Month: September 2023

I only managed to watch half of the Republican debate tonight before I gave up. What a shitshow. The lesson they all seem to have taken from the last one is that they should yell over each other a lot.

That's all I've got. During the small portion I watched I heard little aside from stale bromides and a few lame attempts at zingers. Is it possible for every candidate to lose ground?

After hearing Republicans tonight talk about the supposedly epic crime wave turning America into a hellhole, it occurred to me that maybe the NCVS had been updated through 2022. And it has! Given the current parlous state of the FBI's crime figures, it's the best source we have for national crime statistics. Here's the latest:

Crime has been down lately but spiked back up in 2022. It's now at about pre-pandemic levels.

While we're all watching the latest Republican debate, I want to take the chance to repeat a chart from this morning:

The actual tuition paid by college students, once you account for standard discounts, has barely changed over the past 30 years. It's up 13% at private universities and down 10% at public universities.

What dome should I put up today? How about a nuclear dome? Here are the two containment domes at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, taken on a hazy late afternoon. It's a funny thing: San Onofre was shut down a decade ago, but all the high-tension lines coming from the station are still up even though they no longer have any electricity to carry. I wonder when they're going to get rid of them?

Why are Republicans declining to call for Sen. Robert Menendez to resign? The charges against him are pretty serious, after all. Aaron Blake explains:

Because Republicans believe standing by Trump is politically necessary, because they really wanted Roy Moore to hold a key Senate seat, and because they need the vote of Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) in a tightly divided House, they are going to hold off as long as possible in passing judgment on these or any similar allegations, regardless of whether they have resulted in indictments.

If Menendez is unfit for public office, then so are Trump and Santos—and that's unacceptable. Better to stick to their guns about how the FBI is corrupt itself and can't be trusted to investigate political figures.

In fairness, it's worth pointing out that Republicans get no benefit from calling for Menendez to resign, just as Democrats are taking no risks by demanding that he go. If Menendez does leave office, New Jersey's governor will replace him with a Democrat, and a Democrat will almost certainly win the seat permanently next year. The balance of the Senate will be unchanged no matter what happens.

I suppose everyone is tired of me posting this chart, but sometimes I feel like I should put it up every day:

Joe Biden's approval level is totally normal for this point in time. He's a few points less popular than Bill Clinton was at 140 weeks, but that's it. Everything is fine.

ChatGPT can now hold ordinary spoken conversations with people, and apparently it works pretty well. It can also talk about pictures you show it. And this:

ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021. pic.twitter.com/pyj8a9HWkB

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 27, 2023

I think this is an even bigger deal. All that's left now is for ChatGPT to stop "hallucinating," aka "making up shit." Once that happens it will genuinely become as useful as some people at some jobs.

By the way: even with the hallucinations left in, a speaking ChatGPT is going to be great for low-stakes conversations with lonely elderly people. It's someone they can talk to all day long who will never get tired of them. I expect this to become very widely used in nursing homes everywhere.

I have had my mind blown. Over at National Affairs, Dan Currell says that college tuition hasn't actually gone up over the past few decades:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, colleges discovered that the appearance of high tuition was good for marketing. Positioning one's school as "almost as expensive as Harvard" created a sense of exclusivity and, somewhat contrary to economic theory, resulted in increased applications.

....Of course, almost nobody was willing to pay Harvard-level tuition for a middling college education. Colleges resolved this problem by canceling out their high sticker prices with "institutional scholarships" that had no money behind them; they were simply the discounts a school had to offer to convince students to enroll....Throughout the 1980s, colleges kept publishing ever-higher tuition numbers. Meanwhile, the tuition students actually paid rose only slightly.

Naturally I was skeptical. But sure enough, every year the College Board publishes a report called "Trends in College Pricing," and right out there in the open it lists both the sticker price as well as the actual tuition that the average student pays. Here it is for public and private schools:¹

Now, some students do pay the full list price, but this is mostly limited to affluent kids going to the very top schools (Harvard, Yale, etc.). The vast majority of students pay far less than the published price thanks to "grants" and "scholarships" that are actually just routine discounts from the list price.

