Harris’s Speech Advanced Harris — and Nothing Else Besides
I agree wholeheartedly with the commentators who have suggested that the address was “unthreatening” for swing voters or undecideds. The important question, however, is why was it unthreatening? And the answer is that it was unthreatening because, other than on abortion, where she is already ahead, Harris said nothing of consequence.
....She has become so much of a cipher that even her own supporters cannot tell journalists what she stands for. This may well help her stay ahead in the polls for the next 70 days or so, but it will not help her advance the ball. And in politics, as in football, it is advancing the ball, not possessing it, that is the final aim of the enterprise.
This would all be true if this were an ordinary year. But it's not. Unlike most candidates in most years, Harris has only one real campaign goal: to prevent Donald Trump from winning office. That's it. Democrats are mostly willing to accept that everything else is small beer. Even the Gaza protesters couldn't gin up any enthusiasm for interfering with this singular overriding goal.
Beyond that, what do Democrats want? The honest answer is: nothing much. They're satisfied with any version of ordinary liberal goals—reproductive freedom, civil rights, helping the poor—and are happy to bury their differences in service of keeping Trump very far away from the levers of power.
Moderate Republicans should be delighted by this. The best they can hope for is an outcome that (a) rids their party of Trumpism and (b) doesn't concede much to Democrats in the process. And that's what they're getting. What more could they realistically ask for?
One of the things I liked about Kamala Harris's convention speech was her explicit plea at the end to reject Donald Trump's apocalyptic view of American decline:
You know, our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.
America, let us show each other and the world who we are and what we stand for: Freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibilities. We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world.
Consider what the country looks like if you view it through Trump's speeches:
"70% of our people are living in poverty." According to the Census Bureau, the official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5%.
"They’ve allowed, I believe, 15 million people into the country from all of these different places like jails, mental institutions." There are no figures for this because the real number is probably around zero.
"More drugs are coming into our country right now than at any time in our history." By weight, drug seizures were 33% lower in July than in Trump's last month in office.
"43% increase in violent crime nationwide, 60% increase in rape." According to the FBI, violent crime is down 19% since Trump left office. Rape is down 23%.
Real wages are down 6% for Black families. Real income for Black families has increased 2.9% under Biden. (This is through 2022. It's probably more by now.)
"Border crossings were up 1,000% compared to the same month last year, 1,000% compared to last year. And by the way, last year, it was 1,000% compared to the year before." Border crossings did increase under Biden, but obviously nowhere near 10,000%. As of July, border crossings are up 27% compared to Trump's last month in office.
"Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that?" Since Biden entered office, employment has risen 8 million among native-born Americans vs. 3.5 million for non-natives. Of that, possibly half of the non-native jobs have gone to illegal immigrants, or about 15% of the total.
"If Kamala gets in, we will have 50-60 million illegals from all over the world ferried right into our country." This is nonsensical.
"Real" unemployment is much higher than reported under Biden. No it's not.
"Inflation is destroying our families." The CPI inflation rate in July was 1.9%. Year-over-year it was 2.9%.
"Gasoline prices are now $5, $6, $7 and even $8 a gallon." The average price of gasoline is currently $3.38.
If you take Trump seriously, America is besieged by poverty, native-born workers are unable to get jobs, drug use is skyrocketing, World War III is imminent if Democrats win, gasoline prices are through the roof, crime is rampant, wages are dropping, inflation is eating up our paychecks, the auto industry is about to implode, Democrats are working furiously to steal the election, Christianity is under siege, and before long a quarter of the country will be illegal immigrants.
If I believed all that, I might vote for Trump too. But none of it is.
Sure, we have problems. Everyone does. Ours include climate change, Black education gaps, drug overdose deaths, teen depression, and a high national debt.
But that's nothing compared to what's right with America. Economic growth is strong. Inflation is low again. Everyone who wants a job has one. Wages are going up. Illegal immigration is moderating. Manufacturing is set to grow. Poverty has been steadily dropping for a decade. We are no longer fighting in any wars. Our kids are mostly very well educated. We are energy independent. We conquered COVID in less than a year. Our entrepreneurial vigor is the best in the world by leagues. The poor have access to a wide range of assistance programs. Teen pregnancies are way down. Technological progress in medicine, AI, and renewable energy promises a spectacular future. And finally, with the usual exception of sub-Saharan Africa, the world is surprisingly peaceful.
