Kevin Drum

Now that California sends mail-in ballots to everyone, I figure I should do my usual recommendations a little earlier than usual. Keep in mind a couple of things:

• I don't like ballot initiatives because they lock things into the state constitution that shouldn't usually be locked in. So my standards are high for a Yes vote.
• I especially hate ballot-box budgeting. It's a cancer.
• I believe the point of ballot initiatives is to give grass roots activists a chance to pass legislation opposed by moneyed interests. However, modern initiatives are largely the handiwork of corporations and the ultra-wealthy. I will almost never vote for an initiative sponsored primarily by businesses or billionaires.

That noted, here are my recommendations:

Proposition 1: YES. This initiative places certain abortion and other reproductive rights into the California constitution. I doubt it makes much difference, but you never know. And to me it qualifies as something I'd like to have locked in forever.

Proposition 26: NO. This is one of a pair of initiatives regarding sports gambling. Prop 26 adds sports gambling, dice games (such as craps), and roulette to the menu of games allowed at tribal casinos. Four privately owned horse racing tracks (Santa Anita, Del Mar, Los Alamitos, and Golden Gate Fields) would also be allowed to provide in-person sports gambling. This is the last thing that needs to be locked in forever via constitutional amendment, and my preference anyway is for California to simply legalize online sports gambling with no strings attached.

Proposition 27: NO. This one allows online sports gambling, but only if it's affiliated with a California tribe. That's completely ridiculous.

(Note that these two propositions are sponsored by different tribal groups, which has turned them into wars between big and small tribes. Also, both allocate some of the profits to various good causes, which is getting a lot of attention even though it's hardly a central issue. One thing they have in common is that both initiatives provide money to problem gambling programs, which is pretty damn cynical if you ask me.)

Proposition 28: NO. This proposition requires the state to provide funding for arts education that's equal to at least 1% of the funding required for public schools. It's the worst kind of ballot box budgeting.

Proposition 29: NO. This is the third time that health care unions have placed a measure on the ballot requiring dialysis centers to have physicians or physician-equivalents on the premises during all opening hours. It's unnecessary and everyone knows it. Are they ever going to give up on this?

Proposition 30: NO. California has a goal of selling only electric vehicles by 2035:

For cars in general, California's goal is to have 100% of sales of new cars be electric by 2035. A complete switchover probably won't happen until 2050 or so as older cars bought before 2035 are gradually junked and replaced with new electric cars.

However, the goal is far more stringent for rideshare companies: their fleets are required to actually complete 90% of the switchover by 2030. But where will the money come from to do this?

Prop 30 adds a 1.75% tax on income over $2 million, with the money dedicated to helping people and businesses make the switch to electric.¹ It's primarily funded by Lyft, which wants public money to fund electric rideshare vehicles instead of paying for them themselves. In addition to this sketchiness, California is already pushing the limits of taxing the wealthy and probably needs to stop. Then again, California's wealthy are pretty damn wealthy, so they can probably afford it.

¹It would also fund charging stations, and a bit of the money would go to wildfire prevention, which is getting a lot of play in ads even though it's only 20% of the program. Also worth noting: California already has a program to help low-income drivers buy new low-emission vehicles.

Proposition 31: YES. This is a referendum on a law passed a couple of years ago to ban the sale of flavored cigarettes. The law itself seems sensible to me, since flavored cigarettes are largely used to hook children, and in any case it's a law, not a permanent part of the constitution. Funding for the opposition comes, naturally enough, from Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds.

Has Brexit ruined the UK's trade with EU countries? I've always been a bit skeptical of the horror stories, but for some reason most published analysis only goes through the end of 2021. Today I got curious enough to check out the figures on the UK trade site, which goes through August 2022. Here's the summary:

There's been a huge increase in non-EU imports of oil and gas, which obviously has nothing to do with Brexit. So let's zoom in on everything else:

There was a sharp decrease in EU imports when Brexit was finalized, but that was slowly being made up throughout 2021. Then there was an increase that might have been the result of a change in the way imports were counted, though the UK customs folks say it was probably real. In any case, by mid-year the growth of EU and non-EU imports had just about reached parity.

If these numbers are accurate, it looks like Brexit had a big short-term impact on EU imports that faded over time. The picture is basically the same for exports, though the impact is more muted.

I've never agreed with the Brexit doomsayers. I don't think it's a catastrophe, only that it's a huge waste of time that produced a bit of short-term pain but not much else. Plus there was the strong racial motivation for the whole thing, along with the endless lying about it, which certainly doesn't reflect well on Britain.¹ But I suppose they'll muddle through.

¹Not that we Americans are in much of position to criticize others for this.

Surveillance of workers is on the rise, and it turns out this even applies to retired people. After all, you may be retired from ordinary, unimportant human work, but you're never retired from crucial cat maintenance duties. The feline community likes to keep a close eye on its underlings to make sure they understand this, and Charlie is no exception.

You have undoubtedly heard about the mysteriously leaked recording of Hispanic Los Angeles city council members mocking their Black colleagues and trying to figure out how to redistrict LA in a way that benefits themselves. This has consumed LA for the past couple of weeks, and last night town halls were held around the city to give LA residents a chance to express their opinions:

The most common message that came from dozens of residents at “L.A. in Crisis: The Call for Change,” hosted by The Times and KTTV Channel 11, was that Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo should resign. Both have been stripped of their committee assignments but have resisted calls to leave office.

This is . . . not a turnout that suggests ordinary Angelenos are super concerned about whether Kevin de León resigns from office. (Cedillo also has refused to resign, but it hardly matters since he lost reelection earlier this year and will leave in a couple of months anyway.)

