You hit the nail on the head. Sometimes the answers are simple, if you have the will. I learned this in my twenties, when Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and simultaneously halted crippling inflation, things I had been trained by the news to believe were insoluble and eternal. And what was Reagan’s ingenious magic trick? He TRIED. He decided they needed to be solved, he gripped the nettle, and he solved them. Most politicians want only to kick the can down the road and get re-elected in the meantime.
> when Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and simultaneously halted crippling inflation…
But also failed to stop the inevitable increase in government spending:
>> Government spending was just one of those things you couldn’t control. It was going to organically increase each year, and you couldn’t stop it, slow it — or…
For all DOGE’s good works, the deficit is going to increase.
>> And Iran’s nuclear weapons program, …, was taken out of the picture by the novel expedient of bombing it into rubble.
Also probably not taken out of the picture completely, probably just set back a few years. (No-one without a security clearance actually knows, since all sides are saying publicly what it’s in their interest to say.)
Reminds me of the Napier quote “let us all act according to national customs” ie if you act as savages according to your customs, we will hang you according to ours
No one in my lifetime has attempted as successfully as PDJT to solve the real problems plaguing the USA.
I think it took a clear thinking, determined, and wealthy man (who was not beholden to the normal process that elevates one to the Presidency) to do it.
It also appears that Trump spent much time between terms finding potential Cabinet officers and other members of his team who are absolute rockstars -- Vance, Bessent, Musk, Sacks, Hegseth, Luttnick, Homan (a repeat player), Tulsi, and the rest. He didn't have that kind of backup in his first term. He's said, although it isn't quoted often, that he didn't really expect to win in 2016 -- or, at least, he was working so hard to get elected that he wasn'tlooking hard enough for things after Election Day. Thus he was caught flat-footed with only three months to staff up his,first term, and chose too many inside-the-Beltway, maintain-the-status-quo types. The difference this has made for the first half-year of his second term, compared to his entire first term, is amazing.
Good instructors will sometimes say of a task that doing it is simple, but not easy. That would seem to apply to a lot of what only recently seemed impossible in DC.
I'm okay with bold experimentation. The problem is the left always wants to do it nation wide, with no control group.
They're never like "hey lets try Obamacare on one state and see if it works". It's always "lets totally remake the entire national system". Then even if it fails completely they say "imagine how bad it would have been if we had done nothing."
And the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. (A phrase I just invented now and totally didn't copy from someone else.)
If they would fix something, point to it, and then say "now lets make this happen everywhere" it would be a totally different discussion. But it never works that way, does it?
I distinctly remember the "experts" view of the US relationship with China was that we were joined together in a way that would bring world economic disaster if uncoupled. China bought our Treasuries and we bought their crap. Changing that scenario would be disaster.
Enter DJT's first term - tariffs were established and our economy soared. Lesson learned - the experts don't know squat.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you. What fraction of even the illegals that Biden let in have we deported? I'd be pleasantly surprised if it was as much as 5%.
But if we make examples and cut off the welfare trough, they will steadily self-deport. I think if we very publicly toss out 5-10%, prosecute employers, and cut their funds, the other 90% just go home.
A decade plus ago they prosecuted one local restaurant owner and within days all the Mexicans and Central Americans were gone from car washes, lawn services, etc., all over town.
Much less than that. The number deported is 150,000 so far this year, and most of those likely weren’t Biden arrivals. The real change is not letting in 1-2 million a year additional.
And that's great, of course, and a much better example of his use of the Kipling. I'm not sure the Gods of the Copybook Headings have much to say about digging yourself out of hole somebody else has dropped you into.
Great summary of the (not) insoluble issues facing us today Glenn.
The "energy crisis" is one I believe rooted in something else that is pervasive: fervor bordering on the religious for the sake of humanity. In the case of energy, net-zero and the extremely expensive, immature, amd taxpayer funded renewables industry to fight climate change and the mythical increase in extreme weather events for one.
In California, the path to 2045 (carbon neutrality) requires ever higher energy rates, while driving the remaining refineries out and increasing prices. We are told that in 20 years (!!), overall energy prices will be 30%-40% lower for everyone. That's an entire generation. The political and corporate leaders shake their heads in exasperation because Joe-citizen can't grasp the future value.
Nevermind that current fixed income people (e.g. retirees) are never likely to see that outcome and are viciously penalized and those entering the workforce have to contend with rising costs until the midpoint of thir careers. And there are numerous other examples that can be made.
It is completely tone deaf and ignorant (at best) until you consider the religious component.
Somethings are simple and you've done well illustrating it.
