Stidmatt

I’m researching why New York City’s population has declined over the last few years, and ultimately, I think a lot of it has to do with remote work. Many people moved back to live near their families when they could, yet New York still has one of the highest costs of living in the United States, at least if we think people spend 100% of their income on housing.

But the biggest reason the right wing media says people are fleeing from oppressive high tax states is because Republican states have much lower taxes. Let’s analyze that data by using ITEP.

I just graphed the rate for the lowest taxed quintile as found by ITEP against the Cook Partisan voting index. A negative PVI is Republican, a positive PVI is Democrat.

With an R squared of 0.01, there is no correlation between tax rates and partisan affiliation. Pennsylvania is the highest-taxed state, with a Cook Partisan voting index of R+2. Wait? R+2? I thought Republicans were low tax states?

Despite what some media outlets would want you to believe, Republicans controlled the state legislature of Pennsylvania from 2010-2022. They even had a trifecta from 2011-2014. Despite this trifecta, Pennsylvania is the HIGHEST TAXED STATE IN THE COUNTRY.

Delaware is our lowest-taxed state, with a PVI of 7. It is strongly Democratic and has the lowest tax bracket of 0.08. Delaware has not had a Republican governor since the 1980s, and there has been a Democratic trifecta since 2009. So, if you want to live in a low-tax state, move to Delaware!

Illinois, Hawaii, New York, and Washington are the next high-tax states. These are all Democratic states, but only New York has a progressive tax code. Washington has no income tax.

The next low-tax states are Alaska, New Hampshire, Montana, and Idaho. If you don’t want to tax your citizens directly, focus on resource extraction. All of these states are highly regressive.

But if we focus instead by looking at tax rates on tax brackets, we start to see a pattern.

States with more progressive tax codes tend to be Democratic, while states with more Regressive tax codes tend to be controlled by Republicans.

Now, we see the real differences in tax codes between states. Almost every state taxes someone above 10%, regardless of political affiliation.

A final note, if your state is not blessed to have abundant black lung and cancer, I mean oil and coal, New Hampshire is a model for you. Let’s investigate… According to The Urban Institute:

New Hampshire’s largest spending areas per capita were elementary and secondary education ($2,380) and public welfare ($2,201). The Census Bureau includes most Medicaid spending in public welfare but also allocates some of it to public hospitals. Per capita spending is useful for state comparisons but is an incomplete metric because it doesn’t provide any information about a state’s demographics, policy decisions, administrative procedures, or residents’ choices.

New Hampshire’s per capita income (per the Bureau of Economic Analysis) was $74,663 in 2022, ranking seventh among the states. It was above the national average of $65,423, but below the New England regional average of $76,651. The state’s median household income (five-year estimate) was $90,845 in 2022, ranking sixth among the states and above the national average of $75,149. New Hampshire’s poverty rate was 7.3 percent in 2022 (five-year estimate), below the national rate of 12.5 percent.

New Hampshire also has above-average corporate income taxes.

So invest heavily in education, become rich, tax corporations, be small, embrace the Medicaid expansion, have a low poverty rate, and you can have low taxes? That’s the New Hampshire model.

Any definition of Anti-Semitism, one of the most ancient forms of racism in this world, must include people like bin Laden and Adolf Hitler as being anti-semitic because they were. Still, it also must necessarily exclude people like Hannah Arendt, who, as a Jewish German woman in the 1940s who wrote some of the harshest and most eloquent descriptions of the Holocaust, must be excluded from the definition as well.

As this Rabbi eloquently describes in this blog post, this article could be considered anti-semitic by the definition proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, as do many positions held by a large majority of Jews in the United States and Israel. If we are to adopt rules for what sort of speech is considered dangerous, such rules must be made as clear as possible. Declaring the criticism of a government fits in the same bucket as the wholesale slaughter of families in death camps is reprehensible. It is incompatible with living in a free and democratic society; such societies work because we can criticize our governments, which is why we have a better quality of life.

