Cats, charts, and politics
What the hell has been going on with Truth Social stock?
DJT has been steadily rising since the end of last month, but then it suddenly spiked up nearly 50% starting last Thursday. Then it plunged back starting Tuesday.
DJT is basically a bet on whether Trump will win the election. But what happened on Thursday to make his fans suddenly think he was a sure winner? And what happened Tuesday to make them lose confidence?
Today's economic data dump produced a whole crop of good numbers. Disposable income is up 2.3% from a year ago. Total compensation (salary + benefits) is up 4.8%. Consumer spending is up 2.2%. All adjusted for inflation, of course—which clocked in at a nice, low 2.1%. And yesterday's GDP report showed healthy growth of 2.8%. There's just no bad news anywhere.
PCE inflation ticked up a bit in September, but the headline rate remains at a very solid 2.1%:
On a conventional year-over-year basis, headline PCE was 2.1% and core PCE was 2.7%. These are excellent numbers indicating, once again, that inflation is well under control.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson today:
We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers.
I know this is standard Republican rhetoric, but I wonder if they ever actually listen to themselves when they say this? I'm hardly in favor of regulation willy nilly, but all the evidence suggests that it hasn't hurt much of anything. Business applications in the US continue to rise. Our economic growth is the best among advanced countries. Construction spending has skyrocketed. The finance industry continues to make mountains of money. Innovation is strong. Business profits as a share of the economy have nearly doubled over the past two decades.
At the same time, air and water quality has improved tremendously over the past 50 years. Industrial accidents have declined. Consumer protection is stronger. Seat belts and air bags save thousands of lives a year.
And just look at the economic performance of highly regulated states. The five most regulated states (allegedly) are:
The five least regulated states are:
Which list strikes you as the economic powerhouses? If you guessed the top one, congratulations. The most regulated states have a combined GDP per capita a third higher than the least regulated ones, and both have the same growth rate.
None of this is to suggest that regulation is an unalloyed good. The Jones Act has wrecked the US shipping industry. Regulatory capture is a real thing. Occupational licensing could probably stand to be pared back. Regulations often harm small companies more than deep-pocketed big ones. The deregulation of trains, planes, trucks and telephones was reasonably successful. (Deregulation of the savings and loan industry less so.) Etc.
But what's the case for a generalized jihad against regulation? It's a little hard to see one.
The Washington Post reports today that the federal government's routine election monitoring—in place since 1965—is in trouble. Thanks to the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, the Justice Department can only enter polling places with permission from state officials—and Republican states are increasingly denying them that permission.
That's a problem. But they also say this:
Legal experts said the federal government lost significant legal recourse in 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.... Since then, the number of federal observers has dropped significantly, said Katherine Culliton-González, a former Justice Department monitor and former Biden administration official.
Naturally I wanted to check this. I couldn't find historical data for the number of observers, but I did find data for the number of jurisdictions monitored in elections going back to 2004. Here it is:
It sure looks like monitoring declined in the decade before the Supreme Court's decision and then increased after the decision.
In any case, the Justice Department only monitors about 50 jurisdictions out of thousands each election. And the only change is that observers have to stay outside instead of watching from inside the polling center. They aren't gone entirely. In the end, Republican interference is stupid and paranoid but probably doesn't have a very significant effect.
Stormy day in LA.
When the New York Times famously covered its entire front page in 2016 with reports about the FBI's last minute investigation of the "existence of emails," you could at least argue that this really was news. The Times overdid things, that's all.
Behold the front page of Politico today:
This is all about fake Republican outrage over some remarks by Joe Biden yesterday. Responding to a comic saying that Puerto Rico was a floating island of garbage, he said "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters."
But wait. What Biden almost certainly said was "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s...demonization of Latinos." See? There's an apostrophe there that was obviously silent when he spoke. Plus he mangled his words in typical Biden fashion and made it hard to parse what he was saying.
This is so plainly a case of fake outrage over a nothingburger that I'm surprised it has any legs at all, let alone massive front-page coverage in Politico. I know, I know: I shouldn't be surprised by anything any more. I just can't help myself. By now we all know the press treats every outrage by conservatives as genuine and every outrage by liberals as calculated for political effect. It's just the way things are.
The law says you can't purge voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Nevertheless, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has been removing suspected noncitizens from voter lists ever since August. This runs the risk of leaving people with too little time to fix things if an inevitable mistake is made.
In any case, it's a plain violation of black letter law. A trial court agreed and so did a unanimous appellate panel. But today the Supreme Court allowed the purge to continue. The three Democrats objected, but the Republican justices in the majority outvoted them.
What the hell is going on? The case was on the emergency docket so no reason was given for the decision. But what justification could there possibly be? Are Republicans on the Court trying to send a message that they're just partisan hacks and we'd all better get used to it?
In the final YouGov poll before the election, Kamala Harris is leading Trump by only one percentage point:
This strikes me as overly pessimistic, possibly because it's a poll of registered voters, not likely voters. But we'll find out for sure in six days.
The Atlanta Fed's forecast was spot on: real GDP grew 2.8% in the third quarter:
This is an ideal reading. Growth remains strong, but not so strong that the Fed goes all aflutter about the economy overheating.