A couple of days ago I posted a chart showing that Democrats were more likely to be childless than Republicans. I thought this was mainly due to religiosity, but I wasn't sure.
However, a friend emailed me a link to Ryan Burge's substack, called "Graphs About Religion." This is an admirably clear name, and it delivers what he promises. What he found is that religion has a lot to do with childlessness, but not everything. Here's one chart:
Even if you compare regular churchgoers, Democrats are still less likely to have children. But there's some interesting detail in a second chart:
Among atheists and high-income mainline Protestants, Republicans are more likely to have children even after you control for some standard demographics. However, among evangelicals and Catholics, there's no difference.
So in the end, it's true that Democrats are less likely to have children than Republicans. But this is entirely due to differences among atheists and mainline Protestants. What's more, with a few basic controls in place the gaps become fairly modest. Overall, the difference is probably on the order of 5% or so.
Just for the record, it really is true that sometime soon Kamala Harris is going to have to (a) put up a few policy positions on her website, and (b) start giving interviews to the national media.
It doesn't have to be tomorrow, but it ought to be pretty soon.
US conservatives are in a remarkable lather over the results of a women's boxing match between an Algerian and an Italian. The Algerian is Imane Khelif, a journeyman welterweight with a lifetime record of 38-9, who suddenly might or might not be 100% female depending on who you listen to. Here's what happened.
Khelif was born and raised as a girl. She is not trans. No one argues about this.
On March 24, 2023, after reaching the finals of the IBA World Championships in New Delhi, Khelif was disqualified along with another boxer. The next day, the president of the IBA, Umar Kremlev, said: “Based on the results of DNA tests...it was proven that they have XY chromosomes.” No testosterone testing was done at the time, but more recently Kremlev said "There will be no athletes with high levels of testosterone competing in women's boxing championships." Nobody knows quite what this means.
According to IBA board minutes, both boxers had also tested male at the previous year's championships in Istanbul: "[George] Yerolimpos confirmed that IBA has the results from two independent laboratories in two different countries at its disposal, both of which indicate that the athletes do not meet one of the eligibility criteria to continue competing at the Championships."
Shortly afterward, Khelif filed an appeal but later dropped it. That made the IBA's decision legally binding. And since the International Olympic Committee has no gender rules of its own, deferring instead to each sport's governing body, that was that. Khelif wouldn't be able to compete at the Olympics.
Except for one thing: Thanks to a series of bribery and officiating scandals, the IOC broke off ties with the IBA in 2023. This meant that qualification for the Olympics defaulted to IOC rules, and there aren't any. They declared that both Khelif and the other boxer were eligible since they had no reason of their own to disqualify them.
So what's the deal? No one knows for sure. The IBA has been very cagey about what test they administered and has refused to clarify things. Nor have they explained why Khelif was allowed to compete in the first place if she had supposedly failed a test the year before.
Bottom line: The IBA says something is amiss, but it's too corrupt to be trusted and is refusing to provide any testing details. Plus Kremlev is sort of a known bigot who tweeted a couple of days ago that the Olympic Games are "outright sodomy." On the other hand, Khelif had the opportunity to appeal and decided not to. There are lots of possible reasons for this, but obviously one of them is that she knows she'd lose.
In any case, nobody seems to care very much about this except for Kremlev and Republicans in the US. The other boxers have just shrugged about it. It's not clear if we'll ever know more.
Donald Trump recently proposed eliminating income taxes on Social Security benefits. Why? No one knows. Maybe because low-income seniors already pay no tax on benefits, so it would mostly benefit the well off. And what Republican ever passed up the chance to make a regressive tax even more regressive?
In any case, let's see what Trump's fellow conservatives think of this:
Trump has come up with what I agree is an “ingenious” way to re-describe cutting Social Security, but if you were wondering who’s going to replace the missing immigrant labor under Trump the plan is for grandma to start picking fruit. pic.twitter.com/io7zM5EGc0
Matt is being entirely too kind here. Stephen Moore was once commonly known as the stupidest man in the world, and this is why. First off, getting older people to stay on the workforce isn't a national priority for either party, as far as I know. Second, what does this have to do with taxing Social Security benefits anyway? Third, does Moore think this would cut Social Security costs? Why? Annual benefits go up if you retire later, so net lifetime benefits paid out are the same no matter when you retire.¹
So, fourth, I'm pretty sure Dems aren't mad they didn't think of this. It's a brain-dead idea that even the Heritage Foundation is too smart to endorse.² Only Donald Trump is dumb enough to propose something that would explicitly make Social Security's finances worse.
