. Other stimulant medications used to treat ADHD include lisdexamfetamine and dexamfetamine. Non-stimulant drugs include atomoxetine, an sNRI (selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), and guanfacine.(...)
Last year, a thinktank warned that the NHS was experiencing an “avalanche of need” over autism and ADHD, and said the system in place to cope with surging demand for assessments and treatments was “obsolete”. The number of prescriptions issued in England for ADHD medication has risen by 18% year on year since the pandemic, with the biggest rise in London.
Dr Tony Lord, a former chief executive of the ADHD Foundation, said the long-term benefits of ADHD medication were well established, and included a reduced risk of anxiety and depression, eating disorders, harm from smoking, improved educational outcomes and economic independence.
“Sadly ignorance about ADHD medications persists – a throwback to the 80s and 90s when ADHD medications were mistakenly viewed as a morality pill that made naughty, fidgety disruptive children behave – which of course it is not,” he said.
“It is simply a cognitive enhancer that improves information processing, inhibits distractions, improves focus, planning and prioritising, self monitoring and reduces impulsivity of thought and action.”
An international team of researchers led by scientists from the University of Southampton found the majority of children taking ADHD medication experienced small increases in blood pressure and pulse rates, but that the drugs had “overall small effects”. They said the study’s findings highlighted the need for “careful monitoring”.
“We found an overall small increase in blood pressure and pulse for the majority of children taking ADHD medications,” he said. “Other studies show clear benefits in terms of reductions in mortality risk and improvement in academic functions, as well as a small increased risk of hypertension, but not other cardiovascular diseases. Overall, the risk-benefit ratio is reassuring for people taking ADHD medications.”
About 3 to 4% of adults and 5% of children in the UK are believed to have ADHD, a neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms including impulsiveness, disorganisation and difficulty focusing, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).
Doctors can prescribe stimulants, such as methylphenidate, of which the best-known brand is Ritalin. Other stimulant medications used to treat ADHD include lisdexamfetamine and dexamfetamine. Non-stimulant drugs include atomoxetine, an sNRI (selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), and guanfacine.(...)
Last year, a thinktank warned that the NHS was experiencing an “avalanche of need” over autism and ADHD, and said the system in place to cope with surging demand for assessments and treatments was “obsolete”. The number of prescriptions issued in England for ADHD medication has risen by 18% year on year since the pandemic, with the biggest rise in London.
Dr Tony Lord, a former chief executive of the ADHD Foundation, said the long-term benefits of ADHD medication were well established, and included a reduced risk of anxiety and depression, eating disorders, harm from smoking, improved educational outcomes and economic independence.
“Sadly ignorance about ADHD medications persists – a throwback to the 80s and 90s when ADHD medications were mistakenly viewed as a morality pill that made naughty, fidgety disruptive children behave – which of course it is not,” he said.
“It is simply a cognitive enhancer that improves information processing, inhibits distractions, improves focus, planning and prioritising, self monitoring and reduces impulsivity of thought and action.”
by Alexandra Topping, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
[ed. I'd love to get an Adderall prescription as a cognitive enhancer (more energy - and a history of chronic anemia and depression). But not willing to fake ADHD, and doctors won't prescribe it (unless you're rich, influencial or have a job in finance).]
[ed. I'd love to get an Adderall prescription as a cognitive enhancer (more energy - and a history of chronic anemia and depression). But not willing to fake ADHD, and doctors won't prescribe it (unless you're rich, influencial or have a job in finance).]
Bad Taste or No Taste?
Images:Diggzy/Backgrid, Edward Berthelot, Jacopo Raule/Getty Images
The real star of The White Lotus? Natural teeth (Harper's Bazaar). [See also: How this 'White Lotus' star's teeth stole the show — and sparked a reckoning (MSNBC).]
[ed. Almost feel sorry for them. Fashion for late-stage capitalism. It must take a lot of effort just to keep those fashion antenna up (no matter how ridiculous, but what else do they have to do?). Fortunately, there's a more hopeful trend:]
The real star of The White Lotus? Natural teeth (Harper's Bazaar). [See also: How this 'White Lotus' star's teeth stole the show — and sparked a reckoning (MSNBC).]
Saturday, April 5, 2025
Technocracy 2.0
The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk
President Trump has reportedly told cabinet members that Elon Musk may soon leave the administration. If and when he goes, what will he leave behind?
Mr. Musk has long presented himself to the world as a futurist. Yet, notwithstanding the gadgets — the rockets and the robots and the Department of Government Efficiency Musketeers, carrying backpacks crammed with laptops, dreaming of replacing federal employees with large language models — few figures in public life are more shackled to the past.
On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Musk told a roaring, jubilant crowd that the election marked “a fork in the road of human civilization.” He promised to “take DOGE to Mars” and pledged to give Americans reasons to look “forward to the future.”
In 1932, when civilization stood at another fork in the road, the United States chose liberal democracy, and Franklin Roosevelt, who promised “a new deal for the American people.” In his first 100 days, Mr. Roosevelt. signed 99 executive orders, and Congress passed more than 75 laws, beginning the work of rebuilding the country by establishing a series of government agencies to regulate the economy, provide jobs, aid the poor and construct public works.
Mr. Musk is attempting to go back to that fork and choose a different path. Much of what he has sought to dismantle, from antipoverty programs to national parks, have their origins in the New Deal. Mr. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration provided 8.5 million Americans with jobs; Mr. Musk has measured his achievement in the number of jobs he has eliminated.
Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck at how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.
Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members.
Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.
Technocracy first gained worldwide attention in 1932 but soon splintered into rival factions. Technocracy Incorporated was founded and led by a former New Yorker named Howard Scott. Across the continent, rival groups of technocrats issued a flurry of tracts, periodicals and pamphlets explaining, for instance, how “life in a technocracy” would be utterly different from life in a democracy: “Popular voting can be largely dispensed with.”
Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.” In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.”
Decades ago, in the desperate, darkest moment of the Depression, technocracy seemed, briefly, poised to prevail against democracy. “For a moment in time, it was possible for thoughtful people to believe that America would consciously choose to become a technocracy,” writes William E. Akin, the author of the definitive historical study of the movement, “Technocracy and the American Dream.” In the four months from November 1932 to March 1933, The New York Times published more than 100 stories about the movement. And then the bubble appeared to burst. By summer, Technocrats Magazine and The Technocracy Review had gone out of print.
There are a few reasons for technocracy’s implosion. Its tenets could not bear scrutiny. Then, too, because technocrats generally did not believe in parties, elections or politics of any kind — “Technocracy has no theory for the assumption of power,” as Mr. Scott put it — they had little means by which to achieve their ends.
But the chief reason for technocracy’s failure was democracy’s success. Mr. Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4 and immediately began putting the New Deal in place while calming the nation with a series of fireside chats. By May, E.B. White in The New Yorker could write technocracy’s epitaph: “Technocracy had its day this year, and it was characteristic of Americans that they gave it a whirl and then dropped it as they had dropped miniature golf.”
Nevertheless, technocracy endured. Its spectacles grew alarming: Technocrats wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in parades that evoked for concerned observers nothing so much as Italian Fascists. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was a technocracy stalwart. In 1940, when Canada banned Technocracy Incorporated — out of fear that its members were plotting to undermine the government or the war effort — Mr. Haldeman took out an ad in a newspaper, proclaiming technocracy a “national patriotic movement.” (...)
That Mr. Musk has come to hold so many of the same beliefs about social engineering and economic planning as his grandfather is a testament to his profound lack of political imagination, to the tenacity of technocracy and to the hubris of Silicon Valley.
Mr. Musk left South Africa for Canada in 1989, where he stayed with family in Saskatchewan. His grandfather’s memory loomed large; not long afterward, his uncle Scott Haldeman, who had left Pretoria to pursue graduate studies in British Columbia, wrote an article in which he described Joshua Haldeman as holding “national and international stature as a political economist.”
In 1995, after studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Musk left a Ph.D. program at Stanford to become a tech entrepreneur. He started a company called X.com in 1999. “What we’re going to do is transform the traditional banking industry,” he said. (Technocrats also planned to abolish banks. “We don’t need banks, bandits or bastards,” Joshua Haldeman once wrote.) Mr. Musk made a fortune when eBay acquired PayPal, which had merged with X.com, but in 2017 he bought back the URL, and it was ready to hand when he purchased Twitter and renamed it X, hoping to kill what he called the “woke mind virus” — echoes of his grandfather’s “mass mind conditioning.” Much that Mr. Musk has attempted to do at DOGE can be found in the technocracy manuals of the early 1930s.
Mr. Musk’s possible departure from Washington will not diminish the influence of Muskism in the United States. His superannuated futurism is Silicon Valley’s reigning ideology. In 2023 the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who helped staff DOGE, wrote “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," predicting the emergence of “technological supermen.” It consists of a list of statements:
Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.
That is still true, but unlike his forefathers, Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past.
Mr. Musk has long presented himself to the world as a futurist. Yet, notwithstanding the gadgets — the rockets and the robots and the Department of Government Efficiency Musketeers, carrying backpacks crammed with laptops, dreaming of replacing federal employees with large language models — few figures in public life are more shackled to the past.
In 1932, when civilization stood at another fork in the road, the United States chose liberal democracy, and Franklin Roosevelt, who promised “a new deal for the American people.” In his first 100 days, Mr. Roosevelt. signed 99 executive orders, and Congress passed more than 75 laws, beginning the work of rebuilding the country by establishing a series of government agencies to regulate the economy, provide jobs, aid the poor and construct public works.
