Kevin Drum

This is a sad story in the Wall Street Journal today. Michael Bloomberg wanted to help bright but disadvantaged kids get into good colleges, so he teamed up with two outfits, CollegePoint and the American Talent Initiative:

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $140 million over the past decade to get tens of thousands more talented, lower-income students into top-flight colleges. Those big ambitions have so far fallen short.

....Bloomberg Philanthropies worked with researchers to study their work with CollegePoint. They found 51.4% of students with access to the program enrolled in high-graduation-rate colleges, compared with 50.1% for a control group.

....The American Talent Initiative launched in 2016 with about 30 schools that publicly committed to increasing the socioeconomic diversity of their student populations....In total, 18,100 more Pell grant recipients have enrolled at member schools since 2015.

The awkward but probable truth is that there just aren't a lot of poor but bright high school students falling through the cracks. We've done such a good job of sorting kids by ability over the past 80 years that by now there just aren't a lot of them left—and the ones who remain are mostly tracked into college already. That's not to say there's literally nothing left we can do, but we should probably accept that nothing we do will have a big effect.

I suppose this is both good news and bad news. In either case, it's most likely the truth.

This week New York magazine has a long profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates that reminds once again of why I'm puzzled that he's held in such extraordinary esteem. It all started with "The Case for Reparations," his first big hit, which struck me as sort of a bloated term paper mostly cribbed from Wikipedia—and which fizzled out at the end with no actual call for reparations. I know how harsh that sounds—I'm reluctant to say it in public—and I think I was approximately the only liberal in the country who felt this way.

At around the same time Coates began reading up on the Civil War, which produced in him a sudden burning anger over how Black people had been treated. I was perplexed. Not because of the anger, which is obviously more than justified, but because I'm hardly a savant on the Civil War and the things he was pointing out struck me as fairly common knowledge if you'd read even a little bit about American history. How could a Black writer who's so smart not have known this stuff?

Now Coates is at it again. He visited Israel for ten days last year and came back, once again, burning with anger. And once again I don't get it.

On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. “I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger,” he writes. “The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism — betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered ethnic cleansing, for the voices they’d erased.

It's not surprising that you might get angry when you see stuff in person that you've only read about before. But Coates apparently hadn't even read about it. How is that possible? Again: I'm no savant about the Middle East, but this is all pretty common knowledge unless you deliberately put yourself in a bubble (or simply pay little attention to the whole thing). Hell, Jimmy Carter wrote a bestseller about it two decades ago. How could Coates possibly not have known any of it?

Coates's message through all this is that Palestine is not a complicated situation. It's easy: Israelis treat Palestinians monstrously and that's that. But that's only true if you simply ignore the complexity, as he does:

The book is strongest when its aperture is narrow. There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state’s annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not want to report on a place he hadn’t seen for himself.

This just flatly makes no sense. At the very least you have to ask yourself why Israel treats Palestinians so monstrously. I'd say the answer is fairly simple: Because they think it's the only way to keep from being constantly attacked by them. You might have a different take. Maybe you think it was all a land grab from the start. Or you might think Israel's fears don't justify their actions. That's fine. But you have to at least engage with it. How can you write a book about Israel without doing that?

What are Kamala Harris's economic plans? For that matter, what are Donald Trump's?

To start, we can assume Trump has ordinary Republican opinions and Harris has ordinary Democratic opinions. Beyond that, here are their specific major proposals:

Trump	Harris
Taxes
Extend 2017 tax act 20% tariffs across the board Reduce corporate tax rate Tax-free Social Security, tips, overtime Reinstate SALT deduction 60% tariff on all Chinese imports	Allow most of 2017 tax act to expire Raise corporate tax rate Tax-free tips Tax unrealized capital gains above $100 million net worth Increase ordinary capital gains rate above $1 million income Increase top income tax rate to 39.6% above $400,000 income Eliminate carried interest loophole above $400,000 income
Spending
Build the wall Free IVF Cut IRA spending on green energy Cut environmental spending Reinstate impoundment Build Iron Dome	Child tax credit Increase EITC $25,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers $50,000 tax deduction for startups Extend middle-class subsidies for Obamacare
Other
Cap credit card interest rates at 10% Deregulate crypto Anti-union	Regulate price gouging Raise minimum wage? Pro-union

For what it's worth, I don't see much difference between the two on the level of detail. We know the same amount about both of them.

Am I missing anything big?

The FBI released full-year crime figures for 2023 today, and officially they say murder was down 11.6%. However, if you look at the murder rate, it's down 12.3%. The Crime Data Explorer has also gotten a makeover and now shows crime figures monthly:

(The 2021 figures are grayed out because they're unreliable.) All the numbers in the chart are from the FBI's expanded homicide data, which differs considerably from the normal homicide data. And both of them differ from the official yearly figures. wtf?

I'm confused. But I'm pretty sure the expanded data is better since the normal data shows huge spikes each December, which is certainly not correct. The expanded data shows murder spiking in July.

In any case, we can safely say that murder was down 11-12% in 2023 and has continued to drop in 2024. By the end of 2023 it was down to pre-COVID levels and is below that by now.

Overall violent crime was down 3% and property crime was down 2.4%.

This is another sand dune at the Cadiz Dunes Wilderness in the Mojave Desert. I've got a bunch more, so don't worry that I'll be running out anytime soon.

Ben Dreyfuss tweeted last night about a study showing that Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to believe in conspiracy theories. This struck me as historically unsupported, but who knows? Maybe it's true today.

So I took a look at the study and discovered something odd. The top three conservative conspiracy theories are COVID, climate change, and the birther conspiracy (this was before January 6 and "Stop the Steal"). No problem there.

