Month: February 2024

Talk about your low-hanging fruit. The IRS is finally starting to send letters to people who make $400,000+ but haven't filed a tax return:

One thing nonfilers haven’t had to fear, until recently, was hearing about their shortcomings from the IRS. The agency generally knows who should be filing a return but hasn’t had the staff to handle correspondence with these taxpayers, so it greatly cut back sending out notices, Werfel said.

The first batch of more than 25,000 letters will go out to taxpayers with more than $1 million in income, followed by more than 100,000 letters to people with incomes between $400,000 and $1 million. The notice says to file your return immediately or to explain either why you are late or don’t have to file.

These aren't people who have filed suspicious returns. They aren't people who have claimed dubious deductions. They're people who haven't even filed a return. But until now Republicans have starved the IRS so thoroughly they didn't even have the staff to ask them politely if they wouldn't mind too much filling out a 1040 sometime soon. You know, for the sake of appearances.

I mean.

"Check out this video of Biden at the border," says Rich Lowry, so I did. It's 25 seconds long and there's no sound, just Biden walking along stiffly thanks to his arthritis. So what's the big problem?

Answer: "Most people are simply not going to feel comfortable with a president who walks this way," says Lowry.

So this is where we are? Not even the usual pretense of Biden being senile, just a flat complaint that he has too much arthritis to be president? Jesus.

I'll note yet again that Biden met a couple of days ago with the "Big Four" congressional leadership, and no one—neither Democrats nor Republicans—even hinted at any problems with Biden. That includes Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who spoke with Biden privately for a few minutes after the meeting ended.

But there's still that arthritis.

I keep hearing about how Mitch McConnell was a terrible person because he stacked the Supreme Court and enabled Donald Trump. That's fair enough, but it's hardly McConnell's biggest achievement:

These days you often hear reporters and commentators saying matter of factly that legislation requires 60 votes in the Senate. This is truly McConnell’s greatest accomplishment. People say this like it’s in the Constitution, like the two-thirds requirement for conviction at impeachment or to approve a treaty. But it is a novel development and it has radically altered U.S. politics. It transforms the federal Senate into a genuinely Calhounian body in which minority factions exercise a de facto and permanent veto over the majority.

It’s what creates gridlock, the breeding ground of political disaffection and extremism.

That's from Josh Marshall, who's old enough to remember that McConnell's real genius was not in breaking a single norm a single time, but in pioneering norm breaking as a governing strategy. He was the one who inherited scattered efforts from his predecessors and transformed them into a single brilliant insight: that the Senate operated on lots of traditions that were just that—traditions. Not rules, not laws, and they could be broken by simply realizing there was nothing to stop you.

This is plainest to see in McConnell's adoption of the routine filibuster. He wasn't the first, but he was the one who put the pieces together and realized you didn't have to pick and choose bills to filibuster. You could just filibuster them all:

Filibusters doubled the year McConnell took over as Republican leader, and they've doubled again since then.

But that's not all. McConnell also routinely refused to hold hearings to confirm judges. He would refuse to appoint Republican members to executive agencies, thus preventing a quorum and stopping the agency in its tracks. He held the debt ceiling hostage multiple times. He sometimes flatly refused to hold hearings for executive branch positions, hoping to hamstring Democratic presidents. And most famously, he refused to hold hearings to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court as long as a Democrat was in the White House.

McConnell was also an inspiration to others. Tommy Tuberville's recent blockade of military promotions, for example, never would have happened in the pre-McConnell era. In the post-McConnell era it was just a routine annoyance.

This is McConnell's legacy. In his final years he softened a bit and became effectively anti-Trump. But in his prime he was an unrepentant arsonist who destroyed the Senate and never looked back.

Sunset near the south entrance to Grand Canyon National Park.

This effect may or may not be permanent, but a team of researchers in England has found that long COVID significantly reduces cognitive ability—and the longer the COVID the more it hurts:

Six IQ points is no joke, though this loss is found only in the most extreme cases. On the other hand, these are averages, which means a significant fraction of even the less severe cases are seeing cognitive declines of 4-5 IQ points.

