Month: March 2021

Here is the headline in the LA Times this morning about Oprah's interview last night with Harry and Meghan (last names not required for any participants):

This is wildly wrong. The "palace" did no such thing. Some individual apparently did, but Harry and Meghan were even a little cagey about that. The conversation in question was with Harry, not Meghan—which means that her speculations about motive are meaningless—and Harry didn't provide enough details to know if our mystery person was truly concerned or just shooting the breeze. All in all, genuine concern seems sort of unlikely since (a) from the start, the eventual arrival of a baby was neither unexpected nor a topic of trepidation, [NOTE: Actually, this conversation happened before the marriage.] (b) Harry declined to specify the exact wording of the conversation and Oprah didn't push him on it, and (c) let's be honest here, Meghan is not exactly a dark-skinned woman. There was never any real chance that Archie would be anything but pretty fair skinned.

But who knows? I'm not the royal watcher in my family, and my sister tells me that I'm always wrong about everything. But I did get sucked into watching the interview, and I guess I must be the only person in America who thinks Oprah did a lousy job. It was just softball after softball, never pushing either Harry or Meghan to provide the detail that might allow the rest of us to come to any conclusions.

Of course, Meghan was pretty careful in her answers. One of the big bombshells was Meghan's acknowledgement that at one point she had suicidal ideations. The LA Times interprets this as "driven to the the brink of suicide," which is flatly not what she said. These kinds of thoughts are nothing to make light of, but they are very much not always the same thing as seriously contemplating suicide.

The funny thing about the whole interview is that both Harry and Meghan tried to give the impression that they had literally moved heaven and earth to get some help with their various problems, talking to anyone and everyone they could think of. And yet, I got the distinct impression that this wasn't really the case. Just the opposite, in fact. It seemed more like they talked to individuals here and there but never really followed up in a serious way.

But I don't know for sure, because the interview provided nowhere near enough detail for me to say. In fact, it told me barely anything I didn't already know even though I don't pay a ton of attention to the royals. It sure seemed like a pretty poor excuse for a tell-all to me.

I have several COVID-19 charts for you this morning. First up is our weekly vaccination chart:

Not bad! We performed nearly 3 million vaccinations on Saturday, getting us almost back to our growth trendline from early in the year. We have now vaccinated about a fifth of the population.

Here is our vaccination rate compared to the UK, until recently the best of the big countries:

The UK accelerated quickly, but then flattened out in early February and has even dropped a bit since then. The US has just kept getting better and better aside from the late February dip caused by bad weather.

This is all great news, but there's also this:

After the Thanksgiving and Christmas peaks, our case rate has plummeted. However, even now we're seeing 60,000 new cases per day, which is about the same as our previous peak in summer of 2020. We've still got a long way to go before we have things under control, so mask up, keep your distance, stay home as much possible, and persuade your reluctant friends to get vaccinated.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 7. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Sen. Joe Manchin said this morning that he won't change his mind on supporting the filibuster:

But he added that he would be open to Democrats passing more important legislation like voting reforms by a party-line vote — if senators are given ample space for bipartisan negotiation first....“It takes listening to the minority to make sure the majority is getting it right.”

Does this make any sense? The only way to pass voting reform on a party-line basis—i.e., with 50 votes—is to kill the filibuster. Does Manchin mean that he might be open to that after all, but only if Republicans are given plenty of opportunity to negotiate first? Or what?

It's too bad that Manchin has been so public about "never" changing his mind on the filibuster. Even if he feels that way, Democrats would have more leverage if Republicans were afraid he might vote to eliminate the filibuster if they didn't play ball.

Speaking of which, here's my wildly unpopular voting rights proposal:

• All Americans get a national ID card free of charge.¹ It would look something like this:
  
• In-person voting would require you to show this ID.
• Early voting, mail voting, Sunday voting, etc. are standardized at some reasonable compromise level.
• Redistricting is handed over to a nonpartisan national commission.
• The end.

Republicans get photo ID voting and Democrats get photo ID voting that doesn't favor any particular constituency. The country gets standardized rules for early voting etc., which makes things easier for all and doesn't have much partisan effect regardless of what the rules are. And gerrymandering, which entered a whole new age of corruption with the advent of computerized GIS tools, is finally put to rest.

As near as I can tell, various parts of my plan are hated by Democrats, Republicans, socialists, libertarians, conservatives, liberals, rank-and-file voters, and political elites. Other than that, though, it's great.

¹No, it wouldn't turn us into a "papers please" police state. No, it wouldn't do anything that we haven't already done in a chaotic way already. But it would provide everyone with reliable ID, which would help with voting, legal employment, the unbanked, etc. More here.

My erstwhile colleague Ben Dreyfuss writes that we liberals should ease up on the guilt trips:

One easy thing that liberals could do to make it easier for democrats to win in red and purple states (thus furthering liberal goals) would be to stop moralizing to people about how their personal consumer choices are bad.

