Kevin Drum

This is an okapi at the Los Angeles Zoo, reaching for a juicy tree leaf belonging to one of the 100 varieties of tree leaves they consume. Yummy!

On Tuesday I wrote about my hundredth post on how America is much better off than we think. You know the drill: incomes are high, crime is low, drug use is down, etc., etc.

This produced some of the usual pushback: I'm a retired, upper-middle-class guy living in Irvine who just doesn't get how badly people are struggling. There's some obvious truth to that, but it's ironically due more to my personality than my income. There's just flatly no evidence that Americans are struggling financially more than in the past. By every possible measure for every possible demographic we're struggling less. You can look at rich or poor; income or consumption; assets or debt; homeownership or retirement. No matter what you look at, there are fewer people doing badly and more people doing well than 20 years ago.

In other words, just give it up on the economic front. America is the world's supreme powerhouse on practically every economic measure and looks set to stay that way for some time. Our problem is not prosperity. It's the price we've paid for prosperity.

This is hardly a new insight, and the examples I'm about to list have mostly been well chewed over. But I want to collect them all in one place anyway. Some are unique to the US and some aren't. But they're all things that have made American life more of a grind over the past 20-50 years.

1. We have an increasingly workaholic culture in America. Since 1976, the number of people who work more than 50 hours a week has doubled to about 25%, compared to 7% in Europe. On average we work nearly 300 more hours per year than Europeans and are allowed less vacation time, less sick time, and less maternity leave.
2. We are more obese than any other advanced country by a lot. This makes life wearier, illnesses more common, life expectancies shorter, and time spent in the health care system higher.
3. Life, obviously, is way more complicated than it used to be. Computers and cell phones do a lot of great stuff, but they're intensely frustrating too. Especially for the working class, which doesn't work with computers on the job all day long, it's exhausting to be forced into battles with confusing web pages for so many routine daily tasks.
4. Health care denials are in the news, and they can be drainers of the soul. Most people don't know this, but it's a fact of life for the 15-20% of us who have serious illnesses and therefore have heavy exposure to the medical system. Needless to say, this wasn't an issue 50 years ago because there were hardly any medical procedures expensive enough for claims adjusters to care about.
5. Commuting in rush hour traffic is more stressful than it was 50 years ago because freeways are more jammed—and certainly more stressful than a hundred years ago when you mostly walked or took a trolley to work. More generally, as cities become more crowded they also become more stressful. This is well known, but not something the YIMBY crowd likes to acknowledge.
6. Fox News and its companions have spent the past three decades hellbent on making us livid with anger over everything. They do this solely because it makes them money.
7. Dealing with with large businesses—cable companies, phone companies, electric companies, credit card companies, you name it—has become maddening. Telephone support is often an hours long marathon that's frequently incomprehensible because the call center is located in Bangalore or Manila and staffed with low-paid, poorly trained workers. And you're completely at their mercy. It's just a faceless voice reeling off rules you have no say over, and eventually it brings even the meek and mild to temper tantrums. Is it this bad elsewhere? I don't know, but I'd bet the American obsession with squeezing every possible penny out of corporate expenses puts us near the worst.
8. Everywhere is private property these days, patrolled by private security guards watching to make sure you don't break any rules. Does this make you feel you safer? Probably. Does it also induce low-level stress every time they tell you, sorry but you can't take a picture of that? You can't walk back there? This is a no-smoking area? Probably.
9. Fear of mass shooting events seems to be far more prevalent among teens than I would have guessed. The constant drills, the TV coverage, the transparent backpacks—all of that conspires to induce a persistent low-level fear that something terrible could happen at any moment. This is very definitely a problem unique to America.

So why is my (possible) indifference to this stuff related more to my circumstances and personality than my income? Two reasons. First, most of these things don't affect me: I'm retired; I'm not obese; I like computers; my HMO never denies care; I don't commute; I don't watch Fox News (or MSNBC); and mass shootings are just distant newspaper headlines. That leaves only 7 and 8. Not much, really.

Second, I happen to have a fairly non-fearful personality and I benefit from being a large, not-old looking, man. I'm genuinely never worried about low probability stuff like terrorist attacks, my house being broken into, bird flu killing me, or whatever the latest food scare is. Lots and lots of people fret about this stuff all the time. I understand it, but it's still kind of alien to me. You're really afraid that you might be killed in a terrorist attack?

All of this might help explain why people seem to feel generally more stressed and anxious than their objective financial condition can explain. Or maybe not. This is all off the top of my head, and I'm not super invested in it.

Except for #6, of course. That one is truly an American catastrophe.

I might as well show you my fabulous view under every possible light, right? Lotsa glare on my phone camera!

