Month: August 2024

Donald Trump recently proposed eliminating income taxes on Social Security benefits. Why? No one knows. Maybe because low-income seniors already pay no tax on benefits, so it would mostly benefit the well off. And what Republican ever passed up the chance to make a regressive tax even more regressive?

In any case, let's see what Trump's fellow conservatives think of this:

Matt is being entirely too kind here. Stephen Moore was once commonly known as the stupidest man in the world, and this is why. First off, getting older people to stay on the workforce isn't a national priority for either party, as far as I know. Second, what does this have to do with taxing Social Security benefits anyway? Third, does Moore think this would cut Social Security costs? Why? Annual benefits go up if you retire later, so net lifetime benefits paid out are the same no matter when you retire.¹

So, fourth, I'm pretty sure Dems aren't mad they didn't think of this. It's a brain-dead idea that even the Heritage Foundation is too smart to endorse.² Only Donald Trump is dumb enough to propose something that would explicitly make Social Security's finances worse.

¹In addition, if you take Social Security benefits early—age 62, for example—but continue working, your benefits are reduced. However, they're made up either when you stop working or you reach age 67.

²Probably. Their 900-page Project 2025 tome, oddly, just doesn't have space to address Social Security. How about that? But I don't think they've ever proposed ending the tax on benefits, nor has any other conservative think tank.

Five weeks down, one to go. I'm almost done with my radiation treatment.

I'm pleased to report that the "super sunburn" pain I was warned about hasn't materialized. So far I've gotten a very minor bit of soreness in one or two places, and that's it. With only four treatments left it looks like I dodged this particular bullet.

Also, you may recall that the CAR-T treatment wiped out my immune system and killed off all my existing vaccinations. I've spent the past year being re-vaccinated for everything and today was the last one—assuming, of course, that whatever experimental treatment I get next doesn't kill off my immunities all over again. We'll see.

Yesterday morning I was wondering why I hadn't seen any new reporting about the prisoner swap the previous night. Charlotte Klein has the answer:

For days, various media outlets had been aware — through their own reporting and as information trickled out elsewhere — that a prisoner swap involving American journalists and dissidents was in the works. But news organizations were asked by the White House to hold their stories until Gershkovich et al. were in U.S. custody. Until then, the prisoners would still be in Russian captivity, and officials feared that any attention brought to the fragile deal could risk compromising it — not just for the U.S., but for the multiple other countries whose prisoners were freed as part of the swap.

Apparently everyone agreed to this (very normal) request except for Bloomberg, which published a report early in the morning when the American hostages boarded a plane in Russia and then followed it up ten minutes later with a football-spiking tweet bragging about their "scoop." Now everyone is pissed at them for breaking the embargo and potentially endangering the deal.

And for what? To beat other news outlets by a few hours on a story all of them had? Sheesh.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the key figure in the recent prisoner swap with Russia was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. That's because the main sticking point was the release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany for gunning down a Chechen exile in Berlin:

During a meeting in Saudi Arabia in early spring, the Germans revealed for the first time that they were ready to release Krasikov, but warned the Russians that the price would be much higher than previously discussed.

....The negotiations had dragged for so long that Russia started jailing Germans. By the talks’ final stages, about 30 German citizens were detained by Russia and its satellite, Belarus. Initially, Scholz refused to engage in hostage diplomacy, but after one German was sentenced to death in Belarus, the strategy became untenable.

Welcome to Vladimir Putin's Russia. Talks not going your way? Just keep kidnapping Germans until they see the light. What a monstrous, murderous thug.

This is Charlie pretending to go to sleep. He was fooling no one.

The American economy gained 114,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at a meager 24,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate jumped up to 4.3%.

The number of unemployed workers increased by 352,000 in July while the number of employed workers went up by only 67,000. Average earnings declined at an annual rate of 0.8%.

This is a weak report. If it's not enough to spur the Fed into action, I don't know what is.

Frank Bruni asks us today to spare a thought for Pete Buttigieg:

In 2020, when he was still in his 30s and his main political credential was two terms as mayor of a Midwestern city with only about 100,000 people, he won the most delegates in the Iowa caucuses, placed a close second in the New Hampshire primary and all in all outperformed many seasoned members of Congress.

How? With almost peerless communications skills. He went on Fox News last weekend to scold Trump on broken promises and Republicans on the selective use of crime statistics. It went viral. He went on Bill Maher’s show about a week before that and explained that some Silicon Valley billionaires like Trump because … they like money! It went viral. Buttigieg is a jukebox of perfectly toned, perfectly shaped and perfectly crisp rebuttals and arguments. Punch in your selected topic and let the music play.

And who knows? Maybe he’ll be Harris’s surprise pick.

Like Bruni, I doubt Buttigieg is in serious contention to be Kamala Harris's running mate. Nobody seems to be in a mood right now to take a chance on a young gay guy, even though I suspect this would be a problem only with voters who aren't persuadable in the first place.

I have a soft spot for Mayor Secretary Pete for the same reason as Bruni: he's been a regular on Fox News for years, putting in the work and showing himself practically the only prominent Democrat who can appeal to the Fox audience. That's not a skill to be taken lightly. What's more, as Secretary of Transportation he's proven to be more of a workhorse than a show horse, despite his obvious ambition.

I'll bet he'd be a pretty good VP.

Are you curious about whether Democrats really are a party of childless cat ladies? We know that both women and cat owners are more likely to be Democrats, but how about childless people? Here you go:

Childlessness has gone way up among Democrats over the past three decades while it's gone down among Republicans. I'm pretty sure this is mostly because of declining religiosity among Dems and rising religiosity among Republicans, but I don't have access to the data in order to control for that and find out.

Whatever the reason, Democrats and Republicans used to have about the same number of kids, but that started to change in 2000 and the gap is now pretty big.

LA Times columnist Anita Chabria ponders what Donald Trump was really up to in his disastrous interview with Black journalists yesterday:

Trump offended his Black audience. Mistake or part of the plan?

At best, Trump was grabbing headlines that in recent days have slipped out of his grasp.... At worst, the whole thing was meant to show off to his base, proving “he is willing and able to stand up to Black people and to make a case that he is the same person wherever he goes.”

Trump knows perfectly well how to pander to a crowd—just listen to his comments a few days ago to a Christian audience—so it's only natural to wonder if he was being deliberately insulting in front of a Black audience.

Who knows, really? The mind of Trump is a dark and chaotic place. But I'd bet against it. I think this was just another example of Trump being unable to control himself when the pressure gets too high. He has nothing to prove to his base, after all, and in his disordered imagination he really and truly can't figure out why Black people might not like him. To him, it makes perfect sense that a Black audience would eat up his insinuation that Kamala Harris isn't really Black and therefore doesn't deserve their support. This is the same genre of imbecilic attack that works great in a Republican primary, for example, so why not here? He doesn't understand that stuff this stupid only works when you're among fans who mindlessly lap up everything you say.

As for calling the interviewers nasty, that's also something that works great for Trump when he's among friends. He doesn't realize that it sounds defensive and idiotic to anyone else.

So, no, I don't think this was deliberate provocation on Trump's part. He truly believes he deserves the Black vote because he thinks he deserves everyone's vote. That's what happens when you lose touch with reality.

This is a gigantic moth at the Schmetterling Haus in Vienna. It's appropriately called an Atlas moth, and it's too bad there's no obvious scale to see how big it is. From wingtip to wingtip I'd put it at nearly a foot.

It's also a very lazy moth. It might as well have been a statue for all the movement I saw out of it during a half hour visit.