Month: June 2023

Donald Trump has been indicted on criminal charges related to the classified documents he withheld from investigators after taking them to his home in Mar-a-Lago when he left office:

The Justice Department took the legally and politically momentous step of lodging federal criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, multiple people familiar with the matter said on Thursday, following a lengthy investigation of his handling of classified documents that he took with him upon leaving office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

....Two people briefed on the charges say the indictment includes seven counts. We don’t yet know the full nature of the charges.

That's two indictments so far this year. Georgia is yet to weigh in.

UPDATE: From the Washington Post: "The charges include illegal retention of government secrets, obstruction of justice and conspiracy, according to people familiar with the matter."

For technical reasons, the normal rent inflation measure from the BLS lags actual rent by 6-12 months. BLS has been investigating how to fix this, but in the meantime they've come up with an alternative measure that looks only at the rent paid by new renters. This index is released quarterly and leads the normal shelter inflation measure by 2-4 quarters. In other words, it measures rent right now, not a year ago. Here it is for the first quarter of 2023 (red line):

When rents are going up, new rent is generally higher than average rent (blue line), which includes people who are continuing to rent the same place and generally don't see big rent increases. You can see this in the big spike in 2022.

Conversely, when rents are moderating, new rent is generally lower than average rent as landlords compete for new tenants. You can see this in the recent plunge in rent inflation, which is 0% as of Q1.

Roughly speaking, when BLS calculates normal CPI inflation it uses the average rent shown in the blue line, which is hovering around 7% and has only barely started to turn down. In reality, rent inflation is zero. If the overall CPI (and PCE) inflation measures incorporated this, they would be significantly lower—and more accurate. This is probably one reason why the measures of underlying inflation that I posted yesterday are already more than a point below standard measures. The Fed should take notice.

Yesterday I posted evidence from GSS that young men became suddenly more conservative between 2021 and 2022. Here's a follow-up from a Gallup poll released today:

This is quite different. Young people have spiked upward in their conservatism, but middle-aged people have spiked up even more. And this is for both sexes, not just men. If this spike is actually limited to men—as seems likely—it's even bigger than Gallup shows.

The GSS data only went through 2022, while the biggest jumps in the Gallup data are in 2023. If this is accurate, we'll see something similar in the next round of GSS polling—but unfortunately this won't be until 2024. For now, I can say that Gallup's 2022 data is consistent with GSS (a smallish increase among age 30-49, no increase among age 50-64, and a slight decrease among age 65+) while the 2023 data shows enormous spikes everywhere except the elderly. Practically everyone is getting suddenly and substantially more conservative. This is a little hard to understand.

A springtime bloom of yellow alstroemeria in our backyard.

Eurostat has revised its Q1 estimate of eurozone GDP based on weaker results for Germany. Instead of a slight increase, Q1 GDP fell -0.4% on an annualized basis. This is the second quarter in a row of negative growth:

Negative growth in Europe won't affect the US economy hugely, but it certainly won't do us any good.

Here is the latest reading of my M-protein level from Monday (Day 41 after the CAR-T infusion):

It's now down to 0.39, which is a bit of a slowdown from previous readings. However, this probably means nothing. My doctor had already warned me that measurements from Kaiser Permanente—where I'm now getting tested—deviate slightly from measurements taken at City of Hope, allegedly because "the machines are different."

Weird, isn't it? In any case, I'm still on track to be at zero in a little more than a week. Keep your fingers crossed.

Alabama has seven congressional districts and about 27% of its population is Black. Under normal circumstances you'd expect the Black vote to prevail in two districts, but Alabama has never been normal. In 1992 it got its first Black district since Reconstruction, and it's been limited to one Black district ever since.

In late 2021 Alabama passed HB1, a redistricting statute following the 2020 census. The map in HB1 was similar to the previous map and was limited, once again, to a single Black district. Alabama was sued the same day and the case went before a three-judge panel, which ruled decisively that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In an order handed down today, the Supreme Court concurred in a 5-4 decision:

The three-judge District Court received live testimony from 17 witnesses, reviewed more than 1000 pages of briefing and upwards of 350 exhibits, and considered arguments from the 43 different lawyers who had appeared in the litigation. After reviewing that extensive record, the Court concluded in a 227-page opinion that the question whether HB1 likely violated §2 was not “a close one.”...Based on our review of the record, we agree.

