Kevin Drum

Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, there have been the usual pleas that this was an assault of democracy and has no place in America. An assault on democracy it might have been, but political killings are as American as apple pie.

In just the past century we've lived through the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Huey Long, Harvey Milk, and George Moscone.

Politically adjacent murders include Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Medger Evers, and the Freedom Summer murders.

Attempted assassinations of presidents are too numerous to count, but even if you include only the ones that got close you have FDR, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Harry Truman. Among non-presidents you can count George Wallace, Gabby Giffords, and Steve Scalise.

And let's not forget the 1954 Capitol shootings or the January 6 insurrection.

On average, we have a politically motivated attempt to murder someone every five years or so. And that's just the high-profile murders. There are dozens or hundreds more if you count less prominent political figures.

Welcome to America

The world has gone insane:

A judge on Monday dismissed the federal indictment against former president Donald Trump on charges of mishandling classified documents — his second seismic legal victory in less than a month, following a historic Supreme Court decision on immunity.

Judge Aileen Cannon has demonstrated time and again that she will do whatever it takes to slow Trump's trial to a crawl, and now she's decided to simply say the hell with it and let the world know she's completely in Trump's pocket.

I don't doubt this decision will be quickly overturned on appeal, but "quickly" in the legal world means months. Maybe it will end up in the Supreme Court.

This leaves me speechless. I haven't read Cannon's opinion, and I don't know if I'll bother. It's loony tunes time.

This is just a little something to start your week out with.

The Wall Street Journal says that women are flooding the workplace, largely because of the availability of remote work:

But it’s not time for a victory lap just yet. The same work-from-home opportunities that have enabled many moms in particular to enter or rejoin the workforce are also shackling them with fresh responsibilities. Many say they are effectively working two full-time jobs: managing their households and their careers.

But the Journal leaves something out: this surge of working women started long before the pandemic increased opportunities for remote work. The labor force participation rate for prime age women, for example, started turning up in 2016, not 2021. Likewise, as the Journal's own chart shows, the participation rate of women with small children has been rising since 2004. The same is true for their actual employment rate, and there's no special spike in 2022 or 2023:

The numbers just don't confirm the Journal's narrative that remote work has had an effect on women in general or on women with children. So why are they insisting on it?

A new study is out that provides a variety of estimates of the number of US adults who identify as trans. All of the estimates have something in common:

In one year, between 2020 and 2021, the number of young people identifying as trans nearly doubled. The effect is more pronounced among some groups than it is among others, but it basically holds up across the board.

It's one thing for this number to be steadily increasing. Maybe that's because trans identities have become less marginalized, which makes it easier to go public as trans. But something is way off if you get a sudden huge spike in a single year. I can't really think of any plausible explanation for this that isn't some kind of methodological artifact.

Prominent conservatives were all over Twitter yesterday blaming Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. But were prominent Democrats acting just as badly?

It turns out this is about Dmitri Mehlhorn, who suggested the attack could have been staged. And who is Dmitri Mehlhorn? He's an aide to a donor to Democrats and he apologized immediately after his private email became public.

Is that really the best they can do? One guy who's completely unknown and quickly apologized? I'll take that as evidence that liberals generally acted pretty well after the attack.

POSTSCRIPT: The Semafor story also mentions that some guy at a nail salon wondered if the attack was staged. And some random people on social media. So there's that. Sheesh.

A gunman apparently tried to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania today. Responses from the right came quickly. Noted without comment.

This is apropos of nothing in particular. I just happened to run into it this afternoon:

The contribution of wives to family income steadily increased until 2010 and then leveled out. Both men and women exited the labor force following the 2010 recession, so this probably isn't due to fewer wives working. More likely it's because women's earnings relative to men increased strongly from 1980-2010 but then slowed down after 2010.

I don't know for sure how accurate this is—it's crowdsourced—but it seems to match other estimates of housing prices in big city centers:

This is one reason I'm so skeptical of urbanist arguments about American cities being uniquely expensive due to restrictive building rules and a car-centric culture. As you can see, there's nothing really very unusual about American cities. London is as expensive as New York. Paris is as expensive as San Francisco. Copenhagen is as expensive as Los Angeles.

All over the world, big cities in advanced countries are expensive because lots of people want to live there but residents have a limit to how much crowding and congestion they'll put up with. Good transit can help, I suppose, but London and Paris both have great subway systems (as does New York) and Copenhagen is famously bicycle friendly. That doesn't make them any cheaper than US cities with lousy transit systems.

Allowing more freedom of construction would probably help, but possibly not as much as many urbanists believe. I suspect that certain cities are essentially infinitely attractive: build more apartments and prices will go down, but that will immediately attract new residents and cause prices to go back up. If you could double or triple housing that might finally have a permanent effect, but this isn't really feasible. In the ordinary range of 10-30% housing growth, I'll bet prices wouldn't change much.

The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 has gotten lots of attention lately, though it's mostly just standard movement conservative wet dreams. One interesting piece is its usual right-wing hatred of the Federal Reserve:

A core problem with government control of monetary policy is its exposure to two unavoidable political pressures: pressure to print money to subsidize government deficits and pressure to print money to boost the economy artificially until the next election. Because both will always exist with self-interested politicians, the only permanent remedy is to take the monetary steering wheel out of the Federal Reserve’s hands and return it to the people. This could be done by abolishing the federal role in money altogether....

In the absence of the Fed, Project 2025 makes two recommendations, both of which are essentially returns to the gold standard. But let's take a look at US monetary history with and without active Fed management:

I don't know about you, but given the massive boom/bust cycles of 1870-1940, I think I prefer the modern era of active Fed control. It's hard to understand how anyone can look at this very basic chart and conclude that weak or nonexistent central control of money is a cure for everything that ails us.

And this doesn't even account for the fact that gold is no longer stable in value. If, for example, the dollar were defined as one-thousandth of an ounce of gold, here's what inflation looks like over the past four decades:

Which world do you prefer? Over the past 40 years, the CPI has gone up 204%. Gold has gone up about 450%. It's not exactly a stable source to base a currency on.

This is hardly the most important part of Project 2025, but it's an issue of longtime puzzlement for me. Why are conservatives so suspicious of the Fed? And why are they such gold bugs? Gold has never prevented inflation, and in recent decades its value has gyrated wildly. Meanwhile, during the postwar era the Fed has been responsible for an outstanding record of steady growth, reasonable inflation, and very few serious recessions. Even accounting for its mistakes, what's not to like?