Month: September 2024

My rule of thumb is that Kamala Harris needs to win the popular vote by 4-5% in order to win the election. According to the Economist tracker, she's there:

If Harris can expand her popular vote lead by another point or two, I think she'll be the very likely winner. If she expands by three points or so, she'll win by enough of a margin that even Donald Trump will have a hard time spurring his minions into a repeat of January 6.

Hey! Donald Trump is right about something. Sort of:

Auto insurance has been getting steadily more expensive for a long time, but it's skyrocketed recently. Premiums have gone up by half over the past couple of years, and they're up by a third even after accounting for overall inflation.

I don't really know why. I've read a couple of explanations that left me no wiser than before, but apparently there's no fakery here. Even California's insurance commissioner, who's usually pretty tough on rate increases, approved a big one this year and said it was because payouts really had gone up.

So is this because of the great pandemic spree of bad driving? Are we still driving like lunatics? Why?

This is sunset over the Harbor Patrol building at the far end of the East Basin at Dana Point Harbor.

This is a little down in the weeds, but Josh Marshall today points to another analytic estimate of how many Haitians actually live in Springfield, Ohio. We all agree that various data points suggest a moderate population increase up through 2022, but what if the big surge was in 2023? David Jarman at The Downballot presents a few data points for Clark County:

• The school district reports an increase of 317 ESL students in 2023,¹ and the Migration Policy Institute estimates that 7% of all Haitian immigrants are under the age of 18. This suggests a total increase of about 4,500 Haitian immigrants in 2023 if we assume that every ESL student is Haitian. More likely, if we assume half are Haitian and they make up 10% of the population in Springfield, the increase in the total Haitian population comes to about 1,500.
• Medicaid rolls show an increase among Black enrollees of about 4,500 above expectations. Maybe a quarter of that is Haitians who identify as Black?
• The total population increase in Clark County among those with a race of "Other" is about 2,000.

Meanwhile, we do have data through last month for the total number of employees in the Springfield metro area:

It's up by 1,000 in 2023 and 1,300 through 2024, which suggests a total population increase of about 2,200. This is pretty reliable data, but it doesn't tell us how many of those are Haitian. Certainly no more than 2,500, even if the white population has declined a bit. And you can cut that in half for just Springfield city. Call it 1,300.

These are all super rough, but taken together we might take a horseback guess of 2,000 additional Haitians in Clark County in 2023. That's maybe 1,500 in Springfield? Add that to my guess of 2,000 through 2022 and we get to 3,500 total.

Jarman, for reasons I don't quite get, nonetheless estimates the Haitian population at 10,000. I'm genuinely unsure where this comes from. For now, though, it looks to me like the Haitian population of Springfield city is unlikely to be above 4,000.

¹This has been corrected. Jarman incorrectly reported a 12.5% increase in ESL students but it was actually an increase from 8.5% of all students to 12.5% of all students. That works out to 317 students, an increase of more than half.

But this data point is especially shaky. There's no reason to think all, or even a majority of ESL students are Haitian. Nor is it likely that only 7% of Haitians in Springfield are children. The makeup of Haitians who move to Springfield is probably quite different from Haitian immigrants in general.

I would take this derived statistic with a big grain of salt.

Health care, in broad outline, is pretty simple. The free market, for obvious reasons, doesn't do universal. It sells stuff only to people who can pay for it. That’s why, for things like roads, national defense, the postal service, and old-age pensions—all of which we’ve decided ought to be available to everyone—we let the government do the job.

So if you want universal health care—or close to it—you have two options:

• Expand Medicaid or Medicare so everyone is covered. This is the simplest solution, but not all that popular.
• Keep private insurance but with changes. Obviously, if you want universal, that means private insurers have to accept anyone who wants coverage. They also have to charge reasonable prices even to those with expensive preexisting conditions, or else it's just a sham. But that means they'll lose money on those expensive patients, so they have to make up for it by charging more to healthy, low-risk customers. Poor people can't afford this, so the government has to subsidize them. And to make sure insurance companies don't game the system by selling stripped down plans, you have to mandate some level of minimum coverage.

There's no way around this. If you want to broaden access to health care, the requirements unfold with geometric logic. In wonkese, it means you need guaranteed issue, community rating, means-tested subsidies, and essential health benefits.