The groups suing Alabama presented their own redistricting maps, but Alabama argued that they were flawed because they split a "community of interest"—namely the Gulf Coast. The Supreme Court found this unpersuasive, and in any case ruled that Alabama's maps split a community of interest too:

Named for its fertile soil, the Black Belt contains a high proportion of black voters, who “share a rural geography, concentrated poverty, unequal access to government services, . . . lack of adequate healthcare,” and a lineal connection to “the many enslaved people brought there to work in the antebellum period.” The District Court concluded—correctly, under our precedent—that it did not have to conduct a “beauty contest[ ]” between plaintiffs’ maps and the State’s. There would be a split community of interest in both.

Alabama also argued that its maps were were based on a "race-neutral benchmark" and thus couldn't be racially discriminatory. The Court rejected this:

A district is not equally open, in other words, when minority voters face—unlike their majority peers—bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.

This is not a vigorous ruling. It was written by Chief Justice John Roberts and mostly says only that it agrees with the District Court's "careful factual findings." Its own arguments are generally bland explanations of the Court's precedent in Thornburg v. Gingles, which governs redistricting challenges.

Nevertheless, it's a rare Supreme Court victory for racial challenges to redistricting laws. Two conservatives, Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, joined the three liberals in the majority opinion.

As we all know, a week ago Ron DeSantis flew a group of migrants from Texas and dumped them in Sacramento. But there are a couple of things I don't get about this affair.

First, California Attorney General Rob Bonta says the migrants were picked up in El Paso:

Bonta, who met with some of the migrants who arrived Friday, said they told him they were approached in El Paso by two women who spoke broken Spanish and promised them jobs. The women traveled with them by land from El Paso to Deming, New Mexico, where two men then accompanied them on the flight to Sacramento. The same men were on the flight Monday, Bonta said.

So instead of just flying them out of El Paso, they bused them a hundred miles to the tiny town of Deming and flew them out of there. Why? What's up with Deming? Does it have cooperative airport officials? Does it just happen to be where Vertol Systems, which contracted with Florida for this job, has its planes?

That's a mystery. But a bigger mystery is this:

Florida had remained silent about the two flights, which started Friday, until Tuesday when the state released a video of migrants signing documents....Almost five days after that first flight, DeSantis weighed in on the transports after he was asked about it in Arizona.

Stop me if I'm missing something, but the whole point of an obnoxious stunt like this is that everyone knows about it. If you're going to do it, you want to bray about it to all your fans so they know what a tough guy you are. Keeping silent about it makes no sense. The whole thing loses all its stunt value if you don't take credit for it.

So why Deming? And why the silence for so long? Inquiring minds want to know.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Investors are bracing for a flood of more than $1 trillion of Treasury bills in the wake of the debt-ceiling fight, potentially sparking a new bout of volatility in financial markets.

Some on Wall Street fear that roughly $850 billion in bond issuance that was shelved until a debt-ceiling deal was passed—sales expected between now and the end of September, according to JPMorgan analysts—will overwhelm buyers, jolting markets and raising short-term borrowing costs.

I dunno. That's $1 trillion in borrowing over the course of four months. We did that three times in a row during 2020 without any problems. Hell, we borrowed $1 trillion in April alone. This seems more likely to be an invented problem than something that anyone is seriously concerned about.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Instagram "helps connect and promote" a huge network of pedophile sites:

Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

A related report from Stanford's Internet Observatory notes that searches on Instagram for pedophile content sometimes throw up a warning—but, oddly, include an option to "see results anyway":

It's one thing to host content inadvertently. No social media platform can monitor and control 100% of its content. But the Achilles heel of these platforms—for illicit content but also more generally—is their recommendation algorithms, which have the capacity to actively promote and connect users to dangerous or addictive material. Instagram is especially culpable in this case since the Internet Observatory report notes that TikTok doesn't have a similar pedophilia problem. "TikTok appears to have stricter and more rapid content enforcement," the report says, and if TikTok can do it then so can Instagram—if they bother trying.