Month: December 2023

Brian Beutler has a piece up today that's gotten a lot of attention. He argues that Democrats haven't adjusted to a new online media environment that gives Republicans a big advantage in spreading their preferred dystopian narratives. He points to 2012 as the last old school election:

Back then, Republicans were just as invested in spreading doom and gloom as they are today, but they had fewer tools to work with. Mainstream news outlets still viewed economic data principally through the lens of horserace politics, but they were more or less on the same page about what metrics were important: how many jobs the economy created on net, the unemployment rate, GDP.

....Today, it’s much less clear if and how regular people distinguish news media from every other kind, and (I think by no coincidence) wide swaths of the population believe we’re in recession when we’re not; think inflation remains out of control, when it isn’t; think gas prices are high, when they’re low.

This needs some pushback. For starters, I don't think Democratic campaigns are quite as clueless as Brian suggests. Mainly, though, I think he badly overestimates how informed voters were in the olden days.

As an example, Ipsos has conducted its "Perils of Perception" survey for the past decade. Back in 2014, one of the questions they asked was about how many people are out of work. The real answer was 6%, but that's not what people thought:

Americans pegged unemployment at 32%, above even Great Depression levels! And when Ipsos tallied up their whole set of questions, Americans were (almost) the most ignorant people in the advanced world:

This is in 2014, before the great wave of social media crashed over us. Are we even more ignorant today? Ipsos hasn't asked the unemployment question since then, so who knows. But it hardly matters. When you're as far off as 32% vs. 6%, a few percentage points here and there hardly matter.

There are a couple of things to say more generally:

• Aside from weirdos who inhale BLS statistics, everyone is ignorant about the economy and always has been. Nobody knows anything.
• Fox News has always spread misinformation far more efficiently than social media.
• In fact, research suggests that social media doesn't have a big effect on perceptions. It might make extremists a little more extreme, but that's it.
• In summary: All the evidence I'm aware of suggests that ignorance and distortion are no worse today than they've ever been. Social media just makes our ignorance a little more obvious.

None of this is to say that liberals should brush aside social media. And I don't think they do. But it's outrage that always gets outsized attention, and the unfortunate fact is that Republicans have long been better than Democrats at the outrage business, full stop. They're better at it on TV, better in newsletters, better in email, and better on social media. This is not because they're smarter or meaner than liberals, it's because their audience responds to outrage so that's what they give them. Liberals respond more strongly to other things, so we get those. And since outrage gets more traditional media attention than appeals to unfairness or poverty, we have headwinds there too. Them's the breaks.

Since January, grocery prices have gone up a grand total of 1.1%. That's literally not noticeable. So why are people still complaining about high food prices? This chart tells the story:

Since 2021, which is when the big inflationary surge started, food prices have gone up 20% while wages have gone up only 12%. Shoppers still have memories of what food "used to cost," and it used to be 20% less. Even for folks who factor in their higher wages accurately (which is rare), food is 8% higher than it was before inflation.

This is a bit different from overall inflation, which didn't go as high as food. And the difference is less if you count from 2020, when the pandemic started. But a lot of people probably think of things as "before and after inflation," and in those terms food is still pretty pricey.

Rudy Giuliani has been found liable with extreme prejudice for defaming two Georgia poll workers:

Jurors [awarded] roughly $33 million for the two women together. But plaintiff’s attorney Michael Gottlieb made no specific ask when it came to emotional or punitive damages.

Instead he told the jury to “send a message “to Giuliani and any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take this chance for seeking profit and fame by assassinating the character of ordinary people.” And they did.

Indeed they did. The jury awarded $115 in punitive damages for a total award of $148 million.

This will undoubtedly be knocked down on appeal, and Giuliani doesn't have $148 million anyway. But he's been sent a message, all right.