By the way, everything is fine so far. No side effects except for a sleepless night thanks to the dex. I blame Joe Biden.

National leaders who make big promises usually can't keep them. Their favorite dodge is to pretend that after weeks of intense study they now realize the opposition left them a far worse mess than they had imagined. So, you know, we probably need to lower expectations.

Donald Trump doesn't really have that option. The US government's books are pretty voluminous and transparent, and anyway, Trump has been lying for so long about how terrible things are that he can hardly claim they're even worse than that.

But that's not stopping him. On Sunday he told NBC's Kristen Welker he "couldn't guarantee" that his tariffs wouldn't raise prices. That's certainly not anything he's said before.

Then today he told Time that maybe he wouldn't be able to bring down the price of groceries after all. "It's hard to bring things down once they're up." he said, accurately. "You know, it's very hard." This, of course, was widely known all along. In fact, it would probably be disastrous if prices fell.

I expect these are just the first of many walkbacks. He can't do most of the ridiculous shit he promised over and over, and the stuff he can accomplish will mostly be because Biden already accomplished it for him. But he'll figure out a way to take credit for it anyway.

The Census Bureau released a pile of 2023 data from the American Community Survey today. Some of it is kind of surprising. Unfortunately it's all by county, so the best I could do was an average of the ten biggest counties to get an overall sense of what things are like in urban America. The biggest counties are:

1. Los Angeles
2. Cook (Chicago)
3. Harris (Houston)
4. Maricopa (Phoenix)
5. San Diego
6. Orange
7. Miami-Dade
8. Dallas
9. Kings (Brooklyn)
10. Riverside

Here's the first extraction from the ACS data. It shows the share of households that spend more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage payments:

I was surprised by this. All I ever hear about housing is that rent burdens are going up, especially in big cities. But every single big county has seen a decline in rent burden since 2010. The small increase starting in 2020 is due solely to Dallas, Houston, and Brooklyn. The other counties are either flat or still decreasing.

Note that these are five-year rolling estimates, which smooth out the peaks and valleys. Single-year estimates would be noisier and show more dramatic changes. But five-year estimates are what the Census Bureau released today, so that's what you get.

NOTE: There's plenty more to come! I'll put up more ACS stuff throughout the day.

So far no cytokines are releasing and my brain is clear. But the meds come with a dose of dex, which means I'll probably be up all night. So here's a nighttime picture of the view out my window.

Does a pardon "necessitate" a confession of guilt?

“[A] pardon at some unspecified date in the future ... would not unring the bell of conviction,” federal prosecutors argued in a Jan. 6 case before U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols. “In fact, quite the opposite. The defendant would first have to accept the pardon, which necessitates a confession of guilt.”

....But Jan. 6 defendants have increasingly been seeking “pardons of innocence,” claiming Trump has the authority to grant them clemency without forcing an admission of guilt. Those who haven’t been convicted are hoping Trump’s Justice Department simply drops their charges, obviating the need for a pardon altogether.

I think everyone has it wrong here. It's true that a pardon has to be accepted—or, more accurately, not explicitly rejected—for it to take effect. It's also true that a pardon carries an "imputation" of guilt. However, it doesn't imply a personal confession of guilt. At least, the Supreme Court has never said that it does.

But the J6ers are wrong about "pardons of innocence." There's no such thing except in North Carolina, and certainly not at the federal level. Likewise, expunging criminal records is a widespread option at the state level but not at the federal level.

Of course, everyone who gets a pardon is free to say whatever they want. Gen. Mike Flynn loudly declared he had done nothing wrong and thanked President Trump for granting him a pardon of innocence, but it was all hot air. Legally, a pardon doesn't require an admission of guilt but it does imply guilt. And it doesn't wipe out the criminal acts themselves.

Note how this affects a possible prospective Biden pardon for those on Trump's enemies list. Recipients would have to live with a vague implication of guilt, but they would remain able to personally maintain their innocence. Most likely, Democrats would believe them and Republicans wouldn't, just like they do now.

Um, what?

A sudden infusion of $30 million into Donald Trump's nascent cryptocurrency venture from a Chinese billionaire sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly defrauding investors could potentially deliver an eight-figure payday to a company associated with the president-elect.

Let's break this down:

1. Weird Chinese billionaire and possible crook Justin Sun invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial a few days ago.
2. WLF sells a crypto token promoted by Donald Trump. The token can't be sold and is explicitly worthless.
3. Trump himself has no stake in WLF.
4. However, Trump does have a stake in DT Marks DEFI LLC.
5. Under certain conditions, DTMDEFILLC is entitled to 75% of WLF's revenue.
6. Sun's investment triggered those conditions.
7. Sun's investment, therefore, triggers a possible $15 million payday for Trump down the road.