Mr. Musk is attempting to go back to that fork and choose a different path. Much of what he has sought to dismantle, from antipoverty programs to national parks, have their origins in the New Deal. Mr. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration provided 8.5 million Americans with jobs; Mr. Musk has measured his achievement in the number of jobs he has eliminated.
Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck at how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.
Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members.
Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.
Technocracy first gained worldwide attention in 1932 but soon splintered into rival factions. Technocracy Incorporated was founded and led by a former New Yorker named Howard Scott. Across the continent, rival groups of technocrats issued a flurry of tracts, periodicals and pamphlets explaining, for instance, how “life in a technocracy” would be utterly different from life in a democracy: “Popular voting can be largely dispensed with.”
Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.” In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.”
Decades ago, in the desperate, darkest moment of the Depression, technocracy seemed, briefly, poised to prevail against democracy. “For a moment in time, it was possible for thoughtful people to believe that America would consciously choose to become a technocracy,” writes William E. Akin, the author of the definitive historical study of the movement, “Technocracy and the American Dream.” In the four months from November 1932 to March 1933, The New York Times published more than 100 stories about the movement. And then the bubble appeared to burst. By summer, Technocrats Magazine and The Technocracy Review had gone out of print.
There are a few reasons for technocracy’s implosion. Its tenets could not bear scrutiny. Then, too, because technocrats generally did not believe in parties, elections or politics of any kind — “Technocracy has no theory for the assumption of power,” as Mr. Scott put it — they had little means by which to achieve their ends.
But the chief reason for technocracy’s failure was democracy’s success. Mr. Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4 and immediately began putting the New Deal in place while calming the nation with a series of fireside chats. By May, E.B. White in The New Yorker could write technocracy’s epitaph: “Technocracy had its day this year, and it was characteristic of Americans that they gave it a whirl and then dropped it as they had dropped miniature golf.”
Nevertheless, technocracy endured. Its spectacles grew alarming: Technocrats wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in parades that evoked for concerned observers nothing so much as Italian Fascists. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was a technocracy stalwart. In 1940, when Canada banned Technocracy Incorporated — out of fear that its members were plotting to undermine the government or the war effort — Mr. Haldeman took out an ad in a newspaper, proclaiming technocracy a “national patriotic movement.” (...)
That Mr. Musk has come to hold so many of the same beliefs about social engineering and economic planning as his grandfather is a testament to his profound lack of political imagination, to the tenacity of technocracy and to the hubris of Silicon Valley.
Mr. Musk left South Africa for Canada in 1989, where he stayed with family in Saskatchewan. His grandfather’s memory loomed large; not long afterward, his uncle Scott Haldeman, who had left Pretoria to pursue graduate studies in British Columbia, wrote an article in which he described Joshua Haldeman as holding “national and international stature as a political economist.”
In 1995, after studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Musk left a Ph.D. program at Stanford to become a tech entrepreneur. He started a company called X.com in 1999. “What we’re going to do is transform the traditional banking industry,” he said. (Technocrats also planned to abolish banks. “We don’t need banks, bandits or bastards,” Joshua Haldeman once wrote.) Mr. Musk made a fortune when eBay acquired PayPal, which had merged with X.com, but in 2017 he bought back the URL, and it was ready to hand when he purchased Twitter and renamed it X, hoping to kill what he called the “woke mind virus” — echoes of his grandfather’s “mass mind conditioning.” Much that Mr. Musk has attempted to do at DOGE can be found in the technocracy manuals of the early 1930s.
Mr. Musk’s possible departure from Washington will not diminish the influence of Muskism in the United States. His superannuated futurism is Silicon Valley’s reigning ideology. In 2023 the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who helped staff DOGE, wrote “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," predicting the emergence of “technological supermen.” It consists of a list of statements:
We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being.Mr. Andreessen cited, among his inspirations, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1909 wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” which glorified violence and masculine virility and opposed liberalism and democracy. It, too, is a list of statements:
We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.
We have the will. …
We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars. …
We believe in greatness. …
We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.
- We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
- We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. …
- We want to sing the man at the wheel. …
- We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. …
- Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!
Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.
That is still true, but unlike his forefathers, Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past.
by Jill Lepore, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via
This Habit Is Quietly Ruining Your Relationships
The Silent Treatment.
For the uninitiated, the silent treatment is when a person intentionally refuses to communicate with you — or in some cases, even acknowledge you. It’s a common maneuver that’s used in all sorts of relationships, said Kipling Williams, emeritus professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University who has studied the effects of the silent treatment for over 30 years.
I’m ashamed to say that this was me. When I wordlessly left for work, I glared at Tom and then dramatically slammed the door.
Using the silent treatment is tempting because it can feel good, temporarily, to make the other person squirm, said Erin Engle, a psychologist with NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center. But, she added, it can have long-term consequences in your relationship.
I asked experts what to do if you’re getting the silent treatment — or if you’re feeling the urge to give it to someone else.
If you’re tempted to freeze someone out …
Some people think the silent treatment is a milder way of dealing with conflict, said Dr. Gail Saltz, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
But it isn’t, she explained. “The silent treatment is a punishment,” she said, “whether you are acknowledging that to yourself or not.”
For the person who is being frozen out, it creates “anxiety and fear, and feelings of abandonment,” Dr. Saltz said, and it often causes a “cascade of self-doubt, self-blame and self-criticism.”
And it hurts, Dr. Williams added. His research suggested that being excluded and ignored activates the same pain regions in the brain as physical pain. “So it’s not just metaphorically painful, it is detected as pain by the brain,” he said.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, ask for a timeout instead, Dr. Williams advised. You can say: “I can’t talk to you right now, I’m so upset. I’m going to go for a walk and I’ll come back in an hour.”
Give a clear time when you will be back and willing to talk, so you don’t leave things open-ended, said James Wirth, an associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University at Newark who studies ostracism. Ambiguity, he said, is part of what makes the silent treatment “really lethal.”
And remember: While using the silent treatment may give you a sense of power and control, Dr. Williams said, it’s also draining. It takes work to enforce “this behavior that’s unusual and contrary to norms,” he explained, “so it takes a lot of cognitive effort and a lot of emotional effort.”
If you’re on the receiving end …
There isn’t much literature on the most effective way to break the silence, Dr. Wirth said. The only true suggestion based on the research, he said, is that it should be stopped.
If you’re up for it, he said, write a note or appeal to the person directly rather than prolonging the silence.
To reestablish connection, try to summon your empathy, Dr. Saltz said. Though she acknowledged that could be hard. “You think, ‘Why can’t they just talk to me?’ Like, ‘This is terrible, no sweat for them,’” she said.
But that’s not necessarily true, she added. The person may have worked themselves into a state of distress, she said. “It actually isn’t easy for them,” she said. “It is hard for them.”
Dr. Saltz suggested approaching the person with openness and curiosity by using the following script: “It makes me feel that we can’t move forward when you’re giving me the silent treatment. I want to understand what’s happening with you. I don’t want you to feel upset. I want to make things better between us. And I need more information about what is happening with you in order to do that.”
And while many of us are guilty of using the silent treatment once in a while, Dr. Saltz added, if, say, a partner is chronically and frequently handling all conflict this way, then “it’s fair to qualify that as emotional abuse.”
by Jancee Dunn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matt Chase; Photographs by Shutterstock
[ed. Guilty. I have the suspicion that stubborness has something to do with this, too.]
Image: Matt Chase; Photographs by Shutterstock
[ed. Guilty. I have the suspicion that stubborness has something to do with this, too.]
Economic Termites
How the American Medical Association Screws Doctors
One thing that we’re learning in the Trump era is how extensively government power flows throughout our society, as corporations, universities, and law firms scurry to obey the rules that the new administration is putting forward. A few months ago, I found one of these levers in the form of a fee that doctors must pay when they submit medical bills to Medicare or Medicaid. It’s a classic economic termite, a charge that is relatively small such that consumers don’t notice, but one that fosters a significant amount of money for the monopolist. But in this case, there’s a political twist.
But first, let’s go to the problem itself. In January, a reader sent me a note about a fee paid by her father, a licensed marriage and family therapist. Here’s what she said.
Last year, SimplePractice sent out a note to its customers announcing this fee structure, to widespread anger. One therapist noted on Reddit, “I may get hate for this but this is the kind of shit that really makes me want to surrender my license and become a life coach, allowing me to continue helping people but opting out of the racket. I’m so tired of feeling exploited.” Another said, “Like wtf, being in private practice is already hard and expensive enough, these little ass fees add up. I might drop emr and go back to paper.”
CPT codes are a way to explain what a clinician did during an interaction with a patient. For instance, the most common CPT code for psychologists is 90837, which is the number that means the clinician provided an hour of psychotherapy. To get payment, they will submit this code to health insurers, whether private, Medicare, or Medicaid, and everyone involved will know what it means. First developed in 1966 for use with Medicare, the demand for extensive medical documentation is now a serious contributor to physician burnout, as "[f]or every 8 hours of scheduled patient time, ambulatory physicians spend more than 5 hours on the electronic health records." (...)
In other words, the AMA isn’t offering a software product. It just runs this process, keeping a list of codes that map to different medical procedures. You would think it would be free, a standard for everyone to use. But it’s not, and the AMA is able to charge a royalty for the license to use those codes. Every medical software company seems to have CPT codes and royalties built into their workflow.
Other similar systems are public. For instance, there’s the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes, which are used by most other countries for free. ICD and CPT codes are complements, not substitutes. ICD is a list of diagnoses- “this patient has depression” “this patient has a pulmonary embolus” while CPT is a list of procedures “I talked to this patient for 60 min” “I did this surgery on this patient.” Most billing systems require both codes, basically the insurer is saying “what did you do” (CPT) and “why” (ICD)? But only one is copyrighted. To put it differently, this situation is a bit like if Fedex owned and designed the zip code system, and got to charge anyone who used a zip code.
