Category: Uncategorized

A perennial favorite of presidential campaigns is the "Rose Garden Strategy." But there are others. Harry Truman adopted a "Whistlestop Strategy" in his 1948 campaign. Richard Nixon was the first to pursue a "50 State Strategy" in 1960. During the COVID pandemic, Joe Biden pioneered the "Basement Strategy."

But this year brings something truly new. Donald Trump has promised to attend all of his trials in person because of the media attention they bring. For the first time ever, a presidential candidate is running on an "I Haven't Been Convicted Yet Strategy."

Strange times.

In the seminal Heller case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. However, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the right wasn't unlimited:

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.... Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.

See? Completely reasonable and nuanced. Jittery liberals never had anything to worry ab—

A federal judge in Florida on Friday ruled that a U.S. law that bars people from possessing firearms in post offices is unconstitutional, citing a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 2022 that expanded gun rights.

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, an appointee of Republican former President Donald Trump...said allowing the federal government to restrict visitors from bringing guns into government facilities as a condition of admittance would allow it to "abridge the right to bear arms by regulating it into practical non-existence."

That's from Reuters. The next step, I suppose, will be a ruling that there's no historical precedent for distinguishing handguns from rifles, and therefore no bar to showing up for work with an AR-15 slung over your shoulder. I mean, if you can't bring an assault rifle into a post office or court building, American freedoms are hanging by a mere thread, right?

The Supreme Court will be hearing a couple of cases soon that have the potential of undermining something called "Chevron deference." This does not mean we are supposed to pay special attention to Chevron Oil. It refers to a 1984 Supreme Court case that says courts should allow federal agencies to make any reasonable interpretation of a law if the law is ambiguous. The word reasonable is key here. Agencies aren't allowed to do literally anything they want. They are merely allowed to choose among competing reasonable interpretations based on their experience and expertise.

Getting rid of Chevron has been a white whale of the conservative movement for years. But even the Wall Street Journal editorial page can muster only tepid arguments for overturning it:

Chevron arose when judges were willy-nilly substituting their policy preferences for those of the elected branch. But the doctrine has no constitutional basis.... The late Justice Antonin Scalia supported Chevron after he joined the Court, but he later expressed misgivings as judges bowed to regulators even when they were stretching or rewriting the law.... Overturning Chevron is an important act of judicial housecleaning that would rein in the administrative state and encourage Congress to write clear laws.

The truth, of course, is that overturning Chevron wouldn't rein in the "administrative state." It would simply give more power to judges. Back in 1984 when judges were viewed as too liberal and Ronald Reagan was president, conservatives preferred the administrative state. Today, with a more conservative judiciary, they prefer taking their chances in court.

What's really behind this, of course, is not any real concern with federal agencies per se, or with Congress writing clearer laws. It's the long evolution of the conservative movement against expertise of all stripes. The original justification for Chevron was the simple and obvious observation that modern life is complicated, and in cases of ambiguity it was better to leave things to subject matter experts rather than judges with no relevant knowledge. That's still the case, but movement conservatism has turned so hard to the right that it simply doesn't want to bend to reality anymore. It wants what it wants, full stop. From climate change to environmental rules to labor law to reproductive rights, it knows perfectly well that it can get its way only by a wholesale denial of reality. Nerdy bureaucratic scientists will never go along with that, but judges might. So Chevron has to go.

Rick Hasen echoes an opinion today that I've shared for a very long time:

Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote.... As we enter yet another fraught election season, it’s easy to miss that many of the problems we have with voting and elections in the United States can be traced to this fundamental constitutional defect. Our problems are only going to get worse until we get constitutional change.

Without meaning to disparage other important rights, I've long believed that the three great pillars of democracy are freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, and the right to vote. Of those, the right to vote is not only missing in the US, it's actively opposed in a number of ways. The biggest is probably the common denial of voting rights to prisoners and ex-felons, but it's not the only one. In most places, you also can't vote unless you're registered, a significant and wholly unnecessary hurdle. Why not just let anyone vote who walks up on Election Day? Then there are the numerous photo ID laws set up recently that deny voting rights to anyone without the particular type of ID favored by the party in power.

The historical reasons for voting restrictions are obvious, but the Supreme Court upheld the principle of one-person-one-vote more than 50 years ago. I'm surprised that it's never gotten around to enforcing the obvious corollary to that: Proportional representation can only truly follow the one-person-one-vote principle if everyone has an equal right to vote. Denying or denigrating that right for any group makes a mockery of the principle.

Hasen advocates a constitutional amendment that would force the Supreme Court's hand. It would, he says, "have to be written clearly enough that it would be hard for the Supreme Court to ignore its commands." How about this?

