Keep Our Eyes on the Political Ball and Stick With the Democratic Party

 We Must Keep Our Eyes on the Ball

We liberal and progressive Jews must keep our eyes on the ball in the coming elections. We cannot allow Democrats' criticism of Israel or even the antisemitism of some progressive Democrats to blind us to the need to protect our democracy here at home. We must work to elect progressive Democrats in spite of their attitudes toward Israel.

The Antisemitism of Some Democrats is Obvious

The rising antisemitism of some progressive Democrats is obvious, but we need to be clear: criticism of Israel's policies is not antisemitic. Israel is a country like any other, and when it does awful things, it cannot expect to be immune to international criticism or even ostracism. On the other hand, the claim that Israel has no right to exist is antisemitic because such claims are never made against other countries that have committed awful crimes including genocide.

Israel Has Done Things That Are Unjustifiable, but It Has a Right to Exist

I am a Jew and a supporter of Israel. Nevertheless, I share the belief that Israel has done things in Gaza that are completely unjustifiable. The utter destruction of most of Gaza is grotesquely disproportionate to the damage inflicted by Hamas’s raid that killed 1500 people and took 250 hostages. I loathe Netanyahu and his racist supporters. Those who condemn what Israel has done have a perfect right to do so, and I agree with much of what they say.

On the other hand, those who go further and say that Israel has no right to exist are clearly antisemites because they make that claim only against the Jewish state. No one says that the United States should not exist because we dropped atomic bombs on Japan or because of our genocide of the American Indians. No one says that China should not exist because of the genocide of the Uighurs. No one says that Nigeria should not exist because of the slaughter in Biafra. No one says that Turkey should not exist because of the Armenian genocide. Only when the violence is committed by Jews do we hear that they have forfeited their right to a national state.

We Jews Can Support Israel Without Supporting Its Government

We American Jews can continue to support Israel, but that does not mean that we have to support its current government or its actions in Gaza. If you want to support Israel while opposing its government, you should consider making a contribution to the New Israel Fund. 

We should also remember that Israel and its position in the world have changed since the country's founding almost 80 years ago. Then, Israel was a poor, weak country that barely survived the 1948 assault by its neighbors. Today, Israel is a strong, rich country that is more than a match for its neighbors, and as a strong, rich country, it cannot be exempt from criticism or from international condemnation. We must accept that today, Israel is not merely a refuge for survivors of the Holocaust. It is a normal country with complex politics and social injustices. Israel sometimes does very bad things. So, it is ok to criticize Israel's policies.

We Must Elect Progressive Democrats

In the coming elections, we must stick with the Democratic Party even though many Democrats criticize Israel's policies or call for ending American military support for Israel. We must stick with the Democratic Party even though some of its members are antisemites. We must remember what is at stake here in our own country. We cannot allow Mr. Trump to continue to destroy everything that we love about our country, and the only hope of preventing that destruction is to elect progressive Democrats in November. We must also remember that the antisemitism of the left is much less dangerous than the antisemitism of the right. The antisemites of the right kill us in our synagogues. The antisemites of the left do not.

So, my fellow Jewish Democrats, we must grit our teeth and work to elect progressive Democrats to office. There will be time to deal with the antisemitism after the election.

It's a New World and $1.5 Trillion in Defense Spending Won't Change That

Trump Has Lost Touch With the World

Pres. Trump’s request for $1.5 trillion dollars in defense spending shows that he is completely out of touch with the evolving position of the United States in the world.  He seems to believe that, if he spends enough on our military, he will be able to substitute raw military power for the economic power that we have been gradually losing for years. He will fail because military power cannot really take the place of economic power.

The Power of the United States Was Always Mainly Economic, Not Military

We have dominated the world since 1945 partly through military power but mainly through economic power. At the end of the Second World War, we were the only major industrial power still standing. Our factories had not been destroyed in the war, and we produced more than half of the world’s industrial production. We used the power that gave us to construct a worldwide economic and financial system based on the U.S. dollar. 

Initially, the dollar was strong because it could be converted into gold at a fixed rate. However, when we went off the gold standard in 1974, we were able to maintain the position of the dollar in world trade through an agreement with Saudi Arabia that it would price and sell its oil only in dollars. This “petrodollar system” meant that anyone who wanted to buy oil had to have dollars to pay for it, and that created a strong, international demand for dollars. The dollar remained the currency that all nations used in international trade.

The centrality of the dollar in international trade gave us an enormous amount of geopolitical power, but it rested on trust. The countries of the world trusted that we would not weaponize our economic power against them, and for many years we upheld that trust. However, in 2022 in response to the Russian support for separatists in Ukraine, we and our allies froze billions of dollars in Russian assets in Western banks.

U.S. Power is Declining Because Countries Are Diversifying Away From Dollars

All the central bankers in the world saw that action and asked themselves, “If the Americans can do that to Russia, what stops them from doing it to us?” So, in the name of their own national security, they began to diversify their foreign currency holdings away from dollars, and they began to look for ways to avoid dependency on dollars. As a result, the dollar's share of international currency reserves is declining. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, U.S. dollars constituted about 70% of the foreign exchange reserves held by all countries worldwide. Now, U.S. dollars are down to about 57% of foreign exchange reserves, and that percentage is falling. 

China Has Built a System That Bypasses the Dollar

In the meantime, the Chinese have established a system for conducting foreign trade in their currency, the yuan. The system is called “CIPS” (Cross-border Interbank Payment System), and it bypasses dollars entirely. Trade between China and Russia is handled in that system, and as of 2025, organizations across 121 countries were connected to CIPS. In the fall of that year, Saudi Arabia began to accept payment for oil in yuan. In addition, other countries are building shared systems that allow them to use their own currencies for international trade. This means that foreign countries now have alternatives to the dollar for international trade. They don’t depend on the United States to the same degree as before, and therefore, our economic power is waning. In addition, we are no longer the most important manufacturing country in the world. China is. We can no longer dominate the world's economy. 

