Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Tuesday Tweets special edition


I had planned on doing a post on the hot new genre of "the GOP is abandoning Trump" stories, which long-time readers will recognize as a  reboot of the once popular "Trump will never get the nomination" genre. Today's events somehow manage to both undercut and confirm critique I had in mind. On one hand, this could mark the beginning of the end for DJT's political career. On the other, it reminds us that the GOP is still very much Trump's party.

 Here's a good background piece on the story.

And a couple of threads from some excellent legal experts. 



Attorney and legal commentator Ken White takes a much deeper dive and comes to the same conclusion.



LATimes Legal Affairs Columnist.


Or maybe not...



This will in no way dampen the claims of persecution.


 

"The mind reels with sarcastic replies" -- Snoopy


 

Imagine being Don Jr.'s brother and still being considered the Fredo.

 











 

Removing fascists always carries the risk of a violent reaction. This is not an argument for not removing them.


And who could have seen this coming?


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Monday, August 8, 2022

More on the politics of protecting Social Security -- the Washington Post weighs in


A couple of weeks ago, I finally ran a post questioning the apparent conventional wisdom among progressive politicians and pundits about not making Republican attacks on Social Security a major campaign issue.

Fast forward to 2022. Republicans are talking about cutting, privatizing, or killing Social Security with an openness they hadn't shown in at least twenty years. Trump himself lost interest in the topic long ago. But among the pundit class and much of the Democratic establishment, a few six-year old statements had permanently inoculated not just Trump, but the entire GOP on this issue.

What's remarkable here is not just the convergence but the certainty. A large part of the Republican Party is pissing on the third rail of American politics and yet no influential Democrats thought it was worth pulling the switch just in case the power was on.

If attacks on Social Security have eroded seniors' support for the GOP, they have done so almost entirely on their own. Progressives seldom mention the issue. AARP has been uncharacteristically quiet on the matter. Talking Points Memo, probably the best progressive political news and analysis site has dropped it entirely as far as I can tell.

...

Even in Florida, which has a lot of seniors, Val Demings is all but silent on the topic, despite the fact that her opponent and his fellow senator are both on the record as wanting to cut or kill the program.

There's no conspiracy here, no hidden agenda. These people simply believe with a great deal of confidence that while pushing back against Republican attacks on Medicare and particularly Social Security might be the right thing to do, it is not a winning political strategy.

If there were any doubt in the Democratic establishment's mind, hedging the bet would be cheap, easy and pretty much risk free. A few campaign ads, some viral videos, a couple of lines in stump speeches, a bullet point in campaign websites,  raising the subject in interviews.

The most bizarre part of this is that for decades, one of the unassailable truths of American politics was that attacking Social Security and Medicare was bad for Republicans and defending them was good for Democrats, and yet, in the space of a few years for no particularly good reason, the political establishment became absolutely certain of the exact opposite.

 Shortly afterwards, David Weakliem dug into the question and backed things up with some actual data.

In most presidential elections starting in 1984, there were questions about which candidate would be better on Social Security.  They were not all by the same organization, so the wording varied.  Most of the variations were minor (e. g.  "handling" vs. "dealing with"), but in 1988 and 1992 they asked about "protecting the Social Security system" and in 2016 they asked about "Social Security and Medicare."   I calculated the difference between the percent naming the Democratic candidate and the percent naming the Republican.  The Democrat was always ahead, which is why I call the figure "Republican disadvantage."

In 2016, Trump trailed Clinton by 50-42%, giving an 8% gap, which was just about average--unfortunately the question wasn't asked in 2020.   Reagan in 1984 stands out as an unusually large gap, which is plausible because in one of his Presidential campaigns (I think it was his first, in 1976) he suggested that maybe Social Security should be privatized and got a lot of negative publicity.     Aside from that, there's no trend, and the ups and downs don't show any obvious pattern and are small enough so that they could be sampling error.  So there's not evidence that Trump changed anything--the Democrats consistently have an advantage on the issue.   This isn't really surprising--even someone who doesn't pay much attention to politics can tell that if forced to make a choice between tax increases and spending cuts, Republicans would be more likely to go for spending cuts and Democrats would be more likely to go for tax increases.

 Now it appears things may be shifting. Outside of the NYT, there is no bastion of conventional wisdom more recognized than the Washington Post, so when columnist Helaine Olen argues that "Republicans ... are  ... handing Democrats an issue almost as politically potent as abortion rights," the establishment is likely to listen.