In Hannah Arendt’s book, she quotes Dr. Magnes of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem:

“What a boon to mankind it would be if the Jews and Arabs of Palestine were to strive together in friendship and partnership to make this Holy Land into a thriving peaceful Switzerland in the heart of this ancient highway between East and West. This would have incalculable political and spiritual influence in all the Middle East and far beyond. A binational Palestine could become a beacon of peace in the world.”

I agree with this statement. That is what Israel/Palestine must be if there is to be any future for Jews or Arabs or Jewish Arabs in the region. Imagine what a world we could live in if that had become a reality where no one in the region would be left effectively stateless, which means every individual in the region would have citizenship in a UN member state.

Arendt continues:

In the same way Jewish spokesmen for Arab-Jewish understanding were discredited when their very fair and moderate demands were distorted and taken advantage of, as happened with the efforts of the Magnes group in 1936.

This quote of Dr. Magnes in Hannah Arendt’s book Peace or Armistice in the Near East proves three things:

• The dream of a binational state in Israel and Palestine has been there since before the founding of Israel. It was and is a view held by prominent Jews in the region. It cannot be considered antisemitic.
• Prominent Jews are not uniform in their views. Is every Jew who does not agree with Mr. Netanyahu an anti-semite? That is what IHRA is proposing in its definition.
• There was serious discussion by prominent Jews in Israel about the formation of a confederation where Jews and Arab Palestinians were equal in the 1940s. Israeli policy starting in 1948 and continuing to the present day has no realistic path for the Palestinians who live on land occupied by the Israeli government.

 

Another bombshell:

One of the chief advantages of federal (or confederate) solutions of the Palestinian problem has been that the more moderate Arab statesmen (particularly from Lebanon) agreed to them.

Just… God damn it. The Lebanese delegate to the United Nations pointed to the Constitution of the United States as a model of how to build a successful state in what is now Israel/Palestine.

When the President of the second-oldest Israeli university was actively campaigning against Aliyah and for a federation where Palestinians and European Jews would be equal… this cannot be seen as a fringe position. It should be the mainstream position.

The problem with IHRA’s definition is that the views of the Zionist President of The Hebrew University and Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who lost family in the Holocaust, could easily be construed to be anti-Semites by such a definition. Their views are so contrary to the reality of what exists in Israel that it is a criticism of the foundational structure of the Israeli constitution itself and a standing position of most Israeli Prime Ministers. This view should not have been seen as a fringe position.

One could claim that since it would be unrealistic to expect the Netherlands to be a federalist state modeled after the United Nations, that such a viewpoint falls under the

One of Judaism’s best and most admirable qualities is their willingness to debate one another and how diverse they are in their viewpoints. It is one of the most wonderful cultures in the world. A definition of anti-Semitism, which includes the statement “Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” is itself anti-semitic and shows that whoever wrote this either doesn’t understand Jewish culture or despises it. It is far too vague, and that makes it a poor definition.

A better definition of anti-Semitism is very simple: anyone who believes the rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should not apply to Jewish People. That is real anti-semitism.

Note… the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was written in response to the Holocaust, includes the words: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Criticism of governments is a universal right across all free nations. It is a prerequisite for all other rights which we have.

If you need a more concise definition, I recommend using The Jerusalem Declaration written by over 350 scholars on antisemitism. Unlike the IHRA definition they are precise, and are much harder to distort.

So we now have three ways to define anti-semitism, two of which are not dismissive of Jewish culture. You can either take an already existing universal framework for human rights and rightfully claim anyone who advocates that any one of those 30 articles should not apply to Jews is anti-semitic. That is simple, effective, and clearly defined. Another good definition is The Jerusalem Declaration, which clearly separates political speech from hate speech.

The IHRA definition is only 269 words long. It is not long enough to be used legally because you cannot clearly define any terms in a way that can be clearly stated in such few words. For comparison, the UDHR is 1455 words long. Definitions like this, which are accepted by states worldwide, need to be very precise in their definition not to be highjacked for political purposes. IHRA fails to do this. The Jerusalem Declaration succeeds on these key topics.