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) March 6, 2021

This prompted one person to ask, "Like which ones?" My snarky response is, "Would you like the list alphabetically or by subject area?" but I suppose something more serious is called for. Here's a list off the top of my head:

• Football games (concussion factories run by greedy billionaires)
• SUVs (gas guzzlers, bad for planet)
• "Aladdin" (problematic Arab stereotypes)
• Straws (plastic)
• Fiji water (not as green as they claim)
• Facebook (spreads right-wing disinformation)
• Chick-fil-A (COO opposed same-sex marriage)
• Amazon (treats workers poorly)
• Almonds (crops use a ton of water)
• Meat (uses lots of resources per gram of protein)
• Chicken (factory farmed)
• Fur coats (kills cute little mammals)
• Air travel (emits lots of CO2)
• American Dirt (novel about Mexican migrants written by a white person)
• Guns (duh)
• Barbie (promotes unattainable ideal of female beauty)
• If I Ran the Zoo (racist imagery)
• Etc.

None of these things are unavailable or even shunned by most liberals. But they're all things that liberals of one stripe or another have criticized at one time or another. This is frequently done with excellent cause, but there's no question that it also turns off a lot of people. It's just one of the prices we pay for trying to do the right thing.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 6. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Hum de hum. It's Saturday so let's piss everyone off.

For starters, I will stipulate up front that I mostly disagree with everything that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have demanded in order to win their votes for the American Rescue Plan. (The only exception is the $15 minimum wage, which I'm mildly against since I think it ought to be more like $12 or so.)

But.

Everyone knew this was coming. All the wise heads on Twitter and elsewhere have spent the past couple of months warning everyone that Democrats have precisely 50 senators and that means legislation has to satisfy the 50th most liberal Democrat. There's no way the coronavirus bill was going to be a Bernie Sanders wet dream. What's more, Joe Biden ran explicitly as a fairly moderate guy, and there's no reason to expect him to govern otherwise.

Under the circumstances, we did pretty damn well! A $1.9 trillion bill, regardless of the tweaks that Manchin demanded, is a helluva thing—especially given its generally strong focus on lower incomes. And overall, Biden has turned out to be considerably more progressive than we expected.

And yet, an awful lot of progressives have insisted on absolutely reaming Manchin and Sinema for their (admittedly sometimes performative) objections to the bill. We did the same thing to Susan Collins last year, and it sort of looks like we might be planning to do it to Lisa Murkowski sometime soon.

This is insane. These folks just aren't super progressive and we all know it. They are potential allies in certain cases, and the best way to keep them that way is to persuade them to join us, not to piss them off every time they disappoint us. Politics aside, human nature is what it is: If you attack someone viciously, they are more likely to oppose you in the future because they hate your guts.

So for chrissake, knock it off. Throw things at the TV set if you must, and complain all you like in private. In public, though, keep the complaints relatively mild, and couple them with hopes that we can win their votes in the future. I fully understand how galling this seems, but if you want to win, this is the one of the prices you have to pay.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 5. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Hopper's favorite new place is on the back of my new chair—or on the back of our old couch. I guess she just likes being up high where she can keep an eye on things. Here she is posing with Marian.

One of the lesser known provisions of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill is a "temporary" expansion of Obamacare subsidies:

The American Rescue Plan spends $34 billion expanding the Affordable Care Act subsidies for two years. The changes would make upper-middle-income Americans newly eligible for financial help to buy plans on the Obamacare marketplaces, and would increase the subsidies already going to lower-income enrollees.

Subsidies would be increased for the poor and working class while the "subsidy cliff" for higher-income families would be abolished. Instead of federal subsidies ending suddenly at 400% of the poverty level (about $85,000 for a family of three), they would continue for people at all income levels, who would be limited to paying 8.5% of their income for health coverage.

The subsidy cliff has—quite fairly—spawned endless complaints from middle-class families, and for them this change would be gigantic. Today, if you make $85,000 and your health coverage costs $25,000, then you have to pay $25,000. Under the new plan, your maximum payment is about $7,000. In other words, your subsidy has gone from zero to $18,000.

This change has spawned surprisingly little pushback from conservatives, though last month the Wall Street Journal noted—correctly—that "The politics are such that the benefit will never be revoked." Probably so! The Journal also offered up the tired complaint that even a few very well-off families would get some subsidy money, but their heart wasn't in it since, after all, their core audience is the very well off. It was just a pro forma gripe.

On the other side of the aisle progressives are naturally disappointed that we aren't getting Medicare for All, but that was a pipe dream. There were never enough votes for M4A even if President Biden had supported it. Instead, what's likely to happen to Obamacare is the same thing that happened throughout Europe over the last century. Very few countries introduced full-on national health care in a single swoop. Instead, they passed limited programs and then expanded them steadily until, eventually, they were all but universal. And in every case there was lots of path dependence: improvements were all based on the existing system rather than uprooting the entire thing and starting over.

This is almost certainly how things will happen here too. Obamacare built on Medicaid and private insurance because that's what we already had. Biden is now building on that. Most likely, we'll eventually end up like Switzerland, which relies mostly on subsidies for private insurance, rather than, say, the system used in Sweden or France.

Is this the most efficient way of doing things? Nope. Then again, making Medicare universal isn't the most efficient way of covering everyone either. In any case, this is a big change, and it's especially a big change for the middle class, which progressives should pay a lot more attention to. This has been a huge pain point for many of them, and it's about to go away.

POSTSCRIPT: The big question now is whether Democrats will brag loudly about this. They should! It's a big new benefit for a lot of middle-class families.

Alternatively, centrists will be too timid to talk about something that costs a lot of money, and progressives will sulk in their tents because it isn't Medicare for All. It would be nice to avoid that this time around.