Kevin Drum

Great news today! You may recall that the results of my immunofixation test have looked like this for the past nine years:

"Monoclonal gammopathy" is a fancy term for cancer, and I had it. Then, late last year, the results changed:

Still abnormal, but clearly below the level of firm detection. Today, I got my most recent test result:

Nothing abnormal and no cancer detected. Period. That doesn't mean the cancer is gone, of course, but it does mean it's finally dropped fully and completely below the level of detection using standard tests. What's more, my kappa/lambda light chain ratio has remained normal for the past three months. Technically, this means I have achieved a "stringent complete response," the best category of response. And it only took 11 months!

Next up: On Tuesday I receive the results of my prostate biopsy. Will I remain cancer free, sort of, or just trade one kind for another? Stay tuned.

We now have Israel's explanation for killing seven World Central Kitchen workers earlier this week. In brief: drones followed the WCK trucks from a seaside jetty to the WCK warehouse. The Israelis knew exactly what they were. They also saw several cars join the trucks along the way, but they didn't realize they were part of the convoy. They figured they were Hamas soldiers commandeering an aid shipment. So after the food was unloaded and three of the cars headed south, they fired off three missiles and destroyed them.

This doesn't entirely make sense, but even if we take it at face value the conclusion is obvious: Israel should be providing military escorts for aid shipments. That would prevent misidentification and it would prevent Hamas from stealing humanitarian aid.

But Israel declines to do this. Too dangerous, I suppose. They prefer long-range killing. And it would take a thousand or so troops away from their prime mission of killing anything in Gaza that moves.

If President Biden is (a) serious about holding Israel to account, but (b) still supports Israel's goal of wiping out Hamas, then he should insist on military escorts for aid shipments, something Israel has never been willing to do. What other answer is there?

Whenever we go up or down the stairs, Charlie heads over to the upstairs railing to peer over the edge and watch. I'm not sure what he expects to see. Just checking up on his domain, I suppose.

America's greatest member of Congress speaks:

Oh come on, Marjie. A 4.8 earthquake? When God wants to send us a sign he'll at least hit 7 on the Richter scale. Take it from a Californian.

The American economy gained 303,000 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 213,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked back down to 3.8%.

I normally use a bar chart for the monthly jobs numbers, but I switched to a line chart this month to highlight how flat they've been for the past year. All the way through the end of 2022 the employment figures dropped steadily, but then they suddenly plateaued. This is evidence in favor of a soft landing for the economy.

There was an odd racial cast to the unemployment numbers in March. The unemployment rate for white workers didn't change at all, but it spiked up 0.8 percentage points for Black workers. At the same time it was down 0.5 points for Hispanic workers and 0.9 points for Asian workers. Those are extremely large changes for a single month.

On an annualized basis, average weekly earnings were up a whopping 8.0% from February. Even accounting for last month's inflation spike, that comes to 2-3% in real terms. Not bad.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a ballot initiative here in the Golden State that would make it harder to raise taxes:

The businesses have gathered enough signatures to put a measure on November’s ballot that would require two-thirds of voters to approve most local tax increases and roll back some recently enacted ones.... Backers say it is necessary to stop continued tax hikes that are making it too expensive to operate in California and pushing companies to leave the state.

California is not the highest tax state in the union, but it's a high tax state. That said, our total tax take hasn't changed much over the past quarter century:

In 2023 total tax collections came to 1.85% of total personal income, almost exactly the same as its pre-pandemic average.

But what about corporate taxes? Businesses are the ones behind this ballot initiative, after all. Let's take a look:

The average corporate tax rate in California has steadily declined since 2000 and is now less than 5%. That compares to nearly 10% in 1980.

California has added some new taxes recently. One of them, a "mansion tax" in Los Angeles, seems to have especially peeved rich people. Overall, though, it's just not true that we suffer from "continued tax hikes." The tax burden in California has gone up on the rich (I think) but not on anyone else and not on businesses. A brand new ballot initiative to fix a nonexistent problem hardly seems necessary.

Jean Twenge writes today about the decline in reading among high school students. She has no problem assigning blame:

So where is the time once spent reading going? Screens are the inevitable conclusion...There appear to be two stages to the decline of reading: 1976-2002 and 2012-2022.

Sure, except that Twenge offers as evidence chart after chart that looks like this:

First off, the decline in reading has been going on for nearly 50 years. Second, even if you look only at the second decline, it starts in 2009, not 2012.

This is not nitpicking. If smartphones are responsible for the recent decline in reading, the decline can't start before smartphones became widespread in 2012. Not even by three years. Smartphones might be part of the reason, but there has to be something else too.

In any case, the obvious questions prompted by this chart are:

• The reading decline has been steady since at least 1976. Why?
• There was an odd interruption between 2002-2009. Why?

Twenge acknowledges all this, but still insists that smartphones are a major culprit even though the evidence points well away from that. This is one of the reasons I remain so skeptical about the whole smartphone thing. The folks pushing the theory want to blame every last bad thing that's happened to teens on smartphones, and they mostly do this by searching out any trend they can find that began around 2012. Twisting the evidence like a pretzel makes it even worse.

Hey, did you know that teen use of OxyContin plunged starting in 2012? Well, 2009, actually, but who's counting? It must be the beneficial effect of smartphones! What else could it be?

President Biden spoke to Benjamin Netanyahu this morning about Israel's attack on an aid convoy three days ago:

President Biden emphasized that the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable. He made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers. He made clear that U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.

You can certainly criticize Biden for talking tough but continuing to supply weapons to Israel without condition. Plenty of liberals are doing exactly that. Still, former president Donald Trump also spoke this morning about the war. Here's what he said:

You’ve got to get it over with, and you have to get back to normalcy. And I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory. You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time. And the other thing is I hate, they put out tapes all the time.... They’re releasing the most heinous, most horrible tapes of buildings falling down. And people are imagining there’s a lot of people in those buildings, or people in those buildings, and they don’t like it.... But they’ve got to finish what they started, and they’ve got to finish it fast, and we have to get on with life.

Trump didn't even mention the aid workers who were killed. In fact, he didn't mention aid at all. He didn't mention civilians in any context whatsoever.

His only comment was that Israel needs to prosecute the war harder and stop letting people see the buildings they're destroying because it's bad PR. That's it.

So go ahead. Slam Biden for not caring enough about Palestinians. But make no mistake: He cares a whole lot more than Donald Trump does. Trump actively wants to kill more Gazans and he wants to kill them faster. His attitude toward Palestinians is simple: Starve them, kill them, whatever. Just get it over with.

I was browsing around at studies of crime committed by immigrants and came across this from the Heritage Foundation:

Increased Illegal Immigration Brings Increased Crime: Almost 2/3 of Federal Arrests Involve Noncitizens

A 2021 Department of Justice report revealed that 64% of federal arrests in 2018 involved noncitizens, despite them comprising only 7% of the population at that time.

Shazam! Noncitizen immigrants comprise 64% of all federal arrests!

Well.......no. That number includes federal arrests for immigration offenses—which, by definition, are limited to immigrants.¹ The number for ordinary criminal offenses in 2018, the final year of the DOJ report, was 9.8%:

Here are incarceration rates from a recent study of men aged 18-40 (both citizen and noncitizen) that goes back more than a hundred years:

For the past half century, the incarceration rate of Latino immigrants has been lower than that of native borns. In the most recent year studied, incarceration rates for first-generation immigrants were a full quarter lower than for native borns.

¹It's worth nothing that federal arrests are a small fraction of all arrests and probably aren't a good measure of anything. Still, if you're going to do it, you need to do it right.

Sunrise at the Mexican border.