Month: November 2024

The eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

A single Bitcoin is now worth an astonishing $85,000:

In case you're curious, yes, the recent surge started on Election Day.

Why? Since it's Bitcoin I suppose there not much point in asking. But there are two competing explanations. First, Donald Trump is going to be very crypto friendly, building a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and appointing lax true believers to loosen regulations on crypto trading.

But this involves believing what Trump said on the campaign trail, which is an iffy proposition indeed.

The other explanation is that crypto fans believe Bitcoin is a hedge against recessions. That makes it a good investment since Trump is likely to tank the economy.

Take your pick. They both make about as much sense.

"The economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich" is a research study that came out a few years ago. But I missed it then and it's never too late to catch up. The authors set out to examine all instances of major tax reductions on the rich in 18 OECD countries between 1965 and 2015 and identify the results.

I don't want to keep you in suspense, so here's the impact of the tax cuts on economic growth:

There was no noticeable affect on growth. Or on unemployment. So what did the tax cuts accomplish?

Surprise! Lower taxes on the rich make the rich richer. And that's about it. Here it is in more detail:

We find that major tax cuts for the rich push up income inequality, as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The size of the effect is substantial: on average, each major tax cut results in a rise of over 0.7 percentage points in top 1% share of pre-tax national income.

On the income inequality side, the results do not closely align with the theory that the rich have greater incentives to work and invest when their taxes are cut, given that we do not find any statistically significant effects on growth, unemployment or investment from cutting taxes on the rich. Given our measure of income inequality includes both realized capital gains and labor income, it is also unlikely the results are being driven by tax avoidance, because a significant part of avoidance takes the form of shifting income into capital (Piketty et al., 2014). Rather, our results are most consistent with Piketty et al.’s argument that lower taxes on top incomes induce the rich to bargain more aggressively to increase their own rewards, to the direct detriment of those lower down the income distribution.

There you have it. Tax cuts on the rich just make them even greedier and more predatory. And we've got another one coming thanks to Donald Trump's huge success with working class voters. As H.L. Mencken put it, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." America's common people are about to learn that lesson anew.

Israel's starvation campaign against northern Gaza—intended to enforce its declaration that everyone leave—is continuing apace:

The amount of aid reaching Gaza has dropped to the lowest level since December, official Israeli figures show, despite the US having issued a 30-day ultimatum last month threatening sanctions if there was no increase in humanitarian supplies reaching the territory. The ultimatum was delivered on 13 October, so will expire on Tuesday or Wednesday.

What follows is just a fantasy. But in my fantasy world Joe Biden would give this speech about Gaza tonight:

The United States will always protect Israel. That promise is ironclad.

But enough, at long last, is enough. The war in Gaza ends now. I have ordered the USS Eisenhower strike group to take up station off the shore of Gaza. It will be joined by helicopter carriers, Seabee battalions, supply ships, and the Marine I Expeditionary Force.

Ike will enforce a no-fly zone over Gaza. Any aircraft, of any nationality, that violates it will be shot down. MEF I will land and take control of Gaza. Piers will be built, food and medicine will be delivered, and reconstruction will begin. Marines will treat any interference, from either Palestinians or Israelis, as hostile. All IDF forces will be ordered to evacuate. Reinforcements will be added as necessary.

We welcome assistance from UNRWA and private charities, as well as NATO allies if they choose to join us.

Earlier today I informed Prime Minister Netanyahu of our intentions. He knows precisely what to expect, and we will be in regular communication with Israeli leaders.

This will not be bloodless. Hamas fighters still remain in Gaza and they continue to hold Israeli hostages. We assume they won't accept a ceasefire and a release of their hostages. If that turns out to be their decision, they will regret it.

I can't predict how long we'll stay or what the final status of Gaza will be. It's not the time for that, and those negotiations will be carried out by my successor in any case. Right now it's just time for the fighting to cease and care for its victims to begin.

Even if I had a magic wand I probably wouldn't do this. Do I really want the US to be responsible for governing and rebuilding Gaza over the next decade? That hasn't worked out well for us recently. But I can still dream.

I can taste salt! Hooray!

From the New York Times:

Mr. Trump has accused federal officials and social companies of trying to suppress conservative speech, while they have said they were only trying to identify falsehoods about elections, vaccines and the like.

Potayto, potahto.

Yesterday I asked "What changed?" to cause Democrats to lose the election. Today I spent some time diddling around in the General Social Survey to see if I could find out. My question was: What big gaps have recently opened up between Democrats and Republicans.

For starters, here's an example of what I'm not talking about:

The number of people saying they have no religion has increased among both Democrats and Republicans, but it's increased a lot more among Democrats. Thirty years ago the gap was only two percentage points while today it's 15 points.

