Kevin Drum

The Supreme Court has upheld Congress's demand that TikTok either sell itself to an American owner or shut down. How do I know? Because the New York Times has treated this event with about the same world-historical banner-headline flood-the-zone gravity as 9/11. As of 1:30 pm, they had written 14 separate pieces about it by 13 different reporters—and that's only counting the ones that got headlines:

1. Adam Liptak: The Supreme Court has backed a law requiring TikTok be sold or banned.
2. Adam Liptak: The Supreme Court appeared poised to uphold the law when it heard arguments on Friday.
3. David McCabe: Here’s what to know about the potential TikTok ban.
4. David Sanger: The government’s case for banning TikTok on national security grounds was light on examples.
5. Katie Mogg: A TikTok habit is hard to break.
6. Cecilia Kang: Parents express mixed reactions to a potential TikTok ban.
7. J.D. Biersdorfer: Here’s how to download your videos and data from TikTok.
8. Meaghan Tobin: Here’s why Beijing could have the last say on any TikTok deal.
9. Alexandra Alter: Publishers and authors wonder: Can anything replace BookTok
10. Sheera Frenkel: Teenagers on TikTok exchanged advice on how to get around a ban.
11. Cecilia Kang: The ban is based on national security concerns. Limits because of foreign ownership are not unusual.
12. Madison Malone Kircher: Influencers React to a World Without TikTok.
13. Tripp Mickle and Nico Grant: For Apple and Google, complying with the law would be easy.
14. David McCabe and Maya C. Miller: Government officials react to the looming TikTok ban.

Come on. Let's all calm down. It's a social media app for teenagers. The Republic will survive no matter what happens.

Housing starts spiked upward in December:

This is more good news for the beginning of the Trump administration. Over the past two years housing starts have averaged 140,000 per year higher than the pre-pandemic average from his first term.

In other good news, the Atlanta Fed is now forecasting 3% GDP growth in the final quarter of 2024. Trump is taking over a strong economy.

Do we have a spending problem or a revenue problem? You be the judge:

This includes everything: defense, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt, etc. In 2019, spending was exactly the same as it was in 1980. Revenue was down by two percentage points.

After that we had a huge spike in spending due to COVID—and thank goodness for that since it rescued the economy. Most of it, along with some bits from the American Rescue Plan, has gone away but some of it is still hanging around. That's mostly why we had the upward spike in 2024:

The increase is entirely accounted for by leftover COVID spending plus a big increase in interest payments thanks to the Fed. Some of that still needs to be cut back, but an overall spending target of around 22% of GDP is unavoidable thanks to Social Security and Medicare over the long term.

So that's the story. Aside from COVID, spending has stayed level for nearly half a century. It will go up a bit over the next decade thanks to an aging population, but that's it. All we need now is for revenue to catch up.

Matt Yglesias is reading Middlemarch, and it turns out that a minor plot point in the novel is about the construction of a London-Birmingham railroad that will go through Middlemarch. Not everyone is happy about this, but as one of the book's characters explains, there's no use fighting because the law is on the railroad's side. Matt strongly supports this anti-NIMBY attitude of yore:

That’s how you get things done.... A company willing to invest private capital in the construction of such a railroad was given the right to survey the route and to take whatever land they wanted via the British version of eminent domain. British law is more generous to the landowner than American law in this regard and requires that the company pay the market value plus ten percent to the landowner. But (at the time) there were no procedural tools of delay. The railroad had to pay for what they wanted, but they otherwise operated under very few constraints.

This attitude is one of the things that most bothers me about liberal YIMBYs. You can make a case that modern America puts too much red tape in the way of building new stuff, but the answer is surely not to extol 19th century robber baron practices. That's what was responsible for all the red tape in the first place: during and after the '60s, people got sick and tired of rich corporations having carte blanche to do anything they wanted, wherever they wanted, with no concern for either the environment or the opinions of the people whose lives they were wrecking.

