Month: September 2024

From Donald Trump, asked if he plans to sell Truth Social stock when his lockup period ends a week from now:

No, I’m not selling. I’m not leaving. I love it. I think it’s great.

Well, that's that. He's selling.

J.D. Vance has let slip Donald Trump's secret plan for peace in Ukraine:

Mr. Vance said Mr. Trump would sit down with Russians, Ukrainians and Europeans and say, “You guys need to figure out what a peaceful settlement looks like.”

Um, OK. Gotta say, though, that I expected a little more from the master of dealmaking. Any thoughts on what this settlement might look like?

The Russians would retain the land they have taken and....Russia would get a “guarantee of neutrality” from Ukraine. “It doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join some of these sort of allied institutions,” Mr. Vance said. “I think that’s ultimately what this looks like.”

Stop me if I'm missing something, but the deal Vance has outlined is "Putin gets everything he wants." And in a laughable coda, Vance added that the Ukrainian side of the new border would be "heavily fortified" to make sure Putin can't reopen the war later. I'm sure this latter day Maginot Line would work great.¹

So much for the Churchill of the modern world. I assume Vance was chosen to deliver this message so that Trump can repudiate it if the snickering gets to be too much.

¹Actually, it would be more than twice as long as the Maginot Line.

Donald Trump is on an insult tour of California, and today he stopped by his 17-hole championship golf course for an impromptu press conference.¹ Here's the news the New York Times doesn't report but the LA Times does:

Trump said if he is elected, he would stop sending California federal firefighting aid unless Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he referred to repeatedly as “Newscum,” enacted his policy priorities on issues such as taxes.

“If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires. And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems,” Trump said. “He’s a lousy governor.”

There you go. If California doesn't enact tax laws and farm policy that Trump likes he's going to take away our wildfire funding.

Now, what Trump obviously doesn't know is that about half our wildfires occur on federal land, which means they're the responsibility of the federal government no matter what. Local wildfires are mostly fought with state money with additional federal aid coming from FEMA. Presumably Trump could cut that off by refusing to allow FEMA to declare California's wildfires as disaster areas. He's done it before. It would end up withholding, oh, something like $200 million, which isn't nothing but is also only about 0.05% of the California budget. We'd survive. Trump's threats are perhaps not quite as scary as he thinks they are.

More to the point is this: What kind of president threatens to cut off wildfire aid if a state doesn't pass water and tax policy he likes? Even if this is just blather, how can you vote for a person whose entire agenda is driven by personal vengeance against anyone he disagrees with? It's diseased.

¹Just kidding. The 18th hole fell into the ocean some years ago, but I'm sure it's all fixed and back to regulation length now.

In the year after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action at universities, Black enrollment has plummeted at elite universities:

This data comes from a tracker run by Education Reform Now. It includes whatever universities have reported enrollment data so far, so it will change over time.

So how did this affect white enrollment? Precisely not at all:

Hispanic enrollment is down moderately and Asian enrollment is up moderately:

NOTE: The averages aren't weighted by enrollment size. They should be, and maybe I'll work up the energy to do that someday. However, that day is not today.

This is Charlie sitting innocently next to a tree in our backyard. A few seconds after I took this he galloped up the tree, jumped onto the wall, and made his escape. He showed up shortly afterward in our neighbor's backyard.

This is the first episode of catblogging taken with my new camera. Did I need a new camera? Not really, but a bunch of desires have accumulated over the years and I finally decided to give in to them. For those of you who care about such things, it's a Nikon Zfc and this picture was taken with a Tokina 11-16mm (16-24mm equivalent) zoom lens at its widest setting. The Zfc is an odd camera, but seems to be pretty good aside from one or two little weirdnesses. It's also very small, which is standard these days, something I don't like since I have big hands. But I'll get used to it.

I don't know whether to laugh at this piece from Politico or to be disgusted or something else:

Whenever Vice President Kamala Harris mentions Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s now-toxic blueprint for the next Republican administration — blood starts throbbing in the temples of certain conservative Heritage veterans.... “I cannot think of a study that has done more damage,” said Ken Weinstein, a one-time former President Donald Trump appointee and former head of the conservative Hudson Institute. “It’s the exact opposite of the Harris approach of don’t say anything about what you’re doing.”

The case for laughing at this is pretty obvious. Nuff said.

The case for disgust is the fact that conservatives are upset that Heritage actually said what they believe in public. And make no mistake: the case against Project 2025 is all about tone, not policy substance. Conservatives are all on board with its policy recommendations.

Then there's the case for pity. Project 2025 is just the latest edition of Heritage's Mandate for Leadership series, published in election years ever since Reagan was president. Nobody ever complained before, so why now?

