Kevin Drum

Apropos of nothing in particular, here's how different professions fared during the early days of the pandemic. This is from 2020, so it's pre-vaccination.

Speaking of elections, here's the latest poll from CBS News:

This is only one poll and they don't tell us which states count as battlegrounds. Still, it's the first time I've seen Biden ahead of Trump in any grouping of battlegrounds. Seems like promising news.

The news today from overseas is all about the big wins notched by far-right populist parties in elections for the European Parliament. How did they do?

European Parliament groups that hold a nationalist, anti-immigrant agenda will now likely control about 130 seats, a better showing than the last election in 2019.

That's suspiciously vague. How much better? Here's a breakdown:

Hmmm. The two right-wing populist party groups—Conservatives and Reformists and Identity and Democracy—went from 118 seats to 131. Add in a bunch of nonaligned German AfD members and you get to 146. That's a gain of 19 seats out of 720, or 2.6%.

This is about the equivalent of gaining 11 seats in Congress: a nice win but not a landslide. But I'm no expert on EU politics. Maybe this is a bigger deal than I think.

Zeynep Tufekci says in the New York Times today that "delays, falsehoods and misrepresentations" from government scientists have eroded public trust in expert advice:

Remember the rule that we should all stay at least six feet apart? “It sort of just appeared,” Fauci said during a preliminary interview for the subcommittee hearing, adding that he “was not aware of any studies” that supported it. Remember the insistence that the virus was primarily spread by droplets that quickly fell to the floor? During his recent public hearing, he acknowledged that to the contrary, the virus is airborne.

As for the repeated assertion that Covid originated in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, not in an infectious diseases laboratory there, N.I.H. officials were privately expressing alarm over that lab’s lax biosafety practices and risky research. In his public testimony, Fauci conceded that even now there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of Covid-19’s origins.

This is very misleading. Fauci didn't say that social distancing recommendations popped up out of nowhere, only that we might have been wrong about 6 feet vs. 3 feet. Nor is there any reason to suggest scientists lied about airborne transmission. They just turned out to be wrong. They changed their recommendations quickly when new data became available. Finally, both evidence at the time and evidence now points strongly toward a natural origin for the COVID virus.

Elsewhere, Tufekci mentions the infamous mask debate. Early in the pandemic officials suggested that (a) widespread mask wearing wasn't essential and (b) masks should be reserved for health care workers. This was confusing and somewhat disingenuous, but not nearly as much as it's made out to be. At the time—early March of 2020—COVID was quite limited in the US and officials very reasonably thought masks were only useful for people who were near sick patients. It was only in late March that asymptomatic transmission became clear, which meant universal masking made sense since there was no way of telling if you were near a sick person.

Likewise, the CDC never recommended that parks and playgrounds be shut. That came mostly from local officials who were responding on their own to studies showing how long the virus could survive on outdoor surfaces.

This gets to the biggest problem with the idea that "scientists" misled us. Which scientists? If you search your memory, you'll recall that the chaotic early days of the pandemic were full of new studies and new advice on a seemingly hourly basis. Governors were holding daily briefings. Fresh research findings were released constantly. Television doctors all had their own views. And panic was everywhere. Local officials reacted to all this, and they all reacted differently. There's no way this could have been reined in.

Beyond all this, going after scientists misses the real source of COVID misinformation: Donald Trump and his MAGA allies. They're the ones who pushed the lab leak theory from the start based on no credible evidence. Trump was the one who went on national TV and said he wasn't going to wear a mask. He's also the one who mused about ivermectin and injections of disinfectant. It's conservatives who have spread vaccine conspiracy theories and it's conservatives who started the anti-mask jihad. It was red states that killed thousands of their own residents by cutting back on mitigation efforts because "COVID is no worse than the flu." It was conservatives who insisted that banning large indoor gatherings was an attack on religion because the bans included churches.

Chaos and differences of opinion are inevitable when you combine a sudden crisis with a commitment to free speech. People can say whatever they want—and they do. But the biggest source of the misinformation this promotes comes from politics, not science.

Here are three charts showing fiscal discipline for every president since Ronald Reagan. They show three things.

First, Republicans raise a lot less revenue than Democrats. Second, Republicans blow up spending while Democrats keep it under control. Third, as a result, deficits generally get worse under Republicans and improve under Democrats.

There's a bonus fourth chart at the bottom that shows annual GDP growth. Democratic presidents rank first and third, so there's obviously no penalty for Democratic policies.

POSTSCRIPT: Is the spending chart unfair to Donald Trump since it includes a lot of bipartisan COVID spending? Sure. But his second budget was 6.3% higher than his first one. He was on track to blow up spending all on his own.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that auto sales over the past year were the same as their pre-pandemic average. A surprising number of people saw that and wanted to know what per capita sales looked like. As it happens, I had already done that but decided not to use the chart. Here it is:

There's been a steady decline over the past couple of decades. This obviously has nothing to do with the transition to touchscreens and electric vehicles, which is why I stuck with raw vehicle sales in my previous post.

