Kevin Drum

The Wall Street Journal is inexplicable. Take a look at this headline/chart combo from today's paper:

The chart is clear as day: Boomers in the Reagan era were stuck well into "unaffordable" territory for more than six years. Millennials, by contrast, spent 15 years with wonderful, super-affordable housing and since then have been barely in unaffordable territory for one year.

So where does the headline come from? The story is an endless hodgepodge of unrelated data, but its main point seems to be that back in the '80s interest rates were high but housing supply was fine. Today housing supply is tight so we're all doomed.

Which might be true, I suppose, if housing supply stays tight forever. Which it won't. New home building (and sales) are at a fairly normal rate right now, about the same as in 2019. The problem is that existing homes aren't being put on the market at the usual rate. But there's no reason to think this will last forever, and when it turns around housing supply will ease. Then, when the Fed finally lowers interest rates, mortgages will return to normal levels.

But I guess that's not a very interesting story.

NOTE: I should add that the Journal's data is actually more optimistic than I expected. I thought housing affordability really was in the dumpster at the moment, but it's not. It is in weak shape by historical standards, but it's only barely below the 100% mark. That's not as bad as I thought.

J.D. Vance says he thinks we ought to have a bigger Child Tax Credit. Kamala Harris says we should eliminate the tax on tips.

Huh. What's next? Vance saying we need more illegal immigrants to get the birth rate up and Harris saying we need both a Bitcoin and an Ethereum strategic reserve?

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is yelling on Truth Social that Harris is a CHEATER who uses AI to make it look like big crowds greeted her at the airport:

There you have it. Trump has been driven completely over the edge into madness by his tiny crowds compared to Harris's huge ones.

It's been a remarkable few weeks. It turns out lots of voters really don't like Trump's constant catastrophism and were just waiting for someone to make them feel better. That's really all Harris has been doing, and Trump doesn't know what to do about it. Making up stupid names falls flat in the face of honest exuberance, and Trump has no Plan B.

I get three or four fundraising emails every day from the Kamala Harris campaign. That strikes me as fairly normal these days.

But before Joe Biden dropped out and she entered the race, I got zero emails per day. Can anyone explain this? Obviously I was on the email lists, but the Biden team never bothered to use them. Why?

Naturally I didn't notice this when I wasn't getting emails, but in hindsight it's pretty severe campaign malpractice. Harris fixed it in a couple of days.

UPDATE: It's worth noting that other people in comments are all over the map on this. My experience might not be typical.

Big news today! Revenue at Donald Trump's social media company was up $70,000 in the second quarter:

If this growth trend keeps up, Trump Media might have quarterly revenue of $920,000 by the end of the year. That's almost a million dollars!

They also reported a profit of -$16 million. They reported nearly $20 million in operating costs, and God only knows what they spent that on. They also reported cash flows of -$344 million for the first six months of the year, offset by a bunch of gobbledegook I don't understand. What the hell is "Change in fair value of derivative liability"? I'm too lazy to look it up, sorry.

At the start of COVID, Congress passed a law requiring states to maintain enrollment for anyone then on Medicaid. This produced a sharp increase in Medicaid enrollments until early 2023, when the requirement was ended. Since then, Medicaid has been unwinding and returning to normal operation, which means everyone has to qualify anew each year. Here's what that looks like:

From the start of Obamacare through 2017, Medicaid enrollment increased by 13 million. Over the next three years enrollments declined 3 million, partly because the economy was good and partly because the Trump administration reduced funding for outreach.

During the pandemic enrollment increased 23 million. Of that, we've lost 13 million since the unwinding began.

But overall there's good news here. The unwinding is just about finished and we're still at an enrollment of 10 million higher than when we began. All told, we've added 20 million people to Medicaid since Obamacare started up. That's a lot of health care.

NOTE: The total numbers in the chart are for both Medicaid and CHIP. Of that, about 7 million is CHIP, and it hasn't changed much. The increases and decreases are almost all Medicaid.