However, the Jerusalem Declaration still has one important problem. It is too focused on the challenges of today, and if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is solved, it will be significantly less relevant than it is today. Both definitions have this fundamental problem. The IHRA definition has 7 points that directly relate to Israel, and if the crisis is solved, only four will remain relevant. The Jerusalem Declaration has only 5 points that relate to anti-Semitism directly and not to the State of Israel.

I’m sorry. Anti-semitism cannot be summarized in 4 or 5 points. It is far bigger than that. These definitions despite their signatures utterly fail to define anti-semitism to a sufficient degree.

I prefer my much simpler yet also much more complex definition of anti-Semitism, which is anyone who advocates that any of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should not apply to Jews. I believe the UDHR is particularly relevant because it was written as a direct response to the Holocaust.

I will now go through them one by one. The beauty of this is it also works for people who are anti-Palestinian.

1. Free and equal. Well, most politicians in the Middle East are clearly defined as racist by this definition here. Any politician here who does not explicitly argue that every person in Palestine should have citizenship is clearly and definitely categorized as racist by the first article. Anyone who argues for the deportation of Jews who live in Israel also fits under the definition here as well. Simple, to the point, and precise.
2. All people have these rights always and everywhere. Very bad news for Netanyahu and every member of Hamas and the IDF who have shot at civilians.
3. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the security of person. Israel and Hamas consistently violate these rights towards Palestinians and Jews.
4. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude. Not relevant, thank God.
5. Prohibition against torture. Bad news for IDF and Hamas again.
6. Recognition everywhere as a person before the law. Same.
7. Equal before the law and entitled to equal protection and against discrimination. Palestinians need to be granted property rights.
8. Everyone has the right to a fair trial. Palestinians don’t have this right.
9. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile. This is consistently violated against Palestinians. Over a million refugees with no path to citizenship is a clear violation of this rule, which was written IN DIRECT RESPONSE TO THE HORRORS OF THE THIRD REICH!!!!
10. Fair trial again.
11. Innocent until proven guilty. No police shootings.
12. No arbitrary arrest and equal protection of the law. This does not exist for Palestinians.
13. Freedom of movement within the borders of a state. Checkpoints violate this article.
14. Right to seek asylum. The denial of asylum for the Palestinians in Gaza is reminiscent of Jews being turned away in the 1930s when they were fleeing the Holocaust. It is the same crime.
15. Right to a nationality. In other words, recognize Palestine or grant Israeli citizenship to all Palestinians.
16. Equal rights to marriage. Israel passes this bar. The Palestinian Authority fails miserably.
17. Right to own property. No deprivation of property. The Aliyah was a direct violation of this right, continuing to the present.
18. Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.
19. Right to freedom of opinion and expression. Claims that all criticism of Israel is anti-semitic are invalid because of Article 19.
20. Peaceful assembly and association. Frequently violated for Palestinians.
21. Right to take part in the government of his country. Palestinians are denied a country.
22. Right to social security.
23. Right to work, equal pay, and to form a union.
24. Right to rest and leisure.
25. Right to an adequate standard of living. The blockade of Gaza violates this right.
26. Right to education. Israel has bombed schools in Gaza.
27. Right to participate in cultural events. Hard to do that when your mosque is bombed.
28. Entitled to a social and international order where the rights and freedoms are fully realized. The United States has violated this right the Palestinians have according to our own government by opposing Palestinian membership in the United Nations.
29. Everyone has duties to the community.
30. Do not misinterpret these rights.

Hamas believes these thirty rights should not apply to Jews. Likud believes these rights do not apply to Palestinians.

I believe these rights need to apply to everyone. That includes Jews. That includes Palestinians.

This is a much more concise and measurable definition of anti-semitism or any other form of racism.

Bonus points for being written in response to the Holocaust, I guess. These were deliberately written with Jews in mind. This is a far better definition than any specific definition.

Please read the chapter Peace or Armistice in the Near East. It is an important contemporary Jewish account of the foundation of the State of Israel. It is critical reading if you want to understand the situation in Israel fully.

https://pensarelespaciopublico.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/hannah-arendt-the-jewish-writings-2007.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9092927/

Armenia is sending a delegation to Antalya, Turkey on March 1 to participate in a diplomacy forum, and Macron went to Armenia yesterday as Armenia announced it has frozen its participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a paper tiger Russia set up as an “alternative” to NATO but so far has been rather toothless.

