Month: November 2024

My mood today:

Here's an interesting YouGov poll I happened to come across this morning. It asks people if, overall, social media is good or bad:

It's probably not surprising that young people are far more positive about social media than older people. But I am a little surprised about the big education gap. Is this because of education itself? Or because the kids of high school grads have more problems with social media than the kids of college grads?

Ditto for race. Why are Black people considerably more positive than either white or Hispanic folks?

For what it's worth, it all evens out. Among all adults, it's a dead tie between positive and negative. And positive feelings have been trending up for the past four years.

I guess the good news this morning is that practically overnight the US election system has become reliable and trustworthy. It's amazing the progress we can make in less than a week when we put our minds to it.

Last night I mused about the possibility that the election was really about inflation the whole time and the result has been baked into the cake all along. But that hardly seems possible. Overall inflation has been low for over a year. Food inflation is close to zero. Gasoline prices have been dropping.

But there's more to it. Here are three examples of big, recent, high-profile price surges that have far outstripped wage increases. First up is auto insurance:

Obviously this is not the fault of either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. But it's still big; it's painful; and it hits nearly everyone every six months in an unexpected and shocking bill. Here are credit card payments:

This is a combination of rising credit card balances and higher interest rates. That's mostly the Fed's fault, but who cares? It affects more than half the families in America and it's a big hit. Finally, here are auto loans:

Again, this is the result of normal inflation for new cars plus rising interest rates. The average monthly payment on a new car has gone up more than $200, and even if most people haven't bought a new car lately, it's the kind of thing they hear about from friends and neighbors who have.

I don't know how big a deal this is, but it doesn't all get captured in standard inflation statistics. Rising credit card payments don't get captured at all, for example. The end result is that rising prices and interest rates can be broadly more painful than it might seem they should be.

What a depressing night.

Not because a newly unbound Donald Trump will wreak havoc on American democracy. I've never believed that. He remains too ignorant, too vain, and too undisciplined to do that.

He'll still do plenty of damage. Like all Republicans, he'll continue to bankrupt the country with tax cuts. He'll have four more years to nominate conservative judges. He'll be disastrously inattentive to climate change. He'll fire Jack Smith and escape all responsibility for January 6. Palestinians will be even more utterly abandoned.

But the big ticket items he's been threatening will be hard to fulfill. Does he really want to deport every illegal immigrant in the country? I don't know, but at a minimum he'd have to hire half a million new ICE officers to do it, and Congress won't go along with that.

Does he really want to fire 4,000 civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists? Probably. But it's not clear he can do this on his own. The Project 2025 folks think he can, but it's never been tested in court and there's a good chance it would fail.

And all those panderific tax exemptions for tips, overtime, Social Security, and so forth? I doubt Trump was serious about them, and in any case Republicans in Congress won't go along. They're too expensive and don't benefit corporations or rich people.

RFK Jr. may want to ban vaccines, but he can't. Elon Musk may have fantasies about cutting the federal budget by $2 trillion, but he can't either. It's impossible.

Trump has more freedom to impose tariffs on a whim. But the kind of tariffs he's been talking about are so obviously brain dead I doubt even his most loyal advisors would stand by and let 'em rip. They'd violate treaties; promote retaliation; create inflation; and tank the economy. Even MAGA cultists have some kind of minimal survival instinct against such rank stupidity.

Of course, even if I'm right about this Trump will cause plenty of misery along the way. Immigrants will be terrorized. Ukraine will be left vulnerable to further Russian expansionism. God only knows what will happen on abortion, or what he'll do to trans people.

But even that's not why this is so depressing. That's simpler: It's the fact that Americans would elect a boorish, blustering, fantasizing, moronic, self-absorbed dimwit like Trump. Any other Republican, sure. Sometimes the country turns right. But how can a man like Trump be supported by the vast majority of the Republican Party? That's depressing.

It's not over yet, but things are looking grim for Kamala Harris. Was it all down to inflation?

Here's what the exit polls say about inflation over the past year:

Needless to say, this is crazy. It's perfectly sensible to see big partisan disagreements about abortion or guns or taxes. But a huge partisan split on how much inflation has hurt you?

I think we can say that, obviously, inflation affected everyone roughly the same. It didn't affect Republicans any more harshly than Democrats—not by more than a handful of percentage points anyway. And yet a huge number say it was a severe hardship over the past year. The past year! There's hardly been any inflation over the past year.¹ Maybe Annie Lowrey has it right:

Perhaps. But even assuming that people interpret "the past year" as "ever since Biden took over," it still doesn't make sense that the partisan divide would be so big. This isn't the kind of question that automatically triggers tribal identification, the way some questions do.

In the end, it might be the simplest of things: inflation made people mad. And when they're mad they vote for the out party. They don't care whose fault it was or anything like that. They're just mad, so they vote for a change.

Or maybe it was Fox News banging away about inflation 24/7.

Or maybe there are still just too many men who simply can't bring themselves to vote for a woman. Especially among Latinos.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

¹2.4% to be exact, almost exactly the average from 2000-2019.

Amendment 4, the abortion rights initiative in Florida, received 58% of the vote. In Florida! A state so red that Donald Trump is winning by 13 points. That's a remarkable showing.

But it takes 60% to win in Florida, so it's going down to defeat. That's depressing. Nonetheless, the pro-life forces should be on notice if they can only manage 42% of the vote for an abortion ban in the deep South. They are not holding a winning hand.

If you're jittery and looking for something to do, get up off your butt and go vote. Already voted? Do it again! It's like the All-Star game: you're allowed to vote as often as you want. You just have to show your secret Democratic Party registration card or your Mexican citizenship card.

Little known fact. But it's true. I have it on good authority from Elon Musk himself.

As of 6:50 Eastern time approximately 0.26% of the votes have been counted nationwide and Donald Trump is leading 61.6% to 38.4%. ZOMG!

Um, that's in Kentucky and Indiana. I guess maybe we should wait a little longer to assess things?

Here's some more quasi-election related news to while away the hours until polls close. Stock in Donald Trump's scam company behaved very weirdly today:

The stock had been trading fairly normally all day and then suddenly plunged nearly six points in the 13 minutes from 2:41 to 2:54 before trading was briefly halted. As I type this, it's trading about $7 below its high for the day.

What happened? After the closing bell Trump Media issued a surprise earnings report, which showed a drop of 6% in sales and a Q3 loss of $19 million. This is par for the course, but it's still hard not to wonder if someone got advance notice and then started dumping shares. But no one knows.

In any case, this is nothing compared to what's likely to happen tomorrow. Depending on the election results, DJT will either skyrocket at the opening bell or plummet to nothing. If Trump wins, he'll be the first candidate in history to make billions of dollars in addition to having exclusive control over our nuclear forces.