Annotated Edition

Mark Wilson/Getty Images, via Vox.

Annotated edition of the NBC interview with the president-elect. Nearly all of his response to the first question, "What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days?"

Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful. 

But you won't tell us what?

That’ll be our first signal — first signal to America that we’re not playing games. 

Oh, sending a signal. Something with the border, and it's going to be a signal. To America.

We have people coming in by the millions, as you know, and a lot of people shouldn’t be here. Most of them shouldn’t be here.

It has not been anything like millions at the border since December 2023, and especially since Biden's executive order of last June.

And how do you know who should and shouldn't be here?  

But we have jails being emptied into our country. We have mental institutions from all over the world being emptied into our country. 

Nobody, including your own campaign staff, has ever been able to point to any evidence that there is any truth to this story—

Dude, Where's My Recession?

 

Rezoned development around a suburban transit hub. Image via New Jersey State League of Municipalities.

Happy beginning-of-the-month Freaky Friday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases last month's job numbers and we sit down to play another round of Good News is Bad News:

I'm looking at this jolly message

Holy moly, we've got another one!

Payrolls grew a huuuuuge +253k in April, well above market expectations. There's no hint of any sort of labor market slowdown in these numbers. Other indicators had been hinting at a slowdown, but these are more reliable.

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) May 5, 2023

and instead of smiling, I'm instantly telling myself ruh-roh, Fed's gonna keep pushing those interest rates up. Bad News! But wondering, can't you let it be Good News for a change, just the one time?

Campaign For Nonvoters

 

GDP growth January 2019 to January 2022

Commenter Cheez wrote in re Saturday's post:

That "majority" must be based on the third of eligible voters who so far can't be bothered. Is there any evidence that these groundhogs can be relied on to choose uncomfortable reality over a snug and cosy fantasy? I wonder how much is known about these people, what they care about, what sort of threat would finally make them pay attention to their civic duty, as voting (and serving on a jury) used to be referred to as.

And a majority can be ignored if they do not contest being ignored. It's going to take an existential threat to get people's attention. For the Democratic Party, it should be the outright theft of a presidential election: 2000 didn't do it but Republicans had a veneer of sanity then. It's going to take some unholy blend of Gilead and Idiocracy to get apathetic non-voters to ask "wha happened?" .

My response:

choose uncomfortable reality over a snug and cosy fantasy?

I don't think you can build a bigger majority than we had in 2018 on fear of dictatorship, if that's what you mean. We did do pretty well out of sheer negative partisanship in 2020--more people thinking Republicans are bad than thinking Democrats are bad--but that was a presidential year, with Trump personally embodying the bad. The majority I have in mind is the one that favors minimum wage hikes, family leave and subsidized day care, electric cars, and taxing the rich.

Joe Did What? Glass Half Full

 

Image via African Skies.

We've finally got some text on the Human Infrastructure budget reconciliation package, in the form of a one-page summary of budget topline items under four headings of spending categories (Families, Climate, Infrastructure and Jobs, and Healthcare), and a nine-page Memorandum addressed to Democratic senators, organized by committee, with very broad numbers for how much spending each committee is instructed to approve. Or saving in the case of the Finance Committee, which is instructed to come up with a plan to cut the deficit by "at least one billion dollars", which reminds me enough of Dr. Evil to make me laugh, but is evidently standard procedure in these matters, for reasons I'm not grasping:

There is ample precedent over the past fifteen years for using a nominal reconciliation instruction as a mechanism to allow a committee to bring forth legislation with larger budgetary implications than such an instruction suggests. Republicans used a nominal instruction amount to both the Finance and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committees to move forward with their efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2015 and 2017. The instruction to each committee in each case was to reduce the deficit by $1 billion....  In addition, Democrats used nominal reconciliation instructions in 2010 and 2007 to achieve important changes to health care and education programs. The 2010 example, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act (HCERA) included a nominal instruction of $1 billion in deficit reduction to both the Senate Finance and HELP Committees. According to CBO, That bill impacted hundreds of billions of dollars in meeting those targets.

But it seems to be about "flexibility", and connected to the fact that they won't be asking the Congressional Budget Office to score the programs before the vote:

Brooks Whigging Out Again

 

John F. Kennedy campaigning door to door in West Virginia, 1960, Life cover, via Reddit.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Heart and Soul of the Biden Project", New York Times, 9 April 2021:

So Biden is a Whig. Fight me.

That is, not, thank heavens, a Democrat:

Some people say this is like the New Deal. I’d say this is an updated, monster-size version of “the American System,” the 19th-century education and infrastructure investments inspired by Alexander Hamilton, championed by Henry Clay and then advanced by the early Republicans, like Abraham Lincoln. That was an unabashedly nationalist project, made by a youthful country, using an energetic government to secure two great goals: economic dynamism and national unity.

