Kevin Drum

Here's some good economic news I missed a few weeks ago. The yield curve, which is a fairly reliable indicator of recession when it's inverted (i.e. below zero), is now positive:

But now the bad news:

As you can see, the last four recessions started a few months after an inverted yield curve returned to positive territory.¹ We're not out of the woods yet.

¹The yield curve really did invert in 2019, but it was only for one week.

This is apropos of nothing in particular, but with the passage of time it's now pretty easy to figure out how many people died of COVID in the US:

The trendline shows the normal monthly number of deaths excluding seasonal flu. The spikes in 2020 and beyond add up to 1.2 million, all of which are almost certainly due to COVID.

You can look up this number pretty easily, but I thought at least a few people would be interested in seeing it graphically.

NOTE: The total number of deaths is pretty sensitive to precisely where the trendline is drawn, so there's some inherent error in this kind of calculation. At a guess, I'd put it at ±100,000.

Remember the old meme about how the federal government has spent $7.5 billion on EV charging stations but only three had been built? The meme needs to be updated. As of June, 17 stations have been built:

Hmmm. Still not very impressive, is it? But this is like looking at Hoover Dam in 1933 and being indignant that the government has spent a billion dollars¹ and only poured one bucket of concrete:

The EV charging station project was designed from the start to finish in 2030. Here's how it looks if you extrapolate the current growth rate:

We probably won't hit a thousand stations until the end of 2025. That's just the way exponential growth goes. But like Hoover Dam, the EV project is actually ahead of schedule even though there isn't much to see yet.

¹In 2023 dollars.

This is the city of Banning at the tail end of winter, taken from Highway 243 snaking up the San Jacinto mountains. The Eastern Sierras are the snowy peaks in the distance.

Donald Trump's campaign spokesperson is Steven Cheung, who routinely provides irrelevant and frequently nasty responses whenever he's asked to comment on something. Here's his latest:

Jen O'Malley Dillon is Kamala Harris's campaign manager. Her husband, Patrick Dillon, worked in the Obama White House. They've been married for 17 years and have three kids.

But true to form, in response to a very mild tweet from Patrick, Cheung instantly belches up a juvenile and stupid personal attack. It's no wonder Trump likes him. Reformed Republican Stuart Stevens decided Cheung needed a taste of his own dog food:

I've worked in campaigns for a long time, and known so many operatives in both parties.  There has never been a collection of just awful human beings assembled around one candidate like the Trump campaign. Here you have a 42 year old obese incel @TheStevenCheung, who never did anything of note in politics before the Trump garbage truck picked him up, writing stuff you'd find on a bathroom wall at a truck stop.

Like deadbeat dad Jason Miller, Lewandowski, Bannon. The whole crew. All of these people tried to work in presidential politics before 2016 and no one would come near them. These same freaks will surround Trump if he wins. And they are one of the reasons he will lose.

Keep your fingers crossed that Stevens is right.

This Twitter post has been viewed by 6 million people over the past week:

The "guy" was indeed just a postal carrier delivering a single plastic bin of mail-in ballots. The Washington Post reports that this video is part of a widespread and well-organized effort to promote a far larger and better coordinated version of 2020's hastily created "Stop the Steal" movement:

X has also rolled out new features, such as its “Election Integrity Community,” the feed on which Matlack’s video of the mail worker gained viral attention. The feed, which has more than 50,000 members, promotes tweets showing “potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities,” regardless of their accuracy.

The feed is run by America PAC, Musk’s $118 million pro-Trump super PAC, which shared a since-deleted digital ad calling Harris “a big ole C-word” — they said it meant “communist” — and has boosted claims that Trump’s opponents have tried to “take him out for good.”

....About 12 hours after the Northampton video started exploding on X, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. … Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” The top comment on it, from a user named “Patriotic Marine,” showed the postal worker’s face and license plate and urged viewers to find him and “prosecute him for Treason.” It was liked more than 1,000 times.

This stuff has likely been under your radar so far, circulating only among MAGA cultists, but that's likely to change tomorrow. Prepare yourself for a tsunami of idiotic claims like this if Kamala Harris wins.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Russia is now trying to bring down American airplanes using incendiary devices hidden in packages:

The devices ignited at DHL logistics hubs in July, one in Leipzig, Germany, and another in Birmingham, England. The explosions set off a multinational race to find the culprits.

....Security officials say the electric massagers, sent to the U.K. from Lithuania, appear to have been a test run to figure out how to get such incendiary devices aboard planes bound for North America.... But the head of Poland’s foreign-intelligence agency, Pawel Szota, said Russian spies were to blame and such an attack, if carried out, would have represented a major escalation in Moscow’s campaign against the West.

....Szota’s comments echo what other Western intelligence officials said, indicating that Russia, and specifically its military-intelligence agency, known as the GRU, was responsible.