For the most severe cases, which required ICU admission, IQ declines were 9 points or more, with a few cases showing declines of 20-30 points.

This effect on cognition was highest with the original COVID strain and has waned with the more recent variants. Vaccination helps a little bit. The worst effects were on short-term memory and verbal accuracy, while the mildest effects were on spatial planning.

Has the internet destroyed reading? Not really:

Reading for pleasure has declined by an average of six minutes per day in the internet era, but the truth is we never read very much in the first place. Twenty years ago TV outpaced reading by 7:1. Today it's nearly 11:1. We really love our televisions.

TikTok is a Chinese surveillance and propaganda tool. Chinese-made cranes in US ports are a national security threat. Huawei routers and 5G infrastructure contain backdoors that allow the Chinese government to monitor and disrupt US phone and internet services. Consumer hobbyist drones made in China could provide sensitive images and geographical data to Beijing. Chinese cars "could collect sensitive data about our citizens and our infrastructure and send this data back to the People’s Republic of China," according to President Biden.

That's a lot of Chinese tech that allegedly poses a national security threat. And maybe it does. But with the exception of Huawei, all of these threats come from ordinary companies whose products collect routine data, just like American products do. In other words, the threat isn't sneaky tech, it's the possibility that the Chinese government could demand to see data about US consumers held on company servers.

This applies to literally any Chinese tech, since centralized data collection is a standard part of the modern tech universe. So are all these threats real? Or just excuses for protectionist policies in the guise of national security? That's above my pay grade, but I can't say I'm not starting to get skeptical.

PCE inflation spiked upward in January:

On a conventional year-over-year basis, PCE inflation was up 2.4% in January and core PCE was up 2.8%.

This spike is all about services. Goods inflation was negative, at -2.0%, while services inflation came in at 7.4%.

Here's a question for you. Suppose Joe Biden had a change of heart and decided it was essential to broker a ceasefire in Gaza. What could he do?

Is there any pressure he could bring to bear on Bibi Netanyahu to force him to stop fighting? Be creative, but be realistic too and stay within legal bounds. We aren't going to lob a nuke at Jerusalem or ban Israel from the international banking system. And of course, keep in mind that the war is supported by about two-thirds of the Israeli population.

After you're done with that, do the same thing for the other side. What pressure could Biden put on Hamas to stop fighting and release its Israeli hostages?

My take on both these questions is: nothing. Tell me why I'm wrong.

Over at Mother Jones, Noah Lanard comments on the 13% "uncommitted" vote in yesterday's Michigan Democratic primary:

The results in Michigan are another sign the president’s team underestimated the level of outrage that its war response would provoke. The New York Times’ Peter Baker reported Tuesday that the president’s advisers had been hoping the war would end in early January—and that they thought Arab Americans and people on the left would calm down as they saw Gaza being rebuilt over the summer. This, like so many of their predictions about the war and their ability to shape its direction, is proving to be wishful thinking.

As near as I can tell, Biden's pro-Israel stance is based on conviction, not political calculation. However, if we're judging the politics anyway it's not enough to merely point out that some people don't like Biden's Gaza policy. You have to compare this with the likely impact of following the opposite policy.

It's stating the obvious to say that Biden would have detractors no matter which side of the Gaza conflict he took. It's stating only the slightly less obvious to say that a pro-Palestinian policy would lose him more votes than his current stand.

There's no question that Democratic sympathies have shifted. According to YouGov, Dems have gone from 27%-20% pro-Israel in October to 25%-20% pro-Palestinian now. Nevertheless, even among Democrats, a large majority still think it's important to protect Israel:

Protecting Israel is favored by nearly 3:1 over not caring much.

The simple truth is that Biden would lose some votes no matter what he did, and I find it unlikely that he underestimated much of anything. Disputes over Israel are about as well understood as anything in American politics. In fact, the only surprising thing has nothing to do with Biden: namely that Donald Trump has managed to stay so quiet on the subject and Republicans have managed to block military aid to Israel without much blowback. But this won't stay the case forever.