Month: October 2024

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson today:

We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers.

I know this is standard Republican rhetoric, but I wonder if they ever actually listen to themselves when they say this? I'm hardly in favor of regulation willy nilly, but all the evidence suggests that it hasn't hurt much of anything. Business applications in the US continue to rise. Our economic growth is the best among advanced countries. Construction spending has skyrocketed. The finance industry continues to make mountains of money. Innovation is strong. Business profits as a share of the economy have nearly doubled over the past two decades.

At the same time, air and water quality has improved tremendously over the past 50 years. Industrial accidents have declined. Consumer protection is stronger. Seat belts and air bags save thousands of lives a year.

And just look at the economic performance of highly regulated states. The five most regulated states (allegedly) are:

• California
• New York
• New Jersey
• Illinois
• Texas

The five least regulated states are:

• Idaho
• South Dakota
• North Dakota
• Montana
• Nevada

Which list strikes you as the economic powerhouses? If you guessed the top one, congratulations. The most regulated states have a combined GDP per capita a third higher than the least regulated ones, and both have the same growth rate.

None of this is to suggest that regulation is an unalloyed good. The Jones Act has wrecked the US shipping industry. Regulatory capture is a real thing. Occupational licensing could probably stand to be pared back. Regulations often harm small companies more than deep-pocketed big ones. The deregulation of trains, planes, trucks and telephones was reasonably successful. (Deregulation of the savings and loan industry less so.) Etc.

But what's the case for a generalized jihad against regulation? It's a little hard to see one.

The Washington Post reports today that the federal government's routine election monitoring—in place since 1965—is in trouble. Thanks to the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the Justice Department can only enter polling places with permission from state officials—and Republican states are increasingly denying them that permission.

That's a problem. But they also say this:

Legal experts said the federal government lost significant legal recourse in 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.... Since then, the number of federal observers has dropped significantly, said Katherine Culliton-González, a former Justice Department monitor and former Biden administration official.

Naturally I wanted to check this. I couldn't find historical data for the number of observers, but I did find data for the number of jurisdictions monitored in elections going back to 2004. Here it is:

It sure looks like monitoring declined in the decade before the Supreme Court's decision and then increased after the decision.

In any case, the Justice Department only monitors about 50 jurisdictions out of thousands each election. And the only change is that observers have to stay outside instead of watching from inside the polling center. They aren't gone entirely. In the end, Republican interference is stupid and paranoid but probably doesn't have a very significant effect.

Stormy day in LA.

When the New York Times famously covered its entire front page in 2016 with reports about the FBI's last minute investigation of the "existence of emails," you could at least argue that this really was news. The Times overdid things, that's all.

Behold the front page of Politico today:

This is all about fake Republican outrage over some remarks by Joe Biden yesterday. Responding to a comic saying that Puerto Rico was a floating island of garbage, he said "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters."

But wait. What Biden almost certainly said was "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s...demonization of Latinos." See? There's an apostrophe there that was obviously silent when he spoke. Plus he mangled his words in typical Biden fashion and made it hard to parse what he was saying.

This is so plainly a case of fake outrage over a nothingburger that I'm surprised it has any legs at all, let alone massive front-page coverage in Politico. I know, I know: I shouldn't be surprised by anything any more. I just can't help myself. By now we all know the press treats every outrage by conservatives as genuine and every outrage by liberals as calculated for political effect. It's just the way things are.

The law says you can't purge voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Nevertheless, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has been removing suspected noncitizens from voter lists ever since August. This runs the risk of leaving people with too little time to fix things if an inevitable mistake is made.

In any case, it's a plain violation of black letter law. A trial court agreed and so did a unanimous appellate panel. But today the Supreme Court allowed the purge to continue. The three Democrats objected, but the Republican justices in the majority outvoted them.

What the hell is going on? The case was on the emergency docket so no reason was given for the decision. But what justification could there possibly be? Are Republicans on the Court trying to send a message that they're just partisan hacks and we'd all better get used to it?

In the final YouGov poll before the election, Kamala Harris is leading Trump by only one percentage point:

This strikes me as overly pessimistic, possibly because it's a poll of registered voters, not likely voters. But we'll find out for sure in six days.

The Atlanta Fed's forecast was spot on: real GDP grew 2.8% in the third quarter:

This is an ideal reading. Growth remains strong, but not so strong that the Fed goes all aflutter about the economy overheating.

