Month: March 2024

Oh my:

Speaker Mike Johnson is about to drop to a one-vote majority, as retiring Rep. Mike Gallagher has decided he will exit the House as soon as next month, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Gallagher's resignation will produce a 217-213 Republican majority, which means two defections on a vote would produce a 215-215 tie. So one defection is indeed all Johnson can afford.

On the bright side, a special election will be held in May to replace Kevin McCarthy, which will produce another Republican vote. On the downside, a special election to replace Brian Higgins in April might well produce another Democratic vote. Stay tuned.

Donald Trump's plan to take his worthless social media company public has been approved by investors. At the current valuation of the acquiring vehicle, his 80 million shares (give or take) will be worth north of $3 billion:

But what's really going to happen when the newly merged company starts trading? It currently has 37 million shares outstanding, which will balloon to (approximately) 188 million shares after the merger—with no increase in underlying value since Truth Social is worthless. Under normal circumstances, a 5x share increase would mechanically produce a 5x drop in share price, which leaves Trump with a stake worth about $600 million. And since even that overvalues the stock, his stake could easily drop to $200 million or less.

Under normal circumstances. Which these aren't. The share price is being held up by Trump's MAGA fans, who don't care about fundamentals. They just want to support their hero. The question is whether they can keep this up when there are 188 million shares out there. Are there enough of them to withstand even a modest short seller willing to bet that the balloon has to burst before long?

Beats me. Meme stocks can keep their value for a surprisingly long time if the fan base is big enough and committed enough—and God knows the MAGA base is committed.

Still, the scam here is so obvious that it's hard to believe even the MAGA crowd is going to keep the faith for very long. We'll see.

Is it time to play Speaker Roulette again? Reigning House lunatic Marjorie Taylor Greene is mad that Mike Johnson passed a budget package with the help of Democratic votes:

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, on Friday took the first step toward ousting House Speaker Mike Johnson, filing a resolution calling for his removal after he pushed through a $1.2 trillion bipartisan spending bill that enraged the hard right.

“Today I filed a motion to vacate after Speaker Johnson has betrayed our conference and broken our rules,” Ms. Greene said shortly after passage of the package... “It’s more of a warning than a pink slip,” Ms. Greene told reporters on the steps of the Capitol. “We need a new speaker.”

As it happens, this was not a vote where a few extreme Republicans dissented but most of them voted in favor. Republicans as a whole voted against the budget 112-101.

But did a majority of the Republican caucus truly hate the bill? Or was it more that a lot of them knew it would pass with Democratic votes, so they had the freedom to dissent without any consequences? I suspect the latter.

And what if MTG pulls the trigger on a motion to oust Johnson? He could easily keep his position with the help of a few Democrats, but he'd have to ask for it. Democrats probably wouldn't ask for anything in return, but they'd insist that Johnson has to at least want their support. Kevin McCarthy didn't, which sealed his fate.

These are all thoughts for another day. The debt ceiling is done, the budget is done, and there's nothing else coming up in the near future aside from Ukraine aid. So I imagine that Johnson is safe until Election Day, at least.

Remember the great infant formula shortage of 2022? It was caused by a bacterial infection at a plant run by Abbott Laboratories, makers of the popular Similac brand.

Or was it? About half the formula in the US is provided free to low-income families via the WIC program, which runs competitive bidding in each state every few years to choose a supplier. Over at National Review, Dominic Pino says this is the real problem:

When government steps between customers and producers, price signals stop working as they should. The mutually beneficial dynamic by which competition between producers lowers prices and increases choices for customers does not have the chance to play out. Success in the market becomes dependent on closeness to government, rather than satisfying customers. The baby-formula market is a perfect illustration of this age-old story — but it’s hardly the only example.

Maybe! Ironically, though, the state-level competitive bidding idea was originally a conservative laboratories of democracy thing. After a decade of spiraling formula prices, states turned to competitive bidding to rein in costs:

The most decisive showdown occurred in Texas in 1988, where a conservative Republican administration moved to institute competitive bidding and some of the large manufacturers mounted a major opposition lobbying effort, but the state moved forward with competitive bidding nonetheless.

In 1989, statewide competitive bidding was mandated by Congress. President George H.W Bush sang its praises:

By utilizing the competitive forces of the market, these State laboratories of innovation were able to use savings of $300 million to increase WIC participation by 500,000 this year.... By moving all States to competitive bidding systems, this bill will save an additional $40 million and allow 68,000 more needy pregnant women, infants, and children to participate in WIC.

....This is the kind of action we must pursue — obtaining better value for each dollar of Federal spending — if we are to make progress on pressing national concerns.

Pino's peg for his piece is a recently released FTC report about the 2022 shortage. But that report, far from suggesting that government regulations had reduced the number of suppliers and made the supply chain more fragile, shows just the opposite:

As you can see, the formula market has always been highly concentrated. However, since the start of competitive bidding it's gotten less concentrated, going from three major suppliers to four.

The only real problem is that while the market as a whole may have gotten more competitive, each state relies heavily on a single supplier. In 2022, for example, states that had contracts with Abbott were obviously hit especially hard. Still, what's the alternative? Not to conduct competitive bidding? That hardly makes sense.

