Kevin Drum

From the New York Times:

Trump’s Treasury Pick Is Poised to Test ‘Three Arrows’ Economic Strategy

Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary pick, Scott Bessent, has mapped out a three-pronged approach to jump-starting a U.S. economy that has been saddled with inflation and sluggish output. The concept, which he billed during the campaign as his 3-3-3 plan, entails increasing growth to 3 percent, cutting the budget deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product and raising U.S. energy production by three million barrels of oil per day, or the equivalent in other fuels.

This isn't a strategy. They aren't even tactics. These are just goals, and not very impressive ones. Growth is already averaging 3.04% during Biden's term. Cutting the budget deficit would be easy if Republicans would stop blowing holes in it with tax cuts for the rich. And oil production has increased by 4 billion barrels per day since Biden took office, so 3 billion is hardly a stretch as long as anyone wants to buy the stuff.

In other words, just keep doing what Biden is doing and let the TCJA lapse. Easy peasy, as long as you don't muck things up with a trade war or a bank crash after you stop regulating them.

This is Charlie hiding behind the drapes. Earlier this week he was there having a staredown with our local squirrel. I don't know what the deal is with this. The squirrel loves to sit at a distance and chirrup wildly at the cats as if they're invading his territory, not the other way around. The cats mostly just take it in stride. They seem entirely uninterested in the possibility of squirrel for lunch.

Remember the scare over black kitchen utensils? Andrew Gelman points to this piece about it in the National Post:

The study estimated that using contaminated kitchenware could cause a median intake of 34,700 nanograms per day of Decabromodiphenyl ether, known as BDE-209 . . . [which] “would approach” the reference dose given by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

....The paper correctly gives the reference dose for BDE-209 as 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day, but calculates this into a limit for a 60-kilogram adult of 42,000 nanograms per day. So, as the paper claims, the estimated actual exposure from kitchen utensils of 34,700 nanograms per day is more than 80 per cent of the EPA limit of 42,000.

In reality, 7,000 x 60 = 420,000 nanograms. So the kitchenware contains 8% of the recommended max. Not even close to worrying.

Andrew gently says the peer reviewers are busy people and mistakes can happen, but the authors are more at fault: "I guess that part of the problem is that the incorrect number fit their story so well. When you come up with a result that doesn’t accord with the story you want to tell, you’re inclined to check it. If the result is a perfect fit, you might not even give it a second look."

I'm less gentle. This is a wild-ass screw-up of 8th grade math. It's barely conceivable that this paper could have been seen by at least half a dozen people with PhDs and not a single one noticed an error that literally jumps off the page and hits you in the face. Come on. 7,000 x 60? Even the most rudimentary sense of magnitude tells you this has to be six figures.

The authors call this a typo, which it isn't. If it were just a transcription error they'd have the proper estimate (8%) and recommendations with just a puzzling missing zero. This mistake carried through the whole paper.

The worst part, maybe, is that the authors don't care. They've submitted a correction, but stand by everything else on the grounds that anything above 0% is unacceptable. This is ridiculous. If that were so, there'd be no point in even doing the study. We already knew there was some BDE-209 there.

Oh well. Just another black eye for activist-supported research. The hits keep rolling in.

OK, here's our final ACS chart:

I did this one out of my usual curiosity about whether it would gibe with the rise of working from home during the pandemic. It's still hard to tell.

Clearly, commutes in big cities did go down when the pandemic started. But not by much: a grand total of 54 seconds by 2023. This is less than 3%.

What does this mean? On the one hand, that's only back to 2017 levels. On the other hand, we have 15 million more workers than we did in 2017. On the third hand, we supposedly have more than 15 million people who have abandoned the workplace in favor of working from home.

So . . . it's still a mystery. I still don't think commuting patterns match up very well with reports of how empty office buildings are, but no one seems very interested in trying to reconcile this.