I hope Armenia and Turkey can normalize relations with Turkey on Friday, followed by Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia, and Moldova (GUAM) joining NATO soon.

Why does NATO exist? Let’s look at history.

In 1800, there were only a handful of democracies in the world. The United States and France,  though France, were in decline. The United States had a massive slave population, so by modern standards, the United States was not a democracy. There were no democracies to be allied to.

Fast forward 100 years, and slavery had been ended in most of the world. Most of Africa was colonized by Europe. But most countries in Europe were still monarchies. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia dominated Eastern Europe. There was not a lot of room on the world stage for making big alliances of democracies. Only around 10 countries scored 8 or higher on the Polity IV scale.

The first real wave of democracy happened after the First World War, but it was pretty limited in scope, and in the 1930s, everything came crashing down.

Cold War

But since 1945, there has been a steady increase in the number of countries that are democracies. Countries in Western Europe were starting to form stable democratic systems. But as these were forming there was a series of events which deeply concerned democracies in Western Europe:

• 11 November 1945: Only the Communist Party was allowed in the Yugoslav election
• 2 December 1945: Only Communists were allowed in the Albanian election
• June 1946: The Polish People’s Referendum ended democracy in Poland; the 1947 election was completely manipulated.
• November 1946: In a fraudulent election, communists take over Romania’s government.
• May 1947: Hungarian PM Ferenc Nagy is removed in a coup d’etat
• February 1948: Czechoslovak coup d’etat
• 7 October 1949: East Germany is officially founded.

The Soviets conquered Bulgaria after being under Nazi occupation. They didn’t have an election until the 1990s.

So basically, from 1945 to 1946, the Soviet Union used fraudulent elections (or no elections at all, in the case of Bulgaria) to take over countries politically. In 1947 and 1948, they used a coup d’etat to conquer Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In response to this threat, most remaining European democracies chose to form NATO. Following the establishment of a totalitarian one-party state in East Germany, they refused to negotiate with the Soviets because they feared more “neutral countries” would find themselves with coups in the future.

That is why NATO was founded. The Soviet Union made a very real threat of attacking sovereign states in Europe, and most states joined NATO in response. Finland was promised neutrality if it did not join NATO, and the Soviet Union kept that promise. We had learned in the 1930s that if we did not stand together as democracies (which was the first wave of democratization), what would happen? We were knocked out one by one. Isolationism in the United States and other countries did not create peace; it only led to the worst war in the history of the world.

NATO exists to prevent another world war.

After NATO prevented further incursions into Europe, the Soviet Union moved to Asia:

• 25 June 1950: Even though the Soviet Union already controlled North Korea, they invaded South Korea
• 1955: The Vietnam War as communist insurgents attack South Vietnam
• 1968: Prague Spring is suppressed
• 1974-1991: Ethiopian Civil War, Soviet Union supported the Derg
• 1979-1989: Soviet-Afghan War

Castro is an exception because he was homegrown. He was not put in power by the Soviet Union.

However, it was clear in the Cold War that membership in NATO or the Rio Pact protected countries from being invaded, like Vietnam, Korea, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. It is certain, based on statements made by Soviet leaders, that if it were not for these alliances, the Soviet Union would have pushed further.

In 1955, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand signed a collective security agreement with Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand. This was called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. This is the entire reason the United States was at war in Vietnam.

After the Vietnam War was over, the Soviet Union spread between Ethiopia and Afghanistan. Constant war and poor economic mismanagement led to an economic meltdown. After the fall of the Soviet Union Russia’s economy was in shambles, with former state assets now concentrated in the hands of their new ruling class, the oligarchs.