The right to vote in any election shall not be abridged for any citizen over the age of 18.

That language has sufficed for freedom of speech for over 200 years, so why wouldn't it work here?

Finally, for what it's worth, here's the actual state of the economy in the final quarter of 2023 compared to 2022. I feel like I should hardly need to say this, but everything that should be adjusted for inflation has been.

• Real GDP growth: 4.9%
• Unemployment rate: 3.7%
• Inflation (CPI): 3.2%
  
• Inflation (CPI change from previous quarter): 2.8%
• Stock market (S&P 500): up 12.3%
• Consumer spending: up 2.3%
• New construction: up 8.0%
• Blue-collar hourly wages: up 1.1%
• All hourly wages: up 0.8%
• Productivity: up 2.4%
• Housing starts: up 3.4%

Home sales are down compared to last year and manufacturing orders are slightly down. Those are literally the only major economic indicators that were even slightly negative at the end of 2023.

NOTE: There are a few economic indicators that still aren't available for December. For those, I used the Oct-Nov levels compared to last year.

As long as we're at it, here's what else Republicans think about the economy these days:

• 58% think the overall economy is poor (vs. 14% for Democrats)
• 62% think the economy is getting worse (vs. 22% for Democrats)
• 53% say they are worse off than last year (vs. 18% for Democrats)
• 50% say they've heard mostly negative news about the economy (vs. 23% for Democrats)
• 48% think the economy is shrinking (vs. 16% for Democrats)
• 51% think we are currently in a recession (vs. 28% for Democrats)

On a personal level things are quite different:

• 7% say they are personally unemployed, almost identical to Democrats
• 6% are unhappy with their jobs, almost identical to Democrats
• 8% are "very worried" about losing their job, a little less than Democrats
• 22% say they might have trouble paying bills this month, a little more than Democrats

As usual, what we see in general is that in terms of their personal life, Republicans report roughly the same economic condition as Democrats. But when they're asked about the overall economy, they're far more downbeat. The media might be generally too pessimistic about the economy, but Fox News and its pals are obviously in a class by themselves.

I was fooling around with the latest YouGov/Economist poll and marveling anew at how bad Republicans think the economy is. But the most spectacular finding is surely this:

68% of Republicans think unemployment is a serious problem in the US.

The unemployment rate last month was 3.7%. It's been under 4% for 24 straight months. The unemployment rate in 2023 was the lowest in the past half century:

Now, this is average unemployment. Maybe you think there are individual places where unemployment is high, and the survey is picking up those folks. After all, the unemployment rate in Merced is 9%! But that's not it. In the entire country, only 2.3% of all metro areas have unemployment rates over 7%—almost all of them small farming regions in California.

Nor is it anything else. Unemployment is at historic lows for white people, Black people, and Hispanic people. For men and for women. For the young and the old. By virtually any measure, unemployment is historically low for everyone and has been for the past two years.

And here's the kicker: 54% of Democrats also think unemployment is a serious problem. That's not quite as lopsided as it is for Republicans, but it's still insane. Fox News may be the leader in pushing bad economic news on its audience, but they obviously aren't the only ones.

Unemployment fell to 3.6% in March of 2022 and has stayed within a tenth of a point of that ever since. The press has had 22 months to let people know this, but to this day the vast majority still think people are struggling to find work. What in the name of God is going on?

A boy and his pail at the beach.

How are our young people doing these days. Are they still stuck in low-paying jobs that require side hustles to make ends meet? Let's take a look.

For the entire past decade, the wages of young people have been going up, the ratio of part-time workers has been steadily decreasing, and the number with multiple jobs has been basically steady aside from the pandemic years.

Now, on the multiple jobs front, yes, it's possible that some young folks have really minuscule side hustles that don't get counted in the official statistics. But this isn't IRS data. It's survey data. The Census Bureau just calls up people and asks (among other things) if they have multiple jobs. There's no reason to think there's been any particular change in the way people respond to this question.

So: not only are young people doing fine, on average, but it appears that the whole gig economy meme was never true. Always beware of alleged trends that are based either on minimal data or no data at all.

"Global health security" is a measure of how well a country's public health system is prepared to deal with pandemics and infectious diseases generally. Can you guess which country is ranked #1?

The US is first by a comfortable margin. In the subcategory dedicated to having a strong public health sector to treat the sick, the US is also #1.

In one sense, this is of course good news. At the same time, it makes our generally mediocre response to COVID-19 under Donald Trump look even worse. We had the systems in place to do better than any country on the globe, but among the countries with the best health systems our excess death rate from COVID was the second worst.