The most recent to join the fray is Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). He announced earlier this week that he believes Social Security should be up for a congressional reauthorization vote every single year. “If you qualify for an entitlement, you get it no matter what the cost,” he huffed on a podcast.

The nerve of those entitled seniors. They paid faithfully into a program and expect a check. Imagine that!

This ups the ante from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who opened the Social Security floodgates earlier this year when he proposed putting all government programs — including Social Security and Medicare — up for renewal every five years. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) immediately declared it dead on arrival, but that hasn’t stopped some Republicans such as Johnson from expressing their approval.

...

It’s almost as though these Republicans can’t stop themselves from acting on the hope that when it comes to Social Security, the majority of voters won’t take them seriously, even as the GOP base laps their message up. But, in an age when increasing numbers of Americans are going to need a Social Security check to get by in retirement, that seems like a risky bet.



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Friday, August 5, 2022

Ten years ago at the blog -- We've been banging this particular drum for a long time

 

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Megafires, incentives and the inactivity bias

One of the recurring themes of my conversations with Joseph is this country's growing disinterest, bordering on antipathy, in getting things done. (If you think I'm bad, you ought to get him started.) From building a badly needed piece of infrastructure to addressing global warming, we seem to focus most of our energy on finding reasons for inactivity.

NPR's excellent series on wildfires has a good example. If you weigh the costs and risks of prescribed burns against the costs and risks of letting current trends continue, the case for action is overwhelming, but we continued to let the situation get worse.

Add climate change to the mix (another situation we've shown lots of interest in discussing and little in solving), and we may have reached the point where there are no good solutions, only less terrible ones.
I remark just how lush his forest is, how the Ponderosa pines almost reach out and touch one another. He doesn't take it as a compliment. "They're a plague," he says. "On this forest, it's averaging about 900 trees per acre. Historically it was probably about 40. Here in the national forest, what we're facing is a tree epidemic."
Armstrong has rubbed some people the wrong way with talk like that. But he says forest this dense is dangerous. "We're standing here on the edge of what is known as the Santa Fe Municipal Watershed," he explains. "Imagine a huge bathtub" — a natural bathtub sitting in the mountains around Santa Fe. When it rains, the water flows down into reservoirs. That's where the state capital gets most of its water.

Trees help slow down the flow, but big wildfires take out the trees. They even burn the soils. "They convert from something that's like a sponge to Saran Wrap," Armstrong says. "In the aftermath of a wildfire within this watershed, that would flood like the Rio Grande, for heaven's sakes; that would come down a wall of water, and debris and ash and tree trunks, and create devastation in downtown Santa Fe. Suddenly, they find that the entire mountain is in their backyard."

Armstrong supports trimming smaller trees with machines and chain saws. But that costs hundreds of dollars per acre. The service now lets some natural fires — ones started by lightning, for example — burn within prescribed limits. Or they start "prescribed" burns when conditions are safe. These clear out smaller trees and undergrowth to keep them from fueling megafires. Armstrong has done that here.

But people didn't like the smoke, and when an intentional fire gets out of control, people sue. And there's been widespread drought in recent years. These are some of the reasons the Forest Service has reduced the use of prescribed fires.
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Thursday, August 4, 2022

Thursday Tweets

Today in undeleted texts news.























"Told" is an interesting choice for a verb here.


The MAGA fixation on Fauci remains one of the most curious aspects of that very curious crowd.












HBO Max may be the best service but WB is possibly the worst run studio. The business is idiot proof largely because smart people like Ted Turner bought up valuable catalogs. If that IP hadn't been acquired (or had been allowed to go into the public domain)...




Wish I could find one of these for LA.



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Wednesday, August 3, 2022

Remember when we said the data was thin? Well, it's getting a little thicker

Very quick addition to our political implications of Dobbs thread. Just to recap...

In May, we argued that the conventional wisdom was underestimating the disconnect between state level views on abortion in the willingness of Republicans to push the most extreme laws imaginable (the Alaska Paradox)

Last month, we pointed to polling that suggested that even in strongly anti-abortion states, overturning Roe and its aftermath were not popular. (The data are thin but still worth keeping an eye on)

Which brings us to today's news.

Kansas is pro-choice, but just barely. By comparison, Oklahoma is moderately pro-choice and Ohio is solidly pro-choice.


 

In both of those states, the legislatures pushed through extreme anti-abortion laws, recently enough that we don't know how they will play with voters. In Kansas, however...

