Kevin Drum

Kyle Rittenhouse has been found innocent of all charges. I assume that the rest of the day will  be completely taken up with hysterical takes about how this (a) proves that white people can wantonly kill anyone they want and pay no penalty, or (b) finally puts an end to a sham trial that only happened in the first place because of the demands of lefty gun control nuts.

Take your pick.

Hmmm.

Here's the latest case rate of COVID-19 in the US and its peer countries in Europe. I'm not sure I can keep track of which wave we're in, but I think this is the fourth. Happy holidays, everyone.

The Congressional Budget Office dropped its analysis of the $1.8 trillion social spending bill today, and the first thing to know is that they estimate it at $1.6 trillion over ten years.

So it's now officially the $1.6 trillion social spending bill. They also figure that it will raise about $1.3 trillion in revenue over ten years. The total effect on the deficit is $367 billion over ten years.

However, this doesn't count the revenue raised by going after tax cheats, which would raise at least $200 billion over ten years according to earlier CBO projections. That brings the effect on the deficit down to $167 billion over ten years, possibly even less.

That's about $16 billion per year, which comes to a net increase in the deficit of one half of one percent. That's 0.5%.

Note that this is a ceiling. If the tax cheats generate more revenue, as many economists think they will, the effect on the deficit could be close to zero.

This is about as good as it gets in the real world, and it ought to satisfy the hawkiest of the fiscal hawks. It's time to vote.

I love pictures like this. And by "like this" I mean precisely a bunch of yellow flowers growing out of a dim, primeval setting. This is one of the better ones I've taken, part of my tour of the Honey Island Swamp.

I've been unable to find anything inspiring to write about this morning, so instead I'm resorting to serenfredity. This is similar to serendipity, but involves going to FRED and typing something random to see what comes up. Today I typed in Oklahoma.

Then I scrolled around and eventually lit on average house prices in Oklahoma City. Here they are:

I have no point to make here. It's just random data. If anyone can think of anything to say about this—especially those who live in Oklahoma City—please leave it in comments.

Do we have a shortage of truck drivers?

It sure doesn't look like it. And before you ask, the numbers look the same if you break them down by local and long-distance truckers. There are as many at work today as there were in the month before the pandemic started.

Nor do trucking companies seem to want more drivers. Trucker pay had been increasing steadily for years but flattened out in 2021. If companies were desperate for more drivers, we'd see a continuing increase in wages.

None of this means there might not be shortages in specific regions or specific industries. But overall, we seem to have as many people driving trucks today as we did two years ago.

This is a typical little restaurant in Rome a few blocks from my hotel. You can't tell from the picture, but it was still about 90 degrees at 10 pm when I shot this. That's why I didn't eat dinner out during the whole time I was there. It was just too hot for me to feel like eating pasta or some similar dish. All I wanted were cold things direct from the refrigerator.

In order to pay for his social welfare bill, President Biden plans to crack down on tax cheats. He thinks this will save about $300 billion, but the Congressional Budget Office is expected to disagree, scoring it in the neighborhood of $200 billion. If this happens, it means that the bill would increase the deficit and Democrats would need to cut back on spending to return it to deficit neutrality.

Lefties are crying foul over this, pointing out that Republicans increased the deficit by $1.9 trillion when they passed their 2017 tax bill. Where was the CBO then?

This is a misunderstanding. In 2017 Republicans wrote a $1.5 trillion deficit directly into the reconciliation instructions. The CBO then scored their bill at $1.9 trillion, but Republicans ignored the CBO and produced their own estimates after jiggling around some of the details of the tax cut. Then they passed the bill. They did this because they never really cared about deficits in the first place.

So can't Democrats do the same thing? Sure, except that they do care about deficits. Or, to be more precise, Joe Manchin cares about deficits. Legally, Democrats can produce their own estimate of the bill's impact on the deficit, but it doesn't matter. It won't pass unless Manchin is on board.

So the CBO score is only important if Manchin thinks it is. Which apparently he does. That's it. That's the only reason the CBO score matters.

The Steele dossier is back in the news because it turns out that one of its sources lied about some stuff. Something like that, anyway.

Unfortunately, I never paid a lot of attention to the dossier so I'm a little unsure of why we should care about this. It was always presented as raw, unverified intel, and it played no role in launching the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign. There's also no reason to believe it ever played much of a role in the later stages of the investigation. As I recall, it showed up only as a footnote in a FISA application for surveillance of a minor player, and that was about it.

But maybe I'm missing something. Aside from the "pee tape" mania, which was more snark than anything else, did the dossier play a bigger role in events than I remember? I guess it was a bigger deal on TV than in print? Maybe that slid by me since I almost never watch political shows on cable.