Author: Kevin Drum

In case you're curious, here's a breakdown of the president's FY25 budget proposal:

The two pink regions represent approximately 5% of the defense budget and 5% of the domestic discretionary budget. The whole interminable fight before we finally agree on a budget will be entirely about those two slivers—or less. Those fights will seem very important when they happen, but keep this chart in mind for perspective. As with academic squabbles, the fighting is intense because the stakes are so low.

President Biden released a new campaign pledge federal budget today:

President Biden on Monday called for major new spending initiatives to lower costs for health care, child care and housing and enough new taxes on the wealthy and major corporations to pay for those proposals and also shave $3 trillion off the national debt over the next decade.

....In a $7.3 trillion budget for fiscal year 2025, Biden would have Congress offer universal prekindergarten education, provide 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, expand anti-poverty tax credits and create a new tax break for first-time home buyers.

So that's what Biden wants. By contrast, Donald Trump is proposing mass roundups of immigrants; a fight against COVID vaccines; huge new middle-class taxes in the form of tariffs; politicization of the civil service; a rollback of any and all climate regulation; a National Guard takeover of major cities; and retribution against liberals.

Take your pick.

Anyway, the federal budget continues to sort of dumbfound me. It is, as everyone has long acknowledged, dead on arrival. Literally no one on Capitol Hill cares about it or uses it as a baseline for anything. In one sense this is fine: if Congress wants to control the budget, that's their prerogative. But the president's budget is a massive, detailed undertaking that sucks up God only knows how many hours of time from every federal agency.

So why bother with this if no one pays any attention to it? Why not produce a simple, stripped down high-level budget and leave it to Congress to sweat the details? Is there any concrete benefit to the 2,000-page behemoth the White House produces every year? Or would 50 pages have the same real-world usefulness?

A couple of days ago TikTok's users were greeted with an unusual welcome screen when they logged in: a message from the company warning that Congress was trying to shut them down and asking its fans to call their senators and representatives about it. I remain ambivalent about TikTok, but the reaction of the right to TikTok's lobbying is flatly deranged:

The way in which the Chinese-owned social-media app TikTok went about trying to convince lawmakers to leave it alone was unique. It sicced its youthful users on Washington in a campaign of intimidation and emotional blackmail, confirming that the air of menace the app has cultivated for itself is no accident.

....The campaign was a disaster. It presented tangible evidence to lawmakers not only that TikTok’s capacity to track the data and locations of their users was quite robust but also that those users were in the throes of a deep dependency.

....If TikTok survives as a CCP-controlled entity despite the clear evidence of not just the psychological damage it is doing to the American public but the peril it presents to American national security, we will know why. It will be the culmination of this intimidation campaign, in which a well-funded effort to hold America’s children hostage succeeded.

What in the actual fuck is this about? The NRA, just to take one example, is famous for "siccing" its members on Congress by the millions. AIPAC does it, AARP does it, and the NEA does it. It's all just ordinary political mobilization, not "intimidation and emotional blackmail."

Nor does any of this indicate that TikTok knows anything unusual about its users. Its message went out to everyone, young and old, and was personalized only to the extent of guessing what congressional district they were in.

Nor, finally, does TikTok "hold America's children hostage," at least no more than Taylor Swift does. It's just popular with teenagers, like sugary cereal, sappy music, and other dubious habits of the young—whose mercurial passions and fads aren't exactly a well-kept secret.

If there's any real psychological damage here, it's among America's adults, who have flung themselves into a frenzied moral panic about TikTok based on the flimsiest of evidence. I'll be happy to join them if that evidence ever becomes firm, but you have to give me something, folks. Wild screeds with literally zero behind them aren't going to do it.

Paul Krugman says that recent job growth is all about migrant labor. Immigration hawk Mickey Kaus isn't amused:

And the hell with marginally employed native minorities, high-school dropouts and ex-offenders who might have been hoping that a tight labor market would finally offer them a good shot at steady, decently paid employment ....