But conservatives don't like this stuff because (a) it costs money and (b) it requires a lot of government regulation. So they always end up ditching one or all of these requirements and retreating to their standard package: high-risk pools, HSAs, tax credits, interstate insurance sales, and “tort reform.” It's a mantra—and it wouldn't work. But who cares? Conservatives don't want to broaden health care in the first place, so it hardly matters if it works. They just want something that sounds plausible.

That explains why J.D. Vance said this on Meet the Press about Donald Trump's "concept of a plan" for health care:

He, of course, does have a plan for how to fix American health care, but a lot of it goes down, Kristen, to deregulating insurance markets, so that people can actually choose a plan that makes sense for them.”

....We want to make sure everybody is covered, but the best way to do that is to actually promote more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits all approach that puts a lot of the same people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.

Regulating insurance markets is essential to health care reform. Putting everyone in the same risk pool is essential to health care reform. By placing them on the chopping block Vance is saying Trump doesn't want to make sure everyone is covered—but without actually saying it.

But make no mistake: that's what he's saying. Don't let a little bit of wonkese throw you.

Adjusted for inflation, retail sales and food services declined 1.6% in August at an annualized rate. But despite more than three years of flatness, it's still above its pre-pandemic trend:

In March 2021 there was a sudden spike in retail sales, and that level has been maintained for more than three years. But what happens next?

Exciting news! Next week I'll be starting a new multiple myeloma treatment called Talvey, aka talquetamab. Technically, it's similar to the Carvykti CAR-T treatment I had last year, but instead of targeting the BCMA antigen it targets two receptors called GPRC5D and CD3. Because it targets two things it's called a bispecific. Unlike Carvykti, it's not genetically engineered for each patient.

But that's not the exciting part. Like Carvykti, Talvey has a risk of causing cytokine storms and neurological problems, which means I have to spend a week in the hospital so they can observe me as they ramp up the dosage. Blah. But I'll take my tablet and continue to amuse myself with the blog.

For the record, this is now my eighth treatment for multiple myeloma:

1. Velcade
2. Autologous stem cell transfer
3. Revlimid
4. Darzalex
5. Pomalyst
6. Empliciti
7. Carvykti CAR-T
8. Talvey

There was no change in border crossings in August:

Out of a total of 107,000, about 58,000 were caught trying to cross the border illegally. The rest were asylum seekers who presented themselves at border stations or gave themselves up after crossing between stations.

Over at National Review, Noah Rothman laughingly calls yesterday's wannabe assassin of Donald Trump "a highly impressionable figure radicalized in the support of progressive causes":

That might shock the press, but finding a single Trump supporter who is surprised by Sunday’s news would be a struggle. The political media are constantly on the lookout for right-wing violence; but much of the “sustained spate of political violence” to which Americans have been treated over the course of this election cycle has come not from Trump’s supporters but from his opponents.

Rothman's evidence is largely related to the pro-Palestine demonstrations on college campuses earlier this year. Fair enough, I suppose, although the protesters were considerably more concerned about denouncing "Genocide Joe" than Donald Trump.

But Ryan Wesley Routh didn't "support progressive causes" unless Rothman considers being pro-Ukraine progressive. Aside from that, he was apparently in favor of Obama's Iran deal and distraught by Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He voted for Trump in 2016, Tulsi Gabbard in 2020, and supported Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley in 2024. This is hardly the portrait of a radicalized progressive.

More to the point, the reason the media spends a lot of time reporting on right-wing violence is because there's a lot of right-wing violence:

During the 2020 election, violent rhetoric on Twitter came overwhelmingly from conservatives:

This is not the 1960s. It's the 21st century. And in the 21st century extreme conservatives are overwhelmingly more violent in both word and deed than liberals. Donald Trump talks of retribution. Laura Loomer wants his Democratic opponents executed. White supremacist groups threaten violence and carry out their threats with dismal regularity. Gun supporters endlessly promise "Second Amendment solutions" toward people they dislike. And polls regularly show that Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to believe violence might be necessary to save America:

Liberals simply aren't the main source of aggressive rhetoric or violent action in the contemporary United States. That's why everyone focuses more on conservative violence: because there's more of it.

It's the same reason the press focuses more on Trump's lies than Kamala Harris's lies: because Trump lies with wild abandon and Harris doesn't. It's got nothing to do with bias, just reality.

This is a Red River hog at the Los Angeles Zoo. The zookeepers have hung a 5-gallon water bottle from the fence and the hog plays with it continually. Basically, he just knocks it around with his snout and seems to get endless joy from it. Kinda strange.