The total amount of money to the AMA is relatively small, at least compared to overall cost in our health care system. It’s roughly $300 million a year to the AMA in royalty payments. That’s not nothing; but the impact is far more significant on the politics of health care. To understand why, it helps to start with the importance of this particular trade association.
The AMA is the “doctor’s lobby,” and it has been a powerful force in American politics since it was founded in 1847. The rich American doctor was a 20th century community leader, or a petty tyrant, whichever you might believe. Americans respected their physicians, and doctors were conservative and locally rooted, able to speak with authority on matters of public health. They generally feared the state, but also feared corporate control.
The AMA, as such, jealously guarded this position, routinely opposing government attempts to provide universal health care through a centralized administrative public apparatus, haranguing Democrats as seeking to foster “socialized medicine.” And it worked. The AMA beat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it beat Harry Truman, and it beat Bill Clinton. The threat of corporatization was perceived by medical professionals as coming from the left.
But in the last 20 years, this dynamic has changed, because most doctors now work for large corporations. The old days of hanging up a shingle in a solo or even small group practice is gone because it’s no longer possible for an individual to bargain with the giants that manage the reimbursements, hospital systems, and payment arrangements necessary to be a doctor. Curiously, the AMA, which one would think has some interest in opposing the mass corporatization of its membership, doesn’t seem to care. For instance, the AMA only took a stance on private equity two years ago, long after its membership had transitioned from majority independent practitioners to majority corporate employees. And a key reason might be because it doesn’t make its money by serving doctors anymore. It makes it from the CPT code monopoly it uses to extract from doctors.
Let’s look at some numbers.
If you look at AMA financial disclosures from 2004 to 2023, you’ll notice three big trends. First of all, dues membership is down. In 2004, it was at $48 million. By 2023, it fell to $33 million. Second of all, revenue is way up, from $243 million to $468 million. And third, there’s an item - “royalties” - that explains it. Royalties, which come largely from CPT code revenue, were about a fifth of the AMA revenue in 2004, at $45 million. In 2023 they were at $308 million, 62% of all revenue, including all the profit, most of the overhead, and the lucrative executive salaries, which have increased by 10x since 2004.
The original CPT codes came out in 1966 to coincide with Medicare, but were published as a book updated annually. It was when electronic medical records took off that the revenue stream picked up. (...)
This situation isn’t just a case of unfair rent extraction, though it is certainly that. It’s also a case of political capture of the AMA. At any point, the Secretary of HHS could choose to revisit its standardization on top of CPT codes, and either foster an alternative, allow competition, or demand that the AMA cut prices. There are alternatives. There are ICD codes. There’s also something called SNOMED, which stands for the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms, which is paid for by at a national level. It’s much cheaper than the CPT codes; Japan, for instance, pays less than $1 million. Switching over to a new system, or even allowing a new system would take a lot of effort. A much simpler change would be Congress passing a law invalidating copyrights for public medial standards, such as CPT codes. It’s ridiculous that a public standard on which everyone must operate is subject to extractive royalty payments. The government has a lot of power here, and could actually start to exert it.
But first, let’s go to the problem itself. In January, a reader sent me a note about a fee paid by her father, a licensed marriage and family therapist. Here’s what she said.
In his practice my dad uses a billing software called SimplePractice and in December they started charging a yearly $20 fee to each clinician. They say this fee is to cover the $18 royalty AMA charges SimplePractice for each clinician who uses the software since the software can use CPT codes, as well as a $2 processing fee.Sure, enough, I went to SimplePractice’s website, and there it is explaining the annual $20 charge for something called a Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code. SimplePractice says customers must pay the royalty to the American Medical Association, which “owns the rights to CPT codes and mandates the collection of royalty fees for all clinicians who have access to the codes, regardless of usage.”
Last year, SimplePractice sent out a note to its customers announcing this fee structure, to widespread anger. One therapist noted on Reddit, “I may get hate for this but this is the kind of shit that really makes me want to surrender my license and become a life coach, allowing me to continue helping people but opting out of the racket. I’m so tired of feeling exploited.” Another said, “Like wtf, being in private practice is already hard and expensive enough, these little ass fees add up. I might drop emr and go back to paper.”
CPT codes are a way to explain what a clinician did during an interaction with a patient. For instance, the most common CPT code for psychologists is 90837, which is the number that means the clinician provided an hour of psychotherapy. To get payment, they will submit this code to health insurers, whether private, Medicare, or Medicaid, and everyone involved will know what it means. First developed in 1966 for use with Medicare, the demand for extensive medical documentation is now a serious contributor to physician burnout, as "[f]or every 8 hours of scheduled patient time, ambulatory physicians spend more than 5 hours on the electronic health records." (...)
In other words, the AMA isn’t offering a software product. It just runs this process, keeping a list of codes that map to different medical procedures. You would think it would be free, a standard for everyone to use. But it’s not, and the AMA is able to charge a royalty for the license to use those codes. Every medical software company seems to have CPT codes and royalties built into their workflow.
Other similar systems are public. For instance, there’s the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes, which are used by most other countries for free. ICD and CPT codes are complements, not substitutes. ICD is a list of diagnoses- “this patient has depression” “this patient has a pulmonary embolus” while CPT is a list of procedures “I talked to this patient for 60 min” “I did this surgery on this patient.” Most billing systems require both codes, basically the insurer is saying “what did you do” (CPT) and “why” (ICD)? But only one is copyrighted. To put it differently, this situation is a bit like if Fedex owned and designed the zip code system, and got to charge anyone who used a zip code.
The total amount of money to the AMA is relatively small, at least compared to overall cost in our health care system. It’s roughly $300 million a year to the AMA in royalty payments. That’s not nothing; but the impact is far more significant on the politics of health care. To understand why, it helps to start with the importance of this particular trade association.
The AMA is the “doctor’s lobby,” and it has been a powerful force in American politics since it was founded in 1847. The rich American doctor was a 20th century community leader, or a petty tyrant, whichever you might believe. Americans respected their physicians, and doctors were conservative and locally rooted, able to speak with authority on matters of public health. They generally feared the state, but also feared corporate control.
The AMA, as such, jealously guarded this position, routinely opposing government attempts to provide universal health care through a centralized administrative public apparatus, haranguing Democrats as seeking to foster “socialized medicine.” And it worked. The AMA beat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it beat Harry Truman, and it beat Bill Clinton. The threat of corporatization was perceived by medical professionals as coming from the left.
But in the last 20 years, this dynamic has changed, because most doctors now work for large corporations. The old days of hanging up a shingle in a solo or even small group practice is gone because it’s no longer possible for an individual to bargain with the giants that manage the reimbursements, hospital systems, and payment arrangements necessary to be a doctor. Curiously, the AMA, which one would think has some interest in opposing the mass corporatization of its membership, doesn’t seem to care. For instance, the AMA only took a stance on private equity two years ago, long after its membership had transitioned from majority independent practitioners to majority corporate employees. And a key reason might be because it doesn’t make its money by serving doctors anymore. It makes it from the CPT code monopoly it uses to extract from doctors.
Let’s look at some numbers.
If you look at AMA financial disclosures from 2004 to 2023, you’ll notice three big trends. First of all, dues membership is down. In 2004, it was at $48 million. By 2023, it fell to $33 million. Second of all, revenue is way up, from $243 million to $468 million. And third, there’s an item - “royalties” - that explains it. Royalties, which come largely from CPT code revenue, were about a fifth of the AMA revenue in 2004, at $45 million. In 2023 they were at $308 million, 62% of all revenue, including all the profit, most of the overhead, and the lucrative executive salaries, which have increased by 10x since 2004.
The original CPT codes came out in 1966 to coincide with Medicare, but were published as a book updated annually. It was when electronic medical records took off that the revenue stream picked up. (...)
This situation isn’t just a case of unfair rent extraction, though it is certainly that. It’s also a case of political capture of the AMA. At any point, the Secretary of HHS could choose to revisit its standardization on top of CPT codes, and either foster an alternative, allow competition, or demand that the AMA cut prices. There are alternatives. There are ICD codes. There’s also something called SNOMED, which stands for the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms, which is paid for by at a national level. It’s much cheaper than the CPT codes; Japan, for instance, pays less than $1 million. Switching over to a new system, or even allowing a new system would take a lot of effort. A much simpler change would be Congress passing a law invalidating copyrights for public medial standards, such as CPT codes. It’s ridiculous that a public standard on which everyone must operate is subject to extractive royalty payments. The government has a lot of power here, and could actually start to exert it.
Friday, April 4, 2025
Manufactured Chaos
Musk and seven DOGE staffers—all of them men—appeared on Fox News Thursday, where the world's richest person called the Trump administration's crusade to eviscerate the federal government under pretext of improving efficiency "the biggest revolution in the government since the original revolution" in 1776.
Acknowledging that DOGE's wrecking-ball approach to government reform is getting "a lot of complaints along the way," Musk said: "You know who complains the loudest, and with the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters." (...)
Responding to what she called Musk's "absurd claim," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works (SSW), said Friday that "the truth is that Social Security has a fraud rate of 0.00625%, far lower than private sector retirement programs."
"It is Musk and DOGE who are inviting in fraudsters," she continued. "Scammers are already rushing in to take advantage of the confusion created by DOGE's service cuts."
Critics have denounced the Trump administration for sowing chaos at SSA and other federal agencies by planning to lay off thousands of workers, slash spending, and implement other disruptive policies. Cuts in SSA phone services were reportedly carried out in response to a direct request from the White House, which claimed it is simply working to eliminate "waste, fraud, and abuse."