Kansas voters overwhelmingly shot down an amendment that would have stripped their constitution of its state Supreme Court-interpreted abortion protections Tuesday, a surprising outcome on the heels of a wave of last-minute enthusiasm from those furious at the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

For observers looking to Kansas as a bellwether, the first state to put abortion to a vote since the Dobbs decision, the election may prove a compelling data point given the built-in advantages to the pro-amendment side.

...

More than 60 percent of voters had rejected the amendment when networks, including NBC and CNN, began to call the race shortly before 11 p.m. ET. Roughly 78 percent of the vote had been counted. Preliminary results suggested that Tuesday’s turnout had come close to doubling 2018’s primary turnout.

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern:

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Tuesday, August 2, 2022

We have a winner in the 2022 high weirdness category

This one really does have everything...

    Conspiracies

    Reverse-aging technology

    International Qanon

    Trump waiting in the wings

    Hucksters cashing in on the Tesla brand

    “Life force energy”

    Reanimated JFK

    and the rightful “queen” of Canada.


Kelly Weill writing for the Daily Beast.

An increasingly popular conspiracy theory falsely centers around the existence of “med beds,” a fabled medical instrument that does everything from reversing aging to regrowing missing limbs. The theory has grown in popularity among followers of far-right movements like QAnon, some of whom claim to be urgently awaiting a med bed to treat severe health conditions.

...

Some QAnon sects have made med beds central to their conspiratorial claims. A Dallas-based group, which follows the Q influencer Michael “Negative 48” Protzman, has promoted med beds, in part because the devices address a plot hole in another conspiracy theory. The group falsely believes that John F. Kennedy is still alive and youthful, and attributes his remarkable longevity to the curative powers of med beds.

Romana Didulo, a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy leader who claims to be the rightful “queen” of Canada, has also hyped med beds. The devices “will be made available for FREE to all Canadians” following her revolution, she wrote in an August post. Followers of YamatoQ, a Japan-based QAnon movement, have also latched onto med bed theories, even making their own attempted version of the device with copper wires.

Some conspiracy theorists believe Trump is aware of med beds, and can release them to the public. Delays in the prophesied technology (like one frustrated Q fan noted in an open letter to Trump last year) have led some to speculate that Trump is reserving the devices for the most critical cases, and for military members.

Companies selling self-described “med beds” often stop short of conspiracy theorists’ most unlikely claims.

Tesla BioHealing doesn’t claim that its “medbed generators” can regrow missing body parts—and its med beds are not even beds, but metal canisters designed to be placed under a mattress. Nevertheless, the Delaware-based company recommends its products for a spectrum of conditions, ranging from “mild” (including asthma and autism) to “severe” (including “terminal cancers”).

Reached for comment about Tesla BioHealing’s benefits for people with “severe” conditions, CEO James Liu told The Daily Beast that the devices delivered “life force energy” to those patients.

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Monday, August 1, 2022

Tale of two fires

This is strange. It's almost as if what scientists and forestry professionals have been telling us for the past 50 years about active stewardship and controlled burns was exactly right.

 Alex Wigglesworth writing for the LA Times

The two fires started just 17 miles apart in the rugged terrain of California’s western Sierra Nevada — but their outcomes couldn’t have been more different.

The Washburn fire, which ignited July 7 along a forested trail in Yosemite National Park, was nearly contained, with no damage to structures or to the famed Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.

But the Oak fire, which sparked almost two weeks later in the foothills near Midpines, confounded firefighters as it exploded to four times the size of Washburn and forced thousands to flee as it destroyed at least 106 homes. At times, the wildfire’s smoke plume could be seen from space.

Experts attribute the difference to variations in weather, vegetation and topography. The management history of each landscape also played a role: Yosemite boasts decades of active stewardship, including prescribed burns, while areas outside the park bear a legacy of industrial logging and fire suppression.


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Friday, July 29, 2022

Six years ago at the blog: We should have paid more attention to the right-wing's reaction to those Planned Parenthood "sting" videos

To be honest, I'd forgotten all about this story until I came across this old post.

Friday, July 22, 2016

When catharsis becomes an end to itself

Ed Kilgore does a good job summarizing an important aspect of the GOP convention.
On Wednesday night, Team Trump deliberately provoked what can only be described as a lose-lose confrontation with Ted Cruz that created a nasty and divisive scene overshadowing the maiden speech of the vice-presidential nominee. With each such decision, you get the impression the people in charge of this convention have forgotten that the real "arena" is the general election, and that their real audience is an electorate far beyond this bowl seething with unaccountably angry delegates.