Charlie is not a happy cat. He wounded his back leg somehow, so we took him to the vet and got him an antibiotic shot, but of course recovery also includes a cone to keep him from licking the spot. The regular cone was too big, so we got him this stylish Darth Vader cone instead. He is unimpressed with it. As usual, the lack of peripheral vision unnerves him, so he skulks around very slowly these days.

But it probably won't be for long. His sore spot is visibly better already, so it will probably only be a few more days.

On an annual basis, the United States supplies about 12% of Israel's military budget. That's the equivalent of topping up the US military budget by $100 billion per year.

TikTok and Instagram get all the attention, but YouTube remains by far the most popular social media app among American teens:

On YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, Hispanic teens report using them "almost constantly" at rates more than three time higher than white teens. Among teens, generally speaking, social media is most heavily used by Hispanics, girls, and low-income households.

How are our family farms doing? The USDA's annual survey reports good news:

As in previous years, the median total income of all U.S. family farm households ($95,418) was greater in 2022 than the median income of all U.S. households ($74,580). The median total household income for all family farms in 2022 increased from $92,239 in 2021.

Not bad! But now take a look at this table, which shows farm income by race:

The median family farmer, no matter their race, reports negative farm income. They make money almost exclusively from non-farm work.

Now, this varies substantially by farm size. Farm income is negative for small farms and about $45,000 for medium size farms. That's still not much. Only at midsize farms does income reach $130,000, and it goes up from there.

Still, for the majority of family farmers, the actual farm itself is at best a break-even operation. I wonder why they bother?

The New York Times presents us today with this chart showing congressional retirements compared to the past couple of election cycles:

It looks like everything is perfectly normal this year. Both Democratic and Republican retirements are right on track with their 2022 levels.

Ho ho ho:

Congress has approved legislation that would prevent any president from withdrawing the United States from NATO without approval from the Senate or an Act of Congress.

The measure, spearheaded by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), was included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which passed out of the House on Thursday and is expected to be signed by President Biden.

Republicans might all bow and scrape to Donald Trump in public, but even they have their limits. Trump keeps talking about pulling out of NATO, and they want to nip that in the bud while they have a Democratic president willing to sign it. It's a big middle finger to the Donald.

Today Mother Jones re-upped an interview from 2021 with Dorothy Brown, a law professor at Emory University who argues that the US tax code is rigged against Black people. The example she gives has to do with the so-called "marriage penalty," which in some cases makes taxes higher for married couples than if they had stayed unmarried and paid separate individual taxes:

When Congress passed the joint return, they set the stage for the marriage bonus/penalty to exist. Single-wage-earner couples, who are most likely to be white, get a tax cut when they marry, and equal-earning couples, who are most likely to be Black, pay the marriage penalty. The key is which couples are likely to be single-wage-earner households and which are likely to be co-equal earners. Black Americans need two earners to make ends meet because the labor market doesn’t compensate Black Americans the way it does white Americans.

This is not the whole story. Brown is right that among married couples, Black families are more likely to have two earners than white families, by 91% to 68%. This makes tax penalties larger and more likely for Black families. According to the Tax Policy Center:

Among those with penalties, relative to white couples, Black couples paid less in dollars ($1,804 versus $2,091) but paid more as a share of income (1.8 percent versus 1.4 percent).

This is not a huge difference. Moreover, it doesn't take into account the fact that Black women marry at much lower rates than white women. If you look at all families, it's Black families that are less likely to have two earners:

It's true that there's a slightly bigger penalty for getting married among Black couples compared to white couples, but if you look at all families it's Black taxpayers who come out ahead. Overall, there's not much evidence here of a racial bias in the tax code.

POSTSCRIPT: This is an example of doing a deep dive into some aspect of life and discovering a disparate impact on Black and white people. But while this might be a reason to change things, it doesn't necessarily show evidence of any racial animus. It took 50 years for anyone to notice this, and it's unlikely in the extreme that anyone in Congress in 1969 had the slightest idea that the creation of a new tax schedule would have any racial impact at all.