Month: July 2021

I just got an email asking me something about state taxes in California and Texas. The link was to an article behind a paywall, but I can pretty well guess what the issue was: Are taxes in Texas really lower than they are in California?

The simple answer is yes. Texas has no state income tax and raises far less tax revenue per capita than California. But before you get too excited about that, it's worth taking a look at just who it is that pays lower taxes in Texas:

As you can see, for 80% of its residents, the tax rate in Texas is higher or about the same as it is in California. This is because the California income tax is quite low for most residents, while sales and property taxes are higher in Texas. When you put it all together, you're better off in California unless you're in the affluent top 20%. Then you're better off in Texas.

And you're really better off if you're in the top 1%, where California taxes run to about 12% compared to 3% for Texas.

Anyway, that's the story. Yes, the total tax take in Texas is far less than in California. But that's solely because Texas has very low rates on the rich. As usual in red states, the Texas model is low taxes (on the rich) and low services (for everyone else).

The Los Angeles Times draws my attention to a new study that looks at how traffic cops treat white and Black drivers during routine stops. That is, how do they speak to them? With respect? Friendliness? Or with threatening tones?

One thing I learned from this study is that the pattern of stress and intonation in language is called prosody. The other thing I learned is that officer prosody is judged to be less friendly toward Black men than it is toward white men:¹

When I see studies with results like this, I have two reactions. The first is the obvious one: that this is yet another example of how Black people are treated that's entirely invisible to white people.

But the other is that I'm surprised the difference is so small. In Study 1A, which was the primary study, the difference on a scale of 1-6 was only 0.2, or about 4%. The combined result of all three studies was only slightly higher. When you consider that Black men tend to be both younger and have lower incomes compared to white men, the racial difference here is probably quite small.

In other words, this is yet another example of trying to keep two things in mind at one time. First, Black people are treated worse than white people. Second, this gap is getting smaller and better over time. Both things are true.

¹You can read the study if you want the whole, exhausting explanation, but basically the researchers got hold of hundreds of bodycam videos of traffic stops. Then they cut out segments of each stop and blurred out the driver's comments so that only the police speech was left. Then they had people score the police speech.

About half of all states—almost all of them Republican—cut off extended unemployment benefits in June. Nearly all blue states, by contrast, are keeping the extended benefits in place until they expire in September.

In theory, cutting off the benefits early should motivate people to go out and get a job. But does it? The Wall Street Journal took a look at the state-by-state change in the unemployment rate in June and came up with this:

What does this mean? Unemployment went up in the red states, but it hardly seems likely that the imminent cutoff of UI benefits would cause a bunch of working folks to abruptly quit their jobs.

More likely, I think, is that in the red states a lot of people suddenly started looking for jobs, which makes them officially part of the workforce. However, they haven't found new jobs yet, so they contribute to the official unemployment rate going up. In the blue states, workers are still waiting. And since they aren't actively looking for jobs, they aren't counted as unemployed.

That's my guess, anyway. We won't know for sure until a few months have passed. But no one should be surprised if cutting off UI benefits pushes people to get back in the workforce and start looking for jobs. It may or may not be good policy to force people into jobs fast, fast, fast, but it makes sense that cutting off benefits would have that effect. Employers, naturally, are thrilled.

Here's something I haven't seen for a while: Hopper hiding behind the drapes. It's possible she was looking for her lizard, which she brought into the house yesterday but which then mysteriously disappeared after the humans came home. What do you suppose happened to it?

We continued to spend our little hearts out in June:

I did my part, in ways both large and small, and apparently all the rest of you did too. The June number for retail spending was once again about $60 billion higher than the pre-pandemic trend.

This is mostly thanks to the very generous (yes!) rescue packages that were passed, the first one almost immediately after the pandemic began and the final one in January. The result has been surprisingly limited economic pain and lots of personal savings, which are now being spent down. This should get us safely through the end of the year, by which time the economy should be in plenty good enough shape to stand on its own.