Otherwise it's hard to credit the constant, interminable, over-the-top feeding of red meat to the crowd, beginning with Willie Robertson's first-night taunting of people who are not "real Americans." It may be understandable that speakers are tempted to interact with the people on the floor howling for Hillary Clinton's incarceration, but the job of convention managers is to remind them that these people are TV props — ignore them and remember the whole world's watching!

It's almost as though the Trump people are treating the convention as the culmination of the mogul's campaign: an opportunity to glory in their extremely unlikely conquest of one of America's two major parties, to gloat over the shattered Establishment that's being forced to accept them, and to shake their fists at the unbelievers who still mock their orange-tinted champion. That there is still a difficult election ahead and that this convention is a priceless earned-media opportunity to reach out beyond their own ranks seems to be lost on this wild show's organizers and participants.


This unwillingness or inability to shift the focus from the base to a broader audience is something we've been discussing for a long time. Here's a representative post from last year.

Planned Parenthood, channeled information and catharsis

This recent TPM post about the looming government shut-down ties in with a couple of ideas we've discussed before. [Emphasis added]

Facing a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government, GOP leaders in both chambers decided they would fast-track standalone anti-abortion bills in an effort to allow conservative Republicans to express their anger over a series of “sting” videos claiming to show that Planned Parenthood is illegally harvesting the tissue of aborted fetuses. The leadership hoped that with those votes out of the way, the path would be clear for long-delayed bills to fund the government in the new fiscal year, even if those bills contained money for Planned Parenthood.

But anti-abortion groups and conservative House members are not backing down from their hard line. They are reiterating that they will not vote for bills that include Planned Parenthood funding under any circumstances, despite the maneuvering by leaders to vent their outrage over the videos. If anything, anti-abortion groups are amping up the pressure on lawmakers not to back down from the fight.
Here's what we had to say about the GOP reaction to those videos a month ago.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election).
[I really should have said "causing supporters to push," but it's too late to worry about that now.]

I haven't followed the press coverage that closely, but based on what I've come across from NPR and the few political sites I frequent, I get the feeling that the center-left media is more likely to discuss the doctoring of the tapes than to focus on the gory specifics of harvesting fetal tissue. I'd need to check sources like CNN before making a definitive statement, but it appears that the videos are having exceptionally little effect on what should have been their target audience.

Instead, their main impact seems to have been on the far right. The result has been to widen what was already a dangerous rift. The pragmatic wing looks at defunding as a futile gesture with almost no chance of success and large potential costs. The true believers are approaching this on an entirely different level. It has become an article of faith for them that, as we speak, babies are being killed, dismembered and sold for parts. They demand action, even if it's costly and merely symbolic, as long as it's cathartic.

I've been arguing for quite a while now that we need to pay more attention to the catharsis in politics (such as with the reaction to the first Obama/Romney debate), particularly with the Tea Party.  Conservative media has long been focused on feeding the anger and the outrage of the base while promising victory just around the corner. This has produced considerable partisan payoff but at the cost of considerable anxiety and considerable disappointment, both of which produce stress and a need for emotional release.

There's a tendency to think of trading political capital for catharsis as being irrational, but it's not. There is nothing irrational about doing something that makes you feel better. That's the real problem for the GOP leaders: shutting down the government would be cathartic for many members of the base. It would be difficult to get the base to defer their catharsis, even if the base trusted the leaders to make good on their promise that things will get better.

For now, the Tea Party is inclined to do what feels good, whether it's supporting an unelectable candidate or making a grandstanding play. It's not entirely clear what Boehner and McConnell can do about that.

 

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Thursday, July 28, 2022

Thursday Tweets




I was going to give the abortion thread a rest, but these new twists in the story are worth keeping an eye on.



  

When you read stories about Trump's declining influence in the GOP, remember he can drop below 50%, he can drop below a plurality, but as long as a significant number of people in the party sound like this, he is still the man with the grenade.

 


I'll admit I winced a bit at "shouldn't correlate," but it's still an interesting finding.


Yes, it's a campaign ad and there's no telling what was done in the editing, but having grown up and spent much of my adult life around good ol' boys I can tell you that this is exactly the right approach.


It's the "unwisely" that erases the line between the real thing and an New York Times Pitchbot parody.




