Month: November 2023

I watched the first half hour of tonight's debate between California governor Gavin Newsom and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, but that was all I could take. So I have no idea who "won" or "lost."

But just to set the record straight on something I think Newsom didn't make clear enough, it really is true that taxes in California aren't generally higher than in Florida. Florida has higher taxes on the poor and California has higher taxes on the rich:

The working poor are better off in California. The working and middle classes are about the same in both states. The upper middle class and the affluent are taxed less in Florida.

The reason for this is that California's income tax is very progressive. The poor, on average, pay negative tax, and the next two cohorts pay about 1%. It's only for the wealthy that California's income tax becomes significant:

Long story short, the tiresome debating point about people leaving California has nothing to do with taxes. California no longer attracts a lot of people because we don't build enough new housing, which has made it expensive to live here. That's it.

MSNBC canceled Mehdi Hasan's weekly show today. Twitter is alive with accusations that this was done because Hasan is outspokenly progressive and pro-Palestinian. Or did it happen because of low ratings? You decide:

Hard to say, isn't it? Hasan's ratings over the past half year have been fairly steady, although he's lost a good chunk of audience since August. Most of this decline came after October 7 and may have been due to his pro-Palestinian stance.

So...... was he canceled because he was too pro-Palestinian? Or because he lost his audience because he was too pro-Palestinian? And does it matter?

If you want to see the difference between Democrats and Republicans in action, just consider the issue of congressional subpoenas.

In the House, Republicans have subpoenaed Hunter Biden to provide testimony in a case where there's no evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing. Nonetheless, Biden has agreed to testify and has asked only for the hearing to be public. This has caused Republicans to flip out.

Over in the Senate, Democrats have subpoenaed Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo to provide testimony about gifts to Clarence Thomas, something that clearly did happen. Republicans have gone absolutely ballistic over this, desperately trying to stop the subpoena and then publicly telling Crow and Leo they should ignore it. Leo has told the Senate to fuck itself, and Republicans have assured him they'll mount a filibuster against any attempt to enforce his testimony.

Both sides, though.

Palm trees silhouetted against a rainbow near John Wayne Airport.

Kevin McCarthy has long been a loyal foot soldier for Donald Trump, but when House Republicans were preparing to oust him from the speakership Trump was nowhere to be found. McCarthy called Trump to ask why he hadn't offered any support:

During the call, Trump lambasted McCarthy for not expunging his two impeachments and not endorsing him in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the conversation.

This is an obsession of Trump's. Back in July, Politico's Playbook said this:

We’re told that Trump brings up the matter in every call he has with McCarthy, prodding the speaker about when he will bring expungement to the floor. McCarthy, however, has already pushed back the timeline. Perhaps realizing how tough such a vote will be, he recently told Trump’s team that the House will vote by the end of September.

By the end of September McCarthy had bigger problems on his plate, so we'll never know if he would have followed through.

In any case, Trump now has himself a new Speaker. Mike Johnson has endorsed Trump but hasn't given any indication that he'll bring expungement to the floor. So Trump hasn't really gotten anything out of the whole fiasco except a bit of revenge. But isn't that what life is all about?

POSTSCRIPT: You may be wondering if the House even can expunge Trump's impeachments. Of course not. It's in the Congressional Record and nothing can change that.¹

But if an expungement resolution passed, Trump would be able to say he had never been impeached. Hell, he could say it right now. It's a free country. But a cockamamie resolution wouldn't change the actual historical events any more than a routine Trump lie would.

¹Although I suppose I shouldn't give them ideas.

Today's inflation news is all good:

On a monthly basis, core PCE inflation was down to 2.0%, which is the Fed's target rate. Headline inflation was even better, clocking in close to zero.

On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation came in at 3.0% and core inflation at 3.5%.

POSTSCRIPT: Now that inflation is going down instead of up, I notice that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post even bothers to report it on their front page. Even the Wall Street Journal mentions it only under a headline about consumer spending slowing down. And we wonder why people don't seem to know that inflation is way down?

From Elon Musk, asked what he thinks about companies that have stopped advertising on Twitter in response to antisemitic comments—including one of his own—posted a couple of weeks ago:

Go fuck yourself.