Yesterday a reporter asked Donald Trump if he thought Kamala Harris's career had been helped by her relationship in the 1990s with powerful California politician Willie Brown. This was a perfect opportunity for Trump to throw out a remark about Harris sleeping her way to the top, or something equally Trumpish and obnoxious, but he didn't.

Instead he gapped out and said that he knew Willie Brown very well. He doesn't. Then he hallucinated a story about almost being in a helicopter crash with Brown, which obviously didn't happen either.

However, it turns out he was once in a helicopter with Jerry Brown, who bears no conceivable resemblance to Willie Brown except for his last name. And it was just a routine helicopter ride. No crash, no emergency, no anything.

Everybody's initial response to this was: Huh? Their second response was: What a bizarre guy, lying about everything.

But this is almost certainly not a lie. Nor is it likely that he just got the two Browns mixed up since he was responding to a question about a relationship with Kamala Harris. Willie Brown famously had one; Jerry Brown didn't.

It's all very weird. Listen to the video. It doesn't sound like a lie. It sounds like Trump knew exactly who the reporter was asking about and just hallucinated his entire answer: knowing Brown "very well"; going down in a rough helicopter landing with him; and Brown saying nasty things about Harris.

Trump has gotten to the point where he doesn't just forget a thing or two. That happens to all us oldsters. He literally invents entire incidents in his mind and believes they're real. I don't think he even knows he's doing it. Can you imagine what he's going to be like four years from now?

UPDATE: Bizarrely, today Trump insisted to the New York Times that the story was true and he has "flight records" to prove it:

When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice. As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them.

I think it's safe to say he will never produce these records.

UPDATE 2: We have an answer! Apparently Trump was once on a rough helicopter ride with Nate Holden, a former LA city councilmember:

“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles. I guess we all look alike,” Holden told Politico, letting out a loud laugh.

....“He was white as snow,” Holden added. “And he was scared shitless.”

So, uh, there you have it. Trump didn't completely hallucinate, but he absolutely insisted it was Willie Brown, who he knows "very well," and that Brown had said nasty stuff about Kamala Harris. This is obviously invented out of thin air.

This is Hilbert being uncooperative. As soon as he saw the camera he trotted off to the far side of the yard to hide behind the bushes and then just stayed there. He also made it clear that if I tried to follow him he would lead me on a chase around the entire house until he got all the way to the front yard, where he would finally stop and start rolling over. He loves doing this to me.

The Society of Family Planning released its latest abortion estimates a couple of days ago, and they show that the number of abortions continues to increase. Here is the abortion rate in states where abortion is permitted:

However, not all of these abortions are performed in states where abortion is permitted. Check this out:

Shield laws protect doctors who provide telehealth consultations to women in states where abortion is banned. This chart suggests that it accounts for the bulk of the increase in abortions.

These numbers aren't exact, and things might change over time. But in the same way that banning a book just draws more attention to it, Dobbs seems to have drawn more attention to abortion. It's a little inexplicable, but banning abortions seems to have energized the pro-choice side so much that (slightly) more women are now aware of their options and are choosing to have abortions. This is certainly not what anyone expected.

This is so stupid I can hardly bring myself to write about it, but just for the record:

No, Tim Walz did not sign a law that requires schools to stock free tampons in boys' restrooms. The law leaves implementation up to individual school districts, and they're free to do as they want. Most districts supply menstrual products only in girls' and gender-neutral restrooms (and the nurse's office).

Now, can we please put this idiocy to rest?

Donald Trump doesn't know what mifepristone is:

It's hard to believe, but Trump is getting more ignorant over time. Or maybe his memory is getting worse.

This came during the same press conference where he refused to say how he planned to vote on Florida's initiative to overturn its 6-week abortion ban. What a coward. My guess is that he'll stay silent on the initiative all the way to Election Day, at which point he'll announce that he voted against it. That will be too late to do him any harm with moderates and will assure evangelicals that he's still on their side.