"The truth is that Social Security has a fraud rate of 0.00625%, far lower than private sector retirement programs."
This "DOGE-manufactured chaos," as Altman calls it, has already led to the SSA website crashing several times in recent weeks and hold times of as long as 4-5 hours for those calling the agency.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) on Thursday noted that while it would be clearly illegal for President Donald Trump and DOGE to cut Social Security benefits without congressional authorization, there are other ways for the administration to hamstring the agency.
Referencing a new in-person verification rule that was delayed and partly rolled back this week, Warren said:
Democratic lawmakers and others argue that the Trump administration's approach is "a prelude to privatizing Social Security and handing it over to private equity," as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said earlier this week.
"Improving Social Security doesn't start with shuttering the offices that handle modernization, anti-fraud activities, and civil rights violations," the senator asserted. "It doesn't start with indiscriminately firing or buying out thousands of workers, and it doesn't start with restricting customer service over the phone and drawing up plans to close field and regional offices."
[ed. Making government deliberately dysfunctional. Actually, it would be scarier if they really believed they were making it better.]
The DOGE staffers repeated unfounded claims that Social Security is riddled with fraud; that in some cases, 40% of calls to the Social Security Administration phone center are fraudulent; and that millions of people aged 120 and older are registered with SSA.
Responding to what she called Musk's "absurd claim," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works (SSW), said Friday that "the truth is that Social Security has a fraud rate of 0.00625%, far lower than private sector retirement programs."
"It is Musk and DOGE who are inviting in fraudsters," she continued. "Scammers are already rushing in to take advantage of the confusion created by DOGE's service cuts."
Critics have denounced the Trump administration for sowing chaos at SSA and other federal agencies by planning to lay off thousands of workers, slash spending, and implement other disruptive policies. Cuts in SSA phone services were reportedly carried out in response to a direct request from the White House, which claimed it is simply working to eliminate "waste, fraud, and abuse."
"The truth is that Social Security has a fraud rate of 0.00625%, far lower than private sector retirement programs."
This "DOGE-manufactured chaos," as Altman calls it, has already led to the SSA website crashing several times in recent weeks and hold times of as long as 4-5 hours for those calling the agency.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) on Thursday noted that while it would be clearly illegal for President Donald Trump and DOGE to cut Social Security benefits without congressional authorization, there are other ways for the administration to hamstring the agency.
Referencing a new in-person verification rule that was delayed and partly rolled back this week, Warren said:
Say a 66-year-old man qualifies for Social Security. Say he calls the helpline to apply, but he's told about a new DOGE rule, so he has to go online or in person. He can't drive. He has trouble with the website, so he waits until his niece can get a day off to take him to the local office, but DOGE closed that office, so they have to drive two hours to get to the next closest office. When they get there, there are only two people staffing a 50-person line, so he doesn't even make it to the front of the line before the office closes and he has to come back. Let's assume it takes him three months to straighten this out, and he misses a total of $5,000 in benefits checks, which, by law, he will never get back."This scenario is a backdoor way Musk and Trump could cut Social Security," the senator added. "That's what I'm fighting to prevent."
Democratic lawmakers and others argue that the Trump administration's approach is "a prelude to privatizing Social Security and handing it over to private equity," as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said earlier this week.
"Improving Social Security doesn't start with shuttering the offices that handle modernization, anti-fraud activities, and civil rights violations," the senator asserted. "It doesn't start with indiscriminately firing or buying out thousands of workers, and it doesn't start with restricting customer service over the phone and drawing up plans to close field and regional offices."
by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams | Read more:
Image: Fox "News"
Steve Rattner on Just How Bad Things Will Get Under Trump’s Tariffs
In this episode of “The Opinions,” the deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy and contributing Opinion writer, investor and economic analyst Steven Rattner break down how President Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” are already shaking the global economy — and it hasn’t even been 24 hours. (...)
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. And this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
Trump’s trillion-dollar hike on imports has sent shock waves across the globe. As one professor of trade policy told The Times, “Trump has chosen to blow up the system governing international trade.”
Today, I’m joined by Steve Rattner, a contributing writer for Times Opinion. Steve’s the former head of President Barack Obama’s auto industry task force, which got him nicknamed the car czar. And he’s also a financier on Wall Street who knows what the business community thinks about Trump.
Steve, thanks for being here.
Steve Rattner: Thanks so much for having me, Patrick.
Healy: These are broad and big tariffs: 10 percent across the board, except Canada and Mexico, but also 34 percent on China, 24 percent on Japan, 46 percent on Vietnam, 32 percent on Taiwan and, of course, 25 percent on auto companies. The market started off Thursday down sharply. What’s on your mind about the new tariffs and what matters most about them?
Rattner: Well, first, this is the most extraordinary trade war, if you want to call it, that we have conducted since the 1920s and into the 1930s, ending in the famous Smoot-Hawley tariffs. And ever since World War II, other countries in the world, including China, have been working to reduce tariffs. Why are they trying to reduce tariffs? Because we all learned in Economics 101 that trade is good, that if somebody else can make something cheaper and better than you can, you let them make that, and you make something else that you can do better or cheaper. And on that basis, we’ve had this period of essentially unparalleled prosperity since World War II, and trade has played a meaningful role in that.
Another example, more recently, is the fact that we had so little inflation from the great financial crisis until Covid because the price of goods, which are the things that can more easily move across an international barrier, were coming down in price or at least not going up in price. And they kept our inflation at a very, very low level, and they made things cheaper and better for so many Americans who are out shopping at Walmart or wherever they go.
Healy: I don’t know if Trump took Econ 101, but what does he believe? What does this say about his vision, either the economy or America and the world or something else?
Rattner: I have to assume he took Econ 101, because he went to Wharton.
Healy: That’s probably true.
Rattner: But I think he may have gone into some time warp or something and ended up in a 19th-century class on economics, because back then they taught you what we call mercantilism, that countries’ goal was to accumulate gold. They all wanted more gold, and so therefore, you wanted to have trade surpluses, and therefore tariffs were high, and trade barriers were high. But we’re not in the 19th century anymore. We’re in the 21st century.
Trump doesn’t have a lot of core beliefs, in my opinion. As you watch his antics and you watch over the years — and you’ve watched him for many, many years — he used to be a Democrat, he was pro-choice, he was this, he was that, and now he’s suddenly a hard-right Republican. But the one constant in his life has been this mercantilist view about trade, and therefore we do have a large trade deficit. He believes it’s because other countries don’t trade fairly. As I’ve indicated, there are other reasons for it, and so this is how he responds.
Healy: I’d put it a little differently. I’d say he really believes in walls, in keeping out the invaders that he likes to talk about, in keeping in what he thinks he can do in terms of manufacturing in business. But this idea that the global economy, markets can work in a world where America turns into Fortress America or Trump’s America — can that work in some way on America’s behalf? I still like to think that Trump is not trying to send the markets crashing and send the economy into recession, but I don’t know.
Rattner: I don’t think you’re going to find many economists who think this can work. And so let’s take a couple of the pieces.
First of all, even if other countries stop sending us their clothes, their furniture, their iPhones, whatever, we can’t make that stuff here. We do not, any longer, have the physical infrastructure to make it. You’d have to go out and build lots and lots of factories in order to replace that. Businesses are not going to do that, because they don’t believe in their heart that these tariffs are permanent. They believe that everyone will realize how bad they are and maybe after the next presidential election or whenever, they’ll get removed. And so it can’t work. It won’t work. But simply what this is going to mean is that you’re going to pay 20 percent more for your iPhone or something like that the next time you go to buy one.
Healy: He seems to think that he can get these businesses that you’re talking about to somehow do things, that they’re going to start reshoring jobs or building factories, that somehow he can just sign an executive order with his big penmanship and the economy is going to react in a certain way. But things don’t work that way.
Paul, Weiss might make a deal with him. Columbia University might make a deal with him. But it’s not as if the global economy has an address in Lower Manhattan and he can just sign an order and make them build a fleet of factories.
What is it that he doesn’t either understand about the economy, or is it not about understanding? It’s about projecting some kind of command and control authority.
Rattner: That’s a good question. First, I don’t think he understands how the economy works, but I think his end game here is that he hopes and expects that all these other countries are going to keel over and change their tariffs, change their nontariff barriers, and he’ll be able to declare victory.
Remember, one thing about Trump is he’s a deal guy. “The Art of the Deal,” his first book — his whole life has been around deals, and everything with him is about power. Do you have more power than the other guy? Can you outnegotiate the other guy?
Remember that famous moment in the Oval Office with President Zelensky a few weeks ago, when JD Vance started that whole spat and Trump kept turning to Zelensky and said, “You have no cards. You have no cards”? Because in Trump’s mind, it’s all a negotiation. Do I have more cards than he has, or does he have more cards than I have? Trump thinks that these tariffs are his cards, and he’s going to use them to bring these countries to heel.
I don’t think he believes in his heart — and he may say different things — that the end game here is we’re suddenly going to start making all the stuff that other people make and not import them and become Fortress America. I think in his heart, he believes that this is just another deal, another negotiation, and he will win it.
Healy: We’re in Atlantic City, baby. We’re at Trump Casino.
Rattner: Remember, they went bankrupt, so it didn’t work out so well for that.
Healy: That cards idea — that really is part of my theory about how Trump uses power. You mentioned other countries. Are they going to fall in line? What do you think will happen there?
Rattner: I don’t know. To tell you the truth, we’re in uncharted waters. The response to his tariffs so far — remember, he put tariffs on Mexico, Canada. Cars have already been done. The response has been more retaliatory than conciliatory, particularly from places like Canada and China.
