Author: Kevin Drum

This ad from Donald Trump ran during Thursday's debate. That is, even before Joe Biden's terrible performance:

I don't personally have a strong opinion about Kamala Harris. But that doesn't matter. It's hard to overstate just how long and how intensely Fox News and others have been demonizing her. By now even moderate Republicans are fully convinced that Harris is dangerously incompetent, ultra-liberal, and scary. Most of them are petrified at the prospect of her becoming president.

Needless to say, that prospect is now even scarier than it was before the debate. This is something to keep in mind as you ponder Joe Biden's fate. If Biden drops out Harris is the all but certain nominee, and fair or not, she may be the only Democrat alive with even less center-right support than Biden. And that center-right support is where the election will be won or lost.

California recently passed a bill requiring high school students to take a class in financial literacy in order to graduate. I was curious about just what this entailed, so I took a look at the bill. There are a dozen basic curriculum requirements:

1. Fundamentals of banking for personal use, including, but not limited to, savings and checking and managing to minimize fees.
2. Principles of budgeting for independent living.
3. Employment and understanding factors that affect net income, including worker rights such as:
   • Prohibitions against misclassification of employees as independent contractors.
   • Child labor.
   • Wage and hour protections.
   • Worker safety.
   • Workers' compensation.
   • Unemployment insurance.
   • Paid Sick Leave, Paid Family Leave, State Disability Insurance, and the California Family Rights Act.
   • The right to organize a union in the workplace.
   • Prohibitions against retaliation by employers when workers exercise these or any other rights guaranteed by law.
4. Uses and effects of credit, including managing credit scores and the relation of debt and interest to credit.
5. Uses and costs of loans, including student loans, as well as policies that provide student loan forgiveness.
6. Types and costs of insurance, including home, auto, health, and life insurance.
7. Impacts of the tax system, including its impact on personal income, the process to file taxes, and how to read tax forms and pay stubs.
8. Principles of investing and building wealth, including investment alternatives to build financial security, including tax-advantaged investments such as pensions and 401(k) plans, individual retirement accounts (IRAs), and stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and index funds.
9. Enhancing consumer protection skills by raising awareness of common scams and frauds and preventing identity theft.
10. Identifying means to finance college, workforce education, low-cost community college options, and other career technical educational pathways or apprenticeships. Financing options covered may include scholarships, merit aid, and student loans.
11. Understanding how psychology can impact one’s financial well-being.
12. Charitable giving.

In my usual snobbish way, my first thought about "financial literacy" was: Come on. What are they going to do with the smart kids who will understand everything in the first week and then have nothing to do? But after reading this list my concern is more with how average kids are expected to soak this all up. It feels kind of overwhelming for a C+ 17-year-old.

Plus I wonder who's going to teach these classes. Most adults aren't all that financially literate, after all, and a degree in history or art or English or even math won't help you out much. But I suppose they'll figure it out.

I've seen a surprising amount of confusion over what it means that the Supreme Court has killed "Chevron deference."

But it's not complicated. In the Chevron case 40 years ago, the Court didn't say that federal agencies could just make up their own rules—or that judges couldn't overrule them. Judges can and do overrule agencies all the time.

All the Court said is that judges should defer to agencies if (a) the law is ambiguous, (b) the agency's interpretation is a "rational" and "reasonable" one, and (c) the interpretation is reached through formal proceedings.¹

That's it, and at the time it was published no one considered it an especially big deal because courts had long deferred to agencies anyway on pragmatic grounds—namely that complex modern rulemaking frequently required deep expertise that judges didn't have. Chevron merely changed the grounds for this deference and made it a little more explicit.

It may be, as some people have argued, that the case at hand in yesterday's decision really was an example of egregious overreach by a federal agency. If it was, however, the Court could easily have ruled against the Commerce Department without touching Chevron. They just had to declare that the department's actions weren't a reasonable interpretation of the law.²

In theory, Chevron is neither conservative nor liberal. It's merely a statement about the level of deference courts should show toward Congress and federal agencies, regardless of which party is in power. Nor, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, should it mean that Biden administration priorities are on "shakier legal footing."

In practice, though, it gives the Supreme Court cover to work its will more overtly if federal agencies are being reasonable but the justices don't like the results anyway. And since the Court looks set to be an activist conservative body for a good long time, that means its will is likely to be activist and conservative regardless of what's reasonable.

¹The last bit (limiting deference to formal proceedings) was added in a later case.

²They do this a lot, which makes it unclear just how much impact the end of Chevron will have. In a sense, all the Court did was codify what they've been doing for the past couple of decades anyway.

It's commonplace these days to note with alarm the growing influence of extremist right wing parties in Europe. I think this is generally overblown, but it's worth noting that, to the extent it's true, it's largely because these parties have made themselves over as less extreme. In France, for example, Marine Le Pen took over the fascist National Front and promptly kicked out her racist father; rebadged the party as National Rally; put a lid on overt antisemitism; and reversed course on leaving NATO, leaving the EU, and repealing same-sex marriage.