It's long past time to rid ourselves of self-serving bellyachers like Trump and focus instead on the abundant strengths that make us, by a good bit, the best place to live in the world and the country with the brightest future.
Remember when Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine. She met with Putin, and then three days later, he attacked.... She met with Putin to tell him, "Don’t do it." And three days later, he attacked.
Once again, we have a head scratcher. This is not the usual kind of falsehood, which has some small kernel of truth deep down. It's got nothing. Harris didn't meet with Putin and didn't tell him "Don't do it." End of story. It just flat didn't happen, and neither did anything else even remotely close.
So where did Trump get it? I suppose it was the same place where he discovered that Harris only recently started identifying as Black. Or that Harris's huge crowds were an AI invention. Or that a technical and long-planned annual revision of employment figures was really Joe Biden "fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics to hide the true extent of the Economic Ruin they have inflicted upon America."
He's just literally making stuff up these days based (apparently) on the unhinged Twitter posts that he inhales every night. He is really and truly losing it in the face of a campaign he doesn't know how to fight.
NIMBY means Not In My Backyard. In other words, build stuff all you want as long as you don't do it near me, where it will bring traffic and crowds in its wake.
It's a powerful force, but over the past couple of decades a counterforce has been steadily growing that blames NIMBY for slow growth and high living costs in big American cities. It is, naturally, called YIMBY, for Yes In My Backyard. A couple of nights ago it seemed like it finally got its big breakthrough when Barack Obama endorsed it in primetime at the DNC. Kamala Harris is also a fan.
Kwasny also wonders why Democrats seem to have picked up YIMBY more than Republicans, especially given that deregulation, anti-zoning, pro-growth, pro-developers would seem more compatible with Republican rhetoric and political support.
It's worse than that. It's not just that Republicans haven't "picked up YIMBY." Republicans are absolutely dead set against it.
To understand why, you have to look past the intellectual roots of YIMBYism among libertarians and instead look further back to the original political roots of NIMBYism. It's a movement that unquestionably started in the suburbs, and suburbia has historically been a Republican stronghold. These folks moved to the suburbs for a reason: they liked living in an uncrowded, single-family sprawl. They decidedly didn't want city life sneaking back into their peaceful, grassy neighborhoods where they get to own their own homes instead of renting a few rooms from a landlord.
Democrats, by contrast, have recently become more open to YIMBYism because they have political roots among the young, who push YIMBYism—largely in the form of opposing regulations that restrict new housing—as a solution for high housing prices in cities. These new urbanists also promote greenfield development in suburbs, but their big focus is on infill development in cities.
For Democrats, this is a bit of a balancing act, but for Republicans it's not. They don't care about young people in cities but they care very much about middle-aged families in suburbia. So it's easy for them to oppose anything that has even a chance of ruining paradise.
And they have. Republicans in recent years have relentlessly accused Democrats of wanting to squash everyone into crowded apartment buildings in cities. They make conspiracy theories out of things like Agenda 21, a milquetoast UN program for sustainable development. They oppose bike lanes and trains and mass transit because suburbanites all drive cars.
None of this has to do with ideology or attitudes toward regulation on either side. It's based purely on the demands of each party's political base. This has moved Democrats cautiously in the direction of YIMBYism (cautiously because plenty of Democrats are suburbanites) and Republicans firmly in the direction of opposition.
In the end, most of the second-order arguments for YIMBYism (density is good for the economy, density is good for the climate, density is good for social interaction, etc.) are meaningless. There's only one argument that matters: housing is too expensive in desirable American cities and lots of young people voters believe we need to build way more in order to get the price down. Even now, this is almost universally opposed by people who actually live in cities, so it all boils down to one thing: Who gets to decide? Should the people who live in a neighborhood have the biggest say about what gets built? Or should it be the outsiders who want to move into the neighborhood?
That's a very pretty question, actually, and there's no clear answer. It's pretty obvious what the arguments are on each side, and equally obvious that both sides have legitimate stakes.