The 1990s

The Soviet Union collapsed, China was weak, and the United States was the undisputed world power. No one else came close. As a result, there was relative peace. The Bosnian war in the 1990s was horrific, and there were continued wars in Africa, states with low levels of economic development and major internal problems. but these were limited in scope to small regions. Only two wars in the 1990s killed over 100,000 people, the First Congo War and the Eritrean-Ethiopian War. Historically, these are extremely low numbers. By historical standards, it was the most peaceful decade in history.

This chart from ourworldindata.org makes the chart very clear. The Russian Invasion of Ukraine is the deadliest interstate conflict since the fall of the Soviet Union.

War of Terror

Even the American War on Terror, which started in 2001, is the period with the fewest deaths in global conflict overall and doesn’t come even close to the Eritrean-Ethiopian War in 1999 and 2000. Fatalities started to increase with the Arab Spring in the 2000s, but despite immense population growth, there were only 100,000 deaths per year globally. 100,000 out of 6 billion people in 2010 was the equivalent of 30,000 people per year in 1930 when there were only 2 billion people worldwide. For comparison, the Holocaust killed approximately 1 million people per year on average, the Great Leap Forward killed 11 million people per year in 1960, and World War II killed over 12 million people per year.

Despite our globalized world and the War on Terror, the 2000s were incredibly peaceful by historical standards, and the 2010s were still well below historical averages. We have not seen a war that killed over 0.1% of the world’s population per year since the Great Leap Forward.

In other words, NATO and the Rio Group work.

We had 30 years, which were incredibly peaceful by historical standards, since the fall of the Soviet Union.

But in 2020, something changed. Donald Trump, while insulting our allies and showing signs he didn’t have the same feelings of solidarity with America’s democratic allies, signed a treaty with the Taliban, completely bypassing the legitimate government of Afghanistan in preparation for a withdrawal from the country.

We had been in Afghanistan for 20 years. This is true. 212,000 people were killed over 20 years, the highest estimate. That is 10,000 people per year. In exchange, Afghanistan was relatively free, and girls went to school. The Afghanistan War was ongoing during the most peaceful decade in history.

We threw it all away.

Biden fulfilled the negotiations with the terrorists and withdrew from Afghanistan on 30 August 2021. The Taliban took over the country immediately. Women were pushed out of work and school within weeks.

But we had peace, something so many Americans wanted. Biden gave a speech claiming we weren’t going to worry ourselves about foreign affairs and focus on our dire problems at home. Americans cheered.

From 2014 until 2022, there was a sleeping conflict in Ukraine since Russia had control of the Donbas, Luhansk, and Crimea. On 24 February 2022, less than 5 months after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the fateful speech of American withdrawal, the Russian army invaded further into Ukraine.

Biden and Trump had claimed they would not focus on external affairs.

Putin had called their bluff.

The United States has sent Ukraine far less than they need to expel Russians fully from their territory. We have forbidden them from attacking Russian military installations inside Russia.

Billions of dollars have been sent to Ukraine, but not nearly enough to fully repel the Russian invaders and send them either back to Russia or to hell.

There were few interstate conflicts because the United States went in and created a ceasefire any time they got out of hand. Also, who was going to start an armed conflict in the 1990s? Russia was very weak. China had not built up its military. We saw terrorism from the Gulf States, but aside from that, there were no countries with the economic and military strength to invade democracies. China was developing and deeply intertwined with the US and EU. It still is. Russia was economically weak. There was a credible threat to the attacker that the United States was defending the defending nation, which was enough.

But this is Trump’s legacy, and Biden has refused to reverse it. The credible threat of the United States defending attacked nations is far weaker than in the past. The only way to get it back is to return to our policy of credible retaliation toward aggressor countries.

Bush fueled the flames of the argument that the United States is not a trustworthy partner when we invaded Iraq. But there was no one to oppose us, and no one liked Saddam Hussein anyway. Saddam Hussein was guilty of genocide. The biggest concern is it diverted resources from Afghanistan, and Bush lied about the initial reasons why he started the war. Iraq was then overrun by terrorists, where at least it had been stable albeit authoritarian under Saddam Hussein.