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Wednesday, July 27, 2022

History of terrible ideas

This is Joseph.

This amazing tweet has been commented on by both Dmitry Grozoubinski and Eschaton. Here is the tweet, which, to be honest is worse than the article (written by different people to be fair-- Arias and Granoff -- who are generally interested in fewer nuclear weapons): 


The article suggests removing the last 150 American nuclear weapons from Europe. Steven Pinker appears to be expanding that to all of NATO. One option is pointless symbolism. The other is really daft. 

France has 280 deployed warheads and the UK has 120 deployed warheads. Removing 150 warheads is not a small change but is hardly an end to the NATO nuclear force. The United states still has 14 submarines that deploy weapons, with 20 weapons per submarine. Like if this caused a very robust settlement with the Ukraine maybe the symbolism would be worth it, but isn't the actual negotiations supposed to be between belligerents? How well has it worked historically to have a different alliance negotiate on behalf of one side of a conflict? Note that Ukraine has nuclear weapons and decided to get rid of them and may have opinions on the wisdom of this decision. 

Now, getting rid of all of the NATO nukes WITHOUT getting rid of the Russian weapons would mean the only nuclear power in Europe was Russia. It's also a bit unclear how you introduce this idea to France. You know, the country with the famously rocky relationship with NATO. Does England count as Europe for this metric, because I can see this debate a mile off. Nor is it clear how NATO can negotiate on behalf of the Ukraine. Or what the terms of "ending the war" are. Does Russia leave the 20% of the country it currently occupies? What about Crimea? What about post-war guarantees as to no future invasions with a military reformed based on the lessons from this war? 

But the idea in the article (unilateral removal of US weapons) is at least possible. It requires on decision maker (the US) and might (or might not) have some positive benefits in having fewer weapons around. But, to be frank, any lasting peace needs to involve Ukraine and Russia as the core parties and it might make a lot of sense to ask what they want. Obviously, they are currently too far apart for a peace talk but here is where the real seeds of a lasting peace might lie. Perhaps we might wait for one or the other party to actually make this suggestion before we just start proposing things as third parties? 


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Tuesday, July 26, 2022

What if Trump's Social Security and Medicare stand was never that big a deal to begin with

 [Note: David Weakliem recently looked at the actual data on this going back to the eighties. Check out his analysis here.]

As alluded to recently, Joseph and I have been having  an argument about political strategy. I contended that the Democrats should be focusing on three issues where the GOP had staked out especially unpopular positions: reproductive rights, the insurrection; and Social Security and Medicare. Joseph countered that, largely because of Trump's public commitment not to cut these programs. The GOP was, in a sense inoculated against these attacks.

For the record, my co-blogger Joseph is possibly the smartest person I know. What's more, he cited a number of other very smart people who were in general agreement including Josh Marshall who is probably our sharpest political analyst. I get very nervous when I find myself disagreeing with either, let alone both. And the Democratic establishment was clearly on board (more on that later in the post).

 I wasn't exactly persuaded but I had enough doubts about my position that I decided back-burner the topic and focus on other things. Then I saw this:

Yes, it's just one poll and we can't say for certain that the fifteen point shift is not an outlier. Even if the move is real, we can't say for sure what caused it. Still, if you see this big a jump in seniors, Social Security and Medicare are the obvious place to look.

 If data and common sense point to Republican vulnerability on the issue, why is conventional wisdom converging in the opposite direction? Perhaps it's because the pundits who shaped that conventional wisdom have always been overly invested in the idea that Trump's position on Social Security and Medicare was a key part of his success.

Think back to 2015.

 Pundits were at a loss to explain the rise of Donald Trump which is part of the reason so many tried to deny it was even happening. (Remember Nate Cohen's series of NYT articles in 2015 arguing that there was no way DJT could beat various candidates despite the fact he was crushing them in the polls.) For people whose job it is to explain things, this is incredibly disconcerting, so when Trump broke with the Republican line on two incredibly unpopular GOP positions, taxing the rich and cutting Social Security and Medicare, the pundit class finally had a theory they could converge on: Trump's success came from his combination of reactionary and liberal populist positions.

This was always a thin thread to hang an interpretation on. The stand was hardly the second coming of Huey P. Long. These GOP positions were so unpopular that even a majority of Republican voters opposed them. At most, Trump had mixed a couple of moderate positions into his reactionary and autocratic platform. 