Barack Obama aside, I'm skeptical that the Democratic Party is really willing to spend a lot of political capital on YIMBYism. As an applause line it's fine. But in the real world it's primarily a local issue, not a national one, and local Democrats want to get reelected as much as anyone else. Even in California, which has by far the worst housing problem in the country, YIMBY legislation has come slowly and painfully, and it's been fought tooth and nail at every step. So far, even with legislation, YIMBY has had very little real-world impact yet. There's just too much opposition to it.
POSTSCRIPT: On a related note, YIMBYism has had its biggest concrete successes in the fight against homelessness. Los Angeles in particular has passed bond measures, thrown up agencies with thousands of workers, and spent billions and billions of dollars on it. And yet, even so it's nearly impossible to build homeless shelters. Why? Not because of money or lack of political will. Because of NIMBY. That's how strong it is.
When I go out to the desert for a bit of astrophotography, I never take pictures of the moon. This is because I deliberately go out on moonless nights.
However, I happen to have the telescope set up in my backyard at the moment because I wanted to test out a few things, so last night I finally did it. Marian wanted a picture of the (rare!) blue supermoon, so I took some time early in the evening and slewed over to the moon.
The exposure time for the moon is about one-thousandth of a second, so it only took half a minute to take 30 images. I wasn't actually sure if my software could stack a bunch of moon pictures since there are no stars to align the images, but it worked without a hitch. It turned out pretty well.
I'll admit that the nonstop pronouncements of joy at the DNC kind of set my teeth on edge, but regardless of the word itself it sure does highlight an aspect of the Trump campaign that never got much attention before: it's relentlessly dour, angry, and driven by grievance.
It's almost like we had all forgotten just how bizarre this is. Kamala Harris is running what would, in normal times, just be an ordinary campaign. It only seems unexpectedly fresh and lively thanks to its contrast with the lifelessness of the Biden campaign and the exhausting surliness of the Trump campaign.
Here's the latest YouGov breakdown of the presidential race:
Kamala Harris started out three points behind Trump and is now three points ahead.
I should note that I routinely show the YouGov poll for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's a pretty good poll: reliable, weekly, and with good crosstabs. The second is that by tying myself to a single poll I avoid cherry picking the polls that are most favorable each week and thereby fooling myself about how well things are going. It's a discipline thing.
And for those who are going to insist that only state polls matter, that's not really right. State polls are certainly useful, but they also tend to be smallish and error prone. And while it's true that we don't elect presidents via a national popular vote, the states do generally follow the national vote. If Harris gets to a five-point lead, it will be very unlikely that she loses the electoral vote. That's the target.
There are several reports out today about Kamala Harris's stand on taxes, though I'm not quite sure why. They're apparently based on vague statements from the campaign that Harris supports Joe Biden's tax proposals from several months ago, but there have been no firm details about this.
Nonetheless, two of Biden's proposals have been making the rounds:
Above income of $4000,000: Increase the net investment income tax from 3.8% to 5%.
Above net worth of $100 million: Minimum tax rate of 25%, including unrealized capital gains.
I'm not a big fan of taxing unrealized capital gains because I think you can accomplish much the same thing with ordinary targeted income taxes. That said, this would affect, at most, about 0.004% of Americans. It's not something for us ordinary schlubs to worry about.
The NIIT increase is small and applies to roughly the top 1% of earners. It's a fairly meat-and-potatoes way of raising taxes on the affluent and rich.
We don't know for sure if Harris supports these specific taxes, and there are other tax proposals in Biden's FY25 budget document. But this is what people are talking about. Just so you know.
Southern California electric bills are soaring. Here’s why, and how to save money
There have been anecdotal reports that, for some consumers, bills have skyrocketed, even by hundreds of dollars. And Californians are looking for answers.
....In California, the driving force behind rate hikes is utilities recovering the cost of wildfire mitigation, transmission and distribution upgrades and rooftop solar incentives, according to a recent quarterly report by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Public Advocates Office.
The cost of electricity has gone up in recent years, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's gone up this year. And it hasn't. It's gone down.
Anyway, it turns out the reason electricity bills are up this year is that it's been really hot and people are running their air conditioners a lot. That may be boring, but it has the virtue of being actually true.