Anti-immigration folks have long suggested that high immigration produces a loose labor market and falling wages, and it's a perfectly plausible argument. But I wonder if it's reached its sell-by date? The last three years have been something of a destruction test of this idea, after all. Upwards of 2-3 million immigrants have poured into the country, but the labor market remains tighter than its pre-pandemic average and wages have gone up for the lowest paid workers.

Previous academic studies on the effect of immigration have been equivocal, but none of them have been a natural experiment this big. The effect of the Mariel boatlift on the Florida economy in 1980, for example, has been studied extensively, but even that only involved about 100,000 immigrants. Conversely, the past three years have seen a net increase in the immigrant population of several million with no noticeable effect on low-end employment or wages. At this point, it seems likely that immigration responds to labor tightness, not the other way around.

Earlier today Kensington Palace released the first picture of Princess Kate since her abdominal surgery earlier this year. But today AP and two other wire services withdrew the photo because of evidence that "the source has manipulated the image":

ZOMG! What did the palace do?!? Put Kate's head on someone else's body? Broaden her smile in Photoshop?¹ Make up the picture from whole cloth using AI?

Meh. Probably not. Maybe they airbrushed a wrinkle from Kate's forehead. But that's still a no-no in the journalism world.

¹Yes, Photoshop has a feature just for this. It's under Neural Filters.

One of the things that continues to boggle me is the breathtaking extremism on both sides of the Gaza conflict. On the progressive left, it's now commonplace to believe that Israel is a nation of settler colonialists that has no right to exist—a position that even the PLO abandoned 30 years ago. On the right, it's commonplace to argue that merely acknowledging the suffering of Gazans, let alone doing something about it, is appeasement and weakness. Here is a National Review piece about President Biden's plan to increase humanitarian aid to Gaza:

The White House’s proposed pier solution would endanger American lives, almost certainly experience mission creep that turns temporary into tem-permanent, and, because of Biden’s promise of “no boots” would require a third party to handle dissemination of supplies

....The United States can do almost anything to which it sets its mind. But can and should are two separate matters. Biden is terrified of the pro-Palestinian elements in his party and, in his fear, is creating a situation whereby the U.S. taxpayers are almost certain to aid Hamas in its fight against our regional partner while having to watch U.S. men and women in uniform get left high and dry just off the coast of one of the most volatile few square miles in the world.

This piece is depressingly typical, and it's hardly the worst thing I've read. You say not enough aid is getting into Gaza? Hell no. Too much aid is getting into Gaza. It should be turned into a modern day Biafra until every last Hamas militant is captured or killed.

Even given my squishy views on Gaza, it horrifies me anew whenever I read something like this. How can it be so easy to turn so many of us into brutal mass killers?

Atrios links today to a Wirecutter piece that says you no longer need to worry about turning off the lights when you leave a room. Modern bulbs are so energy efficient it barely makes any difference.

This reminded me of the great Obama light bulb panic of 2011, highlighted by Michele Bachmann (remember her?) and the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act. Yes, that was a real thing. As it happens, the phaseout of incandescent light bulbs was signed into law by George Bush, not Barack Obama, but no matter. It was his Energy Department that wrote the enabling rules.

And the new bulbs were horrible! Flickery, bright white, expensive, and temperamental. Complaints were endless from conservatives, who stockpiled ruddy incandescent bulbs so they'd have enough to last a lifetime even under the new fascist rules.

In 2022 the final phase of regulations went into place and in 2023 incandescents were effectively banned for good. But guess what? The new regs had done exactly what they were supposed to do: spurred innovation and made light bulbs better than ever. Today you can get LED bulbs of any temperature from incandescent to sunlight. Not only that, you can buy 'em from Costco by the dozen for a few bucks apiece and adjust the temperature on the bulb itself. LED bulbs last a long time, they hardly use any electricity, and they don't flicker. We are living in a golden age of light bulbs.

Does anyone even care anymore? Not that I can tell. We're all happily saving a bunch of money and lighting our houses just like we used to. All that panic was for nothing.