The main challenge for the United States in foreign policy over the next 10 years is rebuilding trust. We need to defend Ukraine to the point where they defeat the Russians and then let them and Georgia into NATO as soon as possible to prevent further Russian aggression. We need to push for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by the end of this year for two main reasons. The first and obvious reason is the inhumane treatment of Palestinians needs to end. The other reason is it weakens the United States in foreign policy. Both reasons are important.

We are in a wave of protectionism/nationalism (the two go hand in hand) right now, which has been spearheaded by a large number of anti-democratic politicians and fools. This needs to be reversed.

Defend our allies, support democratization, and build complex interdependent trade webs worldwide. That is the only path to a bright future I can see.

In light of the Invasion of Ukraine, it is the same situation we were in in 1945. Same challenges. Same solution.

We are standing at a crossroads where our leaders must decide what future we want.

Despotism

On the one hand, we can have a future where we might make right. Israel has more weapons than Palestinians, so they have the right to kill them all. Russia has nukes, and Ukraine does not, thanks to Bill Clinton. Russia has the right to rape as many Ukrainian girls as they please. Ukraine is a smaller country; they cannot attack Russia. The United States cannot get involved because Russia, with an economy and population of less than a quarter the population of NATO, is going to threaten us with nuclear bombs. They have the might that makes them right.

If China attacks Taiwan, that is their right. North Korea has the right to reclaim South Korea. If Israel is overpowered by Arab states, then that is just how it is.

Oh wait, but we also have a level of white supremacy on top of this,  so even though Israel is small, they are right because they are white.

So white supremacy is the first priority, and then they might make right on top of white supremacy. This fully explains the foreign policy of the Biden administration. Beyond white supremacy, we have a large bipartisan consensus of nationalism in United States foreign policy. This leads to travel visas for citizens from other NATO member states. A resistance towards free trade with Europe, except if it is just the United States enforcing our ridiculous copyright law on other countries into a global law.

The world of that future is where Russia will eventually attack NATO. America will leave NATO, and Europe does not yet have the focus on domestic military manufacturing to counter Europe by itself, or so we like to tell ourselves.

Europe doesn’t spend enough on their militaries because they are so busy being socialists.

Russia is going to utterly destroy Europe after they finish Ukraine.

We can only stand by as people are massacred, and countries that are improving are invaded and turned into puppet states. We are too weak.

Or that’s the narrative I have been seeing in the media.

The Real World

If we look at real data, we find that Russia spends 4% of its GDP on military, while Germany and France are below 2% targets. Russia has a larger population than either, so Europe is screwed. Right?

But that is not the case. China has the world’s largest GDP at $35 trillion and the United States has the second largest GDP at $28 trillion. The European Union has a GDP of $25 trillion. Russia has a GDP of $5 trillion.

Russia’s 4% of its GDP comes out to only $86 billion in total military expenditure. Germany and France together come out to $109 billion. If you add up the military expenditure of the 14 highest expenditure states in the European Union, there is a total of $308.1 billion. Over 3.5 times larger than Russia’s military expenditure.

If Turkey, the United States, and the United Kingdom are added in, we have a military expenditure 14.5 times the size of Russia’s military expenditure. That is $1.26 trillion. Global military expenditure is $2.2 trillion. Over half of all military expenditure is from NATO countries.

My point is that we have the power to defeat Russia fully and make the world a safer place. We do not need to support Israeli aggression and we have the power to force them to come to a solution with Palestinians whether they want to or not.

The United States has military alliances with countries in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. These include countries as populous as Brazil and as rich as Luxembourg and economies the size of Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany. All of these countries are democracies or were when we signed the treaty. We also have defense pacts with Uruguay, Estonia, Iceland, and Haiti. We have military relationships with democracies large and small, rich and poor. None of these countries are going to be attacked.

One country that is missing from our long list of military allies, however, is Israel.

The United States sends a massive amount of military aid to Israel, but we are not obligated to come to their aid. If Israel was bombed with a nuclear bomb in retaliation for the genocide in Gaza, the United States would be under no obligation to come to their aid.