Meanwhile, two of the top five liberal conspiracy theories are exact opposites: Donald Trump faked COVID during the 2020 campaign (45% believed it) and Trump covered up the seriousness of his COVID infection (75% believed it).

Did half of Democrats really believe that Trump faked COVID? I don't remember that being a big thing at all. I had to Google just to remind myself about it and found barely anything at all. USA Today reported that the rumor was started by some guy named Richard Greene. The New York Times reported that overnight "hundreds of tweets" were posted in sympathy.

Anyone familiar with Twitter knows that hundreds of tweets is indistinguishable from zero. A meme is basically invisible until it gets to 100,000 or a million tweets. So is it really plausible that this caught on with half of all Democrats? Or that three-quarters believed the even more obscure theory that Trump was covering up his COVID?

There's something off here. Even assuming the polling is all correct, conservatives tend to believe in big, long-lasting conspiracy theories. Liberals, even if they believe in similar numbers of things, mostly believe in tiny, short-lived conspiracy theories. For the record, the top four among conservatives are:

• Climate change is a hoax.
• Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
• COVID has been exaggerated and isn't really that dangerous.
• Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

(I added the last one since it would certainly make the list today.) The top four among liberals are:

• Trump covered up the seriousness of his COVID infection.
• Republicans stole the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections.
• Trump made a secret deal with Vladimir Putin/Trump is a Russian asset.
• Trump faked his COVID infection.

These sure don't seem the same to me. None of them ever became widespread except maybe Republicans stealing the 2000 election and, perhaps, a belief that Trump was open to Russian campaign help. And none of these have spawned a whole subculture of politicians and pundits who obsess about them.

For now, anyway, I'm sticking with my belief that everyone believes in conspiracy theories but modern conservatives sure believe in way more serious and consequential ones. Is there anything even remotely similar to Pizzagate or QAnon on the liberal side?¹

¹And that's not even getting into hyper-contemporary stuff like Haitians eating pet cats, currently believed by half of all conservatives.

Let's start out the week with a brief reminder of what the federal government spends its money on:

Your goal is to find $1,700 billion in either spending cuts or tax increases to balance the budget. Generally speaking, most people agree there should be no cuts to defense, Social Security, Medicare, or veterans, which leaves $2,500 billion still on the table.

Can you cut $1,700 billion out of $2,500 billion? If you cut 10% across the board, that's $250 billion, which leaves $1,450 billion in tax increases.¹ If you're even more of a hardass than most MAGA Republicans and think you can cut 20% across the board, that's $500 billion, which leaves $1,200 billion in tax increases.

Can you magic your way out of this by assuming huge economic growth? Nope. It's a favorite piece of smoke and mirrors, but it's completely bogus.

Long story short, it's hard to see any way out of this other than substantial tax increases. The question is when we'll ever face up to that.

¹That's a one-third increase in taxes. It's a lot! Much of it can come from increased taxes on the rich, but probably not all of it.

I like this passage from a Washington Post article yesterday about the insane chaos now surrounding the Trump campaign:

By early last week, Trump and his No. 2, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), found themselves trying to reverse-engineer evidence of Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, arguing they were simply trying to draw attention to the real problem of immigration. They also used inflammatory rhetoric to blame Biden and Harris — whom Trump called “the enemy from within” — for what the Republican ticket claimed was inflammatory rhetoric that lead to the apparent attempts on Trump’s life.

For those of you who don't know, "reverse engineering" is when you examine how something works and then write your own software to duplicate it in meticulous detail. In other words, you know exactly what you want, and you set out to create it no matter how weird parts of it may be.

Conservatives have made an industry out of this. They don't care very much what's real anymore. Once Trump says something they just work backwards to figure out how they can prove he's right, no matter how weird it is.

Not that it matters all that much. As Trump pointed out many years ago, he can say anything he wants: "People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you." Quite so. And all the expert fact checking in the world won't sway that belief.

After failing to pass a stopgap spending bill because of opposition within his own party, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has bowed to the inevitable:

Pressed closer against the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline — and mired with disputes within his conference — Johnson brokered a deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Democrats to dodge what could have been a politically costly outcome.

....The arrangement sets up a frenzied week in Congress: Johnson will likely need to rely on support from Democrats rather than his own party to pass the measure; the Senate will need a bipartisan agreement to expedite the bill’s passage and beat the shutdown deadline.

"Likely." Sure. As in "Kevin is likely to eat some chocolate tomorrow." You can go ahead and bet the ranch on it.

It probably wouldn't have mattered anyway, since the Senate is in Democratic hands, but the Republican opposition to Johnson's bill accomplished nothing except to eliminate the chance of Republicans getting anything. So a Republican speaker will once again have to pass a budget bill with something like 200 Democratic votes and 40 or 50 Republican votes. It's tough times in the GOP these days.

Inspired by a story in the Wall Street Journal today, here are all the spots in California where the wholesale price of electricity is currently negative:

The Journal explains that this is all due to the rise of renewable energy, mostly solar and wind, which is already widespread in Europe:

The changes sweeping Europe’s electricity markets, which were accelerated by the energy crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine, show what could happen in the U.S. in a few years when renewable capacity reaches a similar scale. In 2023, 44% of EU electricity was generated by renewables, compared with 21% in the U.S.

In some U.S. markets—sunny California, the wind-swept Great Plains, and Texas—zero and negative prices are already common. The wholesale price in Southern California was negative nearly 20% of all hours this year because of the region’s boom in solar-panel installations

This is sadly not the case here in Irvine, but maybe it will be soon. "Too cheap to meter" might finally come true 70 years after it was first promised.¹

¹In fact, six days ago was the 70th anniversary of this phrase. It's attributed to Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who you may recall as the villain of the movie Oppenheimer.