Musk is once again demonstrating his keen understanding of the business world here. Advertisers don't like having their ads appear next to hate speech, but Musk continues to think of routine site moderation as capitulation to the woke mind virus. In reality it's just respect for the needs of corporate sponsors. Every medium that relies on advertisers is well aware that they want a 0% chance of being associated with anything that consumers hate.

In any case, Musk seems to know very well what this means to him:

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is to kill the company,” Musk said.... If X does go bankrupt, the public will blame censorious advertisers, not him or his actions, Musk said, vowing not to bow to pressure from outside companies or critics.

Interestingly, Musk admitted during this interview that his antisemitic post "was one of the most foolish he had ever made, and said he was not an antisemite." I believe that, actually. I think he's just gotten himself so wound up with his jihad against the woke mind virus that he can barely think straight. He made the bank shot connection from George Soros funding woke organizations to those organizations favoring the interests of Black people—and his brain blurted out "Jews are anti-white." This is less an indication of antisemitism than it is the sign of a disordered mind that's developed an irrational rage against wokeness.

Nonetheless, he said what he said. What's more, the Times article says he admitted his remark was foolish, but doesn't suggest he apologized for it. That would be a pretty good first step.

A friend sent me an item for the "Pollyanna Drum" file today. It's a study of mental health and the internet, and its basic insight is that internet penetration has been different in different countries. So if we track measures of mental health along with levels of internet usage, we should be able to tell if there's any correlation.

Short answer: There isn't.

What the study finds is that as internet usage goes up, so do life satisfaction, negative experiences, and positive experiences. However, the numbers are all so close to zero that there's really no measurable effect at all.

The study also looks at mental health vs. cell phone use and finds much the same thing. They found a possible small increase in life satisfaction in countries with more cell phones, but it was still nothing meaningful. The authors also find no particular differences between sexes or age groups.

I don't know how seriously to take this report. It compares countries, not individuals, and shows only the broad impact of "the internet" on a vague outcome (life satisfaction). Overall, I'd say it's suggestive, but not much more.

That said, it's yet another brick in the coffin of social media hysteria. The more research that gets done, the less there seems to be to it.

CBS News runs the following headline today:

Americans need an extra $11,400 today just to afford the basics

This is hardly news. Every month Republicans release a report telling us how much inflation is costing the average family—without, of course, bothering to tell us how much the average family's income has gone up.

And sneaky devils that they are, they start their analysis in January 2021. That way, in case you decide to look at average wages on your own, you'll start right in the middle of the pandemic wage decline without showing the previous pandemic wage increase:

Long story short, if you start in January 2020 to get a fair comparison, inflation has cost you a little over $12,000. At the same time, average household income has gone up a little over $13,000.

Why would CBS News even bother running this? It's just a rewrite of some routine Republican propaganda and the headline is wildly misleading. To make it even worse, they wait six paragraphs to tell you that wages are up—and they do it in boring percentages instead of dramatic thousands of dollars. They might as well just put themselves on the RNC payroll and be done with it.

During negotiations over the debt ceiling, Republicans agreed to a topline budget number for the upcoming fiscal year of $1.59 trillion. Within a few weeks, however, the House Freedom Caucus was back to demanding a lower budget number with a peculiar level of precision: $1.471 trillion. In the end, it was this number that prevented the House from agreeing to a budget. This led to Kevin McCarthy making a deal with Democrats to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running, and that in turn led to McCarthy's ouster.

That was two months ago and the House still can't agree on a budget. So guess what? The Freedom Caucus is finally recognizing reality:

Since earlier this summer, conservatives have demanded government spending cuts below the budget levels established by the $1.59 trillion debt ceiling deal reached earlier this year.... But on Wednesday, some of those same conservatives began more actively telegraphing a concession of sorts: They’d reluctantly entertain the same $1.59 trillion topline they once spurned.

So in the end it was all for nothing. They deposed a Speaker, spent weeks electing a new one, still couldn't pass a budget, and have now finally reluctantly agreed to pretty much the same budget number as everyone else.

And why not? Take a look at discretionary spending over the past two decades:

Compared to 20 years ago, defense spending is down 3.5% and non-defense spending is down 20.3%. That sounds great for conservatives. So what are they so unhappy about?