What's more, they were always a relatively small part of the mix. If you read over the real-time coverage of the campaign, you'll see that SS and Medicare weren't that prominent and the guarantees left considerable wiggle room. [Emphasis added.]

Below is a head-to-head rundown on where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand — as best as anyone can tell. Incidentally, Trump's website makes little mention of Social Security; most of his policy positions come from what he has said in debates or speeches. Clinton's site has more details about her proposals and she has fleshed them out elsewhere.

 ...

At a June rally in Phoenix, Trump said: “We’re going to save your Social Security without killing it like so many people want to do.” During the campaign, Trump said something similar: “I will do everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is.”

 ...

But Trump left the window open to future reforms in his comments to AARP, saying: “As our demography changes, a prudent administration would begin to examine what changes might be necessary for future generations.”

So his position wasn't that far out of line with lots of Republicans, basically saying we may cut later rather than we should cut now. More importantly, this was never one of the main points of his campaign. I may have missed something in my Google searches, but it appears that Trump didn't talk that much about the issue (it merits two brief mentions in his 6,000+ word announcement speech, neither in the first half) and that it didn't get that much coverage. Perhaps there is data out there that shows that these positions were a major driver of support or that protecting Social Security and Medicare was top-of-mind when people thought Donald Trump, but if so it would be despite sparse coverage and a lack of emphasis from Trump himself.  

In the pundit class, however, the relationship loomed large. 

From Ezra Klein's influential Vox piece.

Trump is the only Republican running who actually agrees with the GOP base on this one. "They're gonna cut Social Security. They're gonna cut Medicare. They're gonna cut Medicaid," he said on Fox & Friends. "I'm the one saying that's saying I'm not gonna do that!"

And that's what makes a candidate like Trump potentially dangerous. On immigration, Trump holds a hard-line position that the Republican Party establishment has tried to mute, and so far Republican voters are loving it. On Social Security and Medicare, Trump — who opposes cuts — is closer to Republican voters than the party establishment is. On free trade deals, Trump shares a skepticism held by about half of Republican voters, but that's usually suppressed by the party's powerful business wing.

Most candidates who tried to stack this many heterodoxies would be quickly squelched by the party establishment. But Trump isn't beholden to the GOP for money, staff, power, or press attention. That frees him to take positions that Republican voters like but Republican Party elites loathe.

It may be true that support for Trump, so far, is about personality rather than policy. But as the primary wears on, Republican voters might find that they actually agree with him. And that's going to put the rest of the Republican field — all those candidates who were playing by the establishment's rules — in a very tough position.

Klein does get points for pulling away from the then popular "Trump doesn't have a chance" camp, but as mentioned before, there doesn't seem to much evidence that Social Security and Medicare played a big role in Trump's securing the nomination.

Though it has fallen down the memory hole, Trump's real break with the Republican Party line was not over entitlements, but over taxes.

Donald Trump is finally showing us more of his economic plan beyond the "Make America Great Again" slogan on his red hat.

America has now learned:

-- He wants to tax the rich more and the middle class less.

-- He wants to lower corporate taxes.

-- He wants to cut government spending and stop raising the debt ceiling.

"The hedge fund people make a lot of money and they pay very little tax," Trump said in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg. "I want to lower taxes for the middle class."

In short, Trump is willing to raise taxes on himself and those like him.  

We all know how that worked out.

 Fast forward to 2022. Republicans are talking about cutting, privatizing, or killing Social Security with an openness they hadn't shown in at least twenty years. Trump himself lost interest in the topic long ago. But among the pundit class and much of the Democratic establishment, a few six-year old statements had permanently inoculated not just Trump, but the entire GOP on this issue.

What's remarkable here is not just the convergence but the certainty. A large part of the Republican Party is pissing on the third rail of American politics and yet no influential Democrats thought it was worth pulling the switch just in case the power was on.

If attacks on Social Security have eroded seniors' support for the GOP, they have done so almost entirely on their own. Progressives seldom mention the issue. AARP has been uncharacteristically quiet on the matter. Talking Points Memo, probably the best progressive political news and analysis site has dropped it entirely as far as I can tell.

And while Blake Masters, a GOP senate candidate from Arizona, has warranted a number of TPM stories, his suggestion that we privatize Social Security went unmentioned, despite the fact that almost one fifth the population of the state is 65 or over.


Even in Florida, which has a lot of seniors, Val Demings is all but silent on the topic, despite the fact that her opponent and his fellow senator are both on the record as wanting to cut or kill the program.