Here is Donald Trump's apparent governing plan so far:

• Enact 20% tariffs on all imports.¹
• Cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.²
• Let RFK Jr. "go wild" on health, food, and medicine.³
• Mass deportation of illegal immigrants.¹ ²
• Big tax cuts for corporations and the rich.¹
• Abandon Ukraine. Maybe Taiwan too.⁴
• Use the military to fight "the enemy within."⁵
• Build a strategic Bitcoin reserve.³
• Fire thousands of nonpartisan civil servants so he can replace them with MAGA drones.⁶
• Repeal any and all efforts at combating climate change, which is a hoax.³
• Implement "concepts of a plan" to repeal Obamacare, including its provision that protects people with preexisting conditions.⁷
• Take unspecified revenge against Meta and Google.³
• Blow up the federal deficit.¹

How is it possible that there are lots of people who actually want this? Do even conservatives really want this? Even if Trump loses, it's apparent that we've lost our collective mind.

¹Would wreck the economy and spike inflation.
²Not actually possible, thank God.
³Come on, man.
⁴Would encourage two-bit dictators worldwide and make it clear that nukes are a country's only real protection.
⁵Obviously unconstitutional.
⁶Delusions of grandeur, anyone?
⁷Would hurt lots of people for no perceptible reason except retribution against Obama.

In an apparent attempt to lose whatever international support they still retain, Israel voted overwhelmingly yesterday to kick out UNRWA from Gaza. UNRWA distributes the vast majority of aid to Gaza, and no other organization has the know-how and the personnel to take its place. They're indispensable. But everybody's most loathed prime minister just shrugged:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on social media on Monday that it was essential that “sustained humanitarian aid” remain available in Gaza. He gave no details of how that should be accomplished. But Mr. Netanyahu’s office released a statement saying that the government was ready to work with “our international partners to ensure Israel continues to facilitate humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not threaten Israel’s security.”

Technically, Israel has merely banned UNRWA from any contact with Israeli officials, but since that's essential to delivering aid it effectively puts UNRWA out of business. For good measure, Israel also banned UNRWA from activity in Israel's "sovereign territory," which might or might not include Gaza. But the message is crystal clear regardless.

Why did Israel do this? Allegedly it's because they believe UNRWA is basically an arm of Hamas. But that's absurd. In an organization of 13,000 people there are bound to be some Hamas sympathizers, but there's no evidence those numbers are even 1% of the total. The real reason for the ban can be gleaned more simply from UNRWA's full name: the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Israel dislikes the very mention of refugees, since it implies that someday they might return to family homes lost in the 1948 war—an ironclad no-no in Israeli politics. The allegation of a Hamas partnership was little more than a convenient excuse for doing something they've wanted to do for a long time.

The ban takes effect in 90 days, so nothing will happen immediately. But food is mostly delivered to Gaza from a dozen UNRWA depots stocked from hundreds of UNRWA trucks driven by thousands of UNRWA drivers. It's a massive undertaking, and not one that can be replaced in 90 days:

Along with the Palestinian Red Crescent, Unrwa handles almost all aid distribution in Gaza through 11 centres across the enclave. It also provides services to 19 refugee camps in the West Bank. Unrwa director William Deere told the BBC that on a practical level, the ban on interacting with Israeli officials meant it would become almost impossible for the agency's staff to operate in the country.

"We won't be able to move in Gaza without being subject to possible attack, international staff won't be able to get visas any longer," he said.

The executive director of the UN's World Food Programme said without Unrwa's presence in Gaza, aid agencies will be unable to distribute essential food and medicine. "They do all the work on the ground there," Cindy McCain told the BBC. "We don't have the contacts. We don't have the ability to get to know the contacts, because things are so intensely difficulty there."

Everyone understands all of this, which makes Israel's action little more than a gratuitous attempt to amp up the brutality and make Palestinian lives even more miserable than they already are.

To what end? It's hard to think of one aside from pure retribution.

Paul Krugman put up this Gallup chart today with the comment "Crime is way down; Ds are right":

In reality, this chart shows that nobody is right. Here's the actual crime trend since the start of the century:

Violent crime dropped steadily through 2012 and has been flat ever since. Property crime dropped through 2020 and has since been flat. Compared to the previous year, there was essentially no change in 2023.¹

So in the most recent few years crime hasn't gone down, but that's largely because crime never went up in the first place. Murder did, but that's all.

At the same time, big majorities of both Democrats and Republicans thought crime was up from about 2005 through 2015 even though it was declining steadily the whole time.

The media does an absolute crap job of covering crime, and that's not even counting the deliberate misinformation peddled by the likes of Fox News. Every upward blip gets big headlines. "If it bleeds" still leads local news broadcasts around the country. Social media sites like Nextdoor amp up the fear even more.

Obviously I can't fight that. But for those who care, (a) crime is way down over the long term, and (b) nothing much has happened over the short term. Since 2020, crime is neither up nor down.

¹There's some early evidence that crime has dropped substantially so far in 2024, but it's too early to say for sure.

POSTSCRIPT: In case you're curious, here's the trend in the murder rate. It spiked up temporarily in 2020 but is now back down. Recent evidence suggests it's down even more in 2024.