Kevin Drum

Here's the uninsured rate during the Trump and Biden presidencies among the non-Medicare population:

Despite a good economy, the uninsured rate rose 1.0 percentage points under Trump even if you give him credit for the pandemic decline. Under Biden, the uninsured rate has declined 1.5 points so far.

Time for something weird. Springfield, Ohio, as you know, is currently famous as the site of the Haitian cat-eating hoax being promoted by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. This has turned out to be a fabrication, but there's broad agreement about the background story: Springfield was a dying town until 2014, when local leaders began a project to attract new employers and, eventually, new workers. Many of the workers were Haitians living in Florida and elsewhere who heard the town's appeal and moved to Springfield in hopes of getting better jobs. In the end, something like 15,000 Haitian immigrants came to Springfield.

But there's something odd going on. Here's the population of Springfield (the city itself, not the MSA):

Springfield's population has been flat since 2014, actually declining slightly. Here is employment:

This confirms the overall population story. Employment has been flat since 2014. Of course, this doesn't tell us anything about the composition of the population. Here's that:

Through 2022, at least, the Census Bureau recorded virtually no growth in the number of residents born outside the US.

This gibes with decennial census data. Between 2010 and 2020 it records a drop of 5,000 white residents, no major change in Black or Hispanic residents, and an increase of 2,500 in multiracial and "other." That puts a hard cap of 2,500 on the number of new immigrants through 2020, and the real number is probably a good bit lower.

Housing units? Down slightly. GDP? Down slightly. School enrollment? Flat. Median income growth? A bit less than the national average. The number of people who don't speak English at home? Less than 3,000.

What the hell is going on? This data comes from the Census Bureau, the BEA, and the BLS, so it's not just a matter of a single agency screwing up. They're all producing data that's in broad agreement: there's been no economic renaissance in Springfield, no population recovery, and nowhere near 15,000 new immigrants of any nationality.

Obviously there are Haitian immigrants in Springfield. But how many? I'd be surprised if it was much over 2,000, with possibly some more living outside city limits. Either that or there's something hella weird going on with our statistical agencies.

UPDATE: Using data through 2023, the Haitian population of Springfield might be closer to 4,000. Details here.

Kamala Harris sat down yesterday for an interview with Brian Taff of Philadelphia’s Action News. He asked her this:

When you talk about bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people, what are one or two specific things you have in mind for that?

Harris is getting a lot of flak for not really answering the question. She filibustered for 3½ minutes and repeated her talking points about building more housing, providing a $50,000 tax deduction for starting a small business, and giving young families $25,000 in down payment assistance.

This is actually a perfectly adequate answer about making things more affordable, but says nothing about bringing down prices. Why?

For better or worse, it's because Harris is tolerably honest. There is virtually nothing a president can do to lower prices, and it's deceitful to pretend otherwise even if it's politically expedient. So two cheers for Harris not serving up a big dollop of BS about how she's going to lower prices for everyone.

POSTSCRIPT: Go ahead and watch the whole interview. You know the common trope that local reporter ask better questions than the bigfoot national reporters? Nah. They both suck.

The Wall Street Journal has a story today about consumers becoming delinquent in paying their bills. The story isn't wrong: both credit card and auto loan payments have transitioned into delinquency (30 days late) at increasing rates over the past couple of years.

The data comes from a quarterly Fed report, and the problem is that it's very hard to conclude anything from it these days. If everything were headed in the same direction, it would be easy. But it's not. For example:

If you look at severely delinquent loans, there's nothing much going on with autos and only a moderate problem with credit cards. But there's more:

The actual overdue balance on all consumer loans has been steadily down, with only the tiniest of upticks in the past year. And there's this:

Loans in collection have trended down for years and show no problems at all.

The Fed's credit report has been like this for a while: depending on what you look at things can seem good or bad. You might think of the credit card data as a canary in the coal mine—it starts to go bad first and signals trouble ahead—or it might be that it's just the most volatile signal and should be discounted unless it's been bad for a while.

I don't know. Overall, credit trouble does seem to be increasing over the past year, but only slightly. It could be a sign of trouble ahead; a reversion to the mean after pandemic rescue funds dried up; or just a slight wobble ahead of a soft landing. Take your pick.

Ezra Klein put up an interview yesterday with our real border czar, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. It was interesting. Mayorkas talked about several causes of increased illegal immigration, the prime one being the evolution of highly professionalized smuggling organizations. He also mentioned wars and crime surges in certain Central American countries, which have motivated more people to leave. And there's the huge and growing backlog of asylum cases, which has made asylum requests a free ticket to at least 5-10 years in the US while waiting for a judge to decide your case.

But one thing that neither he nor Ezra mentions is the simplest one of all: jobs. When jobs are plentiful, we get more illegal immigrants. When jobs are scarce, we get fewer.