There's no conspiracy here, no hidden agenda. These people simply believe with a great deal of confidence that while pushing back against Republican attacks on Medicare and particularly Social Security might be the right thing to do, it is not a winning political strategy.

If there were any doubt in the Democratic establishment's mind, hedging the bet would be cheap, easy and pretty much risk free. A few campaign ads, some viral videos, a couple of lines in stump speeches, a bullet point in campaign websites,  raising the subject in interviews.

The most bizarre part of this is that for decades, one of the unassailable truths of American politics was that attacking Social Security and Medicare was bad for Republicans and defending them was good for Democrats, and yet, in the space of a few years for no particularly good reason, the political establishment became absolutely certain of the exact opposite.

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Monday, July 25, 2022

The data are thin but still worth keeping an eye on

A couple of months ago, we did a post prompted by this Nate Cohn NYT piece where we talked about draconian anti-abortion bills being proposed and sometimes passed in states with neither anti-abortion majorities or trigger laws.

 Recently, though, some of the news has been coming from a different direction. [Emphasis added]

The geographic pattern evident in the results suggests that a national outcry over a court decision to overturn Roe might not carry many political consequences in the states where abortions could be immediately restricted. In some of those states, new abortion restrictions may tend to reinforce the political status quo, even as they spark outrage elsewhere in the country.

But in some states, a fight over new abortion restrictions might pose serious political risks for conservatives, perhaps especially in the seven mostly Republican-controlled states that are seen as most likely to enact new restrictions even though a majority of voters tend to support legal abortion.

Mississippi is the third most anti-abortion state in the country according to the NYT piece.

 Yes, n = 1 and this could be a bad poll or an outlier, but should these results be valid not being able to get majority support for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in the state where Jackson is the capital, that's worth noting.

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Friday, July 22, 2022

Am I an idiot?

This is Joseph.

Mark had a polite comment on one of the positions that I held:
Conventional pundit wisdom was that Trump's statements about defending Social Security and Medicare had inoculated the GOP against that line of attack. Pundits can be idiots

While I hope I avoid the full "idiot" level, I thought it was worth reflecting why my analysis was wrong. After all, numbers like this need to be explained if you think that people just assume social security and Medicare are safe from Republican meddling:

 

That is a 15 point drop on the generic ballot in two months among the 65+ crowd. 

I think it is important that we be accountable when we are wrong. So what did I miss?

Pondering it for a while, I think I overlooked the real impact of the Supreme Court, in general, and Dobbs, in particular. The quest to overturn Roe versus Wade goes back to the 1980's and Ronald Reagan. But after 50 years this could be dismissed as posturing, after all the ruling had survived two generations of judges who were heavily Republican appointed. But then, one day, it happened.

This seems to me to have had two immediate implications.

  1. Older voters do not like radical change and all of the sudden the Supreme Court was delivering a series of radical rulings, Thermostatic politics kicked in, as well as the general distrust of radical change among those with less time to adapt to it
  2. Suddenly these threats looked less like bombast and more like a real threat.
If I am correct, the implication of abortion is far beyond just the backlash against a known right. It suddenly made the Republican party look like they would do extreme and/or crazy things. Can people like that be trusted with power? 

The supreme court continues with rulings that at least appear to be partisan. Which only makes matters worse. Remember, the same pundits who claimed that people were overwrought about abortion rights are not anywhere near as credible now. Nor is there a great deal of evidence that lawyers think the opinion was especially sound. 

So my gut instinct is that I missed a tipping point, where the old "they would never do that" claims of the pundit class suddenly lost efficacy and voters became alarmed at what could happen next. As they probably should be. 

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Thursday, July 21, 2022

Thursday Tweets

At least here in California, this is what the NIMBY/YIMBY fight actually look like, with valid arguments on both sides.


I should probably talk more about this Monkey Cage piece.






Recommended.

If the food poisoning, cultural appropriation, overpriced menu, and annoying brand hadn't already done it, this would keep me away from the chain.


"First as tragedy, then as farce."

That guy. 



Checking in with the Paypal Mafia.





Musk's hard right pivot did score him a lot of kind words from Rupert's publications.


Do they covet the blood of the young, because that's Thiel's thing.


Conventional pundit wisdom was that Trump's statements about defending Social Security and Medicare had inoculated the GOP against that line of attack. Pundits can be idiots.