POSTSCRIPT: It's worth being clear about this. The US really did respond to the pandemic well in an economic sense, far better than most European countries. We have spent more than $5 trillion, a huge sum, and it prevented a vast amount of pain and suffering. Not all of it. Nothing could do that. But a lot.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through July 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Today's White House press briefing featured Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who spoke about an advisory on health misinformation that he recently published. After he left, press secretary Jen Psaki took questions:

Q: Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies and are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation, because we’ve seen, from the start, there’s not a lot of action on some of these platforms.

PSAKI: In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken — or we’re working to take, I should say — from the federal government: We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals to connect — to connect medical experts with popular — with popular — who are popular with their audiences with — with accurate information and boost trusted content. So we’re helping get trusted content out there.

This prompted a huge outcry from conservatives. For example, here is David Harsanyi at National Review:

A state can regulate speech in numerous ways. If, for instance, the corporate CEOs and cultural elites collude with the government — explicitly or implicitly — to decide how people interact, they engage, functionally speaking, in censorship. And that is exactly what the Biden administration does when it, as Jen Psaki explained to reporters today, “flag[s] problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Anyone who argues for free-association rights of private companies — as I do — should view such a relationship as authoritarian.

Am I missing something here? The White House provides information to news outlets all the time. They also complain about coverage all the time. It's routine.

There's no evidence here of the government abusing its power to force anyone to toe the White House line. They're just passing along information about the COVID-19 vaccine, and social media companies are free to use it or not. In what universe is this either censorship or authoritarianism?

Marian curated today's selection, a pair of photos of a big black carpenter bee in our front yard. It turns out that this bee is easier to photograph than a regular bee because it's a lot slower. He doesn't show up very often, but when he does he makes a great subject.

Today my old friend Ezra Klein writes a column about climate change with this headline:

It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn

When you put it that way, it does seem odd, doesn't it? Except that it's not. In fact, this kind of thing has happened so frequently throughout human history that it would be odd if it didn't happen. Consider a few examples.

The early settlers of Easter Island deforested their entire island over the course of just a few centuries. Today, successive leaders of Brazil are in the process of doing the same thing to the Amazon rainforest in a few decades.

Midwestern farmers in the 1920s used farming techniques that eroded the soil, leading to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Today those same farmers are draining the Ogallala Aquifer.

Ancient hunters hunted big game to extinction in North America. In the 19th century we hunted the plains bison nearly to extinction. Today we hunt whales to extinction.

I could go on in this vein forever. Humans have a long habit of doing whatever suits them best in the present, regardless of what damage it will do in the future. And none of this is from ignorance. In nearly every case we knew exactly what we were doing.

So it's perfectly natural that we would let the world burn as long as it meant a few more years of air conditioning and two-car garages. In fact, it's something of a miracle that climate change has gotten as much attention as it has.

So what's to be done? First off, here are the Four Commandments of Climate Change:

1. If you aren't talking about the whole world, you're just jerking off.
2. If you assume human nature will change, ...
3. If you think current technology can solve the problem, ...
4. If you think facts and analysis will win the fight, ...

This leads us to four requirements for action:

1. Any solution worth wasting ink on has to be global.
2. Human nature will not change. Don't try to guilt people into giving up their comforts.
3. Current technology (primarily electrification) should be rolled out in emergency fashion, but it can solve only about half the problem. The other half we don't really know how to solve yet.
4. Nobody cares about facts. The facts have been clear for a long time.

Got it? Now let's hear your plan!

POSTSCRIPT: What's my plan? In a nutshell, we should spend huge boatloads of money in a desperate attempt to invent new technology. The longer version is here.

Hum de hum. The Guardian says it's gotten hold of a secret Russian report written before the 2016 election. The report says that Donald Trump is the candidate best positioned to wreck the United States:

There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex”.

There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected — the document says — from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory”.

The paper refers to “certain events” that happened during Trump’s trips to Moscow. Security council members are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains. “It is acutely necessary to use all possible force to facilitate his [Trump’s] election to the post of US president,” the paper says.

I have my doubts about all this, mainly because the report is a bit too perfect. It was supposedly written in January 2016, but it sure sounds as if it could have been written a few weeks ago. It's just a little too spot on.

But who knows? Maybe appendix five, paragraph five will become the new rallying cry for the anti-Trump forces. Weirder things have happened.