I've mentioned this before, but here's yet another way to look at it. If there are more job openings than actual hires, it means US businesses are urgently in need of workers. So let's look at the difference between openings and hires over the past decade:

Illegal immigration follows the job market almost perfectly. But not quite: there are still spikes that happen for other reasons. The 2019 spike was likely due to the start of professional smuggling organizations and ended quickly because of Donald Trump's brutal family separation policy. The 2023 spike, according to Mayorkas, was due to a temporary gap in Mexican border enforcement. And the 2020 dip in jobs was obviously because of the pandemic.

So there are policy changes and other outside events that make a difference, but usually only for short periods. Generally speaking, illegal immigration is all about jobs and not much else.

I'll confess up front that I have no idea if this is legit:

I will say, however, that I'm wide open to believing it. Based on previous versions of ChatGPT plus what I've heard about o1, an IQ of 97 sounds very plausible. As with IQ scores on all standardized tests, this is an average of various subtests. On some of them it scored higher than 97 and on some it scored lower.

Speaking of, I watched Oprah's AI special last night and mostly laughed at it. For some reason it reminded me of how strongly we resist the notion that modern LLM models say more about us than about AI.

Sam Altman said on the show that ChatGPT "just" examines a long string of words and then predicts the next one. "Like word suggestions on your phone," Oprah chirped. Yes, Altman replied, except more sophisticated.

This makes it sound like LLMs are just a parlor trick. And I suppose they are. But they also sound remarkably human. That's because taking in context and mechanically creating a response is also how human brains work. There's very little real thinking or understanding going on most of the time. We just aren't nearly as sophisticated or creative as we like to believe.

And that's why AI is certain to get really good really fast—compared to humans anyway. Not because it's all that smart, but because we aren't.

From Donald Trump, asked if he plans to sell Truth Social stock when his lockup period ends a week from now:

No, I’m not selling. I’m not leaving. I love it. I think it’s great.

Well, that's that. He's selling.

J.D. Vance has let slip Donald Trump's secret plan for peace in Ukraine:

Mr. Vance said Mr. Trump would sit down with Russians, Ukrainians and Europeans and say, “You guys need to figure out what a peaceful settlement looks like.”

Um, OK. Gotta say, though, that I expected a little more from the master of dealmaking. Any thoughts on what this settlement might look like?

The Russians would retain the land they have taken and....Russia would get a “guarantee of neutrality” from Ukraine. “It doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join some of these sort of allied institutions,” Mr. Vance said. “I think that’s ultimately what this looks like.”

Stop me if I'm missing something, but the deal Vance has outlined is "Putin gets everything he wants." And in a laughable coda, Vance added that the Ukrainian side of the new border would be "heavily fortified" to make sure Putin can't reopen the war later. I'm sure this latter day Maginot Line would work great.¹

So much for the Churchill of the modern world. I assume Vance was chosen to deliver this message so that Trump can repudiate it if the snickering gets to be too much.

¹Actually, it would be more than twice as long as the Maginot Line.

Donald Trump is on an insult tour of California, and today he stopped by his 17-hole championship golf course for an impromptu press conference.¹ Here's the news the New York Times doesn't report but the LA Times does:

Trump said if he is elected, he would stop sending California federal firefighting aid unless Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he referred to repeatedly as “Newscum,” enacted his policy priorities on issues such as taxes.

“If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires. And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems,” Trump said. “He’s a lousy governor.”

There you go. If California doesn't enact tax laws and farm policy that Trump likes he's going to take away our wildfire funding.

Now, what Trump obviously doesn't know is that about half our wildfires occur on federal land, which means they're the responsibility of the federal government no matter what. Local wildfires are mostly fought with state money with additional federal aid coming from FEMA. Presumably Trump could cut that off by refusing to allow FEMA to declare California's wildfires as disaster areas. He's done it before. It would end up withholding, oh, something like $200 million, which isn't nothing but is also only about 0.05% of the California budget. We'd survive. Trump's threats are perhaps not quite as scary as he thinks they are.

More to the point is this: What kind of president threatens to cut off wildfire aid if a state doesn't pass water and tax policy he likes? Even if this is just blather, how can you vote for a person whose entire agenda is driven by personal vengeance against anyone he disagrees with? It's diseased.

¹Just kidding. The 18th hole fell into the ocean some years ago, but I'm sure it's all fixed and back to regulation length now.

In the year after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action at universities, Black enrollment has plummeted at elite universities:

This data comes from a tracker run by Education Reform Now. It includes whatever universities have reported enrollment data so far, so it will change over time.

So how did this affect white enrollment? Precisely not at all:

Hispanic enrollment is down moderately and Asian enrollment is up moderately:

NOTE: The averages aren't weighted by enrollment size. They should be, and maybe I'll work up the energy to do that someday. However, that day is not today.