Looking At US; Us Looking At Us; Collecting Political Stories From The Weekend

 ‘Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth’: a Chinese journalist on the US under Trump (The Guardian)

Watching the US through Wang makes our political reality appear more comical and more dangerous. He centres China in all his broadcasts, offering a kind of been-there-done-that account of authoritarian creep. He places the US on an arc of history we have long pretended to transcend. “Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth,” he told me. They were born into democracy and have no appreciation of what life is like without it. Chinese people, on the other hand, “have been bullied by rulers for thousands of years. We’re very familiar with these situations.”

There are many American reporters, Wang said, who report competently on China. But when I asked how the US media was doing covering the US, he burst into laughter. “If I were the New York Times, I would be putting curse words on the front page every day,” he told me. “F-word, F-word, F-word.”

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Wang has told viewers that, in all his years as a journalist, the last two had brought about some of the biggest global changes he had seen. Trump, Wang explained, has misidentified the US’s strengths. “Your strengths aren’t your people,” he told me later, expanding on his theme. “I could find a bank teller in Hong Kong, bring them here, and they could do the job of 10 Americans.” What the US has got, according to Wang, is allies and a reliable currency. (“And now you’re threatening to annex Canada?”)

Trump, according to Wang, would like to be more like Xi Jinping – a strongman leading a nation with a huge manufacturing base. He likes to point out that the two leaders have birthdays a day apart. Trump would like to take back the supply chain and manufacture everything in the US – an idea that drew a “c’mon” from Wang. There are, in turn, things about the US that Xi would like to emulate – the global influence, the financial power of the dollar. “Maybe we should just let Xi and Trump switch places. We wouldn’t need to do anything. They could leave the rest of us out of it,” Wang joked. “Although I think Xi Jinping would get beat up in the United States.”

The Actual Human Beings Caught in the Shutdown Vise (The Breakdown)

A BIG REASON REPUBLICANS object to extending the subsidies is the cost, which works out to about $35 billion a year. But it’s not just the amount of money involved that they find objectionable. It’s also the principle: The bigger the subsidies, the more money is taken from hard-working taxpayers. (And, some on the right would additionally complain, the more money is transferred to less productive members of society, creating potential dependency.)

It’s true that, with the extra subsidies, the federal government can end up covering the entire premium for some people at low incomes, since they qualify for the most assistance.3 But that’s what happens in a social insurance system: Healthy people pay more to cover the costs of the sick, rich people pay more to pay the costs of the poor. And when health care is as expensive as it is in the United States, there’s simply no way to make health care affordable to everyone without a lot of those transfers.

A little math can help illustrate why. Annual health care costs in the United States are about $13,400 per person, based on the most recent figures available, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. That’s way more than somebody at even twice the poverty line—which works out to about $30,000 in annual income—can possibly afford. They’re going to need a ton of help. 

Reading LEGO: Brick by Ideological Brick (JSTOR Daily), part of me wants to say, you see what you want to see. Intent, also, seems important to me before condemnation. It would also be good to see what was the effect - did the intent have its intended effect? Then, too, all my LEGOs were red and white blocks.

The Trump Administration has been making much ado about anti-Semitism (while indulging in those ideas every so often), and particularly tying it to anti-Israel rhetoric. I have been curious about Jewish anti-Zionism; something I knew existed without any details. Well, if I can find the time, here is an answer: The Growing Rift Between Young Jews and Israel - Hollywood Star Hannah Einbinder on Zeteo’s New Podcast.

And a voice from another age that still speaks wisdom:

sch 10/19