Trump's Military Spending Will Drive Us Further into Debt and Make Our People Poorer

Trump thinks that we can substitute military power for economic power, and he has asked for $1.5 trillion in military spending. Where will the $1.5 trillion that Trump is asking for come from? It will have to be borrowed because he is not suggesting that we should raise taxes. However, the United States is already spending $980 billion per year just to pay the interest on its existing debt. The cost of servicing the debt is now the largest item in the federal budget, and if we borrow $1.5 trillion more, that cost will go up. He is already talking about cutting Medicare and Medicaid to cover some of the cost. If he does that, our healthcare will become even more unaffordable than it is now, and our people will be poorer and sicker.

Military Power Cannot Substitute for Economic Power

He will do all that in the vain hope that military power can somehow substitute for our lost economic power, but military power cannot really substitute for economic power because we cannot go to war every time a country does something we don’t like. We are going to have to accept the fact that we are living in 2026 and not in 1946. We are going to have to accept that the world has changed, and we cannot dominate it completely. Spending $1.5 trillion on armaments will not roll back the clock.

Private Choices and the Public Good: The Case of Portion Sizes in Restaurants

Is the Public Good the Same as the Sum of Private Goods?

Many conservatives like to say that we don't need government policies to promote the public good because the public good is nothing but the sum of the private good of the individual members of our society. If everyone gets what he/she wants through the free market, the welfare of the whole society is maximized, and anything that the government does can only subtract from the welfare of society.

That sounds persuasive, but is it true? If everyone gets what he/she wants, does that really mean that the welfare of the whole society is maximized? Is welfare of the whole society merely the sum of the welfare of its members, or does the public good of the society include things that the individual members do not include in their sense of their own wellbeing?  The answer is complex because it depends on the way that the costs of individual choices are apportioned. To see why this is so, consider the case of portion sizes of meals in American restaurants.

Why Have Portion Sizes Increased So Much?

Portion sizes in restaurants in the United States have increased greatly over my lifetime. For example, when I was in college in the 1950s, most restaurants served hamburgers that were less than one quarter pound in size. A restaurant that served a quarter-pound hamburger advertised that fact. Today, in contrast, a quarter-pound hamburger is considered small. We see half-pound hamburgers in restaurants, and the portion sizes of other dishes have increased similarly. Today, portions in American restaurants are so large that most people cannot consume them at a single meal. Consequently, restaurants provide boxes for their customers to use to take home the food that they have not eaten, and we often see people leaving restaurants with such boxes.

Why have portion sizes increased so dramatically? They have increased because restaurant owners have discovered that people will pay more for large portions. People feel that they are getting a good deal if they get a lot of food for their money. At the same time, the large portions cost the restaurant owner very little more than smaller portions.

Cooking and Serving a Meal Costs Much More Than the Meal Itself

The biggest part of the cost of a restaurant meal is the cost of cooking and serving it. The cook and the server cost much more than the food itself. The cost of cooking and serving a half-pound hamburger is the same as the cost of cooking and serving a quarter-pound hamburger. The additional quarter pound of meat adds very little to the cost, but customers are willing to pay substantially more for the larger portion because they feel that they are getting a good deal. So, people buy meals that are too large to eat and take home the leftovers. Everyone is happy. The customers get what they see as good deals, and the restaurant owner makes more profit. What could be better?

The Big Portions Create Costs

The fly in the ointment is that the larger portions create costs that are not born by either the customers or the restaurant owner. They are shared by all of the members of our society. The first such cost is environmental. The millions of plastic foam boxes that the customers use every day to take home the leftover food add a huge amount of non-biodegradable trash to our landfills, and the environmental and financial cost of dealing with that trash is not born by the restaurant owner or by the customers. It falls on the whole society. For example, residents of my community pay a monthly fee for trash collection, and the size of that fee depends in part on the amount of trash that has to be collected.

The second cost is the cost of excessive obesity. The large portions drive customers to eat too much, and as a result, too many people in our society are obese. Obesity is a cause of many chronic diseases including heart disease, diabetes and some cancers. The cost of caring for patients with such chronic diseases adds substantially to the cost of healthcare in our country, and that additional cost is born by all of us in the form of higher health insurance premiums.

The Restaurant Owner and the Customers Do Not See the Social Costs

The environmental cost and the healthcare cost are in a sense invisible to the restaurant owner and the customers. They bear only a tiny fraction of those costs, and in any case, there is no way for them to know the environmental cost of a single half-pound hamburger or one plastic foam box.

What is Important and How Do We Decide?

What should we do about the social cost of the large portions? I do not wish to say that restaurant owners should not serve half-pound hamburgers or that customers should not order them. Individual freedom is important. On the other hand, we have to see that the choices made here impose costs on us all, and we would be better off if we did not have to bear those costs. Clearly, maximizing the welfare of our society as a whole involves more than maximizing the benefits to the restaurant owner or to the customers. We would all be better off if we did not have to pay the fees or the health insurance costs imposed by the larger portion sizes. 

Are the social costs more important than the individual benefits, or is it the other way round?

There is no simple answer to the question of the relative importance of the social costs and the individual benefits. The answer to that question is inherently political. We could, for example, forbid the use of nonbiodegradable boxes by restaurants, or we could start a campaign to shame people who take home food from restaurants. Should we do such things? There is no easy answer, but one way or another, we will decide what costs we wish to bear as a society, and we will decide what costs we will impose on the people who impose extra costs on us.