I have a theory about this entire affair: most ordinary folks figure that every LA politician—white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish—talks this way when they're in a safe space (or think they are). The racial politics that dominate Los Angeles are well known and have been around forever.

Now, ordinary folks might be wrong! Who knows. I don't live in Los Angeles so I can't pretend to know about this in any depth. But I'll bet that's what most people believe, which probably means they're a little unimpressed by the "I am shocked, shocked" response by non-Hispanic politicians to the taped recording.

And who the hell bugged the room, anyway? The recording was made a year ago and then posted on Reddit in September—obviously timed for the upcoming mayoral election. But nobody cared for weeks until the LA Times wrote about it in October. And its effect on the November election seems like it will be minimal:

The timing of the leak, in the run-up to the mayoral election and other key races, suggests a classic October surprise designed to kneecap a candidate on the eve of voting. Yet experienced political hands said that although the leak hurt the elected officials involved, it did not seem to benefit — or harm — anyone on the ballot.

“Not in any huge way,” said former Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who was the first Latina on the L.A. City Council. “Whether it affects people’s decision on who to vote, I don’t think so.”

So wtf, anyway? Someone educate me, please.

This is from the Treasury Department today. The 2022 federal deficit was half what it was in 2021.

Rani Molla writes at Vox about job burnout:

Some 43 percent of US office workers “feel burned out at work,” according to the latest quarterly survey by Slack’s Future Forum. That figure is near its peak level last year, though Slack has only been tracking this data since May of 2021.

First off, Slack is probably the company I'd least trust in the entire country with a survey like this. Second, they've only conducted it for 15 months. It's insane to even think about quoting it seriously.

But burnout is practically conventional wisdom these days. Here's a random collection of recent headlines:

NY Post: Two-thirds of workers say their job is stressful: ‘Absolute chaos’
US News: How Job Stress Might Be Killing You
APA 2022 Trends Report: Burnout and stress are everywhere
Bloomberg: The Middle Managers Are Not Alright
Forbes: New Surveys Show Burnout Is An International Crisis

Google is your friend if you want more. But now take a look at a couple of less sensationalistic sources that have been tracking job stress for a long time. Here is Gallup:

As you can see, the number of people reporting serious job stress—i.e., burnout—has been on a modest downward trend for 20 years, with a smallish uptick in 2021. Burnout is up recently, which is hardly surprising, but it's not up very much—one point since 2017 and three points since 2020.

Next, here's the General Social Survey. Their question is about job satisfaction, not specifically about job stress, but that's a close relative. And it has the advantage of breaking out the numbers by age group:¹

Two age groups are up a couple of points, one age group is down a point, and young workers are up four points. However, the trend has been steadily down for young workers—yes, the ones who have supposedly rebelled against the old-school rat race—followed by a spike of a few points during the pandemic.

Nickel summary: Burnout is up a bit thanks to the pandemic, but not by an awful lot. Even among the Gen Z and Millennial sets, the spike is only a few points and there's no special reason to think it won't drop back to normal in a year or two. After all, the problem obviously has far more to do with outside factors than with workplaces themselves, and those outside factors are (touch wood) not going to hang around forever.²

¹This was reported by GSS with a y-axis of 0-100%. I cut it off instead at 15% so that the data was more easily visible.

²As for workplaces themselves, if the problem with young people has to do with Slack and Zoom and working from home—well, we know what to do about that, don't we?

Democrats seemed to be doing well this summer as their approval level surged following the Dobbs decision. But now Republicans are surging back. This is partly because the out party always does well in midterm elections, but David Brooks thinks there's more to it:

The Trumpified G.O.P. deserves to be a marginalized and disgraced force in American life. But I’ve been watching the campaign speeches by people like Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. G.O.P. candidates are telling a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take over the streets, teach sex ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke corporations, open the border and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths and the sorts of things that affect regular people.

Sure, I guess. But this is the farthest thing imaginable from something new. The details change from election to election, but this narrative began with Richard Nixon and became fully weaponized by Newt Gingrich and Fox News in the 1990s. It's been part of the core Republican message for 50 years, and it's been their nearly exclusive message for the past 20.

The most discouraging part of this is not that Republicans do it. What do you expect an opposition party to do? The discouraging part is that after 50 years Democrats still have no idea how to fight it.

It's not that we lose every culture war battle. In fact, we win quite a few. But when Republicans sense weakness, they circle the wagons and beat the class war drums loudly and in unison. That's what we don't know how to fight.

Practically all the evidence suggests the United States is fundamentally a strong country right now. Probably the strongest in the world, and with the brightest future. It's extraordinary to think of just how good a place it could be if only we could figure out a way to overcome the debilitating fear that so many people still have of progress and change.

Here's a little patch of morning glories alongside Laguna Canyon Road in Laguna Beach.

According to Zillow, here is average home price growth over the past five years in our ten biggest cities:

This surprised me. The highest price growth was in the sprawling sunbelt cities that have fewer exclusionary zoning rules and therefore more homes being built. The traditional big cities like Los Angeles and New York, by contrast, have relatively low price growth.

Phoenix, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Washington DC have all peaked and prices are now falling. The others have flattened but haven't yet seen price decreases.

It's worth noting that this is raw home price. It doesn't take into account mortgage interest rates, which have skyrocketed this year. In cities like Phoenix, this produces the worst of all worlds: monthly mortgage payments are going up on homes whose value is going down. It's a miracle anyone is still buying houses there.