So far, I think, the attitude of these other countries has been, “If we match him tit for tat, eventually he’ll back down.” They’re thinking about their cards, too. I’m not sure that’s where this ends. The sheer magnitude of what he did is so enormous that I think you will see countries not coming and begging, but I think you’ll see them trying to reach out and say, “OK, what would it take to get this to reverse?”
Healy: Where does American leverage come into this, though? Because I would imagine, if I’m Donald Trump, I think I am the biggest dog on the porch. Everybody else — allies and adversaries alike — has to deal with me. Who cares if they trust me? Who cares if they trust America?
Is Trump onto something there? Does America have more leverage in the economy than it’s ever even used, and now he’s pushing the bayonet in and seeing how far he can go in making deals?
Rattner: America has certainly had a fair amount of leverage. You can call us the best house in a bad neighborhood, if you want. We still are this incredibly strong economy relative to other countries.
Our economy is about to get a lot less strong because of these tariffs. But as we sit here today, we’re obviously at the center of innovation, A.I., biotech, our military. We are certainly the world leaders, but we’re not omnipotent, and these other countries have come a long way.
The E.U. is now reasonably united, and they think, and China thinks, they are not a baby sister anymore. They are equal to us. So I don’t think the right approach to these people is to bully them and say, “Yeah, I’m the guy, and you have to do what I say.” I don’t think that’s going to work. But that’s the road we’re going down.
Healy: We don’t know what will happen in the next few hours or days, but that’s part of the problem for businesses, right? The uncertainty can be devastating. You’re deep in the world of finance and the economy. Based on your private conversations, how are business leaders, global leaders, dealing with the uncertainty of the new tariffs? Are there any specific stories or comments that you can share with us that you’re hearing?
Rattner: Yeah, let me put it in a little bit of a very recent historic context. The business community was very much behind Trump in this election not because they love the guy but, frankly, because they really detested the Biden administration.
And so they welcomed Trump. They welcomed DOGE. They don’t understand Washington. They don’t understand how to manage a federal bureaucracy, but they all believed there was a lot of fraud, waste and abuse, and so they thought all that was great.
The tariff stuff they are not on board for. None of them, really. In fact, even the auto companies — who you would think, “OK, great” — were saying: This is a pretty dumb move. And so they are very, very unhappy about this. They are very unwilling to speak out publicly because they know what’s going on with the law firms. They know what happens when you get on Trump’s bad side. So they’re holding their tongues.
Healy: When you’re a business executive or investor, is your attitude about the president, whoever the president is, that just going along for the ride is something that you have to fundamentally be reacting to or be on a defensive posture with? Or is there a point where a president is enacting policy that you have to stand against or you have to figure out some way to speak out against?
Rattner: No, the business community generally does not think it’s just along for the ride. They spend a gazillion dollars on lobbyists up and down K Street in Washington to try to have things come out the way they want them to come out. The Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, all these trade organizations, they’re in the White House. They’re in the executive branch. They’re up on the Hill every single day trying to lobby for their interests.
This president is different. They do fear him because of his demonstrated willingness to retaliate in ways that are just completely off the field, in terms of following any norms, any rules, any ethics, about how he’ll retaliate. And so they’re very reluctant, so far, anyway, to speak out publicly. Privately they are deeply, deeply disappointed in the direction that this is going. (...)
Some institutions, including Goldman Sachs, have raised their recession probability. I think Goldman Sachs, before yesterday, was at 35 percent. I would be closer to 50 percent. I think at the very minimum, we’re in what we called, back in the ’70s, stagflation, where you have both inflation and not a lot of growth or no growth. And Trump has been saying: OK, you know, it’s fine. I don’t mind that, because it’s going to be better on the other side.
It’s like if the doctor gives you some medicine, makes you feel worse for the first 24 hours and then you’re better. That’s kind of what he’s claiming is going to happen here. But I don’t know anybody who believes that.
Healy: We had Bill Clinton in the early ’90s talking about shared sacrifice. You’ve had presidents who have created a narrative about America that can convince a lot of voters that there’s another side, that we have to have some short-term pain to get to long-term gain. (...)
Rattner: If you go back to your Clinton analogy, Clinton said what you said: Shared pain, sacrifice, we’ll get to the other side. In the meantime, he got wiped out in the 1994 midterm elections. But then we did get to the other side, and the economy was unbelievably strong in those last five or six years of Clinton’s term, and it all worked out well because he had sane policies. His policies, actually, of shared sacrifice were for a goal and the right means to achieve that goal. This is craziness. And there’s not going to be another side here that’s going to make people say, “Oh, yeah, the guy’s actually a secret genius.”
Healy: Joe Biden and Donald Trump are very different. But I don’t think either man understood how little tolerance Americans have for short-term pain. They don’t like it. They hate inflation. Americans hate inflation. And if you come in, especially, promising on Day 1 that everything is going to be turned around and then not only you don’t deliver it, but you put on these tariffs that just rattle the markets more and more and more, I don’t think a lot of Americans are going to look at this and say, “This is a president who knows what he’s doing.”
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. And this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
Today, I’m joined by Steve Rattner, a contributing writer for Times Opinion. Steve’s the former head of President Barack Obama’s auto industry task force, which got him nicknamed the car czar. And he’s also a financier on Wall Street who knows what the business community thinks about Trump.
Steve, thanks for being here.
Steve Rattner: Thanks so much for having me, Patrick.
Healy: These are broad and big tariffs: 10 percent across the board, except Canada and Mexico, but also 34 percent on China, 24 percent on Japan, 46 percent on Vietnam, 32 percent on Taiwan and, of course, 25 percent on auto companies. The market started off Thursday down sharply. What’s on your mind about the new tariffs and what matters most about them?
Rattner: Well, first, this is the most extraordinary trade war, if you want to call it, that we have conducted since the 1920s and into the 1930s, ending in the famous Smoot-Hawley tariffs. And ever since World War II, other countries in the world, including China, have been working to reduce tariffs. Why are they trying to reduce tariffs? Because we all learned in Economics 101 that trade is good, that if somebody else can make something cheaper and better than you can, you let them make that, and you make something else that you can do better or cheaper. And on that basis, we’ve had this period of essentially unparalleled prosperity since World War II, and trade has played a meaningful role in that.
Another example, more recently, is the fact that we had so little inflation from the great financial crisis until Covid because the price of goods, which are the things that can more easily move across an international barrier, were coming down in price or at least not going up in price. And they kept our inflation at a very, very low level, and they made things cheaper and better for so many Americans who are out shopping at Walmart or wherever they go.
Healy: I don’t know if Trump took Econ 101, but what does he believe? What does this say about his vision, either the economy or America and the world or something else?
Rattner: I have to assume he took Econ 101, because he went to Wharton.
Healy: That’s probably true.
Rattner: But I think he may have gone into some time warp or something and ended up in a 19th-century class on economics, because back then they taught you what we call mercantilism, that countries’ goal was to accumulate gold. They all wanted more gold, and so therefore, you wanted to have trade surpluses, and therefore tariffs were high, and trade barriers were high. But we’re not in the 19th century anymore. We’re in the 21st century.
Trump doesn’t have a lot of core beliefs, in my opinion. As you watch his antics and you watch over the years — and you’ve watched him for many, many years — he used to be a Democrat, he was pro-choice, he was this, he was that, and now he’s suddenly a hard-right Republican. But the one constant in his life has been this mercantilist view about trade, and therefore we do have a large trade deficit. He believes it’s because other countries don’t trade fairly. As I’ve indicated, there are other reasons for it, and so this is how he responds.
Healy: I’d put it a little differently. I’d say he really believes in walls, in keeping out the invaders that he likes to talk about, in keeping in what he thinks he can do in terms of manufacturing in business. But this idea that the global economy, markets can work in a world where America turns into Fortress America or Trump’s America — can that work in some way on America’s behalf? I still like to think that Trump is not trying to send the markets crashing and send the economy into recession, but I don’t know.
Rattner: I don’t think you’re going to find many economists who think this can work. And so let’s take a couple of the pieces.
First of all, even if other countries stop sending us their clothes, their furniture, their iPhones, whatever, we can’t make that stuff here. We do not, any longer, have the physical infrastructure to make it. You’d have to go out and build lots and lots of factories in order to replace that. Businesses are not going to do that, because they don’t believe in their heart that these tariffs are permanent. They believe that everyone will realize how bad they are and maybe after the next presidential election or whenever, they’ll get removed. And so it can’t work. It won’t work. But simply what this is going to mean is that you’re going to pay 20 percent more for your iPhone or something like that the next time you go to buy one.
Healy: He seems to think that he can get these businesses that you’re talking about to somehow do things, that they’re going to start reshoring jobs or building factories, that somehow he can just sign an executive order with his big penmanship and the economy is going to react in a certain way. But things don’t work that way.
Paul, Weiss might make a deal with him. Columbia University might make a deal with him. But it’s not as if the global economy has an address in Lower Manhattan and he can just sign an order and make them build a fleet of factories.
What is it that he doesn’t either understand about the economy, or is it not about understanding? It’s about projecting some kind of command and control authority.
Rattner: That’s a good question. First, I don’t think he understands how the economy works, but I think his end game here is that he hopes and expects that all these other countries are going to keel over and change their tariffs, change their nontariff barriers, and he’ll be able to declare victory.
Remember, one thing about Trump is he’s a deal guy. “The Art of the Deal,” his first book — his whole life has been around deals, and everything with him is about power. Do you have more power than the other guy? Can you outnegotiate the other guy?