In my previous post I said that someone should publicize claim denial rates for Obamacare more widely. Why not me? It's a great big chart with 162 insurers, but I guess I've got the room.

I'll have our last ACS chart later, but in the meantime I happened to run across some actual data about health insurer claim denial rates, the topic du jour since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in broad daylight, allegedly in part because of his company's astronomical denial rate.

These figures come from ACA transparency data and is limited to insurers who participate on Healthcare.gov. This means it's unclear how well it represents the rest of the industry, but I'll bet it's not miles off. Here it is:

Those denial rates sure seem high in general, but at least they're going down a little. There's no reason to think there's been a recent explosion in denials.

Even more interesting, though, is the unbelievably vast difference in denial rates among different insurers:

This is mind boggling. The worst insurer denies half their claims. Half! The best insurer denies only 2% of claims but apparently stays in business anyway. What possible explanations could there be for this disparity?

• Some insurers are just bad actors, full stop.
• There's some kind of weird pricing tradeoff happening. Some insurers charge low premiums to attract customers and make up for it with lots of claim denials. Other insurers charge high premiums in order to provide better service.
• Different insurers specialize in different things. This seems unlikely since Obamacare sets pretty comprehensive rules for minimum service levels.
• Maybe the high denial companies operate mostly in areas with little competition where they can get away with being lousy service providers.

Obamacare requires insurers to report denial rates and provide a bit of explanation for them, but it doesn't set any required standards. Nor does it require data from non-ACA employer insurers even though that's in the law. Maybe someday.

In any case, this sure seems like something that ought to be more widely publicized. I for one would be mighty reluctant to sign up for a Celtic plan in any state given their sky-high denial rates. But until I looked this up I had no idea they were so bad.

Here's yet another ACS chart. It shows the percentage of "disconnected youth," which means late teens who aren't in school and aren't working:

This one isn't as surprising as the other two (I don't know how they're going to turn out until I grab the numbers from FRED). Basically, fewer kids became unmotivated slackers during the Obama/Trump economic expansion, but that turned around slightly during the pandemic. But the number is still way lower than it was in 2010.

Bob Somerby wrote today about a CNN interview with North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer. Wolf Blitzer wanted to know why Cramer supported Kash Patel to be FBI Director, and Cramer replied that it was all about the FBI's search for Donald Trump's classified documents:

[I] want to get to the root of how is it that the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago early in the morning with guns out looking for documents that, if they knew existed, all they had to do was ask for them or get a subpoena and go get them in a peaceful way in cooperation with the president.... There was no need to arm a bunch of FBI agents to the teeth, put on bulletproof vests, show up in their SWAT outfits, and raid Mar-a-Lago. It shows an indignity of the whole thing. And by the way, here we are today with the whole case being dismissed.

You might have a vague memory that this sounds all wrong, but it's way worse than that. Here's a brief timeline of Donald Trump and his top secret documents:

May 2021: The National Archives asks Trump to please return all missing documents in his possession, and keeps asking for the rest of the year.

January 2022: After months of stalling, Trump finally delivers 15 boxes containing 197 classified documents.

May 2022: Sensing that Trump hasn't turned over everything, a grand jury issues a subpoena for any additional classified documents.

June 2022: At Mar-a-Lago, Trump's lawyer responds to the subpoena by turning over to the FBI a small envelope containing 38 classified documents, along with an affidavit that he's searched diligently and this is everything. He also gives agents a tour of Trump's storage room but refuses to allow them to search the boxes inside.

Late June 2022: Upon learning that Mar-a-Lago has a video surveillance system, the Department of Justice subpoenas pretty much all of it.

July 2022: After initially asking his IT director to wipe the surveillance system hard drive, Trump turns it over. It shows Trump aides repeatedly moving boxes out of the storage room to other locations.