Because nobody could say the New Deal had anything to do with economic dynamism or national unity. The New Deal didn't build any infrastructure, other than the rural electrifcation, the Bay Bridge and the Triborough Bridge, the Chickamauga Dam and the Grand Coulee Dam and the Pensacola Dam and the Hoover Dam, the Overseas Highway from Key West to the Florida mainland, the Lincoln Tunnel and the Bankhead Tunnel (in Mobile) and the Detroit Sewage Disposal and dozens of airport projects, or education programs other than the numerous schools, teachers, and classes provided by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, including many programs devoted to the training of the African American community.

For the Record: Biden's Proposal

You wouldn't fuss about moving the Overton window if it was a big enough window. You wouldn't even want to. Photo via.

Incredibly impressed with myself over this tribute from my favorite moderately famous economics professor.

That started with a quick Twitter version of an argument I feel like I've been making forever, attached in this case to the Biden Covid relief proposal-package, which is pretty amazing:

Whig measures & Tory men!

— Brad DeLong: 'Live long, & prosper!' (@delong) January 15, 2021

Well, sort of. Lovestoneite measures and Whiggish men and women, more like, in my case, but it's the same principle, where you might talk about widening the Overton window instead of moving it.

But I do feel tremendously justified by the radical character of this Biden package, with its demands for

Literary Corner: We're looking very strongly at sinks and showers

Ca. 1950, via AllThatsInteresting.

Stung at last, perhaps, at the way he's commonly treated as an ignoramus, Trump came out with a surprising virtuoso display of knowledge and passion on an unexpected subject he knows and cares a great deal about: the effects of federal regulation on hotel bathrooms.

A lot of readers, unfamiliar themselves with the issues or how seriously our emperor takes them, have reacted with confusion and even a certain bemused scorn to the piece, whose coherence escapes them, accusing him of just babbling, or even hallucinating. They're missing something pretty big, in my opinion. Of course it's true that everything he asserts is wrong, as we've come to expect from our poet, but that just contributes to the risky, giddy feel of the work, and as far as coherence goes, there's plenty of that right to the end. Or almost.

The best way to confront it is head on, just reading it for its own sake before you talk about the meaning. Enjoy the sweep and excitement of the way he walks us through it, from the first thing you see—your face in the mirror as you switch on the light—to the potential collapse of the US steel industry. Of the what? No, seriously:

Take a look at your optimism!

Verdon and Fosse, April 2018, screengrab from NBC via.

The Todd-Trump conversation broke down irretrievably over Todd's attempt to ask a pretty interesting question on a passage from the Mueller Report (I:117), as to whether Junior, who "declined to be voluntarily interviewed" by the Mueller team, might have involuntarily testified to the grand jury, as an immediately following redaction hints, maybe:

TODD: So did you not read the Mueller report?

TRUMP: Let me tell you, I read much of it.

TODD: The unredacted version or no?

TRUMP [unable to risk revealing that he doesn't know what the correct answer is supposed to be]: I read -- No I didn't.

TODD: Ok.

Economic downturns kill people. With cancer.

Architect David Adjaye's rendering of the projected Gahanga International Children's Cancer Center near Kigali, Rwanda, where health insurance is mandatory (with zero premiums for the poor). Via De Zeen. 

And government-run health care systems prevent it. A study by Mahiben Maruthappu, Johnathan Watkins, et al. reported in The Lancet this week found in a study of cancer outcomes in 75 countries from 1990 to 2010 that

Unemployment rises were significantly associated with an increase in all-cancer mortality and all specific cancers except lung cancer in women. By contrast, untreatable cancer mortality was not significantly linked with changes in unemployment. Lag analyses showed significant associations remained 5 years after unemployment increases for the treatable cancer class. Rerunning analyses, while accounting for UHC [Universal Health Care] status, removed the significant associations. All-cancer, treatable cancer, and specific cancer mortalities significantly decreased as PEH [Public Expenditure on Health] increased. Time-series analysis provided an estimate of more than 40 000 excess deaths due to a subset of treatable cancers from 2008 to 2010, on the basis of 2000–07 trends. Most of these deaths were in non-UHC countries. 

Let's just say that again.

Troll Poll

Via.

The Hill reports the Gallup Poll (and the Weekly Standard gets very excited):

Economic confidence has been holding at a seven-month low, according to a survey released by Gallup on Tuesday.

The Economic Confidence Index averaged -8 in June, which Gallup said is statistically tied with May’s -7 reading.

Gallup’s latest figures are keeping the index at the lowest monthly reading since November....

Gallup's Economic Confidence Index is the average of two things: the public’s rating of current economic conditions and whether people feel the economy is improving or getting worse.

Then again, according to the Conference Board (via Deseret News):

Trust me

Airbnb in the early days.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Evolution of Trust", July 1 2014:

Well, it turns out deregulating the economy had some unexpected consequences, like millions of liberal arts graduates and non-graduates too, I imagine, don't have stable living arrangements or steady full-time jobs and have to rent out their apartments and cars and hustle freelance gigs to stay afloat, but that's helped them all to learn to trust one another and enjoy fast pseudo-intimacy, easy-come easy-go fluid relationships, and flexible ad-hoc arrangements. So it's all good! Who needs government?