Sen. Katie Britt has gotten a lot of grief for her melodramatic response to the State of the Union address, but it turns out she was also recklessly misleading about a woman she met on a visit to Del Rio, Texas, last year:

That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.... This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.

As journalist Jonathan Katz discovered, Britt didn't have to work very hard to find this woman. She's famous. Her name is Karla Jacinto Romero and she testified before Congress in 2015 about her sex trafficking, which happened entirely in Mexico during the Bush administration. She is now an activist who fights human trafficking.

Britt chose her language extremely carefully on Thursday night, plainly insinuating that Joe Biden was somehow responsible for Jacinto's plight without ever quite saying so. In fact, none of it has the slightest thing to do with Biden or his immigration policies.

Britt's bio says, "A Christian, wife, and mother, faith and family are at the heart of Katie’s life." Haven't any of these Christians ever heard of the Ninth Commandment?

Why did Republicans vote down the bipartisan immigration reform bill? Because Donald Trump told them to. However, serious border hawks really did have some substantive complaints as well. Two of them were the most significant.

First, the bill did nothing about President Biden's CHNV parole program, which allows residents of four countries (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) to apply for temporary two-year residence in the US if they have a sponsor and pass a background check. About 250,000 people entered the US under this program in 2023.

There's nothing complicated about this. You're either for it or against it—though it's worth noting that the immigration bill didn't make things any worse from a hawk's perspective. It just did nothing.

The second issue is more complex and revolves around wording in the bill that says anyone who makes an asylum claim “shall be released from custody.” The complaint about this is that it doesn't merely tolerate catch-and-release for pragmatic reasons, it codifies catch-and-release.

And this is true. But the details are all-important here. Under current law, anyone applying for asylum is supposed to be held in detention. In practice, however, limited detention space means they almost never are. They're released on their own recognizance to wait for their court date, which is often years away.

During this waiting period asylum seekers are monitored by ICE under a program called Alternatives to Detention. The most common version of this requires them to check in periodically using a smartphone equipped with facial recognition technology. In reality, however, ICE tracks only a fraction of asylum hopefuls using ATD monitoring. About 90% are tracked for only a few months and then unenrolled, primarily for budget reasons.

The immigration reform bill changed all this. It created a program called Provisional Noncustodial Removal Proceedings that applies to nearly all asylum seekers. This program does indeed mandate their release while they wait for a decision, but it also mandates the use of ATD monitoring. In addition, it places asylum authority in most cases into the hands of asylum officers, not courts. These officers are required to hold a credible fear interview within 90 days and a final asylum determination within 180 days. The bill allocated about half a billion dollars to hire more asylum officers and asylum judges in order to meet this goal.

In practice, then, the bill is almost entirely hawkish on asylum:

• It raises the credible fear standard so fewer asylum seekers will be allowed in.
• It allocates more money for detention space.
• For those who are nonetheless released, it requires the use of ATD monitoring.
• It provides money for more asylum officers and judges.
• It mandates that final asylum decisions have to be made within six months.

This compares to a current system in which (a) release may not be codified but is almost universal anyway; (b) most released asylum seekers aren't monitored in any way; and (c) they stay in the country for years waiting for a court to decide their fate.

As with anything, you can poke holes in this. How tough will the asylum officers be? Can you guarantee that decisions will really be made in six months? How effective is ATD monitoring?¹

If you want, you can spin this skepticism into a firm belief that the immigration bill would have been worse than the status quo. But for anyone looking at this evenhandedly, it's a tough case to make. The bill's treatment of asylum really does seem clearly tougher than current law. Put this together with everything else the bill does and it's a no-brainer to go ahead and pass it. So why have immigration hawks breathlessly talked themselves into believing it would make things worse?

It's a mystery.

¹This is a surprisingly hard question to answer, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that the absconder rate is low and the court appearance rate is high for asylum seekers who are kept in the ATD program. In other words, it's pretty effective when it's used intensively, but less so when people are released from it.

Hey, check out Mayor Secretary Pete on childhood lead poisoning:

I think Pete is the highest ranking official I've seen endorsing the lead-crime theory. Good work!