Month: September 2024

Let's start out the week with a brief reminder of what the federal government spends its money on:

Your goal is to find $1,700 billion in either spending cuts or tax increases to balance the budget. Generally speaking, most people agree there should be no cuts to defense, Social Security, Medicare, or veterans, which leaves $2,500 billion still on the table.

Can you cut $1,700 billion out of $2,500 billion? If you cut 10% across the board, that's $250 billion, which leaves $1,450 billion in tax increases.¹ If you're even more of a hardass than most MAGA Republicans and think you can cut 20% across the board, that's $500 billion, which leaves $1,200 billion in tax increases.

Can you magic your way out of this by assuming huge economic growth? Nope. It's a favorite piece of smoke and mirrors, but it's completely bogus.

Long story short, it's hard to see any way out of this other than substantial tax increases. The question is when we'll ever face up to that.

¹That's a one-third increase in taxes. It's a lot! Much of it can come from increased taxes on the rich, but probably not all of it.

I like this passage from a Washington Post article yesterday about the insane chaos now surrounding the Trump campaign:

By early last week, Trump and his No. 2, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), found themselves trying to reverse-engineer evidence of Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, arguing they were simply trying to draw attention to the real problem of immigration. They also used inflammatory rhetoric to blame Biden and Harris — whom Trump called “the enemy from within” — for what the Republican ticket claimed was inflammatory rhetoric that lead to the apparent attempts on Trump’s life.

For those of you who don't know, "reverse engineering" is when you examine how something works and then write your own software to duplicate it in meticulous detail. In other words, you know exactly what you want, and you set out to create it no matter how weird parts of it may be.

Conservatives have made an industry out of this. They don't care very much what's real anymore. Once Trump says something they just work backwards to figure out how they can prove he's right, no matter how weird it is.

Not that it matters all that much. As Trump pointed out many years ago, he can say anything he wants: "People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you." Quite so. And all the expert fact checking in the world won't sway that belief.

After failing to pass a stopgap spending bill because of opposition within his own party, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has bowed to the inevitable:

Pressed closer against the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline — and mired with disputes within his conference — Johnson brokered a deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Democrats to dodge what could have been a politically costly outcome.

....The arrangement sets up a frenzied week in Congress: Johnson will likely need to rely on support from Democrats rather than his own party to pass the measure; the Senate will need a bipartisan agreement to expedite the bill’s passage and beat the shutdown deadline.

"Likely." Sure. As in "Kevin is likely to eat some chocolate tomorrow." You can go ahead and bet the ranch on it.

It probably wouldn't have mattered anyway, since the Senate is in Democratic hands, but the Republican opposition to Johnson's bill accomplished nothing except to eliminate the chance of Republicans getting anything. So a Republican speaker will once again have to pass a budget bill with something like 200 Democratic votes and 40 or 50 Republican votes. It's tough times in the GOP these days.

Inspired by a story in the Wall Street Journal today, here are all the spots in California where the wholesale price of electricity is currently negative:

The Journal explains that this is all due to the rise of renewable energy, mostly solar and wind, which is already widespread in Europe:

The changes sweeping Europe’s electricity markets, which were accelerated by the energy crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine, show what could happen in the U.S. in a few years when renewable capacity reaches a similar scale. In 2023, 44% of EU electricity was generated by renewables, compared with 21% in the U.S.

In some U.S. markets—sunny California, the wind-swept Great Plains, and Texas—zero and negative prices are already common. The wholesale price in Southern California was negative nearly 20% of all hours this year because of the region’s boom in solar-panel installations

This is sadly not the case here in Irvine, but maybe it will be soon. "Too cheap to meter" might finally come true 70 years after it was first promised.¹

¹In fact, six days ago was the 70th anniversary of this phrase. It's attributed to Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who you may recall as the villain of the movie Oppenheimer.

I don't really understand how you can conduct a poll in a place like Gaza, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research says they can do it. Here's one result from their latest survey:

After nearly a year of the most brutal pummeling imaginable, only 28% of Gazans still think Hamas can win the war. But still: 28%!

In other results, Hamas has lost a bit of support but is still the most popular single faction in Gaza. And Gazans really, really don't like the United States. I wouldn't be surprised if we poll lower than Israel.

On a side note, there's also this:

This is something I've been following for a while, and this survey seems to confirm that food shipments are improving—at least in southern Gaza. PSR doesn't do fieldwork in northern Gaza, so we have nothing on that one way or the other.

Here's the growth of mobile cellular subscriptions in a few selected countries:

Note that this is per 100. Most rich countries have more cell subscriptions than they do people.

The top region is Hong Kong at 292 (China as a whole clocks in at 125). The United States is a hair above the world average at 110. The lowest number is North Korea at 23, edging out South Sudan's 30.

Regions of the world look like this:

• East Asia: 130
• Middle East and North Africa: 124
• Europe: 123
• Latin America: 109
• North America: 108
• World: 108
• Sub-Saharan Africa: 89
• Pacific islands: 76

Here is the number of murders each year in Springfield, Ohio, both before and after the large-scale arrival of Haitian immigrants:

Daniel Driscoll, the Republican top prosecutor in Clark County, adds this:

During the time that I’ve been with the prosecutor’s office, which is 21 years now, we have not had any murders involving the Haitian community — as either the victims or as the perpetrators of those murders.

Springfield has seen a recent increase in the rate of aggravated assault, but it's a statistical artifact caused by the Springfield police department changing its definition of the term.

Here's a funny thing. The Wall Street Journal, searching for a trend based on Kamala Harris's debate revelation that she owns a gun, says that Democrats are suddenly buying lots of guns. Their data for this comes from NORC at the University of Chicago, but so does mine and it's not the same:

According to the NORC GSS data I downloaded ten minutes ago, gun ownership among Democrats went up a grand total of 1.3 percentage points last year and 2.7 percentage points over the past decade. It's currently at 25.3%, but the Journal puts it at 29.2%.

This is a head scratcher. I've tried all sorts of ways of manipulating the NORC data to reproduce the Journal's figures, but I can't do it. And I'm not sure what the point is anyway, other than trying to find something that supports a thesis. The basic data is what it is, and it suggests only the tiniest uptick in Democratic gun ownership over the past decade.

Here's an odd thing. With my old camera and old flash unit I could never take a picture of Hilbert. Charlie was fine, but Hilbert's eyes always came out pitch black. This happened even though I always use bounce flash, not direct flash.

But with my new camera and new flash everything is fine. As you can see, Hilbert's eyes are lovely and bright.

I can't explain this. It's the same brand of flash. It sits on the hot shoe, just like the other one. It's pointed directly upward, as always. I wonder what the difference is?

Here's the blaring headline at the top of the Washington Post this morning:

In a hyper-technical sense this is true. The new Georgia rule doesn't require a hand count of how people voted, but it does require a hand count of the number of ballots to make sure it matches the machine total. The Post doesn't tell us that until the ninth paragraph.

It's still probably a dumb idea, and maybe even illegal too—according to Georgia's Republican attorney general, anyway. There's no reason to doubt machine tallies, and the whole thing is most likely designed to generate discrepancies in case Trump loses and needs something to yell about.

Still, the headline is wildly misleading. Readers deserve better.