Remember that famous moment in the Oval Office with President Zelensky a few weeks ago, when JD Vance started that whole spat and Trump kept turning to Zelensky and said, “You have no cards. You have no cards”? Because in Trump’s mind, it’s all a negotiation. Do I have more cards than he has, or does he have more cards than I have? Trump thinks that these tariffs are his cards, and he’s going to use them to bring these countries to heel.
I don’t think he believes in his heart — and he may say different things — that the end game here is we’re suddenly going to start making all the stuff that other people make and not import them and become Fortress America. I think in his heart, he believes that this is just another deal, another negotiation, and he will win it.
Healy: We’re in Atlantic City, baby. We’re at Trump Casino.
Rattner: Remember, they went bankrupt, so it didn’t work out so well for that.
Healy: That cards idea — that really is part of my theory about how Trump uses power. You mentioned other countries. Are they going to fall in line? What do you think will happen there?
Rattner: I don’t know. To tell you the truth, we’re in uncharted waters. The response to his tariffs so far — remember, he put tariffs on Mexico, Canada. Cars have already been done. The response has been more retaliatory than conciliatory, particularly from places like Canada and China.
So far, I think, the attitude of these other countries has been, “If we match him tit for tat, eventually he’ll back down.” They’re thinking about their cards, too. I’m not sure that’s where this ends. The sheer magnitude of what he did is so enormous that I think you will see countries not coming and begging, but I think you’ll see them trying to reach out and say, “OK, what would it take to get this to reverse?”
Healy: Where does American leverage come into this, though? Because I would imagine, if I’m Donald Trump, I think I am the biggest dog on the porch. Everybody else — allies and adversaries alike — has to deal with me. Who cares if they trust me? Who cares if they trust America?
Is Trump onto something there? Does America have more leverage in the economy than it’s ever even used, and now he’s pushing the bayonet in and seeing how far he can go in making deals?
Rattner: America has certainly had a fair amount of leverage. You can call us the best house in a bad neighborhood, if you want. We still are this incredibly strong economy relative to other countries.
Our economy is about to get a lot less strong because of these tariffs. But as we sit here today, we’re obviously at the center of innovation, A.I., biotech, our military. We are certainly the world leaders, but we’re not omnipotent, and these other countries have come a long way.
The E.U. is now reasonably united, and they think, and China thinks, they are not a baby sister anymore. They are equal to us. So I don’t think the right approach to these people is to bully them and say, “Yeah, I’m the guy, and you have to do what I say.” I don’t think that’s going to work. But that’s the road we’re going down.
Healy: We don’t know what will happen in the next few hours or days, but that’s part of the problem for businesses, right? The uncertainty can be devastating. You’re deep in the world of finance and the economy. Based on your private conversations, how are business leaders, global leaders, dealing with the uncertainty of the new tariffs? Are there any specific stories or comments that you can share with us that you’re hearing?
Rattner: Yeah, let me put it in a little bit of a very recent historic context. The business community was very much behind Trump in this election not because they love the guy but, frankly, because they really detested the Biden administration.
And so they welcomed Trump. They welcomed DOGE. They don’t understand Washington. They don’t understand how to manage a federal bureaucracy, but they all believed there was a lot of fraud, waste and abuse, and so they thought all that was great.
The tariff stuff they are not on board for. None of them, really. In fact, even the auto companies — who you would think, “OK, great” — were saying: This is a pretty dumb move. And so they are very, very unhappy about this. They are very unwilling to speak out publicly because they know what’s going on with the law firms. They know what happens when you get on Trump’s bad side. So they’re holding their tongues.
Healy: When you’re a business executive or investor, is your attitude about the president, whoever the president is, that just going along for the ride is something that you have to fundamentally be reacting to or be on a defensive posture with? Or is there a point where a president is enacting policy that you have to stand against or you have to figure out some way to speak out against?
Rattner: No, the business community generally does not think it’s just along for the ride. They spend a gazillion dollars on lobbyists up and down K Street in Washington to try to have things come out the way they want them to come out. The Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, all these trade organizations, they’re in the White House. They’re in the executive branch. They’re up on the Hill every single day trying to lobby for their interests.
This president is different. They do fear him because of his demonstrated willingness to retaliate in ways that are just completely off the field, in terms of following any norms, any rules, any ethics, about how he’ll retaliate. And so they’re very reluctant, so far, anyway, to speak out publicly. Privately they are deeply, deeply disappointed in the direction that this is going. (...)
Some institutions, including Goldman Sachs, have raised their recession probability. I think Goldman Sachs, before yesterday, was at 35 percent. I would be closer to 50 percent. I think at the very minimum, we’re in what we called, back in the ’70s, stagflation, where you have both inflation and not a lot of growth or no growth. And Trump has been saying: OK, you know, it’s fine. I don’t mind that, because it’s going to be better on the other side.
It’s like if the doctor gives you some medicine, makes you feel worse for the first 24 hours and then you’re better. That’s kind of what he’s claiming is going to happen here. But I don’t know anybody who believes that.
Healy: We had Bill Clinton in the early ’90s talking about shared sacrifice. You’ve had presidents who have created a narrative about America that can convince a lot of voters that there’s another side, that we have to have some short-term pain to get to long-term gain. (...)
Rattner: If you go back to your Clinton analogy, Clinton said what you said: Shared pain, sacrifice, we’ll get to the other side. In the meantime, he got wiped out in the 1994 midterm elections. But then we did get to the other side, and the economy was unbelievably strong in those last five or six years of Clinton’s term, and it all worked out well because he had sane policies. His policies, actually, of shared sacrifice were for a goal and the right means to achieve that goal. This is craziness. And there’s not going to be another side here that’s going to make people say, “Oh, yeah, the guy’s actually a secret genius.”
Healy: Joe Biden and Donald Trump are very different. But I don’t think either man understood how little tolerance Americans have for short-term pain. They don’t like it. They hate inflation. Americans hate inflation. And if you come in, especially, promising on Day 1 that everything is going to be turned around and then not only you don’t deliver it, but you put on these tariffs that just rattle the markets more and more and more, I don’t think a lot of Americans are going to look at this and say, “This is a president who knows what he’s doing.”
by Patrick Healy and Steve Rattner, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty[ed. FWIW - I imagine this will quickly devolve into an exit strategy that allows him to claim a few minor wins, declare victory, and carve out or phase in massive exemptions and reductions over some period of time. The distraction factor alone, affecting other programs and tax breaks he's planning, will not be worth it. Or, maybe he'll use this excuse: Senators introduce bipartisan bill to give Congress more power over tariffs (The Hill).]
Suddenly Old, Suddenly the Other
On the Unfamiliar World of Aging
All at once and much to my surprise, I am old. I did not expect it, and it is not what I expected. The world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did even ten years ago. Abruptly, I’m one in a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.
From the point of view of children, adolescents, and adults in general, I am no longer completely part of the world on the go. I am no longer a part of social groups in which I had a place. People dear to me decline precipitously and die. Familiar coffee shops, stores, parks, landmarks are gone.
We now know we are subjects completely of time and change. Customs, fashions, beliefs, truths, even the future, all these have changed. It becomes clear in old age that we will not be establishing a stable way of existing in space or time. Navigating this altered world requires circumspection. By aging, it seems, we become exiles.
And this is not simply an outer experience. I now find myself estranged from the person I was accustomed to being. My body and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. My world is marked by loss and uncertainty.
My thinking, feeling, responding, imagining seem somehow unfamiliar. This is not how I thought of myself or my future. Things are no longer in my control. My life has become strangely unrecognizable. My world, my self are less stable, less secure. I have, even to myself, become somewhat “other.”
by Douglas J. Penick, LitHub | Read more:
From the point of view of children, adolescents, and adults in general, I am no longer completely part of the world on the go. I am no longer a part of social groups in which I had a place. People dear to me decline precipitously and die. Familiar coffee shops, stores, parks, landmarks are gone.
And this is not simply an outer experience. I now find myself estranged from the person I was accustomed to being. My body and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. My world is marked by loss and uncertainty.
My thinking, feeling, responding, imagining seem somehow unfamiliar. This is not how I thought of myself or my future. Things are no longer in my control. My life has become strangely unrecognizable. My world, my self are less stable, less secure. I have, even to myself, become somewhat “other.”
Everything is more intensely transitory. But as the world becomes more distant and out of control, I begin to see patterns I had never imagined or only dimly sensed. Situations, objects, places, people become, moment by moment, very deeply to be cherished, valued; loved, not in spite of being impermanent, but because we are only together for this moment.
It is like watching clouds move across the sky. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells more intense, sudden sounds abrupt. Temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. Other worlds, it seems, are waiting to show themselves.
Beethoven wrote this music when he was fifty years old; he was completely deaf, often very sick, and would die five years later. The order by which the sonata progressed was familiar, but its inner impulse was strangely austere, full of unfamiliar longing, searching, finding unsuspected ways forward, touching on new and unique kinds of resolution.
Emotional changes and shifts of keys moved in ways both surprising and deeply moving. In the third and final movement, the grammar contained elements one could never have anticipated (a single note repeated eighteen times, a chord repeated ten times); the sorrow and resolution seemed to emanate from a vast and unfamiliar expanse on the edge of silence.
It was not just the notes, but the space from which they emerged, where they reverberated and in which finally they ended that was transformative. Nothing has ever erased the shock of being drawn into a terrain of such intensity, depth, possibility, and loss. Looking at Beethoven’s life when he wrote this may provide some context for the piece but does not explain how he achieved this.
Beethoven was an almost unbearable person: willful, extravagantly self-absorbed, angry, inconsiderate, demanding, harsh, often close to feral. As Lewis Lockwood has put it: “Two elements of Beethoven’s domestic life run through his last ten years like persistent motives from one of his major works: isolation and obsessiveness.” (...)
