Author: Kevin Drum

We're nearly done with 2024 economic statistics. There are just a few stragglers left. Here is labor productivity for Q4:

The trendline allows you to see periods when productivity lagged or grew more than average. The past couple of years have been slightly above trend, though you have to squint a bit to see it. We'll see if Donald Trump can keep it up.

Donald Trump tweeted this on August 22, 2018:

What's this all about? Trump's 2018 tweet was prompted by President Cyril Ramaphosa announcing his support for a constitutional amendment that, in some cases, would allow the government to expropriate unused land without compensation. Trump took up the cudgel again a couple of days ago, prompted by an expropriation act finally being passed last month.

The whole thing is super complicated and goes back decades. Land reform was a bedrock tenet of the ANC, but over the years voluntary transfers haven't worked. White people still own more than 70% of the land. So President Ramaphosa has been under a lot of pressure to do something.

In addition, South Africa has a very high crime rate and white farmers in rural areas are murdered all the time. As it happens, this murder rate has declined quite a bit, but it still amounts to about 70 per year—which seems like a lot but is lower than the daily murder rate throughout the whole country. Most of the farm killings are the result of robberies gone bad, and the overall murder rate in South Africa is about four times higher for blacks than whites. Still, this has been a hot button issue for a very long time, so when Trump says South Africa is “treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY," he's explicitly talking about white people.

Is white South African immigrant Elon Musk whispering in Trump's ear about this? I wouldn't be surprised, but he hardly needs to. Trump has been concerned for a long time about whether South Africa's white people are getting a fair shake.

So far, Donald Trump has targeted the following federal agencies for sweeping layoffs:

• USAID
• National Park Service
• CIA
• FBI
• National Science Foundation
• NOAA?

The FBI is straight-up revenge. NOAA appears to be motivated by a belief that if you get rid of the agency that monitors climate change, then climate change will cease to exist.

The others are harder to suss out. Summer workers at national parks? Research boffins at the NSF? The CIA? And of course, the jihad against USAID, which becomes more inexplicable the longer it plays out.

I suppose this all legal unless Congress sets explicit staffing levels. But it's not going to save much money. Trump has no plans to slash staffing at Defense, the VA, or Homeland Security, and the entire rest of the government accounts for about $100 billion in compensation costs (wages plus benefits). If you lay off 5% of the workforce, which is a lot, you'd save about $5 billion per year. This is roughly five hour's worth of federal spending.

If this staffing really is wasteful, then fine. Cut away. But it's just not what the government spends its money on. That would be defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, social welfare, and interest on the debt. If you don't take those on, you're not cutting spending. You're just showboating.

This is a nice, fat seagull hanging out at the Seal Beach pier at sunrise, with the Long Beach skyline in the background.

The rental vacancy rate at the end of 2024 was 6.9%:

The rental vacancy rate is generally considered a good proxy for the tightness of the housing market. It went steadily down from 2016-22, suggesting that we were building too little housing and people were having a hard time finding a place to live.

But that's turned around since, and the vacancy rate is now very close to its historical average. The reason for this is simple: during the past three years we've been in the middle of an unprecedented boom in large apartment construction:

We've been building more apartment units per capita than at any time in the past 50 years.

I know it's pointless to ask, but . . .

Aside from everything else, why does Donald Trump want Gaza? What possible use is it to the United States? Am I missing something obvious here?

Since water is in the news, here's a picture of the Hinds Pumping Station in Riverside County. But it has nothing to do with water from the north. It feeds the Colorado River Aqueduct, which begins about a hundred miles east at Lake Havasu. Here in Southern California, we steal our water from a great many places.

The single weirdest thing Elon Musk has done is to take control of the Treasury's payment system. What's the point? Every dollar the federal government spends goes through a bunch of steps to make sure it's legitimate, approved, and due for payment. After that's all done, Treasury cuts the checks. It's a purely mechanical process. "Control" of the system gets you nothing.

So what is Musk up to? The conspiracy theorists think Musk is planning to insert himself in this process and simply halt any check writing he disapproves of. But this isn't just illegal, it's wildly illegal. There's just no way Musk could be thinking of doing this.

So what is he doing? Here's a guess: Musk's minions are writing some kind of custom reporting system. If you want to track literally every cent the government spends, this is the place to do it. Nor would Musk be stopped by the fact that the system is probably written in some ancient programming language like COBOL or PL/I. Modern AI is great at decrypting and modifying code, and while it prefers contemporary languages like Python or C, I'll bet Claude and GPT-4 can do a credible job of hacking their way through a big, boiling pot of COBOL spaghetti.

So then, what does Musk plan to do with his nifty new reporting app? Beats me. I imagine he's designing it to notify him of discrepancies of some kind. Or to track down every last DEI-related payment. Or create God's own pivot table of regulatory spending.

I mean, who knows? But Musk figures that knowledge is power, and he's not wrong about that. The Treasury payment system might be the ideal high ground for Musk to build a personal source of spending knowledge that's independent of having to ask OMB or agency heads or anyone else anytime he wants to know something. If I were him, this is absolutely the kind of thing I'd be highly motivated to do.

If this is the case, Musk is keeping it hush-hush because he doesn't want anyone to know he's building this independent power center. But there's nothing illegal about it as long as the president and Treasury secretary both approve.

More slop from the loon:

What group has been "deleted"? First, some background. 18F (short for 18th and F) is a small group within the General Services Administration that helps other agencies roll out tech projects. They have a reputation for being pretty woke, and even once implemented a bot that would warn Slack users if they weren't using correct language.

That's trifling stuff, but they have a sister agency, TTS, that fucked up pretty badly on a project called Login.gov, which allows users to create a single login for a variety of federal services. Long story short, they claimed login.gov was "IAL2 compliant" even though it wasn't. They never implemented required facial recognition tech because, apparently, they weren't convinced the benefits outweighed the problems of facial recognition among Black people and other minority groups. Several people were reassigned or fired over this fiasco.

That was bad, but TTS isn't 18F, whose sins are the kind of "roll your eyes" stuff that don't really matter that much. And they certainly have nothing to do with the IRS DirectFile program.

Now, having wasted your time with this muck, you deserve an answer to the question: what group has been deleted? As near as I can tell, here's the answer:

The 18F Twitter account has been shut down. 18F itself still exists. DirectFile still exists. TTS still exists. Everything still exists, I think.

But 18F's Twitter account has been shut down.

The ongoing saga of USAID is the damnedest story:

“In many cases USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy with that country or with that region,” [Marco] Rubio told reporters in El Salvador’s capital. “That cannot continue.”

....America’s new chief diplomat also accused USAID leaders of insubordination, accusing agency leaders of refusing to answer basic questions posed by lawmakers during his time in the Senate. He also refuted the notion, which he said agency officials espoused to legislators, that USAID is an apolitical agency.

“American foreign policy isn’t apolitical,” Rubio said. “American foreign policy is … to further the interest of the United States. If someone wants to spend apolitical dollars, they should spend private dollars.”

What exactly is the problem with USAID? I mean, if you just hate foreign aid, then fine. But all you have to do is slash their budget, not pretend it's some communist outpost across the street from the FBI.

As for insubordination, senators always think agency heads are dodging their questions. But Rubio mostly supported USAID during his years in the Senate. He even co-sponsored a bill to diversify its funding.

And as if that's not head spinning enough, Rubio is now accusing USAID of not being political enough? What's going on here? Are they a bunch of "radical lunatics" (Trump)? "Radical left Marxists" (Musk)? Or a bunch of dweebish technocrats (Rubio)?

I feel like someone must know the understory here. What's really going on?