Did you get all that? In simpler terms, this is basically a straight-up bribe to a (soon) sitting president. But for what? This is where "possible crook" comes into play. Sun is being sued by the SEC for various acts of crypto mopery and dopery, and he'd undoubtedly like Trump to put in a good word for him. Common sense screams that this is about as illegal as could be, but the Supreme Court has defined bribery so narrowly that a conviction is all but impossible if the evidence falls anywhere short of a video with both guys cackling over the deal they made. But no such thing exists. It's all understood.

Now, it's entirely possible that Sun is just taking a flyer here and has never so much as discussed this with Trump's bodyguard's wife's cousin. It's chump change to him. But it's still an obvious appeal, and it's only possible because Trump keeps opening the door to things like this. Like he did with Truth Social and his cheap million-dollar watches.

Six weeks and then four more years of this stuff, folks. Suck in your guts.

Montana has once again put on hold a new law banning gender-affirming care for trans teens:

Montana’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors has been temporarily blocked by the state supreme court on grounds that it is likely to violate the right to privacy enshrined in the state’s constitution.

....Montana’s supreme court justices agreed with the district court judge Jason Marks who put a stop to the ban in September 2023, just days before it came into effect. Marks ruled: “The legislature has no interest … to justify its interference with an individual’s fundamental privacy right to obtain a particular lawful medical procedure from a healthcare provider.”

It's all but impossible to say that anything is "clear" when it comes to this topic, but there are a couple of things that seem pretty close:

• It's pretty well known that a lot of young teens who report gender dysphoria—upwards of 70-80%—will grow out of it on their own within a few years. Since there's a small amount of evidence that puberty blockers and hormone treatments might be damaging in the long run, we should probably use them a good deal more sparingly than we do now.
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• It's equally well known that many teens are very serious about transitioning. It's quite feasible to identify them, and they should be able to start puberty blockers early. Invasive surgery should probably still wait until they're adults, but there might be rare exceptions.

Given this, it's not a good idea to ban GAC, as many red states have done. Ultimately, the state should tread carefully about interfering with medical treatment between consenting parties—especially for political reasons. On the other hand, it's probably also not a good idea to let gender clinics run wild with no firm guidance, as many blue states do.

In other words, no to bans but yes to tighter regulations.

Both sides in this dispute are in thrall to highly contentious activist groups. For red states it's MAGA-style culture warriors. For blue states, it's trans groups that insist the science is settled in favor of medical transitions for any child who wants one. It's pie in the sky to insist that the job of legislators is to resist this kind of pressure, but it is. Red states ought to be crafting good-faith guidelines on gender-affirming care, not throwing red meat to the crowd by casually banning it completely.

Today the Supreme Court heard a case about environmental impact statements allegedly running amok. The case concerned an 88-mile railway line in Utah that generated 3,600 pages of environmental reports but was sued because it analyzed only the local effects in Utah. Environmental groups argued that it connected to a national network—how could it not?—so the EIS should have looked at possible effects ranging over much of the country.

According to press reports, the justices appeared unanimous in believing that this claim was sort of ridiculous and the project should be allowed to proceed. However, they were unsure of what kind of general rule should be applied to cases like this.

If I were them I'd rule on the narrowest possible basis for now. Last year's debt ceiling bill included permitting reform that already deals with some of this stuff, so why not let it roll out for a while and take a broader look in a few years?

Did you know, for example, that the bill mandates a maximum time of two years to complete an EIS and generally limits EIS reports to 150 pages. Here's how page counts break down right now:

Out of this sample, the median EIS length was 445 pages. The longest was 8,951 pages for an I70 straightening project near Denver. Only 41 of the 568 statements met the new 150-page guideline.

But there's a catch: the new rule doesn't include appendices, which run to an average of 432 pages. That brings total average length to 877 pages. But who decides what has to be put in the body of the report and what can go into an appendix? What's to keep anyone from simply writing a 150-page "report" that has a thousand pages of appendices?

I suppose the new rules try to address this in some way, but it sure seems like Congress would have done better to address the substance of EIS statements instead of the page count. Someone is going to have to provide guidelines for what has to be addressed in an EIS, and if Congress doesn't do it they're just punting their job to federal agencies and the courts.¹

These new rules were originally recommended by the Council on Environmental Quality during the Trump administration. Biden reversed the rules and then set about reinstating them. They were codified in the debt ceiling deal in 2023 with broad bipartisan support and then adopted by the CEQ in final form earlier this year.

I'll be curious too see how this all works out. Note, however that these are federal rules that apply to a federal law. They don't apply to state or local laws.

¹Then they'll complain that federal bureaucrats have their own agenda and courts have too much power.