And once you account for that, the real-life price of college has barely changed over the past three decades. Since 1992, private school tuition has increased 13% while public school tuition has decreased 10%.²

This is so contrary to everything I've read and heard my entire life that I'm not sure I believe it. But the numbers are right there. In terms of what the vast majority of families actually pay, college costs no more today than it did in 1992.

¹The 1992-2005 figures are from the 2007 report, adjusted to 2022 dollars. The 2006-2022 figures are from the 2022 report and are also in 2022 dollars.

²Keep in mind that this is solely for tuition and fees. It doesn't count either books or room and board, both of which have increased at a higher rate.

In case you've forgotten, Donald Trump has more than just his four criminal trials to contend with. There's also a continuing civil trial over his sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll, as well as yet another civil case brought by New York's attorney general over years of business fraud by Trump and his two adult sons.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that I failed to say "alleged" business fraud. That's because a judge today issued a summary judgment declaring Trump and his sons so obviously guilty that no trial is required:

The decision by Justice Arthur F. Engoron is a major victory for Attorney General Letitia James in her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, effectively deciding that no trial was needed to determine that he had fraudulently secured favorable terms on loans and insurance deals.

Ms. James has argued that Mr. Trump inflated the value of his properties by as much as $2.2 billion and is seeking a penalty of about $250 million in a trial scheduled to begin as early as Monday.

....The decision will not dissolve Mr. Trump’s entire company, but it sought to terminate his control over a flagship commercial property at 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan and a family estate in Westchester County. Mr. Trump might also lose control over his other New York properties, including Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, though that will likely be fought over in coming months.

There will still be a trial, but only to determine the size of the penalty against Trump. Worst case, he and his entire family could be stripped of control over The Trump Organization.

There's other stuff going on too, including the fact that Trump is suing the judge, but I assume this will be quickly tossed out and the penalty phase of the trial will commence soon. Buckle up.

Over at National Review, Noah Rothman takes on the question of why so many people don't believe the Biden economy is actually pretty good. His answer is simple: It's because the Biden economy isn't pretty good, and the only ones who don't get that are sheltered elites who obsess over BLS statistics. Ordinary people, for whom Biden's economy "has become a suffocating burden," aren't being bamboozled by the media. "They have every reason to believe the economy is in rough shape."

Maybe. But first let me share the results of a recent poll with you. It asked people what they thought of the economy:

Roughly similar percentages of Democrats and Republicans agree that their personal financial situation is good. However, only 5% of Republicans say the national economy is good.

It's common for people to be more optimistic about their personal situation (crime, schools, finances) than about the national situation. It's also common for polls like this to produce partisan results. But 5%! That's ridiculous.

In other words, when you see polls showing that "Americans" are losing confidence in the economy—and this is indeed the direction of recent polling—it's driven almost entirely by Republicans. And I think even Rothman would probably agree that 5% is too absurd a number to reflect actual reality. It's almost pure partisanship, not a genuine view of how good the economy is.

It's not Americans who think the economy is bad. It's Republicans. And it's not because their personal financial situation is bad. It's because they dislike Joe Biden. They are indeed being bamboozled by the (right-wing) media.

POSTSCRIPT: I should toss out one other thing. Even non-Republicans underrate the economy, and this is for a pretty simple reason. BLS obsessives like me know that inflation is down a lot and that, in any case, wages mostly kept up with inflation back when it was higher. But everyone else—which is just about everyone—merely has a vague idea of what the economy is like, and that idea doesn't turn on a dime. It takes at least a year, and maybe more, before views of big national trends change, and that much time hasn't passed yet. In the meantime, inflation is still around, house prices are high, gas prices are high, and cars are more expensive thanks to the Fed's high interest rates. So plenty of people are still wary of where things are going.

Still, even with that said, weak views of the economy are mostly just the product of Republicans who refuse to admit that anything under Joe Biden could be any good.