Israel is not part of any treaty that would place it as a prospective member of any alliance of the United States besides the OECD. Aside from the OECD, the United States and Israel have no official ties beyond the aid that is sent there to get the vote of evangelicals.

But we all know America is getting less religious, and the desire for an actual solution to the Israeli-Palestinian war is growing. It is just a matter of time before the United States has a president who does not support sending Israel blank checks without solving the crisis.

Ukraine, however, is a totally different story. It is a member of the Council of Europe, Baku Initiative, GUAM, an observer of the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative, and the Council of the Baltic Sea States. Ukraine has been actively seeking out closer relations with democracies for 20 years now, and that is their right as a sovereign nation.

I love this map because it clearly describes the political situation in Europe. Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia need NATO membership. They can then utilize history, legislative examples, and experts from their allies (which includes the United States) to root out corruption and democratize further. The advantage they have of being so late to the democratization game is we know what works. They don’t need to experiment with many of their challenges because these problems are solved.

This is the real world we are in. NATO countries spend the majority of global military expenditure. No one can seriously harm NATO. With this great power, we can assist people around the world in creating a more just and peaceful world. That is the future I want to live in.

So I have a dataset that I have curated from public data over the last 7 years and continuously updated with the latest data. I include data focusing on political economics (look at this blog, surprised?) and it includes lots of variables. For this regression, I handpicked the following statistics:

• pfi 2021 is the Press Freedom Index data from 2021.
• GDP per capita
• CPI score 2021 is Corruption Perceptions Index
• OECD is a boolean on whether the country is a member of the OECD or not.
• Schengen Area is a boolean on whether the country is a member of the Schengen Area or not.

My data confirms what has been published in Scientific American in an even more thorough study. Income inequality is the biggest driver to homicide.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/income-inequalitys-most-disturbing-side-effect-homicide/

This helps explain why gun control has a much smaller effect than one would expect.

The impact of inequality on homicide (and we know that is the causal direction based on peer-reviewed studies, far more thorough than my messing around with python) is so strong that even if we use the same formula and put inequality as our dependent variable we see this: OK. So we know that if we really want to reduce our homicide rate, we need to reduce our inequality rate.

Off the top of my head, policies I can think of which will help reduce inequality include:

• Universal Preschool increases productivity by helping (mostly) young mothers stay in the workforce while also reducing inequality.
• Debt-free college, seems self-explanatory how it increases productivity and reduces inequality.
• Universal health care and health insurance are there for you whenever you need it. Sick people are less productive, boosting inequality.
• Expanding the child tax credit, giving children more opportunities early in life, benefits them and the entire economy for the rest of their lives.
• Pay for expanded social programs by increasing the tax rates on the top 1% of income earners. Reverse the Bush and Trump tax changes.

This article from the Michigan Journal of Economics points out how increasing the minimum wage will reduce inequality: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2022/02/08/rising-economic-inequality-in-the-us-key-statistics-and-root-causes/

Which makes sense. It also benefits the budget. Increasing the minimum wage means more money comes from employers’ pockets, and less money needs to come from the government to support people in poverty.

A new open-access paper from the International Labour Organization finds that the main driver of inequality in the United States is a drop in productivity growth. https://www.ilo.org/global/publications/working-papers/WCMS_912336/lang–en/index.htm

Other factors help explain the difference between income groups, skilled vs unskilled, but only productivity growth explains the gaps within each of those two classes.

Why is productivity slowing down? According to researchers at Oxford, the slowdown has been seen across developed countries, not just in the United States, and has occurred due to various factors. The bulk of the slowdown happened between 2005 and 2010, or around the time the oldest Baby Boomers were starting to retire. The drop was sudden, and within 5 years, the average productivity growth rate across the countries they studied had declined from around 2% to 1%. No single factor can explain the reduction in productivity growth rates.

Inequality is a complex topic that receives a lot of research from many hard-working professionals. Teasing out the underlying causes is challenging; the most difficult portion, of course, is finding the data you need to find the reality behind the truth, and there is always the risk of having underlying variables. Whether you are doing statistical analysis or a controlled A B experiment, this will always be true. More research will certainly be done, but we do have more than enough research to know where to start, and the 5 proposals I have in this article are a good place to start.

