Month: September 2024

The Pac-12 lives!

Sort of. It's now the Pac-6. Washington State and Oregon State, which never found new homes after the conference collapsed last year, have recruited Boise State, San Diego State, Colorado State and Fresno State to form the nucleus of a new and reinvigorated Pac-something.

Moneywise, it's all stupid. The other Pac-12 schools paid big breakup fees when they left, and that money is being used to pay the breakup fees for the four new schools. That money will now probably be used by the Mountain West to recruit some new teams of their own. Crikey.

At a minimum the new Pac needs eight teams to meet NCAA rules. So who else should they recruit? UNLV? Hawaii? San Jose State? BYU?

Here's a pretty little yellow wildflower. I'm too lazy to try and find out what it is, but maybe someone in comments can identify it?

This is an all-time great headline:

One right-wing crackpot is in a feud with another right-wing crackpot and it's front page news. May God have mercy on us all.

Lord help me, but I read a Wall Street Journal op-ed last night. I keep promising myself never to do this, but sometimes I backslide. The topic of last night's piece was "Welfare Is What’s Eating the Budget."

It was co-authored by Phil Gramm—remember him?—and it was odd even by Journal standards. It contained a blizzard of statistical claims but not a single one was sourced to anything. Here are three of them:

• Means-tested social-welfare spending totaled $1.6 trillion in 2023.
  .
  This is only the case if you use pandemic-level figures, which were temporary and highly inflated. According to the OMB, social welfare spending in 2019 came to about $1.1 trillion. Half of that was Medicaid and the other half was everything else.
• Since funding for the War on Poverty ramped up in 1967, welfare payments received by the average work-age household in the bottom quintile of income recipients has risen from $7,352 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars to $64,700 in 2022.
  .
  Gramm is seriously claiming that poor households in the US, on average, receive $64,700 in welfare benefits? The Congressional Budget Office puts it at $16,300 in 2019.
• With the explosion of means-tested transfer payments, the portion of prime work-age persons in the bottom quintile who actually work has fallen to 36% from 68%.
  .
  I have no idea where Gramm got this. According to the CBPP, the share of low-income people who work has been steadily between 60-70% for half a century. Other research supports this.
  .
  

The Journal editorial page is like Donald Trump: it lies baldly all the time. Usually, though, they're a bit more sophisticated about it. They at least pretend they get their numbers from somewhere. Gramm doesn't even bother.

As usual with these things, what's really odd is that you can use real numbers and still make your case that social welfare spending has increased a lot (it has) and that cutting it should be part of tackling the deficit (I don't agree, but the numbers are large enough to be meaningful). But that's never enough for these guys.

How late can abortions be performed in the US? A few facts:

• There are only seven states where abortion is legal in the third trimester.
• There are only 14 clinics in those states that perform abortions in the third trimester. They are expensive and time consuming.
• Based on extrapolations of CDC surveillance data, there are probably only about 1,000 third-trimester abortions performed each year. The vast majority of these are between 24-28 weeks.
  .
  
• There are no records for the number of abortions performed in the last two months of pregnancy, but it's almost certainly close to zero and exclusively done in cases of severe fetal abnormality or danger to the mother.
• Needless to say, no abortions are performed after birth anywhere in the country.

Now you know.

The New York Times must have been pretty desperate to find a few fact checks on Kamala Harris:

It wasn't $1 trillion, it was $700 billion. Seriously? This is misleading?

Another fact check dings Harris for saying they've created 800,000 manufacturing jobs when the real number is 739,000. Another upbraids her for saying correctly that US oil production is at an all-time high because, um, she shouldn't take credit for it. Yet another disputed her careful statement that there are no Americans in active duty in a war zone—which is true—because there are still US soldiers on station in dangerous places.

I guess you have to find something to balance the fire hose of Trump lies. Gotta stay objective, after all.

CNN says Kamala Harris thumped Donald Trump in their debate last night. In their flash poll, 63% said Harris won vs. 37% for Trump. The Washington Post says this is the fifth biggest victory out of 25 debate polls dating back to 1984. Perhaps even more interesting is that Harris's favorability rating shot up six points while Trump's fell two points:

It's a little mysterious to me why Harris continues to avoid interviews. It's obvious that she's perfectly good at them, so why not do more? Perhaps they seem like a no-win proposition: a good performance doesn't help but a bad performance can hurt. Still.

Here in Orange County we're battling a huge fire in Trabuco Canyon, a semi-rural area in the southeastern part of the county. The canyon itself is highly populated, but luckily the fire moved uphill from where it started and is mostly burning in uninhabited areas.

It's called the Airport Fire due to California's inscrutable naming system for fires, apparently because it started next to an airfield used by hobbyists to fly RC planes. This is not an "airport" by any stretch, but I guess that doesn't matter.

I went out yesterday to take pictures, and they're sort of ho-hum. Needless to say, I couldn't get anywhere near the fire itself, so I had to settle for very long telephoto shots.

My beloved YouGov poll suggests the presidential race is now dead even:

This confirms the Morning Consult poll that showed Harris losing a bit of support in swing states compared to a couple of weeks ago.

However, it turns out the entire change in this week's poll is due to Harris losing support from Hispanic voters, dropping from 59% to 50% in the past week. How likely is that? Coming on the back of last week's sudden 9-point drop among Black voters—which reverted to normal this week—I'm starting to have some doubts about YouGov's mechanics.

Here's something to worry you if you're the worrying sort:

You've probably heard that it's bad news when the yield curve inverts—that is, when long-term interest rates become lower than short-term rates. This is not a normal state of nature. However, the real danger signal is when the yield curve inverts seriously and then heads back up to positive territory. If recent history is any guide, it means a recession is no more than months away.

Well, it just happened after the biggest inversion since 1980. Let's hope that history isn't much of a guide, OK?