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Wednesday, July 20, 2022

"If FIFTY BANKERS ever arrive at your office all at once, (1) you have done something terrible but (2) it is absolutely their problem, not yours."

I might get into trouble for such a long quote, but I wanted to give you a sense of how sharp and funny Matt Levine's writing is (all the more remarkable given his output). Most of his work appear behind the Bloomberg paywall but for cheapskates like me, there's a free but highly influential newsletter (link at the bottom of the page).

 Highly recommended. Essential if you follow business and finance.

If you sell nickel futures at a price of $25,000 per ton, and then the price of nickel futures goes up to $100,000 per ton, then in some simple arithmetic sense you have lost $75,000 per ton. If you sold 100 tons of nickel futures, then you have lost more than $7 million. But if you sold 150,000 tons of futures, the math changes a bit; it becomes non-linear and relativistic. If you sold 150,000 tons of nickel futures at $25,000 per ton, and then the price goes up to $100,000, your banks will call you up and say “uh you have lost $11 billion, can you pay that please,” and you will say “I would prefer not to,” and an insane series of events will happen:

  1. The nickel exchange will cancel a bunch of trades and declare that actually the market price of nickel is $48,000 per ton, magically reversing most of your losses.
  2. Then the exchange will call you and say “okay let’s close you out of that trade at $48,000 per ton.”
  3. Then you will say “no, this is still too much money for me to lose, I prefer not to.”
  4. Then your banks will say “well okay how much are you willing to lose?”
  5. You will say “I would close out this trade at $30,000, that’s how much money I am willing to lose.”
  6. Your banks will say “okay fine, we’ll wait for nickel prices to go back below $30,000, meanwhile we’ll just lend you the money to stay in the position.”
  7. They will.
  8. Eventually nickel prices will go below $30,000 and you will get out of the trade at a modest loss.
  9. If prices never go below $30,000 then I guess your banks are very sad, but honestly they’re pretty sad about all of this anyway.

I cannot stress enough that this is not how it works if you are a small customer. This is the white-glove treatment that only the biggest customers get. If you are big enough, you get to tell the exchange how much money you’re willing to lose, and the exchange and your banks will make sure you don’t lose more than that.

Here is a wild Bloomberg News story about Xiang Guangda, the Chinese metals tycoon who runs Tsingshan Holding Group Co., who is nicknamed “Big Shot,” and who blew up the London Metals Exchange in March. We talked about it at the time, but this story adds a lot more detail about what Xiang, his bankers and the LME were thinking and doing. It is not pretty! Xiang shorted something like 150,000 tons of nickel somewhere in the $20,000s, and when nickel prices went up to $100,000 he said “no thank you”:

After nickel started spiking on March 7, Tsingshan struggled to meet its margin calls. … The LME had eventually intervened to halt trading a couple of hours after nickel hit $100,000. It also canceled billions of dollars of transactions, bringing the price back to $48,078, where it closed the previous day, in what amounted to a lifeline for Xiang and Tsingshan.

And then the LME said “well, okay, $48,000?” and Xiang again said “no thank you”:

To reopen the market, the LME proposed a solution: Xiang should strike a deal with holders of long positions to close out his trade. But a price of around $50,000 would be more than twice the level at which he had entered his short position, and would mean accepting billions of dollars in losses. ...

Xiang told the assembled bankers he had no intention of closing the position anywhere near $50,000. A few hours later he was delivering the same message to Matthew Chamberlain, chief executive of the LME. Tsingshan was a strong company, he said, and it had the support of the Chinese government. There would be no backing down.

And so his banks said “well okay what price would be acceptable” and he said “$30,000” and they said “fine”:

On March 14, a week after the chaos that engulfed the nickel market, Tsingshan announced a deal with its banks under which they agreed not to pursue the company for the billions it owed for a period of time. In exchange, Xiang agreed a series of price levels at which he would reduce his nickel position once prices dropped below about $30,000. 

Eventually nickel got below $30,000 and he got out of the position at about a $1 billion loss. “The loss has been roughly offset by the profits of his nickel operations over the same period.”

The article also describes the scene at Xiang’s office on the evening of March 8:

Within hours, more than 50 bankers had arrived at his office wanting to hear how he planned to respond to the crisis. He told them simply: “I’m confident that we will overcome this.”

If FIFTY BANKERS ever arrive at your office all at once, (1) you have done something terrible but (2) it is absolutely their problem, not yours.

 (And yes, it's a variation on an old joke, but it's a damned good version.)

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