Makes it clear which side Republican states are on.

I didn’t like the Wikipedia map of capital punishment because it didn’t include US states and the US has a moratorium on federal executions thanks to Biden.

UK and Germany back a sustainable ceasefire

So why can’t the United States?

David Cameron is the foreign minister of the United Kingdom. Yes, the same Prime Minister who led Britain into its largest foreign policy debacle since the colonial era.

I disagree with David Cameron on most issues. He was a horrible Prime Minister but is right in calling for a ceasefire.

This leads to where the United States political sphere is so far right wing on foreign relations that we struggle to support Ukraine with enough aid for them to win the war. Our Presidents have consistently thrown Ukraine under the bus, first with the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, which forced Ukraine to give up weapons without the same being done by Russia. In 2012, when Romney rightfully declared Russia as our most important geopolitical foe, Obama incorrectly claimed Romney was living in the past. This was 4 years after the invasion of Georgia, 20 YEARS after the Chechen War, and obviously wishful thinking by President Obama. Obama told Putin directly that Ukraine was not a strategic priority. We threw them under the bus further with the Minsk Agreement, which led to a ceasefire without a total victory for Ukraine.

Not to say European leaders have been perfect. Angela Merkel was the primary reason why Ukraine and Georgia were denied NATO membership in 2008.

The stances of Obama, Merkel, Hollande, and Biden on Ukraine have consistently been weak and have bred a major human rights catastrophe. McCain and Romney might have had horrible tastes in vice presidential candidates and horrible domestic policy proposals, but they were correct regarding their views on Putin.

Biden has consistently gone with the line not to “provoke” Russia. He has denied the long-range missiles to Ukraine which would give Ukraine the tools necessary to defeat Russia and get back Crimea, all while sending Israel more than they ask for.

Ukraine uses the few long-range missiles European nations have given them to blow up warships.

Israel uses long-range missiles to blow up hospitals, schools, and apartments.

The two countries have nothing in common.

Israel is more corrupt, less democratic, and less free than Ukraine. Ukraine does not have millions of stateless people living within its effective borders who are regularly harassed, tortured, and murdered by their occupiers.

Ukraine is a natural ally of the United States.

They couldn’t be more different.

Damn the rankings of Israel; go with how they rank the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which are de facto under Israeli control. That is the true ranking of Israel. Palestine/Israel is ranked lower than Afghanistan on the World Press Freedom Index. If one were to give North Korean leaders their own separate ranking, it would also soar up in the rankings. Israel and Palestine should be combined in human rights rankings.

Russian escalation of wars on their borders violates the sovereignty of Ukraine and Georgia. Biden and Obama’s timidness in their European relations is the root cause of this war.

The right policy is this:

• Deescalate from Israel now. Force Israel to recognize Palestinian sovereignty or give Israeli citizenship to all Palestinians.
• Send Ukraine every weapon we can to ensure they can win their freedom. As soon as they win, grant them immediate NATO membership.
• End visa requirements for European Union citizens. End ESTA.
• This idea that America is an island and the isolationist strain in our politics is fundamentally wrong on both a morality level and construes a deep misunderstanding of both foreign relations and economics.

I made a spreadsheet of 63 of the worst wars and genocides in the history of the world. Wars and Genocides If you sort the list by casualties per year, World War II was the most deadly conflict in the history of the world at 12.2 million per year, not including the Holocaust. The Great Leap Forward was the deadliest democide in the history of the world, with 11.25 million killed per year. The third deadliest conflict in history by casualties per year was the Holodomor, with 7.5 million people killed in only one year. World War I came in 4th place with 5 million per year. 5th place is the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which killed 1.2 million people over 3 months, or 4.7 million per year.

The Holodomor was among the deadliest conflicts in the history of the world.

Russia will do it again if given the chance.

Russia can never rule Ukraine again.

Slava Ukraine.

Read this Foreign Policy Article for more information: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/11/obama-russia-ukraine-war-putin-2014-crimea-georgia-biden/