His hearing had deteriorated almost completely. Deafness constricts our sense of ambient space; putting one’s fingers in one’s ears makes this loss evident. Space behind and to the sides pulls in. This creates a compressed dimension of inner space and could only have intensified Beethoven’s retreat into himself and the inwardness of his music. Lockwood writes:
The further decline in Beethoven’s health moved in tandem with his increasing psychological withdrawal and deepening anxiety. Here the emotional and intellectual demands that he made on himself expanded and deepened as he composed the last piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the last quartets.
Throughout the 1820s, Beethoven’s health became even more unstable. He was afflicted by rheumatic fever, bowel complaints, jaundice, and inflammations in his eyes. Newspapers reported that his closest friends were concerned for his survival. There were times when he was barely recognizable.
In early 1820, at the same time when he was composing Piano Sonata, Op. 110, he went for a long walk along a canal towpath outside of Vienna and made his way to a canal basin at Ungerthor. He had eaten nothing, was exhausted, confused, and disoriented; he began to look through the windows of houses near the path.
He was so erratic and so shabbily dressed that the residents became alarmed and called the police. He proclaimed loudly to the officers that he was Beethoven, but he looked so much more like a beggar that he was not believed.
They locked him up and held him until a nearby music teacher named Herzog, hearing about the unfortunate prisoner, came to look. He told the officers that this was indeed the famous composer. They gave him some clean clothing, food and ordered a cab to take him home.
It is like watching clouds move across the sky. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells more intense, sudden sounds abrupt. Temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. Other worlds, it seems, are waiting to show themselves.
***
My long-suffering piano teacher, Mr. Klaus Goetze, would sometimes play for his students, and one afternoon he performed Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat, No. 31, Op. 110. I was 17 and had already heard many of Beethoven’s more popular sonatas in concert and on recordings, but nothing prepared me for what I heard him play. It changed my life in a subtle way, and now, some sixty years later, it has returned to inspire how I think about growing older.Beethoven wrote this music when he was fifty years old; he was completely deaf, often very sick, and would die five years later. The order by which the sonata progressed was familiar, but its inner impulse was strangely austere, full of unfamiliar longing, searching, finding unsuspected ways forward, touching on new and unique kinds of resolution.
Emotional changes and shifts of keys moved in ways both surprising and deeply moving. In the third and final movement, the grammar contained elements one could never have anticipated (a single note repeated eighteen times, a chord repeated ten times); the sorrow and resolution seemed to emanate from a vast and unfamiliar expanse on the edge of silence.
It was not just the notes, but the space from which they emerged, where they reverberated and in which finally they ended that was transformative. Nothing has ever erased the shock of being drawn into a terrain of such intensity, depth, possibility, and loss. Looking at Beethoven’s life when he wrote this may provide some context for the piece but does not explain how he achieved this.
Beethoven was an almost unbearable person: willful, extravagantly self-absorbed, angry, inconsiderate, demanding, harsh, often close to feral. As Lewis Lockwood has put it: “Two elements of Beethoven’s domestic life run through his last ten years like persistent motives from one of his major works: isolation and obsessiveness.” (...)
His hearing had deteriorated almost completely. Deafness constricts our sense of ambient space; putting one’s fingers in one’s ears makes this loss evident. Space behind and to the sides pulls in. This creates a compressed dimension of inner space and could only have intensified Beethoven’s retreat into himself and the inwardness of his music. Lockwood writes:
The further decline in Beethoven’s health moved in tandem with his increasing psychological withdrawal and deepening anxiety. Here the emotional and intellectual demands that he made on himself expanded and deepened as he composed the last piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the last quartets.
Throughout the 1820s, Beethoven’s health became even more unstable. He was afflicted by rheumatic fever, bowel complaints, jaundice, and inflammations in his eyes. Newspapers reported that his closest friends were concerned for his survival. There were times when he was barely recognizable.
In early 1820, at the same time when he was composing Piano Sonata, Op. 110, he went for a long walk along a canal towpath outside of Vienna and made his way to a canal basin at Ungerthor. He had eaten nothing, was exhausted, confused, and disoriented; he began to look through the windows of houses near the path.
He was so erratic and so shabbily dressed that the residents became alarmed and called the police. He proclaimed loudly to the officers that he was Beethoven, but he looked so much more like a beggar that he was not believed.
They locked him up and held him until a nearby music teacher named Herzog, hearing about the unfortunate prisoner, came to look. He told the officers that this was indeed the famous composer. They gave him some clean clothing, food and ordered a cab to take him home.
Image: Getty via
Tax Revenue Could Drop by 10 Percent Amid Turmoil at IRS
Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.
Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.
The prediction, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS. Senior tax agency officials issued detailed warnings about those outcomes to the incoming Trump administration before the president took office, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.
The administration has moved to fire nearly 20,000 agency employees, specifically targeting new hires in taxpayer services and enforcement divisions. It’s already dismissed more than 11,000 workers at the agency, though some of their statuses are unclear pending fast-moving court cases. (...)
The IRS publishes weekly filing season reports that show the number of returns received and how officials are processing refunds. Those reports show the IRS has received 1.7 percent fewer returns this year compared with the same point in the 2024 filing season.
That percentage is narrower than the projected decrease in total receipts. But the agency also makes more detailed, nonpublic revenue projections based on IRS measurements of scheduled payments from already filed returns and outstanding balances relative to similarly situated taxpayers in previous years.
Those calculations take into account the number of filers who have paid their balances or are owed refunds, those who have scheduled payments by the April 15 deadline, those who have taken extensions, and measurements of annual noncompliance. That gives the agency deeper insight on the amount filers are paying.
The IRS also has separate measurements of business tax receipts. Corporations must pay first-quarter estimated tax on April 15.
“The thing that I think is really alarming is if this data ends up telling a story about how this filing season is evolving, and you’re seeing it happen in real time,” Sarin said.
by Jacob Bogage, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Annabelle Gordon/For The Washington Post
[ed. We shall see. I've been hearing this chatter too. Personally, I'd never think of digging a financial/credit/legal hole for myself on the basis of current politics. See also: IRS Predicts DOGE Lost Half a Trillion Dollars for the USA (TPM):]
The Post reports today that the IRS’ internal projections estimate that the DOGE-driven disruptions to the IRS since the inauguration are on track to have reduced tax receipts by more than $500 billion by April 15th. This, to be clear, is not a final tally. It’s not April 15th yet. It’s a projection based on historical data, the number of people who’ve filed, paid owed amounts of tax, etc. It’s worth taking a moment to put this number into some context in case half a trillion dollars doesn’t do it for you. Non-defense discretionary spending is the cost to fund the U.S. government once you take out mandatory spending (mostly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and the cost of the U.S. military. For 2023 that number was $917 billion. So that’s most of the stuff we think of as the government, apart from those payment programs and the military. In other words, in about eight weeks DOGE managed to lose the U.S. government — more or less light on fire — more than half of what goes to all non-defense discretionary spending.
The administration has moved to fire nearly 20,000 agency employees, specifically targeting new hires in taxpayer services and enforcement divisions. It’s already dismissed more than 11,000 workers at the agency, though some of their statuses are unclear pending fast-moving court cases. (...)
The IRS publishes weekly filing season reports that show the number of returns received and how officials are processing refunds. Those reports show the IRS has received 1.7 percent fewer returns this year compared with the same point in the 2024 filing season.
That percentage is narrower than the projected decrease in total receipts. But the agency also makes more detailed, nonpublic revenue projections based on IRS measurements of scheduled payments from already filed returns and outstanding balances relative to similarly situated taxpayers in previous years.
Those calculations take into account the number of filers who have paid their balances or are owed refunds, those who have scheduled payments by the April 15 deadline, those who have taken extensions, and measurements of annual noncompliance. That gives the agency deeper insight on the amount filers are paying.
The IRS also has separate measurements of business tax receipts. Corporations must pay first-quarter estimated tax on April 15.
“The thing that I think is really alarming is if this data ends up telling a story about how this filing season is evolving, and you’re seeing it happen in real time,” Sarin said.
by Jacob Bogage, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Annabelle Gordon/For The Washington Post
[ed. We shall see. I've been hearing this chatter too. Personally, I'd never think of digging a financial/credit/legal hole for myself on the basis of current politics. See also: IRS Predicts DOGE Lost Half a Trillion Dollars for the USA (TPM):]
The Post reports today that the IRS’ internal projections estimate that the DOGE-driven disruptions to the IRS since the inauguration are on track to have reduced tax receipts by more than $500 billion by April 15th. This, to be clear, is not a final tally. It’s not April 15th yet. It’s a projection based on historical data, the number of people who’ve filed, paid owed amounts of tax, etc. It’s worth taking a moment to put this number into some context in case half a trillion dollars doesn’t do it for you. Non-defense discretionary spending is the cost to fund the U.S. government once you take out mandatory spending (mostly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and the cost of the U.S. military. For 2023 that number was $917 billion. So that’s most of the stuff we think of as the government, apart from those payment programs and the military. In other words, in about eight weeks DOGE managed to lose the U.S. government — more or less light on fire — more than half of what goes to all non-defense discretionary spending.
Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan
The United States could bounce back from the fall of Taiwan to Communist rule. It would have far more dire consequences for Japan. Consider this post a short, informal primer on why this is so.