But unfortunately other things aren't simple and the aphorism, "for any problem there is a solution, clear, simple and wrong" applies, at least in part.
I've heard/read people who say the simple solution to general peace in the middle east is regime change in Iran. No simple way to get to this solution. Similar situation for N Korea, PRC, Russia.
Tariffs and trade deals are said to be a simple solution for the US trade deficit problem and the many decades of loss of manufacturing jobs. But Trump's tariff measures change every other day and the effects of these will take years to be evident.
The simple solution for our crime problem does start with more police and stricter sentences but if it stops there we will still be left with an enormous problem.
Similar with homelessness, similar with other issues.
Then there is the problem of the entitlement programs. Great work by DOGE to ferret out some of the fraud but even with this the combined expense of these programs is a major and severe problem.
“At home, the allegedly insoluble illegal immigration problem is being solved, via the simple and , and traditional, approach of policing the borders and deporting people who are here illegally.
We were told that the problem was hugely difficult, and would require complicated bipartisan legislation from Congress. Nope. All that was needed was a very simple policy: Don’t let them in, and kick them out if they’re already here. From this change, various other allegedly difficult problems began to resolve: Housing prices, crime, employment for American workers, and even L.A. traffic (!) show signs of improvement. Even the federal deficit is under less pressure, as benefits are cut.”
THIS is all you have to say about the immoral, illegal, vicious, cruel, monstrous way in which the brutal goons of ICE are “kicking out” both the undocumented, but otherwise law abiding, immigrants whose only offense was the misdemeanor of crossing our border illegally, and those who have had the permission of our government to be here legally, including tens of thousands of persons with no criminal record, who have been here for years, raising families, working at productive jobs, paying taxes, contributing to the community, checking in with immigration authorities as required by their protected status under various long standing government programs, suddenly, brutally, jumped on by masked silent men who won’t identify themselves, handcuffed, shackled, stripped of phones, wallets, and papers, shoved into cars and planes and kidnapped thousands of miles from friends, families, and legal help, held in horrible overcrowded conditions with inadequate food, toilet, and sleeping facilities and without needed medicines and healthcare, families ripped apart, spouse from spouse, children from parents, siblings from each other, as if they were trash, all of this without the due process guaranteed by law and the Constitution?
Don’t you know or care about what’s going on? The enormous, human rights violations being perpetrated by ICE and by persons in the White House who are avidly breaking the law and violating their oaths of office and the Constitution to satisfy their twisted hatred for those who came here for a better life, because they can?
Don’t you know that even those immigrants who do break the law, do so at a lesser rate than natural born citizens, that many of them are doing jobs that citizens won’t do, and that until Trump started his crazy tariff scheme to tax the American public with import taxes to pay for tax reductions for the rich, that there were more jobs than workers to fill them in this country, and that housing prices are a function mainly of mortgage rates and not of excess housing demand from non-citizens?
Your unfeeling comments on the administration’s illegal and unconstitutional mass deportation program are, in my opinion, a disgrace.
Read Peggy Noonan’s opinion piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, August 2-3, and learn something.
Now that the border is closed, the only decent, humane, moral thing to do is offer all law abiding non-citizens a path to citizenship. That is the proper solution to the problem, not the cruel, twisted, inhuman, immoral, illegal, unconstitutional solution the goons in the DHS and the White House have imposed because they can.
Re: Pols desire to make issues complex & difficult. The pols do so as much to promote he notion that only they possess the needed wisdom & experience to solve it and so need to be elected so they can do so. Of course, they make the same claim s again when they are seeking re-election, or election to higher office.
You hit the nail on the head. Sometimes the answers are simple, if you have the will. I learned this in my twenties, when Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and simultaneously halted crippling inflation, things I had been trained by the news to believe were insoluble and eternal. And what was Reagan’s ingenious magic trick? He TRIED. He decided they needed to be solved, he gripped the nettle, and he solved them. Most politicians want only to kick the can down the road and get re-elected in the meantime.
> when Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and simultaneously halted crippling inflation…
But also failed to stop the inevitable increase in government spending:
>> Government spending was just one of those things you couldn’t control. It was going to organically increase each year, and you couldn’t stop it, slow it — or…
For all DOGE’s good works, the deficit is going to increase.
>> And Iran’s nuclear weapons program, …, was taken out of the picture by the novel expedient of bombing it into rubble.
Also probably not taken out of the picture completely, probably just set back a few years. (No-one without a security clearance actually knows, since all sides are saying publicly what it’s in their interest to say.)