So the party is now more normie friendly. But in the runup to national elections that start tomorrow the Washington Post asks if the makeover is more than paper thin:

Innuendo, conspiracies and vitriol from National Rally candidates and supporters are amplifying doubts about how much a movement originally rooted in antisemitism and racism has truly evolved.

One candidate competing in the first round of the legislative assembly elections on Sunday suggested that a rival party was financed by Jews. Another claimed that some civilizations remain “below bestiality in the chain of evolution.” Yet another blamed a bedbug infestation in France on “the massive arrival from all the countries of Africa.” One more regularly pays tribute to the man who led the Nazi collaborators in World War II-era Vichy France.

....Like Trumpism, LePénisme remains a safe harbor for anti-vaccine advocates, climate-change skeptics and Putin admirers. And as seen through social media posts and telling asides — as well as through homophobic attacks and racist tirades allegedly committed by Le Pen supporters — National Rally still provides a welcome home for vitriolic thought.

In other words, like Trumpism, a lot of support for National Rally is still motivated by racism. Also like Trumpism, this mostly takes the form of tolerating racism rather than overtly appealing to it. With a wink and a nudge, Le Pen lets her fans know that she's on their side—even as they understand that she can't say so in public.

The only question is how many people actively like this? And how many more are either fooled by the makeover or just don't care that much about a bit of casual racism? We'll find out in the first round of voting tomorrow and the final round a week after that.

This is from the Wall Street Journal this morning:

I'm not picking on the Journal here. They're just one of many. My question is: Why does Elon Musk's every utterance seem to get news play?

In the case of Donald Trump it's understandable. He was president of the United States and might be again. But Musk is just a businessman who likes to talk a lot. Why should anyone care what he thinks about Star Wars or DEI or trans people or immigration or any of the dozens of other subjects he blathers about?

We've been through other phases like this with other people. Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. Michele Bachmann. Tucker Carlson.

What is it that makes us periodically train our sights on someone and suddenly become desperate to pay attention to everything they say? And why are these people always conservative?

According to a new study, here's our best estimate of the number of premature deaths caused each year by a variety of chemicals:

But wait! I left the two biggest killers off because they wrecked the y-axis. Here's the full chart:

Lead kills more people than every other chemical combined. And drawing from other sources, small air particulates dwarf even lead: Estimates suggest they're responsible for 8.1 million premature deaths every year.

There's been so much going on today that I forgot all about the May inflation report. This is PCE inflation, the measure preferred by the Fed:

As usual, don't put too much stock in a single month's number. That said, this is superlative news. The headline rate is negative, and the core rate, which the Fed cares most about, is only 1.0%.

On the more conventional year-over-year measure, headline inflation dropped to 2.6% and core inflation also dropped to 2.6%. But those numbers incorporate a lot of inertia from 12 months ago, so who cares?

I would sure like to be a fly on the wall of the Supreme Court chambers right about now. The Court's term typically ends in June, but they still haven't released their ruling on Donald Trump's immunity claim. What can they possibly be waiting for? Was there some kind of last-minute change of heart that delayed things? Or what?

Now, there's no law that says the Supreme Court term has to end in June. It just usually does. Hell, there's no law that says they can only publish opinions on weekdays. Maybe the immunity decision will drop at 3 am on Saturday. At this point anything is possible.

What makes this whole thing especially weird is that there's another decision still in waiting: Moody v. NetChoice, which is about whether a state can prohibit social media companies from removing content based on the views expressed. Like the immunity case, this one should be a no-brainer: of course they can't. This kind of state interference with speech is precisely what the First Amendment is designed to prevent.

What does it mean that two easy cases are taking so long? Maybe nothing. But the justices aren't hermits. They know the stakes of the immunity case in particular. They know that Trump's January 6 trial has been on hold for months waiting on them.¹ What are they thinking?

POSTSCRIPT: On a broader note, why is the Supreme Court so weirdly obsessed by secrecy? Why not just tell us when the term will end? Why not publish their schedule for releasing opinions? What possible benefit is there in keeping everyone on the edge of their seats?

¹The immunity decision doesn't affect Trump's classified documents case because it applies only to immunity for actions taken as president. The documents case is about actions he took after leaving office.

This is hardly the biggest of Donald Trump's whoppers last night, but I've grown weary of his ceaseless claims that he successfully bullied NATO countries to spend more on defense. What really happened is that in 2014—under President Obama—NATO members recommitted themselves to spending 2% of GDP on defense. This was spurred by Russia's invasion of Crimea that year. Here's how that went:

Biden was far more successful than Trump at getting Europe to pony up more money. However, this is just a simple average, not weighted for country size. So let's take a look in dollars:

Same thing. NATO defense spending increased far more under Biden than Trump.

Now, if you want to argue that recent spending has finally hit the 2% goal because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that's fine. I'm not demanding that you give Biden all the credit for this. But Trump? He accomplished very little, despite all his blathering and threats.

Here are Charlie and Hilbert hanging out in the living room on a hot day. Charlie knows that Hilbert is down there, but I'm not sure Hilbert knew Charlie was up above.