I usually don’t get jet-lagged on return flights to the US – but since we returned from Japan last weekend, I’ve been waking up around 3:00 in the morning and have been unable to get back to sleep till about 5:00.
That’s given me some quiet time to catch up on some of the news I ignored while we were away – although I’m not sure that catching up was a good idea.
Before I touch on that, I want to say this: Flying back into Dulles Airport was a disappointing confirmation of my opinion of how much cleaner, safer, and generally more civilized Japan is than the US. The airport carpets were dirty. The escalators and elevators were grimy. The way people sort of muscle their way into lines to board flights seemed almost aggressive compared to Japanese travelers.
Still, it was good to be back home, in the land of the free and the brave.
What was the news I caught up on?
I skimmed the coverage of Mamdani’s win in the NYT, WSJ, NY Post, and a few online publications. None of the opinions I read were surprising. The Conservative publications worried about the economic damage this election will do to the city. The Liberal publications saw Mamdani’s victory as a confirmation that the future for the Democrats is further to the Left. The discussions that most interested me were about how effective Mamdani will be in getting his campaign promises realized.
If he succeeds, Conservative commentators said, the city will lose a large percentage of its tax base as billionaires transport themselves and, in some cases, even their businesses to sunnier climates, while Liberal commentators said that he will prove to the world that you can have a highly taxed and heavily restricted economy with all sorts of free services without going broke.
An argument I found particularly interesting went like this: The best possible outcome for Mamdani would be to have little success in getting his policies effected. There wouldn’t be a mass exodus of the city’s tax base, and – assuming crime and inflation didn’t get any worse – he’d have a decent chance of being reelected. That argument surprised me at first. But I’ve done a bit of research on NYC’s bureaucracy and past attempts to change it, and most of what I’ve read has convinced me that this outcome is more likely than any other, which would leave the city’s denizens with another four years of the same.
Another topic that was hot when I left for Japan – the government shutdown – was resolved at the 11th hour, with a handful of Democrats voting to open up shop again after failing to convince the voting public that the shutdown was the fault of the Republicans (even though they had voted to reopen the government more than a half-dozen times but were opposed by the Dems).
The good news, I suppose, is that I can stop worrying about what damage the shutdown would do and can get back to worrying about the bigger picture – i.e., our government’s $37 trillion budget deficit.
What else? Let me see…
It looks like retail stores are still being vandalized by gangs of young people in cities where stealing anything with a value below a thousand dollars had been reduced to a misdemeanor.
And the CDC is still recommending COVID shots – even for young children whose chances of dying from the biowarfare-invented virus has been zero and while evidence for the multitude of bad outcomes from the mRNA vaccines continues to mount.
Oh, well.
I’m happy to be back to our house across the street from the beach, smoking a Perdomo Robusto this evening with my favorite after-dinner drink (3/4 Cognac and 1/4 B&B), writing on my laptop and watching the sun go down.
