Kevin Drum

Bruce Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa, has joined the multiple myeloma brigade that includes me, Tom Brokaw, Steve Scalise, Karen Tumulty, and maybe even Queen Elizabeth II. I wish her the best of luck.

Semafor published a story this evening about a mysterious right wing financier who organized a secret¹ group of conservative influencers to smear Kamala Harris with sexual innuendo:

This influencer network was organized over emails and Zoom calls....The money was good: One participant made more than $20,000 for several weeks of boosting assigned messages, according to the Zelle receipts.

....An invitation to a call on Monday, July 22, arrived under the subject line “War Room — Kamala Messaging”....The influencers’ marching orders were clear: make a series of lurid sexual jibes aimed at Harris, the least crude of which was comparing her to Haliey Welch, the “Hawk Tuah girl” who became a viral sensation over a video of her discussing oral sex.

But wait. There's a punch line. Nobody knows who was on these calls, with one exception:

Semafor was able to identify one of them: former New York Republican Rep. George Santos, who spoke up on one conference call to object when the parties discussed making sexual allegations against Harris.

In other words, this operation was so disgusting that even George Santos refused to be a part of it. And Semafor was too embarrassed to describe it. But apparently everyone else had no problems at all. They happily took the money and followed their marching orders. Welcome to right wing social media.

¹Really secret: "None of the participants identified themselves by name, and all joined calls with their cameras off to preserve their mutual anonymity."

What's the single best metric for the health of an economy? Conventionally it's GDP growth, and there's nothing really wrong with that.

But if I had to choose one thing it would be median income. In particular, market income before taxes or government benefits. Here it is:

Compared to GDP, income is a better measure of what actually matters to people. Compared to per capita, median is a better measure of how the economy is working for the average person, not millionaires. And compared to other measures of earnings, market income is the best measure of how the underlying economy is really doing.

Now, it may be that we're better off allowing market income to grow slowly for the middle classes and then making up for it with government transfers. But I've always thought that was a distant second best. An economy that's really working should produce strong direct growth in wages instead of trying to make up for lopsided growth with unpopular welfare programs. Maybe someday we'll figure out how to do that.

TECHNICAL NOTE: Market income is regularly calculated by the Congressional Budget Office, but they don't actually produce a median. However, they do produce an average of the middle three quintiles, which is very close to the same thing. That's what I used here.

Government bureaucrats say the unemployment rate last month was 4.2%. Donald Trump says the real unemployment rate was 7.9%.

Please. In August the United States had 161 million workers out of a total population of 337 million. That's an unemployment rate of 52.1%.

Why won't the lamestream media tell you that more than half of all Americans are out of work? Even Donald Trump is afraid to tell the real truth. Wake up, sheeple!

What do you make of this?

If you start at 2009, suicidal thoughts reported among teens have gone up by more than half. But if you look at the entire data series, suicidal thoughts declined by half during the '90s and aughts and have now merely reverted to their historical average.

It's all especially hard to figure out when you add this:

The number of teens who seriously attempted suicide has been roughly flat for 30 years. There's a bit of a dip in the aughts, but that's about it. Even the COVID pandemic appears to have had only a small effect.

Finally, the actual number of suicides is also fairly stable. It spiked in 2014-17 but has been declining ever since. COVID had no effect at all.

I'm not sure what to think of this, but it's the kind of thing that makes me a little skeptical of the whole teen mental health crisis narrative. If, over the past decade, teens say they think about suicide more but they don't actually attempt suicide more, what's the explanation? A genuine increase in depression? A culture that encourage teens to talk about depression more? Just a bit of random movement in a data series that goes up and down over time? I don't know.

This data comes straight from the CDC:

Nuff said. This is a crisis, people.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that the share of foreign born workers in the US had accelerated a bit over the past two years. This was largely because the number of native born workers had flattened out, and I wasn't sure if this was due to native workers being pushed out of the labor force or just because of boomer retirements.

It's the latter. Here's the labor force participation rate for prime age workers:

For native born workers, the prime age participation rate is higher than it was before the pandemic and higher than it's been since 2002. Nobody's been pushed out of the labor force by foreign born workers.

NOTE: The BLS doesn't make it easy to find this information. They also provide data only by ten-year age bands, not for age 25-54, so the numbers I used are averages of the three age bands from age 25 to age 54. Here's the raw data if you don't trust this whole averaging business.

I was looking for some old photographs last night and ran across my pictures of Hilbert when we first brought him home ten years and two cameras ago. So today you get a stroll down memory lane. Hilbert isn't quite a kitten in these pictures—he was ten months old when we adopted him—but he still had a bit of a kittenish look to him. Such a cutie pie.

Over at National Review, Dominic Pino has a sarcastic post about Democratic efforts to collect unpaid taxes from rich people by amping up IRS enforcement. I don't care much about the fact that some of the estimates for revenue collection were a little crazy, but even putting that aside Pino has a point. Using the CBO estimates that were used to score the initiative, here's how we're doing:

The $1.3 billion figure comes from a Treasury Department press release today. It only goes through August, but since the fiscal year ends in four weeks I doubt it's going to change much. We're not collecting a fraction of what CBO estimated.

Of course, there are multiple possible reasons for this. The two most obvious are (a) the estimates were always fantasy, and (b) it's taken way longer to start up the program than anyone planned. Both of these are perfectly plausible. It's going to be another year or two before we really know.

As you all know by now, a couple of days ago the Justice Department indicted a pair of Russian nationals who work for the propaganda outlet RT. They are charged with secretly bankrolling Tenet Media, a startup content farm that churned out right-wing videos. But why?

Unlike Russian efforts to seed social media with low-quality bots and trolls that earn little, if any engagement, the alleged scheme helped to launch Tenet as a serious player in conservative media, fueled by content from Trump-supporting personalities who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, had well-known views hostile to U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and advanced narratives that at times aligned with Russian talking points.

I doubt this was part of an effort to reelect Donald Trump. Tenet's viral videos were quite obviously aimed at true believers who were already committed to Trump.

Most likely, its aim was simpler: persuading right-wingers not to support Ukraine. They're the ones listening to Tenet, after all, not centrists or liberals. And Russia has been remarkably successful in this. What's interesting is that their efforts all along have been aimed at conservatives, who would normally be thought of as tougher sells. But the combination of Ukraine being "Biden's war" along with Donald Trump's sympathetic views of Russia made the far right natural targets. It's worked pretty well.