Month: December 2023

Our friends at National Review point us today to Matthew Dickerson's recent review of the federal government's improper payments rate:

The Biden Administration has reported a total of $764 billion in improper payments in just three years The improper payment rate has averaged 5.9 percent during President Biden’s administration. The pre-pandemic historical average was a 4.23 percent improper payment rate. If the Biden Administration had simply kept improper payments at the historical norm, improper payments would have been $210 billion lower over the last three years.

This finger-pointing is misguided. The spike in improper payments was largely due to pandemic-era programs that were hastily and sloppily put together by the Trump administration. What's more, as Dickerson himself points out, improper payments from the unemployment expansion were accounted for in 2023 even though they were actually paid out in 2021 and 2022. He also doesn't account for recoveries of improper payments. Here's an apples-to-apples chart:

Following the pandemic spike, the improper payment rate dropped to 3.8%. Over the last 15 years the trend has been almost perfectly flat.

POSTSCRIPT: I have to say that I'm impressed with the speediness of this report. The 2023 fiscal year only ended two months ago and we already have improper payments all tallied up.

But that also prompts a question: If agencies can figure out this quickly that improper payments have been made, why do they make them in the first place?

This is not news, but here's a recent poll finding about the 2020 election. It's for Republicans only:

Among Republican voters who support Trump in the primaries, 86% think he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election and 61% think there was outright fraud from Democrats.

Those are basically Trump cultists. But even among the non-Trump voters, 41% think Trump rightfully won the election. That's a majority of those who expressed an opinion.

For what it's worth, this is one of the answers to the question of why even moderate Republicans still plan to vote for Trump rather than Biden. In their view, it's Democrats who are a threat to democracy, and all Trump is doing is fighting back.

In other news, it looks like Republicans have pretty much given up on Ukraine:

Republicans only like wars that Republicans start. They get tired of wars supported by Democratic presidents pretty quickly, even if, as in this case, it means giving Vladimir Putin whatever he wants.

This is a municipal bus driver in Paris. She looks kind of bored, like any bus driver, but startlingly elegant. In France I guess even the bus drivers like to look chic.

A couple of weeks ago Speaker Mike Johnson agreed to release the full 40,000 hours of videotape from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol:

He strongly suggested that the videos would contradict the public understanding of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.... “When bureaucrats and partisan activists withhold data to advance a narrative, it erodes trust in our institutions,” Mr. Johnson posted on social media. “We must restore that trust.”

Quite so. We must release all the—

Sorry. Almost all the surveillance video:

“We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” Johnson said at a press conference.

Ah, right. Gotta blur the faces of folks doing illegal stuff so they don't get in trouble. But not the faces of rioters who we can pretend were law enforcement officers in order to feed conspiracy theories that this was all a false flag operation by the FBI:

This was sent to me.

Is this person flashing a badge? If so, this would prove there were undercover federal agents disguised as MAGA.

I was thrown in solitary confinement for peacefully protesting. I just want the truth to be known.

Please RT so we can get the truth either way pic.twitter.com/e5ru9wfNyb

— Derrick Evans (@Evans4WV) November 19, 2023

Sen. Mike Lee and the ever reliable Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene both circulated this crackpot theory. It's funny that no one bothered to blur it out.

POSTSCRIPT: As you might imagine, the Justice Department has had full access to this video from the start. This makes Johnson's blurring excuse even dumber than it already is.

The Senate seems to be moving closer and closer to overriding Tommy Tuberville's jihad against military promotions. So Tuberville is throwing in the towel before that happens:

New: Tuberville announces he will drop his holds on all military officer noms except 4-star generals

— Ursula Perano (@UrsulaPerano) December 5, 2023

The vast majority of promotions are at the lower ranks of flag officers, so this means there are only 11 holds left. Will Senate Republicans help break a filibuster to get just those promotions through? Stay tuned.

PISA test scores for math were released today. As usual, the US trails just about everyone, a result I take with a grain of salt because I've always had some doubts about the PISA methodology. More interesting, I think, is the decline in scores from 2018 to 2022:

Whatever my doubts about PISA's methodology, it stayed the same from 2018-22. This means the change in scores is probably fairly reliable.

As you can see, the US did surprisingly well. France and Sweden, for example, reported keeping schools open at much higher rates than the US, but even so their test scores declined more than ours.

This fits with data suggesting that school closures had little effect on test score declines within the US. Put everything together and the evidence is pointing ever more strongly to the conclusion that COVID test declines were unrelated to school closures. The real cause of the declines, then, remains a bit of a mystery. Perhaps just overall stress from the pandemic?

Hiring data came out today, and October was slightly down over the previous month. However, this is part of a longer term decline:

New hires are now back down to their 2019 level and falling steadily. Job openings were down 7% from September, but still well above their pre-pandemic level. It's nothing to be alarmed about yet, but it might be in a few months.

From Dean Baker:

I know people say the rationing was the pandemic, but guess what folks, so was the inflation of 2021-2022. It was a worldwide story. That point is too complicated for Donald Trump, but not for most voters.

— Dean Baker (@DeanBaker13) December 5, 2023

Unfortunately, I think this is too complicated for most voters. They've heard a million times that inflation was Joe Biden's fault because of his stimulus bill, and that's what they believe even if it makes no sense.

Rep. James Comer has been trying to bushwhack Hunter Biden for months and months and months. He's desperate to prove that Hunter passed along money to Joe Biden, thus showing that Joe was part of Hunter's lobbying operation all along.

The problem is that he just outright lies about everything. These are not subtle lies, either. He claimed that Joe accepted a $200,000 payment from James Biden as a payoff for something or other. It wasn't, and Comer knew it. It was just repayment of a loan.

Then Comer did the same thing again. And again, it was a completely innocent and legitimate loan.

Now he's doing it again, claiming that Hunter made monthly payments to Joe in 2018. J'accuse! But as Comer knows perfectly well, this was all about a truck that Joe bought for his son during the worst of his drug addiction phase. Hunter took over the payments when he could, which meant reimbursing Joe.

After years of investigation, Republicans have come up with nothing. They have precisely one (1) actual grievance against Joe Biden: that in the 2020 debate with Donald Trump he said his son hadn't made money from China. That was untrue.

And that's it. There have been no pass-through payments to Joe. There was no corruption over the pressure on Ukraine to fire its head prosecutor. There were no conversations with Hunter's clients deeper than, "Hi, howya doing?" There were no offshore accounts for Joe. There were no meetings set up for Hunter. There was nothing. Period.

But Republicans are nonetheless bound and determined to destroy Hunter Biden just for the sheer joy of knowing how much it will hurt Joe. It's nauseating behavior.

Earlier today I wrote about the stalled talks over Ukraine aid. Republicans want border security measures in return for their support, and this morning it looked as though talks had broken down over their unwillingness to compromise.

I have an afternoon update on this. It's no longer that it "looks like" Republicans are unwilling to compromise. Sen. John Cornyn has just come out and said so:

“I think there’s a misunderstanding on the part of Senator Schumer and some of our Democratic friends,” Cornyn said. “This is not a traditional negotiation, where we expect to come up with a bipartisan compromise on the border. This is a price that has to be paid in order to get the supplemental.”

That's clear enough. As usual, the pretense here is that only Democrats care about passing legislation, so they have to pay a toll to be allowed to do so. It's remarkable how routinely they get away with this.