Ian Easton explains the PLA’s view:
The Luzon Strait, you will notice, also runs directly adjacent to Taiwan. Chinese control of Taiwan would—in event of conflict—force Japanese shipping out of the South China Sea entirely. This in itself is not a death blow: at some cost, sea traffic that now passes through Malacca and runs adjacent to Taiwan could be rerouted through the Sunda Strait and up the east coast of Mindanao. I am sure someone in Japan must have calculated the likely economic costs of rerouting Japan-bound traffic this way (or in a more extreme circumstance, replacing Middle Eastern energy supplies with North American ones) but I have not yet seen any actual numbers. But given alternate sea lane possibilities, I doubt clearing Japanese shipping out of Taiwanese waters entirely would be enough to threaten Japan with “famine.”
But the problem posed by Chinese control of Taiwan is not really limited to the shipping that passes through the Taiwan and Luzon Straits. Navalists like to talk about what they call the “First Island Chain,” a group of islands that keeps the PLA Navy and PLA Air Force hemmed into the East and South China Seas. These islands include the Philippines Archipelago, Taiwan and the Pescadores, the Japanese Archipelago, and the Ryukyu Islands, which are Japanese territory. Here is a map of that last group:
In times of peace there is little to stop Chinese naval and air forces from crossing out into the Pacific as they wish, but in times of war things will be different. Over the last few years the Japanese have been quietly stocking these islands with anti-ship and anti-air missile units; were war imminent these deployments would grow. It is very difficult to imagine a significant number of Chinese commerce raiders slipping out to prey on Japanese shipping outside the Taiwan Strait as long as they have to slip between hostile Japanese and Taiwanese island bastions. It is very easy to imagine this if the Taiwanese side of the equation is no longer hostile to Chinese forces.
This is true for several reasons. One of the more interesting ones involves submarines. Look again at the image at the top of this post; that is a seafloor depth map of the West Pacific. You will notice that the water east of the first island chain is much deeper than the water west of it. This has very practical implications for submarine warfare. The prime reason the Chinese built their most important submarine base in Sanya is because it allows the submarines harbored there to slip into the deeper waters of the South China Sea where detection is far more difficult. For China, this is the cornerstone to a credible seaborne nuclear “second strike.” If the Chinese had direct access to the western Pacific—the kind of access possession of Taiwan would give them—their nuclear armed submarines could roam freely across the globe. It would also make detecting and tracking submarines tasked with commerce raiding far more difficult.
The loss of Taiwan would also put to question Japan’s ability to hold and defend the Ryukyu islands altogether. Yonaguni, at the tail end of the Ryukyu chain, is less than 70 miles away from Taiwan’s east coast. That is almost one fourth the distance between the island and the Chinese coast (approx. 250 miles), and one fifth the distance between the island and Okinawa (330 miles). Okinawa itself is closer to Taiwan’s north coast (approx. 370 miles) than it is to the Japanese Archipelago proper (approx. 480). If Taiwan were in hostile hands, Japan would be fatally vulnerable to an island hopping campaign that would rob it of the ability to control its near sea lanes.
Taiwan is the keystone of China’s naval containment. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses the ability to keep the PLA Navy hemmed up against their own coast line. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses control of its most important supply lanes. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses the extended island chain defense system that protects its home waters.
Japanese naval leaders understand this. They always have. It is why the Imperial Japanese Navy insisted upon Taiwan’s annexation in 1895, and it is why Taiwan contingencies have been an important part of the Self Defense Force’s thinking since the 1950s. They understand—even if most Japanese civilians do not—that the loss of Taiwan would give the Chinese incredible leverage over Japan.
There are some who believe that America could retreat from the defense of Taiwan while keeping the rest of its alliance system in the Far East intact. This is a fantasy. An argument to retreat from Taiwan is an argument to fatally undermine the defense of Japan. In truth, it is an argument to retreat from East Asia. That argument can be made, but I would prefer to see it made openly.
Ian Easton explains the PLA’s view:
The Course Book on the Taiwan Strait’s Military Geography is a restricted-access PLA manual, used to teach senior officer seminars in Beijing… This source [informs] readers that Taiwan is a chokepoint of great utility for blockading Japan. The Taiwan Strait, it notes, is a Japanese maritime lifeline that runs from Europe and the Middle East, and based on PLA studies, Japan receives 90 percent of its oil imports, 99 percent of its mineral resources, and 100 percent of its nuclear fuel needs from ships that travel across these sea lanes. In total, 500 million tons of Japanese imports pass by Taiwanese waters each year, with 80 percent of all Japan’s container ships traveling right through the Strait, the equivalent of one Japanese cargo ship every ten minutes. Consequently, these waters will, “directly affect Japan’s life or death, its survival or demise.”The first PLA document Easton quotes here has the statistics slightly wrong: the larger part of Japan’s energy imports travel to the south of Taiwan through the Bashi channel, in the Luzon strait. To get a sense for what those shipping lanes look like, here is a map of A.P Moeller-Maersk, Mediterranean Shipping Co. and CGM SA’s Japan bound shipping routes:
PLA intentions and plans for a conquered Taiwan are made plain in another internal document, The Japanese Air Self Defense Force, a handbook studied by mid-career officers at the PLA Air Force Command College in Beijing. The stated purpose of the text is to help Chinese pilots and staff officers understand the strengths and weaknesses of their Japanese adversaries. Buried amidst hundreds of pages of detailed maps, target coordinates, organizational charts, weapons data, and jet fighter images are the following lines:
As soon as Taiwan is reunified with Mainland China, Japan’s maritime lines of communication will fall completely within the striking ranges of China’s fighters and bombers…Our analysis shows that, by using blockades, if we can reduce Japan’s raw imports by 15-20%, it will be a heavy blow to Japan’s economy. After imports have been reduced by 30%, Japan’s economic activity and war-making potential will be basically destroyed. After imports have been reduced by 50%, even if they use rationing to limit consumption, Japan’s national economy and war-making potential will collapse entirely…blockades can cause sea shipments to decrease and can even create a famine within the Japanese islands.
The Luzon Strait, you will notice, also runs directly adjacent to Taiwan. Chinese control of Taiwan would—in event of conflict—force Japanese shipping out of the South China Sea entirely. This in itself is not a death blow: at some cost, sea traffic that now passes through Malacca and runs adjacent to Taiwan could be rerouted through the Sunda Strait and up the east coast of Mindanao. I am sure someone in Japan must have calculated the likely economic costs of rerouting Japan-bound traffic this way (or in a more extreme circumstance, replacing Middle Eastern energy supplies with North American ones) but I have not yet seen any actual numbers. But given alternate sea lane possibilities, I doubt clearing Japanese shipping out of Taiwanese waters entirely would be enough to threaten Japan with “famine.”
But the problem posed by Chinese control of Taiwan is not really limited to the shipping that passes through the Taiwan and Luzon Straits. Navalists like to talk about what they call the “First Island Chain,” a group of islands that keeps the PLA Navy and PLA Air Force hemmed into the East and South China Seas. These islands include the Philippines Archipelago, Taiwan and the Pescadores, the Japanese Archipelago, and the Ryukyu Islands, which are Japanese territory. Here is a map of that last group:
In times of peace there is little to stop Chinese naval and air forces from crossing out into the Pacific as they wish, but in times of war things will be different. Over the last few years the Japanese have been quietly stocking these islands with anti-ship and anti-air missile units; were war imminent these deployments would grow. It is very difficult to imagine a significant number of Chinese commerce raiders slipping out to prey on Japanese shipping outside the Taiwan Strait as long as they have to slip between hostile Japanese and Taiwanese island bastions. It is very easy to imagine this if the Taiwanese side of the equation is no longer hostile to Chinese forces.
This is true for several reasons. One of the more interesting ones involves submarines. Look again at the image at the top of this post; that is a seafloor depth map of the West Pacific. You will notice that the water east of the first island chain is much deeper than the water west of it. This has very practical implications for submarine warfare. The prime reason the Chinese built their most important submarine base in Sanya is because it allows the submarines harbored there to slip into the deeper waters of the South China Sea where detection is far more difficult. For China, this is the cornerstone to a credible seaborne nuclear “second strike.” If the Chinese had direct access to the western Pacific—the kind of access possession of Taiwan would give them—their nuclear armed submarines could roam freely across the globe. It would also make detecting and tracking submarines tasked with commerce raiding far more difficult.
The loss of Taiwan would also put to question Japan’s ability to hold and defend the Ryukyu islands altogether. Yonaguni, at the tail end of the Ryukyu chain, is less than 70 miles away from Taiwan’s east coast. That is almost one fourth the distance between the island and the Chinese coast (approx. 250 miles), and one fifth the distance between the island and Okinawa (330 miles). Okinawa itself is closer to Taiwan’s north coast (approx. 370 miles) than it is to the Japanese Archipelago proper (approx. 480). If Taiwan were in hostile hands, Japan would be fatally vulnerable to an island hopping campaign that would rob it of the ability to control its near sea lanes.
Taiwan is the keystone of China’s naval containment. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses the ability to keep the PLA Navy hemmed up against their own coast line. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses control of its most important supply lanes. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses the extended island chain defense system that protects its home waters.
Japanese naval leaders understand this. They always have. It is why the Imperial Japanese Navy insisted upon Taiwan’s annexation in 1895, and it is why Taiwan contingencies have been an important part of the Self Defense Force’s thinking since the 1950s. They understand—even if most Japanese civilians do not—that the loss of Taiwan would give the Chinese incredible leverage over Japan.
There are some who believe that America could retreat from the defense of Taiwan while keeping the rest of its alliance system in the Far East intact. This is a fantasy. An argument to retreat from Taiwan is an argument to fatally undermine the defense of Japan. In truth, it is an argument to retreat from East Asia. That argument can be made, but I would prefer to see it made openly.
by Tanner Greer, The Scholar's Stage | Read more:
Images: Wikimedia.org
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