August 2022: Since Trump is plainly obstructing them in every way he can, the FBI gets a warrant to search Mar-a-Lago. They show up quietly in plainclothes in the early morning, making every effort to keep the search low key. They find boxes strewn around the mansion, eventually recovering 13,000 documents in 13 boxes, more than a hundred of them with classification markings—including 18 marked Top Secret.
.

Late August 2022: Judge Aileen Cannon, acting on a motion from Trump, halts the FBI's review of the documents and instead appoints a special master to do it. She is quickly overturned by both an appeals court and the Supreme Court.

November 2022: Jack Smith is appointed as a special counsel to investigate the case.

June 2023: Jack Smith indicts Trump.

November 2024. Trump wins the presidential election. Smith drops the case due to longstanding Justice Department rules that prohibit the prosecution of sitting presidents.

This is what conservatives have furiously misrepresented from day one. It became the poster child for charges of "weaponizing" the FBI and "lawfare" by Joe Biden against a political opponent. The simple truth, of course, is that Trump repeatedly and relentlessly tried to obstruct the return of classified documents in the face of polite requests, firmer requests, and finally subpoenas. We now know that he repeatedly insisted he didn't want anyone messing with "his boxes." He enlisted his aides to move boxes around to hide them from his own lawyer's court-ordered searches. He tried to prevent the FBI from reviewing surveillance video. To the bitter end he concealed documents until the FBI was finally forced to recover them by searching Mar-a-Lago themselves—which they did professionally and discreetly.

Nonetheless conservatives keep up their ridiculous version of events and insist the FBI is hopelessly corrupt and politicized. It's disgraceful conduct.

I've been waiting for this shoe to drop:

After years of resistance from tax software companies, the IRS finally introduced Direct File in 2024. It replaced Free File, a partnership with tax prep software companies that had been operating for 20 years. But Intuit had been caught trying to trick eligible taxpayers into paying for extra services, and by 2021 both Intuit and H&R Block had withdrawn from the program. For obvious reasons, none of the tax prep partners had ever been enthusiastic about the program anyway, and it was limited to taxpayers with incomes under $80,000. Because of this, almost no one used Free File.

Direct File stepped into this mess with a very nice, direct-from-the-government tax app that was free with no tricks and served anyone with an income up to $200,000. It was a hit even though it was pretty limited, but the 2025 version is considerably more capable and is being rolled out to more states. It's likely to be even more of a hit.

In other words, it's a rare thing: a really good IT project rolled out at moderate cost and benefiting millions of taxpayers. But the tax prep companies hate it and would love to see it die. Their MAGA minions in Congress are eager to help.

There's no reason to kill Direct File. If you click the tweet and read Adrian Smith's letter to Trump, you'll see that it's just a tired stew of complaints about how we should leave everything to the private sector and not entrust tax prep to Deep State bureaucrats acting as "tax assessor, collector, preparer, and enforcer." All made worse, of course by Joe Biden's history of "wielding the IRS as a tool to silence political opponents and control private citizens" and the IRS's own "long record of abusing its authority to target political opponents."

This is all stale conservative BS, part of their decades-long jihad against the IRS in service of rich donors who obviously want the agency hobbled. None of it is true, but it's sure phrased in a perfect way to appeal to Donald Trump. Will he bite?

Here is today's next selection from the ACS data dump. It's an odd statistic called the Racial Dissimilarity Index, which measures the percentage of white folks who would have to move in order to have the same racial distribution everywhere.

In other words, lower is better. It means a city is less segregated. For a long time I've been hearing that cities are becoming more self-segregated, but at least since 2010 that turns out not to be true:

The numbers were down in every big county except Dallas, Miami-Dade, and Riverside.

Admittedly, this is still not much of a picture of racial harmony and bliss, but at least things are improving. And as usual, some of this segregation is just a symptom of a bigger problem: Neighborhoods naturally segregate by wealth, and Black families earn a lot less money than white families (37% less in 2023). It's one of the few truly intractable big problems we face even after decades of efforts.