The Politico piece suggests the problem is all about style:

The bitterness these days focuses on a new house style that allegedly enabled the current embarrassment: an elevation of marketing over research; a chest-thumping tendency to assert dominance within the Trump-era right; an inability to distinguish partisan agitation from policy advocacy because “engagement on X, positive feedback from Slack channels or mentions in their news feeds” have become paramount, in the words of one conservative activist who watched Project 2025 take shape.

Sure, whatever. But it's not as if Heritage has ever been a watchword for rigorous, honest research in the first place. And the entire conservative movement has become Trumpist, so you can hardly blame Heritage for following along.

Maybe Heritage could have worded things less belligerently. But for the most part the policy recommendations are garden variety modern conservatism. They just aren't hedged for a popular audience, which is typical of these things.

In the end, then, put me down for disgust. Conservatives are mostly mad simply because their true beliefs have been set down in black and white—and the Harris campaign has decided to highlight them. Boo hoo.

The BLS released its August report on import prices today. They were down 0.3%, or 3.7% on an annualized basis.

But here's a more interesting long-term look at import prices adjusted for overall inflation:

Why do we buy so many imported goods? Because they're cheap! The price of imported goods, after adjusting for overall inflation, has dropped 23% over the last decade and 38% since 1990. Why wouldn't we buy them?

NOTE: And do you see that ~20% increase during the pandemic? It was largely responsible for our inflation spike. It's over now, and so is inflation.

If we give away welfare to poor people with no work requirements attached, does this make them lazy and indolent? It's hardly a nonsensical idea, though there's not much evidence that it happens in real life.

More importantly, however, is that nearly all of our big means-tested welfare programs do have work requirements. The main exception is Medicaid because, generally speaking, we don't want people dying in the streets even if they don't have a job. Here are the rest of the Big Seven welfare programs:

• CHIP: Explicitly limited to families with incomes above the poverty line.
• SSI: Explicitly for the sick and disabled who are unable to work.
• EITC: Explicitly limited to the working poor.
• SNAP: Requires work unless you're caring for a child under six.
• TANF: Designed from the start to require work.
• Housing assistance: Generally no work requirement.

You might want to add the Child Tax Credit to this list, but it's not a means-tested program. Everyone is eligible for it up to an income of half a million dollars. In any case, it's a tax credit and therefore requires some income, though not very much.

When I show crime rates I normally use the FBI's figures, which are tallied up from police reports. An alternate source is the National Crime Victimization Survey, which calls up people and asks them if they've been the victim of a crime in the past year.

The NCVS figures for 2023 were released today, but there are a couple of things you have to do to compare them with the FBI numbers. First, the "all violent crime" category has to include only aggravated assault, not simple assault, since that's how the FBI does it. Second, you have to include only crimes reported to the police. Luckily the NCVS reports the numbers this way in addition to providing a simple headline number.

As it turns out, neither of these things affect the trend numbers much, but you still have to do it if you want an apples-to-apples comparison. Here it is:

Using the modified NCVS numbers, violent crime was down 6% in 2023. Using the raw headline number, crime was down 10%.

One thing you'll notice is that the NCVS bounces around a lot, so single-year figures aren't super reliable. Another thing you'll notice is that there was no pandemic crime spike.

That's because there wasn't, though no one seems to have noticed. There was a pandemic murder spike, but even the FBI figures show only tiny changes in overall violent crime during the pandemic. The NCVS—which doesn't count homicides since you can't survey homicide victims—shows a considerable crime decline during the pandemic.

So what really happened? My best read of the evidence is that murders went way up in 2020 and have been declining ever since, while other violent crime probably changed very little. The yearly NCVS numbers jump around a bunch but always revert to a mean a little below 0.4%, just like the FBI's numbers. That's probably about where they've been for the entire past decade except for the 2020-22 murder spree, which remains unexplained.

Today Peter Coy takes on our habit of measuring inflation as the total over the past 12 months. He says this is like ignoring a football play that just happened and instead announcing only the results of the past 12 plays:

Can’t blame the government for this. The headline on the news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that came out on Wednesday was this: “C.P.I. for All Items Rises 0.2% in August; Shelter Up.” That’s the one-month change in the Consumer Price Index. It’s the equivalent of telling people what happened on the latest play from the line of scrimmage.

But reports about that announcement said things like this: “Inflation fell in August to 2.5 percent, down from 2.9 percent in July.” Summing up the price change over the past 12 months through August is the equivalent of summing up the total yardage over the past 12 plays.

Quite so. And here's something you might not know. The chart below shows monthly inflation over the past 24 months:¹

Housing inflation remains a problem, though it doesn't affect the two-thirds of people who own homes and only mildly affects the two-thirds of the remainder who haven't moved recently. In other words, for about 90% of Americans inflation has averaged 1.5% over the past two years.

¹It's actually a rolling average to smooth out the spikes a little bit.