As it concerns our current adversaries, I also take a cue from Kipling in "Grave of a Hundred Heads"
Wow that’s bloody but good
Reminds me of the Napier quote “let us all act according to national customs” ie if you act as savages according to your customs, we will hang you according to ours
They made a pile of their trophies
High as a tall man's chin,
Head upon head distorted,
Set in a sightless grin,
Anger and pain and terror
Stamped on the smoke-scorched skin.
12
Subadar Prag Tewarri
Put the head of the Boh
On the top of the mound of triumph,
The head of his son below—
With the sword and the peacock-banner
That the world might behold and know.
13
Thus the samadh was perfect,
Thus was the lesson plain
Of the wrath of the First Shikaris–
The price of a white man slain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back into camp again.
Great essay Glenn.
No one in my lifetime has attempted as successfully as PDJT to solve the real problems plaguing the USA.
I think it took a clear thinking, determined, and wealthy man (who was not beholden to the normal process that elevates one to the Presidency) to do it.
It also appears that Trump spent much time between terms finding potential Cabinet officers and other members of his team who are absolute rockstars -- Vance, Bessent, Musk, Sacks, Hegseth, Luttnick, Homan (a repeat player), Tulsi, and the rest. He didn't have that kind of backup in his first term. He's said, although it isn't quoted often, that he didn't really expect to win in 2016 -- or, at least, he was working so hard to get elected that he wasn'tlooking hard enough for things after Election Day. Thus he was caught flat-footed with only three months to staff up his,first term, and chose too many inside-the-Beltway, maintain-the-status-quo types. The difference this has made for the first half-year of his second term, compared to his entire first term, is amazing.
Good instructors will sometimes say of a task that doing it is simple, but not easy. That would seem to apply to a lot of what only recently seemed impossible in DC.
Clausewitz said that about war, that it is very simple, but that in war even the simplest things are very difficult.
I'm okay with bold experimentation. The problem is the left always wants to do it nation wide, with no control group.
They're never like "hey lets try Obamacare on one state and see if it works". It's always "lets totally remake the entire national system". Then even if it fails completely they say "imagine how bad it would have been if we had done nothing."
And the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. (A phrase I just invented now and totally didn't copy from someone else.)
If they would fix something, point to it, and then say "now lets make this happen everywhere" it would be a totally different discussion. But it never works that way, does it?
Oh But That's Small Thinking! Besides their intentions are pure, so they are certain to succeed.
There are 3 small questions I like to ask.
1. What Do You Want?
2. How Do You Get It?
(most importantly)
3. Then What Happens?
We are good at 1 & 2. Question 3..Now so much. And For The Left question 3 doesn't even occur to them.
If common sense and basic knowledge prevails in how we run government, what will the experts do?
Nice reference to Inman Majors. The Millionaires was great. I liked Love’s Winning Plays even better.
I distinctly remember the "experts" view of the US relationship with China was that we were joined together in a way that would bring world economic disaster if uncoupled. China bought our Treasuries and we bought their crap. Changing that scenario would be disaster.
Enter DJT's first term - tariffs were established and our economy soared. Lesson learned - the experts don't know squat.
every time I see the 'illegal aliens commit less crime than citizens', I look for the 'per capita', and never see it.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you. What fraction of even the illegals that Biden let in have we deported? I'd be pleasantly surprised if it was as much as 5%.
But if we make examples and cut off the welfare trough, they will steadily self-deport. I think if we very publicly toss out 5-10%, prosecute employers, and cut their funds, the other 90% just go home.
Perhaps. That would be good. Have we started prosecuting employers yet?
A decade plus ago they prosecuted one local restaurant owner and within days all the Mexicans and Central Americans were gone from car washes, lawn services, etc., all over town.
Much less than that. The number deported is 150,000 so far this year, and most of those likely weren’t Biden arrivals. The real change is not letting in 1-2 million a year additional.
And that's great, of course, and a much better example of his use of the Kipling. I'm not sure the Gods of the Copybook Headings have much to say about digging yourself out of hole somebody else has dropped you into.
Yes, that is a biggie. Hopefully the courts won't eventually force that to stop...
I agree. He's way overoptimistic about the DOGE effects, too.
Great summary of the (not) insoluble issues facing us today Glenn.
The "energy crisis" is one I believe rooted in something else that is pervasive: fervor bordering on the religious for the sake of humanity. In the case of energy, net-zero and the extremely expensive, immature, amd taxpayer funded renewables industry to fight climate change and the mythical increase in extreme weather events for one.
In California, the path to 2045 (carbon neutrality) requires ever higher energy rates, while driving the remaining refineries out and increasing prices. We are told that in 20 years (!!), overall energy prices will be 30%-40% lower for everyone. That's an entire generation. The political and corporate leaders shake their heads in exasperation because Joe-citizen can't grasp the future value.