Why the decline? I don't know, but if I had to guess it has something to do with (a) the increasing reliability of cars and (b) the shrinking number of teenagers who drive.

POSTSCRIPT: On another note, this chart shows car sales per adult. This is harder to figure out than you'd think. One of my long-time pet peeves is that the Census Bureau doesn't provide simple time series for various population metrics, like number of children, number of elderly, number of adults, etc. You can extract all this stuff, but not easily.

You might be amused to know that the simplest way of counting adults is to use two FRED series. They have one series for the population of veterans over 18 and another for nonveterans over 18. Add them up and you get all adults. This is sort of a ridiculous hack, and it only goes back to 2000, but it works.

The Washington Post writes today about Trump whisperer Russ Vought:

Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-constitutional’ vision for second term

“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”

I read Vought's "seminal essay" so you don't have to, and it turns out to be a lot less interesting than you might think. Vought thinks we're living in a post-constitutional era not because he wants to shred the Constitution but because he thinks liberals have wrecked things over the past hundred years. He's one of those conservatives who wants to return to the Lochner era and get rid of all the Progressive Era and New Deal projects that created independent agencies and turned interstate commerce into a justification for overweening federal power. Yawn.

This is mostly crazy stuff, but it's a dime a dozen among Federalist Society types these days. Still, maybe Vought goes a little further than most. Here he is explaining why it's OK for states to take control of the border:

We have looked to the Constitution for what the Founders would do if one was a current governor of a border state, and lo and behold, we found Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3, articulating that states cannot engage in war making unless invaded. And in our research, we found that they did not mean threats from foreign nation states, but rather smugglers, militias, Indian tribes, etc.

This is ridiculous. "Invasion," both then and now, refers to an organized force attacking the country with violence and malice. Individuals acting independently with no intent to conquer or kill do not constitute an invasion under any plausible interpretation.

I wonder sometimes how these folks actually want to govern the country. I mean, suppose you agreed with their basic criticism that agencies can't be allowed independence from the president; that Congress can't delegate its rulemaking powers; and that most of the civil service should be political, changing with each new administration.

Suppose you agreed with all that. We're still living in a country of 330 million people and an era of immense complexity. It's not physically possible for Congress to do all the rulemaking. It's not physically possible to appoint a million new civil servants every few years. It's not physically possible to govern a jet-age, atomic-age, computer-age, internet-age society using rules from 1787—or even 1905.

So in practical terms, what are they really thinking? I find it a mystery.

I came across this while I was looking for something else. A study done a few years ago analyzed different federal agencies for partisanship and found, for example, that workers in the Department of Education tend to be Democrats while workers in Homeland Security tend to be Republicans.

Then, using the party affiliation for individual procurement officers in each of the agencies, they found that contract costs were controlled significantly better when a procurement officer belonged to the same party as the president:

The researchers were able to match the party affiliation for 7,200 officers who administered over 700,000 contracts across 132 departments and agencies during the period. Comparing among similar contracts, they found an 8% increase in cost overruns among contractors who were registered as Democrats under a Republican president, and vice versa. That was true even when they compared procurement officers within the same department in the same year.

“We didn’t see any change in how people were choosing contractors or the types of contracts, so the decline in performance occurred while they were overseeing the contract,” he said. “These overruns really do seem to be due to a decline in morale, which we corroborate through data from employee surveys.”

The researchers guess that the reason for this is morale. When a president of the opposite party is elected you get discouraged and don't put as much effort into your job. Less oversight means more cost overruns. The effect is the same for Democrats and Republicans and is higher for bigger contracts. It's also higher the longer an officer is misaligned with the president.

This is interesting, but offhand I can't think of anything to be done about it.

There's been a lot of chatter lately about stuff we got wrong during the COVID pandemic. Fair enough. Nearly everyone worldwide got some or all of the same things wrong, though, so I'm not super inclined to hate specifically on Dr. Fauci or the CDC or WHO about it. It was just a really hard problem that came at us at very high speed.

But there's one particular "mistake" that deserves a little more attention: masks. A lot of people seem to think that mask mandates were proven to be just a piece of pandemic theater, and it's true that cloth masks and medical masks turned out to be of minimal use against COVID. But that doesn't mean masks are useless. Just the opposite. Recent studies have shown that we actually needed to mask better by encouraging broad use of N95 masks. Even better would be a program that distributes and fits N95 respirators individually.

I don't personally like this. I tried N95 masks a couple of times late in the pandemic and found them annoying. Nonetheless, they're what works.

This is something we should prep for. Maybe in a future pandemic we can reduce the social distancing to three feet and keep the kids in school. Lessons learned. But we should also be prepared to wear those annoying N95 masks anytime we're indoors. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a lesson that's gotten much airtime.

A lot of people see Elon Musk's tweets, so you might have seen this one:

This is not from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the main professional group of pediatricians in the US with nearly 70,000 members. It's the American College of Pediatricians, a small, socially conservative advocacy group founded in 2002 to oppose adoption by gay couples. They have opposed gender affirming care for trans children for many years. There's nothing either new or noteworthy about their latest statement.