Month: July 2024

Raj Chetty and a cast of thousands have a new paper out that looks at economic mobility. In a nutshell, it finds that mobility has increased among Black families and decreased among white families. Similarly, it has increased among the rich and declined among the poor. For more details, the New York Times has a long write-up here.

But I was sort of intrigued by this chart:

Children from higher-income families tend to have higher employment rates. This probably doesn't seem too surprising. But at the 90th percentile—that is, household income above $250,000—the trend breaks down. Kids from the very richest households work a little less than those who were merely well off.

The difference is only a few percentage points. Still, what's the cause? The most obvious possibility is that rich kids are more likely to get by on family wealth (or inheritance) and don't have to work. But while that seems plausible at very high income levels, it seems a little unlikely at $250,000.

But what other explanations are there? I'm coming up blank.

Here's the latest YouGov poll on the presidential race along with all the crosstabs:

Kamala Harris is leading Trump 46% to 44%. Compared to two weeks ago, she's five points ahead of where Biden was and seven points ahead of where she was.

Compared to Biden two weeks ago, Harris has picked up 3 points among whites, 7 points among Blacks, and 7 points among Hispanics. She's also gained among all age groups, including a solid 11-point gain among young voters.

Harris has also gained a spectacular 10 points among independents, and she's polling higher with Democrats than Biden did. The undecided/third-party vote has plummeted by 7 points since she entered the race.

The YouGov poll generally changes slowly thanks to its structure, so these are big gains. And while it's true that Harris's honeymoon with the public won't last forever, I think these gains are permanent and will only get bigger. There are just a whole lot of people who breathed a huge sigh of relief when Biden withdrew. They really didn't want to vote for Trump, and all they were looking for was someone, anyone, who seemed like a reasonable alternative. Harris is that person.

If Donald Trump wants to lose the "weird" label, he needs to stop being.......not so much weird in this clip as just plain creepy:

"She was always of Indian heritage ... until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black." What kind of person talks like this? A five-year-old knows better.

Kamala Harris went to Howard University. In the '90s she was famously the girlfriend of California Speaker Willie Brown. Here's the lead from a San Francisco Chronicle article in 2004 about her first political victory:

Kamala Harris was sworn in Thursday as the first black woman in California history to serve as a district attorney, pledging to be "smart on crime" as she assumes the role of San Francisco's top prosecutor.

Harris's ancestry, as everyone knows, is Black on her father's side and Indian on her mother's side. This isn't hard. But Trump blundered ahead obliviously, suggesting that she only recently adopted a fake Black identity for political advantage. And even more incredibly, he seemed to think this might be a great ploy in front of a Black audience. Was he expecting them to nod appreciatively and murmur, "Hell yeah, man's got a point"?

Whatever else you can say, Trump sure as hell didn't win any Asian or Black votes today. Why did he agree to an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in the first place if he planned to be hostile and condescending the whole time?

Traffic jam on the Danube.

Can we please keep this simple? When Donald Trump told a bunch of evangelical Christians that after 2024 "you won't have to vote anymore," all he meant was:

Just vote for me this year. I don't care what happens after that.

That's it. Trump doesn't care about anything but himself. He doesn't genuinely care one way or the other about abortion. He doesn't care about immigration. He doesn't care about being Christian. He doesn't care about either Israel or Ukraine. There are things that personally annoy him. And there are people he wants revenge on. But that's about it. His public stands are whatever he thinks will win him fans.

Everyone knows this. Trump is all about Trump, full stop.

Today's big headline:

Fed Opens Door Further to a September Rate Cut
Officials held rates steady, but made an important pivot by highlighting a more equal focus on employment and inflation goals

Fer chrissake. "Opens door"? An "important pivot"? What more does the Fed want? Every measure of inflation has been hovering between 2-3% for the past year, and estimates of underlying inflation are around 2%. It's time to declare victory and go home.

The Wall Street Journal informs us today that inflation affects some household more than others. Their example is Nicole Lewis, a mother of three who lives north of Flint, Michigan:

Pay raises since the pandemic helped Lewis and her husband, now a city manager, double their earnings to what had previously seemed unattainable: more than $90,000 a year. But price hikes for everything from groceries to auto insurance still forced the couple to siphon funds from savings.

The 35-year-old Lewis now buys many basics on credit, juggling cards to protect her credit score without letting outstanding debt snowball. Trips to the beach and bowling alley are out. Shopping at thrift stores is in.

This is nuts. Their earnings doubled but they're allegedly having trouble with price hikes that amount to about 20%? There's obviously a lot more going on here than inflation.

Since 2019, inflation has raised prices by 19.2%. Here is CBO's estimate of how that breaks down by income level:

There's practically no difference. The Lewis family is in the middle quintile and experienced inflation of 19.3%.

The Journal, of course, doesn't bother with actual evidence, even though it's quickly and easily available. That might ruin a good story, after all. It's just vibes and more vibes.

Watch this short clip of Kamala Harris at a campaign rally on Tuesday:

What's important here isn't what she says. It's how she says it. She's talking like a normal person and she's obviously having fun. It's been a long time since we've seen that from a presidential candidate of either party.

So far Harris hasn't really had to navigate any tough wedge issues, like Gaza or immigration. That will come, and when it does we'll find out how good a politician she really is. In the meantime, though, she's building up a lot of political capital just by being excited, buoyant, and playful in the way she attacks Trump. It's a huge contrast to the dour doomsaying of Trump and Vance, and they have no answer for it.

I ignored this when I first saw it this morning:

I ignored it because I hadn't paid attention to the name and figured it was just some rando on Twitter. It's not. It's Kimberlé Crenshaw, a longtime law professor at UCLA and Columbia who's influential and extremely well known as a pioneer of intersectionality.

And yet she wrote a post that isn't within light years of being right. She must know that by now, but she hasn't deleted the post or corrected it. According to the Washington Post's database, here are police killings over the past decade:

Black women make up 0.85% of all police killings since 2015. Not one-third. Here's the armed/unarmed breakdown (not counting six undetermined cases):

Sonya Massey is the only unarmed Black woman killed by police in the past three years. Overall, unarmed Black women made up about 11% of the total among Black women, not a majority. Not even close.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is way too famous and influential (188,000 followers on Twitter) to post recklessly incorrect stuff like this. Where does it come from?

Are Republicans weird? Minnesota governor Tim Walz started this meme and Republicans are steaming about it. Their response has mostly been, "No, you're weird."

The best way to settle this is to go to the tape. Here's a list—by no means exhaustive—of things that various Republicans have proposed recently. You be the judge.

1. The FBI was secretly behind the January 6 insurrection.
2. Facebook is constantly censoring conservatives.
3. America needs a strategic bitcoin reserve.
4. You shouldn't drink Bud Light because it's too woke.
5. COVID vaccines can kill you.
6. Childless people should get fewer votes.
7. New York state should be defunded for allowing a court to convict Donald Trump.
8. Trans people are scheming to turn your child trans behind your back.
9. We should return to the gold standard.
10. Climate change is fake.
11. We should allow more oil drilling in national parks.
12. Barack Obama is secretly in charge of the White House.
13. Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.
14. You should not be allowed to buy cultivated meat.
15. Americans stop working too early. The retirement age should be raised.
16. We should get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because it produces too much evidence of climate change.
17. Energy efficiency standards for home appliances should be repealed.
18. The world's most notorious online drug trafficker deserves a pardon.
19. Christians in America are a persecuted minority.
20. The 2024 Olympics were ruined by a brief tableau that looked vaguely like The Last Supper.