Nevermind that current fixed income people (e.g. retirees) are never likely to see that outcome and are viciously penalized and those entering the workforce have to contend with rising costs until the midpoint of thir careers. And there are numerous other examples that can be made.
It is completely tone deaf and ignorant (at best) until you consider the religious component.
I think in 2045, the crisis is going to be how to dispose of all the worn out crap they’re putting up today.
Somethings are simple and you've done well illustrating it.
But unfortunately other things aren't simple and the aphorism, "for any problem there is a solution, clear, simple and wrong" applies, at least in part.
I've heard/read people who say the simple solution to general peace in the middle east is regime change in Iran. No simple way to get to this solution. Similar situation for N Korea, PRC, Russia.
Tariffs and trade deals are said to be a simple solution for the US trade deficit problem and the many decades of loss of manufacturing jobs. But Trump's tariff measures change every other day and the effects of these will take years to be evident.
The simple solution for our crime problem does start with more police and stricter sentences but if it stops there we will still be left with an enormous problem.
Similar with homelessness, similar with other issues.
Then there is the problem of the entitlement programs. Great work by DOGE to ferret out some of the fraud but even with this the combined expense of these programs is a major and severe problem.
“At home, the allegedly insoluble illegal immigration problem is being solved, via the simple and , and traditional, approach of policing the borders and deporting people who are here illegally.
We were told that the problem was hugely difficult, and would require complicated bipartisan legislation from Congress. Nope. All that was needed was a very simple policy: Don’t let them in, and kick them out if they’re already here. From this change, various other allegedly difficult problems began to resolve: Housing prices, crime, employment for American workers, and even L.A. traffic (!) show signs of improvement. Even the federal deficit is under less pressure, as benefits are cut.”
THIS is all you have to say about the immoral, illegal, vicious, cruel, monstrous way in which the brutal goons of ICE are “kicking out” both the undocumented, but otherwise law abiding, immigrants whose only offense was the misdemeanor of crossing our border illegally, and those who have had the permission of our government to be here legally, including tens of thousands of persons with no criminal record, who have been here for years, raising families, working at productive jobs, paying taxes, contributing to the community, checking in with immigration authorities as required by their protected status under various long standing government programs, suddenly, brutally, jumped on by masked silent men who won’t identify themselves, handcuffed, shackled, stripped of phones, wallets, and papers, shoved into cars and planes and kidnapped thousands of miles from friends, families, and legal help, held in horrible overcrowded conditions with inadequate food, toilet, and sleeping facilities and without needed medicines and healthcare, families ripped apart, spouse from spouse, children from parents, siblings from each other, as if they were trash, all of this without the due process guaranteed by law and the Constitution?
Don’t you know or care about what’s going on? The enormous, human rights violations being perpetrated by ICE and by persons in the White House who are avidly breaking the law and violating their oaths of office and the Constitution to satisfy their twisted hatred for those who came here for a better life, because they can?
Don’t you know that even those immigrants who do break the law, do so at a lesser rate than natural born citizens, that many of them are doing jobs that citizens won’t do, and that until Trump started his crazy tariff scheme to tax the American public with import taxes to pay for tax reductions for the rich, that there were more jobs than workers to fill them in this country, and that housing prices are a function mainly of mortgage rates and not of excess housing demand from non-citizens?
Your unfeeling comments on the administration’s illegal and unconstitutional mass deportation program are, in my opinion, a disgrace.
Read Peggy Noonan’s opinion piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, August 2-3, and learn something.
Now that the border is closed, the only decent, humane, moral thing to do is offer all law abiding non-citizens a path to citizenship. That is the proper solution to the problem, not the cruel, twisted, inhuman, immoral, illegal, unconstitutional solution the goons in the DHS and the White House have imposed because they can.
Emerson wrote about people like ‘Buysider,’ with his tiresome pose of ‘moral superiority’:
“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”
I hate it when axioms collide: Must correct everyone on the Internet vs Don't feed the trolls.
I will compromise with: You use these words "misdemeanor" and "due process" but they mean what you think they mean.
And a third axiom: Pendants always make mistakes in their corrections. ".. they _do not_ mean_ ..."
Great essay!!
I love the common sense exhibited in Glenn's writing and greatly appreciate his willingness to support Instapundit and this platform.
Would have liked to have seen Trump be more libertarian economically and not tariff happy this go round.
Re: Pols desire to make issues complex & difficult. The pols do so as much to promote he notion that only they possess the needed wisdom & experience to solve it and so need to be elected so they can do so. Of course, they make the same claim s again when they are seeking re-election, or election to higher office.