¹In addition, if you take Social Security benefits early—age 62, for example—but continue working, your benefits are reduced. However, they're made up either when you stop working or you reach age 67.
²Probably. Their 900-page Project 2025 tome, oddly, just doesn't have space to address Social Security. How about that? But I don't think they've ever proposed ending the tax on benefits, nor has any other conservative think tank.
Five weeks down, one to go. I'm almost done with my radiation treatment.
I'm pleased to report that the "super sunburn" pain I was warned about hasn't materialized. So far I've gotten a very minor bit of soreness in one or two places, and that's it. With only four treatments left it looks like I dodged this particular bullet.
Also, you may recall that the CAR-T treatment wiped out my immune system and killed off all my existing vaccinations. I've spent the past year being re-vaccinated for everything and today was the last one—assuming, of course, that whatever experimental treatment I get next doesn't kill off my immunities all over again. We'll see.
Yesterday morning I was wondering why I hadn't seen any new reporting about the prisoner swap the previous night. Charlotte Klein has the answer:
For days, various media outlets had been aware — through their own reporting and as information trickled out elsewhere — that a prisoner swap involving American journalists and dissidents was in the works. But news organizations were asked by the White House to hold their stories until Gershkovich et al. were in U.S. custody. Until then, the prisoners would still be in Russian captivity, and officials feared that any attention brought to the fragile deal could risk compromising it — not just for the U.S., but for the multiple other countries whose prisoners were freed as part of the swap.
Apparently everyone agreed to this (very normal) request except for Bloomberg, which published a report early in the morning when the American hostages boarded a plane in Russia and then followed it up ten minutes later with a football-spiking tweet bragging about their "scoop." Now everyone is pissed at them for breaking the embargo and potentially endangering the deal.
And for what? To beat other news outlets by a few hours on a story all of them had? Sheesh.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the key figure in the recent prisoner swap with Russia was German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. That's because the main sticking point was the release of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany for gunning down a Chechen exile in Berlin:
During a meeting in Saudi Arabia in early spring, the Germans revealed for the first time that they were ready to release Krasikov, but warned the Russians that the price would be much higher than previously discussed.
....The negotiations had dragged for so long that Russia started jailing Germans. By the talks’ final stages, about 30 German citizens were detained by Russia and its satellite, Belarus. Initially, Scholz refused to engage in hostage diplomacy, but after one German was sentenced to death in Belarus, the strategy became untenable.
Welcome to Vladimir Putin's Russia. Talks not going your way? Just keep kidnapping Germans until they see the light. What a monstrous, murderous thug.
The American economy gained 114,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at a meager 24,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate jumped up to 4.3%.
The number of unemployed workers increased by 352,000 in July while the number of employed workers went up by only 67,000. Average earnings declined at an annual rate of 0.8%.
This is a weak report. If it's not enough to spur the Fed into action, I don't know what is.
In 2020, when he was still in his 30s and his main political credential was two terms as mayor of a Midwestern city with only about 100,000 people, he won the most delegates in the Iowa caucuses, placed a close second in the New Hampshire primary and all in all outperformed many seasoned members of Congress.
How? With almost peerless communications skills. He went on Fox News last weekend to scold Trump on broken promises and Republicans on the selective use of crime statistics. It went viral. He went on Bill Maher’s show about a week before that and explained that some Silicon Valley billionaires like Trump because … they like money! It went viral. Buttigieg is a jukebox of perfectly toned, perfectly shaped and perfectly crisp rebuttals and arguments. Punch in your selected topic and let the music play.
And who knows? Maybe he’ll be Harris’s surprise pick.
Like Bruni, I doubt Buttigieg is in serious contention to be Kamala Harris's running mate. Nobody seems to be in a mood right now to take a chance on a young gay guy, even though I suspect this would be a problem only with voters who aren't persuadable in the first place.
I have a soft spot for Mayor Secretary Pete for the same reason as Bruni: he's been a regular on Fox News for years, putting in the work and showing himself practically the only prominent Democrat who can appeal to the Fox audience. That's not a skill to be taken lightly. What's more, as Secretary of Transportation he's proven to be more of a workhorse than a show horse, despite his obvious ambition.
Even if you compare regular churchgoers, Democrats are still less likely to have children. But there's some interesting detail in a second chart:
Among atheists and high-income mainline Protestants, Republicans are more likely to have children even after you control for some standard demographics. However, among evangelicals and Catholics, there's no difference.