But this is a long-term trend. It doesn't explain anything recent. And it so happens that nearly everything is like this. General happiness, number of children, approval of gay marriage, abortion, defense spending, affirmative action, tougher courts, confidence in education, you name it. All of these have showed a steadily increasing gap between Republicans and Democrats but nothing new recently.

But a few things did change recently. Here they are:

Confidence in both science and medicine was roughly similar between Democrats and Republicans all the way through 2018. Then both plummeted among Republicans, almost certainly due to COVID-era Trumpian disinformation about masks, vaccines, the origin of the virus, and so forth.

Confidence in the press wasn't very different until the spread of Fox News in the early 2000s. For the next 16 years Republican trust in the press was about 20 points lower than Democrats'.

This became turbocharged after Trump took office and went on his "fake news" crusade. For the last few years Republican trust in the press has been 60 points lower than Democrats'.

Starting in 2014, the number of Democrats who thought we should spend more on welfare programs spiked up. Republican views stayed about the same. This is presumably a Ferguson effect, but I'm not sure about that.

In 2021, the number of Democrats who self-ID as gay spiked upward by four percentage points before settling down slightly. The number of Republicans who said they were gay went down by a point.

This is an old favorite: For years Republicans reported higher financial satisfaction than Democrats by more than 10 percentage points. As soon as Biden became president that plummeted to -5 points despite an objectively pretty good economy.

This chart is a little different: it shows Republicans and Democrats on separate lines. As you can see, Republicans have been growing more conservative fairly steadily for the past 30 years. Democrats showed little change until 2016, when the number saying they're liberal spiked upward 20 points in just six years.

The GSS doesn't have any questions about immigration—though I think other evidence suggests a partisan gap that's big but has been opening up pretty steadily for years. However, the Biden-era surge in illegal crossings may have made it more salient for Republicans than Democrats.

For the time being, this is just raw information. There's nothing super obvious that ties all these things together. But give me enough time and maybe I'll come up with a theory.

More from Ben Dreyfuss:

It's been my assumption that queer, in its current usage, is an umbrella term that means anyone other than a boring cis het person. Maybe you're gay, maybe you're trans, maybe you're questioning, maybe you're pan, whatever. As long as you're not garden-variety ordinary in some sex-related way, you're queer.

It's also an example of reclaiming a word often used as a slur in the past. So it's a little more shocking and radical than plain old gay and trans.

Let's open this up to comments. Is this correct? Or am I misinformed?

Here's the latest weirdness from Donald Trump:

All three of the leading candidates to replace Mitch McConnell immediately replied with some version of "Yes sir!" But what does Trump even mean? Recess appointments are just a thing the president can do when the Senate is in recess. No one has to agree to it. The first recess of Trump's presidency will be next August.

Does Trump mean that the Senate should periodically declare a recess so he can make appointments? Maybe, but Democrats will just filibuster it. Does he mean there should be no more of the pro forma sessions that technically keep the Senate alive during vacations and eliminate recesses? Maybe that too, but the first recess still isn't until August. What does he plan to do until then?

He also wants Republicans to ensure that no judges are approved during the rest of the lame duck session. But how does he expect them to do that? Democrats control the Senate until January, just as they have for the past two years. They can approve anyone they want.

Does Trump actually understand how anything works? He doesn't seem to know how tariffs work. He doesn't understand NATO "dues," as he keeps calling them. And he doesn't seem to understand anything about how Congress works. I'm not sure if this is good or bad.

Why does California take so long to count votes? I wanted to find out once and for all, so I started to dig. And I got nowhere. The universal answer was always something like California is a big, complex state that wants everyone to vote. That takes a while.

Please. Voting is complex everywhere; there are other big states; and being big also means you have more ballot counters. What's the real reason?

Well, California is an all-mail ballot state, and ballots can be received up to seven days after Election Day (as long as they're postmarked by Election Day). So things take a while.

Fine. That's progress. But how long does it take in practice to receive the bulk of the ballots? Here's the best I could discover:

Apparently the Secretary of State doesn't tell us how many ballots are received on Election Day. Or the day after. Or the day after that. But on Friday we were told that 16.2 million ballots had been received. That's almost certainly 95%+ of the eventual total, and I'm willing to bet that most of them were received by Wednesday or Thursday at the latest.

So, once again, what's going on? Why have we counted only 63% of the vote? Once the ballots are received—and nearly all of them have been—why does it take more than a few hours to process them? We use the same optical scanners as everyone else, so it's not that. Oregon and Washington both vote exclusively by mail, and they have the same 7-day rule as California and the same signature verification process, but they've both counted more than 85% of the vote. That's slow, but nowhere near the molasses-slow rate of California.

So what's the real real deal? Why do we seem able to count less than a million ballots per day? I still don't know.