So there's not really much to the market interference criticism. Statewide competitive bidding was a conservative idea in the first place, and it has indeed lowered taxpayer costs by billions of dollars with no ill effects on market concentration. The only remaining objection is a generic complaint about all social welfare programs distorting the free market, with WIC merely a handy example.

Actually, though, there is one remaining objection. Pino only barely mentions this, but he's right that competition suffers from pointless US tariffs on foreign sources of formula. That's something we probably really should do away with. Unfortunately, conservatives are pretty stoked about tariffs these days thanks to Donald Trump, so there's not much chance of that.

The Washington Post reports today that misinformation about birth control has surged on social media:

Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence.

....Physicians and researchers say little data is available about the scale of this new phenomenon, but anecdotally, more patients are coming in with misconceptions about birth control fueled by influencers and conservative commentators.

When they say little data is available, they aren't kidding. To my surprise, contraceptive use is barely tracked at all, and the tracking that is done is years out of date. After a good deal of searching, the only relevant information I could find was a limited survey that measured contraceptive use between 2021 and 2023:¹

[Aside from condom use] the research did not reveal significant changes in the proportion of each state's reproductive-aged population using any other methods. We found no significant changes in reports of use of intrauterine devices (IUDs).... And, as with contraceptive use overall, we did not find evidence that the proportion of women who were using their preferred contraceptive method changed between the two time points in any of the four states.

In other words, there was no measurable change in the use of either oral contraceptives or IUDs.

I'm not a sworn foe of anecdotal information. I promise. At the same time, I am a sworn foe of popular delusions and the madness of crowds, regardless of where they come from. Right now we seem to be in the grip of madness about social media, as if misinformation and teenage fads are brand new things that didn't exist before Instagram.

My advice is to keep an open mind about social media, especially if you're old and don't think highly of it in the first place. This goes two ways. It means you should be skeptical of unsupported panics about social media's effects on teens and you should remain open to the possibility that evidence might someday demonstrate concrete harm to teens from social media. Try not to go crazy in either direction.

¹This is a Guttmacher study of women age 18-44 based on an annual survey of contraceptive use from NORC in four states. The raw NORC data goes back to 2017 and covers nine states, but it appears to be available only to scholars, not the general public.

In 1983 Congress passed a Social Security bill that, among other things, raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. This was justified on the basis that life expectancies had gone up a lot since the program started in 1937.

There was something to this. Life expectancy after reaching adulthood (age 25) increased more than seven years over that period. It was reasonable to think that most people could afford to work a couple of years more than in the past.

Everything would have been OK if that's where we had left things. The problem is that Republicans have been obsessed ever since with raising the retirement age even more. This is despite the fact that adult life expectancies have behaved radically differently in recent decades. In 1992 states began collecting education information on death certificates, which means we can now directly see the difference between those with college educations and those without:

People without college degrees saw only a small increase in life expectancy through 2019 and were then absolutely walloped by COVID-19. As of 2021, their adult life expectancy was 1.76 years less than it was in 1992.

Think about this. If we raise the Social Security retirement age to 70, it means that folks without college degrees will have average retirements nearly five years shorter than 30 years ago—even though they'll pay all the same taxes during their working lives.

How can a party that supposedly appeals to the working class justify this? Even if you dismiss COVID as a temporary hiccup, an increase in the retirement age to 70 would still mean that non-college workers would lose about 1½ years of retirement. It's unconscionable.

UPDATE: Overall life expectancy numbers for 2022 were released after I wrote this post and show a significant recovery from the COVID pandemic. Here's an approximate update of chart above:

This is a cute little house jutting out over the Seine. I guess the passage under the house is sort of like having an attached garage: just tie up your boat and take the elevator directly up to your living room. It's got an elevator, doesn't it?

Punchbowl reports today about a bill that trades a Republican tax cut for a Democratic increase in the Child Tax Credit:

The Wyden-Smith tax bill is in deep trouble. The Senate Finance Committee’s top Republican, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, told GOP colleagues privately on Wednesday that he doesn’t want to pass a tax bill this year, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the conversation.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Republicans at the lunch that he hopes they’ll back Crapo’s position on the tax bill.... Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also spoke up against the tax bill and its child tax credit expansion during the lunch, according to two sources.

Republicans are a strange bunch these days. Last year the Senate passed a budget nearly on time with two-thirds of Senate Republicans joining in. But House Republicans revolted, finally relenting only a couple of days ago.

The tax bill is just the opposite. It sailed through the House with 80% of Republicans voting for it. In the Senate, something like 0% of Republicans are on board.

How is it that House and Senate Republicans can be so wildly at odds? It's like they're hardly even the same party these days.

Sales of existing homes rose sharply in February, up 9.5% from January:

Prices broke a yearlong slide, rising 1.6% from January.

Huh:

Surgeons in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into an ailing 62-year-old man, the first procedure of its kind. If successful, the breakthrough offers hope to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose kidneys have failed.

I'm personally looking forward to new eyes from a genetically engineered hawk and a new nose from a genetically engineered bloodhound. Someday.