If this is true, it's an astonishing and reckless escalation from Vladimir Putin. Does he really have no idea of the shitstorm he'd release if one of these things brought down a US passenger jet?

Election Day is tomorrow, so here's a repeat posting of my traditional recommendations about how to vote on California's ballot initiatives. As 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 2: NO. This is a school bond initiative. There's not much harm if you want to vote Yes, but I'm opposed to all bond measures, especially small-bore stuff like this that ought to funded out of the normal budget.

Proposition 3: YES. This protects same-sex marriage in the state constitution. It's not really necessary, but it's best to be sure, I guess.

Proposition 4: NO. Water bonds.

Proposition 5: YES. Allows local communities to approve housing and infrastructure bonds with a 55% majority instead of the current two-thirds. This change can only be made via initiative, so this is the way to do it.

Proposition 6: YES. This is an odd duck. It bans prisons from requiring inmates to work—aka ENDING SLAVERY, as its backers put it. I'm not sure this is quite the moral issue of our time, but there's no opposition even from conservatives. So sure.

Proposition 32: NO. This would raise the minimum wage slightly, from about $16.50 to $18, and index it to inflation. But the minimum wage is already indexed to inflation in California and the $1.50 increase itself doesn't strike me as anywhere near important enough for a ballot initiative. Let the legislature handle it.

Proposition 33: NO. This is yet another initiative from Michael Weinstein that would widely allow rent control in California. But California doesn't need rent control. It needs more housing, something that rent control would hurt, not help.

Proposition 34: NO. This is ostensibly a measure about prescription drug discounts. In fact, it's a punitive measure aimed solely at Michael Weinstein from folks who are tired of his rent control initiatives. Whether you love Michael Weinstein or hate him, this is preposterous.

Proposition 35: NO. This would extend a tax on health insurers that provides extra money for Medi-Cal payments to health workers. That's fine, although the tax will get extended regardless. But it would also designate which health workers get more money—and those groups are different from the ones who are set to get money in the state budget. In other words, this is basically a fight between different big health care providers and I'm not excited about this kind of ballot box budgeting. If the legislature was clearly acting in bad faith to divert funding, that would be one thing. But it's not.

Proposition 36: NO. This would repeal a reduction in penalties for certain drug and theft crimes that was passed a decade ago. It's a dumb, panicky, "tough-on-crime" measure based on a nonexistent crime wave supposedly sweeping California. There isn't one. The old reforms were good ones and we should keep them.

After listening to 680 people in 61 focus groups over three years, Patrick Healy of the New York Times thinks Donald Trump has a good chance of winning. Inflation is one of the big reasons, but immigration might be even bigger:

What I’ve heard has left me thinking that Democratic Party leaders have deeply underestimated the mood of the electorate on immigration — that more people than Democrats realize want something serious, even draconian, done to remove undocumented migrants and secure the border. If it takes an authoritarian Trump administration to do it, then so be it, some of these voters feel. The degree of their anger can be unsettling to contemplate.

....That could look like Mr. Trump getting re-elected this week and, using any means he can, perhaps including the military, rounding up undocumented immigrants, putting them in militarized camps and deporting them, with more Americans than you would think going along with it. Such a move would devastate our sense of America as a sanctuary, erode our norms, fracture the tacit acceptance that immigrants do a lot of jobs that many Americans don’t want to do. It would redefine us as a society.

I think Healy is half right: Democrats have seriously blown it on immigration over the past decade, but it won't ultimately doom Harris.

Democrats haven't always been as soft on immigration as they've become. Without adopting Donald Trump's ruthless methods, Barack Obama kept a fairly tight lid on illegal immigration. In fact, border encounters were lower under Obama than they were under Trump:

Now, Obama had an easier job than either Trump or Biden. Coming off the Great Recession, job demand was negative or zero for Obama's entire term, so there just wasn't a lot of pressure on the border. But job demand grew during Trump's administration until the pandemic killed it, and then skyrocketed during Biden's term.

That said, Democrats overreacted to Trump's immigration hawkery in 2016, moving way to the left and adopting positions nearly indistinguishable from open borders. Ironically, in 2020 Biden remained moderate on immigration, but pressure from the Democratic base kept him from responding aggressively to the huge surge on the border after he took office.

It could be that there wasn't much Biden could do. When job demand surges, the market is going to find a way to satisfy it. And it's true that some kind of comprehensive reform is the only real answer. Still, none of that defends Biden's unwillingness to at least acknowledge the surge in illegal immigration and try to do something about it. This is the minimum the public expects.

My rule of thumb—like it or not—is that people will accept annual migration rates of about a quarter of a percent of the country's population. In the US that comes to 800,000 or so. Legal immigration is already above that, so when you add a big surge of illegal immigration an angry tribal response is almost inevitable. Democrats make a big mistake when they try to pretend this away.