They wanted a say, and that's what gave us laws like NEPA at the federal level (signed by Richard Nixon) and CEQA in California (signed by Ronald Reagan). Have those laws gotten out of hand? Maybe. We're a litigious society, and lots of things get out of hand. But surely the people most affected by development deserve a voice in that development?

Later on Matt glosses the railroad building boom like this:

The railroads got built because the national government decided it wanted a national railroad network to get built, so that the aggregate benefits would exceed the costs. And then having decided that the aggregate benefits would exceed the costs, it created an institutional framework that facilitated doing the thing and cleared out procedural obstacles to it happening.

This, I think, is an exorbitantly rosy view of things. As in the US, British railroad building was largely a frenzy of projects launched by rich people who won permissions and contracts via political hardball and outright bribery. It was decidedly not the result of a cool cost-benefit analysis followed by technocratic white papers setting out national plans.

As genuine democracy advances, things get messy. It often turns out that when people get enfranchised they aren't happy with the status quo after all. So they fight. That means it's inherently harder to make decisions today, with a huge and diverse electorate, than it was in 1789 when only a relatively small and homogeneous group (white, male, well-to-do) had to agree on things. But that's the price. If you want democracy, you have to accept that everyone gets a say and a lot of extremely stubborn people are going to disagree with you. Fractious, unsatisfactory compromise is unavoidable.

When Joe Biden became president he directed immigration officials to focus their arrest and removal efforts on criminals, national security threats, and recent border crossers. Here's the guidance DHS issued a few weeks after inauguration:

This didn't restrict the removal of illegal immigrants, which was far higher under Biden than Trump:

That's from David Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute. He has a long examination of Biden's immigration record here, and it's worth reading. His conclusion is pretty close to my own:

• Biden's record was far from perfect.
• But the surge in immigration was mostly due to an ultra-hot labor market.
  
• Biden increased enforcement in almost every possible category (arrests, removals, detention space, deportation flights, etc.).

Biden's record on the border is mixed, and he did a poor job of explaining what he was doing. That said, it's a lot like inflation: he got the blame for something that was set in motion by the pandemic a year before he took office. It was unlucky timing more than poor policy.

This is San Gorgonio Mountain, tallest peak in the Transverse Ranges at 11,503 feet. This picture was taken back in the olden days when it rained and snowed here in Southern California. Not anymore. Even the tall mountains are pretty dry these days.

With 2024 wrapped up, it's time to check in with the Washington Post to find out how many unarmed Black suspects were shot by police last year:

The good news is that only ten unarmed Black suspects were shot. That's a small number and an all-time low.

The bad news is that this number is higher than it is for unarmed Hispanic suspects (8) or unarmed white suspects (6) even though Blacks make up a smaller share of the population.¹

The good news, nonetheless, is that shootings have gone down 72% since 2015.

The bad news is that all of this decrease happened in 2015-19. Since then there's been virtually no progress. Apparently all the protests around George Floyd had no effect.

¹Adjusted for population, the rate of unarmed Black shootings in 2024 was 2x higher than Hispanics and 8x higher than whites.

After adjusting for inflation, retail sales were up 1% on an annualized basis in December, continuing a streak of increases in the second half of 2024:

CBP recorded 96,048 southwest border encounters in December, a slight increase over November:

Of these, 47,000 were people trying to cross the border illegally and 49,000 were asylum seekers who showed up at ports of entry.

What?

President Joe Biden’s administration is considering ways to keep TikTok available in the United States if a ban that’s scheduled to go into effect Sunday proceeds, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

....Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump is ready to intervene to preserve access to the Chinese-owned video app in the American marketplace.... The moves represent parallel efforts by the rival presidents to execute an end-run around Congress and the Supreme Court, which is teed up to rule on the ban at any time.

An end run around Congress? One of these presidents signed the ban and the other one supported it. They're doing end runs around their previous selves.

In related news, Sen. Ed Markey, who voted to ban TikTok last April, has introduced a bill to extend the deadline for TikTok's divestiture to an American owner.

This is comical. Now everyone suddenly wants to keep TikTok? A year ago both presidents and 80% of Congress were gung ho to boot their commie asses out of the country. What's going on?